Orville Dewey

“ It was a kind of heart's home to me while I lived in New York, and I always resort to it now when I go there, sure of welcome and kindly greeting.'
Then, again, I had in William Ware, the pastor of the First Church, a friend and fellow-laborer, than whom, if I were to seek the world over, I could not find one more to my liking. Our friendship was as intimate as I ever had with any man, and our constant intercourse, to enter his house as freely as my own, his coming to mine was as a sunbeam, as cheering and undisturbing, I thought I could not get along without it. ”

“ I have had, all my life, the greatest blessing of life,—leave to work on the highest themes and tasks, and I am not turned out, at the end, on to the bare common of the world, to starve. I have a family, priceless to me. I have many dear and good friends, and above all I have learned to draw nigh to a Friendship which embraces the universe in its love and care, if one may speak so of That which is almost too awful for mortal word. . . .
But leaving myself, and turning to you,—what a monstrous person you are! a prodigy of labor, and a prodigy in some other ways that I could point out. ”

“ In London or Paris the presence of the government is hardly felt; the action of public affairs is merged and lost in the life of a great city; but in Washington it is the one, all-absorbing business of the place. Now, whether it be pride or sympathy, one does not enjoy a great movement of things going on around him in which he has no part, and the thoughts and aims of a retired and studious man, especially, sever him from the views and interests of public men. But, on the other hand, this very pressure of an all-surrounding public life brings private men closer together. ”

“ Yes, the mingled sorrow and affection which have swelled many hearts among us within the last week, tell me that the excellence we have lost has not lived in vain. Precious memory of early [156] virtue and piety! and such memories, and more than one such, there are among you. Hold these bright companions ever dear, my young friends; embalm their memory in the fragrant breath of your love; follow them with the generous emulation of virtue; let the seal which death has set upon excellence stamp it with a character of new sanctity and authority; let not virtue die and friendship mourn in vain! ”

“ It is the one reigning thought of my life now to see and to show how the Infinite Wisdom and Loveliness shine through this universe of forms. To this will I devote myself; nay, am devoted, whether I will or not. This will I pursue, and will preach it. I will preach it in the Lowell Lectures. Shall I be wrong if I give up other preaching for the time? You think so. Perhaps you are right. Any way, it is not a matter of much importance, I suppose. There is a great deal too much of preaching, such as it is. The world is in danger of being preached out of all hearty and spontaneous religion. ”

“ Whether we would study human nature or the Nature Divine,-whether we would study religion, science, nature in the world around us, in the life within us,—these are the lights that shine upon our path. For those who have time to read, it seems a deplorable mistake not to turn their thoughts distinctly to what the greatest minds have said; that is, upon as many subjects as they can compass.
If I were to undertake anything in the way of education, I would set up in New York an Institute of English Literature. ”

“ It is the grand mystery of Providence that what is divinest and most beautiful should be suffered to be so painfully, and, as it must seem at first view, so injuriously misconstrued. But what is universal, must be a law; and what is law, must be right,—must have good reasons for it. And certainly so it is. Varying as the ages vary, yet the experience of the individual is but a picture of the universal mind,—of the world's mind. The steps are the same, ignorance, fear, superstition, implicit faith; then doubt, questioning, struggling, long and anxious reasoning ”

“ They might as well accuse England; they might as well accuse all the civilized world. For the conviction that slavery is wrong, that it ought not to be advocated, but to be condemned, and ultimately removed from the world,-this conviction is one of the inevitable developments of modern Christian thought and sentiment. It is not we that are responsible for the rise and spread of this sentiment; it is the civilized world; it is humanity itself.
And now what is it that the South asks of us as the condition of union with it? ”

“ I always long for you, and for spring, I think I long for it more than I ever did It must be that I am growing old. Shall we ever meet, my friend, if not by Menotomy, by those fountains where Christ leads his flock in the immortal clime, and rejoin our beloved Henry, and Greenwood, and Channing? I am not sad, but my thoughts this winter are far more of death than of life. Ought one to part with his friends so? ”

“ The true, practical preaching is that which brings the celestial truths of our nature and our destiny, the powers of the world to come and the terrors and promises of our relationship to the Divine Being, to bear upon our present duties, to animate and elevate our daily life, to sanctify the secular, to redeem the common from its loss of wonder and praise, to make the familiar give up its superficial tameness, to awaken the sense of awe in those who have lost or never acquired the proper feeling of the spiritual mystery that envelops our ordinary life. This was Dewey's peculiar skill. ”

“ Yet when the miserable days of fugitive-slave rendition were upon us, he was with Gannett in the sad conviction that the law must be obeyed. We could not see it then; but we can see to-day that it was possible for men as good and true as any men alive to take this stand. And nothing else brings out the nobleness of Dewey into such bold relief as the fact, that the immeasurable torrent of abuse that greeted his expressed opinion did not in any least degree avail to make him one of the pro-slavery faction. ”

“ I should like to go to church with you this morning, where you are probably going; but the places are very few where I should want to go. More and more do all public services dissatisfy me,—all devout utterances, my own included. Communion with the Highest, with the Unseen and Unspeakable, seems to me to consist of breathings, not words, and requires a freedom of all thoughts and feelings,—of awe and wonder, of adoration and thanksgiving, of meditations and of stirrings of the deeps within us, such as can with difficulty be brought into a regular prayer. ”

“ True, life passes on visibly with us as usual; but every now and then the thought of you and him comes over me, and I exclaim and pray at once, in wonder and sorrow.
But the everlasting succession of things moves on, and we all take our place in it-now, to mourn the lost, and now, ourselves to be mourned—till all is finished. It is an Infinite Will that ordains it, and our part is to bow in humble awe and trust. ”

“ Dewey has from the beginning been the most truly human of our preachers. Nobody has felt so fully the providential variety of mortal passions, exposures, the beauty and happiness of our earthly life, the lawfulness of our ordinary pursuits, the significance of home, of business, of pleasure, of society, of politics. He has made himself the attorney of human nature, defending and justifying it in all the hostile suits brought against it by imperfect sympathy, by theological acrimony, by false dogmas. ”

“ This morning we walked into Geneva to church, the air so clear that it seemed as if we could count every tile on the houses. The chimneys are crowned with a forest of tin pipes, twisted in every direction to carry off smoke. At dusky eve, in a superstitious time, a man, coming suddenly upon the town, might think that an army of goblins had just alighted upon its roofs. . . . What stupendous things do ages accumulate upon every spot where they have passed! Every time we go into town we pass by the very place where Servetus was burned. And Geneva is old enough to have seen Julius Caesar! ”

“ He was one of those great gifts of God, like sunlight or the beauty of nature, which we scarcely know how to live without, or in the loss of which, at least, life is sadly changed, and the world itself is mournfully bereft.
But a letter affords no scope for such a theme; and besides, painful as it is to pass to common topics, they claim their dues. Life, ay, common life, must go on as it ever did, and nothing shall tear that infinite web of mystery in which it walks enveloped. Ours, however, in these days, is rather a shaded life. ”

“ WASHINGTON, Dec. 28, 1852.
MY DEAR BELLOWS,—I will wish you all a happy New York, (ahem! you see how naturally and affectionately my pen turns out the old beloved name) —a happy New Year. After all, it isn't so bad; a happy New Year and a happy New York must be very near neighbors with you. I sometimes wish they could have continued to be so with me, for those I have learnt to live with most easily and happily are generally in New York. Our beloved artists, the goodly Club, were a host to me by themselves. ”

“ The persuasiveness of Dewey was another of his greatest characteristics. His yearning to convince, his longing to impart his own convictions, gave a candor and patient and sweet reasonableness to his preaching, which has, I think, never been equalled in any preacher of his measure of intellect, height of imagination, and reverence of soul. For he could never lower his ideals to please or propitiate. He was working for no immediate and transitory effects. He could use no arts that entangled, dazzled, or frightened; nothing but truth, and truth cautiously discriminated. ”

“ The fear of death, for instance, which I had, which all children have, can childhood escape it? Far onward and upward must be the victory over that fear. And the fear of God, and, indeed, the whole idea of religion,—must it not, in like manner, necessarily be imperfect? And are imperfection and error peculiar to our religious conceptions? What mistaken ideas has the child of a man, of his parent when correcting him, or of some distinguished stranger! ”

“ There was not merely silence, but the spell of absorbed attention that makes itself felt, and spreads itself as by a general sympathy through a congregation profoundly moved by great thoughts filled out and made alive by deep and uplifting emotions. The exercises in the church were often followed by lasting convictions. The Sunday's sermon was the topic, not of curious discussion or indiscriminate eulogy, but of serious conversation among the young, who looked forward to the coming Sunday as offering privileges which it would be a misfortune to lose. ”

“ We are not fairly thrown into the field of life. We do not fairly take the free and [231] unobstructed pressure of all surrounding society. We are hedged around with artificial barriers, built up by superstitious reverence and false respect. We are cased in peculiarity. We meet and mingle with trouble and sorrow,—enough of them, too much,—but our treatment of them gets hackneyed, worn, weary, and reluctant. They grapple with the world's strife and trial, but it is an armor. Our excision from the world's pleasure and intercourse, I doubt, is not good for us. ”

“ By the bye, it 's no matter what you call me; "my dear Doctor" is well enough, if you can't do better; only "my dear Sir" I do hate, between good old friends such as we are, as much as Walter Scott did. But, as I was saying, you are like grapes yourself,—fair, round, self-contained, hanging gracefully upon the life-vine, still full of sap; shining under the covert of leaves, but more clearly seen, now that the frosts of age are descending, and causing them to fall away; while I am more like—but I have so poor an opinion of myself, that I won't tell you what. ”

“ I should turn rebel to all the great instincts within me, and all the great behests of nature and life around me, if I did. Ah! the confounding, ever-troubling difficulty is not to believe, but to feel the great Presence all the day long. This is what I think of, and long have, with questioning and pain. What beings should we become—what to one another—under that living and loving sense of the all-good, the all-beautiful and divine within us and around us! ”

“ Nor, least of all, do I forget the great Christian ministration of light and wisdom, of hope and help to us. But the one thing that is especially signalized in my experience is this, the Infinite Goodness and Loveliness began to be [35] revealed to me, and this made for me "a new heaven and a new earth."
The sense of religion comes to men under different aspects; that is, where it may be said to come; where it is not imbibed, as it ought to be, in early and unconscious childhood, like knowledge, like social affection, like the common wisdom of life. To some, it comes as the consoler of grief ”

“ William Ware.
NEW YORK, Nov. 7, 1836.
MY DEAR WARE,—Shall I brood over my regrets in secret, or shall I tell you of them? I sometimes do not care whether any human being knows what is passing in [159] me; and then again my feelings are all up in arms for sympathy, as if they would take it by storm. I declare I have a good deal of liking for that other,—that sullenness, or sadness, or what you will; it is calmer and more independent. ”

“ Dewey's preaching came in just at this critical time, and it was to me the opening into a new world. The hymn, the prayer, the Scripture reading, usually brought me into a reverent and plastic state of mind, ready to receive and be moulded by the deepest and loftiest Christian truths. From the beginning to the end of the sermon I was under the spell which he had thrown over me, and unconscious of everything else. Very seldom during my life, and then only for a few minutes at a time, has any one, by his eloquence, exercised this absorbing and commanding influence over me. ”

“ And though I lift my thoughts to Heaven, there are times when I dare not trust myself to pray aloud; the burden is too great for words. It is singular, but you will understand it,—I think there was never a time when there was less visible devotion in my life than now, when my whole being is resolved into meditations, and strugglings of faith, and communings with the supreme and holy will of God. ”