The contribution of Isaac Errett to our movement was the contribution of himself. From the time when, as a child of thirteen, in this city of historic memories, he confessed Christ and went forward to seek baptism in the waters of the Allegheny, his life belonged to the movement for the restoration of apostolic Christianity.

      To him, the gift of his life to Christ did not mean that his own will was passive under the will of the Lord. His own will was vibrant with life, instinct with choice.

      To speak more specifically of his gift to our movement, he contributed a sympathetic imagination. He knew how to put himself in other people's places, to think their thoughts, to feel what they felt without having experienced it.

      So far as their relation to human progress is concerned, all men and women can be divided into four classes: Those who have the constructive imagination, those who have the sympathetic imagination, those who have neither, and those who have both. The persons of constructive imagination are those who do the thinking of the world. Those who have the sympathetic imagination are the personal leaders of the world. Those who have neither live [398] near the ground and follow the round of life as it is laid down for them by others. Those who have both are the master geniuses, the epoch-makers whose story is the story of the race.

      It is easy to place Alexander Campbell as a man of constructive mind. He was by no means lacking in the gift of sympathetic insight, but it was not through this gift that he deserves to be called great. Isaac Errett was as distinctively a man of sympathetic mind--not, on the other hand, that he was entirely lacking in the constructive gift, but it is not because of this that he holds his high place among us. The one dealt primarily with truth as truth, the other with truth in its relation to individual human need.

      Isaac Errett came into prominence at a time when a basis for the union of God's people had been formulated and given to the world. The need was not for construction, but for interpretation. Misinterpretation abounded. Little men were giving a petty meaning to a great and dignified plea. The motto, "Where the Scriptures speak, we speak, and where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent," had been uplifted, but often the Scriptures, bound by narrow and selfish interpretation, were not allowed to speak in the beauty and catholicity of their spirit, and often the silence of the Scriptures was made the occasion of fruitless and contentious human speech.

      He was able to see the plea of the Disciples in its entirety, in its spirit as well as in its form, in its relation to human experience and human problems as well as in its relation to the revelation of God.

      He lived close to the hearts of the people. It was no hardship for him to love or to make himself beloved. Of noble face and bearing, with a smile that charmed, a voice that enthralled, and a handclasp that received you instantly into high fellowship, you dared to feel, on your first meeting with him, that he wanted you, that he needed you, and that he gave himself to you. The most ignorant man or woman in the world was interesting to him. The humblest of those who trusted in him were dear to his heart. I have heard him say, and more than once, "I have felt for years that I am so encompassed by the love and prayers of my brethren that I can not fall. In the midst of all my weakness and temptation I feel that I dare not shake the faith of these dear ones who have given me their trust."

      He saw humanity as it is seen not by its critics, but only by its lovers. He could laugh and pity, all in a breath. Once he was speaking of a preacher who differed from him, and whose interpretation of our plea seemed to many of us essentially narrow and provincial.

MRS. POUNDS.

"Oh," said Bro. Errett, "I have never really blamed him. He grew up in a community where the only light used was a tallow dip, and where it was quite the correct thing to snuff the candle with one's fingers and wipe one's fingers on his shirtsleeve. I suppose it isn't strange that he thinks snuffers unscriptural." Loving much, he dared to laugh.

      To such a nature as his the revelation of God could never present itself merely as a theology. The gospel of Christ was to him the means for the world's renewal, divine power applied at the point of human necessity. I remember one day when the labors of the editorial office had been particularly exacting, he started for lunch and was stopped by a young girl from the printing office, who asked a question concerning the teaching of the Disciples on the subject of pardon. He talked to her for the better part of an hour, and came back quite forgetful of lunch, but with his eyes aglow. "People are hungry for the gospel," he said. "It is what they need and they will accept it. Why can we not see that the fields are white for the harvest on every hand?" Never have I seen such divine enthusiasm on any other face. Never have I seen so nearly reincarnated the spirit of the master Teacher at the supreme moment when he, too, forgot hunger and weariness to break the bread and pour the draught of eternal life. In all his ministry, whether public or private, he [399] interpreted the revelation of God in its relation to human need.

      Similarly, too, he interpreted the gospel in its relation to the practical problems of the church and of society. His application of it was not to a scheme of things, but to things and people as they are--to a world full of men and women of varying trainings and temperaments and prejudices, but all equally in need of a divine Helper. His sympathetic imagination enabled him to put himself into every situation. He could see the Disciples of Christ not merely from the viewpoint of a partisan adherent, he could see them from the viewpoint of the Methodist or the Presbyterian or the Roman Catholic or the agnostic. This made him an ideal controversialist--he never failed to see the other side, and he never made his own side ridiculous through prejudice and partisanship. I remember that once, when he was engaged in a newspaper

H. M. BELL.

debate with a Roman Catholic journal, I was surprised to find that my old Irish Catholic landlady had read all the articles on both sides. "And what did you think of them?" I asked. "Oh," she confessed with naive frankness, "it's sure plain that your Mr. Errett had the best of our man. And so polite about it, too!"

      In the same way, he was able to see inconsistencies among his own people as well as elsewhere. He pleaded for higher education, because he saw that leadership in the religious world, such as that to which our plea calls, could never be held by a people without scholars. He saw that scholarship has always led the world and that it always will. It may be said, in passing, that while Mr. Errett was not a school-trained man, he had none of the provincialism and mental arrogance which are often attributed to the self-educated. The humility and the charity of knowledge were his, and he ardently longed to see their spirit reproduced and incarnated in all of our preachers and leaders.

      In the same way, he saw that a people who claimed, and who must of necessity claim, leadership in the religious world, would be a reproach to their own plea if they should fail in missionary enterprise. Why claim to have a better hold than others upon the means for the world's salvation if the means remain unused and the world unsaved? Hence a large part of his life was given to our missionary interests--first in connection with our general and State work, then as inspirer of our women's work and as founder and president of the Foreign Society, and always as the promoter, by means of tongue and pen, of them all. The Foreign Society was indeed the object of his special care and solicitude, and his love for it was like the love of a father for the Benjamin of his old age.

      He contributed also a spirit of moderation. He came into prominence at a time when extremists and radicals were claiming right of way. More than any other man, he helped to hold the Disciples true to that reasonable spirit which had characterized their leaders in the beginning.

      Isaac Errett was a man of heroic courage. He embodied Garfield's definition of a brave man--one who dares to look the devil in the face and tell him he is a devil. He feared nothing but that he should fail to do his duty. Poverty, opposition, death itself, did not count with him. But he early learned that courage is never so heroic as when under the control of the judgment and the will. A prominent public man of his time said of him: "Never have I seen such courage as his, tempered by such prudence as his." It is not easy to acquire such self-control as this, and to use it often means the hardest path of all. There is always a cheer for the extremist on either side. By his own party, at least, he is hailed as a hero. But few lift a cheer for him who, resisting the movings of passion and prejudice, compels himself to keep to the middle of the road. And yet, to die in a frenzy of zeal may be less difficult than to live day by day in the sober-minded love and service of truth.

      This courage, tempered by moderation, was one of Isaac Errett's glorious [400] gifts to our religious movement. He was never afraid to speak, but his voice was for union and not for disruption. It was lifted to urge the good of all against the personal feelings of the few. All through his public career, and especially through his editorial career, he stood as the representative of progress. But it was progress of that kind which conserves itself because of its sober appeal to the judgment. Many reformers have left their work to be done over again by others because their results were not thus conserved. Ultra-conservatism and ultra-radicalism are the two robbers that beset the path of progress, and truth is often crucified between the two. His quarter century of leadership was so eminently safe and sane that the course of our great brotherhood was always onward.

      The times in which Mr. Errett lived were not easy. There were great questions at the front concerning which good men and women differed, and often a man's foes were those of his own household of faith. He lived in the stormy days of the antislavery agitation, and some of his earliest utterances to attract general attention dealt with this question. The war came on, with its tragedies and horrors. Some of the large religious bodies were divided by the questions at issue and remain divided to this day. But the Disciples of Christ remained and remain united. That this is true, is due to men of the spirit of Isaac Errett.

      The questions at issue within the churches were met in the same spirit. Not only did his sympathetic imagination enable him to see these questions clearly; his poise and judgment enabled him so to deal with them that the result was union and not discord. The organ controversy has passed, but the tornado might have easily torn a great people to pieces in passing. The opposition to missionary societies is over, but it might have easily caused a division whose evils we should still be lamenting. We should never forget our debt to Isaac Errett for the spirit in which these dangers were met and overcome.

      Finally, Isaac Errett led the Disciples of Christ to a closer walk with God. The pioneers of the first group were men of deep personal piety. They had been at the burning bush ere they entered upon their errand of deliverance. Some of those who followed were of like spirit. But there were others to whom the intellectual side of our plea made a peculiar appeal, and who were less touched by its spiritual significance. Isaac Errett saw God. He did not merely argue about a basis of Theism, he put his hand into the hand of his Father. A day in his presence was better than a thousand volumes on Immanence. He walked and talked with God in the garden at the cool of the day. His prayers were leanings upon God's arm. Never have I known elsewhere such an exquisite blending of reverence and loving familiarity. Heaven was not to him a remote possibility, to be considered only when the chances of the present life are gone--it was a real home, and he talked of it with sweet, every-day, matter-of-course speech. "I shall have to wait until we get to heaven to have our visit out," he would say to his friends. "What a good time that will be, won't it? When we get over yonder let's sit down and talk this all over. Don't you long for the time?" In one of his last letters he wrote: "I've decided that I'll have to wait until we both get home, to see you and the rest of the dear ones I never see here any more. Of late, I find myself repeating daily those words of Wesley's:

So I go on, just living by the day."

      His life was terribly toilsome. Though extremely frail in his youth, he enabled himself, by constant care and simple living, to do the work of three or four men. Had he husbanded his strength for its own sake, rather than to expend it upon others, he might have lived to extreme old age. But he spent the gold of life with a lavish hand, and it was gone ere he reached threescore and ten.

      Perhaps it is irreverent, but, beyond this removal of earthly burdens and limitations, I can not think of him as greatly altered. I hope his spiritual body will at least bear a resemblance to the splendid tabernacle which he wore when among men. I hope he will have, when we see him again, the same smile [401] as of old, the same joy in friendship, the same "saving sense of mirth." For to our weak sight, untrained to the vision of immortal possibilities, there seemed little need of change.

[CCR 398-402]