Untitled article by W. H. M.

Untitled article

W. H. M.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · June 2, 1892

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 7, No. 22

FOR the furtherance of the organized effort to attain national and municipal righteousness by legal enactment and enforcement it has been quite the custom of late to bring to bear upon Washington, in the hope that some stray shot may hit a congressman, all the heavy artillery possible among the legal religionists. A masked battery of their forces having been lately uncovered in New York, in the person of Dr. Parkhurst, he was immediately invited to the Capital and spoke to an overflowing congregation at the Church of the Covenant, on the evening of May 16. Dr. Parkhurst's rhetorical style is quite “Kiplingesque,” sharp, biting, unique. His sentences were spear thrusts barbed with unexpected epithets. This unlooked for originality of thought and method seemed to catch his audience, which was fairly representative of Washington society in general, although there were but very few lawmakers and officials present; even those who lent their names to the public invitation being conspicuously absent. The exordium of the discourse was a studied philosophical presentation of the National Reform theory of the municipal and national responsibility of a Christian nation, in which he talked about saving men “in their social and civil inter-relation,” and reached the climax of that idea when he described Heaven as “a redeemed commonwealth.” According to his theory one of the last of the duties of the Church is the conversion of the individual. He says,

It is a great thing to be a holy man, better to be a holy family and greatest to be a holy municipality. The Church has been busy with the individual and family, but if I do not mistake, and I do not think I do, it is just coming into touch with the organizations of society, and striving to have them seized upon by a divine spirit. Human history is to culminate in a divine municipality made up of holy men bound together in holy relations. If the only question was, how many men can be brought to their knees, all we would need to do as a church would be to strengthen our evangelical work.

The body of the discourse was an astute defense, indirectly, of the Parkhurstian methods for the evangelization of the municipality of New York, and a savage attack upon Tammany and the New York Police Department.

In introducing Dr. Parkhurst, President Rankin of Howard University, referring to the means used by the Doctor to obtain evidence, in the late cases against proprietresses of houses of prostitution, brought by the Society for the Prevention of Crime, said “If there is any shame in the act we, Christian citizens of this Capital City of the Nation, wish by our presence here to participate in that shame.”

It is safe to say that not all present were ready to agree to any such division with the Reverend detective.

It must have been with mingled feelings that those who consider this a Protestant Christian Nation looked upon the funeral pageant in the Senate Chamber of the United States on the occasion of the

ceremonial service to the memory of the dead senator from Virginia, on May 16. It was the first time that the Roman Catholic funeral ceremonies were ever witnessed in the Senate Chamber. The sight was one to fix itself upon the memory and imagination, gorgeous, stately, impressive, suggestive.

The Vice-President, the officers of the Senate, and the senators, bound with broad, white, silken sashes, rise at the entrance of the speaker, and officers, and members of the House, also wearing sashes of white silk; they arrange themselves side by side, Speaker of the House with President of the Senate, secretary with secretary, senator with congressman, and are seated; again they rise to honor the entrance of the Chief and Associate Justices of the Supreme Court, gowned in their long black monkish robes, who take their seats at the right of the President of the Senate; in a few moments, again, all stand to receive the members of the Cabinet and the Diplomatic Corps: scarcely are all seated again before the entire assembly, in solemn silence rises to its feet, awaiting the bearers bringing the dead senator, closed in his narrow house, buried under masses of flowers, preceded by acolytes in vestments of purple and white, with uplifted crucifix, lighted tapers, and swinging censers of perfumed burning incense; the dignitaries of the church, bishop, and fathers, and assistant celebrants in their robes and vestments of purple and black, silver embroidered; at the head of the casket as it is placed upon the catafalque burn the wax tapers in the candelabra about the shining crucifix. After the service of the church, with opening invocation in sonorous Latin, and the address of the officiating bishop, a master of polished speech and pulpit oratory, the cortege re-forms and with shimmer of silk and shine of silver, a golden gleam of the crucifix through clouds of sweet incense, the strange and bewildering pageant passes from the Senate Chamber.

And this was not a Roman Senator, but a plain and simple Virginian of the nineteenth century, who had served his country faithfully and without thought of ostentation; but who years ago had said that when he became a church member he would be a Roman Catholic. Rome never changes.

It is a striking suggestion of the wide and general attention now given to the Church and State question of the legal observance of Sunday that this subject was in the minds of the two prominent men of the Capital City whose sudden deaths have just occurred almost within twenty-four hours of each other. The Virginia Senator was a member of the Senate District Committee which had under consideration the Sunday ice bill for the District, and was present at the meeting of the Committee in apparent good health, the next morning—dead. A respected and eloquent minister, presiding elder in his denomination, was advertised to preach on the “Sunday question.” Those who gathered to hear him were told, “Our pastor fell suddenly dead this morning.” Men die, but the truth and the error that they championed both live after them.

W. H. M.