REV. DR. CHARLES H. PARKHURST. CHARLES HENRY PARKHURST, D. D., Presbyterian clergyman and municipal reformer, was born in Framingham, Massachusetts, February 17, 1842, of the New England Puritan or Pilgrim stock. The homestead which was his birthplace and that of his father, on the banks of the Sudbury river, has completely disappeared, the site having been included in the Boston water-works system. The house was of the unadorned but comfortable type common on New England farms three-quarters of a century ago-a two-storied frame structure with rooms on each side of the front door, topped under its low slant-roof with a broad garret whose dim and quiet corners held a mysterious attraction for children. Until young Parkhurst was about eleven years of age-at which time (about 1853) the family removed to the manufacturing town of Clinton, not many miles away-his father had been a farmer in summer and a schoolmaster in winter, an old-fashioned combination of employments now banished from even rural regions by modern educational systems. About the time

of this removal the father gave up school-teaching and took the position of head bookkeeper for a great manufacturing corporation. His children had their schooling from him until they grew old enough to enter the academy. Charles, however, had become a scholar of his mother not long before their change of residence. In former years she had been a school-teacher, and she resumed this occupation during the last summer in the old homestead. Both then, and four or five years afterward in Clinton, where Charles had become a clerk in a store, he studied Latin under her tuition. It is said that "she was always a help to him in his studies."

At Clinton, Charles began at Miss Lucretia Morgan's

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Copyright, 1895, by Garretson, Cox & Co.

private school; then attended the town grammar school until the age of fifteen or sixteen years; then took a clerkship at the pay of three dollars a week in H. C. Greeley's dry goods store. Mr. Greeley, a third cousin of Horace Greeley, still has the principal store in the town, though he has removed from the building in which young Parkhurst served; and he holds his young salesman and errand-boy of former years in very kindly remembrance. He speaks of Charles as a boy for whom he had much liking, and in whose principles and character he had entire confidence, though the youth showed no special fitness for the work of a salesman, and evidently looked to a future along lines of literature rather than of trade. His employer remembers his liveliness in conversation, his relish for jokes, his enjoyment of wit and sarcasm, and especially his persistency of purpose. The young clerk had a great desire for study and an ambition to become a teacher. In the town of Lancaster, two miles away from his home, was the "Mansion School,” which was in fact an academy where the Reverend M. C. Stebbins, a Congregational minister, prepared boys for college. Parkhurst, turning from a mercantile life, entered this academy, walking from and to his home each day. While studying he also began his work of teaching. The daily tramp over the rough hills that roll eastward from Wachusett Mountain may have given him his taste for the Alpine climbing to which he has betaken himself in his summer vacations; but probably his Alpine recreation is one of the forms in which his delight in doing difficult things develops itself. In recent years he has passed over Alps that had been deemed insurmountable barriers to municipal reform. Not only this-he has shown the path and has stirred a city, and more than one city, to follow.

Having finished his preparatory course at the academy. he entered Amherst College at the age of twenty in 1862. and graduated with the class of 1866, passing immediately to the principalship of the Amherst High School, to which he gave two years, and from which he took more than he gave, inasmuch as one of his pupils there shortly afterward became his wife. After a brief service as instructor in the Williston Seminary at Easthampton, he married and went to Germany for theological study, having his mind now set on the work of the Christian ministry. Two years at Halle, Leipsic, and Bonn ended this stage of study, and he returned to America to enter on pastoral duty. His own estimate of the educational influences which thus far had prepared him for his life's work is interesting: "As the

most fortunate feature of my early life, I regard the fact that I was not sent much to school. By this means I was not so bound down to the continuous day after day enslavement to school discipline as to render it irksome and cause me to hate books and scholarship. My father and mother looked after my education until I was sixteen years old." Evidently his mother, with her unusual intellectual and moral gifts, gave valuable guidance to his studies and a deep impress to his character. Doctor Parkhurst's acknowledgment of his indebtedness to the Reverend Doctor Julius H. Seelye, president of Amherst College, illustrates an important benefit of a collegiate course which is not. always sufficiently recognized: "Aside from my home training, I regard the most salient influence of my life as coming from my fortunate association with the late President Julius Seelye at the time that I was a student." He speaks of the president's "strong rich nature" as having "left his impress upon me." Thus, in many colleges the true educators have acted and are acting as creators of intellectual and moral ideals of incalculable value and force. A nature observant and alert like that of our young student, gains through such gift of an ideal in a living person an inestimable impress and impulse.

President Seelye, who had formed a high regard for his pupil, doubtless deemed it a service both to him and to the First Church (Congregational) at Lenox, Massachusetts, when he advised the church to call to its pastorate the theological student just then returned from Germany. At the same time Mr. Parkhurst was offered the pastorate of the church in Pepperell, Massachusetts. The Lenox call was accepted, and his work there began in 1874. After five years it was ended by his acceptance of a call to the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, New York city. The call was the result of the young pastor's sermons having been heard by New Yorkers who were summer residents or visitors in Lenox. Notable among these was Bishop Henry C. Potter of the Protestant Episcopal diocese of New York, who, in a recent public address in New York, half jocularly, but with all his usual delicacy and geniality, suggested that Dr. Parkhurst's introduction to work in New York might be credited to him, inasmuch as having heard the young minister preach in the Congregational church at Lenox, he had advised a friend who was an official of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church in New York, then seeking a pastor, that they would do well to hear him with a view to a call. The good bishop, al

ways watchful to do the helpful thing, showed in this act the amity in which differing Christian denominations now dwell-an Episcopal prelate commending a Congregational minister to a Presbyterian church, with the result of a most successful pastorate.

Fifteen years have passed since Doctor Parkhurst's work in New York began. He commanded attention as a preacher from the first, from both his critical and his uncritical hearers; but his oratory was not of the sort that takes the town by storm. The public attitude toward him was at first largely interrogative-his independence in thought was so marked; his use of words often so novel yet often so singularly apt; his carelessness so evident as to the tricks and aids on which the common-place "fine speaker" relies; his lambent humor seemingly so unaware of itself; his general simplicity and directness so broidered at spots with quaint flourishes of fancy or of phrase; his comparative indifference to mere dogma, however authoritative by the voice of a church, balanced with such urgency on the fundamental moral contents and bearings of Christianity. It is difficult to speak definitely concerning the growth or change of a man's style of public address, so much depends upon the observer's point of hearing; but it is probable that Doctor Parkhurst's style has been modified by the years in which he has had to face the problems offered to such an earnest nature as his by the wealth and the poverty of a great city, and by the crime that lurks in both alike. Concerning his preaching in the very early years of his ministry, some people in Clinton, his boyhood home, tell of his first visit there as a preacher of his lofty style, polysyllabic words, theological technicalities, Latin quotations, and of the congregation understanding nothing but their own ignorance; and of his mother's wise and kind advice never to preach in that way again. Such stories usually gain size as they roll along the years; but probably both his thought and style, having much of their present originality, but far less of their present simplicity, directness, and pungent practical moral appeal, were less "understanded of all the people" than are his utterances of to-day, which his city and the whole land pause to hear.

It is evident that in recent years it is far from Doctor Parkhurst's care in public speech whether his style is pleasing, pretty, polished, precise, graceful, dignified, grand, impressive: facts and living men are his concern, and these are taking care of his style. It is not, however, to be denied that the nature of the man reveals itself in his whole

mode of pulpit and platform address. His use of the epigram is at times a very marked characteristic. In the use of this mode he is a prince-sentence after sentence flashing a keen, quick ray. Extreme and continuous brilliancy in this line was, in the view of some, a fault in his earlier years in New York; but now his epigrams serve him and do not lead. Still, in dividing his theme and in marshalling its successive parts, he is never ostentatiously logical. Hence the connection of thought is not always instantly seen: a variety of sentences, many of them brilliant, seem to be strung together by chance or by an errant fancy. After a little the hearer becomes aware of a certain insistence of tone which gives note of a strong underswell of feeling and purpose; a theme becomes evident, though not a theme anxious to proclaim its presence and power: the insistence gradually becomes persistence, though the speaker's theme and his purpose in it show no solicitude lest they shall not be seen of men. The effect is, at least for a time, that every hearer is allowed to frame the precise logical contents of the discourse in words to suit himselfthus making the thought in some sense his own; while with pointed thrust that lays the English language under tribute for keen and direct explicitness, or with wide ranging stroke that sweeps the field clear of all possible lurkingplaces for evasion and escape, the practical moral issue is crowded home. The seeming fragments of discourse reveal their essential unity, the theme completes itself, the speaker's purpose is accomplished. His aim has been not æsthetical, logical, ecclesiastical, doctrinal, except incidentally; it has been directly and practically moral. Yet, since morality for a being like man cannot exist without the spiritual, his preaching is also spiritual. If he does not preach so much about Christ as is the custom of some good men, he preaches Christ to the dismay of the pharisaical, to the awakening of souls that lie spiritually unconscious, and as the great Hope of the penitent and the Help of the helpless.

Doctor Parkhurst's monumental work in the public estimation is his work in municipal, and incidentally in social, reform. By reason of this his name shines on the annals of his city in letters legible to the farthest borders of the land. The motive and power of this work, however, were not in political, or social, or even ethical science; the motive and power were spiritual and personal, the lines of applied force were spiritual and personal. All this was unique. The success thus far has been unique, so unique