Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament/Moncure Daniel Conway
VII.
MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY.
"His hearers can't tell you on Sunday beforehand
If in that day's discourse they'll be Bibled or Koraned;
For he's seized the idea (by his martyrdom fired)
That all men (not orthodox) may be inspired."
MR. CONWAY'S inspiration may be questioned, but none will gainsay his total heterodoxy. If he is not a prophet, it is not his fault: he is the least orthodox preacher in London. "His faith has centre everywhere, nor cares to fix itself to form."
The congregation of South-place Chapel, Finsbury, are Nonconformists who non-conform very much. Their Bible is called "The Sacred Anthology,"—a book of ethnical Scriptures, collected and edited by Mr. Conway. The purpose of the work is simply moral. "He has aimed," he says in the preface, "to separate the more universal and enduring treasures contained in ancient Scriptures from the rust of superstition and the ore of ritual;" and he has succeeded in his aim. To good rationalists "The Sacred Anthology" ought to be what "The Garden of the Soul" is to good Romanists. "The utterance does not wholly perish which many peoples utter; nay, this is the voice of God."
At South Place the condemnation of the Pharisees who, for a pretence, make long prayers, is not incurred. No prayers are offered up. There has been substituted what is called "meditations," or moral soliloquies, and the finest music. The whole atmosphere of the chapel is "advanced" to such a degree that Unitarians of the older school, when they occasionally enter it, are almost as puzzled as orthodox Trinitarians what to make of it. The average intellectual level of the congregation is, I should imagine, the highest in London. Men and women who could not be induced to listen to any other preacher go readily to hear Mr. Conwa3^ Nowhere will you find a finer collection of human heads; and yet Mr. Conway is not an orator in any sense of the word.
His predecessor, the celebrated W. J. Fox, "Publicola" of "The Dispatch," and member of Parliament for Oldham, was a different man. He combined all the qualities of a popular, if heretic, preacher. It is what Mr. Conway says, and not how he says it, that attracts. He is hardly even a scholar in the English and strictly technical sense of the term, and in matters of detail he is occasionally inaccurate. But he is an original and fearless thinker,—a born instructor of other men in whatever is true, beautiful, and good, with an ear delicately attuned to catch the faintest accents of the "still, small voice" of conscience. What he hears in the closet he has the courage to proclaim from the housetop. His discourses consequently bear an oracular impress. They have, moreover, an aroma of mysticism, faint but sweet,—a breath of New England transcendentalism peculiarly grateful to unaccustomed Cockney nostrils. It were curious to speculate what would happen if say Spurgeon and Conway were to exchange pulpits for a month or so. Both churches, I imagine, would be completely emptied. To the eclectics of South Place Mr. Spurgeon's doctrines would be mere foolishness, while to the Calvinists of the Tabernacle Mr. Conway would be worse than a stumbling-block: he would be Antichrist. Yet there is a golden bridge over this terrible chasm of conflicting beliefs. Mr. Conway and Mr. Spurgeon have a common object for which they toil; viz., the moral elevation of mankind. Where this essence of all true religions is present, the form is of secondary consequence. Creed or no creed, for the good the path of duty is the same.
"The soul is still oracular: amid the market's din
List the ominous, stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,
'They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin.'"
Moncure Daniel Conway, it need scarcely be recorded, is by birth an American. He was born in 1832 near Fredericksburg, Stafford County, Va., where his father, Walker Peyton Conway,, a gentleman of independent fortune, enjoyed universal esteem. The elder Conway was both a county magistrate and a member of the State legislature. The stock had come originally from Wales, and in the course of a century or more had multiplied rapidly in Stafford County. Intermarriage with other "leading families" of Moncures and Daniels had been very frequent. The Moncures were of Scottish Jacobite extraction, while the Daniels were English. The father of young Conway's mother was John Moncure Daniel, a graduate in medicine of Edinburgh University, and surgeon-general of the United States army. Among her ancestors was likewise Stone, the first colonial governor of Maryland; while her grandfather, Thomas Stone, enjoyed the proud distinction of being one of the signatories of the famous Declaration of Independence. These were matters of some moment in a State where slavery was an institution, and "mean whites" were treated with contempt.
Supported by troops of affluent friends and kinsmen, Conway's path in life seemed at its commencement nowise steep or arduous. As a politician he might hope to climb the ladder of power and dignity in the republic easily and rapidly; but the lion of slavery crouched in the way. His father was, unfortunately, a large slave-owner,—a humane man, it is time, but still, like his neighbors, an owner of scores of human chattels. "Few," says Mr. Conway in his "Testimonies concerning Slavery," "are the really peaceful days that I remember having smiled on in my old Virginian home. The outbreaks of the negroes among themselves; the disobediences which the necessary discipline can never suffer to be overlooked; the terrors of devoted parents at the opportunities for the display of evil tempers and the inception of nameless vices among their sons,—I remember as the demons haunting those days. I have often heard my parents say that the care of slaves had made them prematurely old."
Conway's early education was the best that the neighborhood afforded. As a child he attended several private schools, and subsequently he became a pupil of the Classical and Mathematical Academy in Fredricksburg. Here he made rapid progress, and in due course was entered as an undergraduate of Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1849. The students were mostly from Maryland and Virginia, with strong pro-slavery sympathies; and young Conway returned to his Virginian home in his eighteenth year as full of anti- Northern prejudices as the rest. He commenced the study of law at Warrenton, and, while thus engaged, fell under the influence of a remarkable man, his cousin John M. Daniel, the formidable duellist editor of the notorious "Richmond Examiner." Daniel was the best educated man in Richmond, a profound student of Spinoza, Hegel, Kant, Fichte, Feuerbach, Fourier, Cousin, Voltaire. His range of vision far exceeded that of any man Conway had known, and it is scarcely to be wondered at that Daniel made a strong impression on his youthful kinsman's mind. He professed to rest slavery on a quasi-scientific basis of racial inferiorit}^ "We hold," he declared in his journal, to which Conway became a contributor, "that negroes are not men in the sense in which that term is used by the Declaration of Independence. Were the slaves men, we should be unable to disagree with Wendell Phillips."
Thus fortified in his pro-slavery ideas, Conway's next step was to become the secretary of a Southern rights, otherwise a secessionist, club, whose sole raison d'être was to break up the Union in the interest of the "peculiar institution" of the South on the first available opportunity. So much for the pernicious teaching of his misanthropic cousin. But happily other considerations began to weigh with Conway. If circumstances had leagued him with the oppressor, kind Natm'e had made him at heart an irrepressible Radical. In 1850, before the completion of his eighteenth 3'ear, appeared his first pamphlet, entitled "Free Schools in Virginia," which was distributed among the people, and laid on the desk of every member of the State Convention which met that year for the revision of the Virginian Code. I have read this plea for free schools to educate the "mean whites," and can only wonder that a lad of eighteen should have had the ability or patience to produce so masterly an appeal. The effect was, nevertheless, most disappointing. He was virulently attacked by the journals as one who, by advocating a "mob road to learning," was jeopardizing the very existence of Southern society. The mean whites, like the servile blacks, must be kept in ignorance. It is not, however, so long since representatives of our own "agricultural interests" were in the habit of giving expression to views equally enlightened. But Mr. Conway was not thus to be put down. Reason, conscience, compassion, told him that the cause he had espoused was just and beneficent. He had not taken it up, as he had taken slavery, on trust. He had thought out the problem for himself, and he remained unshaken in his convictions. Whether he knew it or not, he had taken a distinct step away from the slaveholding oligarchy in the direction of freedom. In order to promote his laudable object, he threw up the law and took to the gospel. He became a Methodist preacher as the likeliest means of reaching the hearts and heads of the people whom he desired to benefit. The Baltimore Methodist Conference speedily appinted him to the charge of some twelve congregations. One of these happily lay in a section of country settled by Quakers, and consequently unpolluted by any taint of slavery. He saw prosperous agriculturists and happy, free, educated negro laborers, and the scales began to fall from his eyes. He had never dreamed of such a state of society. At first he was bewildered; but an aged Quaker, whose acquaintance he had made, eventually enabled him to turn a steady, admiring gaze on the rising sun of negro emancipation.
"Up, up! and the dusky race
That sat in darkness long,
Be swift his feet as antelope's,
And as behemoth strong."
"Again," says Mr. Conway, "I visited the old Quaker patriarch, and told him with what delight I had found that the interior of Sandy Spring was even more attractive than its exterior. 'Now, friend, can thee account for this evident superiority of the Friends' neighborhood over the rest of this county, or of thy own State?'—'Well,' I ventured, 'doubtless you have certain habits of thrift and industry which others have not.'—'Perhaps it is so,' said the old man, gravely. After which followed a long silence, which I felt belonged to him, and was for him to break. Then he turned his eyes—at once luminous and keen—full upon me, and said, 'But there is one habit of our people to which thee will find, should thee search into it, is to be traced all the improved condition of our lands and our homes; that is, the habit of taking care that our laborers get just wages for their work. No slave has touched any sod in any field of Sandy Spring.'"
These simple words eventually converted the reluctant secretary of the Southern Rights Club into an uncompromising abolitionist. Henceforth his duty, with respect to the great social problem of his time and country, was clear to him.
The change in his religious conceptions was no less striking. About the time of the Moody and Sankey revivals, Mr. Conway gave an account of his own conversion almost unparalleled in its candor: "It was my destiny to be born in a region where this kind of excitement is almost chronic. … When the summer came the leading Methodist families—of which my father's was one—went to dwell in the woods in tents. About two weeks were there spent in praying and preaching all the day long, pausing only for meals; and during all that time the enclosure in front of the pulpit was covered over with screaming men and women, and frightened children. … While I was there women came and wept over me; preachers quoted Scripture to me. No one whispered to me that I should resolve to be better,—more upright, true, and kind. Hundreds were converted by my side, and broke out into wild shouts of joy; but I had no new experience whatever. I was not in the least a sceptic: I believed every word told me. Yet nothing took place at all. On a certain evening I swooned. When I came to myself I was stretched out on the floor with friends singing around me, and the preachers informed me that I had been the subject of the most admirable work of divine grace they had ever witnessed. I took their word for it. All I knew was that I was thoroughly exhausted, and was ill for a week." But he did not take their word for it for an unreasonable time. In 1852 his religious as well as his social ideas underwent modifications so important that he determined to betake himself to Harvard University, where the dominant theology is Unitarian. Here he graduated B.D. in 1854, having in the interval contracted lasting friendships with Emerson, Parker, Stunner, Phillips, and others, the best hearts and heads in the republic.
After completing his studies, he returned with fond hopes to his home in Virginia. But it was only to find that, as an abolitionist, his own flesh and blood regarded him as a leper. Eventually a company of young men confronted him in the street, and warned him that he must henceforth regard himself as a perpetual exile from Virginia, kindly adding that he had been spared tar and feathers solely on his parents' account. Thereupon he again turned his steps towards the free North, and in 1854 he was appointed minister of the Unitarian church in Washington, but did not long find rest for the sole of his foot. An antislavery sermon which he preached, in denunciation of the dastardly outrage on Senator Sumner by Preston Brooks, led to his dismissal by the most liberal and antislavery congregation in Washington, In 1856 he was invited by the Unitarians of Cincinnati to become their pastor, and there some of his most useful and brilliant discourses were delivered. But his mind was absorbed in the impending conflict with the slave-power, and he ultimately became an abolitionist lecturer in Ohio and the Middle States. And his pen was as busy in the work of emancipation as his tongue. In 1858 were published "Tracts for To-day; " in 1861 came "The Rejected Stone;" in 1862, "The Golden Hour." All these were powerful weapons put into the hands of the abolitionists; "The Rejected Stone," in particular, making a deep impression on the mind of the martyr-president, Abraham Lincoln. Subsequently he became the first editor of "The Boston Commonwealth,"—a high-class weekly, primarily started as an abolition organ. Meanwhile, his father and his two brothers threw in their lot with the secessionists, the young men both receiving wounds in the fratricidal struggle.
At last, when the tramp of the Federal soldiers was heard in the streets of the little town whence Conway had been driven in 1854, he hastened to the spot to assist the slaves of his father's household to escape to the free North-West. By dint of great exertions he found the fugitives. The old woman who had nursed him sprang forward, and folded him in her arms as if he were still a child. "Far into the night we sat together; and they listened with glistening eyes as I told them of the region to which I meant to take them, where never should they
'Feel oppression,
Never hear of war again.'
At the Baltimore Railway Station all was nearly lost. A threatening mob beset the station, and the ticket-agent peremptorily intimated, 'I cannot let these negroes go on this road at an}' price.' I simply presented my military order to this very disagreeable and handsome agent, and he began to read it. He had read but two or three words of it, when he looked up with astonishment, and said,—
"'The papers say these are your father's slaves.'—'They are,' I replied. 'Why, sir, you could sell them in Baltimore for fifty thousand dollars!'—'Possibly,' I replied. Whereupon (moved, probably, by supposing that I was making a greater sacrifice than was the case) the young man's face was unsheathed: 'By God! you shall have every car on this road if you want it, and take the negroes where you please! ' Then, having sold me the tickets, he gave his ticket-selling to a subordinate, and went out to secure us a car to ourselves; and from that moment, though the imprecatious around us went on, our way was made smooth."
In 1863 Mr. Conway was commissioned by the friends of abolition to come to England to try to influence English as he had American opinion in favor of the Federal cause, and in this good work he was engaged when the Confederacy suddenly collapsed. At that juncture South-place Chapel was in need of a pastor; and who so able to discharge the duties as this transatlantic iconoclast and idealist, who brought with him to the old world the best manhood of the new?
In 1875 he revisited the West on a lecturing-tour, and was received by his long-estranged family, and by his countrymen generally, with open arms. He was offered the pastorate of Theodore Parker's old church in Boston, but preferred to return to England, where the battle with theological obscurantism and political oligarchy is more arduous. England has sent so many of her good and brave men to America, that it is but right that the latter should begin to return the compliment.
Mr. Conway, needless to say, remains a stanch republican. Like all intelligent American citizens whom I have known, the more he has studied our political institutions, the less he has been captivated by them. His little work, "Republican Superstitions," is the best commentary on the working of "our glorious constitution" that I know. Therein he shows, with incontrovertible logic, and complete mastery of details, that it is precisely the monarchical elements, thoughtlessly or superstitiously imported. into the Constitution of the United States by its framers, that have worked all the mischief in the republic. He would have but one chamber, returned by equal constituencies, with a chief magistrate and executive directly eligible by, and responsible to, the legislature. A second chamber, if it is opposed to the popular house, is noxious; if it is in harmony with it, it is superfluous.
Mr. Conway has learned, by the sad experience of his own beloved republic, how disastrous a thing is the doctrine of state rights or home rule. Let this Radical of Radicals speak a word in season to those undiscerning ones in England, who in this matter seem in haste to confound purblind re-action with action, retrogression with progression:—
"Could there be a more cruel concession made by England to Ireland than that very home rule for which so earnest a demand is now made? Whether England should concede complete independence to Ireland may be' a question; but to raise up in Ireland ambitions that at some point must be checked, to give embodiment to aspirations and interests which no sooner reach their development than they will be certainly crushed, were the gift of weak indulgence, and by no means that of true generosity. For every concession the Northern people made to 'state sovereignty' in the South, several thousand Southerners had to be slain in the end."