09. FROM SEA TO SEA

FROM SEA TO SEA As related in the foregoing chapter, F. B. Meyer paid his first visit to America in 1891. His last was in 1926, when he made an extended tour of the United States and Canada, from Boston to the Rockies, which lasted more than two months. He had planned to visit America during this present year (1929) but---Nicanor lies dead in his harness.

Thus, for thirty-eight years Meyer came and went, and remained, to the end, the best-known and best-beloved of visiting British divines. Annual religious gatherings of almost every sort, conventions, interstate and inter-city special efforts, church anniversaries, Sunday school festivals and celebrations, tent-meetings, as well as the ordinary services of the sanctuary, were laid under tribute to F. B. Meyer, in all parts of America, for close upon forty years.

What was the secret of F. B. Meyer’s unfailing popu­larity? I am not concerned, at the moment, with the character of the message he carried to the Western world. Every phase of that message has been preached and taught there by others, none of whom have attained a tithe of Meyer’s vogue or enjoyed so much as a remnant of the popularity and affection that were his to command. Nor was the secret to be discovered in the fact of his being simple, unassuming, human. There have been other men from Britain, just as un­affectedly sincere, frank, and modest as F. B. Meyer. What was it, then, that so endeared the man to men and women of almost every complexion of religious creed and belief?

It would be idle, I think, to attempt to attribute it to a single quality. Nevertheless, I am quite persuaded that, chiefly, it lay in the fact that he remained what he had always been---an Englishman. Less insular, perhaps, than many of his fellow-countrymen, yet in manner, method, and message, essentially and unmis­takably British. So far as my limited discernment enabled me to judge, Meyer never assumed or annexed a single American pulpit-mannerism since first visiting the country, thirty-eight years ago. Everywhere he went in the States he preached as he had preached at Leicester, at Regent’s Park, at Christ Church, without the least attempt to trim his style or alter his method to suit or meet any differentiating conditions, alleged to exist between English and American taste and preference in preaching.

Because of this steadfastness, Dr. Meyer was admired and honored; for Americans love a man to be himself: It is precisely the same in England. The American who finding himself located in England imagines he can win English esteem by sinking his Americanism, knows little of the English. If it be true that they, themselves, conform to nobody, it is equally true that they expect nobody to conform to them. Aping English manners, or paying court to English prejudices, is the very last way in which the citizen of another country may expect to conciliate English good-will. Above all things else, Britishers value genuineness of character. They look for a man to be himself, and not somebody else. By the same rule, my own experience justifies my declaring, that if a man of another nationality expects to be taken into the heart of the best type of American, he must, also, "to his own heart be true".

It was ever thus with Dr. Meyer. Here was a preacher possessing everything his American fellow-ministers had in culture and general equipment, and something they had not. And that something is (as I think) almost exclusively distinctive of English preachers. I t was not fertility of idea, or quickness of mind alone---although Meyer had these things in wonderfully abundant fashion. It was not merely an almost uncanny facility for the faultless phrase-for the one peculiarly and superlatively fitting word, when the use of any of a dozen possible synonyms would have lessened the beauty of the thought it was intended to express and adorn-though in these particulars Meyer was, per­haps, without a peer. It might be called a unique capacity for lambently flinging new light about old texts and themes; but even that would scarcely repre­sent it, completely. Perhaps flexibility is the word I am after---a word which comes nearest to expressing the quality which American star preachers so frequently lack, and English preachers, such as Jowett, Meyer, Campbell Morgan, Charles Brown, J. D. Jones, or R. J. Campbell---to name a few of them---so pre­eminently possessed, and still possess. This fact (and fact it is) is all the more surprising because flexibility, as a national characteristic, is very much more the possession of the average American than of the average Englishman. As these pages already have emphasized, F. B. Meyer remained to the end incorruptibly evangelical. I have seen it stated that his preaching made no claim on scholarship or theological erudition; and, of course, the obituary notice in the Daily Telegraph, to which reference has been made, carried the implication, that abstract philosophy and the study of metaphysics were, from Dr. Meyer, as the poles asunder. All such crude comment, however, is simply absurd. To be sure, there is a narrow, hidebound, pedantic sense in which something of the sort might be given a valid standing. But to apply it to Meyer---pshaw! Meyer’s preaching and teaching never offended real scholarship. Men of authentic academic attainments were content---eager, even---to sit at his feet, and hearken to his word; and no British preacher, or teacher, ever taught the average American preacher half as much as did F. B. Meyer. Were the assembling of evidence, witnessing to this fact, the only mission of this volume, its every page could be filled to overflowing with extracts from written and spoken testimony, transcripts of which lie scattered about the table at which these lines are being written.

F. B. Meyer never permitted academic considera­tions to stand between the message he had to deliver and those from whom it was intended to reach and benefit. He paid scant attention to a presentation reflecting the possession of knowledge such as may be, and often is, acquired by men of otherwise godless and worthless lives. Nor did he for so much as a moment suggest the pitiable spectacle presented by the ultra­modern, who imagines that to serve his day and genera­tion, he must needs cut himself adrift from all con­sideration of, and reverence for, the past. F. B. Meyer never claimed to be anything except an unreserved servant of God. Yet he was more---in a mundane sense---very much more, amongst other things, both a philosopher and a metaphysician, the Daily Telegraph notwithstanding. For what, after all, is abstract philosophy but reasoned science, considered apart from the tangible and the concrete? And what metaphysics---in Aristotelean phrase, meta ta physika, i. e., a study which begins where that of physics ends ---but a philosophical quest in pursuing which a man strives to lay hold on the first principles of knowledge and being? Even the veriest tyro in definitions realizes that all this is just a somewhat involved formula, far more readily understood when described as the study of the life of the spirit and the unending quest of God. And in this dual pursuit it is not too much to say Meyer spent nine-tenths of his waking hours.

During his American tour of 1921 Dr. Meyer was the chief speaker at Grove City (Penn.) Bible Con­ference, and made a deep impression on those privi­leged to hear him. The Presbyterian Banner, for Sep­tember 2, 1921, contained a spirited account of these meetings, and, in addition, printed A Minister’s Musings, which dealt specifically with the preaching, personality, and radiating influence of F. B. Meyer. As the daily preacher at the Grove City Bible Conference [said the writer], Dr. Meyer has revived all these memories and influences of earlier years and has tested them in the light of present-day estimates, and the experience has stood the test. There is a scenic beauty along the route which he travels, that the mind carries with it long after the journey and is often refreshed by it in its happy, quiet excursions, when the imagination carries it back to the days of the distant past. Some of the preachers of high imagination are but temporary entertainers and leave no deep influences upon the minds of men. This would never be said of Dr. F. B. Meyer. And the secret of this, I think, is near at hand. With him all roads lead to the Cross of Christ. If one were to ask him where exists the center of the universe, I am sure he would answer quickly, "Where Jesus is". At this Conference Dr. Meyer gave a number of his famous studies of Old Testament characters and worthies. Those of my readers who, anywhere in America or in Britain, were so fortunate as to be privi­leged to hear these addresses, will recall the masterly, magnetic way in which Dr. Meyer delineated the sub­jects of these spiritual biographies, and gave to his hearers not only suggestions for holy living, but for earnest preaching, and sent those who ministered in Israel back to their flocks, with his burning message interwoven with the very texture of their future word to those committed to their spiritual care.

Three ministers of the United Presbyterian Church sat at table with me at Grove City [says the correspondent of The Banner]. I turned and asked them as a group what in Dr. Meyer impressed them most, and conjointly they replied that his simplicity, his saintliness, and his scripturalness were outstanding characteristics in his life and his preach­ing. There is order, method, advance, in the racy course pursued by this master of musical sounds, whether he is speaking or writing of heavenly things. The three dis­tinctive features discovered by my ministerial brethren are unquestionably dominant in Dr. Meyer, but the simplicity is touched by a strong art, the saintliness is approachable through its marked wholesomeness, and the scripturalness is free from dogmatism which is narrow and sectarian. However, while there is evident style in the sermons of this British divine, there is little reference to art or literature or philosophy, or even science as she unfolds herself in nature. The Bible interprets the Bible and, like the early apostles, he is ever proving "out of the Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ". The message of Dr. Meyer was highly stimulating to research. It was not at all in the interest of negations but in the interest of positives. He did not spend his time trying to prove that Joseph or Abraham were mere ideas, but rather in letting us see in them, and through them, the foregleams of the Christ whom they set forth dimly, but most truly. I do not presume to discuss the style of Dr. Meyer, though it has always appealed to me as most attractive in its union of beauty and variety and strength. It gives a living suggestion to a preacher as to how he may use Bible stories in proclaiming Bible truths, and find in the men of the Bible the everlasting prototypes of the human race.

One of the unusual characteristics of F. B. Meyer, as a traveler, was the ease with which he could accom­modate himself to circumstances. He learned to econo­mize every moment of his time, and was thus able to accomplish so much. One writer who had the excep­tional opportunity afforded him of accompanying Dr. Meyer on a mission which he conducted in America, years back, says that in six weeks, thirteen cities were visited, necessitating 3, 500 miles of journey, during which time Dr. Meyer made one hundred addresses. Nevertheless, he still had plenty of time to write, and continued to conduct departments in two English weekly religious journals and several articles for a number of other periodicals. Many of these were written on a writing-pad held on his knee, with an old-fashioned stylographic pen, while travelling from place to place, or at odd moments between meetings. He learned, as few men have, how to make every moment tell---waiting for a train, upon a journey, between appointments anywhere, everywhere. While others were distracted by disturbing surroundings, he remained unaffected, because he had studied and acquired the faculty of absolutely giving himself to the theme uppermost in his mind; and so, with tablet on knee and pen in hand, he prepared copy for his thoughtful and helpful expositions and inspirational works. In 1905 Dr. Meyer travelled from Atlanta, Ga., to Los Angeles, Cali£, in a Pullman, being four days on the train. This was his first experience of a journey of this mileage and duration, and he wrote an account of it for the British Week{y which he called "Four Days on the Train". It is a charming bit of writing and worthy of finding a place in these memorials, not only because of its interest in showing the sort of genuine work Meyer’s pen and knee-pad could turn out, but because of the contrast the picture furnishes between the places through which he passed, as they were twenty-five years ago, and as they appear today.

Before he started, Dr. Meyer regarded the journey as a very formidable business. He reviewed it, after­wards, as being one of the most interesting experiences of his life. It is not necessary to dwell on the first stage of the journey, lying between Atlanta, Ga., and New Orleans. The more interesting portion of the journey lay westward from the latter city, by the Great South Pacific Railway---the Sunset route to the West. He found his fellow-travelers communicative and pleasant, and the pleasure of animated conversation added to the zest of the long journey.

Immediately after starting at noon [he writes] the entire train was taken aboard an immense lighter which, escorted by a power pulley, was transported across the muddy waters of the Mississippi. Then, for most of the afternoon, under brilliant sunshine our track lay through a low-lying tropical forest, and, presently, through fields, whence the sugar-cane crop had been recently gathered. Thundering along, we were pulled up, suddenly, by the ghastly tidings that a colored man from one of the adjoining villages has placed himself deliberately in front of the locomotive. What tragedy was behind that lifeless body, which we left at the side of the track, covered by white sheets, borrowed from the Pullman? There was a gorgeous sunset that night, dyeing the land with glory. But our party felt shocked and depressed, for even as the land smiled in beauty, death had stalked through it and claimed his own. On Wednesday morning he woke much refreshed, and had his breakfast early. The train was stopped between seven-thirty and nine, to give the passengers an opportunity to visit San Antonio. Dr. Meyer describes it as being a quaint, historic place-narrow streets, low roofs, flower-embowered houses, a younger sister of New Orleans, and bearing ineffaceable traces of its Spanish origin. Here, too, was the historic Alamo, the first of the mission stations, which the early Franciscan fathers founded in Texas, and Ari­zona, and California, ending, of course, at San Fran­cisco. The crumbling walls, towers, and domes with their long, beautiful lines, commemorated for Dr. Meyer the taste of those brave pioneering padres. San Antonio River, a winding, gently moving stream, spanned by artistic iron bridges, and bordered with acacia-like trees, added greatly to the beauty of the scene. The citizens were busily preparing for a fete to be held on the following Friday, in honor of President Roosevelt’s visit. It was here, seven years ago, that he raised his famous Rough Riders for the Cuban War. For the rest of the entire day we kept on travelling in Texas. Our speed was not great, the recent floods having greatly affected the track. For the most part, Texas is divided in vast ranches, but on either side of the line the land adjacent to the railroad is poor, with a considerable growth of wild cactus, and large tracts of sandy waste. Ranges of ragged mountains, the rock-ribbed backbones of some lost cordillera, now half-buried in sand, but lofty enough for snow to lie in the upper crevasses, just out from the plain and run parallel, for short distances, with the railroad track. Lean jack-rabbits and coyotes, endeav­oring to scrape a scanty living on the straggling grass complete the picture. In Arizona, through which we now passed, the Govern­ment is introducing ostrich farms and date-growing, so that even these unfertile tracts are being placed under contribution to the general prosperity of this wonderful country. On Thursday morning the party had to put back their watches two hours, and began to go by Pacific time. Dr. Meyer says that he kept one of his watches by Greenwich time, so that he could keep track of the doings of his friends, as he was then eight hours behind the schedule of old England.

We stayed in the border town of EI Paso, two hours [he continues], inhabited by a strange medley of Spaniards, Italians, half-breeds and Americans. It appeared to be a heaven-deserted place. But they tell me that it has improved immensely within the last three years, owing to the crusade which has gone forward against the saloons and houses of ill fame. But there seemed, to me, to be a terrible lack of counter-attraction.

Early on Friday morning, the express reached Fort Yuma, on the border of the Indian Reservation. About twenty of these Indians---the meager remnants of the vast tribes that once roamed these territories­ were at the stations, with bows and arrows and other articles of aboriginal manufacture for sale. Fort Yuma, Dr. Meyer’s American travelling companions declared, was the hottest place in the universe. On leaving the station we crossed the Colorado River, the boundary between Arizona and California. At first, we encountered a barren tract of country known as the wilder­ness. But it served a useful purpose for us, in preparing, by force of contrast, for the gradual increase of cultivation and beauty. First one noticed the bunches of yellow poppies, the characteristic flower of the State; then the eucalyptus trees and the orchards of cherry and apple in glorious blossom, followed by immense fields of corn, as yet quite green. But what is that perfume borne through the open windows of the car? Surely, it is unmistakable! Nothing but orange blossoms carries such fragrance. The air is laden with it! I shall never easily forget the first glimpse I had of those miles of orange-groves, and the bloom, and the sweetness floating on the air, the golden fruit gleaming amid the dark foliage, and towering over all, as mighty screens from chilling blasts, the eternal mountains, crowned with eternal snow. Here, too, were graceful pepper trees, and again more orchards. The owner, apparently, is fearful of a slight frost to-night, and so huge bonfires are lighted to keep up the temperature after the sun has dipped down in the west. And so, sounding their great engine-bell and passing at grade through pretty and wealthy suburbs, the train made its way slowly into the city of Los Angeles, where Dr. Meyer left it for ten days of meetings arranged by the city pastors. My closing word [he says] for all who contemplate this trip is: Don’t be afraid of the colored porter; he is, after all, a very ordinary mortal easily squared by a quarter. Be sure to undress when you go to bed, just as you would if you were at home. If you are of the male sex, provide yourself with a safety razor; eat three square meals a day; get into conversation with your fellow-travelers, and throw off your very English reserve.

Nowhere on the planet was F. B. Meyer more popu­lar, more eagerly welcomed, than at Old Tent Evangel, in the city of New York. Of all the international speakers who have been heard, year after year, from the platform of what has, on more than one occasion, been called the citadel of orthodox doctrine, none received a more cordial welcome from the non-sectarian congregation which gathered there than Dr. Meyer, whose voice had been heard from its platform for more than a quarter of a century. The reason is not far to seek [says Dr. G. W. McPherson, who was its Superintendent from first to last]. This veteran of the evangelical faith is a man of the people, simple, unassuming, and human; a preacher who never employs shoddy methods and who believes that, since the old doctrines have done so much for the evangelization of the world, they are superior to the new theology, which, so far, has accomplished so little.

All the world knows that Dr. Meyer was a man of peace, and that throughout his long and wonderful life threw all the weight of his great influence against the red ruin of war. Yet the great struggle of 1914-18 found him where all true men of Meyer’s caliber were found, life-long convictions to the contrary. None was more concerned than he regarding America’s tardy entry into the struggle, and none rejoiced more heartily when the die was, finally, cast.

We opened the newspapers the other morning [he declared at the time] to discover that our great daughter or sister across the Atlantic has resolved to throw in her lot in this great conflict. The grey walls of St. Paul’s have witnessed extraordinary scenes in marriage and burial, in jubilation and humiliation; but probably they have never witnessed a scene which will live more certainly in history than that glorious day when in that historic church the United States of America and Britain entered into a holy compact in the presence of God. We were glad that the United States should enter into the war, because we knew at once that it meant a speedier cessation of this awful strife. In his noble sermon Bishop Brent said that war had been looked upon as a rough game played by kings, but that that delusion was now to be succeeded by the truer view that war was a wild beast that had to be hunted down and killed. We agree with that conclusion, and we are thankful that the accession of the United States hurries up this consummation; more especially as the three great objects of this war, as we understand them, are, first, the rehabilitation of Belgium, and the granting of the right of self-government to all weak and feeble States; secondly, a new emphasis on international relationships and law; and thirdly, a League of Nations that shall make war so difficult as to be almost impossible. Because this war must end war, and the accession of the United States is to bring that conclusion nearer, we thank God in the name of humanity for the determination of that mighty people.

But, in addition to that, we are thankful for the sake of the United States themselves, if I may dare so to put it. It seems to us as though that nation was led up into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil, and that the tempter came to them and said, "Sell your soul for gold, fill the temple of mammon with your incense, take as your rule of conduct not self-sacrifice, but self-aggrandizement, fall down and worship my ideals, and all the world shall be yours." And for a little---only for a moment in comparison with the history of humanity---it seemed as though that great country hesitated. While it was thinking out the profound problem, all the world held its breath and waited anxiously to know the issue.

Then, in words that will live in history as among the most momentous spoken by mortal lips, came the message of President Wilson that put beyond doubt, and made abundantly clear, that the United States stood for honor and freedom and righteousness rather than for self-aggrandizement; and the revelation brought great consolation to the heart of Dr. Meyer.

We, in Great Britain, have been standing on our Mount Moriah [he said], beside our sacrifice, and have seen the fire consume much that we loved. Then, as we looked down the mountain slope, we saw climbing it the embodi­ment of that great people to which we gave birth, but which has so vastly outgrown her mother. We found pre­sently, standing side by side with us, all the chivalry, all that was beautiful and strong and good in the American people. They were drinking of our cup, they were being baptized with our baptism, they were travailing in the same birth for the same issue, and we knew we were not alone. God was with us; but it was an unspeakable conso­lation that those who are closest akin to us of all mankind understood the inwardness of the quarrel, the purity of our aims, and threw in their lot for victory by our side.

Dr. Meyer’s activities during the momentous years of the World War were such as fell to the lot of all British pastors, whose flocks were decimated and mem­bership drained by the unceasing demand for men, and more men, to fill the red gaps that daily were being torn in the British front. Hundreds of the men associ­ated with Christ Church---the number given me is seven hundred and sixty---were with the colors, and Dr. Meyer’s ministry, of course, was to homes and families from which the boys and young husbands were absent, departed, many of them, never to return. Meyer hated war with a deep and fervent hatred; but, then, he loved England, and love---as ever---proved more than conqueror.