USA > Illinois > Winnebago County > Rockford > Golden anniversary exercises, historical record and manual of the Second Congregational church, Rockford, Illinois. November 7, 1849. November 7, 1899 > Part 4
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My brother's growing enthusiasm for study was accompanied by a deep- ening interest in public speaking. He was called upon very frequently in the early days of the college to give commencement orations and these were prepared with very great care and labor on such subjects as Chivalry, The Greek and the Roman, Socrates as a Reformer, The Revolutions of England and France, and Skepticism and Human Progress. In 1867 he was graduated from Olivet in the first class and was its valedictorian. In these college years he had the great advantage of living among highly in- telligent and high-minded people who were supremely devoted to the king- dom of God.
The same fidelity which marked his Olivet life was carried by my brother into his theological studies in New Haven and New York and after- wards in Andover. He had now become master of himself and there was, as a result, a joyous self-confidence in his work. One of his classmates in New Haven has pictured him in his splendid youth, full of vitality, making one feel as if a wind had sprung up from the west ; nervous and sanguine in temperament. He has described him also as open-hearted, earnest-
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minded, and sympathetic, with a certain dignity and reserve. He found that the training which he had received in the small western college was as thorough as that of any of his classmates who had been trained in the eastern institutions. Henry Drummond was known among his fellows as " The Prince." That name might have been justly applied to Walter Bar- rows in the golden splendor of his youth.
I need not narrate the story of his wide and eminent services to the church as a Christian minister. He preached for one year in the churches and school houses of Kansas in various places. For one year he was pas- tor of a church in North Topeka. During that time an edifice was built. He preached most successfully in Marshall, Michigan, where he made many friends. Then followed a third year of theological study in Andover, where he was graduated in 1873. In that year he was strongly urged by the Secretaries of the American Board, Dr. Treat and Dr. N. G. Clark to enter upon foreign missionary work in Japan where the Christian outlook was then so radiant with promise, but Walter's mind was turned in another direction and he asked the Home Missionary Society to give him their hardest field. It was decided to send him to Utah, to its capital, Salt Lake City, to a missionary parish as large as New England and half of Old Eng- land together. Dr. Henry M. Storrs wrote : " No single pastorate in any city, in my judgment, will begin to compare with it. If one choose to ac- cept the present isolation, he has before him within a short lifetime such a work for God and man as offers nowhere else in this land. He will raise up the foundations of many generations for a region that is to be an empire of itself."
Salt Lake City is our American Damascus, but fairer than the city of the east. It rises from a more fertile plain. The waters that rush in its streams are purer, and some of the peaks of the Wahsatch are nearer and grander than the Anti-Lebanon mountains. Charles Kingsley thought the view from the Bench, which embraces a mountain ring three hundred miles in circumference, the loveliest scene he ever saw. Of the moral darkness of this region I need not speak, nor tell at length of the wonderful success achieved by the brave young missionary during his eight years of indefati- gable toil. It was a perilous and very noble service which he there ren- dered in strengthening the beginnings of Christian American civilization. He sometimes visited the east where his voice was heard, speaking power- fully at great conventions and in many churches, on the claims of western evangelization and especially the needs of the new west. He is justly
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deemed one of the chief founders of Christian civilization in the Rocky mountain region, where he helped to organize the Salt Lake Academy which has now become a college. I once made a visit to his church in that city and came to realize what a hold he had gained on the hearts of the Gentile population there. One who knew and loved him in his Salt Lake ministry has said : " He had the faculty of ignoring trifles and apply- ing his strength to essentials. He kept well abreast of the progressive thought of the times and took an active interest in whatever was of public concern. He was a man of discretion, self-contained, with a masterful way that is inseparable from ability." Walter Barrows worked very wisely, not spending all his time in denouncing Mormonism, but illustrating the highest wisdom of the Christian missionary whose chief calling is to preach the gospel. In his dealings with Mormonism he illustrated the mind of the Apostle Paul. In one of his sermons he said, "When Paul was first in Athens his heart was stirred within him to see the city wholly given up to idolatry, but this did not impel him to rush up on the Areopagus and begin a violent harangue against those Athenians. When he rose to speak it was with calmness and he began by paying them a compliment." When in Salt Lake City he had the affectionate and cordial co-operation and appre- ciation of the Secretaries in New York. One of these, Dr. Henry M. Storrs, wrote: " God has wonderfully helped you ; He has given you brains and heart and genial wisdom and good sense, practical judgment and love of human beings and the spirit of labor, so that you have found happiness and success in your work ; He has kept piety alive in your soul, minister- ing by His Spirit of the things of Christ to you, that bread which is meat indeed. And it is He who has brought around you some of His choice dis- ciples to minister to you as well as to be ministered unto by you."
The service which he rendered in Salt Lake City was followed by seven years of administrative work as Secretary of the American Home Missionary Society. Here his statesmanlike qualities found an adequate field. He was willing to take responsibilities. He led in great movements, helped to organize and make successful the annual home missionary con- ventions, and up and down the land he preached powerfully of the need of evangelizing America. Who can estimate what harvests have sprung from the seed which he thus planted over the country? The missionaries listened to him and felt that their cause had had an adequate presentation. The largeness of his theme was like the largeness of his mind. With what
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directness, with what eloquence, with what appeals to the conscience, with what appeals to Christian patriotism, he presented his majestic argument !
Let me recall a few sentences from one of his missionary sermons : " We certainly have an important trust committed to us as citizens of this republic, and great things are expected of us. Others are watching us and this fact should stimulate us to faithfulness. For the eyes of the world are upon us and the hopes of the world are centered here. Ours is the princi- pal nation. The destinies of mankind are more completely wrapped up in the fortunes of our republic, in the success of our institutions than any other nation or government on the face of the globe. It is believed by many that if America fail the world will fail, or as Emerson expressed it, ' Our whole history appears like a last effort of Divine Providence in behalf of the human race.'" .His appeal for Home Missions was as broad as our country and was always grandly effective whether he spoke in Boston, Chi- cago, before the State Association of Massachusetts, or that of North Da- kota. Wherever his voice was heard in Maine or Texas, in Florida or Oregon, he was the apostle and advocate of a Christianized America.
He plead for the new south as well as the new west. He urged evan- gelization among the dozen new nationalities thronging our cities, as well as among the hills of Vermont and New Hampshire. The large advance made by the Home Missionary Society during his seven years of faithful toil is familiar to some of you, and his praises have been written or spoken by his fellow Secretaries, Dr. Henry M. Storrs, Dr. Joseph B. Clarke and Dr. Washington Choate. Walter gave himself to his work with an eager conscientiousness. He never spared himself. We used to complain of this. It did not seem possible for him to let others attend to certain de- tails when he felt that he could do them better. In an editorial in the Christian Union, he was truly called one of the most enthusiastic, efficient and successful secretaries, combining remarkable executive faculty and thorough personal knowledge of America, his policy showing a broad and intelligent comprehension of the problem of civilization in the west.
" A great pastorate," wrote Phillips Brooks, " is the noblest picture of human influence and of the relationships of man to man which the world has to show. It is the canonization of friendship, it is friendship lifted above the regions of mere instinct and sentiment and fondness and exalted into the mutual helpfulness of the children of God." His great work as one of the Secretaries of the American Home Missionary Society was followed by the great pastorship in this beautiful and thriving City of Rockford, Illinois,
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one of the noblest of American communities, east or west. Such a pastorate is the glory of the Christian church. It is a supreme evidence of the power of Christian character and of the adaptation of the Christian gospel when preached with loving wisdom. The energy, the hopefulness, the self-sacri- fice, the unsparing fidelity which have characterized his whole life appeared conspicuously in those ten years of fruitful service. This, the most beauti- ful church edifice which I have seen in the State of Illinois is one of the monuments of that pastorship. When the church was burned, it was only to be rebuilt, and it is the conviction of those who knew the facts that but for the almost military genius of this brave leader, such a building would not have been begun or completed. What he dared to dream of he dared to do. The record shows that he not only urged others to give but that he gave from his own salary $500. His ten years of service in connection with the Second Congregational Church of Rockford is worthy of a dis- course by itself. I have studied the record of that life with great care and know of no other pastorate in our country marked by truer success, by braver wisdom, by better results.
This Home Missionary pastor was a most efficient friend of Foreign Missions, and by his efforts the amount given to the world-wide evangelism sometimes reached $2,000 a year. One who knew him well in Rockford said : " He never spoke an unkind word of his fellowmen, but always saw some good to praise in all." His power of getting others to give and to work was unusual. In the decade of his ministry in Rockford over $100,- 000 were raised for missions above the very great offerings, more than $100,000, demanded by the church for its new building. In one of his papers presented before the great Home Missionary meetings in Saratoga, he said : " Dr. Goodell, of St. Louis, so trained and organized his church that when he himself was suddenly taken away. the work went on without interruption. If there were more pastors like Dr. Goodell there would be more consecrated laymen like the late Earl of Shaftsbury, and Samuel Morley of England ; like the late William E. Dodge and Amos Lawrence of this country."
What he accomplished during fifteen months in the attractive field opened to him in Greenwich, Conn., what ripe experience, what spiritual power he manifested, how eagerly he entered into every department of his work, how he ministered to the sick, the aged, the children, what large plans and expectations he had of future developments, all these things have become familiar to us. In my observation of churches I have never known Hist. Rec. 6.
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of one who in so short a time was able to make so deep an impression upon a community. There, indeed, he showed that his spirit was one of cour- age and of power and of love and of wisdom. He had never known such a thing as failure ; his career was one of uninterrupted achievement and he had reason to anticipate that there he was to accomplish what would be, in some respects, the best work of his life. He carried to the east the golden fruitage of long experience and that wisdom which came from a life of obedience to the truth. In one of his sermons he said, " There are parts of the Word oi God that often seem nebulous and indefinite, without form, and void, but when we turn upon them the light that comes from an experience in doing the will of God, they shine out like stars." I think that Walter's success in his pastorates was largely due to his loving insist- ence on courage and self-sacrificing fidelity on the part of his people. While himself a student and thinker, deeply interested in questions of theology, he bent his energies and those of his congregation upon faithful and loving Christian service. He identified himself with the moral life of the com- munity, helping its charities and its civic administration. How urgent and faithful he was in inciting his people to give to every good work. He be- lieved that selfishness was stagnation and death. He was an apostle and embodiment of the new era.
I need not speak of what he was to the children of other homes. One who knew him well writes : " Nothing has appealed to me more than the love that little children bore to him. While he was never very demonstra- tive, they seemed to feel the beauty of his character and his love for them. This was brought out in conversation with members of the church who called to make inquiries during his illness. One mother spoke of the fact that there was always something in the sermon for children, and when that part was reached her little girls would grow suddenly animated and sit up straight to hear what was being said to them."
One characteristic of Walter Barrows was that he had faith in the pos- sibility of doing the best. If any feature of the church life was unsatisfac- tory, he set himself about to remedy it.
In Rockford his second service on Sunday became one of the most popular, successful and instructive in the whole country. The second ser- vice is a problem everywhere. Walter Barrows turned it into a joyful sus- cess by his carefully prepared vesper services in the afternoon, which some- times drew nearly two thousand people to the edifice.
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Another dominant characteristic was an exacting idealism as a preach- er. Whatever he did in proclaiming the gospel he decided to do in the very best way. An ideal sermon is doubtless one that has been carefully prepared, diligently studied, elaborately thought out and then delivered with- out notes. Such was his sermon. This sort of preparation demanded an infinite toilsomeness, but he did not shrink from it. He had his ideals of a perfect communion service and a perfect children's service, and those ideals, at whatever cost of labor to himself, he very largely realized.
But one does not understand his character without perceiving that it was vitalized through and through with the self-sacrificing love. His favor- ite hero was the Apostle Paul, and like Paul he was willing to spend and be spent for the sake of others. When doing Home Missionary work in the far west, he was preaching sermons as carefully prepared as if he was addressing a metropolitan audience. Occasionally hearers were aston- ished that a man who might be commanding a large salary in New York was preaching in Independence Hall in Salt Lake City. There is a great-
- ness about this loving self-sacrifice, this identification of himself with the cause of Christ, giving his thought and heart to the spiritual necessities of the far west, which touches the soul and commands reverent admiration.
I need not speak to any who knew him well of the genuine and beau- tiful modesty which characterized this man of energy, self-confidence and success, nor of his unusual gentleness which we do not expect to find where resolute, commanding energies are so prominent. The care and neatness characterizing all his ways betokened the man of truest refinement. His gentleness, his unresentful spirit were the products of the grace of God. In his sermon on Gentleness he quoted the words of George Eliot: " When Death, the great Reconciler, has come it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity."
Walter Barrows was a true patriot and an inspirer of patriotism. On Commemoration Day loving hands lay the blossoming wreaths on the ban- nered mounds where rest the soldiers of the republic. In my judgment, there is no American grave, whether in Arlington or Gettysburg, in Santi- ago or Manilia, which better deserves this annual baptism of flowers than the grave wherein he rests. He gave his life to his country. While he realized the bigness of our land, its boundless resources and its natural greatness, he knew that morality and religion were the stability and the splendor of the nation, and he tried with large success to make stronger the better life of the country. He may truly be called a builder of churches.
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Probably no pastor in any metropolitan pulpit in America has more effi- ciently aided the Home Missionary work. In hundreds of communities throughout our land the gospel is to-day preached because Walter Bar- rows was what he was and did what he did, and was a lover of the kingdom of God everywhere. His heart took in the world. He was not satisfied that Home Missionary churches should become absorbed in their local in- terests and refuse to co-operate in the world-wide evangelism. He said, " The character of a church, like the character of a child, will in all proba- bility become fixed during the first years of its history. If, then, the churches planted and fostered by the Home Missionary Societies become wholly absorbed in their local interests during the first five or ten years of their existence, receiving all the time from others, but giving nothing to others, they will grow narrow in their sympathies and become dwarfted in their Christian life. When they reach self-support, if they ever do reach it, they will not have received the education best calculated to fit them to become helpers of others." This home missionary pastor succeeded in vastly raising the annual Foreign Missionary contributions of his churches. His appeal was for self-denial, for consecration, for brotherhood, for active helpfulness wherever he spoke, at the meetings of the American Board, or of the American Missionary Association, and on all these occasions one felt the adequacy of his utterances.
With loyalty to his own church and denomination, Walter Barrows was an apostle of a true catholicity. It was fitting that he should be chair- man of the Missionary Congress at the Columbian Exposition, bringing to- gether the representatives of many societies and of many denominations on the work of evangelization. He had no sympathy with the unseemly rivalries of American churches crowding themselves into the small Western com- munities. He believed that a large part of the church's energy and ac- tivity was mis-directed, divided, and wasted, that thirteen ministers half- starved, thirteen rival societies of Jesus Christ in one small Western town, were a sorry spectacle. His statesmanlike paper at one of the Sar- atoga meetings on Denominational Comity, was highly praised by editors of leading Presbyterian Journals. When the beautiful church edifice in Rockford was destroyed by fire he received two checks of $50 and $25 for its rebuilding, sent him by Catholic priests of this city.
But this rapid sketch of one so dear to me and so dear to you would be still more incomplete if I did not say something of Walter Barrows as a preacher. I can surely say this : He avoided the faults which have
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made so much preaching a weariness to the flesh. He felt that he had no right to speak, to command the time of intelligent and restless hearers, unless he could be interesting and profitable. He had what lan MacLaren has called the supreme need of the modern pulpit, "spiritual intensity." He was altogether earnest. It was not mere physical animation-it was not the spontaneous oral fluency which wearies the auditors. It was moral earnestness. He profoundly believed and then he carefully studied what he was to say. He drew upon all history and literature and nature to illus- trate his theme. His sermon had many windows in it. It was illumina- ted as well as illuminating. There was also a practical directness to his discourse shown by their fruitfulness. How he longed to bring men to ac- cept the Christianity which was such a large and reasonable and sensible thing to his mind ! He was an inspirer of faith, of faith in the permanent verities of the gospel. He felt that God is very near and real ; that the life of Christ is the most vital thing in history and that modern scholarship has made it more human, more divine than ever, that men should not waste their time and strength in disputes and divisions over unessentials. Though greatly influenced by modern thought, he was profoundly evangeli_ cal and evangelistic in his temper, for he had had a very deep experience. In his college journal for 1862, I find a brief account of his conversion, or rather of his re-conversion, for he had become a member of the church still earlier. He tells of the meetings conducted by Rev. Thomas W. Jones and the prayers of President Morrison. He speaks of the tarrying of the young men after the regular prayer meeting to pray till near mid- night. He says : "I was aroused from lethargy and back-sliding in the church of God." For two years he had been a member of the church, but he thinks these years were lost. "Yes, God called me again, and I trust I gave myself to Him in a covenant that shall indeed be everlasting. I have a great work to do in my own heart, base passions to subdue, car- nal desires to overcome, to do which I must receive grace and strength from on high. I have tried for two years to live as I should and have utterly failed. May I learn a lesson !" Of his power as a preacher the last sermon he ever delivered from the text, " Never man spake like this man," was a splendid illustration. How adequately he treated the majes- tic theme! How full of research were the comparisons made between Jesus and other chief leaders of mankind ! How helpful in all his sermons were his illustrations ! He once said : " The top of the tower of Pisa is reached by a spiral stair-case within the walls. Now, what would you say
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of a man who should enter the doors and make a remark like this: ' I see only six steps ; they will not take me to the top. I would go, but seeing only six, I won't start.' You would say, ' ascend those six steps and you will see six more, and so on.' So the six foundation steps of the Christian life are before us. We ascend one of them and the promise is that if we take that we shall see others. 'He that doeth the will of God shall know of the doctrine.'"
In the morning prayer-meeting preceding the funeral service twelve weeks ago, one of the members of the Greenwich church spoke of him as " a great and good man." Surely I may re-echo and reaffirm these words. Of both his greatness and his goodness we have ample illustration. I can scarcely think of any position in church or state, in the administration of a business organization, or in. the duties of a metropolitan pulpit, to which Walter Barrows had he been summoned, would not have been adequate. He perceived clearly in every situation what were the conditions of success and those conditions he fulfilled. Twice he was offered a college presi- dency, but he chose to remain in the pulpit making direct appeals to men's hearts and consciences, and building up disciples in the faith of the gospel.
It was my privilege in April, 1865, to hear Dr. Woodbury preach the funeral sermon of Abraham Lincoln, at the close of which he quoted from Tennyson's great ode to the Duke of Wellington :
"He is gone that seemed so great- Gone; but nothing can bereave him Of the force he made his own Being here, and we believe him Something far advanced in state, And that he wears a truer crown Than any wreath that man can weave him."
This is a vicious and folly-smitten universe. If there is no life beyond the grave to fulfill the natural expectations of the present, nothing has pierced the darkness of the future with so swift a gleam of faith in the life beyond as the impulse which is born of love. Innocent or holy love, whether of friend or mother or child, not only rebels at death but has in it the instinct of immortality. By loving, love grows greater and demands continuance. As the waters of the Nile seek an outlet in the sea, and as, by rolling them back, to the torrid heart of Africa, you leave Egypt a des- ert, so love seeks an outlet into the immortal life, and if you roll back its flood and stop its heavenward current you make the human heart a waste of-drifting sand. A friend of Agassiz once said that "" to be one hour in
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