23. The Sad Summer
23
THE SAD SUMMER
“I am staying indoors until the weather shall moderate,” Fanny wrote to White during the winter of 1907–1908. She seldom went out now in wintertime, but she was far from idle, with streams of visitors who came for advice and help. When the weather improved, away she went. In March, she boarded the train at Bridgeport and traveled alone to New York, where she was met by Phoebe, with whom she spent a week.
At her annual banquet, she was asked about her more than eight thousand hymns. Which did she consider the best? Significantly, she remarked, “I have not yet written my best hymn.”
“I HAVE NOT YET WRITTEN MY BEST HYMN.”
Although she felt many of her hymns had been used by God for great good, she still felt that from an artistic point of view she had not written many great ones. Her output had been rushed. Perhaps now, since much less was being asked of her, she could get down to writing her greatest.
After her birthday, Fanny spent a week at a Methodist convention in Brooklyn. One afternoon she called on Ira Sankey in what would be her last visit to this beloved old friend. Ira was dying. For three years he had suffered from a sickness that caused him severe pain and reduced him to a near skeleton. When Fanny told him “the entire Christian world is praying for your recovery,” he shook his head. He bade Fanny to meet him in heaven, “at the pearly gate at the eastern side of the city.” There, he said, “I’ll take you by the hand and lead you along the golden street, up to the throne of God, and there we’ll stand…and say to Him: ‘And now we see Thee face to face, saved by Thy matchless, boundless grace!’ ”
After the convention, Fanny set off for Perth Amboy, New Jersey, for two weeks of speaking engagements. Although she must have known she was seeing Sankey for the last time, when she bade adieu to Phoebe Knapp at the Hotel Savoy, she had no way of knowing that for her, too, it was to be the last good-bye.
From there she proceeded to Princeton, where she spoke at a “sacred concert” on Good Friday at the Presbyterian church. On Sunday, she preached the Easter sermon.
Before leaving Princeton, she paid one last visit to her old friend, Grover Cleveland, who was feeble and emaciated. She was deeply concerned about him as she rode to New Haven, where she visited Bert White at Yale. On the morning of June 25, she learned Grover was dead. She consoled herself that they had had a “deep, warm friendship that death cannot break, for the cords will be united and we shall see and know each other in the land of the blest.”
It was to be the saddest summer of Fanny’s long life. Little more than two weeks after she learned of Cleveland’s death, she was stunned by the news that Phoebe had died. Still vigorous and youthful-looking in her early seventies, Phoebe had gone to Poland Spring, Maine, for a vacation and there, on July 10, had suffered a stroke.
A month later, Sankey’s soul was freed. He drifted off into a coma on the morning of August 13, singing the opening lines of Fanny’s “Saved by Grace”:
Some day the silver cord will break
And I no more as now shall sing,
But, oh, the joy when I shall wake
Within the palace of the King!
By nightfall, he was gone.
Fanny must have felt quite lonely. Not only had she outhved most of her friends her own age; she had outhved most of those who were a generation younger. Unlike many very old persons who wonder why they are left behind, Fanny remained basically “as happy as a chickadee,” secure in the confidence that she eventually would be united forever with those she had loved and secure in the confidence that God still had work for her to do on earth.
She continued to write hymns, mostly for Allan Sankey and Charles Gabriel, a few for Hugh Main. For Main, she wrote a successful hymn on the transitory nature of earthly life titled “We’re Traveling On.” It was the last of her major hymns.
She continued to speak regularly at the Christian Union and maintained her ministry of cheer by private meetings, letters, lectures, and hospital visitations.
Fanny’s lifetime had spanned many changes in America. She had seen the invention of the telephone, telegraph, steam engine, phonograph, moving picture, bicycle, typewriter, X-ray, elevator, sewing machine, safety match, anesthetics, reaper and mower, submarine, typesetting machine, automobile, airplane, and radio. She came to know and somewhat appreciate modern poetry—poetry without rhyme and rhythm, so unlike that which she wrote. She enjoyed the popular songs of the day and toyed with the idea of writing secular songs once again, as she had done fifty years before. She felt her lyrics could “elevate above their present standard” the songs of the day.
Aunt Fanny was profoundly disturbed by other trends she saw developing in American society: the growing tendency toward materialism and the beginning of the breakdown of the American home and family structure. At odds with the feminist movement, she complained that modern women seemed eager to do everything but “the work that ought to be done at home.” She added, “I may appear a little old-fogeyish, but I have firm convictions on this very vital question.” She was convinced the strength of a nation lay in family and home life; when that broke down, so did the nation.
At the center of the home should be God, and Fanny saw with great concern the decreasing interest in Christianity among Americans. “When I was a child,” she said of the Bible, “this book had a practical place both in home and nation.” The growing doubts and disbelief of scripture saddened her. “No Christian nation can be great which ignores the Sacred Book,” she lamented. And America could not endure “if the heads of the families are prayerless.”
FANNY SAW WITH GREAT CONCERN THE DECREASING INTEREST IN CHRISTIANITY AMONG AMERICANS.
She felt the nation, too, must be headed by a man of prayer. William H. Taft, a rather nominal Unitarian, was in the White House. Fanny said she felt it was impossible for the nation to survive with “prayerless presidents.” Without a return to the faith of their fathers, America had no future at all.
She saw all this reflected in the life of the church itself, where attendance was falling off. She was appalled at the small number of men interested in religion. She feared that from the generation rising about her “there will not be men enough in heaven to sing bass.”
Within Protestantism were movements that appalled Fanny. Many modern theologians had come to question the authority of scripture. Fanny was deeply troubled about trends she perceived developing among the clergy. She was troubled when told of many young people losing their faith in college and seminary.
Fanny seldom went to church services now. The infrequency of her attendance is a mystery. She was growing quite frail, but this did not stop her from traveling up and down the East Coast to speak. About the only times she appeared at First Methodist Church now were when she was asked to speak. When asked by friends about her infrequent attendance, she said, “I can worship God just as well here, by myself, as I can at church.” This is a baffling statement, coming from a lifelong churchgoer.
Fanny retained her Methodist membership, however, and continued to work diligently with the King’s Daughters. She became increasingly interested in Roman Catholicism, finding it a “good, strong religion” whose fervent piety she admired. She held in highest respect Pius X, who had opposed the trends toward “modernism” among his own clergy and people and who was noted for the extraordinary holiness of his life. The only drawback she saw with the Roman Catholic faith was not doctrinal but liturgical.
Not all the developments within Protestantism filled her with dismay. She followed with interest the career of Dr. W. A. (Billy) Sunday, who in many ways proved himself a successor to her dear Moody. She also was inspired by Dr. J. Wilbur Chapman and his “chorister” Charles M. (Charlie) Alexander, who in 1909 conducted a successful multinational campaign. She even wrote a poem in their honor.
SHE FOLLOWED WITH INTEREST THE CAREER OF BILLY SUNDAY.
In March 1910, Fanny celebrated her ninetieth birthday. She was bent nearly double but continued to travel and lecture, refusing to give in to the ravages of time. She wrote Bert White that “I am so busy I hardly know my name.” Her cheerfulness seemed to increase rather than diminish. She maintained that “I don’t want to die yet, but rather live on for another decade-and-a-half, to the age of a hundred and five.” Yet if her heavenly Father willed otherwise, she conceded, “it is well.” She attributed her longevity to “angel-guards” who controlled her appetite, temper, and speech.
Fanny traveled to New York alone in the spring of 1911, where she appeared as the principal speaker at the “Tent, Open-Air and Shop Campaign” of the Evangelistic Committee of the Methodist Episcopal Church. More than five thousand people were at Carnegie Hall that day, and a choir of two thousand sang, almost exclusively, her hymns.
Fanny arrived in an automobile. When it pulled up, the attendants were so appalled by her ravaged appearance that one of them cried, “For heaven’s sake, get a wheelchair!”
Fanny’s strong voice stopped them. “I need no rolling chair. I can stand on my own two feet. My strength is in the Lord.”
That October, she returned to New York for the last time to visit Helen Keller, whom she had met a decade before. After a day with her gifted friend, whom she considered a modern prophet, Fanny once more visited the Bowery Mission and spoke there. Then she went to Jersey City, where she spoke at the Simpson Memorial Methodist Church and visited Alice Holmes, who at ninety was somewhat deaf and feeble. The two women had not been together for four decades, but Alice recognized Fanny at once by her voice.
That autumn, everyone felt the last hour had come for Aunt Fanny when she was stricken with pneumonia, but to everyone’s amazement—including her own—she recovered. She looked so frail now that everyone expected her death momentarily.
But she still traveled occasionally. In February 1913, she and Florence journeyed to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to speak at the First Baptist Church. At one service she preached to an audience of two thousand. Years later, a man who had been a child at the time remembered “the little old lady, dressed in black, standing with Dr. Campbell behind the lectern, saying good-bye to the world.”
Her ninety-third birthday fell on Easter, and she remarked, “If there is anyone in this world happier than I, I want to shake his hand, for I believe myself to be as happy as it is possible for a mortal to be in this world. Life with me glides on like a little boat on a waveless stream, with flowers on each bank.”
That evening she appeared at the First Methodist Church for the first time in many months. George Stebbins had come from Brooklyn to be with her, accompanied by his neighbor Mrs. Jenny Bennett Carpenter, a blind soprano. Fanny had heard her sing while on a visit to New York several years earlier and had been impressed by her talent. After Fanny spoke and blessed the congregation, Mrs. Carpenter sang “Saved by Grace.” Halfway through, Aunt Fanny rose, took her arm, and sang with her. The congregation was moved to tears by the sight of the two blind women singing together.
Fanny spent her time now, as she said in a letter to Bert White, “knitting, always as usual—stopping when callers come in or something more pressing presents itself.” She took a few automobile rides and a few trips to see friends, but beyond that she seldom went out anymore. As her ninety-fourth birthday approached, the King’s Daughters decided all Fanny’s friends should honor her by wearing her favorite flower, the violet. Hugh Main saw to it that Violet Day came to the attention of the newspapers, and another nationwide birthday celebration was planned.
The Sunday before Violet Day, Fanny spoke for what was to be the last time—at First Methodist. The church was packed. A local newspaper reported Fanny was “feeble in body, yet strong in mind…buoyant in spirit, with a trust and faith in God as firm as the everlasting hills.”
Most of her address was about the power of prayer. Prayer is essential in the life of the believer, she said. Some people think one must kneel or assume a certain position to pray, but this, she said, is false. “I do not kneel to pray. I no longer have the strength to rise from that position.” Believers should feel free to pray wherever or in whatever position is most convenient.
MOST OF HER ADDRESS WAS ABOUT THE POWER OF PRAYER.
She gave several examples of God answering prayers, including her own recovery from pneumonia, which she attributed solely to the prayers of her friends. “I want all of you to go to God in prayer in all trials and sorrows. The good will come out of it, and He will answer your prayer better than you think.” Of course, one may not always get exactly what is requested, she said. But one must trust God’s way as best.
She urged the congregation to “cling to the Saviour” in “this age of change.” She concluded, “My dear, dear people, I love you dearly, and if I should first cross to the beautiful shore, I know that I shall greet you there!” But she felt her work was not yet done. “I believe that He still has work for me yet. I don’t want to die yet.”
But it was now apparent to most and probably to her that she would not approximate her goal of 105 years.