Recollections and Impressions, 1822-1890

In my early ministry, the discourses of Dr. Orville Dewey on "Human Nature," "Human Life," "The Nature of Religion," seemed all-sufficing. I read them over and over again with increasing admiration, and his solutions of spiritual problems were accepted as final.

Miss Mary Dewey, in the admirable memoir of her father, lays great stress on his affectionate qualities. These cannot be too emphatically asserted; yet they probably had more scope than even she suspected. Indeed, unless I am much mistaken, they formed the basis of his character. He was a most deep-feeling man. He loved his friends in and out of the profession, with a loyal, hearty, obliging, warm, and even tender emotion, expressing itself in word and deed. It was overflowing, not in any sentimental manner, but in a manly, sincere way. He was a man of infinite good-will, of a quite boundless kindness. His voice, his expression of face, his smile, the grasp of his hand, – all gave sign of it. He felt things keenly; his sensibilities were most acute; even his thoughts were suffused with emotion. He could not discuss speculative themes as if they were cold or dry. Nothing was arid to his mind. In prayer it was not unusual for his audience to discern tears rolling down his cheeks. One day, in his study, on speaking about the intellectual implications of the "Philosophie Positive," he dropped his head and seemed for a moment lost in reverie largely made up of devotion. In him, heart was uppermost; intellect, conscience, were of subordinate value when taken alone; in fact, they were incomplete by themselves, and wanted their proper substance. He said once that his skin was so delicate that the least soil on his hands was felt all through his system and prevented him from working. This excessive sensibility, which could not be understood by the world at large, was at the bottom of his likes and dislikes, of his personal fears and hopes. Excitement drained off his strength. He exhausted himself physically, and fell into ill-health by exertions that would not have taxed an ordinary constitution. It cost him a great deal to write sermons, to visit the sick or sorrowing, to conduct public services. At the same time, he was disqualified, by a certain want of steel in his blood, for any but the clerical profession, where qualities like his are of inestimable value, and of the rarest kind. He was a minister from the beginning, always profoundly interested in questions of the interior life, and though he early left the orthodox communion and became a preacher of Unitarian Christianity, making it his work to apply religious ideas to all the concerns of the natural world and the secular life, he retained all the fervor of spirit that charaterized the most devout believer. A vein of passionate feeling ran through all his discourses, and while his themes were taken from daily existence, his thoughts were fixed on eternity. He was absorbed in the destiny of the human soul, of the individual soul, bringing all discussions to that point, and trying to make lasting impressions on the spiritual natures of men and women.

When I first knew him he had the reputation of being a self-indulgent man. This was a great mistake. His way of life was exceedingly simple, and his habits were almost abstemious. In fact, neither his physical nor his mental constitution allowed of any indulgence in eating or drinking. Still the impression was a natural one, for a certain amount of ease, exemption from care, gayety, was necessary to him. The society of elegant, accomplished people was indispensable to his recreation and rest. His motive for seeking such was not the love of luxury so much as a demand for recreation and a craving for repose. He was not, in any sense, an earthy man or one who loved sensual delights. On the contrary, he was always mindful of his calling, always intent on high subjects, always ready to lead intercourse upwards, always, to the extent of his power, interested in the moral aspect of current discussions; over-anxious, if anything, to approach speculative themes. He possessed an eager, unresting, questioning mind. He was always thinking, and on great subjects of theology or philosophy, and he put into them an amount of feeling that is extraordinary with intellectual men.

That he should have been so sensitive as he was to the words and suspicions of anti-slavery men who charged him with being an advocate of a fugitive-slave law, an apologist for slavery, a ready tool of the inhuman, reactionary party of the country, is not surprising. His dread of pain, his hatred of falsehood, his horror of injustice, his love of fair play, will sufficiently account for this; while the impossibility of explaining himself kept the wound open. That for thirty years the sore should have bled, shows the delicacy of his temperament and the shrinking nature of his will. To speak of him as a friend of slavery is absurd. No one can read his sermon on "The Slavery Question," preached shortly after the annexation of Texas and at a moment of great excitement at the North in regard to the advances of the slave-power, and not perceive that he was deeply moved.

"Are these people men?" he said; "that is the question. If they are men, it will not do to make them instruments for mere convenience, – for the mere tillage of the soil; – if they are men, it is not enough to say that they have a sort of animal freedom from care, and joyance of spirits. If they are men, they are to be cultivated; their faculties are to be regarded as precious; they are to be improved… If he is a man, then he is not only improvable and ought to be improved, but he will improve in spite of all we can do." And a great deal more to the same effect. He indignantly protested against treating "an intelligent creature, a fellow-being, a brother-man, a being capable of indefinite expansion and immortal progress," as one would treat a tree, a flower, an ox, or a horse. "Grant that the African of the present generation cannot be raised to our stature; yet if in the course of ages he may be, and if it is our policy systematically to arrest or to retard his growth, does the case materially differ from what I have supposed?" Namely that of a child. Dr. Dewey visited slave-States and talked with slave-holders in order to make himself fully acquainted with the condition of opinion and of feeling about the case, and he took occasion everywhere to argue the Northern side. This ought to be enough in the way of vindication of his personal sentiments.

At the same time, he was a Unionist of the Webster school. His attachment to the Union was intense. Disunion in his judgment meant ceaseless discord, the end of republican institutions, the arrest of civilization, the indefinite postponement of progress, the hopelessness of education and uplifting for the slave, the withdrawal of Northern influence, the final overthrow of government by moral powers. A long reign of anarchy, in the course of which the lovers of the race must see their visions of good disappear, would supervene, and this he could not contemplate with equanimity.

Then he was an old-fashioned enemy of war, especially of civil war. He was a sincere lover of peace, and a believer in the arts of peace, in industry, education, the diffusion of intelligence, the weaving of the ties of fraternity; and though he acknowledged the heroic mission of strife, he recoiled instinctively from it. War, in his estimation, was an inevitable necessity in the order of the world, but it was an awful element in the "world problem"; "a fearful scourge," a condition to be outgrown along with vice, passion, injustice, selfishness, ambition, a sign that is destined to disappear as intelligence and Christianity come in. It must be submitted to as an ordination of Providence, but it should never be precipitated by men, least of all should it be brought on hastily, by unreasonableness, malignity, or hate. The evils of war were precisely such as appealed most directly to his imagination; they were so personal, they were so domestic, they were so pitiable, they were so full of tears. He shrank from violence, from rage, from party ambition, from curses and cries. He loved his countrymen, and, so long as any reason remained, he could not bear to think of fighting. So long as any oil was left in the can, the troubled waters were not to be abandoned by the peace-makers. It was much for him to have patience with those who used angry words, even in a cause of righteousness. He, for his part, could not scold or overstate, or do anything in a harsh temper.

Dr. Dewey believed in colonization; not necessarily in Africa, but in a separation between the white and black races, in the civilization of the negro. In the tenth lecture of the course on "The Problem of Human Destiny" (1864), he takes occasion to welcome "the great hope" that thus was opened "for purging our American soil from the stain of slavery. Many of us have long been asking how this is to be done. Look at Africa, surrounded by a wall of darkness, and filled with cruelty and blood, with no civilizing influence in herself, as the story of ages has proved; what now do we see? Britain sends to her borders the man-stealer, to tear her children from her bosom and transport them to the American colonies. It was a deed of unmingled atrocity, compared with which capture in war was generous and honorable; the African King of Dahomey grows white by the side of the Saxon slave-trader. But what follows? The African people in this country improve, and are now far advanced beyond their kindred at home. And now they begin to return; they are building a state on their native borders which promises to stop the slave trade with Africa and to spread light and civilization through her dark solitudes." At the close of his discourse on the slavery question, he said:

If I were to propose a plan to meet the duties and perils of this tremendous emergency that presses upon us, I would engage the whole power of this nation, the willing co-operation of the North and the South, if it were possible, to prepare this people for freedom; and then I would give them a country beyond the mountains, – say the Californias, – where they might be a nation by themselves. Ah! if the millions upon millions spent upon a Mexican war could be devoted to this purpose, – if all the energies of this country could be employed for such an end, – what a noble spectacle were it for all the world to behold, of help and redemption to an enslaved people! What a purifying and ennobling ministration for ourselves!

The intimacy with Dr. Charming re-inforced the conclusions which were native to Dr. Dewey's temperament. The moderate view, the dread of overstatement, the fear of fanaticism, the faith in reason, the love of tranquillity, the desire after truth, were rooted in his mind. His constitutional conservatism was confirmed. Then he was a Unitarian, and therefore rational in his methods, inclined to judge by arguments, to sift opinions by the understanding. The abolitionists were, for the most part, either Calvinists or transcendentalists, people who followed an inward voice, who placed interior conviction before ratiocination, and encouraged moral sentiment to take the lead in action, blowing coals into a flame, and not content unless they saw a blaze. The Unitarians, as a class, were not ardent disciples of any moral cause, and took pride in being reasoners, believers in education, and in general social influence, in the progress of knowledge, and the uplifting of humanity by means of ideas. The habit of discountenancing passion may have been fostered in a school like this. Perhaps if young Dewey had continued in his old belief he would have been a more vehement reformer than he was. His natural glow was softened down into a mild effulgence, communicating warmth to his convictions, but not producing a burning zeal for any substance of doctrine.

His power of emotion made him a powerful preacher but prevented his being a great philosopher. Dr. Bellows, who was his close friend for many years, described him as a man of "massive intellectual power," and then went on to impute to him the gifts that belong to the pulpit orator: "poetic imagination," a "rare dramatic faculty of representation." Perhaps by "massive" Dr. Bellows meant the power to throw thoughts in a mass, with cumulative effect. This power Dr. Dewey certainly possessed in an extraordinary degree. But of philosophical talent he had little. Indeed, he seemed to be conscious of this himself. At the end of his first lecture before the Lowell Institute he said:

I am not sorry that the place and occasion require me to make this a popular theme. I am not to speak for philosophers, but for the people. I wish to meet the questions which arise in all minds that have awaked to any degree of reflection upon their nature and being, and upon the collective being of their race. I have hoped that I should escape the charge of presumption by the humbleness of my attempt – the attempt, that is to say, to popularize a theme which has hitherto been the domain of scholars.

The lecture assumes the existence of a Personal God, the reality of a conscious soul, the freedom of the human will, the fact of a moral purpose in creation, the perfectibility of man, the idea of progress, the evidence of design in the universe attesting a divine intelligence. The treatment nowhere shows metaphysical acumen or speculative insight. On every page is brilliancy, eloquence, skilful manipulation of arguments, fervent appeal to conscience. Nowhere is subtilty or depth of intuition. Take for example the discourse on "The Problem of Evil," the most intellectually exacting of all subjects. It ends thus after a series of pictures:

Give me freedom, give me knowledge, give me breadth of experience; I would have it all. No memory is so hallowed, no memory is so dear, as that of temptation nobly withstood, or of suffering nobly endured. What is it that we gather and garner up from the solemn story of the world, like its struggles, its sorrows, its martyrdoms? Come to the great battle, thou wrestling, glorious, marred nature! strong nature! weak nature! Come to the great battle, and in this mortal strife strike for immortal victory! The highest Son of God, the best beloved of Heaven that ever stood upon earth, was "made perfect through suffering." And sweeter shall be the cup of immortal joy, for that it once was dashed with bitter drops of pain and sorrow; and brighter shall roll the everlasting ages, for the dark shadows that clouded the birth-time of our being.

This is not argument, but preaching – very fine, stimulating, powerful preaching, but preaching nevertheless; quite different from James Martineau's treatment of the same theme, in the course of the Liverpool lectures (delivered in 1839). Mr. Martineau, too, addressed a popular assembly, and closed his discourse in a strain of exhortation. Still, the grave tone of the previous discussion sobered the rhetoric, and the background of the ancient debate made the moral lessons solemn. Philosophy yielded to the necessities of ethics, much as the "Kritik der Reinen Vernunft" gave place to the "Kritik der Practischen Vernunft" of Kant – the preacher and the reasoner standing indeed on different ground, but the moral instruction being tempered by the philosophical.

Orville Dewey was a great preacher, perhaps the greatest that the Unitarian communion has produced; greater as a preacher than Dr. Channing, because more various and more sympathetic, nearer to the popular heart, less inspired by grand ideas, and for that reason more moving. He was imbued with Channing's fundamental thought – the "Dignity of Human Nature," – and illustrated it with a wealth of imagination, enforced it by an urgency of appeal, quickened it by an affluence of dramatic representation all his own. His function was to apply this doctrine to every incident of life, to politics, business, art, literature, society, amusement, and he did this with a boldness, a freedom, a frankness unusual at any time, but without example when he was in the ministry. I shall never forget, in one of his sermons, an allusion to a symphony of Beethoven which gave me a new conception of the essential humanity of the pulpit's office, of the close association that there was between religion and art. His conversational style, impassioned but not stilted and never turgid, was exceedingly impressive, while his constant employment of the forms of reasoning added weight to his sentences. The discourse was plain, and yet from its copiousness it was ornate; and the affectionate tone assumed an air of grave remonstrance which was deepened in effect by the appearance of formal logic. The hearer seemed to be admitted to the secrets of a living, earnest mind, and to be listening to something more than the usual enunciations of ethical principle. At the same time his own will was consulted, he was taken into partnership with the orator and introduced to the processes of conviction. His state of feeling was considered, his objections were met, his scruples answered, his arguments confronted. He was, in short, treated like a rational being, to be reasoned with, not to be looked down upon.

Dr. Dewey was always a friend of liberal thought. There are no more significant pages in his daughter's memoir of him than those which contain his correspondence with Mr. Chadwick, one of the most radical of Unitarian divines. He was himself a student of divinity at Andover, early converted to Unitarianism, became an assistant and warm friend of Dr. Channing, but instead of remaining stationary in dogmatic faith, took a rational view of all religious questions, favored the largest liberality, and welcomed every effort to adapt spiritual ideas to actual knowledge. He had no dogmatic prepossessions, and no professional fears. What he asked for was sincerity coupled with earnestness. This being given, conclusions, within certain limits, of course, were of little moment. Theodore Parker used to sadden and irritate him, but less on account of his opinions than on account of his pugnacious manner in expressing them. Parker rather despised him for what he regarded as his time-serving disposition, and could not understand his mental delicacy; but men who thought as Parker did were even then on the best terms with Dr. Dewey, whose mellowness, on the whole, increased instead of diminishing with age, and was greatest in his declining years.

He was a man fond of personalities; even in his addresses on the greatest themes, he would if possible narrow the subject down to the measure of individual application. Thus when lecturing on "The Problem of Evil," after submitting various considerations, he adds:

Broad and vast and immense as that problem may appear, it is after all, in actual experience, purely individual… The truth is, nobody has experienced more of it than you or I have, or might have, experienced. With regard to all the intrinsic difficulties of the case, it is as if one life had been lived in the world; and since no man has lived another's life, or any life but his own, there has been to actual individual consciousness but one life of thirty, seventy, or a hundred years lived on earth. The problem really comes within that compass… If I can solve the problem of existence for myself, I have solved it for everybody; I have solved it for the human race… Do you and I find anything in this our life that makes us prize it, anything that makes us feel that we had rather have it than have it not? Doubtless we do and other men do; all men do.

This passage illustrates well the tendency to personal reference that distinguished the man. In a discourse on war delivered before the Peace Society he resolves its miseries into those of the individual, as if mass – affecting, as it does, nations, civilizations, humanity itself – counted for nothing. This tendency explains his fondness for his friends, his strength of sympathy, his tenacity of attachment, his love for people. It does not betoken a broad, deep, philosophic mind, but it does betoken a warm, clinging, affectionate nature.

It made him too a charming feature in society, a delightful talker, an easy, graceful, delectable companion, an interested adviser and counsellor, a beloved person in his family, an excellent townsman.

We should be grateful for this, that one has lived to irradiate a somewhat sad profession, to warm the bleak spaces of mortal existence, to throw a gleam of gladness upon the sunless problems of human destiny. It is a great deal to be assured that a living heart has walked with us, and that a living voice has proclaimed the heart-side of man's lot.

XIII.

MY COMPANIONS

These were many, but most of them are living and cannot, therefore, be spoken of. There is an advantage in writing about the dead, for they cannot protest against the handsome things you say, and they cannot remonstrate against the unhandsome things. I shall on this account choose but two, with whom I was very intimate, and who are very near to my heart. I shall give sketches of John Weiss and Samuel Johnson, and first of John Weiss.2

This man was a flame of fire. He was genius unalloyed by terrestrial considerations; a spirit lamp always burning. He had an overflow of nervous vitality, an excess of spiritual life that could not find vents enough for its discharge. As his figure comes before me it seems that of one who is more than half transfigured. His large head; his ample brow; his great, dark eyes; his "sable-silvered" beard and full moustache; his gray hair, thick and close on top, with the strange line of black beneath it, like a fillet of jet; his thin, piping, penetrating, tenuous voice, that trembled as it conveyed the torrent of thought; the rapid, sudden manner, suggesting sometimes the lark and sometimes the eagle; the small but sinewy body; the delicate hands and feet; the sensitive touch, feeling impalpable vibrations and detecting movements of intelligence within the folds of organization (they say he could tell the character of a great writer by holding a sealed letter from his hand), – all indicated a half-disembodied soul. His spoken addresses and written discourses confirm the impression.

I first met him at the meetings of the "Hook-and-Ladder,"3 a ministerial club of which we both were members. At the house of Thomas Starr King, in Boston, he read a sermon on the supremacy of the spiritual element in character, which impressed me as few pulpit utterances ever did, so fine was it, so subtle, yet so massive in conviction. Illustrations that he used stay by me now, after the lapse of more than forty years. I next heard him in New Bedford, at the installation of Charles Lowe, when, in ill-health and feeble, he gave, in substance, the discourse on Materialism, afterwards published in the volume on "Immortal Life." It struck me then as exceedingly able; and it derived force from the intense earnestness of its delivery, as by one who could look into the invisible world, and could speak no light word or consult transient effects. Many years later, I listened, in New York, to his lectures on Greek ideas, the keenest interpretation of the ancient myths, the most profound, luminous, sympathetic, I have met with. He had the faculty of reading between the lines, of apprehending the hidden meaning, of setting the old stories in the light of universal ideas, of lighting up allusions. The lecture on Prometheus I remember as especially radiant and inspiring; but they were all remarkable for positive suggestions of a very noble kind.

His genius was eminently religious. Not, indeed, in any customary fashion, nor after any usual way. He belonged to the Rationalists, was a Protestant of an extreme type, an avowed adherent of the most "advanced" views, a speaker on the Free Religious platform, a writer for the Massachusetts Quarterly, and for the Radical. His was a purely natural, scientific, spiritual faith, unorthodox to the last degree, – logically, historically, critically, sentimentally so, – so on principle and with fixed purpose. The accepted theory of religion excited his indignation, his scorn, his amazement, and his mirth. He could brook no dogmatic limitations, even of the most liberal sect, but went on and on, past all barriers, facing all adversaries, confronting every difficulty, and resting only when there was nothing more to discover. He had an agonized impatience to know whatever was to be known, to get at the ultimate data of assurance. Nothing less would satisfy him. His cup of joy was not full till he could touch the bottom. Then it overflowed, and there was glee as of a strong swimmer who is sure of his tide. His exultation is almost painful, as he welcomes fact after fact, feeling more and more positive, with each new demonstration of science, that the advent of certainty was by so much nearer. Evidence that to most minds seemed fatal to belief was, in his sight, confirmatory of it, as rendering its need more clear and more imperious. "We need be afraid of nothing in heaven or earth, whether dreamt of or not in our philosophy." "The position of theistic naturalism entitles it not to be afraid of all the scientific facts that can be produced." "There is dignity in dust that reaches any form, because it eventually betrays a forming power, and ceases to be dust by sharing it." "It is a wonder to me that scholars and clergymen are so skittish about scientific facts." "We owe a debt to the scientific man who can show how many moral customs result from local and ethnic experiences, and how the conscience is everywhere capable of inheritance and education. He cannot bring us too many facts of this description, because we have one fact too much for him; namely, a latent tendency of conscience to repudiate inheritance and every experience of utility, to fly in its face with a forecast of a transcendental utility that supplies the world with its redeemers, and continually drags it out of the snug and accurate adjustment of selfishness to which it arrives." There is a great deal to the same purpose. In fact, Mr. Weiss cannot say enough on this head. He accepts the doctrine of evolution in its whole length and breadth. "Of what consequence is it whence the living matter is derived? We are not appalled at the possibility that organic matter may be made out of non-living, or, more properly, inorganic matter. We are nerved for such a result, whether it occur in the laboratory or in nature, by the conviction that the spiritual functions are no more imperilled by using matter in any way, than that the Creator hazarded his existence by originating matter in some way to be used by himself and by us." "Science does me this inestimable benefit of providing a universe to support my personal identity, my moral sense, and my feeling that these two functions of mind cannot be killed. Its denials, no less than its affirmations, set free all the facts I need to make my body an expression of mental independence. Hand-in-hand with science I go, by the steps of development back to the dawn of creation; and, when there, we review all the forces and their combinations that have helped us to arrive, and both of us together break into a confession of a force of forces."