Privilege means obligation to any honest soul."

One's Debts Should be Admitted

Minister Asserts in Sermon on Thanksgiving | Little Payments Now and Then Show Man is Honest, Rev. Jesse Halsey Says

Acknowledgement of debt to the past formed the basis of Dr. Jesse Halsey’s Thanksgiving sermon at the Seventh Presbyterian Church yesterday morning.

Describing the sacrifices with which modern privileges have been bought and comparing life in the United States with life as he saw it in Russia during the Bolshevik uprising, he said:

‘With this in mind—our comforts and their destitution—with this in mind, I ask you and myself—‘Am I a Bolshevik? Will I destroy the wells of the past, or seek to maintain and to build better?’

Using the text, “Wells digged which thou diggest not,” Dr. Halsey said:

“Ancient civilizations developed along the water courses. The Pilgrims chose Plymouth because of its brook. Isaac and Abraham and Jacob built wells. Water is indispensable.”

“We daily use the wells of the fathers. They wrought: we enjoy. Lightly we accept the blessings of home and country, forgetting the awful cost.

Examples Are Given

“Think, then, of some ‘well diggers’ in whose debt you have come within the last few hours. A telegram here is the result of Morse’s experimentation and privation. He had the greatest difficulty in persuading Congress to appropriate money to build the first line of telegraphic communication. Today we use his well, forgetting his labor.

“The shade of Alexander Graham Bell stands by every time you use the telephone. Into your breakfast room this morning came Cyrus McCormick when you made the toast. He with a thousand others who have perfected agricultural machinery and technique are your creditors. Your radio suggests Henry’s experiments, Pupin, Marconi, a thousand more. All this at your disposal for a few dollars—so simplified that a boy of 10 can make a receiving set.

“A railway journey—James Watt is there to see you off. His bubbling teakettle was 12 years becoming a steam engine and then only by starvation and deprivation. Ten thousand men on guard at switch and throttle and keyboard, making your journey safe. Pioneers, blazing trails, fighting savages made your journey possible. The Fair of the Iron Horse staged by the Baltimore and Ohio last month was a marvelous moving picture of the development of transportation. It only emphasizes our debt to the past—to inventors and engineers and investors. Your automobile—the tires alone speak of Goodyear and 12 starving years of experimentation and delayed success. Turn where you will, you only multiply your feeling of obligation.

Newspaper Given as Example

This morning’s paper—10 cents? Back of it, Cadmus, the Phoenician, or whoever it was that invented letters; Gutenberg and moveable types; Hoe and his presses. News gathers at the ends of the earth; syndicated material from the wits and poets and philosophers of every land. All for 10 cents—plus toil and blood and tears. For in Russia, for example, you couldn’t have your newspaper, uncensored. Free speech lies written here between the lines. Runnymede and Magna Carta, a thousand places, ten thousand martyrs—all yours in a newspaper for 10 cents, or two.

“Political rights are yours. Why? Because of Independence Hall and Bunker Hill, and Valley Forge. Track their feet across the blood-stained snow that bitter winter 150 years ago, and then cast your ballot as you handle a sacred thing. A woman in a certain precinct refused a ballot the other day because it was soiled. The clean one she received in its place was marked with blood, the blood of heroes and patriots. Every ballot cast in America is like that, it represents sacrifice. How lightly we use it.

“Your doctor is the most wanted and most needed member of society—at times. He comes armed to fight dread disease, equipped to give you the best science has to give. With the hospital equipment at his disposal he gives you the best that human skill can offer. What did it cost? Well, very much more than your contribution to Christ Hospital or some other. You may have given a large sum, but you’re still in debt! Listen to a bit of the story. Harvey was hounded when he told of his discovery of the circulation of the blood. Lord Lister was laughed at for a decade while he developed antiseptic and aseptic surgery. Sixty years ago Pasteur and Koch were derided while, with painstaking skill and superhuman thoroughness, they perfected the germ theory of disease and produced anti-toxins. On the basis of averages it would be a simple thing to say how many of us are here today because of the introduction of diphtheria anti-toxin alone.

“Think of Martyrs”

“And religion—wells Thou digest not.” Think of the martyrs of religious persecution, the fires of Smithfield, John Bunyan a dozen years in jail for conscience sake. Think of the makers of the first American Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim Fathers—and Mothers. Driven from home, to Holland, a leaky boat on the squally autumnal Atlantic, rockbound shore, deadly pestilence, bleak winter—all for conscience sake. Thanksgiving came out of that. Down on your knees, people, before the altars of your God, grateful for the wells of life given us by our forefathers

I speak to you with the lurid background of revolution in my mind. Ten years ago I was in Russia. All that interminable winter we saw destruction rampant. Wells destroyed, the best fruits of civilization wasted. And with this in mind—our comforts and their destitution—with this in mind I ask you and myself—‘Am I a Bolshevik?’ Will I destroy the wells of the past or seek to maintain and to build better?

“Privilege means obligation to any honest soul. There are many slackers. Taking all the past offers and saying no thanks in word or deed.

“Welldiggers are still needed. There are arid areas in business. Last night I received a booklet—“What the Central Trust Company Can Do for You.” This bank, or any other, is a Temple of Faith; it can promise and guarantee certain things because of the same costly well-digging process that has been going on through the centuries. Business must extend the areas of service and goodwill if ever it lives up to the obligations imposed by the past.

“Next time you open your Bible (today I hope) think of John Wycliffe and of William Tyndale, burned at the stake that you might read in your own tongue the wonderful works of God. Next time some civic duty presents itself remember Saratoga and Lexington. And before the campaign closes tomorrow night send something to Christ Hospital*—you can’t pay your debt in full; make a payment on your account. For you are a debtor to science, you’ve been drinking at a well you never digged.

“In Labrador, where I once lived, when a fisherman gets in debt to a trade, no matter how large the debt, if every year he makes a payment on the debt, even small payment, he is considered an honest man. This is called ‘acknowledging the debt.’ I’d like to acknowledge my debt to the past, today at this Thanksgiving season; I can’t pay it in full, even if I were rich as Croesus, but I can and do acknowledge the debt and with grateful heart will seek to pay a little.”

*(Helen Augusta—b. Feb. 8, 1914 at Bethesda Hospital, Cin.; Wilmun Haynes, b. Sept. 30, 1920, at Christ Hospital, Cin.) 

With thanks to: The Jesse Halsey Manuscript Collection. Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library.
 

The Christmas Driver

Abigail Fithian Halsey "Thanksgiving 1890"

"Let Us Give Thanks!"

November 1932 | Cincinnati Enquirer

"Except These Abide in the Ship Ye Can Not Be Saved"

Jesse Halsey | Thanksgiving 1936

It is a good old New England custom that comes with Thanksgiving to take stock, to consider the assets and liabilities of our social and national life and at the same time that we express gratitude for our privileges to assume the new obligations that entail upon us.

One of the most remarkable things on the world horizon to my notion is the recent election. I am not thinking of the outcome of the election but rather of the process itself. Fifty million people voting for a population of one hundred and twenty million registered their choices without let or hindrance in a peaceful fashion, and this after a campaign marked with considerable heat and vehemence. Nowhere the country over was police or military interference needed. The Republic can take pride in this achievement. Look at Spain, Germany, Italy, or Russia by way of contrast if you need to heighten the impression.

There are recurring waves of popular prejudice that seem to sweep across the public mind at different times. Twenty years ago the railroads were under fire due to a real or supposed attitude on their part expressed in classic form by Commodore Vanderbilt in his reference to the public. More lately, it is the public utilities due to abuse of privilege. Since the Depression, economists and bankers have come in for their share of criticisms—just and unjust. The engineer has had his day both in public favor and out of it. Lately, there has been a new distrust of the scholar. Periodically, the clergyman comes in for his share of current disapproval, either he is too much interested in public affairs and is too practical, or else he is too “other worldly.” There are some who think that our pioneer traditions make great masses of the population resentful of the higher education. This I very much doubt, but at any rate, we are divided into all sorts of groups with differing interests. It is a marvelous thing to me that we manage to get on together so well as we do.

At this Thanksgiving season every right-minded American citizen ought to “highly resolve” as in the presence of his God, that he individually will do all that he can to heal the wounds of the body politic, that no prejudiced word of criticism will escape his lips, that he will be not only tolerant of but generous toward men and women of other faiths and conditions.

The only way that our ship of State can come successfully on her voyage between the Scylla and Charybdis of Fascism and Bolshevism is for all our people, committed to the great ideals of our common heritage, to compose their internal and minor differences with common sense and mutual trust; to put country above party, and faith in God above our denominational differences.

The East Riding of Yorkshire

By Jesse Halsey, c1938

The East Riding of Yorkshire. Thus it was called in the early days. The name has changed but the savor of the old time lingers.

Farmhouses low and sturdy with gray weathered shingles punctuate the flat countryside. Shingles three feet long, rived from red cedar that grew in the swamps, worn thin now where they have defied the east-wind-driven storms of two hundred winters and the bristling heat of as many summers, but with butts still thick enough to cast healthy shadows in endless parallel windows where the long sweeping roofs on the north side slope almost to the ground.

“Regardless of the direction of the highway those houses were set by their builders always facing the south—and the sun and the sea. Farm houses like that, gray and weathered but trim and tight against the weather, were built, some on village streets and some at the hub of the surrounding acres.

Tiny windowpanes peek out, diamond, and square and oblong, most from the days when glass came from over the water and was priced in shillings and pence and is bubble-scarred and blue streaked and is enchantingly distorting as one peers out.

Lanes there are that wind as one did the cow-paths. Lanes with names like this: Job’s Land, Gin Lane, Loylsome Lane, Hither Lane, Further Land, Middle Lane. Some lead through the woods and some across the meadows but all come at long last—or short—to some water, great or small, fresh or salt—any one of a dozen bays or ponds, or the beach banks and the Ocean.

Squat and square brick chimneys anchor the houses to the ground. Within, these chimneys are fed by fireplaces, one in each and every room. Floorboards creak when you enter, boards half as wide as puncheon head. Low ceilings, paneled woodwork, musical H and L hinges on gently squeaking doors.

Leaning barns and wood sheds where eel-spears and clam rakes and harpoons prod the latest agricultural machinery. A discarded seine is sometimes seen, used now for a net for tennis or volley ball, but a swift reminder of days when corn was grown with fish for fertilizer—“two bunkers to a hill.”

By trim white Churches, surmounted by pointing spires, one comes upon ancestral burying rounds where rhymed epitaphs quarrel with life’s adventures to attempt to perpetuate the excellence of some village worthy—or mayhem his idiosyncrasies.

Names nostalgic attach to the villages, reminiscent of Old England—Southwold, Maidstone, Southampton. The music of the Indian words echoes in geographic designations –Quoque, Quioque, Ponquogue, Kumsebog, Shinnecock, Amagansett, Montauk, as the New Yorkers say. Or as the natives say, Montawk. (I am a native.)

Hamlets, two house or a dozen, a mile apart, or two, the names come back as you flash through, remembering the days when in the springless farm wagon it took half the day to take a grist to the mill. Littleworth, Good Ground, Scuttle Hole, and Hecox. Tuckahoe, Seabonac, North Ben, or Hog Neck. Towd and Cobb and Little Cobb, Flying Point, the Sea Poose, and Wickapoque. Then there was—and is—Scuttle Hole and Wainscott, Sag and Sag Harbor, Water Hill and North Sea and Canoe Place.

Captain’s Neck is there, and Cooper’s Neck, First Neck, and Halsey’s Neck is there, and Cooper’s Neck, First Neck, and the Great and Little Plains.

Windmills, a dozen or so, some in wreck, some in good repair, one, or maybe two, still grinding! And Whalebone Landing, Sandy Hollow, and Coopers Hill, The Twelve Acres or Reeves’ Orchard. In each of these my grandfather owned parcels of woodland. They furnished fuel aplenty for his many fire-placed house. He had inherited the woodland from his father, and he from his, for seven generations since the settlement date. I own it now. It is worth little, that land, but it has furnished fuel for Halsey households for nigh on to three hundred years, one generation after another—ten of them now. A cutting of new growth, is ready, say, once each thirty years.

Some of the wood from those parental acres I heap upon the fire tonight—steady burning hickory with a back of fragrant cedar—and in its glow of memory many things come back some out of the dim past. For I have lived a long time. Sometimes I think it must be close on to two centuries. What I mean is this—in fifty years, and odd, I’ve seen in the village where I was born the change from colonial simplicity in belief, in practice, and in custom to the usages of modern mechanized today.

I can remember for example when one family in our community kept Sabbath from Saturday sundown to Sunday evening, when everyone kept Sabbath in some strict form, when many people had candle moulds and some used them. When the few cottagers were called Yorkers. When most families raised and cured their own pork and canned their own fruit and dried their own vegetables. When potatoes and turnips and cabbage were the sole and staple vegetables for nine months of the year. Salt pork, salt codfish, steady diet. Carrots were for horses, pumpkins would keep only up to Christmas and were never canned, hence the untiring profusion of “pumpkin” pie this time of year.

It is as it were, a sprightly evening in early winter and a fire is burning on the hearth. It seldom snaps; it never smokes for grandfather was a skilled mason and knew his trade. Supper is over and the dishes cleared away, from the kitchen come the sounds of cleaning up and the stirring of buckwheat cakes being “set to rise” for breakfast. A Kerosene lamp burns on the erstwhile dining table now covered with a turkey-red damask cloth. In a Boston rocker by the fire sits and old man and on a foot-stool, toasting his shins, stretches a little boy. Whether he is six or eight or ten I cannot quite tell—no it is not the smoke, grandfather was a capable mason—it must be my eyes. Against the wall, so near that the boy can lean on it, is a seaman’s chest. The old man is reading, the boy listening, when he gets drowsy he leans his head on the chest and dozes off, waking with a start as Napoleon leaves Moscow, or Alexander reaches Babylon.

We must open that chest. Its stout rope handle smell of oakum, its battered exterior betrays its history knocking ‘round the seven seas in more than one forecastle. We should like to see what’s inside. The hand-hammered strap hinges gently protest but the boy turns back the lid. I’ve read in William James that smells quicken sure remembrance—well, they are here in urgent suggestions of far Cathay, the Moluccas, of the Celebes and other spice islands. The old people call it “cassia,” though we say cinnamon; this chest must have brought home cassia on occasion: at any rate its lined with strips of red cedar and San Domingo mahogany and sandal wood. It has fragrance when opened that to me is pleasant, though pungent and pervasive.

The boy explores the contents while his father holds the lamp. A broken backed leather bound Bible, with s’s that look like f’s, an old log book, some maps and charts, a volume of town records, a bunch of yellow letters tied with a faded blue linen rag, a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress, a Bodwich’s Navigator and a box that used to hold a sextant. These and some sea shells from the south seas, (the boy holds one to his ear to hear the throbbing ocean), a few small nuggets of gold from California, more books—a lot of junk, so the boy thought—then. Now—with reverence he closes the lid realizing that the chest is empty—except for memories.