Talk:Josephus Flavius Cook

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I. AMERICAN OPINIONS.

The Bibliotheca Sacra for January, 1880.

The Boston Monday Lectureship is now in its fifth year. One hundred and thirty-five lectures on abstruse and difficult topics have been delivered to noon audiences of extraordinary size, and containing sometimes two hundred ministers, with large numbers of teachers and other educated men. Each lecture has been preceded by a short address, called a Prelude on Current Events, and discussing some topic of urgent political or religious importance, like civil service reform, temperance, fraud in elections, Mormonism, the Chinese question, the Bible in schools, the Indian question, or the negro exodus. In revising the stenographic reports, both the lecture and the prelude are usually somewhat expanded by their author, so that a prelude in print is often more than thirty minutes in length. The lecturer has thus treated two important to,pics on each occasion; and the contrast of the practical matter of the prelude with the more speculative and scientific substance of the lecture, has assisted in fixing public attention upon both. Mr. Cook has been the first speaker to employ preludes in this contrast with theological and metaphysical lectures.

The thirty lectures delivered in the second year of the lectureship, which was founded in 1873, are comprised in the three volumes entitled " Biology," " Transcendentalism," and " Orthodoxy." The results of the third year of the lectureship are embraced in the volumes entitled " Conscience," "Heredity," and " Marriage." Those of the fourth year are summarized in the books called " Labor " and "Socialism," now in press. It is understood that the present series of lectures will make two more volumes, to be entitled " Culture" and "Miracles."

During the third year of the lectureship, Mr. Cook gave six lectures in New York City, besides speaking in most of the prominent cities of the North-eastern States. In the season of 1878 and 1879, he conducted a Boston Monday-noon Lectureship and a New York Thursday-evening Lectureship at the same time. In his course of the preceding year in New York City, he had been introduced by presiding officers like Professor Hitchcock, Dr. William Adams, Professor Schaff, and William Cullen Bryant, and the audiences were extraordinarily large. On the closing evening of his second course in New York, some two hundred people were turned away, unable to find standing-room, and the money for their tickets was refunded. In the spring and summer succeeding the last full course of the lectureship, he visited California, and performed a service at the dedication of a chapel in the Yosemite Valley. He studied and discussed Mormonism in Salt Lake City, and the Chinese question in California.

In the year ending July 4, 1878, Mr. Cook delivered one hundred and fifty lectures; sixty in th*. East, ten of them in New York City, and sixty in the West; besides thirty new lectures in Boston, which were published in that city, New York, and London; issued three volumes, one of which is now in its sixteenth and another in its thirteenth edition; and travelled, on his lecture-trips, ten thousand five hundred miles.

In the year ending July 4, 1879, he delivered one hundred and sixty lectures; seventy-two in the East, twenty of them in Boston and ten in New York, seventy in the West, five in Canada, two in Utah, and eleven in California, of which five were in San Francisco. He twice crossed the continent in the last four months of the season, and in the last nine months has travelled, on his lecture-trips, twelve thousand five hundred miles. In the former of these seasons he addressed large audiences in sixteen, and in the latter in seventeen, college towns.

It is worth noting that Mr. Cook has no church nor parish work on his hands, although he not infrequently speaks in a church on Sundays. Living opposite the Boston Athemeum Library, and using it as much as though it were his own, the lecturer lias found time, outside of all his other work, to carry through the press, in three years, the eight volumes of Monday Lectures, issued by Houghton, Osgood, & Co.

Mr. Cook had a previous preparation of at least ten years' study, at home and abroad, for the discussion of the relations of Christianity to the sciences.

"The New York Independent " owns the copyright of the present series of lectures, and sells the right of republication to other papers. There are now published, and have been for the last two years, over one hundred thousand newspaper copies of the Boston Monday Lectures and preludes in full, and over three hundred thousand copies of the preludes and parts of the lectures. The Committee of the Boston Monday Lectureship reported in March last, that, at a moderate estimate, more than a million readers in the United States and Great Britain are reached weekly.

In September, 1880, Mr. Cook intends to suspend his American lectures for a year, at least, and to seek opportunity for rest and study in England and Germany.

President James McCosh, Princeton College, in the Catholic Presbyterian for September, 1879. What influence I may have had on Mr. Cook, I do not know; but I am pleased to notice that on intuition and several other subjects, he is promulgating to thousands the same views I had been thinking out in my study, and propounding to my students, in Belfast and in Princeton. From scattered notices, I gather that he was born (in 1838) and reared, and still lives in his leisure days, in that region in which the loveliest of American lakes, Lake Champjain and Lake George, lie embosomed among magnificent mountains. He was trained for college at Phillips Academy, under the great classical teacher, Dr. Taylor; was two years at Yale College, and two years at Harvard, graduating at the latter in 1865, first in philosophy and rhetoric of his class. He then joined Andover Theological Seminary, went through the regular three-years' course there, and lingered a year longer at that place, pondering deeply the relations of science and religion, which continued to be the theme of his thoughts and his study for the next ten years. At this stage he received much impulse from Professor Park, who requires every student to reason out and to defend his opinions; and many sound philosophic principles from Sir William Hamilton and other less eminent men of the Scottish school. He spoke from time to time at religious meetings, and was for one year the pastor of a Congregational church, but never sought a settlement. In September, 1871, lie went abroad, and studied for two years, under special directions from Tholuck, at Halle, Berlin, and Heidelberg ; and received a mighty influence from Julius Muller of Halle, Dorner of Berlin, Kirao Fischer of Heidelberg, and Hermann Lotze of Gottingen. He then travelled for a time in Italy, Egypt, Syria, Greece, Turkey, Switzerland, France, England, and Scotland. Returning to the United States in 187.'!, he took up his residence in Boston, and became a lecturer in New England on the subject to which his studies had been so long directed, the relations of religion and science. For a time he lectured at Amherst College; and, while doing so, he was invited to conduct noon meetings in Boston.

Mr. Cook did not take up the work he has accomplished, as a trade, or by accident, or from impulse; but for years he had been preparing for it, and prepared for it by an overruling guidance. I regard Joseph Cook as a Heaven-ordained man. He comes at the tit time; that is, at the time he is needed. He comes forth in Boston, which is undoubtedly the most literary city in America, and one of the great literary cities of the world. I am not sure that even Edinburgh can match it, now that London is drawing towards it and gathering up the intellectual youth of Scotland. It has a character of its own in several respects. I have here to speak only of its religious character. Half a century ago its Orthodoxy had sunk into Unitarianism — a re-action against a formal Puritanism — led by Channing, who adorned his bald system by his high personal character and the eloquence of his style. People could not long be satisfied by a negation, and Parkerism followed; and a convulsive life was thrown into the skeleton of natural religion by an a priori speculation, derived from the pretentious philosophies of Germany, in which the Absolute took the place of God, and untested intuition the place of the Bible. The movement culminated in Ralph Waldo Emerson, a feebler but a more lovable Thomas Carlyle, — the one coming out of a decaying Puritanism, the other out of a decaying Covenanterism. But those who would mount to heaven in a balloon have sooner or later to come down to earth. The young men of Harvard College, led by their able president, have more taste for the new physical science, with its developments, than for a visionary metaphysics. As I remarked some time ago in a literary organ, Unitarianism has died, and is laid out for decent burial. Meanwhile there is a marked revival of Evangelism, and the Congregational and Episcopal churches have as much thoughtfulness and culture as the Unitarians. Harvard now cares as little for Unitarianism as it does for Evangelism — simply taking care that Orthodoxy does not rule over its teaching. But the question arises, What are our young men to believe in these days when Darwinism and Spencerism and Evolutionism are taught in our journals, in our schools, and in our colleges? To my knowledge, this question is as anxiously put by Unitarian parents of the old school, who cling firmly to the great truths of natural religion, and to the Bible as a teacher of morality, as it is by the Orthodox.

Such was the state of thought and feeling, of belief and unbelief, of apprehension and of desire, when Joseph Cook came to Boston without any flourish of trumpets preceding him. Numbers were prepared to welcome him as soon as they knew what the man was, and what he was aiming at. Orthodox ministers, not very well able themselves to wrestle with the new forms of infidelity, rejoiced in the appearance of one who had as much power of eloquence as Parker, and vastly more acquaintance with philosophy than the mystic Emerson, and who seemed to know what truth and what error there are in these doctrines of development and heredity. The best of the Unitarians, not knowing whither their sons were drifting were pleased to find one who could keep them from open Infidelity. Young men, tired of old rationalism, which they saw to be very irrational, delighted to listen to one who evidently spoke boldly and sincerely, and could talk to them of these theories about evolution and the origin of species and the nature of man. The consequence was, his audiences increased from year to year. He first lectured in the Meionaon in 1875. The attendance at noon on Mondays was so large that his meetings had to be transferred to Park-street Church in October, 1870 ; and finally, in 187G-77, in 1877-78 and 1879, to the enormous Tremont Temple, which is often crowded to excess. In the audience there were at times two hundred ministers, many teachers, and other educated persons. His lectures, in whole or in abstract, appeared in leading newspapers, and his fame spread over all America ; and, continuing his Monday addresses in Boston, he was invited, on the other days of the week, to lecture all over the country. He now lectures in the principal cities from the Atlantic to the Pacific, always drawing a large and approving audience.

Some scientific sciolists have thrown out doubts as to the accuracy of his knowledge, but have not been able to detect him in any misstatement of fact. He lightens and thunders, throwing a vivid light on a topic by an expression or comparison, or striking a presumptuous error as by a bolt from heaven. He is not afraid to discuss the most abstract, scientific, or philosophic themes before a popular audience; he arrests his hearers first by his earnestness, then by the clearness of his exposition, and fixes the whole in the mind by the earnestness of his moral purpose.

Rev. Professor A. P. Peabody, of Harvard University, in the Independent.

Joseph Cook is a phenomenon to be accounted for. No other American orator has done what he has done, or any thing like it; and, prior to the experiment, no voice would have been bold enough to predict its success.

We reviewed Mr. Cook's "Lectures on Biology" with unqualified praise. In the present volume we find tokens of the same genius, the same intensity of feeling, the same lightning flashes of impassioned eloquence, the same vise-like hold on the rapt attention and absorbing interest of his hearers and readers. We are sure that we are unbiased by the change of subject; for, though we dissent from some of the dogmas which the author recognizes in passing, there is hardly one of his consecutive trains of thought in which we are not in harmony with him, or one of his skirmishes in which our sympathies are not wholly on his side.

---

L.T. Remplap, ed., The Gospel Awakening (1885), p. 44.

REV. JOSEPH COOK. It happened, through the overruling providence of God, that an admirable coadjutor to prepare the way for Mr. Moody's advent in Boston, by awakening the minds of its thoughtful and skeptical citizens to give a respectful hearing to the claims of the gospel, as well as to co-operate with that evangelist, and continue the good work after his departure, was raised up in the person of Rev. Joseph Cook. He next passed to Andover Theological Seminary, and completed its course of study for the ministry three years later. For two years he filled vacancies in the pulpits of Congregational churches at East Abingdon, Mass., Middlebury, Vt., and Maiden, Mass. Then his passion for a profound study of the deep problems of religious life and thought, led him abroad as a student to profit by the curriculum of the German universities, and by a personal association with their foremost evangelical divines. After ins return, he became for a short time associate minister of tho First Church, Lynn. When that edifice was burned, he turned to a music hall, and there lectured impressively on the evils of the factory system and of intemperance. Thus were spent the formative years of his manhood, in severe and conscientious study, that he might be fitted to grapple understandingly with the mightiest questions that divided the minds of his generation, and upon whose correct decision hung the welfare of untold numbers. A fellow minister, Rev. William. M. Baker, says of him as a student: "It might be said that amid the harvests of books he wields the flail with an arm as muscular as that which holds the sickle, that he has a singularly quick perception as to what is ripe and wholesome wheat for food among the chaff, but this would be only a part of the truth. The fact is, the energy and the discrimination of the man are owing to the instinct, so to speak, in him of one supreme purpose, which is to find for himself and others, among the very latest results of all thought, scientific and philosophic, those ultimate facts which are also, as he thinks, the highest food—food for the intellect and the heart, because for the undying souL" Early in 1876, Mr. Cook found his congenial and fitting field of labor. Under the auspices of the Young Men's Christian Association of Boston, he began a course of Monday lectures, at the Meionaon, in the basement of Tremont Temple. As the hour was from noon till one P. M., the general subject "Modern Skepticism," aod the speaker, by his intellectual calibre and thorough scholarship, was admirably fitted to confront and deny the fundamental principles of error involved in the destructive teachings of the school Of Theodore Parker, it soon chanced that the unknown lecturer came to hold entranced a large and highly cultured audience, many of whom were city clergymen. In an easy, conversational style, and in clear, terse language, he gave utterance to the weightiest thoughts and most substantial arguments. A hearer describes him as quoting freely from his extensive reading; his memory seeming to retain in wonderful variety, like a magnet drawn through it all, that which is of the nature of 11 is own thought, and that from authors wholly oppowd in general to orthodoxy, some of the most genuine sensations of the hour being the unexpected testimony of Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, as well as the German rationalists, to the truth he is advocating, the effort of the speaker being to get at the undermost and innermost soul of his hearer by repeating the deepest and most intuitive soul of the profoundest thinkers of every land and age." In the fall, the lectures were resumed, and1 the great theological problems were considered. But the throng of auditors soon drove the lecturer from the Meionaon to Park Street church, and from thence to Tremont Temple itself, where week after w^ok accommodations for three thousand people failed to satisfy. Mr. Cook has been pictured as possessing a massive and athletic frame, whose strong vitality is wrought upon by a highly nervoussanguine temperament, as evidenced by his sandy hair, ruddy cheeks, blue eyes, and intense earnestness. A sympathetic friend, Rev. Edward Abbott, thus sketches him as a lecturer: "He handles brief notes, wherein his important propositions are accurately written, but he is essentially an extemporaneous speaker, an orator of the fervid and impassioned order, not without peculiarities which some critics of the schools would call faults; but eloquent, grandly eloquent, in the sense that he makes men hear his message, and often persuades tliem of its truth. In theology, a moderate Calvinist; in philosophy, an eclectic; in learning, affluent; full of sympathies for all who are in any sense oppressed; a hater of cant in all its forms; familiar with the best thoughts of the best minds of all times; a brilliant rhetorician, and jet never allowing the clearness and percision of his logical processes to be obscured by the play of his marvelous fancy; with all these, and many more qualities which might be mentioned, it may readily be imagined that ho is a speaker to whom men love to listen. This description will sound extravagant to those who have never heard him; but it is wholly within the limits of sober truth." The pulpit at the Boston Tabernacle wa« repeatedly filled by Mr. Cook, at Mr. Moody's invitation. To its vast audiences he delivered impressive sermons on such topics as "Certainties in Religion;" "The Atonement a Motive to Conversion;" and "Faith the Source of Faithfulness." From the first of these, we take the following extract: • "When Ulysses sailed past the isle of the Sirens, who had the power of charming by their songs all who listened to them, he heard the sorcerous music on the shore, and to prevent himself and his crew from landing, he filled their ears with wax, and bound himself to the mast with knotted thongs. Thus, according to the subtle Grecian story, he passed safely the fatal strand. But when Orpheus, in search of the Golden Fleece, went by this island, he—being, as you remember, a great musician—set up better music than that of the Sirens, enchanted his crew with a melody superior to the alluring song of the sea-nymphs, and so, without needing to fill the Argonauts' ears with wax, or to bind himself to the mast with knotted thongs, he passed the sorcerous shore not only safely, but with disdain. "The ancients, it is clear from this legend, understood the distinction between morality and religion. He who, sailing past the island of temptation, has enlightened selfishness enough not to land, although he rather wants to [sensation]; he who, therefore, binds himself to the mast with knotted thongs, and fills the ears of his crew with wax; he who does this without hearing a better music, is the man of mere morality. Heaven forbid that I should underrate the value of this form of cold prudence, for wax is not useless in giddy ears, and Aristotle says youth is a perpetual intoxication. Face to face with Sirens, thongs are good, though songs are better. Sin hath long ears. Good is wax; Wise at times the knotted thongs; But the shrewd no watch relax,

Yet they use, like Orpheus, songs, They no more the Sirens fear;

They a better music hear. "When a man of tempestuous, untrained spirit must swirl over amber and azure and purple seas, past the isle of the Sirens, and knots himself to the mast of outwardly right conduct by the thongs of safe resolutions, although as yet duty is not his delight, he is near to virtue. He who spake as never mortal spake saw such a young man once, and, looking on him, loved him, and yet said, as the nature of things says also, 'One thing thou lackest.' Evidently he to whom duty is not a delight does not possess the supreme pre-requisite of peace. In the presence of the Siren shore we can never be at rest while we rather wish to land, although we resolve not to do so. Only he who has heard a better music than that of the Sirens, and who is affectionately glad to prefer the higher to the lower good, is. or in the nature of things can be, at peace. Morality is Ulysses bound to the mast. Religion is Orpheus listening to a better melody, and passing with disdain the sorcerous shore. [Applause.] "Aristotle was asked once what the decisive proof is that a man has acquired a good habit. His answer was, 'The fact that the practice of the habit involves no self-denial of predominant force among the faculties.' Assuredly that is keen, but Aristotle is rightly called the surgeon. Until we do love virtue so that the practice of it involves no self-denial of that sort, it is scientifically incontrovertible that we can not be at peace. In the very nature of things, while Ulysses wants to land, wax and thongs can not give him rest. In the very nature of things, only a better music, only a more ravishing melody, can preserve Orpheus in peace. This truth may be stern and unwelcome, but the Greek mythology and the Greek philosophy which thus unite to affirm it are as luminous as the noon." The value of the historic Awakenings in America has been graphically shown by his illustration of the rightful part played by enthusiasm in religion: .'It would be a sad whim in the art of metallurgy if men should take up the notion that a white heat is not useful in annealing metals; and so it is a sad whim in social science when men think that the white heat we call a religious awakening is not useful in annealing society. Twice this nation has been annealed in the religious furnace just previously to being called on to perform majestic civil duties. You remember that the thirsty, seething, tumultuous, incalculably generative years from 1753 to 1783, or from the opening of the French war to the close of the Revolution, were preceded by what is known to history as the Great Awakening in New England in 1740 under Whitefield and Edwards. So, too, in 1857, when we were on the edge of our civil war, the whole land was moved religiously, and thus prepared to perform for itself and for mankind the sternest of all the political tasks that have been imposed in this century upon any civilized people. But our short American story is no exception to the universal experiences of social annealing." "Discussing the subtler meaning of the Reformation, Carlyle says: 'Once risen into this divine white neat of temper, were it only for a season and not again, a nation is thenceforth considerable through all its remaining history. What immensities of dross and crypto-poisonous matter will it not burn out of itself in that high temperature in the course of a few years I Witness Cromwell and his Puritans, making England habitable even under the Charles Second terms for a couple of centuries more. Nations are benefited, I believe, for ages by being thrown once into divine white heat in this manner.'" "That is the historical law for nations, for cities, for individuals. Do not be afraid of a white heat; it is God's method of burning out dross. [Applause.]

"Standing where Whitefield stood on the banks of the Charles, a somewhat unlettered but celebrated evangelist years ago, face to face with the culture of Harvard, was accused of leading audiences into excitement. 'I have heard,' said he, in reply, 'of a traveler who saw at the side of the way a woman weeping and beating her breast. He ran to her and asked, "What can I do for you? \Vhat is the cause of your anguish?" "My child is in the welll My child is in the well!" With swiftest despatch assistance was given and the child rescued. Further on this same traveler met another woman, wailing also and beating her breast. He came swiftly to her, and with great earnestness asked, "What is your trouble?" "My pitcher is in the welll My pitcher is in the well!" Our great social and political excitements are all about pitchers in wells, and our religious excitements are about children in wells.' [Laughter and applause.] A rude metaphor, you say, to be used face to face with Harvard; but a distinguished American professor; repeating that anecdote in Halle, on the Saale, in Germany yonder, Julius Muller heard it and repeated it in his university, and it has been used among devout scholars all over Germany. Starting here on the banks of the Charles, and listened to, I presume, very haughtily by Cambridge and Boston, it has taken root in a deep portion of German literature as one of the classical illustrations of the value of a white heat. [Applause.]"