METHODIST REVIEW.

NOVEMBER, 1887.

ART. I.-IN MEMORIAM-DANIEL CURRY.

[DANIEL CURRY was born near Peekskill, Nov. 26, 1809. He was a graduate of the Wesleyan University. In January, 1841, he was received on probation in the Georgia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and stationed at Athens,. in that State. His following appointments were: 1842, Athens and Lexington; 1843, Savannah; 1844, Columbus. On leaving this charge he came north, and was stationed in 1845 at Twenty-seventh Street, New York; 1846-47, his station. was New Haven, Conn.; 1848-49, Washington Street Church, Brooklyn; 1850-51,, Fleet Street; 1852-53, he was at Hartford, Conn.; 1854, again at Twenty-seventh Street, New York; 1855-57, President of Indiana Asbury University, finishing the year at South Third Street, Brooklyn; 1858-59, at Middletown, Conn.; 1860-61,. New Rochelle; 1862-63, at Thirty-seventh Street, New York; 1864, for a short time, presiding elder of South Long Island District. In May, 1864, he was elected editor of the Christian Advocate, in which office he was continued until May, 1876;. he was then elected editor of the Ladies' Repository, the title of which was soon thereafter changed to that of the National Repository; in 1881-82, he was again in the pastorate, at East Eighty-second Street and South Harlem; in 1883, at Bethany Chapel; in May, 1884, he was elected editor of the Review and General Books. While in this office he ended his earthly career on the 17th of August, 1887, in the 78th year of his age.]

SUCH are the historic facts in the career of the great man who has gone from us. But how meager such a record is!a skeleton without the breath of life.

DANIEL CURRY came of that Scotch-Irish ancestry which lives long, works hard, fights well, reasons closely, loves intensely, dislikes strongly, and has underneath the firm rock of religious conviction. Methodism owes much, in both continents, to this strain, and owes nothing stronger or braver than Daniel Curry. Such an inheritance fits its possessor to take on culture readily, and gives steadiness of aim and industry in acquisition. These

51-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. III.

He read per

qualities were conspicuous in the young Curry. sistently but discursively. He studied with this habit of discursive reading upon him, and had need to resist it all his life, as his maturing judgment saw the value of accuracy as well as breadth. His ancestry made itself visible not only in the qualities of his mind but in his fraine and face. Tall, almost gaunt, with square forehead, deep-set and easily kindled eyes, projecting and shaggy eyebrows, a straight and prominent nose, high cheek-bones, a firmly set mouth, a square and well projected chin, his appearance was such as is not easily forgotten. It was the diaphanous veil which disclosed the firm, earnest, aggressive spirit, which grew with his years and the development of his career, to have at length its iron strength softened by age and broadening piety.

It would have been difficult for any one meeting Daniel Curry in his middle life to form any other impression at first sight than that here was a man to be feared and followed. The commander was visible and vocal in him. His mental constitution and its physical agent both gave strength to this impression. From his youth he could value the deftly cutting cimeter, but his own weapon was naturally the broad-ax, which crushes as well as cuts; and many who knew him only in the days of controversy which brought him to the front, and who saw him only while fighting a great wrong, supposed that sympathy and tenderness were foreign to his nature. But as through the granite hills internal heats have thrown up veins of softer rock, seen as penetrating the larger masses only by the observer close at hand, so those who knew him well in his most warlike days detected the affection and tenderness which veined his rugged nature.

His mind was incisive and yet philosophical. He could not only penetrate but explore. He could generalize as well as observe. Indeed, his powers of observation were so great that he missed something of that intensity which is the outcome of a partial view. Had he been a narrower man he would have left larger literary monuments. He made advance in knowledge too rapidly to feel that at any one moment he knew any thing fully, and while others reached what they believed to be the final stages, and gave their work to the world in that pleasing belief, he was so enamored of the many-sidedness of truth

that he felt incompetent for its expression. This gave a vagueness to some of his critical and theological utterances which ill accorded with the most easily visible elements of his mind. But it was only in the range of higher thought that his trumpet ever knew an uncertain sound. There was such a large practical element in him that nothing passed him without awakening his interest. He was no mere dreamer, no abstracted metaphysician, dwelling contentedly amid the cobwebs spun from the involu tions of his own consciousness.

An idealist in philosophy, he was a realist in life. A spiritualist of the true sort, almost a quietist in religion, no man among us more strongly insisted upon the axiom of St. James, "Faith without works is dead." This intellectual breadth reenforced his personality and diminished its output. If he had had less of it he would not have so much dreaded authorship in the more personal and independent form. He often said to the writer, "I sometimes think I know too much to write a poor book and not enough to write a good one." It was this which made him chiefly a commentator and essayist. If he had been less able to determine historical and critical values he would not so often have startled the Church by divergences from accepted thought. If he had been incapable of seeing truth from another's stand-point, the chief strain of lamentation over him would not be that a great personality has gone from us. It was, then, the blending of breadth and intensity which marked the success and failure of his career. As an intellect he will live as an influence-as one of the most stimulating and suggestive of minds. He made no advance in philosophy, but he has helped those who will. He has not defined the faith anew, nor shown us where the breadth of God's visible kingdom must be more fully the interpreter of the invisible. He has not so weighed and adjusted the sciences that we can feel ourselves of his school; but no man met him who did not think more broadly for the contact. He gave hints which others will work out. He opened the doors through which others will pass. As an intellectual guide-post no man in Methodism has been his superior.

This is only another way of saying that such great critical faculty as he had was largely of the destructive kind. To know what a thing is not is much toward knowing what it is.. A

certain combative element gave him great power in attacking the theories of others. His glance was eagle-like in strength and quickness. He laid hold of shaky pillars as if he delighted to overturn them. Indeed, he may not uncharitably be suspected of a grim pleasure in bringing down flimsy structures on the heads of the builders. This appeared most fully in his speeches. He might appear to be half asleep or reading a paper; but as an opponent neared his close Daniel Curry's eye would shoot new fires, his lounging form would straighten, and, leaping to his feet, the smile on his face meant that he saw where he could hit, and that the pleasure of the conflict spurred him on. But very rarely would the hearer receive the impres sion of intentional injustice, or of battling for the sake of victory. Daniel Curry came from a race whose blood and training led its representatives to identify unconsciously their own will with the will of God. He had enough of the Puritan and Covenanter in him to love a tilt against any existing order. In the work of John Knox we see God, but we see also John Knox. And as Knox, conscious of the righteousness of his aim, and believing in his cause, had sometimes scant courtesy for his opponent, so Daniel Curry was, especially in middle life, often impatient of contradiction, occasionally overbearing in manner, sometimes contemptuous of an untried foe. It is difficult for any man who is made conscious of his power by success to avoid complacency and self-will. It is equally difficult for one who from youth knows himself to be masterful to keep his sovereignty in modest exhibit when events exploit it. Rare, indeed, is that courtesy which treats intellectual weakness with the consideration due to strength. That in these things Daniel Curry sometimes failed, his most loving friends will admit. But the general impression produced, by method, manner, and man, was that of unflinching courage and downright honesty. Seldom, indeed, did he warrant the judgment that in his work he was thinking chiefly of himself. He breasted too many currents to be deemed a time-server.

Thus much it is needful to remember to understand his long public career of almost fifty years.

Possessed, at the beginning of his work, of culture beyond that of most of his co-workers, it has been said that much of his eminence was due to this advantage. No greater mistake

He would have come

is possible. Eminence was in the man. to the front because of himself. Culture and conflict made him stronger, as the oak is stimulated and toughened by the soil in which it grows and the winds which blow about it. But the oak-possibility must be there in the beginning.

In reviewing his career as pastor, professor, college president, journalist, legislator, and critic-in studying his character as acquaintance, associate, friend, and Christian-one wishes for the broadest vocabulary, the deepest insight, and the most facile pen. One is compelled to wish that Daniel Curry might have been his own biographer. Few remain who recall his early career in Georgia as pastor and preacher. This seems to have been, as was natural, a formative and tentative period in study, opinion, meditation, and effort. It bore fruit, but he needed pressure and compulsion to bring on his most fertile moods, and to the last was apt to delay important work. Little remains to us of the earlier period of his career, except that in the presence of slavery he learned to hate it, and with its seductions around him lifted up his voice against it. That voice was never silent until slavery was dead. It was like him to be out of tune with such an institution. He claimed liberty for himself. He valued institutions only as they enlarged and strengthened the individual. To see humanity, black or white, in bondage through slavery was to rouse all that was most fiery, forceful, and religious in his natBut his experience in the South was had at a time when Calhoun was changing the Southern sentiment as to the wrong of servitude. To that great but perverted mind is largely due the change which came over our Southern brethren in respect of the right and wrong of human bondage. Until he became a force Southern statesmen and pastors used language not very different from that of the North. They admitted that slavery was an evil to white and black, but one inherited, from which they could not see the way of deliverance. Calhoun taught them that it was a blessing, according to the divine order, and therefore a religious, commercial, and social necessity. That he taught masterfully and well needs no further proof than the fact that some ministers in every denomination in the North took their lesson in public utterance from him. Daniel Curry's instincts were superior to such beguilements. His clear pene

ure.