Yale University Library.

Smyth , Newman
h Sermon upon the Life and Character
of Frederick Collins...
Quincy, 1878

YALE
UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

A SERMON

The Life and Character

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DELIVERED BY

Rev. NEWMAN SMYTH,

FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH,
QUINCY, ILL.,
February 24th, 1878.

A SERMON

The Life and Character

DELIVEKED BY

Rev. NEWMAN SMYTH,

FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH,

QUINCY, ILL.,

February 24th, 1878.

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Proverbs, xiii: 22. —
A GOOD MAN LEiAVETH AS INHERITANCE TO HIS CHILDREN'S
CHILDREN.
A good man's life is itself an inheritance to children's children.
Once lived it can never be lost from among the imperishable forces.
It continues, an abiding influence, in the lives of other men, and
when one after another friends and children and children's children,
in their appointed time, are gathered to the fathers, still the good
man's life lives on, unnoticed perhaps and indistinguishable, but
still conserved as it blends -with all those pure and gracious influ
ences which God consecrates as the ceaseless ministry of His saints
on earth. We dwell to-day not only through the inheritance of
these bodies in the kingdom of this world, whose motions and whose
life take up the tremors of its forces through the ages past, and
whose atoms vibrate to the touch of influences from all the stars,
but also through our spiritual birthright we dwell in a kingdom
which is in this world but not of it — the unseen kingdom of God —
in whose increasing grace and power prophets and apostles, and the
long succession of chosen Christian men, have a perpetual ministry.
There is a two-fold immortality, the life of a spirit in glory and the
continuous influence of the good man's life on earth. The evening
light fades from our vision; it has changed our skies for an hour;
the earth is henceforth different for the flight of those sunbeams
through its clouded air; and the sunbeams themselves fly on, into
what realms within realms of nature more ethereal we can not tell;
we only know that in God's larger Providence there is no waste nor
loss. So the living spirit continues its course among the stars, and
the influence left behind upon this earth enters into its permanent

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forces. And now that another father in Israel has entered within
the veil, and left us gazing into the heavens and wondering whither
he has gone — what activities of heart enlarged and spirit disen
thralled are his along the ways of God in the unseen glory — it is for
us, as we take up our lowlier tasks, to recount the gain which we
have received from a good man's life whose influence shall linger
upon the earth, abiding in our memories of it, a rich inheritance to
children's children.
Frederick Collins treasured up to new usefulness in his own per
son the lives of true men and noble women who had gone before
him. Wound around the very core of nature are those laws of
hereditary descent which formed the warp of the history of the
chosen people, and which bind the generations within their elastic,
but unbroken, network into one human race — those laws of the
Eternal which ordain that the iniquities of the fathers shall be
visited upon the third and fourth generations of them that hate him,
and that the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting
upon them that fear him, and His righteousness unto children's
children. When then we search for the secret of this successful life, we
should expect, in accordance with these laws, to find among its
natural antecedents a succession of God-fearing men, and honorable
Christian women. With this expectation I opened the book of the
family history of Frederick Collins to find the word of the covenant-
keeping God again proved true in his life. The natural decision
and promptness which characterized him can be traced back to a
vigorous Saxon ancestry; and the uprightness of the man had its
earthly origin in the conscientiousness of a Puritan home. When
we reflect that the names of all, or nearly all, of the children, and
the grand- children who have reached maturity, of this branch of a
large family, are enrolled in the membership of the church; it is in
structive to turn back to the account of that Puritan ship-builder,
Thomas Morris, who came in one of the companies of the early pil
grims in the year 1637, to Massachusetts Bay, and whose name was
signed to that Plantation covenant of Connecticut in which those
founders of our civil institutions agreed that "in all public offices
which concern civil order, as choice of magistrates and officers,
making and repealing laws, dividing allotments of inheritance and
all things of a like nature, they would all of them be ordered by the
rules which the Scriptures held forth to them." The line of descent
runs from the pilgrim sire to a grandson of the era of the revolution,

who is described as a Puritan of the best type, and who was a deacon
of the East Haven church in Connecticut. His daughter Esther mar
ried William Collins, a deacon in the church of which Lyman Beecher
was the pastor. The character of a father who was industrious, en
terprising, and unfeignedly pious, and a mother who was habitually
happy and cheerful, even in the sufferings of her declining years, •
and who gave to death, at last, a Christian's welcome, were met and
transmitted in the sons who were among the pioneers to whom this
State of Illinois is indebted for some of the best elements of its
civilization. Frederick Collins, who was the last of this family, was
born February 24, 1804, — to-day, had he lived, would have been
his 74th birthday. As early as the year 1821, in his seventeenth
year, he took that decided Christian step, which determined the
direction of his whole subsequent life. His* family moved in 1822
to Collinsville in this State, and there began their service in
transplanting the best social and religious influences of their New
England home to this virgin soil. He was married January 1st,
1829, to Mary L. Allen — another year would have brought him to
his golden wedding, but these forty-nine years now wait for an
anniversary more precious than gold among the eternal welcomes.
I need not delay with the outward frame-work of his life from
that time until in the year 1851 he made this city his home; — the
outward passes away, it is the inward life that remains, and which
we should cherish. Two services, however, the one a work wrought
in the enthusiasm of his Christian youth, the other a position firm
ly held in his Christian manhood, stand out from among the events
of his life, marking at once the character of the man and the history
of the times. The enterprising deacon and his five sons, after first
settling the affairs of religion and education, the church and the
school, had erected at great expense an extensive distillery. It
was hardly in successful operation before their old pastor, Dr.
Lyman Beecher, aroused to the evil of intemperance, rang out from
that famous Litchfield pulpit his trumpet-peals to the consciences
of all Christian men. His voice reached this Puritan family in the
then far West. Remember, on the one hand, was an extensive in
vestment, a pleasant family and commercial relationship, and a bu
siness beginning to be lucrative, and, on the other hand, were two
centuries of Puritan blood and the grace of God. Once aroused
conscience became all commanding. That imperious word, ought,
followed by pilgrims across the waves, honored by father, mother,
and sons, again demanded unconditional surrender. And its man-

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date was obeyed. Dollars and cents counted for nothing, right
eousness became all and in all. Father and sons together destroy
ed the work of their own hands, refusing so much as to sell any
implement used in their distillery to others, but breaking with their
own hands the copper stills — making thus a strange echo ring back
from their blows to Lyman Beecher's voice from the old Litchfield
pulpit. And upon the corner-stones of that distillery was raised a
Christian Church! So may the Temple of Life rise everywhere
over the ruins of the house of death!
Some years after that signal triumph of conscience, in face of
urgent remonstrances, and in spite of legal restrictions, another dis
tillery was built near that same site. The proprietors boasted
that they would make their fortunes. Daily, the Sabbath not ex
cepted, their team would pass hauling whiskey to St. Louis. But
one afternoon their large mash-tub, filled with its boiling contents,
burst its hoops, and mortally scalded two of the three proprietors,
and three of the workmen. We may not forget our Saviour's cau
tion with regard to passing judgment against those upon whom the
tower of Siloam fell — but when I think on the one hand of those
five brothers living to honored age, and by losing their livelihood
finding it again, and, on the other hand, of those five bodies, horri
bly macerated, and those widows and fourteen orphan children of
men who meant to make their fortunes in spite of conscience, I
cannot but feel that it is safer for us always to take our stand on
the moral law, and to follow duty whithersoever it may lead.*
The other prominent feature of Mr. Collins' life was one which at
this distance from the great conflict in which the issue has been
forever settled we can judge without partiality, and mention with
out bitterness. No child now need blush because that term of re
proach, an abolitionist, was once cast at a father's name. Mr.
Collins was a firm, fearless abolitionist; he spoke and reasoned for
the cause which seemed to him right, when to stand for such prin
ciples was neither profitable nor safe. At one time he was the
candidate of the free-soil party for Lieutentant Governor of the
State. In one of the briefs of his anti-slavery speeches, which has
been handed me, I find at the close of a calm, careful argumeht
this heading: "Means to be used to promote these principles: —
First, Speaking the truth in love." It was perhaps largely owing
*Since the above was written I have been informed that subsequently another distillery was
built near that same place, which was burned down ; a fourth attempt at a distillery was then
made, which has proved to be the financial ruin of its owner and is now closed up.

m
to his rare tact in speaking the truth in love that while others suf
fered more severe consequences in life and limb, Mr. Collins was
only burned in effigy, the figure of a slave-woman by his side.
Those effigies, in all the coming years of freedom, children's chil
dren may remember among the honors of his life!
Mr. Collins' principles, and his manner of advocating them, with
regard to these two moral questions, one of which is happily set
tled, and the other of which is not yet laid — slavery and intempe
rance — 1 can in no way present more justly than by reading the
following extract from a speech delivered by him before the Gen
eral Assembly of his church in May 1846. It is in reply to this re
mark which a delegate had offered, "There is no trouble unless
some one makes it."
"Mr. Moderator — Twenty-two years since, I was engaged with some others in
Illinois in making whiskey, and thought no wrong in it, although once in a while
some of Cheever's imps might flit across the angle of vision, making one wince
and dodge a little. Still I thought the article useful and habit seemed to make it
necessary The subject of Temperance began to be talked of away down East
and the sin of making, vending, and drinking, exposed ; but like the Asiatic
cholera this agitation was a great way off and would do us no harm. We agreed
that it was much better for good pious Christians to make a»id vend the article than
wicked men; because they did up the business on moral principles and a portion of
the net proceeds were used to promote the preaching of the Gospel, which we be
lieved was designed to correct all of the evils of the world, consequently we did not
think such agitation necessary. But soon the subject of Temperance reached the
far West. * * * We resisted the light and truth and love which was shed
around and upon us going forward with our business in all good conscience. But
light shone with increased and steady brilliancy till the Hydra-headed monster
stood out in bold relief in all of its hateful forms ; and immediately, conferring
not with flesh and blood, with sledge in hand, we literally crushed the head of the
'worm of the still.'
We thus learned indeed that there was no trouble except some one made it, but
we found the shoe on the wrong foot.
Mr. Moderator, I have no time to run a parallel ; but having made one line, I
believe all present can make another."
Those even, if any there are here, who would judge otherwise
now the position which Mr. Collins then took, can let the memory
of evil days pass in their own rejoicing in the fulfillment of this
prediction, which I find at the end of one of Mr. Collins' speeches,
made as early as the year 1834, in commemoration of the act of
emancipation in the West Indies.
"For, methinlvs, the time is not far distant when our own country will celebrate a
day of emancipation, within her own borders, and consistent songs of freedom shall
indeed ring through the length and the breadth of the land."

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Mr. Collins in the latter years of his life was singularly free
from that misfortune which is the too common lot of conspicuous
Christian characters in an evil world. Through the general esteem
in which he was held in this community, and among those who had
had business relations with him for nearly half a century, the breath of
suspicion hardly ventured to pass. There are not many men whose
memories children have to guard against so few unjust reproaches,
and even those persons, infecting every community, whose own con
sciousness makes them ready to prove their fellow-men insincere or
venal, do not disturb us as we mourn to-day the loss of an honest
man. He himself would have been the last to deny that like others
he was a sinful man needing the mercy of the sinless One. His
faults he was ready to confess, and he knew that even to the last he
must strive against the sins which do so easily beset us. There is
none good, but One. But the faults of this man, I who have seen
him only in the ripeness of a character that had been maturing for
over fifty years, hardly know how they should be named; and I
hasten then to these three great truths of character which it has
seemed to me were well exemplified in his useful life, and happy
death, three truths of goodness, — what goodness is, how much
goodness can do on earth, how greatly goodness may be blessed of
Heaven. The sketch thus briefly drawn is enough to show that the vital
power of his life was principle. But the heart of his principle
was his religion. His principles of conduct did not wither nor
fail, because they struck their roots down into the deep piety which
was in his heart, Christ's fountain of living waters. His was a
morality toward man which grew out of his morality toward God.
Because with his heart he sought to keep the first commandment,
he could the better keep the second. Men found him just and
reverent of the rights of others because the Father in Heaven heard
him pray in secret, Hallowed be thy name. The church had in
him its zealous servant, its faithful officer, and its friend true to the
last pulsation of his heart, because God saw in him a man whose
life-long prayer had been, Thy kingdom come. The world recog
nized in him an unselfish man, solicitous for the true well-fare of
his fellow-men, because the God of grace saw in him a man whose
daily petition was,. Thy will be done in earth as it is in Heaven. Men
in trouble and men under obligation to him found him not a hard
man but a friend, because God saw him in his closet to be a man
who prayed, Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our

[9]
debts as we forgive our debtors. Merchants and bankers regarded
him as a man whose word was as good as his bond, because God
marked in him a man whose prayer morning and evening was, Lead
us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. And the angel of
life, whom we in our little faith call the angel of death, found in
him a man waiting and willing to go, because in his heart God gave
him the witness of the Spirit that in the new song of the Lamb
his ransomed soul should continue this Psalm of his life— For thine
is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.
So the Lord's prayer was at the heart of his goodness; and we, re
membering his balanced virtues, and his character kept as few so
well unspotted from the world, own this first great lesson of his life
that a simple religious faith is the best morality, and a life consecrated
to the Lord and his Christ the truest life in the sight of men. Of
the more personal type of his religious experience, of those char
acteristics which are partly the result of natural temperament, and
partly of education, brief mention need only be made. His was a
mind too reflective and clear not to hold a well-defined creed, and to
grasp firmly the leading doctrines of his church. He was always
ready to give decided testimony to his own faith. His religious
principles had been formed in that season of comparative calm
which succeeded the dying away of the stormy infidelity of the
eighteenth century, and which preceded the scepticism whose
doubts, gathering from other quarters, first beclouded some eminent
and solitary thinkers, and now are sweeping down over the popular
faith, — though happily many lofty minds have already broken
through the driving mists, and on the summits of our nineteenth
century civilization at evening time it shall be light. A faith
formed and fostered in this happy lull between the religious storms
of the two centuries, was not likely to be disturbed by the subtle
questions of to-day's unbelief. But that natural reasonableness,
and that culture of grace, which together constitute the Apostolic
charism of spiritual common-sense, gave to Mr. Collins often a fine
tact in meeting and speaking the healing word to persons into whose
spiritual perplexities he had not himself been called through his
own experience to enter. Rejoicing to detect in any heart the
essentials of faith, and confident, also, in his own clear belief that
whosoever doeth the will of God shall know of the doctrine, he has
been for twenty-two years a wise and sympathetic elder of this
church, and especially in his latter days has readily found his way
into the spiritual confidence of some whose intellectual conceptions
might have seemed widely divergent from his own.

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I cannot refrain in this connection from bringing my own testi
mony to one grace of his last days, which often in my intercourse
with him has left a grateful impression upon me, and which, per
haps, is all the more worthy of honor because it is too rare a grace —
I mean his docility. It could hardly have heen expected that one
of so much natural decision, and experience so matured, would
have been ready, as he seemed to be, to listen as a child to those to
whom he might well have been a teacher, or even to receive with a
tolerant wisdom new ideas upon which he saw the faith of younger
men lived, though he needed them not himself. "Tell me," he said
one day in the last months of his ripening life, "Tell me what the
simple plan of salvation is;" and as he sat ready to listen, the aged
disciple, as though out of the mouth of babes and sucklings, God
still could perfect praise, I could not but think that the plan of
salvation is indeed very simple; — a Father in Heaven, a man of sor
rows wounded for our transgressions, a Spirit of Truth come unto
us, and on our part a humble and a contrite heart.
This life which brings to us anew the lesson taught by all the
saints, what goodness is, impresses us, also, with a sense of how
much goodness can do on earth. "Not by might, nor by power, but
by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts." God gave him the natural en
dowment for a successful life, as he* has given the inheritance of a
sturdy and honorable ancestry to many other men, who, nevertheless,
have failed. Nature intends many and many men for usefulness,.
and lives as successful as his, who fail of nature's first intention
because they lack the goodness whose law is grace. A man may in
deed be great and bad, as one may also be good and. small; but the
bad man can only be a great man for a few years of earthly domin
ion, and the good man can be a small man only for a few years of
earthly blindness; and throughout human history and again in this
life is Christ's word proved true, "He that is greatest among you
shall be your servant."
How much, through faith and prayer, Mr. Collins accomplished,
how great the success of religion in his work, it is not for us in our
erring human scales to judge; we know that two churches were
founded by his early efforts; that often in the absence of an or
dained shepherd, he gathered the flock to listen while he read; and
that in ways of Christian influence, which we can hardly tell, this
church will miss his presence and his voice. The general feeling
of loss, reaching beyond our own communion and calling to his

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funeral services the President of Illinois College, of which he had
been the Trustee and benefactor, as well as grateful memories of
the poor, and the sense of benefaction among the secrets of many
hearts helped by him in the Christian life, may measure better than
any words of mine, how much the grace of the Lord has wrought
through this man's life for his fellow- men.
How much, moreover, in him goodness has been blessed of
Heaven, we all of us have known. While in this world of moral
confusions, evil so often rides in purple and humble goodness goes
afoot; while there is so much in the unequal disposition of men's
lives to make us sometimes wonder how the just God can wait in
the patience of the centuries till the day of final judgment comes, it
certainly is a pleasure to know that there are lives in which no
enemy prevents virtue from reaping its own rewards, and we all
may well rejoice together that in Mr. Collins' life the course of
natural good has again been seen to run in the grooves of the moral
order, and another man who delighted in the law of the Lord has
been like a tree planted by the rivers of water that bringeth forth
his fruit in his season; his leaf also has not withered, and whatso
ever he hath done hath prospered. It would be pressing too rudely
over the threshold of household joys to that inner and sacred hearth
where the good man gathers around him God's best gifts, and
where, after he has gone with Christ to prepare a place for the
future home of his own, still linger those hallowed memories into
which a thoughtful Christian sympathy may not intrude, should I
endeavor to number the blessings with which Heaven filled his cup.
"I have been trying since yesterday," he once said to me, "to re
count my blessings, but I have not yet begun to number them all."
We can not but feel that the prosperity in business which has at
tended the life of the young man, who once destroyed the most lu
crative part of his own business for the sake of principle, illustrates
again the promise of the Lord: "Every one that hath forsaken
houses, or brothers or sisters, or father or mother, or wife or children,
or lands, for my name.'s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall
inherit everlasting life "
And he was blessed, likewise, in his death. Perfect love casteth
out fear, and there was no fear in the pilgrim's heart as he entered
that dark stream which all must cross. "That will be good news
for my side of the house" was his welcome to death's call, and al
most the last words of the Christian were, "Jesus give me breath
and I will praise thee." And Jesus who alone knew what death

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is, always called it what it seemed to be in that Christian's chamber
as he fell asleep.*
Men and brethren, fathers and elders of this church, and you,
especially, the young, for whom he watched and prayed— solemnly,
humbly, thankfully, let us gather up the words af the Lord to us in
this honored life and blessed sleep. The voice of the Lord comes
to us again by his servant, saying great words of duty, simple
words of charity, strong words of faith, cheering words of the hope
that is anchored within the veil. We shall not soon lose from our
meetings of prayer the echoes of that voice that now speaks from
the Heavens. And to-day I should fail to do him justice did I not
present — and it is no mere fancy which leads me to think that were
he able to direct my speech of him, he would bid me almost impa
tiently hasten through these words of measured praise, that I
might in his name present — the two great objects pertaining to
God's kingdom here, which seemed always on his heart as the end
drew near. The one was the work of the Lord among the young.
He wanted to see you all in the church, he wanted to see you all
active in the church. "Every day of the year is an important day," —
this sentence, which I find in one of his early speeches, might be a
fit motto for all young men. His Christian service began almost
in his boyhood. A church member at the age of seventeen, the
Superintendent of a Sunday school at the age of twenty, an elder
in the church at the age of twenty-five, so he gave the dew of his
youth and the first fruits of his life to the Lord; and we can well
imagine what memories of those first glad services reaching
through the lengthening years led him to call the young to his side
in his last sickness, and to urge them to be strong in the Lord. He
has left his work in your hands. May you all have part in it, it is a
good work. May those prayers born of love and winged with faith
which in his failing strength, and from amid his sufferings, went up
daily to Heaven's gate for you, return now from the skies as the
benediction of his finished life, making your lives Christian, manly,
womanly, honorable, blessed, like his own.
And the other burden upon his heart, any one who visited him
in his sickness knows what it was. Almost the first question which
he used to ask would be, are they doing anything on the new
church to-day? It seemed almost that he in his sick chamber knew
better than we who had eyes to see, just how far each day the work
was carfied, so particular were his questions, and so much was that
*Mr. Collins died Feb. loth, 1878.

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building on his heart. He longed to see the ' rising spire, he
thought he never should. But God sent to his ebbing life a re
turning tide of strength, and he gazed upon that finished shaft, and
those solid walls, as a father would welcome the sight of a long-
absent, much thought of, son. He told me once that on a Sunday
when pain had been God's messenger to him that day, he had but
two wishes, the one was to worship God once in our new church,
and the other was to worship him then in the Temple not made
with hands. The one wish has been answered. The other wish be
comes a charge left for us to meet. He felt that the kingdom of
God demanded that we should not pause nor tarry in our work.
He felt that we should do now with our might what our hands find
to do. He felt that the poor should give of their poverty, and the
rich of their abundance, and all with willing hearts. So he felt
and.spake and prayed, so would he plead to-day, as he used to wish
that he had the strength to appear but once more, and appeal to a
generous people for the Lord's house, for the beauty and the praise
of our Zion. '
Does there not come to us in the service of this day, not from
him alone, but from all the sainted dead into whose labors we have
entered here, from those still honored fathers and mothers of other
days by whose toils and sacrifices this church was built and carried
forward, as well as from those but lately with us, so many of whom
have within the last few years entered into th<*ir rest, a voice of
duty and of good hope, bidding us go forward in our work — their
work and ours — and to make no delay?
Why should we not begin at once a memorial work? A memo
rial work for all those whose lives and memtfries are the rich inher
itance of this people, a memorial work upon which, if spirits know
aught of earth, they can look down with grateful joy, and behold
that their toils and gifts are treasured up by our hands in the com
pleted church, which holds already in its massive wall the corner
stone of the old once laid by them in prayer; a memorial work which
shall enable us soon to enter with songs and thanksgivings a Tem
ple of the Lord founded in strength and finished in beauty, beneath
whose vaulted roof, and within whose ample arches, we may forget
the world, and the separations of earth, and in the fellowship of the
saints, and the communion of the Spirit, worship Him that liveth
forever and ever, before whose throne the elders fall down and
worship, and cast their crowns saying, Thou art worthy, O'Lord, to
receive glory and honor and power. Amen.

YALE UNIVERSITY

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