T is the pathetic feature of the early death of this man that his generation had little knowledge of him while he was of it. His name stands almost for a shadow. He was a great and substantial person to those who knew him well, but so secluded was his life, so unobtrusive was his character, so scant was his career of special achievements, that it is difficult to convey a distinct picture of him except by arbitrary assertion. Even then the terms employed produce conflicting impressions and leave an indistinct image. Never speaking in public; engaging in no controversies; heading no party; following no leader; identified with no school; touching here and there many creeds and philosophies but falling in with none; suspected by the reputedly orthodox, yet so evidently Christian that unbelief never claimed him; an Episcopalian by sincere preference, yet uttering no word for his church in any page of his writing; holding that schism is deadly, yet an ardent admirer of the Puritan and the Quaker; a good Catholic and yet a stout Protestant,-how shall such an one be rendered explicable to an age that cannot think of men except as ranged under some school or church or party.

Nor does he grow much clearer to the majority when his books are read. It is claimed that in "The Nation" he has presented a lofty and philosophical conception of the state: the book is opened to find it constantly asserted that the nation is a moral organism, with illustrations drawn from American institutions and nearly forgotten pages of Hebrew history, rising at last into the mystic allusions of the Apocalypse, which the author regards as a clear and substantial utterance of political wisdom. What relation can such a book have to American politics? Or take his "Republic of God": it is asserted that it is a scientific and rational presentation of Christianity. The book is found to consist of continuous assertion, without a suggestion of argument or formal proof, and even without quotation of Scripture except in way of illustration. What is there here scientific or peculiarly rational? Nothing, it must be confessed, unless one is able of one's self to discern the logic that is more than its forms. The majority fail to understand the book because they miss the

grinding logic, the theological wrangle, the defense of church or school, and the massing of texts; because also they fail to comprehend the attitude of a mind that looks directly at the faith and measures it by its own light.

The external life of Dr. Mulford does not throw much light upon him, yet there was a singular harmony between his history and his thought. He came of excellent lineage; the blood of his ancestry for two hundred years had been of a full Puritan strain. He was born in Montrose, Pa.; was prepared for college in Homer, N. Y., under Dr. Woolworth; and was graduated from Yale College in 1855.

One who had skill in discerning character might early have detected signs of the greatness that followed, and even the form it would take. His imagination—a large feature in his mental organization-led the way at first, and he seemed about to enter the field of belleslettres. But even before college days he had declared to himself that he would write great books, if any. He never lost his love for lit erature as a fine art and always responded keenly to a well-turned sentence or a fine verse; but his main concern, first and last, was with high thought. The two tastes led to what has not been fully recognized in him,namely, a double life, or rather, a life so broad that it had that appearance. His early indications as a writer and his constant habit of discussing literature and art in a critical way led many of his friends to underrate the solidity of his mind; but even in college, while neglecting his studies for the literature which was then being rapidly poured upon the world by Tennyson, the Brownings, Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Longfellow, and also for the social life of college, then peculiarly brilliant, he was leading another life than that which appeared. He was not careful to prepare himself to meet in full the demands of the class-room, but he startled his classmates with disquisitions on the authors there read such as they did not hear from the tutors. That the college did not do more for him and that he did not get more from the college was not the fault of either, but was rather due to ill adjustment between a mind like his and the methods of education which then prevailed. The college furnished at least a good shelter while his powers were uniting and taking shape, and it provided him with a sufficient knowledge of Latin and Greek for practical purposes.

After a college life that could hardly be called earnest, though in no way open to grave charge, the real seriousness of his nature became apparent in the choice of theology as a profession. In this choice the true man was disclosed, for Dr. Mulford was preeminently a theologian. He spent two years in Andover, but, as in college, saw more truth than he heard, and ended his studies with undisguised protest against the theology then taught in that institution. He was perhaps the first Protestant of his kind in New England, after Dr. Bushnell and Dr. Washburn. Heretofore those who dissented from the prevailing theology had turned towards Unitarianism or Universalism, but Mulford did not feel himself shut up to these somewhat beaten paths, discerning another that has since become well known and is much used. The separation from Andover was wide and thoroughly mutual. The year in which he was buried found Andover busily engaged over points that then were clear to his mind, and in substantial accord with his views of humanity and the reach of Christ's work. After leaving Andover he spent a year in Europe, traveling, and hearing lectures on theology, but chiefly brooding,- for such was his life-long habit, and returned home, hurried by the outbreak of the war. He was in no way fitted to become a soldier: a better task awaited him, to which he was drawn by an inward voice which was also a divine call. He took orders in the Episcopal Church, not merely because there was no other place for him, but because upon the whole he thought along its lines, or rather, as he then believed, it suffered him to think in his own way. The point of contact, however, did not reach far within. Esthetically he felt with his church and could easily have gone into some lengths of ritualism; no excess of it would have troubled him so long as it did not involve dogmatic assumption. He prized the catholicity of the Episcopal Church as to doctrine, but its rubrics had little interest for him, and the lines that separate it from other churches had for him no existence. Only in a very limited degree is he to be regarded as belonging to the Episcopal Church. He never violated her canons; he served obediently at her altars; he taught theology under her name; but he wrote no line in her support, received no honors and but the barest recognition from her hands. There was repeated in him the story of all ages, the prophet is never accepted by his age, and a great man is always greater than any institution that holds him.

Dr. Mulford took a parish in New Jersey, and immediately found himself face to face with a congregation disposed through business interests to sympathize with the South

VOL. XXXV.— 121.

in the war then raging. It is at this point, perhaps, that a certain aspect of his character can be best explained. To a certain extent he did not make the impression of a man of courage. His manner was calm but was not strongly charged with assurance. He almost never pointedly disagreed with any, but indicated his variance by suggesting another view of the subject, leaving the other to find out the difference. His intense sympathy and absolute courtesy held him back from controversy and made him over-tolerant in conversation, so that dull persons often suspected him of weakness and mental dishonesty, not discerning the delicacy and fineness of his dissent. He also carried any difference into the region of principles —often very remote and general, and apparently of slight consequence to any save himself. But if he differed in principle he differed all the way through, and saw little need of formal explanation. His real character in this respect is seen in his position as a preacher. The influences about him would have led him to remain silent; no man more yearned for sympathy or more hated a wrangle; he seemed incapable of living without one or of enduring the other. But, contrary to his superficial disposition, he carried the war into his pulpit, overcoming all opposition by simple weight of utterance and solemnity of conviction. It is here that his character offers itself in one of its finest lights; his general attitude throughout his life was taken and held in opposition to much in himself. He had no great endowment of natural courage; he was not born with the clinched fist of a reformer or a polemic; he was sensitive in the highest degree to human sympathy and was made for fellowship; but his thought led and kept him apart, and his path through life was for the most part solitary. His divergences were not great enough to call out denial or denunciation, but were sufficient to awaken suspicion. He was not impeached, but he was made to feel a mild, ill-defined ostracism; there were no blows and wounds, but there was a fretting irritation; no turning of the back, but a somewhat doubtful offering of the hand. This sort of treatment, which is the form persecution takes in these later ages, being restrained by law and public opinion from any other, calls for a finer and more spiritual courage than that demanded by the grosser forms.

His retirement from parish labor, brought about by the claims of private business and by a growing deafness, seems now a divine shaping of his life to the high end in store for him, but along a path not then easily traced. The close of the war found him in his native county, living in the ancestral home of his wife twelve miles distant from Montrose.

Greater seclusion could hardly have been found, but the appointments of his life were generous and appropriate. Most men in his circumstances would have drifted into politics or turned to money-making, but Dr. Mulford was not fitted for one and for the other he had no taste. The nature and force of his intellectual gifts in no way more clearly appear than in the life he now entered upon. So far as books, reading, and daily occupation were concerned, he might have been living in New Haven or Cambridge. I have never met a person the current of whose intellectual habit flowed in so steady and strong a stream as his. Nothing diverted or lessened it, or apparently added to it, being always at the full. No variation in his intellectual register could be discovered. Whether in the woods of Pennsylvania or in the streets of Cambridge, the same themes engaged his attention, and his sense of them was always about the same. No separation from men and books dulled him, nor could I discover that any contact with them greatly quickened him. The reservoir of his thought was within himself and sprang from fountains that seemed to be inexhaustible.

Dr. Mulford carried with him to Friendsville a purpose, conceived in college days, of writing upon political themes. He had read Aristotle and had been profoundly moved by his political wisdom. He early noticed the fact that the German theologians found themselves led to write on the constitution of society. His own theological conceptions from the first carried him into the same field. His mental cast was of such a character and so ample that it was simply impossible for him to keep away from such subjects. But these influences were as nothing compared with those of the civil war just closing. Here was a most weighty fact in history to be accounted for. A great, prosperous, Christian nation, one by every consideration of nature and self-interest, suddenly breaks itself in two and appeals to war to enforce the unnatural action. That such a thing should happen seemed to him to indicate a defective consciousness of itself in the nation. Slavery and sectional ambition and party heat were not enough to explain so mighty a revolt of the nation against itself; its sense of itself must be at fault.

Thus his mind worked on the problem, and hence those years of thought and writing and re-writing that produced "The Nation." His object was not simply to explain the civil war, but to teach the people the nature of the state and the grounds of their government. Hence his book bore the sub-title, "The Foundations of Civil Order and Political Life in the United States." His argument with himself was: If I can reveal to the people

the nature of the nation so that they shall see how divine a thing it is, it will be forever sacred in their eyes. Such was the aim of this young scholar, conceived and entered upon before the smoke of battle had cleared away. He provided himself with all needful books,— leisure and a free mind were already provided; his theological conceptions formed a nourishing atmosphere for his purpose, and the fresh memory of the war keenly stirred his interest. Everything was favorable except the solitude in which he worked and the greater solitariness of the path he was opening through the tangle of history; for it may safely be said that if Dr. Mulford's conception of the nature of the nation is not new, it has never been so fully worked out, nor has it ever been presented with the illustration of a nation that reflected the conception; for never before in the course of history has there been a nation whose political order bore out the divine plan of a nation. While Dr. Mulford's conscious aim in "The Nation" was to unfold the lesson of the civil war, we now see that he was working on a larger plan. Society is now making the dangerous transition from the aristocratic to the democratic idea of government, and with the change there is danger lest that truth be lost which alone makes any government real and binding,-namely, that it is by the grace of God. Kings planted themselves on this truth, and hence had power and majesty. The pomp of courts is not the reflection of human pride, but of the divineness of government. In passing from one form to the other the insignia of power and majesty are largely dropped, and with them there is danger lest the conception of government as a divine thing be also given up and it come to be regarded, even as it already is by some schools of social science, as a mere matter of police, a negative check on crime, with the result of resolving society into nearly absolute individualism, the idea of humanity as a social fact lost, and progress reduced to a go-as-you-please scramble for the most that can be got, or to selfish combinations that turn society into a war between labor and capital—a condition already existing in part and sure to prevail unless it is checked by the conception of gov ernment as existing by the will of God and for righteousness, and as God's own instrument for blessing humanity-not an instrument merely, but a creatively ordained order, in which men must live if they would live at all. Dr. Mulford, whose work was always constructive and at heart conservative, saw the necessity of unfolding the truth that a democ racy not only rests on the grace of God, but, beyond all other forms of government, is so grounded and must be so interpreted. Hence

his continual assertion that the nation is a moral organism and has a life of its own, with certain necessary institutions and characteristics working towards certain ends. Being an organism, its processes are necessary as in all organic bodies. Hence social science is possible, and hence also there is no occasion for or justification of the empiricism that so marks its history. If society is an organism, social science consists in finding out the laws of the organism and their methods and ends-a process the reverse of arbitrarily shaping society so as to get rid of certain evils and to secure certain good results. If society is a moral organism, its aim is righteousness and its action will be in freedom. His main thesis is that the nation is such a moral organism, that it transcends physical conditions, and finds the constituents of its life in freedom and law and in the conscious fulfillment of a vocation. He carries this thought through more than four hundred pages, with much apparent repetition but always with some advance of the argument, which is chiefly illustrated in the laws and institutions of the United States, but is abundantly reenforced by quotations from literature and history. The constant refrain from first to last is that the nation is not constituted in the necessary process of the physical world, but in the order of a moral world; the ties of the nation are the ties of humanity, and the life of the individual in the two is one life, and it is moral. Moral action is conditioned on freedom, which is the law or essence of the nation. He makes the analogy between the life of the individual and of the nation exact and imperative, but each working out its destiny in mutual dependence and along the same lines.

This theory is a repudiation of all social compact and police theories of government as something to be shaped by chance or apparent need. The outcome of such a line of thought, as we might suppose, is in the loftiest heights of religion, the nation is divine; its vocation is righteousness; it lives in freedom; its laws are moral, and are like those over the individual; it exists in God. In short, Dr. Mulford, by a scientific examination and in the actual process of our own institutions and in the confirming testimony of the great thinkers, reaches the same conception of the nation as that of the Puritans. They leaped, or rather flew, to the height of their truth on the wings of spiritual sight; he reaches it by an examination of humanity and by an elaboration of details of ten as dry as the statute-book itself. He reaches it also by an exhaustive study of the nation in its antagonisms, as against the idea of confederacy and the empire and other arbitrary or tyrannical conceptions. He finds

himself carried by his argument beyond the limits usually set about politics, even to the very throne of God, from which he does not hold back, but draws nigh and lays down the allegiance of the nation where it receives its life,- in no rhetorical or sentimental way, but with full logical necessity. The book closes in a strain matching at once the loftiest visions of the Apocalypse and the profoundest feeling of the country as it emerged from the war of sacrifice, finding each to be in accord with the other and one equally to be realized with the other.

It presents a conception of the nation never before so fully wrought out: it is a work done once and finally; its definitions of the nation cannot be varied more than the definitions of geometry; all future treatment of social science will be upon the foundations laid by him and along the lines which he pursued. He made that clear and logical connection between the social life of humanity and the kingdom of God which has always been felt to exist but which had not been put into scientific form. He showed that Christianity is the order of the world and that its laws are the laws of society,-truths long well understood and often asserted, but not before wrought into the details of a theory of social science. It is a book that could not have been written at an earlier period; it was inevitable that it should have been written when it was. Dr. Mulford simply transcribed the evolution or rather, revelation-of society as he beheld it. The ideal of the nation had been unfolded on this continent; the war for the Union was the seal of its divineness. It was given to him to see this ideal and to connect it with the life of humanity as revealed in the Christ. He had that endowment of profound thought and mental grasp, that patience in research, that divisive glance which separated the real from the unreal, that rare gift of accurately detecting law, that moral sense which made him responsive to the moral and the divine, that sure conviction that God is not absent from the world but is a living order within it, and that loftiness of nature which kept the great facts of human society before him as vital and moving realities; these qualities fitted and enabled him to fulfill the task set him by Providence.

The fault of the book is that of style, and may be simply indicated as lack of clearness. This does not reach to the thought, but has its origin in excessive pondering and so of penetrating farther and farther into the abstract forms of the subject, and also in some mannerisms caught from the Germans and reenforced by personal peculiarities. In dignity, majesty, and massiveness of expression, in occasional eloquence, it cannot well be sur

passed. It is, with all its abstractness and farawayness, still a most near and vital book, and bears as much trace of feeling and devotion as of thought. One lays it down querying whether one has been reading a book of politics or of theology, but with a dawning suspicion that they may possibly be one. This was exactly Dr. Mulford's position. The nation is divine; theology is realized in organized humanity; the laws and methods of each are the same and run indistinguishably into each other. Thus he says: "The morality of a people, and so also its politics, will always correspond to its actual theology, and will be but the sequence of that."

The influence of this book has been great but peculiar. It can hardly be said to be popular. Dr. Mulford had so great confidence in his thought, and such respect for the intelligence of the people, that he fancied its publication would influence the fall elections; but its effect upon the masses was about that of the Beatitudes upon a mob,— the exact truth needed, but not quite in moral range. It is a book for the leaders, and not for the rank and file. No one who legislates, or writes on political science, or speaks on social subjects can afford to pass it by; and one should hesitate long before one allows one's self to conceive of human society as having any other basis or end than that here indicated, for the book simply presents the life of the nation as included within Christianity. So ably is this done, and so firmly is political life linked to the work of the Christ, that there could be no better book of Evidences than this. The skeptic who doubts Christianity when looked at directly cannot fail to see in this picture of national life, which he cannot doubt, the full lineaments of essential Christianity. In a secondary way the influence of the book has been marked. Many statesmen have pondered its great truths and baptized their principles afresh in its divine spirit. The abler editors have caught its meaning and now interpret the nation under its conception. Its under tone may be heard in presidential messages and in the forms of legislation. It reënforces social reformers and guides them along safe and winning lines. It has helped to create a popular sentiment against those conceptions of society which are based on the hard analogies of physical science. But its chief office is to link the necessary life of the nation to the processes of Christianity, or to establish the identity of political action with Christian faith, or, in simpler words still, it presents the kingdom of God as coming in the order of human society.

This book was the product of long and wide study and much brooding and rewriting. Dr.

Mulford fulfilled the Horatian maxim, and kept his work till the "ninth year" before giving it to the world. He was not insensible to the ambition of an author; still the book came from him like the message of a prophet, and almost as if without will of his own.

In 1880 Dr. Mulford removed to Cambridge, where he became a lecturer on theology in the Episcopal School. No other position was ever offered him in the ecclesiastical world, and the recognition of a theological degree was carefully withheld; for it must be stated that he early fell under that suspicion of "unsoundness" which blasts so much of fresh and independent thought in this country. Why this suspicion should have fastened on him, it is hard to tell, unless it was occasioned by a disposition to ask questions within theological precincts — a habit which is never unobserved nor forgiven. It may also have been due to his undisguised sympathy with Maurice, who had come into prominence through the Jelf controversy and awakened an interest if not a following in this country while Mulford was in college. That this suspicion followed him even to the last with its mild but real defamation, shutting off all but a grudging and half-hearted recognition, illustrates the degree of intelligence and charity which still mark our theological world. One may deny the multiplication table with impunity, but if one intimates that eternal may not be synonymous with everlasting, he is a heretic though he have all the graces of St. John; and when this suspicion once fastens on a man, musk is not so diffusive and persistent. While Dr. Mulford was conscious of the fact that he was suspected where he ought to have been understood, he seldom spoke of it, and was the farthest from courting such a reputation or meeting it in a bravado way; he was not keyed to such a spirit. He was no comeouter; the whole cast of his mind was profoundly conservative; there was in him nothing of the iconoclast; he was to the last fiber constructive. One searches in vain along his pages for denials except for the sake of definition; his sense of human society and of personal relation to it was such as to hold him off from eccentric thought and conduct; he was nearly devoid of those qualities which usually belong to heretics, yet he bore most unjustly that imputation. His appeal from it was not to the right of private opinion or merely to intelligence and reason, but to the consensus of the centuries. Hence at the close of "The Republic of God "he prints the Nicene creed,- as though he would say, "See, I have said nothing new, but only this"; and most significantly he adds the two dates, “A. D. 381-1881."

This book, like "The Nation," was born, as