Chapter VII: Preface (1)

When I was asked to become the biographer of Dr. Mateer, I had planned to do other literary work, and had made some preparation for it; but I at once put that aside and entered on the writing of this book. I did this for several reasons. Though Dr. Mateer and I had never been very intimate friends, yet, beginning with our college and seminary days, and on to the close of his life, we had always been very good friends. I had occasionally corresponded with him, and, being in hearty sympathy with the cause of foreign missions, I had kept myself so well informed as to his achievements that I had unusual pleasure in officially conferring on him the first of the distinctions by which his name came to be so well adorned. As his college classmate, I had joined with the other survivors in recognizing him as the one of our number whom we most delighted to honor. When I laid down my office of college president, he promptly wrote me, and suggested that I occupy my leisure by a visit to China, and that I use my tongue and pen to aid the cause of the evangelization of that great people. Only a few months before his death he sent me extended directions for such a visit. When—wholly unexpectedly—the invitation came to me to prepare his biography, what could I do but respond favorably?

It has been my sole object in this book to reveal to the reader Dr. Mateer, the man, the Christian, the missionary, both his inner and his outer life, just as it was. In doing this I have very often availed myself of his own words. Going beyond these, I have striven neither to keep back nor to exaggerate anything that deserves a place in this record. All the while the preparation of this book has been going forward in my hands my appreciation of the magnitude of the man and of his work has been increasing. Great is the story of his career. If this does not appear so to any reader who has the mind and the heart to appreciate it, then the fault is mine. It, in that case, is in the telling, and not in the matter of the book, that the defect lies.

So many relatives and acquaintances of Dr. Mateer have contributed valuable material, on which I have drawn freely, that I dare not try to mention them here by name. It is due, however, to Mrs. J. M. Kirkwood to acknowledge that much of the chapter on “The Old Home” is based on a monograph she prepared in advance of the writing of this biography. It is due also to Mrs. Ada H. Mateer to acknowledge the very extensive and varied assistance which she has rendered in the writing of this book: first, by putting the material already on hand into such shape that the biographer’s labors have been immensely lightened, and later, by furnishing with her own pen much additional information, and by her wise, practical suggestions.

D. W. F.

WASHINGTON, 1911

I

THE OLD HOME

“There are all the fond recollections and associations of my
youth.”—JOURNAL, March 4, 1857.

Calvin Wilson Mateer, of whose life and work this book is to tell, was born in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, near Shiremanstown, a few miles west of Harrisburg, on January 9, 1836.

This Cumberland valley, in which he first saw the light, is one of the fairest regions in all our country. Beginning at the great, broad Susquehanna, almost in sight of his birthplace, it stretches far away, a little to the southwest, on past Chambersburg, and across the state line, and by way of Hagerstown, to its other boundary, drawn by a second and equally majestic stream, the historic Potomac. Physically considered, the splendid Shenandoah valley, still beyond in Virginia, is a further extension of the same depression. It is throughout a most attractive panorama of gently rolling slopes and vales, of fertile and highly cultivated farms, of great springs of purest water and of purling brooks, of little parks of trees spared by the woodman’s ax, of comfortable and tasteful rural homes, of prosperous towns and villages where church spires and school buildings and the conveniences of modern civilization bear witness to the high character of the people,—all of this usually set like a picture in a framework of the blue and not very rugged, or very high, wooded mountains between which, in their more or less broken ranges, the entire valley lies.

True, it was winter when this infant first looked out on that world about him, but it was only waiting for spring to take off its swaddling of white, and to clothe it with many-hued garments. Twenty-eight years afterward, almost to the very day, he, cast ashore on the coast of China, was struggling over the roadless and snow covered and, to him, wholly unknown ground toward the place near which he was to do the work of his life, and where his body rests in the grave. When he died, in his seventy-third year, the spiritual spring for which he had prayed and longed and labored had not yet fully come, but there were many indications of its not distant approach.

John Mateer, the father of Calvin, was born in this beautiful Cumberland valley, on a farm which was a part of a large tract of land entered by the Mateers as first settlers, out of whose hands, however, it had almost entirely passed at the date when this biography begins. The mother of Calvin was born in the neighboring county of York. Her maiden name was Mary Nelson Diven. Both father and mother were of that Scotch-Irish descent to which especially Pennsylvania and Virginia are indebted for so many of their best people; and they both had behind them a long line of sturdy, honorable and God-fearing ancestors.

At the time of Calvin’s birth his parents were living in a frame house which is still standing; and though, with the passing of years, it has much deteriorated, it gives evidence that it was a comfortable though modest home for the little family.

One of the employments of his father while resident there was the running of a water mill for hulling clover seed; and Calvin tells somewhere of a recollection that he used to wish when a very little boy that he were tall enough to reach a lever by which he could turn on more water to make the mill go faster,—a childish anticipation of his remarkable mechanical ability and versatility in maturer years.

Calvin was the oldest of seven children—five brothers and two sisters; in the order of age, Calvin Wilson, Jennie, William Diven, John Lowrie, Robert McCheyne, Horace Nelson and Lillian, of whom Jennie, William, Robert and Horace are still living. Of these seven children, Calvin and Robert became ministers of the gospel in the Presbyterian Church, and missionaries in Shantung, China; John for five years had charge of the Presbyterian Mission Press at Shanghai, and later of the Congregational Press at Peking, where he died; Lillian taught in the Girls’ School at Tengchow, and, after her marriage to Rev. William S. Walker, of the Southern Baptist Mission, in the school at Shanghai, until the failing health of her husband compelled her to return to the United States; William for a good while was strongly disposed to offer himself for the foreign missionary service, and reluctantly acting on advice, turned from it to business. Jennie married an exceptionally promising young Presbyterian minister, and both offered themselves to the foreign work and were under appointment to go to China when health considerations compelled them to remain in their homeland. Some years after his death she married a college professor of fine ability. Horace is a professor in the University of Wooster, and a practicing physician.

In view of this very condensed account of the remarkable life and work of the children in this household, one may well crave to know more about the parents, and about the home life in the atmosphere of which they were nurtured. Their father and mother both had the elementary education which could be furnished in their youth by the rural schools during the brief terms for which they were held each year. In addition, the mother attended a select school in Harrisburg for a time. Both father and mother built well on this early foundation, forming the habit of wise, careful reading. Both were professing Christians when they were married, and in infancy Calvin was baptized in the old Silver Spring Church, near which they resided. Later the father became a ruling elder in the Presbyterian church to which they had removed their membership. In this capacity he was highly esteemed, his pastor relying especially on his just, discerning judgment. He had a beautiful tenor voice and a line musical sense, and he led the choir for a number of years. Few laymen in the church at large were better informed as to its doctrines and history, and few were more familiar with the Bible. There was in the church a library from which books were regularly brought home; religious papers were taken and read by the whole family, and thus all were acquainted with the current news of the churches, and with the progress of the gospel in the world.

In the conduct of his farm Mr. Mateer was thrifty, industrious and economical. His land did not yield very bountifully, but all of its products were so well husbanded that notwithstanding the size of his family he yet accumulated considerable property. Though somewhat reluctant at first to have his boys one after another leave him, thus depriving him of their help on the farm, he aided each to the extent of his ability, and as they successively fitted themselves for larger lives he rejoiced in their achievements.

Mr. Mateer died at Monmouth, Illinois, in 1875. When the tidings reached Calvin out in China, he wrote home to his mother a beautiful letter, in which among other things he said: “Father’s death was eminently characteristic of his life—modest, quiet and self-suppressed. He died the death of the righteous and has gone to a righteous man’s reward. The message he sent John and me was not necessary; that he should ‘die trusting in Jesus’ was not news to us, for we knew how he had lived.”

By reading the records that have been at my command I have gotten the conviction that the mother was the stronger character, or at least that she more deeply impressed herself on the children. When Calvin made his last visit to this country, he was asked whose influence had been most potent in his life, and he at once replied, “Mother’s.” In his personal appearance he strongly resembled her. If one could have wished for any change in his character, it might have been that he should have had in it just a little bit more of the ideality of his father, and just a little bit less of the intense realism of his mother. Some of his mother’s most evident characteristics were in a measure traceable as an inheritance from her father, William Diven; for example, the place to which she assigned education among the values of life. He was a man of considerable literary attainments, for his day, and for one residing out in the country; so that when in later years he came to make his home with the Mateers he brought with him a collection of standard books, thus furnishing additional and substantial reading for the family. Even Shakspere and Burns were among the authors, though they were not placed where the children could have access to them, and were made familiar to them only by the grandfather’s quotation of choice passages. When his daughter was a little girl, so intense was his desire that she should have as good an education as practicable, that if the weather was too inclement for her to walk to the schoolhouse he used to carry her on his back. It was her lifelong regret that her education was so defective; and it is said that after she was seventy years of age, once she dreamed that she was sent to school at Mount Holyoke, and she awoke in tears to find that she was white-haired, and that it was only a dream. Although it involved the sacrifice of her own strength and ease, she never faltered in her determination that her children should have the educational advantages to which she had aspired, but never attained; and in what they reached in this direction she had a rich satisfaction. Toward every other object which she conceived to be good and true, and to be within the scope of her life, she set herself with like persistence, and strength, and willingness for self-sacrifice. Her piety was deep, thorough and all-controlling; but with her it was a principle rather than a sentiment. Its chief aim was the promotion of the glory of the infinitely holy God, though as she neared the visible presence of her Saviour, this softened somewhat into a conscious love and faith toward him. She survived her husband twenty-one years, and died at the advanced age of seventy-nine. When the tidings of this came to her children in China, their chief lament was, “How we shall miss her prayers!”

When Calvin was about five years old, his parents bought a farm twelve miles north of Gettysburg, near what is now York Springs, in Adams County. It is some twenty miles from the place of his birth, and beyond the limits of the Cumberland valley. Even now it is a comparatively out-of-the-way spot, reached only by a long drive from the nearest railway station; then it was so secluded that the Mateers called the house into which they removed the “Hermitage.” Here the family continued to reside until about the time of Calvin’s graduation from college. Then a second and much longer move was made, to Mercer County, in western Pennsylvania. Still later, a third migration brought them to Illinois. It is to the home in Adams County that Calvin refers in the line quoted at the head of this chapter, as the place where “were all the fond recollections and associations” of his youth.

The farm was not very large, and the soil was only moderately productive, notwithstanding the labor and skill that the Mateers put upon it. In picking off the broken slate stones which were turned up thick by the plow, the children by hard experience were trained in patient industry as to small details. At least the two elder frequently beguiled the tedium of this task “by reciting portions of the Westminster Catechism and long passages of Scripture.” Another really tedious occupation, which, however, was converted into a sort of late autumn feast of ingathering, was shared by the whole family, but was especially appreciated by the children. This was the nut harvest of the “shellbark” hickory trees of the forest. As many as fifty or more bushels were gathered in a season; the sale of these afforded a handsome supplement to the income of the household. Along the side of the farm flows a beautiful stream, still bearing its Indian name of Bermudgeon, and in front of the house is a smaller creek; and in these Calvin fished and set traps for the muskrats, and experimented with little waterwheels, and learned to swim. Up on an elevation still stand the old house and barn, both constructed of the red brick once so largely used in the eastern section of Pennsylvania. Both of these are still in use. Though showing signs of age and lack of care, they are witnesses that for those days the Mateers were quite up to the better standard of living customary among their neighbors. “This growing family,” says Mrs. Kirkwood (Jennie), “was a hive of industry, making most of the implements used both indoors and out, and accomplishing many tasks long since relegated to the factory and the shop. Necessity was with them the mother not only of invention, but of execution as well. All were up early in the morning eating breakfast by candlelight even in summer, and ready before the sun had risen for a day’s work that continued long after twilight had fallen.” In the barn they not only housed their horses and cattle and the field products, but also manufactured most of the implements for their agricultural work. Here Calvin first had his mechanical gifts called into exercise, sometimes on sleds and wagons and farm tools, and sometimes on traps and other articles of youthful sport.

In this home family worship was held twice each day,—in the morning often before the day had fully dawned, and in the evening when the twilight was vanishing into night. In this service usually there were not only the reading of Scripture and the offering of prayer, but also the singing of praise, the fine musical voice of the father and his ability to lead in the tunes making this all the more effective. Of course, on the Sabbath the entire family, young and old, so far as practicable, attended services when held in the Presbyterian church not far away. But that was not all of the religious observances. The Sabbath was sacredly kept, after the old-fashioned manner of putting away the avoidable work of the week, and of giving exceptional attention to sacred things. Mrs. Kirkwood, who was near enough in age to be the “chum” of Calvin, writes: “Among the many living pictures which memory holds of those years, there is one of a large, airy, farmhouse kitchen, on a Sabbath afternoon. The table, with one leaf raised to afford space for ‘Scott’ and ‘Henry’ stands between two doors that look out upon tree-shaded, flower-filled yards. There sits the mother, with open books spread all about her, studying the Bible lesson for herself and for her children. Both parents and children attended a pastor’s class in which the old Sunday School Union Question Book was used. In this many references were given which the children were required to commit. Older people read them from their Bibles, but these children memorized them. Some of the longer ones could never be repeated in after times without awakening associations of the muscularizing mental tussles of those early days.” It was a part of the religious training of each child in that household, just as soon as able to read, to commit to memory the Westminster Shorter Catechism,—not so as to blunder through the answers in some sort of fashion, but so as to recite them all, no matter how long or difficult, without mistaking so much as an article or a preposition.

Stories are handed down concerning the boy Calvin at home, some of which foreshadow characteristics of his later years. One of these must suffice here. The “Hermitage,” when the Mateers came into it, was popularly believed to be haunted by a former occupant whose grave was in an old deserted Episcopal churchyard about a mile away. The grave was sunken, and it was asserted that it would not remain filled. It was also rumored that in the gloomy woods by which the place was surrounded a headless man had been seen wandering at night. Nevertheless the Mateer children often went up there on a Sabbath afternoon, and entered the never-closed door, to view the Bible and books and desk, which were left just as they had been when services long before had ceased to be held; or wandered about the graves, picking the moss from the inscriptions on the headstones, in order to see who could find the oldest. It was a place that, of course, was much avoided at night; for had not restless white forms been seen moving about among these burial places of the dead? The boy Calvin had been in the habit of running by it in the late evening with fast-beating heart. One dark night he went and climbed up on the graveyard fence, resolved to sit in that supremely desolate and uncanny spot till he had mastered the superstitious fear associated with it. The owls hooted, and other night sounds were intensified by the loneliness, but he successfully passed his chosen ordeal, and won a victory worth the effort. In a youthful way he was disciplining himself for more difficult ordeals in China.

II

THE MAKING OF THE MAN

“It has been said, and with truth, that when one has finished
his course in an ordinary college, he knows just enough to be
sensible of his own ignorance.”—LETTER TO HIS MOTHER, January
15, 1857.

The letter from which the sentence at the head of this chapter is taken was written a week after Mateer had reached his twenty-first year and when he was almost half advanced in his senior year in college. Later in the letter he says: “Improvement and advancement need not, and should not, stop with a college life. We should be advancing in knowledge so long as we live.” With this understanding we may somewhat arbitrarily set his graduation from college as terminating the period of his life covered by what I have designated as “the making of the man.”

Back of all else lay his native endowments of body and of mind. Physically he was exceptionally free from both inherited and acquired weaknesses. In a letter which he wrote to his near relatives in this country on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, he said, “I have not only lived, but I have enjoyed an exceptional measure of health.” At no period was he laid aside by protracted sickness. At the same time, this must not be understood to signify that he had one of those iron constitutions that seem to be capable of enduring without harm every sort of exposure except such as in its nature must be mortal. In that part of his Journal covering portions of his college and seminary work he often tells of a lassitude for which he blames himself as morally at fault, but in which a physician would have seen symptoms of a low bodily tone. Bad food, lack of exercise and ill treatment on the voyage which first brought him to China left him with a temporary attack of dyspepsia. Occasionally he had dysentery, and once he had erysipelas. At no time did he regard himself as so rugged in constitution that he did not need to provide himself with proper clothing and shelter, so far as practicable. Nevertheless it was because of the sound physique inherited from his parents, and fostered by his country life during early youth, that without any serious breaking down of health or strength he was able to endure the privations and the toils and cares of his forty-five years in China.

As to his native mental endowments, no one would have been more ready than he to deny that he was a “genius,” if by this is meant that he had an ability offhand to do important things for the accomplishment of which others require study and effort. If, as to this, any exception ought to be made in his favor, it would be concerning some of the applied sciences and machinery, and possibly mathematics. He certainly had an extraordinary aptitude especially as to the former of these. While he himself regarded his work in the Mandarin as perhaps the greatest of his achievements, he had no such talent for the mastery of foreign languages that he did not need time and toil and patience to learn them. In college his best standing was not in Latin or Greek. In China other missionaries have been able to preach in the native tongue after as short a period of preparation; and the perfect command of the language which he attained came only after years of ceaseless toil.

Such were his native physical and mental endowments: a good, sound, though not unusually rugged, bodily constitution; and an intellect vigorous in all of its faculties, which was in degree not so superior as to set him on a pedestal by himself, yet was very considerably above the average even of college students.

Concerning the qualities of his heart and of his will it is best to wait and speak later in this volume.

In the making of a man native endowments are only the material out of which and on which to build. Beyond these, what we become depends on our opportunities and the use to which we put them. The atmosphere of the old home had much to do with the unfolding of the subsequent life and character of Mateer. Some of his leading qualities were there grown into his being.

Other powerful influences also had a large share in his development. About three quarters of a mile from the “Hermitage” stood a township schoolhouse, a small brick building, “guiltless alike of paint or comfort,” most primitive in its furnishing, and open for instruction only five or six months each year, and this in the winter. The pressure of work in the house and on the farm never was allowed to interrupt the attendance of the Mateer children at this little center of learning for the neighborhood. Of course, the teachers usually were qualified only to conduct the pupils over the elementary branches, and no provision was made in the curriculum for anything beyond these. But it so happened that for two winters Calvin had as his schoolmaster there James Duffield, who is described by one of his pupils still living as “a genius in his profession, much in advance of his times, and quite superior to those who preceded and to those who came after him. In appearance Duffield was awkward and shy. His large hands and feet were ever in his way, except when before a class; then he was suddenly at ease, absorbed in the work of teaching, alert, full of vitality, with an enthusiasm for mastery, and an intellectual power that made every subject alive with interest, leaving his impress upon each one of his pupils.” Algebra was not recognized as falling within the legitimate instruction, and no suspicion that any boy or girl was studying it entered the minds of the plain farmers who constituted the official visitors. One day a friend of the teacher, a scholarly man, came in at the time when the examinations were proceeding, and the teacher sprang a surprise by asking this friend whether he would like to see one of his pupils solve a problem in algebra. He had discerned the mathematical bent of the lad, Calvin Mateer, and out of school hours and just for the satisfaction of it he had privately been giving the boy lessons in that study. When an affirmative response was made by the stranger, Calvin went to the blackboard and soon covered half of it with a solution of an algebraic problem. Surprised and delighted, the stranger tested the lad with problem after problem, some of them the hardest in the text-book in use, only to find him able to solve them. It would have been difficult to discover which of the three principal parties to the examination, the visitor, the teacher, or the pupil, was most gratified by the outcome. There can be no question that this country school-teacher had much to do with awakening the mathematical capabilities and perhaps others of the intellectual gifts which characterized that lad in manhood and throughout life.

When Calvin was in his seventeenth year, he started in his pursuit of higher education, entering a small academy at Hunterstown, eight miles from the “Hermitage.” In this step he had the stimulating encouragement of his mother, whose quenchless passion for education has already been described. His father probably would at that time have preferred that he should remain at home and help on the farm; and occasionally, for some years, the question whether he ought not to have fallen in with the paternal wish caused him serious thought. As it was, he came home from the academy in the spring, and in the autumn and also at harvest, to assist in the work.

The first term he began Latin, and the second term Greek, and he kept his mathematics well in hand, thus distinctly setting his face toward college. But his pecuniary means were narrow, and in the winter of 1853-54 he had to turn aside to teach a country school some three miles from his home. In a brief biographical sketch which, by request of his college classmates, he furnished for the fortieth anniversary of their graduation he says: “This was a hard experience. I was not yet eighteen and looked much younger. Many of the scholars were young men and women, older than I, and there was a deal of rowdyism in the district. I held my own, however, and finished with credit, and grew in experience more than in any other period of my life.”

When the school closed he returned to the academy, which by that time had passed into the hands of S. B. Mercer, in whom he found a teacher of exceptional ability, both as to scholarship and as to the stimulation of his students to do and to be the best that was possible to them. In the spring of 1855 Mr. Mercer left the Hunterstown Academy, and went to Merrittstown, Fayette County, Pennsylvania, where he took charge of the Dunlaps Creek Academy. Calvin, influenced by his attachment to his teacher, and also by his intention to enter Jefferson College, situated in a neighboring county, went with him. Here he made his home, with other students, in the house occupied by the Mercers. For teaching two classes, one in geometry and one in Greek, he received his tuition. For the ostensible reason that he had come so far to enter the academy he was charged a reduced price for his board. All the way down to the completion of his course in the theological seminary he managed to live upon the means furnished in part from home, and substantially supplemented by his own labors; but he had to practice rigid economy. It was while at Merrittstown that he made a public profession of religion. This was only a few months before he entered college. He found in Dr. Samuel Wilson, the pastor of the Presbyterian church, a preacher and a man who won his admiration and esteem, and who so encouraged and directed him that he took this step.

In the autumn of 1855 he entered the junior class of Jefferson College, at Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. In those days it was customary for students to be admitted further advanced as to enrollment than at present. I had myself preceded Mateer one year, entering as a sophomore in the same class into which he first came as a junior. One reason for this state of things was that the requirements were considerably lower than they now are; and they were often laxly enforced. Then, because the range of studies required was very limited in kind, consisting until the junior year almost exclusively of Latin, Greek and mathematics, it was possible for the preparatory schools to carry the work of their students well up into the curriculum of the college. Mateer had the advantage, besides, of such an excellent instructor as Professor Mercer, and of experience in teaching. He says: “I was poorly prepared for this class, but managed to squeeze in. The professor of Latin wanted me to make up some work which I had not done; but I demurred, and I recollect saying to him, ‘If after a term you still think I ought to make it up, I will do it, or fall back to the sophomore class.’ I never heard of it afterwards. I was very green and bashful when I went to college, an unsophisticated farmer’s boy from a little country academy. I knew little or nothing of the ways of the world.”

As his classmate in college, and otherwise closely associated with him as a fellow-student, I knew him well. I remember still with a good deal of distinctness his appearance; he was rather tall, light-haired, with a clear and intelligent countenance, and a general physique that indicated thorough soundness of body, though not excessively developed in any member. When I last saw him at Los Angeles a few years ago, I could perceive no great change in his looks, except such as is inevitable from the flight of years, and from his large and varied experience of life. It seems to me that it ought to be easy for any of his acquaintances of later years to form for themselves a picture of him in his young manhood at the college and at the theological seminary. So far as I can now recall, he came to college unheralded as to what might be expected of him there. He did not thrust himself forward; but it was not long until by his work and his thorough manliness, it became evident that in him the class had received an addition that was sure to count heavily in all that was of importance to a student. I do not think that he joined any of the Greek letter secret societies, though these were at the height of their prosperity there at that time. In the literary societies he discharged well and faithfully his duties, but he did not stand out very conspicuously in the exercises required of the members. In those days there was plenty of “college politics,” sometimes very petty, and sometimes not very creditable, though not wholly without profit as a preparation for the “rough-and-tumble” of life in after years, but in this Mateer did not take much part. Most of us were still immature enough to indulge in pranks that afforded us fun, but which were more an expression of our immaturity than we then imagined; and Mateer participated in one of these in connection with the Frémont-Buchanan campaign in 1856. A great Republican meeting was held at Canonsburg, and some of us students appeared in the procession as a burlesque company of Kansas “border ruffians.” We were a sadly disgraceful-looking set. Of one thing I am sure, that while Mateer gave himself constantly to his duties and refrained from most of the silly things of college life, he was not by any of us looked upon as a “stick.” He commanded our respect.

The faculty was small and the equipment of the college meager. The attendance was nearly three hundred. As to attainments, we were a mixed multitude. To instruct all of these there were—for both regular and required work—only six men, including one for the preparatory department. What could these few do to meet the needs of this miscellaneous crowd? They did their best, and it was possible for any of us, especially for the brighter student, to get a great deal of valuable education even under these conditions. Mateer in later years acknowledges his indebtedness to all of the faculty, but particularly to Dr. A. B. Brown, who was our president up to the latter part of our senior year; to Dr. Alden, who succeeded him; and to Professor Fraser, who held the chair of mathematics. Dr. Brown was much admired by the students for his rhetorical ability in the pulpit and out of it. Dr. Alden was quite in contrast to his predecessor as to many things. He had long been a teacher, and was clear and concise in his intellectual efforts. Mateer said, late in life, that from his drill in moral science he “got more good than from any other one branch in the course.” Professor Fraser was a brilliant, all-round scholar of the best type then prevalent, and had the enthusiastic admiration even of those students who were little able to appreciate his teaching. In the physical sciences the course was necessarily still limited and somewhat elementary. His classmates remember the evident mastery which Mateer had of all that was attempted by instruction or by experimentation in that department. It was not possible to get much of what is called “culture” out of the curriculum, and that through no fault of the faculty; yet for the stimulation of the intellectual powers and the unfolding of character there was an opportunity such as may be seriously lacking in the conditions of college instruction in recent years.

These were the palmy days of Jefferson College. She drew to herself students not only from Pennsylvania and the contiguous states, but also from the more distant regions of the west and the south. We were dumped down there, a heterogeneous lot of young fellows, and outside of the classroom we were left for the most part to care for ourselves. We had no luxuries and we were short of comforts. We got enough to eat, of a very plain sort, and we got it cheap. We were wholly unacquainted with athletics and other intercollegiate goings and comings which now loom up so conspicuously in college life; but we had, with rare exceptions, come from the country and the small towns, intent on obtaining an education which would help us to make the most of ourselves in after years. As to this, Mateer was a thoroughly representative student. He could not then foresee his future career, but he was sure that in it he dared not hope for success unless he made thoroughly good use of his present, passing opportunities. He was evidently a man who was there for a purpose.

The class of 1857 has always been proud of itself, and not without reason. Fifty-eight of us received our diplomas on commencement. Among them were such leaders in the church as George P. Hays, David C. Marquis and Samuel J. Niccolls, all of whom have been Moderators of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. In the law, S. C. T. Dodd, for many years the principal solicitor of the Standard Oil Company, stands out most conspicuously. Three of our number have served for longer or shorter periods as college presidents. Of Doctors of Divinity we have a long list, and also a goodly number of Doctors of Law; and others, though they have received less recognition for their work, have in our judgment escaped only because the world does not always know the worth of quiet lives. To spend years in the associations of such a class in college is itself an efficient means of education. It is a high tribute to the ability and the diligence of Mateer that, although he was with us only two years, he divided the first honor. The sharer with him in this distinction was the youngest member of the class, but a man who, in addition to unusual capacity, also had enjoyed the best preparation for college then available. On the part of Mateer, it was not what is known as genius that won the honor; it was a combination of solid intellectual capacity, with hard, constant work. The faculty assigned him the valedictory, the highest distinction at graduation, but on his own solicitation, this was given to the other first honor man.

In a letter sent by him from Wei Hsien, China, September 4, 1907, in answer to a message addressed to him by the little remnant of his classmates who assembled at Canonsburg a couple of months earlier, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of their graduation, he said:

It was with very peculiar feelings of pleasure mingled with
sadness that I read what was done by you at your meeting.
The distance that separated me from you all adds a peculiar
emphasis to my feelings, suggestive of loneliness. I have
never been homesick in China. I would not be elsewhere than
where I am, nor doing any other work than what I am doing. Yet
when I read over the account of that meeting in Canonsburg my
feelings were such as I have rarely had before. Separated by
half the circumference of the globe for full forty-four years,
yet in the retrospect the friendship formed in these years
of fellowship in study seems to grow fresher and stronger
as our numbers grow less. A busy life gives little time for
retrospection, yet I often think of college days and college
friends. Very few things in my early life have preserved their
impression so well. I can still repeat the roll of our class,
and I remember well how we sat in that old recitation room of
Professor Jones [physics and chemistry]. I am in the second
half of my seventy-second year, strong and well. China has
agreed with me. I have spent my life itinerating, teaching and
translating, with chief strength on teaching. But with us all
who are left, the meridian of life is past, and the evening
draws on. Yet a few of us have still some work to do. Let us
strive to do it well, and add what we can to the aggregate
achievement of the class’s life work—a record of which I trust
none of us may be ashamed.

In the unanticipated privilege of writing this book I am trying to fulfill that wish of our revered classmate.

III

FINDING HIS LIFE WORK

“From my youth I had the missionary work before me as a dim
vision. A half-formed resolution was all the while in my mind,
though I spoke of it to no one. But for this it is questionable
whether I would have given up teaching to go to the Seminary.
After long consideration and many prayers I offered myself
to the Board, and was accepted.”—AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH for
college class anniversary, 1897.

In the four sentences at the head of this chapter we have a condensed outline of the process by which Calvin Mateer came to be a foreign missionary. In his case it did not, as in the antecedent experience of most other clergymen who have given themselves to this work, start with an attraction first toward the ministry, and then toward the missionary service; but just the reverse. In order to understand this we need to go back again to “the old home,” and especially to his mother. We are fortunate here in having the veil of the past lifted by Mrs. Kirkwood, as one outside of the family could not do, or, even if he could, would hesitate to do.

Long before her marriage, when indeed but a young girl,
Mary Nelson Diven [Calvin’s mother] heard an appeal for the
Sandwich Islands made by the elder Dr. Forbes, one of the early
missionaries of the American Board, to those islands. He asked
for a box of supplies. There was not much missionary interest
in the little church of Dillsburg, York County, Pennsylvania,
of which she was a member; for the Presbyterian Board of
Foreign Missions had not been organized, and the American Board
had not attained its majority. Her pastor sympathized with the
newly awakened zeal and interest of his young parishioner,
when she proposed to canvass the congregation in response to
Dr. Forbes’s appeal. The box was secured and sent. This was
the seed that germinated in her heart so early and bore fruit
through the whole of her long life.

When in her nineteenth year she was married to John Mateer,
hers was a marriage in the Lord; and together she and her
husband consecrated their children in their infancy to his
service. This consecration was not a form; they were laid upon
the altar and never taken back. Through all the self-denying
struggles to secure their education, one aim was steadily kept
in view, that of fitting them either to carry the gospel to
some heathen land, or to do the Lord’s work in their own land.

In addition to the foreign missionary periodicals, a number
of biographies of foreign missionaries were secured and
were read by all the family. Not only did this mother try
to awaken in her children an interest in missions through
missionary literature, but she devised means to strengthen
and make permanent this interest, to furnish channels through
which these feelings and impulses might flow toward practical
results. One of these was a missionary mite box which she
fashioned with her own hands, away back in the early forties,
before the mite boxes had been scattered broadcast in the
land. Quaint indeed it was, this plain little wooden box,
covered with small-figured wall paper. Placed upon the parlor
mantel, it soon became the shrine of the children’s devotion.
No labor or self-denial on their part was considered too great
to secure pennies for “the missionary box.” Few pennies were
spent for self-indulgence after that box was put in place, and
overflowing was the delight when some unwonted good fortune
made it possible to drop in silver coins—“six-and-a-fourth
bits,” or “eleven-penny bits.” Most of the offerings were
secured by such self-denials as foregoing coffee, sugar, or
butter. There was not at that time much opportunity for country
children to earn even pennies. The “red-letter” day of all the
year was when the box was opened and the pennies were counted.

This earnest-hearted mother had counted the cost of what she
was doing in thus educating her children into the missionary
spirit. When her first-born turned his face toward the heathen
world, there was no drawing back—freely she gave him to the
work. As one after another of her children offered themselves
to the Foreign Board, she rejoiced in the honor God had put
upon her, never shrinking from the heart strain the separation
from her children must bring. She only made them more special
objects of prayer, thus transmuting her personal care-taking to
faith. She lived to see four of her children in China.

This explains how it came about that this elder son, from youth, had before him the missionary work as “a dim vision,” and that “a half-formed resolution” to take it up was all the while in his mind.

When he graduated from college, he had made no decision as to his life work. During the years preceding he at no time put aside the claims of missions, and consequently of the ministry, upon him, and in various ways he showed his interest in that line of Christian service. As he saw the situation the choice seemed mainly to lie between this on the one hand, and teaching on the other. Before he graduated he had the offer of a place in the corps of instructors for the Lawrenceville (New Jersey) school, since grown into such magnitude and esteem as a boys’ preparatory institution; but the conditions were not such that he felt justified in accepting. Unfortunately, there is a blank in his Journal for the period between March 4, 1857, some six months before he received his diploma at Jefferson, and October 24, 1859, when he had already been a good while in the theological seminary; and to supply it scarcely any of his letters are available. In the autobiographical sketch already noticed he says:

From college I went to take charge of the academy at Beaver,
Pennsylvania. I found it run down almost to nothing, so that
the first term (half year) it hardly paid me my board. I was on
my mettle, however, and determined not to fail. I taught and
lectured and advertised, making friends as fast as I could.
I found the school with about twenty boys, all day scholars;
I left it at the end of the third term with ninety, of whom
thirty were boarders. I could easily have gone on and made
money, but I felt that I was called to preach the gospel,
and so, I sold out my school and went to Allegheny [Western
Theological Seminary], entering when the first year was half
over.

One of his pupils at Beaver was J. R. Miller, D.D., a distinguished minister of the gospel in Philadelphia; and very widely known especially as the author of solid but popular religious books. Writing of his experience at the Beaver Academy, he says:

When I first entered, the principal was Mr. Mateer. The first
night I was there, my room was not ready, and I slept with him
in his room. I can never forget the words of encouragement
and cheer he spoke that night, to a homesick boy, away for
almost the first time from his father and mother.... My contact
with him came just at the time when my whole life was in such
plastic form that influence of whatever character became
permanent. He was an excellent teacher. His personal influence
over me was very great. I suppose that when the records are all
known, it will be seen that no other man did so much for the
shaping of my life as he did.

While at Beaver he at last decided that he was called of God to study for the ministry, but called not by any extraordinary external sign or inward experience. It was a sense of duty that determined him, and although he obeyed willingly, yet it was not without a struggle. He had a consciousness of ability to succeed as a teacher or in other vocations; and he was by no means without ambition to make his mark in the world. Because he was convinced by long and careful and prayerful consideration that he ought to become a minister he put aside all the other pursuits that might have opened to him. Not long after he entered the seminary he wrote to his mother: “You truly characterize the work for which I am now preparing as a great and glorious one. I have long looked forward to it, though scarcely daring to think it my duty to engage in it. After much pondering in my own mind, and prayer for direction I have thought it my duty to preach.”

On account of teaching, as already related, he did not enter the theological seminary until more than a year after I did, so that I was not his classmate there. He came some months late in the school year, and had at first much back work to make up; but he soon showed that he ranked among the very best students. His classmate, Rev. John H. Sherrard, of Pittsburg, writes:

One thing I do well remember about Mateer: his mental
superiority impressed everyone, as also his deep spirituality.
In some respects, indeed most, he stood head and shoulders
above his fellows around him.

Another classmate, Rev. Dr. William Gaston, of Cleveland, says:

We regarded him as one of our most level-headed men; our peer
in all points; not good merely in one point, but most thorough
in all branches of study. He was cheerful and yet not flippant,
and with a tinge of the most serious. He was optimistic,
dwelling much on God’s great love.... He was not only a year in
advance of most of us in graduating from college, but I think
that we, as students, felt that though we were classmates in
the seminary, he was in advance of us in other things. Life
seemed more serious to him. I doubt if any one of us felt the
responsibility of life as much as he did. I doubt if anyone
worked as hard as he.

The Western Theological Seminary, during the period of Mateer’s attendance, was at the high-water mark of prosperity. The general catalogue shows an enrollment of sixty-one men in his class; the total in all classes hovered about one hundred and fifty. In the faculty there were only four members, and, estimated by the specializations common in our theological schools to-day, they could not adequately do all their work; and this was the more true of them, because all save one of them eked out his scanty salary by taking charge of a city church. But they did better than might now be thought possible; and especially was this practicable because of the limited curriculum then prescribed, and followed by all students. Dr. David Elliott was still at work, though beyond the age when he was at his best. Samuel J. Wilson was just starting in his brilliant though brief career, and commanded a peculiar attachment from his pupils. Dr. Jacobus was widely known and appreciated for his popular commentaries. However, the member of the faculty who left the deepest impress on Mateer was Dr. William S. Plumer. Nor in this was his case exceptional. We all knew that Dr. Plumer was not in the very first rank of theologians. We often missed in his lectures the marks of very broad and deep scholarship. But as a teacher he nevertheless made upon our minds an impression that was so great and lasting that in all our subsequent lives we have continued to rejoice in having been under his training. Best of all was his general influence on the students. We doubt whether in the theological seminaries of the Presbyterian Church of the United States it has ever been equaled, except by Archibald Alexander of Princeton. The dominant element of that influence was a magnificent personality saturated with the warmest and most tender piety, having its source in love for the living, personal Saviour. For Dr. Plumer, Mateer had then a very high degree of reverent affection, and he never lost it.