A SPECIAL and pathetic interest belongs to these addresses; Archdeacon Cunningham was giving them just before his fatal illness, and indeed the last of them, although prepared, was not delivered. They were given to the American soldier students who came to Cambridge at the end of the war. He had visited the United States twice, and he had lectured at Harvard University for Professor Ashley in 1899-1900, and had also been Lowell Lecturer at Boston in 1914. In the United States, youthful, varied, and keen with life as they are, he found qualities which he liked, and was in a world where he was at home. These visits, and the many friendships he formed across the Atlantic, left him memories which he greatly prized, and it is needless to say that with the American public he was understood and popular, accepted at his true worth as a great teacher and a great man. When he knew that American students were coming to Cambridge he was delighted to welcome and to help them. These Sunday-morning addresses were one of the ways in which he did it. Now that they remain his last public words, these addresses will be prized by many, specially at Cambridge, but indeed everywhere; many of us feel that we have lost not only a great guide in his own special field, but also a friend always ready and always able to help us in most varied ways. We went to him for help more readily because we knew that it was a real delight to him to give it. A happy fate had made him, after wide experience as an Extension Lecturer, a teacher in a great University, where he was able to found a school of Economic History. Here all of us, his pupils, soon found that he had not only the gift of expressing sound learning and decided views in a plain and unmistakable way, but that in teaching he also thought more of his hearers than of himself or his opinions. In spite of his strong personality, he never tried to impress himself too much upon us; it was his aim, alike in matters religious, historical, or social, to help us to help ourselves. For this we owe him a great debt, and shall treasure the memory of him and his work. There was one characteristic of all that he thought or said to be noted above all: everything in history interested him; everything in life interested him. In the study of economic history, which he really created at Cambridge, and so greatly advanced in Britain, these two interests were combined. were combined. In his service to religion, represented by the Church, it was the same. History-the greatest of histories-was joined to a study of human life and social needs. He was always in touch with history; he was always in touch with life. Hence came his unique and many-sided success as a teacher, as a writer, as an Archdeacon, and as a parish priest. Many of us who had gone to him for help when we were young and found his mind and heart remaining open to us in later years, must thank him not only for what he was to us, but for what he tried to make us become. In the last few months of his life it was plain that he was looking to the end, although he still kept his many and varied interests; he wished not only to be at peace with others (he spoke to me more than once of the smoothing out of controversies from the past), but to gather up for the sake of others the lessons of his own most earnest and laborious life. This can be easily seen and felt in all that he wrote of late, and he wrote much when he might have fairly claimed the right to rest. To the very end of a life full of power, of activities and interest, he was strong and eager to help others to the glory of God and for the service of man. J. P. WHITNEY. |