A Study in Origins
New England, past and present— Dr. Gordon's ancestry— Early days-
Conversion— School life in New London
THE central portion of New Hampshire is a land of far distances and blue outlines, of winding roads, upland pastures, and sun-crowned hills. Dozens of lakes, small and great, stretch their bared breasts to the July sun. Great tracts of maple and birch blaze with a fire of scarlet, of orange, of crimson, of yellow, in the shortening afternoons of October, Threading its way like a stream of quicksilver from the highlands in the north through the smiling hill-country, the Pemigewasset carries seaward the contributions of unnumbered mountain brooks. It is a land of idyllic beauty, with a charm of its own, half indefinable—perhaps the result of the endlessly new combinations of the simple elements of its landscape, which no one who rides over its rough roads can fail to make.
A quiet country wrthal, quite unlike the rest of our great, busy, commercial land. Life here is to the fevered and strenuous life of the cities below as the peaceful mountain pool is to the mill-race which drives ten thousand spindles. For great changes indeed have come over the face of the land in the course of a third of a century. Those subtle but omnipotent economic forces which, apparently from sheer arbitrariness, destroy the patiently constructed foundations of generations of industry, while rearing with superhuman energy new creations elsewhere, have made themselves felt here. New England
ti ADONIkAM JUDSON GORDON
farm life has gone down before the inordinate competition of the great West. Farms have become pasture, pasture has grown into wilderness, homesteads have disappeared. Those monuments of untiring energy, the endless stone walls, are themselves tumbling apart. Back roads are closed; the strange faces of Canadian habitants are more and more common. The old order is passing away. The most encouraging indications of a future in the general decadence are the attractive villas of Boston and New York, which are rising here and there in coigns of vantage wherever the outlook is unusually striking and beautiful.
And where are the old occupants of these farms? What has become of the children of these lovely hillsides? Not a city in the land but has representatives from their large families, not a State in the Union but has benefited by the reserve of granite energy which they have carried with them into the exacting life of the day. Grappling with other problems now, — of finance, of justice, of legislation,— they show the same indomitable spirit which solved the humbler though equally knotty problem of wringing sustenance for a dozen little ones from these boulder-strewn fields. Fifteen miles from the spot where this is written was born that imperial man with the mighty brow, under which glowed two coals for eyes— the great commoner, the expounder of the Constitution, Daniel Webster. Fifty-three miles away as the crow flies stands the little school-house on one of whose benches the name Horace Greeley, cut with school-boy's knife, is still to be seen. Looking off from my window, I can see on a distant hill the old white homestead of the Magouns, name distinguished in pulpit, in counting-house, in college chair. The remembrance of venerable Parson Morton, with his unfailing black gloves, is still fresh in the minds of the old people of the adjoining town. His son, whom they recall as a barefoot lad, has become a leading banker at the metropolis, a vice-president of the
A STUDY IN ORIGINS 13
United States, and much else. At Hillsborough Bridge below was born the Nestor of American journalism, Charles A. Dana. Somewhat to the west is the old home of Austin Corbin, the wizard of speculative finance. At a distance farther south stands the town where John P. Hale first saw daylight. Of the others— the Miners, the Brewsters, the Wentworths, the Pillsburys, the Colbys— it is not necessary to speak. They have been worthy children of the New Hampshire soil— strong, shrewd, hard-hitting, much-enduring men, very like the Scotch, also bred in rugged hills under a Calvinist regime, and vitalizing the British empire, world over, as these New Englanders have vitalized the great Republic.
The thoughtful American cannot but question whether, in the new homes of Kansas and Dakota, where the black loam of river-bottoms furnishes an easy livelihood, but where there can be two elements only, sky and prairie, in the background of his mental pictures, the transplanted New Englander will not lose something of the idealism and poetic sensitiveness which have been so finely blended with the more masterful elements of his character. Still greater will be his misgivings as to the future of this people in the luxurious homes which they have made for themselves in every American city. Plain living was the necessary condition of existence on these rocky hillsides. High thinking was an almost equally necessary consequence of life in such lovely natural surroundings. Can the stock retain its noble characteristics under the new conditions?
Concerning the more remote ancestry of the subject of this sketch little is known. That the blood of the saint of Leyden, John Robinson, coursed in his veins is fairly well authenticated. The Gordons themselves were perhaps the flotsam drifting to the American coast from the great wreck of their clan at Culloden. Yet wheresoever they came from, they were a sturdy race with " the thews of Anakim," performing great feats with ax and plow. The Puritan, steel before, was now thrice hardened by the pioneer experiences of wilderness Hfe. Pushing up from Massachusetts, he cut his roads far up the mountain-sides, as if in scorn of rich intervales, cleared away the primeval forests, built his churches and schools, and took his properly accredited place on the map of the world like a straightforward, matter-of-fact man.
Old Levi Robinson, Dr. Gordon's great-grandfather, was a man of this rugged type. When hostilities with the mothercountry became imminent, he shouldered his flint-lock, and tramped through wood and over stream, one hundred miles to Boston, Arriving too late to take part in the engagement at Bunker Hill, he served through the remainder of the campaign
with Washington. A stout-hearted man who believed what
he believed, he first in the region saw the cogency of the Baptist position, and on sight accepted it, spite of the opposition of standing order, spite of the odor of fanaticism popularly supposed to cling about Anabaptist notions. Some thereare even now in his native town who remember the old man, in his powdered wig and with a huge silver-topped stick, walking Sunday mornings seven miles or more to the distant church of his persuasion.
What traditions of piety there were in this Puritan family! We recall especially one old grandmother, hid away on a back farm with but two books, the Bible and Bunyan, who tended and nurtured a spiritual life fairly efHorescent in its devotion, its sweetness, its humility. In extreme age interest in the Lord's work never dimmed. Often did her grandson, coming back to the old home in the summer-time, marvel at the depth, the richness, the fulness of this hidden saint life. Often did he wonder that, in her obscurity, she should show such an intelligent perception of the truth. A prayerful life is as a corn of wheat in the ground— sure to bring forth fruit in the years
to come. Who shall say how much the flower of a later
noble and saintly career owed to this hidden, unobserved, unobtrusive life, rooted and grounded in God?
A STUDY IN OEIGIjVS 15
John Calvin Gordon, the father, was a man in whose character our own easy-going age would doubtless find much amusement. To the average jellyfish, convinced of the perfection and completeness of the invertebrate state, a backboned creature must seem little short of a freak. A man to whom the doctrine of God's sovereignty was even more important than a five-per-cent. change in the newest tariff, would be equally curious and unaccountable nowadays. Yet this was such a one, cast in the mould of earlier days, whose whole life was bound up in the " five points " of the Genevan system, whom the fire-cry of "dogma" never alarmed, whose little property was spent in building churches and providing for the religious instruction of his generation. It was a period of doctrinal agitation on a subject somewhat obsolete in these days of exegesis— a subject which, as Froude says, has ever divided men who tamper with it, and will to the end. The problems of " fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute," were then the standards round which battles were waged. The disagreement resulting from these discussions led to division and the formation from the parent organization of a new body, the Free Baptists.
Deacon Gordon went with the hyper-Calvinists. To him the very principle and foundation of things was involved. He often declared humorously that he could tell an Arminian farmer by a glance at his woodpile, so disorderly and so irregular were the adherents of a disorderly and irregular system apt to be. Yet we would not give the impression that here was a wrangling, disputatious schoolman to whom controversy was the breath of the nostril and doctrinal disagreement meat and drink. On the contrary, few men have left behind them such traditions of piety and devotion. The morning exercises of the family were held in a corner room of the old homestead, close to the cross-roads, where the villagers were constantly passing. The recollection of Deacon Gordon's prayers, wafted
1 ADON/RAM JUDSON GORDON
out of the open windows into the June air, are still present in the minds of the older people, as the aroma of long-preserved sandalwood. Nor did insistence on tenet interfere with the weightier matters of practical Christianity. Rectitude, charity, self-denying effort for the advancement of the kingdom, won for the rigid Calvinist the affection of the whole region. Strength and sweetness were here blended as in the greatest of New England Calvinists, Jonathan Edwards. And the sweetness was as different from the sweetness of our modern saccharine, humanitarian theology, as the honey of Hybla is from the candy of the little corner store.
And of the mother how shall we adequately speak? Genius for goodness, as pronounced in Dr. Gordon's character as ever the genius for music or mechanics in any, presupposes a good mother. Here was a woman like Susannah Wesley, self-effacing in her unselfishness, quaintly unconscious of her own surpassing goodness, and endowed with minor excellences, discernible daily in the son's life. Those who were present at her funeral will not soon forget the tribute which he paid to the still face wrapped in its death-sleep. How full of love, of gratitude, of longing reminiscence! What references to her laborious life, to the unrecorded sacrifices, to the solicitous care with which she brought up her twelve children, to the constant ministry among the sick and needy of her village; for if there was want of watcher or nurse she was ever ready, spite of her large family, to spend the night away from home, ever back at her work in the early morning. At the risk of anticipating, we cannot refrain from reproducing here a letter written immediately after the son, in anguish of spirit, had laid the mother away. It is a breath from the flood-tide of blessed
memories which death alone awakes, revives, gathers up. He
walks back from the grave dug in a hillside white with February drifts to the old home. One hope alone can in any degree assuage the sorrow; and so he takes up the New Testament,
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and for two days reads and ponders on every passage referring to the resurrection.
" I have spent two days here," so the letter goes, " much of the time alone in the dear home where mother spent her last years. So far from seeming lonely, I should be glad to spend days there where everything reminds us of the beloved one. I have many times gone into her vacant bedroom and knelt where she so often bowed and prayed for her children. Her family was her parish; to them she ministered, and for them she ceased not to pray until the end. ' Father, I pray for those that thou hast given me, that they may be with me where I am, and behold my glory.' All my sorrow for her has been turned into unspeakable joy in view of the rest into which she has entered."
It was into this home with its long heritage of Christian living that a son was born on the 19th of April, 1836. A new era was opening for American Christianity, a new impulse was throbbing with springtime energy in its veins. The greatest of modern missionaries had gone forth, in the spirit of Boniface, to grapple with the forces of heathenism in their very stronghold. And now the. story of the heroic career in Burmah had reached the homes of America. In city, in hamlet, in distant farm, wherever devout hearts were praying for the spread of Christ's kingdom, the history of hardship and suffering and faithful testimony was being rehearsed. The tale of the agony of Oung-Pen-La wrung the heart of the New Hampshire villager, and in his admiration he determined to name his child after the apostle, Adoniram Judson. The interval of keynote 'twixt the name of John Calvin Gordon and that of his little son marks in a significant way the transition in American Christianity from its speculative to its practical and missionary phase. To the new generation Christianity was to be not so much a bunch of theories for debate and discussion as a universal economy, a regime whose sway was to extend over all peoples. Few men entered more earnestly, though in a humble way, into the robust life of Calvinistic Christianity than the father. Few men have, under God, been more active and helpful in emphasizing the new purposes and revived mission of the Christian church of our century than the son.
Calvin Gordon was the owner of a woolen-mill. Nowadays, in the era of capitalism, such a statement would imply the possession of at least considerable wealth. Not so then. Mills were small, and run usually by the owner himself with the help of his family. The type is now obsolete. The all absorbing system of centralized production, with its proletariat work-people, its immeasurable capital, its dreary history of strike and lockout, has crushed the little mill as completely as the Dakota wheat-field has crowded out the New England farm. The stream which supplied power to the Gordon mill and to five others now runs untroubled through the alders. It has become the sole property of a wealthy manufacturer, who uses it for trout much as the patricians of old Rome used the lakes of Campania for carp and barbel. The plain, brave life of New England has vanished; the old economy, with its relatively meager productivity, but its incomparably better distribution of wealth, is a thing of the past. The coming socialistic synthesis, if it be no mirage, is at best far, far distant. And, meantime, suffering, want, class hatred, economic chaos
We can easily imagine what life in such a diminutive factory would be. Duties were of course multifarious. To bargain with the farmer at the door, who came to exchange his year's shearing for substantial, long-wearing cloth; to follow the shuttle back and forth in its magical course; to attend to any stoppage in the water-wheels; to repair breaks in machinery to keep the accounts in the little closet office—-doubtless the days were full enough. Commission-agent, machinist, accountant, mill-hand— all functions were centralized in one man. Work then was an education; it is now a form of
A STUDY IN ORIGINS 1
slavery. Then the diversity of labor developed an ingenuity which has made the New England name proverbial; now the machine-like task, pursued ten hours daily throughout a lifetime, of throwing a hand this way or bending the body the other, ends usually in mental stupefaction and moral inertia. Work in the fields, too, was in the spring season often substituted for the labors of the mill. Doubtless the lad eagerly left his ordinary task of washing greasy wools in the big iron kettle—a vessel that in after-years was the treasured receptacle for flowers on the lawn of his summer home— for the more welcome labor of following the plow through the fresh-turned sod under the skies of May. It was in these years too, doubtless, so healthfully varied, so full of opportunity for the observant mind, that the gift of comparison and illustration from the common things of hfe was developed— a gift which made the discourses of later years as instinct with naturalness and vitality as the parables of the synoptists themselves.
So passed the early years in a quiet village lying in the trough of the billowy New Hampshire hills, in a home of exceptional piety, amid such surroundings as could hardly fail to nurture a wholesome, high-souled, nature-loving character. When the boy reached his fifteenth year a great change passed across his inner life. Hitherto a thoughtless, somewhat indifferent, unresponsive lad, he now became intent on new things. New vistas opened out; a new seriousness sobered him; a new thoughtfulness was turning his attention to a larger life than that which had to do with fuller's tub and farmer's team. The weightier interests of the spiritual Hfe began to absorb his thoughts. First came the struggle, the wrestling as at Peniel till the gray dawn. The conviction of sin was intense, unendurable. A realization of the corruption of the human heart, a vision of the perfect God, high and lifted up— to what conclusion could these lead save that of unqualified unworthiness, of utter helplessness? The conflict of soul darkened and intensified. A whole night was finally spent in such anguish of spirit that the father was obliged to sit with him till daybreak. Sorrow endureth for the night, but joy cometh in the morning. Calm as the sunshine which flooded the hills the next day was that boy spirit which had found peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
On a lovely Sabbath in June he witnessed, with his two sisters, a good confession, going down with them in mystic death into the waters of the old mill-stream, which enlarges itself into a bit of a lake above his home. His conversion was a new impulse in all directions. Books had been an aversion, study an almost penal discipline. With what avidity did he now go back to these distasteful tasks! For did they not constitute the necessary preparation for a future, the anticipation and hope of which he was now treasuring in his heart?
This hope and purpose he did not long keep to himself. Shortly after his sixteenth year had opened he confessed before the church his determination to enter the ministry. One who was present has described the scene to the writer. A warm evening in late spring; the sounds of the wakeful world of the lower creation coming in the open doors and windows; a shy, awkward boy, yet with a light on his face, announcing, with much difficulty and stumbling, his purpose to devote his life and best powers to his Saviour's work. " Judson is a good boy, and would make a good minister if only he had energy^^ remarked one old deacon to the writer's informant. Not the first person, forsooth, to mistake noisiness for force, and, conversely, to disregard the latent power which lies hid in the quietest mill-pond.
This decision made, the first step to be taken was preparation for college. There was a fitting-school in the village, but its connection was with the new and lax seceding party. The boy was sent, therefore, by his stanchly Calvinist father to a trustworthy denominational school at New London, N. H. In
A STUDY IN OR/GINS 2i
a suit of clothes made by his mother's hands from cloth spun in the old mill, (how reverently in after-years did he speak of these ministrations! ) he started from home. A long walk truly, thirty-four miles, when one is baggage train as well as infantry. Yet doubtless the bag in which he carried his effects was not heavily freighted— a change of clothing, a Virgil, and an algebra constituting a not unsupposable inventory of its contents. The country, too, through which he trudged is peculiarly beautiful, past Cardigan and Ragged mountains, round the base of Kearsarge and by Sunapee Lake, into the plain in which the school town is situated.
Of his life in New London there is very slight record. Foundations, though more essential than finials, are usually hid in the earth and forgotten. Up to this time there had been little preliminary instruction. The classes, therefore, were much in advance of the new-comer. But, though the cabbage outstrips the oak in the first months of spring, final results are never uncertain. The difficulties were further complicated by that problem of self-support which so often meets and vexes students in American schools. Odd moments, the small change of leisure, were all carefully economized against the day when termbills should come due. On one occasion young Gordon took the contract of painting the exterior of the main school building, a structure four stories in height. The whole spring recess was spent in work on corner boards and cases and windowsashes. His room-mate, a young man with better financial backing, generously assisted in the task without pecuniary return. This copartnership, begun on high ladders with paintpots and brushes, was resumed in a very different sphere later on. The two painters became respectively executive chairman and corresponding secretary of the missionary society of the Baptist denomination in America, and shoulder to shoulder labored for the evangelization of the world.
We have before us a small bundle of themes or essays in fine, copperplate handwriting, much faded now, which were written in these school-boy days. Among them is the text of an address before the literary association of the school, which bore the pretentiously classical name of "The Euphemian Society." It is full of references to the duties of the hour in the moral-political crisis which the slavery agitation had brought on. There is much attempt at bravura, and a turgid style which contrasts strangely with the calm, unruffled, lakelike lucidity of later years. On the other hand, we find in these years the stagings going up which were to support the delicate, aerial, and yet geometrically accurate exegesis which constituted so great a charm in Dr. Gordon's writings and addresses. In anticipation of future needs and interests, Greek became immediately the subject of special study. His old teacher writes:
" Greek he began with me. He liked the language, and
pursued it with a genuine zest. He seemed to realize that it was the tongue specially prepared by God as the depository of his highest spiritual revelations. With this language he was specially to deal in all his future study and work. Hence, thoughtful and high-purposed as he was, he sought to know it. He studied his long and tedious lessons in the Greek paradigms as though in pursuit of game which he was bound to round up. In later years, when I have noted in his writings specially fine and discriminating renderings of difficult texts in the New Testament, I have thought I could detect an apt and skilful use of the principles of the Greek language first learned in New London."