Our sermon this morning is going to be one that was delivered to this congregation on November 5, 1916 by The Rev. Dr. Charles Parker Connolly, minister of this church from 1913-1942. Two weeks ago we acknowledged the gift of this portrait of Dr. Connolly. This morning I want to take just a few minutes to give a verbal sketch of this important contributor to our history.

Charles Parker Connolly was born on May 1, 1869 in Warren, Ohio, the son of James and Catherine Parker Connolly. His family moved to Long Branch, NJ where his father became assistant editor of the Long Branch News.

After graduating from high school, Dr. Connolly worked for three years as a railroad stenographer and typist. He then attended Dickinson College, from which he received a BA and a Phi Beta Kappa key in 1895 . He was an orator, and placed second in a national contest for speeches on prohibition, which he supported at that time. While at Dickinson, he also studied theology and spent two years following his graduation as minister of Methodist Churches in Pennsylvania. He then attended Union Theological Seminary in New York City, from which he received his Bachelor of Divinity, Magna cum laude.

He served Congregational churches in Hiawatha and Leavenworth, Kansas, and in Milwaukee, before coming to Rockford. While in Hiawatha, he married Ellen Wilder Lawrence, daughter of a friend of Abe Lincoln.

When the pulpit of this congregation became vacant in 1913, the minister of the Second Congregational Church recommended Dr. Connolly. On March 31st a call was extended, and on April 5th, he wrote:

I appreciate the hearty call of your church to serve as its pastor. After much reflection, I am convinced that this call is one of Opportunity, Duty, and Joy combined, and I accept it with a determination to give the best that is in me to the work. Surely a church with such broad-minded people and social spirit has a practical mission to the City. I shall come to love and to be loved."
He began on May 1st of that year, and served the congregation and the community until his retirement in 1942, when he was made minister emeritus.

Given the length of his sermons, since brevity was not his forte, we do not have time to catalog his contributions to the church and community. Let me share with you these words from a letter he wrote to the congregation on his 90th birthday:

I try to think scientifically, realistically, and naturally, but what is more natural and realistic and scientific than nature herself; and it is nature that gives us spring after every winter. Nature puts the buds on the trees, the warmth in the air, the songs of birds in our ear, the vision of young green grass on ground that but a few weeks before was frozen hard. . . . I love our church . . . above all because it has believed in the supreme importance of trying to serve people. This feeling has inspired the church from its inception."
He died in 1960 at the age of 91. In his memorial service, Alan Deale observed

"As husband, as father, as minister, as scholar, as poet, and as civic leader our Charles Parker Connolly did everything in the warmth of love. This is a better world because of him. We were touched by greatness and at times did not realize it. We were touched by greatness. He belonged to us and now he belongs to the ages."
After we take this opportunity to be charmed by beautiful music and to give to the support of this church, our church, to which Dr. Connolly gave so much, I will share with you a sermon from a series Dr. Connolly delivered eighty years ago, in the fall of 1916 on the creed by which he lived.

"The Path of Love"
The Unitarian Universalist Church
Rockford, IL
written by Dr. Charles Parker Connolly 11/5/16

delivered by Dave Weissbard on 5/12/96

[radium people]

Our old planet has sheltered millions and billions of human beings. As we sweep in imagination over the whole sea of human life the vast majority of individuals seem like momentary waves -- they merge from the surface for an instant in distinct form and then disappear again. They came, leaving as their only record a bubble or two, soon to burst. Too forceless to add anything significant to life, too indifferent to advance, too thoughtless to grasp the problem of human existence, the great masses have lived and died without permanent individual significance. The utter insignificance of their careers is the infinite pathos of history. Most of them lived leaden lives; a few, silver lives; still less, golden lives. We are not concerned this morning with lives of lead, silver, nor even lives of gold. We are concerned with an exceedingly small and immensely significant minority -the minority [I have previously described] as truth seekers. I call them the radium people. Radium, happily symbolizes their significance in three respects: rarity, radioactivity, and preciousness.

To assist me now will you kindly perform a little mental arithmetic. Please multiply a million by a million. Thank you! Now multiply that by six thousand and you have what? Yes, six quadrillions. Call those tons, and you have the weight of this earth. I do not wish to deceive you. I have never weighed it myself. I take this total on the word of scientists. Kindly multiply the six quadrillions by two thousand to convert it into pounds and then that total by 16 to convert it into ounces, and the result is one hundred and ninety quintillions, or for convenience that is 192 with 16 ciphers (0's) after it. This is the weight of the earth in ounces. Of this inconceivable gigantic total take only four ounces and you have the total amount of radium known to exist in the world at the time the last edition of the Standard dictionary was published. Radium is certainly rare. Its preciousness is appreciated by comparing it to gold. Gold is worth about $16.50 an ounce. Radium was, a few years ago, worth $2,100,000 an ounce - that is over 180,000 times as much as gold. We need not discuss radium's familiar and remarkable property of radiation. Certainly radium is extremely rare, precious, and radioactive.In these three respects, I repeat that radium fittingly symbolizes the lives of the world's eminent truth-seekers, and you will therefore permit them to be called radium-people.

We are not here this morning to praise or eulogize those people. We are here to ask them a question -- the supreme question: "What is the meaning of life?" As radium is worth far more than gold, so the answer of these radium people is worth far more to us than the answer of the insignificant millions who have answered by their lives that life is eating, drinking, sleeping, drifting, drudging, dying. Socrates is worth more to the student than all the other citizens of Athens. Jesus is more valuable than all the others of the whole century of men and women around him.

In consulting the radium people we are impressed first of all with the fact that they all give us precisely the same answer in substance. There is absolute unanimity upon this basic problem of life. Yet the way that each truth seeker makes his [or her] answer is both interesting and instructive. I wish, therefore, to let these people speak to you again. In their unanimous verdict and differing phrases we shall find fresh courage, deeper conviction.

[Socrates]

First of all, as the first illustrious truth seeker of the ancient world, we call upon Socrates. He is more alive today than many a person upon the street. In the great universities where some of our young people are preparing for the leadership of the future, Tom, Dick and [M]ary upon the streets, who eat and drink and mouth their prejudices, mistaking them for thought; and repeating their vulgarity, mistaking it for humor; and go to cheap vaudeville shows, mistaking them for entertainment, are absolutely unknown, but Socrates by a culture defying time and space speaks tothose students bidding them open wide their minds to the entrance of light, and the dauntless quest of truth. What answer does the great Father of Truth Seekers give to his children throughout the ages?

This is his wonderful answer. "Love is the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the gods, desired by those who have no part in him, and precious to those who have the better part in him; parent of delicacy, luxury, desire, fondness, softness, grace; careful of the good, uncareful of the evil, in every word, work, wish, fear, -- pilot, helper, defender, saviour, glory of gods and men . . . Love is something more than the desire of beauty. One who has the instinct of true love, and can discern the relations of true beauty in every form, will go on from strength to strength, until at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, and he or she will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty, in the likeness of no human face or form, but absolute, simple, separate, and everlasting."

[Jesus]

What says Jesus, our next illustrious truth-seeker? The great fact about him is nothing short of profoundly significant. Jesus has but one absolutely new, fresh thing to say. All the rest is but a fine quoting of the best that the prophets and his contemporaries had to say. But he said one absolutely new, immeasurably impressive and valuable thing. "A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another even as I have loved you."

[Goethe]

We skip many generations. We come to modern Germany. She has given us many truth seekers and has thereby invigorated the culture of all the great universities of the world. Today her idea of government may not appeal to you. But when we let not her present leaders but her greatest scholar speak for the nobler Germany of the German people then we have precisely the right answer and the great Goethe re-echoes the wisdom of Socrates and Jesus. He says to Eckerman, who records the fine utterance, "Love engenders love and one who is love can wisely govern." Elsewhere he says "We lean to know nothing but what we love." Our own Charles W. Eliot was but echoing the sentiment of wisdom when he said "There is not a subject in the whole range of human knowledge that will not develop to a high degree in a mind which loves it."

[Shakespeare]

Shakespeare is certainly another radium person not because of his remarkable dramatic power, nor because of that mastery of words that make his phrases surge in literature and sing in memory, but pre-eminently because he held the glass up to nature. He tried to reflect the truth in the lives of people about him. He was essentially a truth-seeker and truth-presenter. It would do him injustice to quote the utterance of any one of his characters to express the supreme answer of the myriad-minded man. I shall let TenBrink, a singularly sympathetic interpreter of Shakespeare answer for him. He says, "To Shakespeare the best thing on earth is love, self-sacrificing, active; and he feels that it is infinite love which pervades and animates the universe.

[Greene]

John R. Greene, the historian of England, may be called a truth seeker in history. As a result he gives us a history of people and not the old wearisome playing of fife and drum and chronicles of insignificant kings and queens and gilded puppets in their courts. We expect from so judicious and discriminating a historian a profound insight as to the meaning of life. Mr. Green writes to Mrs Humphrey Ward, "You are quite right to fall in love with your subject -- nobody does any good with any work he does not fall extravagantly in love with. That is why the cool-headed young Oxford men fail to do any good in the world."

[Emerson]

We come at last to our own land. We have produced two great philosophers. First, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Yankee Plato, as he has been called. Unquestionably one of the radium people of history, who has radiated truth that has reached Russia and Japan. He said "Love would put a new face on this weary old world in which we dwell as [barbarians] and enemies too long and it would warm the heart to see how fast the vain diplomacy of statesmen, the impotence of armies and navies, and lines of defense would be superseded by this unarmed child. Love will creep where it cannot go, will accomplish that by imperceptible methods -- being its own lever, fulcrum, and powers -- which force could never achieve."

[James]

The lamented Professor William James, pronounced by Chesterton "the turning point in history of our own time," and by another admirer "that incandescent American." James said, "The passion of love . . . If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it, yet it transforms the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like gray to rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life."

[unanimity for love]

For all those hard-hearted people who want the facts, who are suspicious of all kinds of faith because of the unfortunate associations of faith with credulity, bigotry, fanaticism and superstition in the past, for all hard-headed people the testimony of these radium people ought to be immensely impressive. They are absolutely agreed that people don't live, they only exist, until they love. They take up the word love and express it in varying phrases according to their genius until the effect is as musical as when a great musical composer takes some musical idea and puts it in variously harmonized passages to enrich its meaning. The result is that the deeply sincere investigator cannot escape this unanimous verdict of the radium people. The wisdom and the music of life speaks to all through their greatness. Certainly if the foremost people of the world cannot be trusted in the one ideal upon which they are completely agreed, then no independent thinker of any real force can dare to stultify himself or herself by putting their single judgement against this collective unanimous wisdom. Let the people of lead - the pessimists, let the people silver - the superficial, let the people of gold, the merely erudite, be silent, for the radium people have spoken. Life means love. If life does not mean love, then truth-seeking is not worth- while, for this is the verdict of the highest truth seekers, then ignorance and superstition may usurp the throne of truth and we must denounce the leaders we have revered - Socrates, Jesus, Goethe, Shakespeare, Greene, Emerson, James.

[radium experiences]

But that which makes any such preposterous overturning of genius impossible, that which makes the majority of us subscribe to the verdict of these thinkers is that our own radium moments of life match the verdict of the radium people. I mean this. We all have a few experiences in life which shine out incandescently. They were moments of deep insight of great and beautiful emotion; rare, precious, radiant. We might call then the radium hours of life when vision became clarified. I don't care precisely what form the words might take within which you describe those hours, nor precisely what thoughts were uppermost, but upon one thing I do insist: those radium moments were moments of love. They were loyal to love even if unconscious at the time that love was the precise expression of their meaning and beauty. In that little life history where each one sums up in the self something of the follies and failings and aspirations of the whole history of humankind at large,, we have radium moments to match the radium people, and those are our own moments of deep love. To them we must return as to a bright light to throw illumination upon the page of existence. To them we must return for warmth, for our aspirations grow cold, our hopes grow frigid, and the radiating hours of illumination and warmth in the past invite us back to their light and comfort.

Do you ask me then why I include the path of love in my creed? It is because the radium people whom I cannot help but admire and respect unanimously, emphatically, gloriously command me to put it in. And then my own radium moments of life confirm them with a grand "Amen."

Life to me means the opportunity to love; it should mean nothing lower, it can mean nothing higher.

[heaven]

There is one other experience of people that suggests radium. That is hope. Radium-like, because it is extremely precious, because it keeps radiating incessantly throughout history from, stricken, darkened lived. Before closing I wish to consider with one great hope of people: the hope of heaven.

It is easy for us to poke fun at our theological forbears with their fantastic hope of a distant heaven, with its insipid piety, its perpetual passivity, its total absence of any noble appeal to active powers. But with all of us who are truly tolerant and human, I think that ridicule turns to pity when we consider why people dream of a future heaven. They had tasted the bitterness of earth, they had beheld aghast its fierce injustice. They had toiled wearily and receive scanty remuneration. A deep dark despair of earth settled upon them. The only way they could avoid a withering pessimism was to keep hope alive in some other soil. They sang "Earth is a desert drear, heaven is my home." They believed that earth had not the materials nor the capacity for their ideals. When you think of the hope of a celestial paradise in the breasts of those people where it lived, not a faint echo of tradition but as an actual protest against the vice and crime of the world and as a glorious hope of divine victory, you cannot but pity them and you do not wonder that these people who tried to be very pious had little interest in trying to reform this earth. Why should they do so?

They conceived of the world as a sinking ship. The one thing, the only thing to do was to man the life boat and to save as many lives as possible, The life boat was the church. The orthodox preachers the oarsmen. Friends, it is all very logical if we once grant at the outset that this world is hopeless; that this is indeed a sinking ship, a hopeless proposition, that the has no capacity for real progress. One who tries to regild and repaint a sinking ship instead of rushing to the lifeboats is a fool.

[heaven here]

But a very marvelous thing has happened in this generation. We are so busy trying to keep up with the rush of modern life that we take too many things for granted, and perhaps we have taken this transformation of thought for granted without giving its marvelousness and significance sufficient meditation. We don't think that the ship is sinking. We think it is sailing onward. We are transforming it. People today are beginning to believe that this world has capacity for heaven. That is the reason that our interest has shifted from theology to sociology. Theology in the past was interested in angels with wings. Today we believe that beings without wings but with social usefulness are far nobler than the prettiest angel that ever graced the fanciful canvass of the finest painter of the past. Our young women in our colleges when they get the best impulse that a college ever has to offer, the practical sociological impulse, never sing "I want to be an angel" but they sing, "I want to be a Jane Addams.," This means a positive revolution. Hope has descended from the azure blue and has made her nest on the earth. People are interested in heaven-making here! Our orthodox theological grandparents would be amazed at our inventions today and we have often wondered what they would say at the electric light, the phonograph, and the telephone and such things. But there is one modern thing that would astound them far more. As the pious religious leaders of his day were amazed that Jesus could expect anything of the lowly men and women with whom he went, so these grandparents of ours would be amazed at our lack of morality and respectability in expecting that our of anything so hopelessly sinful, tangled and corrupt as this world, that anything worth while could be made. There is a vast difference between the middle age charity that gave alms in order to get a ticket to heaven, and the charity of today that is trying to reach the needy and make their lives more heavenly. It is the profound revolution of history.

[the Greek ideal]

Mr. Steffins told us that Mexico might each us much. Its lesson is a partial exemplification of the Greek quest of beauty. Those of us who [recently] recalled the fascinating book of Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson on the Greek Life were extremely interested in this resurgence of the Hellenic people among a crude population near at hand. We realized, of course, that it is to Greece rather than Mexico that we go to appreciate the full import of the quest of beauty. The splendid Greek life appeals to all of us who have any artistic sensibility. We realize that religion must learn a great lesson from their spontaneity. Our puritanical tradition, which makes religion consist in restraint and prudent self-suppression, is the absolute denial of that artistic kind of goodness we find in Jesus who went about pouring himself out with enthusiasm. Jesus' goodness, that is to say, was of the Hellenic spontaneity not of the Puritanical restraint. We like the freedom and joyousness of their lives. We perceive that it came from learning the first lesson, that matter is responsive to the touch of beauty. Out of the rough quarry they could make a beautiful palace and fill it with statues of grace and charm.

But glorious as that achievement is, it is accompanied by a pathetic tragedy: they never realized that there is a second lesson to be learned - the lesson of heaven. They never learned that human nature has capacity for love, and that out of our rough human nature, this divine quarry, can be reared the living temple of fraternity and sorority whose foundation might be art. But they absolutely reversed the thing. They turned it upside down. They made the marble the superstructure, and people the foundation. The Greek state and Greek achievements of material beauty were reared upon slave labor. Their foremost thinkers had no appreciation of the slave. They did not believe that the slave had a soul; slaves had no claim upon the wise and good for either justice or pity. Hence the temple of Greek art is the reared upon lives it left rough and ugly, because the marble quarry of art was honored, the human quarry of heaven was dishonored. It was that kind of thing in the world that caused Lowell to cry out in poem that might be called an anguish. He represents Jesus looking down beneath the art of the world to the oppression that had founded it and crying out in pain

Have you builded your thrones and altars then
On the bodies and souls of living men,

And think you that building shall endure

that shelters the noble and crushes the poor?

But men sneer and answer you can make beauty out of rough marble but you can't do it out of rough men. If any sculptor had told the Philistines of his day that he saw an angel in the stone and would set it free, they would have ridiculed him, and called him the equivalent of a dreamer, visionary, idealistic. After he produced the angel, they might in decency keep still.

[the challenge]

I feel thus about those modern Philistines who sneer at Love, the heaven-making power on earth. If people of vision had not seen the nobler self in their fellows, and by the patience of love evoked it, they might cavil at dreamers. But the thing has been done over and over again. Their are little patches of heaven all over the world. It has ceased to be a dream, it has ceased to be a visionary hope. It is an achievement. Love has given us just so much of life as is really worth while.

Hence I have no inclination to try to defend myself against the charge of visionariness and ultra-idealism in preaching a gospel of leaven-making love. I insist that the deniers of love must accept the burden of proof, and I challenge them thus:

You believe in money and learning. Well, Europe had hundreds and thousands of wise men, and prodigious treasures of money and yet all the wealth of Europe and all the learning of Europe could not prevent a war that is at once a synonym for insanity, and hell. And there was only one thing that could prevent that war, and only one thing that will prevent future wars, and only one force that can make a success of any of the exploited reforms of would-be reformers, and only one motive power to utilize any of the machinery of state or church aright, and that one motive power has been the dynamo that has given us what progress we have made, has lit our home with what joy they do radiate. It is LOVE.