Good Neighbors and Family Papers:
C. Harvey Palmer, Jr. (1919-2019) &
Elizabeth Machen Palmer (1926-2008)
We have been fortunate all the years we have lived in Roland Park (since 1971) to have good neighbors. On the East side we shared a driveway and garage with Harvey and Betsy Palmer who were always friendly and helpful, giving good advice, a helping hand, and large gingerbread men cookies for the children at Christmas. Harvey even lent his Jeep Cherokee when a friend and I retrieved a player piano from upstate New York, and then they had to tolerate our limited antique collection of player piano rolls donated by another good neighbor, Dorothea R. Thorne (1933-2019), which wasn’t so bad, except perhaps in the Summers before air conditioning, when the William Tell overture was an oft repeated favorite.
Harvey and Betsy were aware they lived next door to an Archivist, and over the years Betsy sought advice on family papers and books which for the most part are now housed at the Library of Congress[1], although a few remain in family hands or were given away.
gift from the Library of Charles Carroll of Carrollton (September 19, 1737 – November 14, 1832)
library of ecpclio
Shortly before they left for their retirement home, Betsy arrived on our doorstep with a present of a book from the library of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a Maryland signer of the Declaration of Independence, containing a bookplate Carroll had purchased as a young man studying law in London. While Betsy knew how touched I would be by the gift of the bookplate, the book also proved significant. It is the collected works of Edmund Waller, an able politician and poet who advocated religious freedom, a theme dear to the heart of the Carrolls who were Roman Catholics.
Harvey Palmer (1919-2019),
Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Johns Hopkins University[2]
Harvey was always working on some project or another. Most were successful, but not all. My favorite was the fish pond he built in their backyard adjoining our mutual driveway. He never was able to prevent it from leaking, but it was attractive nonetheless.
Harvey loved solving puzzles and knew my passion for historical ones. In 2016 when he was encouraged by the family to unburden himself of the remaining family papers Betsy had left him, he and his daughter Helen showed up on our doorstep with transcriptions of Betsy’s mother’s diaries (which were given to the Maryland State Archives) and a single letter postmarked Baltimore 1890, given to me to tell its story.
I promised Harvey I would, but set it aside until I ran across it in my effort to catalog and dispose of my own papers. It turned out to be quite a story that led me to an ex-Confederate grandfather and the life of the author, a prominent Presbyterian New Testament Scholar whose obituary was written by H. L. Mencken.
The letter on the surface is a treasured piece of juvenalia, written by a nine year old Gresham Machen to his grandfather in Macon Georgia, thanking him for sending him some stamps, one of which was rare, and relating how his father and mother rewarded him for answering all his “Chatesism” [Catechism] questions correctly. In time he would learn how to spell well the word (among many others) on his path to becoming a prominent Presbyterian theologian.
Pardon and application for Pardon of John J. Gresham (1812-1891)
Case files of applications from former Confederates for Presidential Pardons (“Amnesty Papers”), National Archives Microfilm Publication, M1003, Records of the Adjutant General;s Office, 1780’s-1917,
Record Group 94; National Archives, Washington, D. C.
Not long after the letter was written, the grandfather, John J. Gresham (1812-1891) came to live with Gresham and his family, after a long career in Georgia as a lawyer, judge, and prominent businessman. He proved to be a Confederate pardoned in 1865 by President Andrew Johnson on the advice of Supreme Court Justice James Moore Wayne who was also from Georgia, but remained with the Union until his death in 1867.
John Gresham Machen, the author of the letter given to me by Harvey Palmer, was the beloved uncle of Betsy. He grew up to be a distinguished biblical scholar and professor of the New Testament at Princeton Seminary, who left the Seminary to found his own, conservative, Westminster Theological Seminary as a more orthodox alternative. His textbook on basic New Testament Greek is still used today in many seminaries.[3]
Greenmount Cemetery grave of John Gresham Machen next to his Mother
source: Wikipedia
John Gresham Machen died in December 1936, while on a lecture tour in North Dakota and was buried in Baltimore’s Greenmount Cemetery with the wrong year of his death engraved on his tomb.
H. L. Mencken, no fan of his theology, nonetheless, admired his intellect and wrote a glowing obituary (for Mencken) in the Baltimore Evening Sun which ends this tribute to a good neighbor whose gift set me on the trail of the life of a young boy who wrote a proper thank you note to his grandfather, what in today’s world of video game worship and texting friends is a lost art.
H. L. MENCKEN'S OBITUARY OF JOHN GRESHAM MACHEN
"Dr. Fundamentalis"(1)
[Courtesy of https://www.garynorth.com/
The Rev. J. Gresham Machen, D. D., who died out in North Dakota on New Year's Day, got, on the whole, a bad press while he lived, and even his obituaries did much less than justice to him. To newspaper reporters, as to other antinomians, a combat between Christians over a matter of dogma is essentially a comic affair, and in consequence Dr. Machen's heroic struggles to save Calvinism in the Republic were usually depicted in ribald, or, at all events, in somewhat skeptical terms. The generality of readers, I suppose, gathered thereby the notion that he was simply another Fundamentalist on the order of William Jennings Bryan and the simian faithful of Appalachia. But he was actually a man of great learning, and, what is more, of sharp intelligence.
What caused him to quit the Princeton Theological Seminary and found a seminary of his own was his complete inability, as a theologian, to square the disingenuous evasions of Modernism with the fundamentals of Christian doctrine. He saw clearly that the only effects that could follow diluting and polluting Christianity in the Modernist manner would be its complete abandonment and ruin. Either it was true or it was not true. If, as he believed, it was true, then there could be no compromise with persons who sought to whittle away its essential postulates, however respectable their motives.
Thus he fell out with the reformers who have been trying, in late years, to convert the Presbyterian Church into a kind of literary and social club, devoted vaguely to good works. Most of the other Protestant churches have gone the same way, but Dr. Machen's attention, as a Presbyterian, was naturally concentrated upon his own connection. His one and only purpose was to hold it [the Church] resolutely to what he conceived to be the true faith. When that enterprise met with opposition he fought vigorously, and though he lost in the end and was forced out of Princeton it must be manifest that he marched off to Philadelphia with all the honors of war.
II
My interest in Dr. Machen while he lived, though it was large, was not personal, for I never had the honor of meeting him. Moreover, the doctrine that he preached seemed to me, and still seems to me, to be excessively dubious. I stand much more chance of being converted to spiritualism, to Christian Science or even to the New Deal than to Calvinism, which occupies a place, in my cabinet of private horrors, but little removed from that of cannibalism. But Dr. Machen had the same clear right to believe in it that I have to disbelieve in it, and though I could not yield to his reasoning I could at least admire, and did greatly admire, his remarkable clarity and cogency as an apologist, allowing him his primary assumptions.
These assumptions were also made, at least in theory, by his opponents, and thereby he had them by the ear. Claiming to be Christians as he was, and of the Calvinish persuasion, they endeavored fatuously to get rid of all the inescapable implications of their position. On the one hand they sought to retain membership in the fellowship of the faithful, but on the other hand they presumed to repeal and reenact with amendments the body of doctrine on which that fellowship rested. In particular, they essayed to overhaul the scriptural authority which lay at the bottom of the whole matter, retaining what coincided with their private notions and rejecting whatever upset them.
Upon this contumacy Dr. Machen fell with loud shouts of alarm. He denied absolutely that anyone had a right to revise and sophisticate Holy Writ. Either it was the Word of God or it was not the Word of God, and if it was, then it was equally authoritative in all its details, and had to be accepted or rejected as a whole. Anyone was free to reject it, but no one was free to mutilate it or to read things into it that were not there. Thus the issue with the Modernists was clearly joined, and Dr. Machen argued them quite out of court, and sent them scurrying back to their literary and sociological Kaffeeklatsche. His operations, to be sure, did not prove that Holy Writ was infallible either as history or as theology, but they at least disposed of those who proposed to read it as they might read a newspaper, believing what they chose and rejecting what they chose.
III
In his own position there was never the least shadow of inconsistency. When the Prohibition imbecility fell upon the country, and a multitude of theological quacks, including not a few eminent Presbyterians, sought to read support for it into the New Testament, he attacked them with great vigor, and routed them easily. He not only proved that there was nothing in the teachings of Jesus to support so monstrous a folly; he proved abundantly that the known teachings of Jesus were unalterably against it. And having set forth that proof, he refused, as a convinced and honest Christian, to have anything to do with the dry jehad.
This rebellion against a craze that now seems so incredible and so far away was not the chief cause of his break with his ecclesiastical superiors, but it was probably responsible for a large part of their extraordinary dudgeon against him. The Presbyterian Church, like the other evangelical churches, was taken for a dizzy ride by Prohibition. Led into the heresy by fanatics of low mental visibility, it presently found itself cheek by jowl with all sorts of criminals, and fast losing the respect of sensible people. Its bigwigs thus became extremely jumpy on the subject, and resented bitterly every exposure of their lamentable folly.
The fantastic William Jennings Bryan, in his day the country's most distinguished Presbyterian layman, was against Dr. Machen on the issue of Prohibition but with him on the issue of Modernism. But Bryan's support, of course, was of little value or consolation to so intelligent a man. Bryan was a Fundamentalist of the Tennessee or barnyard school. His theological ideas were those of a somewhat backward child of 8, and his defense of Holy Writ at Dayton during the Scopes trial was so ignorant and stupid that it must have given Dr. Machen a great deal of pain. Dr. Machen himself was to Bryan as the Matterhorn is to a wart. His Biblical studies had been wide and deep, and he was familiar with the almost interminable literature of the subject. Moreover, he was an adept theologian, and had a wealth of professional knowledge to support his ideas. Bryan could only bawl.
IV
It is my belief, as a friendly neutral in all such high and ghostly matters, that the body of doctrine known as Modernism is completely incompatible, not only with anything rationally describable as Christianity, but also with anything deserving to pass as religion in general. Religion, if it is to retain any genuine significance, can never be reduced to a series of sweet attitudes, possible to anyone not actually in jail for felony. It is, on the contrary, a corpus of powerful and profound convictions, many of them not open to logical analysis. Its inherent improbabilities are not sources of weakness to it, but of strength. It is potent in a man in proportion as he is willing to reject all overt evidences, and accept its fundamental postulates, however unprovable they may be by secular means, as massive and incontrovertible facts.
These postulates, at least in the Western world, have been challenged in recent years on many grounds, and in consequence there has been a considerable decline in religious belief. There was a time, two or three centuries ago, when the overwhelming majority of educated men were believers, but that is apparently true no longer. Indeed, it is my impression that at least two-thirds of them are now frank skeptics. But it is one thing to reject religion altogether, and quite another thing to try to save it by pumping out of it all its essential substance, leaving it in the equivocal position of a sort of pseudo-science, comparable to graphology, "education," or osteopathy.
That, it seems to me, is what the Modernists have done, no doubt with the best intentions in the world. They have tried to get rid of all the logical difficulties of religion, and yet preserve a generally pious cast of mind. It is a vain enterprise. What they have left, once they have achieved their imprudent scavenging, is hardly more than a row of hollow platitudes, as empty as [of] psychological force and effect as so many nursery rhymes. They may be good people and they may even be contented and happy, but they are no more religious than Dr. Einstein. Religion is something else again--in Henrik Ibsen's phrase, something far more deep-down-diving and mudupbringing, Dr. Machen tried to impress that obvious fact upon his fellow adherents of the Geneva Mohammed. He failed--but he was undoubtedly right.
If this book helps you gain a new understanding of the Bible, please consider sending a small donation to the Institute for Christian Economics, P.O. Box 8000, Tyler, TX 75711. You may also want to buy a printed version of this book, if it is still in print. Contact ICE to find out. icetylertx@aol.com
Footnote:
1. Baltimore Evening Sun (January 18, 1937), 2nd Section, p. 15.
ecpclio 2020/01/05
[2] image from: https://engineering.jhu.edu/
Palmer was born on 8 December 1919 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, to Charles Harvey and Grace Hambleton (Ober) Palmer. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in physics from Harvard University in 1941 (magna cum laude), a Master of Arts in physics in 1946 from Harvard, and a Doctorate in physics from Johns Hopkins University in 1951. While pursuing his master’s degree, Palmer worked as a staff member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then went into academia as an assistant professor and associate profession of physics at Bucknell University. Palmer moved to Baltimore, Maryland in 1954 and began his career at Johns Hopkins University. He held various positions in the electrical engineering department at Johns Hopkins over the course of his tenure including assistant professor, associate professor, professor and ultimately professor emeritus (1992).
Palmer was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Physical Society, New York Academy of Sciences, and Sigma Xi. He authored numerous papers, articles, presentations, and was most known for his book, Optics: Experiments and Demonstrations, published by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Palmer was married to Elizabeth M. Palmer for sixty years and they enjoyed many adventures together including hiking Kilimanjaro in 1981 and raising their family. Palmer was a devoted father, brother, and grandfather. OSA and the scientific community mourn the loss of C. Harvey Palmer.
[3] see his online biography at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
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