The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1874-03-20
Building and Reiug.

Last evening Rev. E. II. Chaplin delivered at
City Hall his lecture entitled Building and
Being" The audience was, considering the
lateness of the season and the bad condition of
the travelling, large one. The lecture did not
begin until half past eight owing to the illness
of Mr.. Chaplin, who found it difficult to speak
at all.
The lecture was very characteristic one,
Astounding as it did in ornate flights of rhetor-
ic, in cutting sarcasm, in vigorous pleading for
the right and in those odd and grotesque COM
parsons peculiar to Mr.. Chaplin among Ameri-
can platform speakers. 1t might have borne as
subtitle, "The whole duty of man.
The theme of the discourse was the proper
development of character, individual, social
and national. This idea was kept well in hand,
though the thought became at times little
nebulous as the speaker wandered off into some
lofty flight of defamation. He began 10y say
ing that formative process was continually
going on all about us. Nothing is really ever
lost, but all matter is continually changing its
structure. The great law of nature is not
law of death, but law of ever-working change
Old forms are merely destroyed to give place
to new ones The physical and mental history
of the world is epitomized in the work of &c.
struction and construction in process in great
city.
This work of construction is of chief inter
est to us in the development of character indi-
vidual, or Social or national. 1t is true that in
mans life much works outside of his will.
His life is an Intervening of influences from
without and within. There is no such thing as
detached individuality. The man is in
measure moulded by his Surroundings. Still
these outside influences have been greatly mag
nified by Buckle and his school. Inside all
these are the potentialities of the man. Every
man who lives, constructs. No really great
efficient man was ever built up by circum-
stances.
The lecturer then enlarged upon the duty
and necessity of harmonious development of
character and deplored the exclusive cultivation
of special faculties. 1t is often argued that
this disproportionate development of one fac
olty at the expense of all others is in the line
which nature has indicated; that the man of
great imaginative power necessarily lacks prac-
teal or executive force. This the lecturer held
to be an error. A man should be wholly edu-
Gated. Both mental and physical powers should
be studiously cultivated. Moreilearning is not
necessarily culture or education. A man may
have his head crammed with facts and still not
be man of true education. Learning is but
of little good unless it can be made to accom-
plish something; unless its possessor knows
how to effect something with it,
The matter of social development was next
taken up, the speaker contendng that the great
want of the age is culture. The present is an
age of intellectual activity, but scarcely one of
culture. Still the process of tearing down and
building up continues and good is being evolv-
ed If we will only cease to be so pretentious, to
put ourselves forward for what we are not, our
progress will be much more rapid. Some as
poets of our national development were then
considered, and Charles Sumner adduced as an
example of that complete developme nt, which
formed the theme of the lecture.