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some scientific method of taxation that would distribute with certainty, equality, economy, and convenience the expenses of government. The schools and colleges should have had the people educated by this time, in a civilization as Christian as ours, to a view of government as a necessary good, not a necessary evil, and to taxation and civic duties as a yoke that is easy and a burden that is light. Authorities are well-nigh agreed on the best way to raise revenues for the state so as to have the burden equitably distributed when each shall bear his just part. But practical politics protrudes its hydra head into the tent of the student of political science, catches up a few of the more superficial conclusions, and proceeds to put upon the statute-books some laws that will raise revenue for the assessors first, and incidentally some for the state. There is a scramble of property-owners to get under cover, and stand in with the assessor, for he has the power of financial life and death, and can give the Czar points on how to become an autocrat.

"He is monarch of all he surveys,

The lord of the fowl and the brute;
From the center all round to the sea,
His right there is none to dispute."

"The statesman," said Colonel Ingersoll, "thinks that he should do something for his country; the politician thinks that his country should do aomething for him." Ideal politics produces statesmen, practical politics produces politicians. The one is a fine admixture of faith in the final supremacy of right with practical wisdom in attaining it, and its fruitage was seen in men like Washington, Lincoln, and Gladstone; the latter is founded on expediency, and finds its fruitage in a Machiavelli and Spanish statecraft; in the beautiful specimens of manhood that fill assessors' positions and haunt the assessors' and collectors' offices in our cities. Aristotle's conception of mobocracy, therefore, which is simply degenerate democracy, fulfills

the definition as democracy is seen in its practical operation in our large cities to-day. The remedy for this deplorable condition of affairs is reform at the primaries; the extension of civil service rules to municipal and state offices; rigid educational, moral, and, if need be, property qualifications before the right of franchise is conferred on persons of foreign birth; the divorce of politics from the saloon and the growth of a sense of civic duty on the part of all intelligent and law-abiding citizens.

ARTICLE IX.

NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS: A CHARACTER SKETCH.

BY Z. SWIFT HOLBROOK.

THE late Professor David Swing had finished that sentence, "We must all hope much from the gradual progress of brotherly love," when he laid down his pen. He never returned to his desk to complete his task, for in a few days he passed into the great beyond. The work at Central Church was at a stand-still because its moving spirit, its master-mind, was gone. Many thought that no one could be found to follow in the footsteps of such a man, for he was a genius, a rare combination of poet and artist. To ask another to complete that unfinished sermon was to ask some writer of fiction to finish "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" where Dickens left it, or like seeking an artist to restore the missing arms to the Venus of Milo.

David Swing was the most beautiful destructionist that Chicago had ever listened to. His poetical instincts and religious faith were all that saved him from being a cynic. His natural tendency was to destroy, but his artistic sense, his intellectual love of the true, the good, and the beautiful bade him sheathe his sword like Hamlet, and, like Hamlet, he obeyed with a tenderness born of affection. He was not only poet and artist, but philosopher and sage. He was the deadly enemy of the ugly, the deformed, the cruel, whether in theology, in art, or in literature. Like Tennyson and Wordsworth, he was the poet's poet, not in verse but in prose. For twenty years the most cultivated people in Chicago had listened to such an one who combined in the rarest degree a broad philosophy with poetical insight and artistic skill, for Swing could touch the deepest emotions of the heart in the minor key, or, with ease and simplicity, could change to the major and arouse one's hopes and faith. He left his audience not hopeless and desolate, as does Chopin in his funeral march; but, like Mendelssohn or Beethoven, he left a ray of sunlight to brighten and to cheer. He was influenced and molded intellectually by Greek thought; for, though he never went abroad but once, and then only to Scotland, he sauntered in the streets of Athens, he was on terms of familiarity with the great minds that made that city the home of culture, of refinement, and of intellectual brilliancy. Sappho and Dante he knew by heart, and he conversed with Plato and Socrates every day in the market-place. He sauntered about the Acropolis; he loitered at the gateways of Knowledge to hear the voices of those who had learned

some new truth; he loved his New Testament, not so much that it was revelation as that it was the truth, beautiful and written in Greek.

He loved Christianity not less as the way and the life, but more as the truth. His friendship for Marcus Aurelius, and his admiration of the constancy of Penelope were among the charges of heresy brought by Professor Patton. Swing was willing to admit that such virtues might have saving merit apart from a knowledge of a historical Christ. When Swing was a young man, it is told of him that he once, on a hot summer day, was driving a yoke of oxen, and stopped by a running brook in the shade to cool and rest and dream. The oxen were in as much of a hurry as young Swing, so he waited, and drank of the cool running water. Being overheated, he injured his health for life by so doing, bringing on the trouble that finally caused his death. The incident was a prophecy; for if Swing's theology were ever foundered it was because he let the running brook and the voices of nature sing to him of love and beauty, cooling off the overheated doctrines of eternal punishment, predestination, election, or saving grace. His whole nature revolted when logic demanded the damnation of infants, and he found no time or patience to discover the flaw in the argument.

Cultivated by listening to such high ideals and lofty ethical standards as only David Swing could present in his artistic way, with his matchless graces and gift of language, the board of trustees of Central Church, composed of such men as Lyman J. Gage, felt that the hope of finding a successor was a forlorn one. It was like searching for such a master as Turner to complete a half-finished canvas, or for a companion piece to the "Angelus," or for a poem to compare with Gray's "Elegy," with Drake's "Culprit Fay," or Bourdillon's eight matchless lines.

Theological seminaries do not send out such men in droves; they are born not made; they never come in duplicates, for they are not the product of any school or college. They are the product of many generations; they are born of heroic and gentle blood, and are thus of a noble ancestry that asks for no insignia of rank beyond that stamped upon the soul. Such men come as well from the homes of the humblest and from the walks of the lowly as from the palaces of the rich or from the ranks of nobility. The trustees of Central Church looked not far and wide, to Ireland or Scotland, but they looked wisely and well.

The choice of a successor to David Swing fell upon Newell Dwight Hillis, a young man only thirty and six years of age. Few people realize what a momentous task was set before this young thinker and speaker then comparatively unknown. He was a stranger, but, as time has proved, not in a strange land; for, after several years of public service, no one familiar with the facts for a moment doubts the wisdom of the choice. Audiences as large as ever greeted Professor Swing fill Central Music Hall each Sunday morning, while through published writings and books his audience has widened far beyond the bounds of his church or city. VOL. LV. No. 219.

ΙΟ

What then is the secret of Dr. Hillis' power and popularity, whence comes it, why do the educated and refined no less than the common people hear him gladly when so many pulpits are vacant, so many churches in Chicago half-deserted. Why do his books go so quickly to the fifth and seventh editions when printing is cheap, and standard writers are clamoring for a hearing?

Dr. Hillis, like David Swing, was born of a German mother who gave him the power and love of abstract reasoning. She was of high origin, born of one who married against her father's wishes and for this was disinherited. His father was a descendant of the Hylles of England driven out from Kenilworth, during the days of Charles II., to the north of Ireland. His grandfather, a Puritan Quaker, went from Philadelphia to Kentucky in the days of Henry Clay, and became prominent in politics, while his father was such a stern and unbending opponent of slavery that he refused to vote because of his then radical views. He moved to the Western Reserve, and then to Iowa, where, at Magnolia, Dr. Hillis was born, September 2, 1858. He was the youngest of the family, and brought up in the society of three older sisters, all graduates of Grinnell College. One of them was missionary for the American Board in India for fifteen years, and died in 1887-a woman of sweet spirit and of remarkable gifts, who acquired a knowledge of the Aryan language no less than the Indian. At the age of seventeen, with thirteen dollars in his pocket, the boy left home, and became from that time dependent on his own resources. Of the boyish struggles, the hardships, the privations, no one knows, but there were battles that made the hero and the man; that touched the deepest chords of the heart, that strained the will to its severest test, and awakened the most rugged thought. The greatest battles in history are oftentimes fought in childhood in the human heart, away from the sight of men; but God keeps a record of all such struggles, and rewards in character.

Young Hillis graduated at Lake Forest, Illinois, in 1884; at McCormick Seminary, Chicago, in 1887; became pastor of churches at Peoria and Evanston; received the degree of D.D. from Northwestern (Meth.) in 1894. While yet in Evanston he organized the Workingmen's Club, and, having called the labor leaders together, offered to resign his wealthy church and become a leader and pastor to the poor; but he was told that the exigencies of modern labor-agitations demanded measures that he never could endorse or sanction, and his unselfish offer was declined.

When, therefore, Dr. Hillis took up the task laid down by David Swing, he was at the threshold of a success or a failure so conspicuous that to him it meant public life or death. It led up the Capitoline hill to the palace of the Cæsars, or turned aside to the tullianum in the Colos

seum.

It goes without saying that Dr. Hillis is in no sense an imitator of Swing. That would require a low order of talent, but no genius. Genius

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