It may be questioned if a later generation will not often come into as accurate an impression of a great personality like that of Dr. Dewey as the contemporaneous one that is passing or has already passed away. A man like Webster may have as many and as enthusiastic admirers among the younger men who never saw and heard him as among those who now estimate his personal power from memory. Certainly, a great man need only have personal power enough, and be sufficiently strong and sympathetic in a large human sort of way, to create this atmospheric responsiveness, and draw around him, even after he has gone, a constituency of loyal and outspoken souls. It is easy for a Websterian Society to crystallize about the still magnetic personality of the man to-day. And, in a measure and in his own way, Dewey approaches Webster in his possession of this kind of personal power. There was something large and vital and forceful about him. He moves us by an effectiveness which is more than merely intellectual or literary, and which merely literary means cannot altogether transmit. His range is unlimited by the age in which he lives, and capable still of carrying on a not inaccurate impression of its viva voce power. Such vivid, vigorous men will always tend to turn the memory of them into a sort of tradition, with almost indefinite powers of expansion and a faculty of laying hold of the new generations of men that come up as a still existent fact. Such a personality, to draw about it the friendly adherence of those who have never known its living exercise, was Dr. Dewey's. There is something familiar as well as weighty in his approach. The charm of his presence does not put you at a distance, but causes you to draw near, to really love as well as to admire the man. It is as if you had seen, known, felt with him. This is something, the illusive personal element, which does not go with his literary work, except so far as it is a part of the man himself. It is partly in his works, but it is more above, behind them, and is largely the element that will keep them afloat when their literary quality comes into question. For, great and inspiring as I must rate the published writings of

Dr. Dewey, it is certain that they do not and cannot measure the man. There was something in him of native rugged force, the fire and effectiveness of genius, which can never be stereotyped. Hints and glimpses there are every now and then of this glow of conviction, this grandeur and selfforgetfulness of utterance; but, for the most part, his published writings emphasize the loss, fully as much as they show forth the fact, of his distinctive personal power and charm. Structurally, they are open to criticism, for they are always direct and urgent appeals; but, whatever they lose in artistic finish, they gain in stimulating quality. They are tonic and bracing to the moral nature, and infuse a sort of world-wide comprehensiveness into our view of the universe. I know of no one in the pulpit who has had such large, sweeping outlook into the world of fact, allusion, experience, and who has made finer use of the common material which lies about us waiting but a sensitive eye and vigorous touch to make it yield a vast fund of suggestiveness. He did not seem to take the great problems of life which confronted his mind into the study so much as out into the world of men and nature. Traces there are of the student in all his work, but he seems to subordinate books to the authority of nature and experience. One feels in his "Problem of Human Destiny" as if the writer were summoning all the universe to his help. The issue is one in which all things have a bearing and an almost equal interest. He reasons from the thing to the idea it typifies, and his illustration will commonly smack of the soil. Evidently, farmers had taught him much as well as professors, and his unaffected love of the country had given him many resources not to be found in the books.

Above all, Dr. Dewey was the Preacher,-in many respects perhaps the greatest preacher the liberal faith has ever had. This was his aim and ambition, and our acknowledgment of the result need not be otherwise than hearty and grateful. The signal service which he rendered the cause of preaching should not go unrecorded, when we consider that he did. more than almost any other to adapt preaching to modern

demands and to save it from threatening disrepute at a very critical time of transition in its history. The fixed, perfunctory standards of pulpit work then in vogue must have brought his own fresh, breezy methods of address in their beginnings to the instant test of boldness. He dared to go outside the ruts and traditions of professional treatment. Another and nearer line of topics engaged his attention. His subject was as broad and universal as the want of human nature itself. To present the simple but yet pressing questions of life; to speak out of the widest possible generalization; to be fearless and familiar in the treatment of topics of every-day doubt and trouble, was the task he proposed to himself, and consistently carried out. One can almost feel, in reading his sermons to-day, the subtle atmosphere of distrust and opposition they must have encountered for a time at least in many minds, and imagine the sense of uncertainty as to their reception with which many of them must have been spoken. And that the response was really so generous and appreciative only indicated the poverty and hunger of the time.

The church idea of preaching, with its authoritative and saving utterance, was now losing its hold. The new life of the country, developing with a tremendous insistence on the practical, was everywhere secularizing the tendencies of thought and making strange havoc with professional dignity and influence. Dewey was, however, fortunate in being able to see beneath all this the elements which are permanent and essential in the civilization of every time, and to address himself at once to the fixed factors in the problem. However it might be with technical religion, life was always interesting and impressive. Though priestly sanction no longer carried its accustomed weight, the voice of direct, manly appeal out of a full mind and heart never sounded with fresher effectiveness. This loosening hold of the pulpit only called for a transference of emphasis: the voice of experience would speak the louder, when waning institutional supremacy should at last let the heart be heard. The wonderful stimulation of activity everywhere else made a

new demand here in the church. A live, constructive, progressive age was waiting for a live word. Traditional methods had now left place for the prevalence of the life idea of preaching.

Dewey was the pioneer of practical preaching. That which the Church had thus far antagonized he brought into repute and helpfulness. He was the first to demonstrate the possible influence of the pulpit in its direct appeal to active men of affairs. He addressed himself to secular concerns with the deliberate purpose of dignifying the humblest of human pursuits, but he did more than this. His sympathies were with life in all its varied spheres of exercise; and, if he had much to say of religion, it was simply because he regarded it as the highest expression of that life which might everywhere be interesting and good. The suggestions and inspiration of his theme met him at every turn, and his own mind and heart were quick to respond. His aim was to penetrate the surface, to sound the depths, and find the beauty and consolation of simple things. He could well assert that his "great business with life was so to read the book of its teaching; to find that life is not the doing of drudgeries, but the hearing of oracles." And the result was that none listened more attentively than men of business, those who had no special leaning to the institution and profession of religion. He suited equally the Quaker quietude of New Bedford and the metropolitan push of New York; for no one knew better than he that the problem of life is at heart everywhere the same. never fell into the common ecclesiastical error of making life a means to religion. Religion was the means, life the end. Technical theology and the church were with him subsidiary to the simple vital needs of the heart and home. He made more of the man than of the institution.

He

Life had been held by the preachers to be wrong and essentially evil. The antidote they proposed was religion. Dewey made his counter-claim, that it was religion that was false and superficial, and the antidote with him was life. On every hand, it was asserted that the world had not

enough religion; but he replied that the difficulty was not here. Its real need was not of more religion, but of more life. Job appears to have been his favorite book of study and suggestion for quite a period of his ministry,― Job, the book of Life, the plain, unvarnished statement of man's every-day need, the book of experience that faces doubt and suffering, and grapples manfully with the universal human problem. On Job for the most part is built up that great series of sermons on life and human nature. Job furnishes many of the texts, and starts most of the questions. Job represents humanity in its unsophisticated relations to the truth; and, as it is with the humanities rather than with divinities and theologies that Dewey has principally to do, one can feel instinctively the stimulus there must have been in the story for one of his large sympathies with the life so represented. Job is the questioner, the hungry inquirer, the wide-eyed wonderer who looks out into the great world of fact and experience with a doubt as big as sorrow and a longing as quick and keen as life.

And, indeed, the lectures on the "Problem of Human Destiny" are only a later elaboration of the answer Dewey wrought out in his earlier sermons. They restate, amplify, and enforce from maturer thought and wider reading the instinctive position of his youth. They are broad and optimistic, but eminently logical, and calm with the consciousness of a vast array of facts to rest upon. The thing evidently needed to be done, and as yet no one had touched precisely this field. The need was waiting and always will wait for one of just his fine equipment for a task requiring at once delicacy and strength. His treatment of the broad subject is manly, direct, and to the point. He does not yield to the temptation to be abstract and metaphysical by the way, but keeps resolutely to the plain, practical course he has marked out for himself. One escapes the involution and ambiguity common to such discussions; and whether it be in the ordinary relations of man to nature and society, or his higher relations to the ideal and spiritual, the thought is equally vigorous and suggestive. It is difficult to con