teach us His own accent if we will ask His approval only and utter all that He gives. This alert, sensitive, confused, and yet earnest and plastic age so greatly needs the true meaning of the genuine Church of Christ, that I long to see all ecclesiastical impedimenta sent to the rear.

The plain issue is so mortal and so painful that we can well afford to let the ecclesiast and the logician pass by so that the humane Son of God can lift and bear and heal. A shorter statement and a longer arm say I, for one.

Now, "He standeth behind our wall. He looketh in at the windows. He showeth Himself thro the lattice."

Yet a little while and "we shall know, even as also we have been known," Him "in whom are hid all the treasures both of the wisdom and knowledge of God," who said "I am come that ye might have life and more abundantly;" Him, "of the increase of whose government there shall be no end."

Thou Holy, Omnipresent One,

Of God's whole Church the only Guide!

Thy gifts, at Pentecost begun,

Thro every age are multiplied.

Above the heads of fervent men

Still burns the unconsuming flame,
And Thou dost utterance give again
To speak with tongues in Jesus' name.

In every land and language, Thou

One mighty work dost still increase,
Perplexing earthly wisdom now,—

For Babel discords giving peace.

Man's spirit is Thy lamp, O Light!
Wherewith to search the inmost part.
Obedience shall not walk in night,
Nor guiding fail the craving heart.
Thy Scripture speaketh not in vain
Of all the yearning love Thou hast
That man should in Thy life attain
That sky no doubt can overcast !

EXPECTANT ATTENTION

We trust Thee, God, forever near !
Not timid lest Thou be withdrawn ;
Each century makes Thy word more clear,
And shall, till day eternal dawn.

We dare not heed another hand,
Nor hark to any lesser voice,
Give Thou Thy truth to understand,
And make that truth our only choice!

167

Partisanship and Patriotism

A RESPONSE AT THE “HARDWARE DINNER"

HOTEL SAVOY, NEW YORK CITY

FEBRUARY 20, 1896

Mr. President and Fellow-citizens:

It was a remark which I have seen attributed to Sydney Smith, upon his leave-taking with a departing missionary, "Sir, I hope you will agree with the man that eats you"! It always struck me that the indigestibility of Jonah must have been instructive to that fish whose hospitality was so unsuccessful and so brief. Both the monster and the medicine must have had wiser notions as to quick sails and small prophets.

A little while ago I talked behind a table in this city and did not finish until the next day! The presiding officer intimated that I was the last man who should speak that night, and he was right. I began by congratulating those who had already left and then asked leave to print. I would say to my fellow morsels who are appetizingly displayed at this counter, that I know what it is to hold my thumbs and wonder if there is to be any time left. I am credibly informed that the Holland Society is responsible for first running a dinner with a windmill. The fluidity of the Dutch Republic may have much to do with the fluency of which we are now in the habit at several dollars a plate. Men used to take naps as an aid to digestion, now they hear speeches. Let us make the most of it while it lasts. The next thing will be something else. The peerless lay-preacher who in his less occupied moments presides over the only four track road in America is one of the chief sponsors for this decade of ventriloquism. All of us can admire where none can emulate his scintillating facility. Not

pretending to offer you anything so stimulating in its effervescence, I would try to persuade you that Apollinaris is as good and even better if you only think so! I am a preacher and a college professor. There are some who are ready to assume that preaching and teaching make a man an impracticable, a spinner of theories without real relation to average and actual affairs. If there are those here who think that preaching is, in Mr. Huxley's polite phrase, "lunar politics," and that a college is a school of cranks, I will not challenge them nor argue the point. I am a man. I am an American. I am a citizen. I trust that I am a Christian. These grounds are solid leverage for my present purpose. From them I speak. And from these I say that he is no true minister who is not evermore busy to show how all desirable good rests in the recognition of ultimate principles, and who is not urgent to compel all matters of custom and practice to testify before the grand jury of conscience. And I say again that any College abuses its opportunity if it does not seek to inspire its every student with ideals which are most practical when they are most generous, and to base him broad and strong with the conviction that his better training is a holy trust for larger manhood and for the most resolute, intelligent and robust citizenship. It is the human duty of us all, whatever our antecedents, our attainment, or our occupations, to help make this a larger and pleasanter world for every man that is in it. We can only do this as our love steadily becomes more dominant, and as we more and more widen our comprehension of that high relationship in which all men are kin. Not the word "My," but "Our," begins the Lord's Prayer. The man who prays:

"Lord, bless me and my wife,

My son John and his wife,

Us four and no more, Amen,"

that man does not pray at all, and, preaching tho it may be, I say that a man who does not pray does not live! In this state which holds the ashes of John Brown, in this city, which keeps the dust of Alexander Hamilton and of Ulysses Grant, you are

assembled in the name of a common business interest. This dining emphasizes a commonalty, a community, a cooperativeness of purpose. It is what men have in common, not what they have in severalty, that fulfils their life. That which unites men is normal, that which sunders them is abnormal. It is not because we are states, but because we are United States, that we are a nation. But real union can not be an external device, it must be an inward truth.

In my eagerness to affirm a great principle, as wide as all life, and comprehensive of all human relation, I am aware of a peril of becoming too abstract. An aged woman in Alabama was with her husband, taking her first ride on the cars. Her wonder and anxiety increased with the speed, until at the top of her astonishment and fear, the train struck a long and high trestle. With a scream the woman bounded to her feet, clutching the seat-back before her. To her trembling obliviousness of all else it seemed that the cars had leaped into space. But in a brief moment the train was on terra firma once more, and with a happy shout heard thro all the car, she cried: "Thank Heaven, she's lit again!" Gentlemen, if for a little here and there, I seem to you to be in the air, I assure all who have tickets for this trip that I shall try not to leave the rails!

What is partisanship? It is identification with a part. A party is a section-bipartisanship is bisection. To see no

more than a part is to ignore the whole. A part is a part only. The sum of parts is the true goal. A part divorced from its fellow parts is a part no longer. Your arm wrenched from its body is not your arm! Parts and parties are means, partnership is the end. The word idiot is from a Greek adjective meaning selfish. It is an introspection which becomes mental blindness. Individuality, by exageration, becomes insanity. The vice of selfishness is in its isolation from a common life. Its secession is centrifugal-the atom resenting the universal law of unity. In the heart it is hate, in the life it is war, in essence it is hell. The bane of partisanship in whatever realm