CHAPTER XII. "Only as in the presence of the cross we are touched, humbled, and drawn to God, with hearts awakened and glowing in the purpose to have no other life or law, are we Christians in truth.” Our New Departure. IT is related of stout old Barbarossa, mightiest and manliest of all the Hohenstaufens, that on the outer covering of the imperial tent he hung his lance and shield, that all who saw might know that the king stood ever ready to redress a wrong. Bloody-minded though he may have been, as were all those old heroes of the earlier days, when force, not fairness, swayed the minds of men, he had still that innate hatred of wrong and that ready wish to aid what seemed to him the right that has kept his memory green, though centuries have passed since the swift torrent of the Cilician river bore horse and rider to a watery grave, and that still shrines him, legend-glorified, in German hearts as in the dark recesses of the Thuringian cavern he awaits the summons to strike the crowning blow for the greatness and glory of Fatherland. Lance and shield hang on the outer walls of many a tent to-day; fair play and a helping hand still merit honest praise; and though we are a buying and a selling age, a practical, reasoning, pushing, all-acquiring world, as far removed from the old-time childishness of knight-errantry and feudal vows as is the rifled cannon from the clumsy bombard, yet chivalry and courtesy, devotion and heroism are still as living as were they in the olden days; and however much we may work for Number One, we are all ready to accord respect and honor to the man who, hating wrong and error and oppression, keeps lance and shield in view, and is ever ready to strike for justice, truth, and right. It is the duty of every biographer to be first just, and then generous; free from bias and absolutely impartial, looking only for the truth; and could the dead come back to earth to guide the pen that seeks to faithfully record their merits or their sins, who doubts that in the larger light that the larger life has brought them, the plea would come, even as it came from the betrayed and dying Othello : "Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, As with the gathering darkness of that April night still other shadows fell across the death-bed of the busy man whose life-story has been outlined in the preceding pages, it was told him that the son to whom he had been so much as father, friend, and helper, wished, if life and strength were spared, to try, some time, to trace the story of that father's active and noble life; "My dear fellow," came the slow but earnest words, "I fear you will be too lenient. But whatever you say, tell the truth; I have tried to do my duty." And so, writing the story of this life of endeavor, I have tried. to tell the truth. If there may exist in these pages any overstatement, any undue praise, any excess of eulogy, let it be thought that the love of the son has overborne the duty of the biographer. But I know of no overstatement. The high purpose of a loving, earnest, wholesouled, conscientious, just, and manly Christian man and worker cannot be overstated, even though minor peculiarities live for a time in the memory of the few. Said Dr. Patterson, speaking words of tribute above his brother minister and friend, "Few men have invested the office of the Christian ministry with so much of the solemn grandeur of the prophet, and the persuasive reasoning of the apostle. He loved humanity. He loved purity. He loved liberty. He made the Golden Rule the supreme law of life. He was a royal friend; a loyal son; a faithful brother; a kind, loving, and provident husband; a patriotic citizen; a manly man; a lover of humanity; a friend of God." It is not for me, even though here seeking to record the life-work of Elbridge Gerry Brooks, to attempt any searching 46 analysis of his character. "They only who live with a man," said Johnson, can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination; and few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him." Not every man is a Boswell, as, fortunately, not every man is a Johnson; and lest in attempting to summarize the chief points of my father's character I be found wanting in many a requisite, I shall merely seek to indicate what seemed to be the guiding forces of his personality and his endeavor, and draw upon the tributes of others for words of characterization. In the closing chapter of "Our New Departure" Dr. Brooks sums up the peculiar requisites which unite for the development of that deeper and more practical nature which should be a part of the spiritual economy of every true Universalist, in three terse and pertinent words: Candor, Loyalty, Ignition." Crystallizing each, a wealth of endeavor and a breadth of desire, they seem also to have here a peculiar personal application; and looking back over the life of this busy worker, with many a fact and many an aspiration calling for recognition and remembrance, it seems to me that no three words can better express the qualities that combined to fill and round out the life of practical Christian endeavor that he lived, as he worked and labored among his fellow-men, than the very qualities he there pleaded for -Loyalty, Candor, Ignition! Of his Loyalty little need here be said; in every chapter of this life-work it cannot but be apparent; it was the key-note to which all his effort was attuned. "Loyalty to ideas," he has said, “fidelity to honest conviction--the purpose at all hazards to put one's self unflinchingly where one morally and intellectually belongs-what but this has given us heroes and martyrs, illuminated the otherwise dim annals of our race with the most chivalric self-sacrifice, destroyed old errors, lifted fresh truths into victory, and so kept the wheels of the world's progress in motion ?" His loyalty was not, however, mere slavish obedience to dominant convictions, nor an unthinking attachment to the truths he had learned in childhood. Every question was tested by him by the standards of right and justice, and he followed no man's chariot-wheels, serf-held like the clients of old Rome; what he believed he believed all through, and so far as loyalty and power are synonymous he worked with all his strength to bring his convictions to fruition. "Lovers of truth indeed I would have you," he writes,* "more than lovers of any sect or church, or anything your father has believed. That is a very poor kind of man or woman who believes even the best things solely because he or she has so been taught. It is alike the divinely-given prerogative and the solemn duty of every intelligent mind to think its own thoughts and to reach its own conclusions. The authority of God and the authority of Christ and the Bible are final; but the authority of any mere man in respect to opinion is nothing, except as he has some higher authority to back him. Even the authority of Christ and the Bible is to be accepted as final only because the weight of evidence shows that God speaks through them. I have been thought by many to be opinionated, and disposed in an intense dogmatism to insist that everybody must agree with me. But nothing could be farther from the fact. Having my own distinct convictions, I have felt it my duty to hold them and to stand by them as if they were really convictions, and therefore principles to be asserted and served, and not mere whims or impressions to be waived or compromised. But, claiming the right to think for myself, I have never been disposed to deny or trench upon this right as belonging equally to others. I have never loved any one the less because differing from me in opinion; nor have I ever had the slightest wish to force my opinions on anybody, nor to insist that they should be received except on due evidence. Rather a thousand times would I know that, as the result of your own free thought, honestly, earnestly, and reverently exercised, you have rejected even my most cherished convictions, than to know that you had become the most zealous devotees of these convictions simply because I had held and taught them. I reverence the sacred individuality of souls and the consequent right of private judgment. I trust that, next to God and the Saviour, you will no less reverence this sacred individuality in yourselves and others, and that, thinking to your own conclusions, you will hold no opinion except for reasons which make it your opinion, and not that of somebody else adopted on trust." *Extract from private paper attached to his will. It was this heart-born and thought-tested belief in the real value of convictions that he hoped for in others and lived up to himself, and this strength of purpose and loyalty to principle swayed the action of his entire life, as from time immemorial it has pervaded and dominated all honest workers for the truth who have striven for "the fruitage that is and the more glorious fruitage yet to be." Priestly craft and priestly greed have sullied every age, from the days of Baal and Delphi to the scandals that have soiled the tiara and clouded the modern pulpit; but truth and loyalty and deathless devotion have burned as brightly in the hearts of priest and preacher as in the deeds of warriors and the vows of mail-clad knights, beautifying the history of every faith, and since the advent of the Master giving dignity and glory to the Church of Christ. It was the monk Froissart who beat back the invaders from the breach at St. Amand; it was the monk Telemachus who thrust his body between the swords of the gladiators and died, a bleeding protest, martyred for the cause of humanity; it was the bishop Leo who, when all Rome trembled, faced the victorious Alaric and saved the Eternal City; as, too, it was glorious old Latimer, who braved unflinchingly the torturing flames, crying out to his companion, “Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England as I trust shall never be put out ;" and, later still, it was the stout Scottish preacher, Melville of St. Andrews, who when asked to omit something from his writings that might offend the king, said, "Tell me, man, if I have told the truth ?" Yes, sir, I think so," was the reply. Then," said Melville, "I will bide his feud and all his kin's. Pray, pray God for me, and He will direct me!" It is loyalty such as this that has made Christianity a power pervading rank and file of the great army of the cross since the shadows fell on Calvary and the Pentecostal glory descended upon that feeble brotherhood at Jerusalem. 66 66 "Dr. Brooks was well characterized," writes Rev. Dr. Emerson, "as the 'John Knox of Universalism.' Full of the better part of the |