Read Ebook: Senatorial Character A Sermon in West Church Boston Sunday 15th of March After the Decease of Charles Sumner. by Bartol C A Cyrus Augustus

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SENATORIAL CHARACTER:

A SERMON

WEST CHURCH, BOSTON,

SUNDAY, 15TH OF MARCH,

AFTER THE

DECEASE OF CHARLES SUMNER.

BY C.A. BARTOL.

BOSTON: A. WILLIAMS & CO., 135 WASHINGTON STREET. 1874.

SERMON.

The common theory of the pulpit is of a place devoted to expound some old situation, abstract scheme of salvation, or article in a creed. It has a higher end,--to give the meaning of the scenes of real life, in which we observe the actors and play ourselves a part. If history be philosophy teaching by example, and of all history biography be the soul, then human character, when rare and conspicuous in its traits or achievements, gives as pattern or warning the chief lesson. Christian edification comes less signally from hair-splitting, dogmatic distinction than from contemplating for imitation or admonition the lives of Enoch and Solomon, Paul and Peter, Jesus and John. So I take to-day the death of the most eminent civilian of Massachusetts for my theme.

As the King in Egypt chose Joseph to teach his senators wisdom, no man of late years has equalled Charles Sumner as an instructor or influence in the Senate of the United States.

An instinct of nature prompts us to make some account and sum up the significance of any one's career, privately, on the domestic stage, or before the people, if he has challenged attention in a larger sphere.

It may be useful to make some discriminating estimate of Mr. Sumner's contributions to the public good, the legislature of a free State in a great Union being the monarch that for so long a period continued to elect him to his high office.

However opinions may differ of his prudence or ability, the weight of his word or importance of his position none will doubt.

Our messenger of the lightning had no greater task this last week in the world than to wait at his threshold and run with news every hour over the wires of his estate.

His principal peers at his bedside and his colored clients flocking for inquiry at his door showed a feeling of love and sympathy reaching from the highest to the lowest class.

In culture he was a match for nobles, in temper he was a champion of the oppressed and friend to the poor.

I suppose no American name is more widely known and celebrated in all civilized lands.

Great Britain and France will feel the shock of his decease.

That one of our political pillars has fallen will be known at the Court of St. Petersburg and among the counsellors of Berlin.

Italy and Spain, with their Republican struggles and aims, will miss an advocate on this side the sea.

Castelar will mourn the departure of a companion in arms in the peaceful battles of reform, as Cavour might have felt through the cable from him for emancipation an electric touch.

South America, with her strange mixture of barbarism with liberation, will be conscious of owing some honor to the obsequies of a sympathizer with all that is generous in her aspirations.

Hayti will deplore the decease of a supporter of her rights more powerful than any on her own shores.

A flutter of pain and sorrow will pass through that whole flock of islands alighted, as in the great harbor of our land, betwixt the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.

So it will be because not only a man, a citizen of the Commonwealth and foremost trustee in the Congress of the country, but a cosmopolite is dead, deserving that name as truly as any man who, since the settlement of these colonies, has lived within their bounds.

What is the reason of the wide consequence of this event?

Not in the man's extraordinary original power.

Nature did not intend aught intellectually pre-eminent in his constitution.

It had no organic strength to strike out new paths in action or expression.

It fell into ways other agents had broken.

Mr. Sumner was not even an aboriginal abolitionist; he joined and did yeoman's service in the antislavery ranks.

He startled the soldiers, twenty-nine years ago, in Boston, with his extreme doctrine of peace; but he followed Ladd and others, with copious illustration, but no new sentiment or novel idea.

Of origination there is no speck in his reflections or spark in his style.

His mind is parasitical, his discourse full of precedents, quotations, classic scenes, and historic allusions, sometimes savoring of schoolboy recitations, sophomoric and declamatory, stilted and grotesque. Yet he is in the list of wonderful men. Others thought and he was led to fancy some resemblance in his feature and person to Edmund Burke, which the portrait of Mr. Burke might actually suggest; but this resemblance to the great English Commoner was but skin-deep, with little hint of the deep sea line that fathomed every question, or the impassioned imagination which cast the light of flame on every measure, and kindled with magnetic sympathy, against the French Revolution and for American privilege, now one and now another portion of the British realm.

Mr. Sumner was perhaps a greater lover of freedom in its principle as an inherent right and claim of all mankind than Mr. Burke; but Burke had pre-eminent genius in politics, Sumner only accomplished talent, though in the later light of a more humane era put to service in a grander cause.

Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Newton, Burke, William Blake: such would be our shining classification for poetry, philosophy, science, politics, art, in the mother land.

But for native force we should think of many persons before Sumner in his own field of study and pursuit.

He had not the majestic sweep of Webster, the weight or heat of that mountain with its base of granite and flame, the fiery eloquence of Clay, the close grip of John Quincy Adams in argument, or the subtile felicity and gleam of primary perception which William Henry Seward brought for the enlivening of debate.

Mr. Sumner quoted abundantly, but he is not for any rhetorical merits or ideal inventions in the whole range of his voluminous works quotable, however rich in his right to be cited for the spirit and design on every page.

He stands not strong among men of strength, thinkers and benefactors at first hand, germinators of thought and heroism in the van of the race,--such as bear the stamp of a primitive and primeval energy, like Abraham, Noah, Moses, David and Paul, Buddha and Mohammed, Socrates and Plato, in the East; Garrison and John Brown among ourselves.

He was an orator of the conceptions of his predecessors and superiors, an arguer of the case, a sheriff to execute a writ.

One name I do not mention in this comparison, because, being neither ancient nor modern, it is greatest of all.

But if his were a secondary mind, a vine round a stouter trunk, how like some such creeper it towered and grew, appropriated nourishment and vigor from the old decaying boughs, till at length, with superior toughness and tenacity, it could breast every breeze, and stood proudly alone!

Yet his understanding was that not of the revealer, but the scholar to the last. He imparted what he learned; he knew what he had been told. His delivery was not, like Patrick Henry's, a bolt from Heaven to rend the obstacle and burn up opposition, but a crystal stream flowing smoothly from some rock that had garnered up the mountain-dew and the rain; and he completely informed if he did not like Fisher Ames irresistibly charm.

But in the moral region lay the real greatness of the man. His conscience was original and he had no original sin.

No imputation on his purpose but cleared away like the cloud from a breath on spotless steel, leaving the metal bright as before.

He was as incorruptible as he honorably said to me was Fessenden, his great rival in the Senate; and when he also one day, speaking of his limited means, remarked: "I have never had the art to get my hands into the Treasury," I was fain to answer, "You the whole man are in the Treasury yourself." He was indeed in our politics a fund and never-broken bank of moral wealth. Justice was his inspiration. He was a prophet by equity. Righteousness was his genius; and humanity, in any lack of imagination, his insight and foresight. He was without spot. He wore ermine though he sat not on the bench. John Jay had not cleaner hands, nor John Marshall a more honest will; Hamilton and Jefferson were no more patriotic in contending than he in every legal or congressional strife; and Story, his favorite teacher, and whose favorite pupil he was, no more opulent in knowledge or innocent in its use.

As an antagonist, handling questions of motive or policy, he was as frank as the lion-hearted Richard and simple as a child.

From those early debates to which I listened, on prison discipline, thirty years ago, to his latest speech on the Centennial Exhibition, this candor, amounting to generosity and magnanimity, was plain as the sun.

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