In this sermon, Douglas talked about the unique characteristics that he admired about President George Washington: his poise, his simplicity, his attitude of service to others. And now, at the conclusion of his address, Douglas says,
“Among the many written prayers with which his [Washington’s] personal memoirs abound is this petition, composed during his presidency of the United States, and evidently at a time of considerable strain.” Douglas closes with this prayer by Washington:
Most Gracious Lord: from whom proceedeth every good and perfect gift, take care, I pray Thee, of my affairs, and more and more direct me to Thy truth.
Suffer me not to be enticed from Thee by the blandishments of this world.
Work in me Thy good will; discharge my mind from all things that are displeasing to Thee, of ill will and discontent, wrath and bitterness, pride and vain conceit, of myself, and render me charitable, pure and patient.
Make me willing and fit to die when Thou shalt call me hence.
Bless the whole race of mankind, and let the world be filled with the knowledge of Thyself and Thy Son, the Christ.
Bless Thou my friends, and grant me grace to forgive my enemies as heartily as I desire forgiveness of Thee for my transgressions.
Defend me from all evil, and do more for me than I can think or ask, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
“Now, if a man proposes to be a servant of his time, it means that his chief errand in life is to give rather than to get. There is something peculiarly apt about Paul’s admonition to them that have something to give.
“Says the Tarsan: ‘Let him that gives, do it with simplicity.’
“No big show of it; no large spread of it; no self-conscious parade of it; for many a seemly virtue has been made extremely obvious for having been too broadly advertised by its possessor.
“Not too serious about it, either, as if to say, ‘Here, I have skimped and saved and done without — for you, you no-account; I have slaved till my fingers bled, in order to hand you this inestimably valuable whatever-it-is; and now that it is yours, don’t let me ever catch you forgetting what an awful time I had getting it for you.’
“Why, you and I know people who, when they give anything, raise such a hullabaloo about it and make such a profound and painful fuss over their magnanimity that they who benefit by the generosity would as leave do without the good thing as to witness the scene in the shambles before the altar of sacrifice has been reached.
“George Washington had much to give, and he gave it with simplicity. He apparently never thought of himself as a great man who must of necessity weigh his every word so that when history laid hold of him it should find him guiltless of a split infinitive or caught with some idea slightly less than cosmic in its application. I don’t believe he was thinking much about the future or attempting to prescribe for universal maladies of the social order. He was doing his honest best to serve his own people, of his own generation, and minister to the needs of the hour.
“One mark of his simplicity was his modesty, a not altogether unbecoming grace in a man elected by his countrymen to execute their wishes. When, for example, he was appointed commander-in-chief of the United States armies, he declared himself utterly unfit for the position and begged to be permitted to serve his country, at war, in some subordinate capacity. And when finally he accepted this trust, he took the office without salary, stoutly maintaining that only the feeling that he might be shirking his duty if he declined reconciled him to the idea of serving in this conspicuous position.
“Moreover, it is stated of him that Washington was always a determined skeptic as to his fitness to fill the positions to which he was successively elected, plainly shrinking from promotions involving larger responsibilities. When Washington gave of himself, he gave with simplicity.
“Examination of his state papers reveals them as of immediate concern with the problems of the exact day and hour of their composition. Therefore they are of great interest to succeeding generations. Had he been writing under the delusion that he was a prophet or a seer, it would not have been so. Neither would his utterances have amounted to much in his own time, or to anything later.
“He was just a simple-hearted American citizen — of deep patriotism and genuine concern for his neighbors, trying to do and say that which might best meet the needs of his country at the hour. And, having acted in that attitude, his words have become invested with much wisdom for his posterity…. No prophet; no sage; no seer; no political mystic, conscious of the powers of divination; but only a simple-hearted, great-souled, fine-fibered Christian gentleman — the welfare and contentment of his countrymen his most urgent thought.”
[I will share the last part of Douglas’s sermon in my next post.]
“The sign and token of this day is a device featuring a hatchet and the ragged stump of a young cherry tree. Many people know that George Washington once cut down a cherry tree and truthfully confessed his sin, who probably remember little else about this man except, possibly, that he was the first president of the United States.
“Now, instead of merely taking it for granted, as a peculiar and interesting fact that so great a man as Washington must be made concrete for us by the sign of a hatchet with which, as a lad, he was said to have hewn down a cherry tree, it is worth our while to attempt to fathom the reason for this. Surely there must be a reason.
“It may be hastily concluded that this hatchet symbol means that Washington’s outstanding attribute was his unswerving adherence to the absolute truth. In the interest of that same kind of truth, it must be admitted that this story about Washington probably hasn’t a leg to stand on. It pains me to reflect that this yarn about the hatchet and the cherry tree was said to have been invented by a man of my own profession — one Reverence Mason Weems.
“This good man wrote a biography of Washington in 1800 which caught the popular fancy and had a circulation quite out of proportion to its actual merits. When, six years later, he came to the point of preparing a second edition of it — flushed with pride over his success — he introduced many anecdotes of Washington’s youth which that worthy, then silent in his tomb at Mt. Vernon, was unable to deny. Among these delightful reminiscences of the great man which the Reverend Mr. Weems evolved from his exceedingly versatile imagination, occurred the story of the cherry tree. And she is a very unprofitable schoolteacher who fails to point the salutary moral for her disciples that Washington was so infatuated with the truth that it began to show up in him when he was a little boy; therefore, go and do likewise.
“A slightly deeper inquiry into the peculiar processes of the public mind, however, in catching at this fanciful story of the hatchet and the cherry tree reveals a fact that must not be overlooked in our estimate of Washington. That he was a truth-lover and a lie-hater is undoubtedly correct. But the real reason that the hatchet-story has become symbolic of this man is probably due to his simplicity of heart.
“There are a few equestrian statues of Washington, but they are not notable statues, and not many people know exactly where they are, who carved them, or the occasions of their establishment. When you try to visualize Washington, you do not think of him on a horse, though that is the way he spent most of his time out of doors. Neither do you conjure a picture of him brandishing a sword and shouting to a tattered and disorganized army to get into the game and try to put some pep into it before it is too late.
“You would have John Paul Jones that way, and Phil Sheridan, and the redoubtable [Teddy] Roosevelt (all of whom were truly great men, if I have any notion of the meaning of that adjective), but Washington seems always to be placid, poised, unexcited.
“Most people like that picture of him in the open boat, crossing the Delaware — by no means posed as a big dictator, frowning upon the slaves of his galley, impatient to be done with them and on his way — but rather as a member, in good and regular standing, of a party of patriots, all equally concerned with a common cause — he not moving any faster than they, all of them in the same boat, he conscious of the value and importance of their oar-strokes to the successful course of this little transport.
“One of the marks of Washington’s greatness was his democratic simplicity. Of old, our Master said to his disciples, apropos of human greatness: ‘You are aware that among the gentiles, their leaders exercise lordship and their greatest men lord it over them; it must not be so among you. Whoever would be greatest must be servant of all.’
“Now, we do not stray far afield when we make this the first test of a genuinely great man. Of course, it is to be admitted that there are many notable historic characters of whom but little could be predicated, were one to judge them by this Galilean standard of greatness. But such conspicuous characters were mostly of the type that shot up, like a red rocket, to flare, dazzlingly, for an hour, in some crucial exigency when, but for their audacity and courage, a great cause might have been lost. And we are quite willing that these meteors should have as much praise as the fixed stars — even if their highest service was rendered at the moment of their extinction.
“But as one turns the pages which certify to the long careers of eminent leaders, one discovers that the great names — the really and truly great, who were so great that little children must be taught to speak pieces about them and the banks close on their birthdays, seven scores of years after their deaths — such great were invariably of the servant type in their attitude toward the state as an institution, and their countrymen as fellow pilgrims.”
[Douglas went on to talk about this attitude of service. I’ll tell you more about that in my next post.]
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