MEMOIR. THE history of an age finds often its best record, in the life of one man. In Church and State, in Cæsar and Alfred and Washington, as well as in Cranmer and Laud and Seabury; the living, thinking, working spirit of a generation, stands incarnate, before our eyes. They are the foci, in which divergent rays unite; and while we best see, in them, the combined results of all events of their time; their characters are the best standpoint, from which to note the varied means, by which God works out the orderings of His minute and manifold Providence. That my father was one of such men, a man whose life is the history of a most eventful period of the American Church, larger heads and less loving hearts than mine, have readily acknowledged, even in his life. First Seabury, and then Hobart, and then he; the asserter, the definer, the defender of the faith; surely these three names, all in one century, the representatives of its three generations, are even to our eyes, and must be more and more plainly, through the receding vista of years yet to come, the living, thinking, working spirits of the age; the incarnations, of God's making, into which He has breathed the life of this period of the American Church. To a certain degree, these pages must be looked at in this light. Yet they do not venture to undertake such a work. The writer would shrink from it, even more, than from the easier effort, to portray, with the pencil of intimate and reverential love, the character of the Individual, the Bishop, Pastor, Teacher, Poet, Man. And biography, in this historical view of it, must not be contemporaneous. Another generation must climb, from our footsteps, still farther heights of time, to get the unconfused extent of the great panorama of the past. We, for our very nearness, cannot grasp it in our limited horizon. Its actors, we cannot fairly distinguish, in the dust of the busy present, and in the inextricable maze of mingled interests, and combined instruments. Neither of the two great Bishops of the American Church, who preceded my Father, have risen to their historic level, or found yet their historian biographer. Nor does he, in these pages-only they may be the material, out of which that history can be wrought. Unequal utterly, they must be. None ever was readier or truer, or more appreciative of other men, than he, in the many notices, he wrote of their lives and deaths. Who is there, that can do it for him; could he have done it, equally, for himself? CHAPTER I. BIRTH AND EARLY LIFE-INDICATIONS OF CHARACTER-SCHOOL AND COLLEGE CANDIDATESHIP. GEORGE WASHINGTON DOANE was born in Trenton, New Jersey, May 27 A. D. 1799. His father, Jonathan Doane, was a man of mark in his day, as a master builder and contractor. He died in the same year, that his son graduated, leaving the homestead unfinished, and most of his hard-earned livelihood, in an unsecured debt, which was never realized. He was a man of singular perseverance and high principle, commanding and handsome in his appearance, most loving and devoted in all his home relations, and very proud of his son. But my Father's strongest points of character are his, through his Mother. She was a noble woman, heroic, and self-denying; full of the wise instincts and great impulses of her nature; earnestly religious; and most careful and affectionate in the training of her children. Over her deathbed, as his hand lay upon her breast, and life's last pulse died out, he said to himself, "great heart." It was her best description. And his unvarying love, and admiring appreciation of her, have their record on the grave-cross which he put at her head, "The Bishop of New Jersey to the best of Mothers." In days when the Church in America was weak and small, she had a brave woman's loyalty to its distinctive features, which moulded, in no small degree, from early boyhood, the earnest promptness, and the bold uncompromising energy of character, that made him a "defensor fidei " in life and death. She was one of the women of the revolution, no whit less heroes, than its men. And she had with it all, a maiden's modesty, which is the true background of real courage; on which it may fall back from the snares of self-consciousness, or cruelty. This rare union of modesty and bravery, her son derived from her. Men saw most of the latter, for modesty becomes immodest by public gazing. But those who knew him well, remember the quick and ready blush; the almost humility, with which he undertook a new subject, before an untried audience; the unconsciousness with which he welcomed approval; and his disavowal of any praise, for what he thought accidentally successful, in what he did; his gesture or his voice. I remember so well, asking him, at dinner, on last Washington's birthday, whether his oration before the Ladies' Mount Vernon Association, which he that moment, had finished, was "fine." He said "that is for you to say." And when I asked him if he were satisfied with it, his answer was "I never was, with any thing of my own.' And in that noble oration, in which orator and subject were equally met, he proved this feature of his own character, by the quick accuracy, with which he detected,† and the earnest admiration, with which he regarded, it, in George Washington. Through his Mother's blood, and in his Mother's milk, God adorned his soul, with the glory of courage, and the grace of modesty. It was the great boulder, carved into a column, with its chapiter of leaves. And none owned more gratefully and constantly, than he, the debt he owed to her. I have beside me now, the Bible and the Prayer Book, which she gave him when he went to College. Carefully he treasured them, and when she had gone, touched them with almost veneration. How they are doubly consecrated now. The Bible is an old and worn book, "hoary with time." And on the fly-leaf, he had kept these lines, copied in his boyish hand. LINES WRITTEN BY MY MOTHER WHEN I WAS AN INFANT. He who the ravens' wants supplies For all his creatures will provide; How beautiful the faith of the Mother's love. His home with her was the house of all home pleasure and delight. And when he left it at his marriage, his care and devotion to her were unintermitted. His Mother and sisters lived always near him. He was, every day, in her house. The first copy of his pamphlets, that went out of his own home, was hers. The flowers, that they loved so together, and the vegetables of his garden, must be shared with her. His daily care was, that the newspaper went to her regularly. And while his energetic His great diffidence and modesty, in college, which always raised a blush upon his cheek, every time that he recited, and prevented him from finishing a single declamation which was required of him, alone gave him the second, instead of the first, place, in a class of more than ordinary ability.-Church Review, Oct. 1859. See pages 12 and 13 of "One World, One Washington." youth, was the stay of her widowhood; his loving manhood, and his playful tenderness, were the comfort and delight of her age. Through her long and painful illness, his coming was the pleasure of each day. No day so weary, or overborne with work; no night so late, or dark, kept him away. He was her Son, her Pastor, the Father of her second childhood. And the dearest human love had God's own hallowing, in his frequent and earnest administrations of the Holy Eucharist at her bedside, and in his daily prayer, with her, teaching her poor slow lips the prayer he learned from them, in childhood; "Come, Grandmother, let us say Our Father.'" The sorrow of her death was a shadow, that lay upon his heart, till it has passed away in the peaceful light of Paradise, where they are together. And those two graves lie side by side, far sooner than we thought; but no sooner, than they wished. I could not speak of the germs of my Father's character, without this reference to the one,* whose hands God used so wisely, in planting them, in him. And his devotion to her, was a beautiful thread, in the web of his manifold+ character, which broke most painfully, a year ago last March, and which death, that separates so many, tied again for them, fourteen months after. His first lines to her, that we have, and his last, are the uniting ends, of the life-long circle of his love. TO MY DEAR MOTHER. In a copy of "The Winter's Wreath" given to her, Christmas, A. D. 1830. O many, many winters more, And then, be thine, a fairer wreath, And then twenty-eight Christmases after, the first and the last Christmas for him, without her, this was his carol. THE FIRST CHRISTMAS WITHOUT MY MOTHER. "One who mourneth for his Mother." Sweet Mother, eight and fifty years, Thy Christmas blessing crowned my brow; And Christmas comes, without thee, now. "After all the Mother has the making of the man."-Address on the death of General Harrison, by the Bishop of New Jersey. tоIKIAN, "many-coloured."-1 St. Peter, iv. 10. |