Wikiquote:Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers/Joseph Cook

Joseph Cook was a 19th century clergyman.

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• Do you know a book that you are willing to put under your head for a pillow when you lie dying? Very well; that is the book you want to study while you are living. There is but one such book in the world.
  • Orthodoxy, With Preludes on Current Events (1878), p. 101.

• What is the average type of a counterfeit church? A hammock, attached on one side to the cross, and, on the other, held and swung to and fro by the forefinger of Mammon; its freight of nominal Christians elegantly moaning meanwhile over the evils of the times, and not at ease unless fanned by eloquence and music, and sprinkled by social adulations into perfumed, unheroic slumber.
  • Orthodoxy, With Preludes on Current Events (1878), p. 298.

• We shall never be at peace with ourselves until we yield with glad supremacy to our higher faculties.
  • Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 477.

• It is with men as with wheat; the light heads are erect even in the presence of Omnipotence, but the full heads bow in reverence before Him.
  • Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 484.

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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.

Great pains have been taken to secure the fullest information for the preludes from official sources at Washington and elsewhere. The committee in charge of the Boston Monday Lectureship embraces thirty-six members, of whom twelve are an Executive Board, representing different evangelical denominations in Boston, and twenty-four are scattered through the country all the way to CailBOSTON MONDAY LECTURES.

fornia. Written permission to add their names to the committee has been given by such men as President McCosh of Princeton College, Professor Hitchcock of New York, Dr. Storrs of Brooklyn, Bishop Huntington of Syracuse, Professor Mead of Oberlin College, Professor Curtiss of Chicago Theological Seminary, Dr. Post of St. Louis, and Drs. Gibson and Stone of San Francisco. It will readily be seen that consultation from time to time by letter with so large and distinguished a committee, and with other public men with whom the lecturer forms acquaintance in his extensive travel, together with the opportunity of wide personal observation, makes the preludes an important source of suggestions as to current reform, and a most useful means of discussing popular evils as they arise. The independence of the platform adds to the effect of its treatment of living issues. It is noticeable, that, in both the Scotch and English republications of Mr. Cook's volumes, the preludes are included in full. It is believed that no leading articles in any newspaper in England or America are so extensively copied by the press as the preludes of the Boston Monday Lectureship. Each one is intended to be a compact prose sonnet, discussing current eventB from the religious point of view.

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.