CHAPTER XV
SUMMERING AT SARATOGA AND MOHONK.
Bishop Haven.-– Dr. Schaff.--President McCosh.
To the laborious pastor of a large congregation some period of recuperation during the summer is absolutely indispensable. The cavalry officer who, when hotly pursued by the enemy, discovered that his saddle-girths had become loose, and dismounted long enough to tighten them, was a wise man, and affords a good example to us ministers.
It was my custom to call a halt, lock my study door (stowing away my pastoral cares in a drawer) and go away for five or six weeks, and sometimes a little longer. A sea voyage was undertaken during half a dozen vacations, but during a portion of forty-two summers I "pitched my moving tent" in salubrious Saratoga, and a part of twenty-one summers was spent on the heights of Mohonk.
As this volume is issued in London as well as in New York, I will mention some things in this chapter for my British readers with which many of my own fellow-countrymen may be already familiar. There were several reasons that induced me to select Saratoga early in my ministry as the best place to spend a part of the summer vacation. It is the most widely known the world over of any of our American watering places and is an exceedingly beautiful town. Its spacious Broadway, lined with stately elms, is one of the most sightly avenues in our land; and some of the superb hotels that front upon it fulfill the American demand for "bigness." The most attractive spot to me has always been the beautiful park that surrounds the famous Congress Spring, and to which every morning I made my very early pilgrimage for my draught of its sparkling water.
The park covers but a few acres, but it is a continuous loveliness. When its rich, soft greensward--worthy of Yorkshire or Devonshire--was sparkling with the dew, and the fountains were in full play, and the goodly breeze was singing through the trees, it was a place in which to chant Dr. Arnold's favorite hymn:--
"Come, my soul, thou must be waking;
Now is breaking
O'er the earth another day;
Come to Him who made this splendor,
See thou render
All thy feeble strength can pay."
The second reason for my choice of Saratoga was the variety of the wonderful medicinal waters, and their renovating effects. "I can winter better," said Governor Buckingham, "for even a short summer at Saratoga," and my experience was quite similar. I honestly believe that those waters have prolonged my life. In addition to the many health fountains which have been veritable Bethesdas to multitudes, the dry, bracing atmosphere is perfumed and tempered by the breezes from the pine forests of the Adirondack Mountains. While some are attracted to Saratoga by the waters and others by the air, I found both of them equally beneficial. As far as its social life is concerned, there are, as in all summer resorts, two very different descriptions of guests. One class are devotees of fashion, who go there to gratify the "lust of the eye, and the pride of life." They drive by day and dance by night; but some devotees of pleasure have yielded too much to the ensnarements of the gaming table and the race course. There is another and a more numerous class made up of quiet business men and their families, clergymen, college professors and persons in impaired health, who go for recreation or recuperation. From this latter class, and in some measure indeed from the former also, the churches of the town attract very large congregations. It has been my privilege to deliver a little more than two hundred sermons in Saratoga, and there is no place in which I have found that a faithful and practical presentation of the "word of life" is more eagerly welcomed. It is no place to exhibit a show sermon on dress parade, but it is the very one in which to press home the word on hearts and consciences, to arouse the impenitent, to give tonic truth to the weak and the weary, to afford the word of comfort to the sorrowing and soul-food to the many who hunger for the heavenly manna. I have already narrated some of my pleasant experiences in preaching at Saratoga, and I could add to them several other interesting incidents.
For about thirty summers, and occasionally in the winter, I found a happy home at Dr. Strong's "Remedial Institute" on Circular Street. This is a family hotel during the summer, and a sanitarium during the remainder of the year. Every morning the guests assemble for worship, and the intolerable trio of fashion, frivolity and fiddles, has never invaded the refined and congenial atmosphere of the house. My host, Dr. Strong, is an active member of the Methodist Church in that town, and naturally a large number of ministers of that denomination are his summer guests. This was very pleasant for me, for, although I am loyally attached to my own "clan," yet I have a peculiarly warm side for the ecclesiastical followers of the Wesleys, and am some times introduced in their conferences as a "Methodistical Presbyterian." At Dr. Strong's I met many of the leading Methodist ministers, and was exceedingly "filled with their company." I met, among others, the sweet-spirited Bishop Jaynes, who always seemed to be a legitimate successor of the beloved disciple John. If Bishop Jaynes recalled the apostle John, let me say that the venerated father of my kind host and the founder of the Sanitarium, the late Dr. Sylvester S. Strong, was such an impersonation of charming courtesy and fervid spirituality that he might be a counterpart of "Luke the beloved physician." He was an admirable preacher before he entered the medical profession. Bishop Peck was a very entertaining companion and most fraternal in his warmheartedness. He was a man of colossal proportions, and it was quite proper that he was appointed to the charge of the churches in the wide regions of California and Oregon. When he came thence to the General Conference, he presented his protuberant figure to the assembly, and began with the humorous announcement, "The Pacific slope salutes you!" On that same "slope" I discovered last year that Methodism has outgrown even the formidable proportions of my old friend Dr. Peck.
At Saratoga I first met the eloquent Apollos of American Methodism, Bishop Matthew Simpson. Those who ever heard Henry Clay in our Senate chamber, or Dr. Thomas Guthrie in Scotland, have a very distinct idea of what Simpson was at his flood-tide of irresistible oratory. He resembled both of those great orators in stature and melodious voice, in graceful gesture, and in the magnificent enthusiasm that swept everything before him. Like all that type of fascinating speakers--to which even Gladstone belonged--he was rather to be heard than to be read. It is enough that a Gospel preacher should produce great immediate impressions on his auditors; it is not necessary that he should produce a finished and permanent piece of literature. Bishop Simpson was the bosom friend of Abraham Lincoln, and on more than one occasion he knelt beside our much harassed President and prayed for the strength equal to the day of trial.
Among all the guests there was none to whom I was more closely and lovingly drawn than to Bishop Gilbert Haven. None shed off such splendid scintillations in our evening colloquies on the piazzas. Haven was not comparable with his associate, Bishop Simpson, in pulpit oratory, for he was rarely an effective public speaker on any occasion, but in brilliancy of thought, which made him in conversation like the charge of an electric battery, and in brilliancy of pen, that kindled everything it touched, he was without a rival in the Methodist Church--or almost in any other church in the land. Consistently and conscientiously a radical, he always took extreme ground on such questions as negro rights, female suffrage, and liquor prohibition, and he never retreated. Underneath all this impulsive and impetuous radicalism he was thoroughly old-fashioned and orthodox in his theology--as far from Calvinism as any Wesleyan usually is. He did delight in the doctrines of grace with his whole heart, and it is all the more grateful to me, as a Presbyterian, to pay this honest tribute to his deeply devout and Christ-like character. I knew him when he was a student in the Wesleyan University at Middletown--somewhat rustic in his ways, but a bold, bright youth hungry for knowledge. In 1862 he published a series of foreign letters in the New York Independent, which Horace Greeley told me he regarded as most remarkable productions. During the summer of that year I was watching the sun rise from the summit of the Righi in Switzerland, and was accosted by a sandy-haired man in an old oilcloth overcoat who asked for some explanation about the mountain within our view. At the foot of the Righi I fell in with him again, and was struck with his original and vigorous thought. The same evening he marched into my room at the "Schweitzer-Hoff," dripping with the rain, and introduced himself as "Gilbert Haven." We ministered to the few Americans whom we could find in Lucerne, and held a prayer meeting on the Sabbath evening in Haven's room for our far-away country in her dark hour of distress. On that evening began a friendship which waxed warmer and warmer until death sundered the tie for a little while; the same hand that sundered can reunite us.
I am under a strong temptation to give my reminiscences of many notable persons whom I was wont to meet at Saratoga, such as the urbane ex-President Martin Van Buren, and that noble Christian statesman, Vice-President Henry Wilson, and the cheery old poet John Pierpont, and the erudite Horatio B. Hackett, of Newton Theological Seminary and the level-headed Miss Catherine E. Beecher, and the gifted Queen of the great temperance sisterhood, Miss Frances E. Willard, and General Batcheler, the able American Judge, at Cairo, and that extraordinary combination of courage, orthodox faith, and brilliant platform eloquence the late Joseph Cook, of Ticonderoga. I would like also to attempt a description of the gorgeous "Floral Festivals," which are celebrated in every September, when the streets of the town blaze with processions of vehicles decorated with flowers, and the sidewalks and house-fronts are packed with thousands of delighted spectators; but if "of making many books there is no end," there ought to be a proper end in the making of a book. In the course of my life I may have done some very foolish things, and quite too many sinful things, but I have always endeavored to avoid doing too long a thing, if it were possible.
During the last twenty-three years I have spent a portion of almost every summer at Mohonk Lake Mountain House, a hostlery equally celebrated for the culture of its guests and charms of its scenery. It is situated on a spur of the Shawangunk Mountains, about six miles from New Paltz, on the Wallkill Valley Railway. Its discoverer and proprietor is Albert K. Smiley, who was for many years president of a Quaker Ladies Academy in Providence, R.I., and is a gentleman of fine scholarship and varied attainments. He is quite equal to discussing geology with Professor Guyot (from whom one of the highest hilltops near his house is named), or art with Huntington, or botany or landscape gardening with Frederick L. Olmstead, or theology with Dr. Schaff, or questions of philanthropy with General Armstrong or Booker T. Washington.
The distinctive character of the house is that there is a notable absence of what is regarded as the chief attractions of some fashionable summer resorts. Neither bar nor bottles nor ball-room nor bands are to be found in this Christian home;--for a home it is--in its restful and refining influences. The young people find no lack of innocent enjoyment in the bowling alley or on the golf links, in the tennis tournaments or in rowing upon the lake, with frequent regattas. Instead of the midnight dance the evening hours are made enjoyable by social conversation, by musical entertainments, by parlor lectures and other interesting pastimes. The Sabbath at Mohonk realizes old George Herbert's description of the
"Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky;"
Not a boat is loosened from its wharf on the lake; not a carriage is geared up for a pleasure drive, and many a guest has learned how a Sabbath spent without the introduction of either business cares or frivolities may be a joyous refreshment to both body and soul. The spacious parlor is always crowded for the service of worship on every morning during the week and also on the Sabbath. I can testify that on the three-score Sabbaths when I have been called upon to conduct the services, I have never found a more inspiring auditory.
It is no easy thing to put the external beauties of Mohonk upon paper. The estate covers four thousand acres, and is intersected with about fifty miles of fine carriage drives. The garden, which contains a dozen acres, is ablaze during the most of the season with millions of flowers--many of them of rare variety. As the glory of Saratoga is its springs, of Lake George its islands, of Trenton Falls the amber hue of its waters, so the glory of Mohonk is its rocks. The little lake is a crystal cup cut out of the solid conglomerated quartz. Its shores are steep quartz rocks rising fifty feet perpendicularly from the water. The face of "Sky Top" is heaped around with enormous boulders some thirty feet in diameter. In among them extend rocky labyrinths which can be explored with torches. On every hand are immense masses of Shawangunk grit hurled together over the cliff as if with the convulsions of an earthquake. Upon these acres of rock around the lake grow the most luxuriant lichens and the forests in June are efflorescent with laurels and azalias. The finest point of vantage is on Eagle Cliff; I have climbed there often to see the sun go down in a blaze of glory behind the Catskill Mountains. The three highest peaks of the Catskills--Hunter, Slide, and Peekamoose--were in full view, in purple and gold. Beneath me on one side was the verdant valley of Rondout; on the other side the equally beautiful valley of the Wallkill. In the dim distance we could discover the summits of the mountains in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts.
When I took Newman Hall, toward sunset, to a crag or cliff overlooking the lake, he said to me: "Next to Niagara I have seen nothing in America equal to this."
Mohonk has been a favorite summer resort of many of the most distinguished people in our land. The Honorable Rutherford B. Hayes, after his retirement from the presidential chair, loved to find recreation in rowing his boat on the lake, and in making the ascent of Sky Top. President Arthur came there during his term of office; and the widow of General Grant, after spending a fortnight there, pronounced it the most fascinating spot she had ever seen on this continent Among all the guests who made their summer home there, none contributed more to the intellectual enrichment of the company than my revered Christian friend, Dr. Philip Schaff. No American of our day had such a vast personal acquaintance with celebrated people. Dr. Schaff was the intimate friend of Tholuck, Neander, Godet, Hengstenberg, and Dorner; he was one day in familiar conversation with Dean Stanley in the Abbey and another day with Gladstone; another day with Dollinger in Vienna, and another day with Dr. Pusey at Oxford. The promise, "He shall stand before kings," was often fulfilled to him. The veteran Kaiser William had him at the royal table, and gave him intimate interview. The King and Queen of Denmark came on the platform to congratulate him after one of his eloquent speeches, and the Queen of Greece was one of his correspondents. He shook hands with more ministers of all denominations, and of all nationalities than any man of this age. He was as cordially treated by Archbishop Canterbury as he was by Bismarck at Berlin or the old Russian Archpriest Brashenski. Dr. Schaff was a prodigy of industry. During half a century he was the foremost church historian of this country; he led the work of the Sabbath Committee, and was the master spirit of the Evangelical Alliance. He edited a volume of hymnology, and wrote catechisms for children; he filled professors' chairs in two seminaries and lectured on ecclesiastical history to others. He published thirty-one volumes and edited two immense commentaries; he was the president of the Committee on Biblical Revision, and he crossed the ocean fourteen times as a fraternal internuncio between the churches of Europe and America. His prodigious capacity for work made Dr. Samuel Johnson seem an idler, and his varied attainments and activities were fairly a match for Gladstone. To those of us who knew Dr. Schaff intimately, one of his most attractive traits was his jovial humor and inexhaustible fund of anecdotes. When I made a visit to California--journeying with him to the Yosemite--his endless stories whiled away the tedium of the trip. How often when he sat down to my own, or any other table, would he tell how his old friend, Neander, when asked to say grace at a dinner, and roast pig was the chief dish, very quaintly said: "O, Lord, if Thou canst bless under the new dispensation what Thou didst curse under the old dispensation, then graciously bless this leetle pig. Amen!"
Another eminent scholar who was wont to seek recreation at Mohonk was the venerable President McCosh, of Princeton University. Since Scotland sent to Princeton Dr. John Witherspoon to preside over it, and to be one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, she has sent no richer gift than Dr. James McCosh. For several years before he came to America he was a professor in the Queen's College at Belfast. Passing through Belfast in 1862, I looked in for a few moments at the Irish Presbyterian General Assembly, which was convened in Dr. Cook's church, and said to a man: "Whom can you show me here?" Pointing to a tall, somewhat stooping figure, standing near the pulpit, he said: "There is McCosh." I replied: "It is worth coming here to see the brightest man in Ireland." What a great, all-round, fully equipped, many-sided mass of splendid manhood he was! What a complete combination of philosopher, theologian, preacher, scholar, and college president all rolled into one! During the twenty years of his brilliant career at Princeton he displayed much of Jonathan Edwards' metaphysical acumen, of John Witherspoon's wisdom, Samuel Davies' fervor and Dr. "Johnny" McLean's kindness of heart; the best qualities of his predecessors were combined in him. He came here a Scotchman at the age of fifty-seven, and in a year he became, as Paddy said, "a native American."
To my mind the chief glory of Dr. McCosh's presidency at Princeton was the fervid interest he felt in the religious welfare of his students. He often invited me to come over and deliver sermons to them, and occasionally a temperance address; for he was a zealous teetotaler and prohibitionist, and I always lodged with him at his house. As I turn over my book of correspondence I find many brief letters from him. In the following one he refers to the remarkable revival in the college in the winter and early spring of 1870:
COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY, PRINCETON, Jan. 9, 1873.
My dear Dr. Cuyler:
In the name of the Philadelphian Society, and in my own name, I request you to conduct our service on the day of prayer for colleges, being Thursday the 30th of January. It is three years, if I calculate rightly, since you performed that duty for us. That visit was followed by the blessed work in which you took an active part. May it be the same this year! The college is in an interesting state: we have a great deal of the spirit of study; there is a meeting for prayer every night except Friday; the class prayer meetings are all well attended, in some of the classes as many as sixty present; but we need a quickening. I do hope you will come. Our habit is an address of half an hour or so at three PM in the college chapel, and a sermon in one of the churches, especially addressed to students, but open to all in the evening. Of course, you will come to my house, and live with me. Yours as ever,
James McCosh.
To hundreds of the alumni of Princeton this letter will stir the fountain of old memories. They will hear in it the ring of the old college bell; they will see the lines of students marching across the campus to evening prayer and into the chapel. Upon the platform mounts the stooping form of grand old "Uncle Jimmie," and in his broad and not unmelodious Scotch accents he pours out his big, warm heart in prayer. With honest pride in their Alma Mater, they will thank God that they were trained for the battle of life by James McCosh.
The limits of this narrative do not allow me to tell of all my delightful "foregatherings" with that venerated Nestor of American art, Daniel Huntington; and with General James Grant Wilson with his repertoire of racy Scotch stories; and with my true yoke-fellows in the Gospel, Dr. Herrick Johnson, Dr. Marvin R. Vincent, and Dr. Samuel J. Fisher--and with a group of infinitely witty women who regaled many an evening hour with their merry quips and conundrums. The unwritten law which prevails in that social realm is: "Each for all, and all for each other."
Mr. Smiley had been for some years a member of the United States Indian Commission, and his experience in that capacity had awakened a deep interest in the welfare of the remaining Aborigines, who had too often been the prey of unscrupulous white men who came in contact with them. About sixteen years ago he conceived the happy idea of calling a conference at Mohonk of those who were conversant with Indian affairs and most desirous to promote their well being. His invitation brought together such distinguished philanthropists as the veteran ex-Senator Henry L. Dawes, General Clinton B. Fisk, General Armstrong, the founder of Hampton Institute; Merrill E. Gates, Philip C. Garrett, Herbert Welsh, and that picturesque and powerful friend of the red man, the late Bishop Whipple of Minnesota. The discussions and decisions of this annual Mohonk Conference have had immense influence in shaping the legislation and controlling the conduct of our national government in all Indian affairs. It has helped to make history.
The great success of this conference, which meets in October of each year, led my Quaker friend, Smiley, eight years ago, to inaugurate an "Arbitration conference" for the promotion of international peace. It was a happy thought and has yielded a rich fruitage. About the first of every June this conference brings together such men and women of "light and leading" from all parts of our country as ex-Senator George F. Edmunds of Vermont, the Rev. Edward Everett Hale of Boston, the Hon. William J. Coombs, the Hon. Robert Treat Paine, Dr. B.F. Trueblood, John B. Garrett and Joshua L. Bailey, Colonel George E. Waring, Hon. John W. Foster, Chief Justice Nott, Warner Van Norden, and a great number of well known clergymen and editors have read able papers or delivered instructive addresses on that ever burning problem of how to turn swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks.
I especially sympathize with the spirit of this Arbitration conference, not only because I abominate war per se, but because I firmly believe that among the grievous perils that confront our nation is the mania for enormous and costly military and naval armament--and also the policy of extending our territory by foreign conquests. The high mission of our Republic is to maintain the fundamental principles initiated in our Declaration of Independence--that all true government rests on the consent of the governed. It is an impious profanation of our flag of freedom to make it the symbol of absolutism on any soil. In the conflict now waging for true American principles, I heartily concur in the views of the late Benjamin Harrison, who was one of the most clear-sighted and patriotic of our Presidents. Just before his death I addressed to that noble Christian statesman a letter of heartfelt thanks for the position he was taking. With the following gratifying reply which I received, I conclude my chapter on peace-loving "Smiley-land":
INDIANAPOLIS, Dec 26, 1900
My dear Dr. Cuyler.
I can hardly tell you how grateful your letter was to me, or how highly I value your approval. My soul has been in revolt against the doctrine of Congressional Absolutism. I want to save my veneration for the men who made us a nation, and organized the nation under the Constitution. This will be impossible if I am to believe that they organized a government to exercise from their place that absolutism which they rejected for themselves. The newspaper reports of my Ann Arbor address were most horribly mangled, but the address will appear in the January number of the North American Review. Allow me, my dear friend, to extend to you the heartiest thanks, not only for your kind words, but for the noble life which gives them value.
With all good wishes of the Christmastide,
Most sincerely your friend,
BENJAMIN HARRISON.