Joseph Cook

Joseph Cook.

MR. EDITOR:- Will you allow me to bespeak from our fellow-citizens a general hearing for the eloquent lecturer who is to address us on Friday evening. Mr. Cook is attempting to do what every honest man will claim that would like to see done. He is aiming honestly to bring the eternal truth tonight. He is not the attorney of a narrow orthodoxy, nor the hireling of unthinking doubt. He is God's ally and messenger, and seeks to proclaim all that the broadest grasp of intellect and the most lucid of rational intuitions can discern as real and true in the moral constitution of the world. If there is a basis of reality on which religion rests with its fruitage of hopes, we all desire to know what it is. If we have been beguiled by the phantasms of ignorance, imagination or sentiment, we desire to be undeceived. I believe Mr. Cook is as honest and as earnest as any one of us wish him to be, in sifting the real from the unreal; and I am persuaded that his extraordinary learning and keen intellectual perception qualify him to do justice to the high motives and burning zeal which we like to attribute to him. I have been accustomed to reading reports of Mr. Cook's lectures for several years. I observe that his method is characterized by a recognition of the unity of truth. Scientific truth is not a realm by itself, but must exist in harmony with moral truth, and religious truth, and all truth. Mr. Cook, from his large stores of knowledge brings out the great truths of science, and instead of disparaging them as incompatible with accepted religious truth, puts them all side by side, and demonstrates that science is something parallel with religion, and bound up with religion, and supported by the same underlying basis of fundamental truth. Instead of teaching religious belief as a dogma which must stand apart from the great body of rational evidences; he shows that sound religious faith is in alliance with all rational evidence; and all faiths not defensible by an appeal to the common intelligence are spurious and hurtful. Those who like to see the basal principles of religious faith and practice strengthened and defended by a stalwart arm, will certainly be gratified in listening to Mr. Cook; and those who are struggling, in the face of doubts and uncertainties for some clearly discerned and unmovable rests for their religious nature will thank Mr. Cook for helping them over the most distressing obstacles which beset the inquiring mind. It is not to be supposed that because Mr. Cook is a giant in argument. His discourse is necessarily ponderous and sleepy. There is not a more fascinating speaker on the public platform. His grand ideas are set in polished phrase; and the most charming diction is enriched by the loftiest thoughts. His discourse is the marriage of poetry and logic. He takes us to the profoundest depths without inflicting the slightest sense of weariness or effort. We rise with him to the lostiest heights and are neither dizzy nor lost in empty space. Mr. Cook is entirely unique. This logic is clothed in roseate flesh, and animated with throbbing warmth. His poetry is the garment which he flings about the sturdy frame of his majestic thought. He is altogether such a speaker as we have never heard before, and shall never hear again until Joseph Cook returns.

Alexander Winchell.

Ann Arbor, 27 Apr., 1880.