Starr King in California | Page 3

eminent career
as pulpit orator and popular lecturer. He recognized the undeveloped
genius of his young friend, he knew of his earnest student-ship, he
delighted to open the doors of opportunity to him. It was a gracious and
honorable relation and most advantageous to the younger man. Writing
to a good Deacon of a neighboring church Chapin said: "Thomas has
never attended a Divinity School, but he is educated just the same. He
speaks Greek, Hebrew, French, German, and fairly good English as you
will see. He knows natural history and he knows humanity, and if one
knows man and nature, he comes pretty close to knowing God."
In 1846 Chapin was called to New York, and through his influence
Starr King, then twenty-two years old, was installed as his successor in
the pastorate of the First Universalist Church of Charlestown. If his
preparedness for an important New England pulpit is questioned it must
be admitted that he entered it wholly without academic training, but we
need not be distressed on that account. From the first he had adopted a

method of study certain to produce excellent results, thorough
acquaintance with a few great authors, and reverent, loving intercourse
with a few great teachers. Little wonder that the "boy preacher" made
good in the pulpit from which his honored Father had passed into,the
Silence, and wherein the eloquence of Chapin had charmed a
congregation of devoted followers.
Two years pass and he is called to Hollis Street Church in Boston, a
Unitarian Church of honorable fame but at the time threatened with
disaster. It was believed that if any one could save the imperilled
church, King was that man. Not yet twenty-five years of age,
established as minister of one of Boston's well known churches; a
co-laborer of Bartol, Ballou, Everett, Emerson, Theodore Parker and
Wendell Phillips, - surely he is to be tried and tested as few men so
young have ever been, here in the "Athens of America," the city of
beautiful ideals and great men.
It is certain that King regarded the eleven years he gave to Hollis Street
as merely preparatory to his greater work in California. Writing
playfully from San Francisco to Dr. Bellows in Boston he said: "At
home, among you big fellows, I wasn't much. Here they seem to think I
am somebody. Nothing like the right setting." The record shows that
even among the "big fellows" Starr King was a very definite somebody,
for although crowds did not attend his preaching in Boston as in San
Francisco, he was able to congratulate himself upon the fact that he
preached his last sermon in Hollis Street Church to five times as many
people as heard his first. Nor do we need to await the judgment of
California admirers to be convinced of his ability as a preacher or his
popularity as a lecturer. It was said of him that "he was an orator from
the beginning:" that his first public address "was like Charles Lamb's
roast pig, good throughout, no part better or worse than another." "His
delivery," says a candid and scholarly critic, "was rather earnest than
passionate. He had a deep, strange, rich voice, which he knew how to
use. His eyes were extraordinary, living sermons, a peculiar shake and
nod of the head giving the impression of deep-settled conviction.
Closely confined to his notes, yet his delivery produces a marked
impression."

Hostile criticism, which no man wholly escapes, enjoyed suggesting
that King had been educated in the common schools of Portsmouth and
Charlestown, and that he had graduated from the navy yard into the
pulpit. A Boston correspondent passed judgment upon him as follows:
"He was not considered profoundly learned; he was not regarded as a
remarkable orator; he was not a great writer; nor can his unrivalled
popularity be ascribed to his fascinating social or intellectual gifts. It
was the hidden interior man of the heart that gave him his real power
and skill to control the wills and to move the hearts, and to win the
unbounded confidence and affection of his fellow-beings."
William Everett is authority for the statement that in those early years
in Hollis Street Church "Starr King was not thought to be what a
teacher of Boston Unitarianism ought to be. He was regarded rather as
a florid platform speaker, one interested in the crude and restless
attempts at reform which sober men distrusted." Another reviewer
mingles praise and criticism quite ingeniously. "He astonishes and
charms his hearers by a rare mastery over sentences. He is a skilful
word-marshal. Hence his popularity as a lyceum lecturer. However
much of elegant leisure the more solid and instructive lecturers may
have, Mr. King is always wanted. He is, in some respects, the most
popular writer and preacher of