My Education and Religion: An Autobiography
by , D.D. With Illustrations. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1925. 8vo. xii+352 pp. $4.00.
UNLIKE Charles Lamb, who made his imperfect sympathies with Caledonians classically familiar, Yankees who visit Scotland frequently return with reports of a special congeniality with the natives of that land. In this Autobiography of a Scot turned Yankee a reciprocal sympathy and the sound basis of it are clearly revealed. After describing his own origin and inheritances, Dr. Gordon declares that in dwelling upon this subject he has ‘in truth been depicting the origins of the people of New England. My antecedents,’ he says, ‘are the antecedents of most New England men. They may be rich to-day, wear fine clothes, and occupy fine houses. Go back two or three generations and you will find their ancestors in exactly the conditions that I have described.’
This, with some extensions of the generations beyond two or three, is, in most of its applications to the older New England stock, essentially the truth. The difference between Dr. Gordon and many Americans to-day is that, through the force of his character and abilities, he has condensed in a single life the progress which many families have needed from one to three centuries to achieve.
The very qualities of rugged strength and honesty which everybody likes to ascribe to his immigrant ancestors are found in this boy reared in the austere, happy piety of a Scottish farm, and confronted at eighteen with the necessity of keeping himself alive in a strange country. He became a day laborer in a safe factory in Boston, and went on to the work of glass-setting and painting. Through the arduous exercise of his mental as well as his bodily vigor he found himself entering the doors that led to a theological and secular education, at the Bangor Seminary in Maine and at Harvard College, to a brief pastorate at Greenwich, Connecticut, and to the long pastorate in Boston which has so honorably identified the name of this eminent preacher and writer with that of the Old South Church.
This book of his has, to a remarkable degree, the quality of hearty talk. It is the talk of a man who likes and remembers good stories, and tells them well; one with the humor, by no means universal, that enjoys a joke at his own expense; one who loves his poets, particularly his Burns, and quotes them sometimes, indeed, at a perilous length. But the book is much more than that of even such a talker. It is the book of a reader and thinker, an observer and recorder of significant events — such as the substitution of the new for the old theology — and of memorable persons — such as Phillips Brooks, President Eliot, and a score of others with whom he has lived on terms of inspiring friendship.
It must have been through the practice of some self-denying ordinance that in ranging over so wide a field of topics Dr. Gordon has kept from his pages all mention of the political affairs of his time. One who felt and thought so vigorously through the days of Blaine, Cleveland, Bryan, Lodge, and Wilson must have held, with regard to all of them and the national tendencies they represented, opinions which his readers, whether agreeing with him or not, would be sure to value. Possibly some of these opinions were unfit for utterance in a parsonage or parish house, where all the words of the book might have been fitly spoken. Be this as it may, the pages are so filled with wisdom, kindness, sound humorous good sense, and the enlightened spirit of true religion that they will charm a multitude of readers. M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE