His Last Days
The end came not from positive disease, but from exhaustion of nature. During the entire session he had met his four appointments a week with his classes with perfect regularity, only two exceptions being remembered. Yet his strength was gradually, though almost imperceptibly failing. He took his nourishment very regularly, but with almost no appetite and in diminishing quantities. In the early spring he once fainted at the table. Then his weak resources were very severely tried by the sudden deaths of two of his best-beloved nieces on successive Saturdays in April. His record is: “April 6th — Our dear niece, Harriet Woolsey, wife of Dr. H. Lenox Hodge, died suddenly. She apparently fainted, and never revived. One of the loveliest and best of women.” Then, alas! again: “April 13 — Died suddenly, Alice Van Rensselaer, wife of Rev. Edward B. Hodge. The joy and pride of her whole family connection.” On April 14th he discoursed for the last time at the “Conference” in the old Oratory, in which he had delivered the first student’s speech a few months more than sixty years before. His subject was, “Fight the Good Fight of Faith,” and on the afternoon of April 21st he administered and partook with the professors and students in the Seminary Chapel of his last communion.
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It had been his custom for years to spend the month of May with his brother-in-law, General David Hunter, in the city of Washington, and the months of July and August at Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island. From these changes he had hitherto uniformly experienced very decided advantage. But at the close of the Seminary term, on this last year, his physician and friends were in great doubt whether his strength was sufficient for either of these journeys. Suggestions were made with regard to his seeking relief from the midsummer heats at some nearer and more readily accessible point on the New Jersey coast. But after much hesitation he went to Washington at the usual time, the 2d of May.
Then came the death of his life-long friend, Prof. Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institute. For this noble man of science and truly Christian Philosopher Dr. Hodge had a long-cherished and warm personal affection, as well as intellectual sympathy and sincere admiration. Professor Henry had said of Dr. Hodge that “He had made the best use of his talents his life through of any man he ever knew.” When visited. May, 1873, at the Smithsonian by a large part of the General Assembly, just retiring from their sessions in Baltimore, he declared, in response to their salutations, that “by birth, by education, and by preference he was a Presbyterian.” The last letter, except a few brief business notes, he ever wrote, contains a statement of his conviction that physical science demonstrates the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and absolutely good God. And further than this, that the facts of experience prove the necessity of such a mediator between God and man as Christians believe Christ to be. And that Christ he lived and died trusting and loving.
Thursday afternoon. May 16th. Dr. Hodge attended the funeral of Professor Henry in the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. He made a long prayer, emphasizing in climacteric order the great fundamental principles of the plan of salvation, with such an effort of voice that he was fairlywell heard by that vast audience. Yet this was simply the result of an exhaustive excitement. It was the last occasion in which he was ever in a church. His decline, which had been marked ever since he came to Washington, became now more rapid. He suffered from indigestion, weakness, weariness, and from acute neuralgic pains. On the next Thursday his son-in-law, Colonel S. W. Stockton, brought him to Baltimore, where they spent the night with the beloved family of the Rev. Andrew B. Cross. On Thursday, by the kindness of Wolcot Jackson, General Superintendent of the New Jersey division of the Pennsylvania Railroad Co., the limited express stopped for his accommodation at the Princeton Junction. He came in a horizontal position, and as he affirmed, with more comfort than ever before
His pulse indicated vital exhaustion, and he gradually grew weaker. He rode out every day up to the 29th of May. He spent the days in his old chair in the study and his nights in his bed-room, in the second story, up to the 2d Sabbath of June. Then his absent children were summoned, and then a bed was erected for him in the back parlor, next adjacent his study, and where, a generation before, he had lectured to his classes during his lameness. He strove to spend the day-time in the study, on the old chair, to the last. On one of those very last days he said: “This old chair and I have been growing to fit each other for forty years.” When at last, on Monday, two days before he died, late in the afternoon, he fainted almost for his bed; it was indeed a touching sight to see him delay his needed movement to the other room to the last possible moment, as he was as conscious as we were that he was leaving that chair and study for the last time. He suffered frequent pain, and almost constant uneasiness and distress. Yet he reclined and waited in beautiful patience and peace, his face always overflowing with love.” Even through the last hours of
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his illness, when freedom from pain and from torpor was gained for a little, he was alert and inquisitive, with his usual interest in events around him, and events of the day: the Presbyterian Assembly, the Congress at Washington, the Congress at Berlin, the College at Princeton, and the minutest concerns of his own children and grand-children here and elsewhere. This rapid and wide synoptical vision was that of a consciously dying man. For he had been busy in setting his house in order, and wisely making the most exact arrangements in view of his final demise. He knew that death was at hand, and though it did come sooner than he looked for, he repeatedly spoke of its approach being ’ slow.’” *
He did not wish to die, yet he was evidently without the shadow of fear or of painful reluctance. He maintained to the last his characteristic aversion to being read to, and his shyness as to the expression of his intimate, personal feelings. To a loving inquiry of his wife he once said, “Yes, my love, my Saviour is with me every step of the way, but I am too weak to talk about it.” Once she asked him if it would comfort him if she should repeat aloud his favorite hymn; he answered, “No, dearest, I am repeating it over and over again to myself all the while.”
That his dying thoughts may be known the hymn is
given:
HYMN OF THE LATE MRS. WEISS. Daughter of the late Archbishop of Dublin; composed on her death-bed.
I.
Jesus, I am never weary,
When upon this bed of pain;
If Thy presence only cheer me,
All my loss I count but gain, — Ever near me, — Ever near me, Lord, remain!
* Dr. A. T. MeGill’s letter to the New York Observer.
II.
Dear ones come with fruit and flowers,
Thus to cheer my heart the while,
In these deeply anxious hours;
Oh! if Jesus only smile! — Only Jesus
Can these trembling fears beguile.
III.
All my sins were laid upon Thee,
All my griefs were on Thee laid;
For the blood of Thine atonement,
All my utmost debt has paid;
Dearest Saviour!
I believe, for Thou hast said.
IV.
Dearest Saviour! go not from me;
Let Thy presence still abide;
Look in tenderest love upon me, —
I am sheltering at Thy side.
Dearest Saviour!
Who for suffering sinners died.
V.
Both mine arms are clasped around Thee;
And my head is on Thy breast;
For my weary soul has found Thee
Such a perfect, perfect rest.
Dearest Saviour!
Now I know that I am blessed.
Seeing his widowed daughter weeping while she watched him, he stretched his hand towards her and said: “Why should you grieve, daughter? To be absent from the body is to be with the Lord, to be with the Lord is to see the Lord, to see the Lord is to be like Him.”
On the Wednesday previous to his death his dear friend, Dr. H. A. Boardman called, and with great tenderness set upon his forehead a farewell kiss. On the last day of conscious life he saw Dr. William Adams, who gave the followino- account of the interview to th.e New York Observer.
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“Being in Princeton, as a trustee of the College, last Tuesday, and having heard through the papers of the illness of Dr. Hodge, I called at his home to inquire how he was. Hearing that I was in the library with his sons. Dr. H. requested to see me. Such a request was to me at once a surprise and a gratification. I found him in extreme debility, so that I immediately cautioned him against making any effort to speak. He had taken my hand as I came to his bedside, and held it through the whole interview; his conversation with me being chiefly by its responsive pressure and the intelligent expression of the eye. My words were very few, assuring him how many there were who held him in their thoughts and hearts; and, most of all, how certain it was, amid all his discomforts, that he was not forgotten by Him who, knowing our frame, ‘piticth those who love Him even as a ^Sithev piticth his children.’ Both hand and eye responded that he felt the beauty and force of that one inspired word — which taken out from the Bible would leave an irremediable vacancy — ‘pitictli! Entirely conscious was he as he lay calmly waiting for the lifting of that curtain which alone separated him from the vision of his Lord.
“I have since been informed that I was the last person out of his own family who saw Dr. Hodge before his death. A few hours later he passed into a sleep from which there was to be no waking.”
Thus he slept until, in the presence of his wife and children and elder grand-children, life ebbed away entirely at six o’clock, p. M., on Wednesday, the 19th of June, on the middle day of Commencement Week of the College.
At one o’clock on Saturday, the 22d, an informal meeting of the Presbytery of New Brunswick was held in the lecture-room of the First Presbyterian Church, Princeton, where resolutions were passed, expressive of their sense of the Christian elevation of his character, and of the value of his services, and of the loss involved in his death. Then the Presbytery, with many other clergymen, alumni of the
Seminary, and others, met in the chapel, where the remains of the venerable Professor were borne, and for a short time presented to the view of his pupils and friends. At this meeting Dr. Atwater presented another set of appropriate resolutions, at the request of several members of the Boards of Directors and Trustees of the Institution, which were unanimously passed. The procession was formed in the grounds of the Seminary, the body being borne and deposited in the grave only by the sons and nephews of the deceased. The Presbytery of New Brunswick, the Directors and Trustees and other officers of the Seminary and College and other institutions, and other clergy and friends, forming in line, proceeded to the First Presbyterian Church. All the stores in the town were closed, and all business suspended in token of respect.
In the church the Rev. President McCosh read the Scriptures; the Rev. Dr. Paxton, of N. Y., delivered a funeral address with admirable taste and effect; the Rev. Dr. Adams, President of Union Theological Seminary, and the Rev Dr. Henry A. Boardman, of Philadelphia, offered prayers. The procession then reformed, and the body was carried to its resting place in the lot next to that of the Alexanders, in Princeton Cemetery. Here, as he was lowered into the grave, his pastor, the Rev. Horace G. Hinsdale, repeated the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, and after prayer, pronounced the benediction.
Resolutions expressive of the reverence and love with which he was regarded, and the sorrow which his death occasioned, were passed by the Trustees of the College, by the Alumni of the Seminary at their next annual meeting, and by the various Boards and Societies of which he was a member. Cordial and appreciative notices of his death appeared as editorials in all the papers of all evangelical denominations. Especially it is proper to notice three eminently intelligent and discriminating, as well as affectionate notices of his character and achievements: (i) An article
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on “The late Dr. Hodge,” in the British and Foreign Evangelical Review, October, 1878, by his loved and trusted pupil, Rev. Robert Watts, D. D., Professor of Systematic Theology in the Assembly’s Theological College, Belfast, Ireland. (2) An address delivered before the First Presbyterian Church, of which Dr. Hodge was a member and life-long communicant, by the Rev. Prof. Lyman H. Atwater, D. D., for some years his colleague in the editorship of the Princeton Rcviezu. (3) An address by his friend. Dr. H. A. Boardman, before the Directors and Alumni of the Seminary, in the First Presbyterian Church, Sunday morning, April 23d, 1879. These addresses were printed and widely circulated. A tablet was also erected to his memory in the chapel of the Seminary, and unveiled with an address by Dr. Boardman, Tuesday, April 25th, of the same year.
I append the following selections from the contemporary notices of his death, because of their character, and because they furnish the testimony of Christian scholars of other denominations.
The editor of the National Repository, a Methodist magazine, wrote: “Timothy Dwight, Nathaniel Emmons, Samuel Hopkins, Edwards A. Park, Moses Stuart, Nathaniel W. Taylor, Albert Barnes, the Alexanders, Francis Wayland, Tayler Lewis, Bishop Mcllvaine, Bangs, Fisk, Mc-Clintock, Whedon, Bledsoe, Dr. True, whose loss we have just been called on to mourn also, and a hundred others have shed lustre on the American name since the era of independence opened; but none of these can, in grandeur of achievement, compare with Charles Hodge, who recently died at Princeton, an octogenarian. He was not only/cr,” excellence the Calvinistic theologian of America, but the Nestor of all American theology, and though we differ widely with him in many things, we yet accept this master mind and beautifully adorned life as the grandest result of our Christian intellectual development. He produced many valuable writings, but above all stands his ‘Systematic The-
586 IIS LAST DA YS. [ 1 878.
ology,’ a work which has only begun its influence in moulding the religious thought of the English-speaking world. We could wish that its fallacy of dependence on the Calvinistic theology were not one of its faults. But what is this slight failing compared to the masterful leading of a thousand, lost in speculation, from the labyrinth of doubt and despair to the haven of heavenly faith and angelic security? We may say of this now sainted man, ‘With all thy faults we love thee still’ Princeton has lost its greatest ornament, the Presbyterian Church its most precious gem, the American Church her greatest earth-born luminary.”
The Congregational paper, the Christian at Work, for June 27th, 1878, edited by Dr. Wm. M. Taylor, contained an editorial written by Dr. Doolittle, a Professor in the Reformed (Dutch) Church, and a former pupil of Dr. Hodge. He closes thus:” It is not, however, as the erudite Professor, nor as the masterly reviewer, nor as the impressive pulpit orator, nor as the gifted author of commentaries and theologies, that the venerated Princetonian will be most remembered by former pupils. It was rather on those fondly memorable Sabbath afternoons when he used to unfold before the hearts of rapt listeners the meaning of Scripture passages. Oh, with what sweet evidences of love, born not of earth but of heaven; of unaffected grace burning in his heart and beaming, like the glory of Moses, from his countenance — that he appeared at his greatest and best. Can any one that ever saw this good man while in the endeavor to portray the entrance of a divine life into our human life, opening unconsciously the door of his own heart, and exhibiting Jesus enthroned there on a believing, yearning, loving, rejoicing disposition, ever forget how he realized at that supreme moment that Jesus is greater than the greatest of great men, that the Redeemer who could thus irradiate and transform his worshipper is worthy of universal adoration and love. Oh, profound earthly teacher, thou wast yet infinitely less than the Heavenly Teacher whose words thou yET. 8o.] HIS LAST DAYS. 587
didst live to exemplify in thine own character and utterances; for showing us this we bless thee more than for all thine other works.”
CHARLES HODGE, OF PRINCETON.
A Prince, wise, valiant, just, and yet benign;
His own will free, and still by law controlled:
No King, with armaments and fleets untold,
Such mastery had with purpose so divine,
O’er unseen forces active and malign.
He fought th’ invisible spirits of the air,
Nor for himself alone, but for his race.
And men grew wiser, better, unaware
That he in silence, by his faith and prayer
Saved their beleaguered souls. Spirit of Grace
“Who in him wrought, and held him in the strife.
We give Thee thanks that Thou didst him ordain
Unto a work wherein no act is vain.
And death but longer makes the service and the life.
A. D. F. R.