IV

THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE OF

WHITTIER1

DURING the years in which Whittier lived and wrote, the hills and valleys of New England were resounding with the tumult and shouting of a long-waged ecclesiastical conflict. The old order was changing, yielding place to the new. The harsh, dogmatic, logical, positive Calvinism of an earlier day was inevitably reacting into a nebulous but militant Unitarianism. Young men in libraries were closing their Paleys and grappling with the intricacies of a Kantean transcendentalism. Still, to a

large degree, unknown in Europe, the greatest book of the nineteenth century, Sartor Resartus, was in America finding readers among men of light and leading and the mighty message of the flaming-hearted, golden-mouthed prophet of Dumfries's purple moors was burning its way into the souls of men. From the lecture platform Emerson was giving to inquiring minds a somewhat misty and shallow

The selections from Whittier are used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers.

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philosophy, but a vital and luminous interpretation of life. The scintillating Dr. Holmes with zest was tilting his shining lance against the monstrosities of the old Calvinism. The age was rife with subtle questionings. On every side could be heard the clash of creed and the babel of isms. Emerson said that the motto of Margaret Fuller was: "I don't know where I'm going. Follow me." And not a few of her contemporaries could have sounded the same slogan.

But in the religious poetry of Whittier we are taken far away from the world of dogma and controversy. His grasp of religious truth is at once simple and comprehensive. His message is essentially spiritual rather than theological. The emphasis is upon the great elemental, fundamental truths of the life of the Spirit. Whittier's muse rises with wings as eagle's above the smoke of the conflict. The devotee of any creed can find solace and refreshment at the Valclusa fountain of the genius of the Quaker poet.

Whittier only among our great American poets was not a Unitarian, although the Unitarianism of Holmes and Longfellow was the expression of a revulsion from the harsh creed of their fathers rather than a denial of the deity of the Christ. To claim that he was

a Unitarian is to ignore some of the sweetest and noblest measures in our literature. But the Christ whom he worshiped was not a dead Christ upon whose grave the silent Syrian stars look down. In the poem "Our Master” we find words which upon the wings of song have carried many a world-tossed, sin-burdened soul to the throne of God:

"No fable old, nor mythic lore,
Nor dream of bards and seers,
No dead fact stranded on the shore
Of the oblivious years;

"But warm, sweet, tender, even yet

A present help is He;

And faith has still its Olivet,

And love its Galilee.

"The healing of his seamless dress

Is by our beds of pain;

We touch him in life's throng and press,

And we are whole again.

"Through him the first fond prayers are said

Our lips of childhood frame,

The last low whispers of our dead
Are burdened with his name.

"We faintly hear, we dimly see,
In differing phrase we pray;
But, dim or clear, we own in thee

The Light, the Truth, the Way!"

"The Meeting" is one of the great meditative poems of our literature. It has the grand

old virtue of sincerity. Amid the perfumed brightness of the summer day in the plain little meetinghouse the farmer folk gather in silence to be still and know that God is God. And for them, towering above all others like a mountain in the clear, cold air of morning, looms one great truth:

"... the dear Christ dwells not afar,
The king of some remoter star.
Listening, at times, with flattered ear
To homage wrung from selfish fear,
But here, amid the poor and blind,
The bound and suffering of our kind,
In works we do, in prayers we pray,
Life of our life, he lives to-day."

Through all of the warp and woof of Whittier's poetry like a golden thread runs the sublime thought of the "living Christ," and nowhere is it more nobly expressed than in the ringing measures of "Palestine":

"Blest land of Judæa! thrice hallowed of song,

Where the holiest of memories pilgrimlike throng;
In the shade of thy palms, by the shores of thy sea,
On the hills of thy beauty, my heart is with thee.

"Blue sea of the hills! in my spirit I hear

Thy waters, Gennesaret, chime on my ear;

Where the Lowly and Just with the people sat down, And thy spray on the dust of his sandals was thrown.

"And what if my feet may not tread where he stood,
Nor my ears hear the dashing of Galilee's flood,
Nor my eyes see the cross which he bowed him to bear,
Nor my knees press Gethsemane's garden of prayer.

"Yet, Loved of the Father, thy Spirit is near
To the meek, and the lowly, and penitent here;
And the voice of thy love is the same even now
As at Bethany's tomb or on Olivet's brow."

Theologically Whittier was neither a radical nor a reactionary. He was always anxious to conserve the precious heritage of other years, but the windows of his soul were ever open to new light and new truth. In the poetry of the gentle-spirited son of a sect which in earlier days the men of blood and iron of the old Puritan theocracy had excoriated and violently persecuted, we find no spirit of bitterness. In fact, in the verse of Whittier we find a tolerance for the Ironside Calvinist which is lacking in the works of their own descendants. He says,

"Hold fast your Puritan heritage,
But let the free thought of the age
Its light and hope and sweetness add
To the stern faith the fathers had."

And again,

"Praise and thanks for an honest man,
Glory to God for the Puritan!"