CHAPTER XXI.

SUMMARY VIEW OF THE MAN AND HIS SERVICES.

HIS PHYSICAL ORGANISM.-DISTINGUISHING TRAITS OF HIS CHARACTER. THE ENERGY, HARMONY, EASE, POISE AND SPLENDOR OF ALL HIS MENTAL, EMOTIONAL AND PRACTICAL WORKING.-HIS ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS CHARACTER. THE UNION IN HIM OF UNCOMPROMISING ALLEGIANCE TO DENOMINATIONAL CREED, WITH AN INCLUSIVE LOVE FOR ALL MANKIND.-TACT.-MAGNETISM, OR CAPACITY FOR LEADERSHIP.-DR. PALMER AS A PREACHER.-AS A PASTOR.-As A TEACHER. AS A THEOLOGIAN.-AS CHAMPION OF THE PRINCIPLES And Leader of THE HOSTS OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, SOUTH.AS A PHILOSOPHER.-AS A STATESMAN.-AS A PATRIOTIC CITIZEN.— AS THE HEAD OF A FAMILY.-AS A FRIEND.-AS A SOCIAL SERVANT. AS A SERVANT OF GOD.

ENJAMIN MORGAN PALMER was under, rather than

over, medium height, slight in build, though deep in the chest and somewhat stooped as age came on. He was susceptible of indefinite physical wear and tear, able to endure and equally able to wage unceasing conflict. All his bodily movements were as easy, agile and graceful as those of a leopard. His head was small; its shape would have been a pons asinorum to peripatetic phrenologists. His forehead, however, was relatively ample. His eyes were very fine, dark brown, sparkling and brilliant. His mouth was not handsome, but of generous proportions, the most conspicuous feature of his face, suggestive of sweetness and eloquence and strength. His whole lower face was indicative of will power; power to determine and to persist. Taking the entire face into view, one saw written thereon great kindliness, alertness, penetration and force. In his general bearing there was a still more pronounced air of power coupled with dignity, graciousness and utter freedom from self-consciousness. While his physical person did not conspicuously advertise his noble intellectual` and practical endowments, it suggested to all shrewd observers, even before they had heard his name or seen his power evidenced in overt fashion, that he was an extraordinary man.

Turning from his physical organism to his faculties of mind, feeling and will, the student of his life observes in Dr. Palmer

a very unusual combination of rare endowments. One is struck with the energy, harmony, ease, poise and splendor of all his mental, emotional and practical working. Glancing at his intellectual working, we see him absorbing and acquiring easily the glorious classics of the English tongue, while yet a mere lad at his mother's knee, well prepared for college at the age of fourteen; and so easily mastering the literature of theology, at the age of twenty-one to twenty-three, that his fellow students at Columbia were wont to say: "Palmer has only to put a book under his pillow and go to sleep; he will awake the next morning knowing all that is in the book." We see him taking in knowledge so naturally, easily and rapidly that all through his life only brief periods of special preparation are needed in order to his furnishing himself for noble and instructive addresses on topics outside the pale of his ordinary studies, and that, too, before exacting audiences, keyed to the highest point of expectation. We see this power of acquisition evidenced at length in the impression which he so frequently made of being approximately universal in knowledge.

His dialectical faculty worked as efficiently and splendidly as his acquisitive faculties. His vast acquisitions were stored away in his capacious memory in a logical order, and were drawn forth from that great storehouse under the same rigorous canons. His power to unfold and elaborate the logical implications in a word of truth or a dictum of error was nothing short of masterful. The possession and use of this power gave to his ministry a prophetic aspect, and an aspect of great originality. In bringing out the implications of a truth he seemed to the less logical to be bringing somewhat that was new to the mind of man. His deductions were so remorseless in their sweep of the plain involved that he was wont to make the impression upon his audiences that he was one whose teachings were as unanswerable as they were impressive.

His constructive imagination was not less active than his acquisitive and elaborative faculties. We see its operation in his permanent bent toward series of sermons, on some one particular line or other, tending to bring out the whole rotund and beautiful truth on the particular line. We see it in his love for systematic theology, which was so great that he would preach that queen of the sciences in the pulpit. We see it in

his eternal effort to expound the philosophy of God's dealings with man. This faculty made it inevitable that he should plan and build structures. Had there been no systematic theology he must have taken the materials from the word of God and builded one up. The operation of the faculty is still more beautifully and generally evidenced in his trying God's truth on the whole face of nature about him, and thus vivifying it for himself and all who heard him. This faculty made him a poet, an interpreter of nature as well as of God. He understood, at least in part, the things around him; and could talk in terms of the material while expounding the spiritual.

These very remarkable mental endowments were tnoroughly trained. The training was intense from the time of his conversion till he was seventy years of age. It never ceased altogether till the day of the fatal street car accident. His intellectual development placed him amongst the few very foremost men of his age in point of mind.

He was not more remarkable for the proportions of intellect than he was for those of the heart, for his susceptibilities and emotions. His was a very sensitive nature, an instrument with ten thousand delicate strings on which Providence could play with the fingers of every man, woman and child with whom he was brought into touch, and find a response in answer to every touch of any string. Answering to this sensitive endowment was another of active, emotive desire, rising in his early youth often to the pitch of passion; and not less strong but brought under almost perfect control after he reached manhood. He was a great lover. He loved his wife, loved his children, loved his parents, loved his brothers and sisters; he loved the people of his pastorate, he loved his friends everywhere, he loved the people of his city, his State, his section, his whole country. He loved all classes and conditions. He loved all men and he loved them intensely, because he loved God. He hated well and strongly, too, as is inevitable; hated evil, and the more dangerous the form of it the more he hated it. This intensity of feeling was steadily firing him to endeavor, making it inevitable that he should use his great tal

ents.

Once these vigorous likes and dislikes, guided by his equally clear and discriminating judgments as to the true, beautiful and good and their contradictories, had issued in choices, he

was no man to be easily turned from the choices. Particularly, having explored with his mind and embraced with his heart. what he conceived to be the fundamental principles of proper human conduct, he became as immovable as the Alps. All the world could see in him wonderful persistence in regard to religious convictions and political theories. Many looked upon this persistence with wonder. They could not explain it. The explanation, however, is not difficult. He had adopted each set of principles for cause, and through conflict, on grounds that had appeared ample notwithstanding all objections. He had thought the matters through, had deliberately reached his conclusions, and had made his decisions. Thenceforth the matter was settled. Others might change with the passing. years, but he changed not. Stonewall Jackson was no more confident that his brilliant plans for a campaign, or a battle, were correct than was Dr. Palmer that he was right as to the great principles he had chosen in the sphere of religion, morals and civil government. He never questioned whether his beginnings were essentially correct, in his mature life. It was a fixed fact in his mind and heart that they were substantially right; and that it was his duty to give himself to a life in accord with the principles. This helped to make him a hero. In every time of stress he was to be found just where these principles logically led him.

Other very remarkable features of Dr. Palmer's immaterial constitution were the harmony, ease and poise with which his great faculties worked. Some men, even men with very considerable achievement, work only with much friction, wear and tear. Along every line he seemed to do what he did with ease, as if born to do that thing and to do it easily. This was no doubt due in part to his original endowments, but also to that large mastery which he so easily acquired over himself. The quality of self-control, perfect self-mastery, was one he valued very greatly. He had struggled hard to acquire it, and he had made it his own to such a degree that when he was in the pulpit or on the platform it was hardly possible to disconcert him or to interfere in the least with the order of his mental processes. Nor is evidence wanting that in his daily. fife he exercised over himself from hour to hour this same mastery. His faculties wrought and wrought together, there

fore, as so many well directed and well trained servants. Hence their easy, balanced working.

Another remarkable feature was the splendor with which he worked. There was a dignity and majesty about all his mental operations. This may be explained by the strength of the whole bundle of his faculties and their vigor and activity, and particularly by the great force and vitality of his faculties of the constructive imagination and the esthetic. His faculty of the constructive imagination has already been noted. His faculty of the esthetic was equally pronounced, though severely regulated. He had a great love for the beautiful and power to perceive wherein beauty lay, in nature and art, particularly in literary art. From the former of these faculties came dignity and majesty of form; from the latter came beauty. Hence his thought clothed itself in splendid garments. He could only speak in stately and beautiful phraseology. He early formed the habit of such speech. He carried it with him into the street, into the parlor, into inmost recesses of his own home. It never degenerated into stilt. It was never moved by pedantry. Simplicity was wedded to his splendor of diction and style. He spoke as one who had dwelt long on a Christian and literary Olympus, and who had while there wrought into a fixed faculty of his own the power to think in the high fashion of the place; for here, by a word, he sets the imagination a-stretch, like John Milton, or the sense of the awful or the sublime, like Dante, or Job, or Isaiah, or John the apostle in Patmos. Then, with a single stroke, he lays open an aspect of the human heart, like the Bard of Avon, or Paul the apostle, or King David, or Solomon. He shows a readiness, an excisiveness, a clearness and a sufficiency of thought which mark him as akin to those great spirits. Apparently he saw the world lit up with God's great glory, and when he talked of it to his fellow men he tipped it with the sheen of light in which he saw it.

Thus his thinking had large, noble and peculiar attraction. Men heard somewhat from his lips that was fresh and new as to form, even though as to matter it might be, in other men's mouths, a commonplace.

If his mental operations were clothed with splendor, his feelings and his will were similarly garbed. Hence men called him knightly; said that in him were embodied the highest and