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Starr King
by
The new pastor fully expected his congregation to give him “absent treatment,” but instead, the audience grew–folks even came over from Boston to hear the boy-preacher. His sermons were carefully written, and dealt in the simple, every-day lessons of life. To Starr King this world is paradise enow; it’s the best place of which we know, and the way for man to help himself is to try and make it a better place. There is a flavor of Theodore Parker in those early sermons, a trace of Thoreau and much tincture of Emerson–and all this was to the credit of the boy-preacher. His woman’s mind absorbed things.
About that time Boston was in very fact the intellectual hub of America. Emerson was forty-three, his “Nature” had been published anonymously, and although it took eight years to sell this edition of five hundred copies, the author was in demand as a lecturer, and in some places society conceded him respectable. Wendell Phillips was addressing audiences that alternately applauded and jeered. Thoreau had discovered the Merrimac and explored Walden Woods; little Doctor Holmes was peregrinating in his One-Hoss Shay, vouchsafing the confidences of his boarding-house; Lowell was beginning to violate the rules of rhetoric; Whittier was making his plea for the runaway slave; and throughout New England the Lecture Lyceum was feeling its way.
A lecture course was then no vaudeville–five concerts and two lectures to take off the curse–not that! The speakers supplied strong meat for men. The stars in the lyceum sky were Emerson, Chapin, Beecher, Holmes, Bartol, Phillips, Ballou, Everett and Lowell. These men made the New England Lyceum a vast pulpit of free speech and advanced thought. And to a degree the Lyceum made these men what they were. They influenced the times and were influenced by the times. They were in competition with each other. A pace had been set, a record made, and the audiences that gathered expected much. An audience gets just what it deserves and no more. If you have listened to a poor speech, blame yourself.
In the life of George Francis Train, he tells that in Eighteen Hundred Forty Emerson spoke in Waltham for five dollars and four quarts of oats for his horse–now he received twenty-five dollars. Chapin got the same, and when the Committee could not afford this, he referred them to Starr King, who would lecture for five dollars and supply his own horse-feed.
Two years went by and calls came for Starr King to come up higher. Worcester would double his salary if he would take a year’s course at the Harvard Divinity School. Starr showed the letter to Chapin, and both laughed. Worcester was satisfied with Starr King as he was, but what would Springfield say if they called a man who had no theological training? And then it was that Chapin said, “Divinity is not taught in the Harvard Divinity School,” which sounds like a paraphrase of Ernest Renan’s, “You will find God anywhere but in a theological seminary.”
King declined the call to Worcester, but harkened to one from the Hollis Street Church of Boston. He went over from Universalism to Unitarianism and still remained a Universalist–and this created quite a dust among the theologs. Little men love their denomination with a jealous love–truth is secondary–they see microscopic difference where big men behold only unity.
It was about this time that Starr King pronounced this classic: “The difference between Universalism and Unitarianism is that Universalists believe that God is too good to damn them; and the Unitarians believe that they are too good to be damned.”
At the Hollis Street Church this stripling of twenty-four now found himself being compared with the foremost preachers of America. And the man grew with his work, rising to the level of events. It was at the grave of Oliver Wendell Holmes that Edward Everett Hale said, “The five men who have influenced the literary and intellectual thought of America most, believed in their own divinity no less than in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth.”