A Man’s Reach: The Autobiography of Glenn Clark

By Glenn Clark

Clark was a man who, without being himself a recognized "New Thought" leader, has been highly influential in introducing "New Thought" ideas and techniques into the churches. Clark was deeply religious and something of a mystic, a great believer in prayer. He first came into prominence through an article in the "Atlantic Monthly" titled "The Soul's Sincere Desire." He began to be much in demand as a speaker in the churches and in summer camps. In 1930 he organized a summer camp of his own in Koronis, Minnesota to which he gave the name "Camp Farthest Out." Here for a period, amidst pleasant surroundings, a group of congenial and serious-minded people met for a season of fellowship, relaxation, and spiritual renewal, under the direction of Dr. Clark and others of somewhat similar views. In 1942 he resigned from his position at the College to give all his time to helping others discover this integration of body, mind and spirit in God. Through a series of experiences told in his autobiography, "A Man's Reach," he had been brought to an unusual interest in prayer, and it became his major concern and emphasis. It set him to reading especially the works of the mystics and about them and their approach to God. Among the books he read was "Life Understood" by Frank Rawson, a onetime Christian Scientist who had been expelled from the church, and went on to become an influential leader of "New Thought" in England. The thing that attracted Clark to Rawson, he says, was that "he believed one's prayers could be just as scientifically infallible as the laws of physics and chemistry.".-Print ed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Braunfell Books
• Release date: Nov 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839749605

Book preview

Book One—I ASSEMBLE MY UNIVERSE

CHAPTER I—I Assemble My Ancestors

EACH of us is a son of God.

Each of us is a son of Man.

As the former, we are each a focal point through which the infinite resources of God Himself may flow. As the latter, we are each related to every other human being on the face of the earth. Therefore, in writing these pages from my own life, I am actually reporting the experiences of every life. In writing this auto-biography of me, I am in reality writing a bi-ography of you.

A famous author when asked to address a group of descendants of the Mayflower felt impelled to explain why none of his own ancestors came over in the famous boat:

I had two grandfathers and two grandmothers, was the purport of his remarks. "Four great grandfathers and four great grandmothers, and back in 1620 I had sixty-four great, great, great, great grandfathers and sixty-four great, great, great, great grandmothers. When it came time for the Mayflower to sail, all these great, great, great, great grandparents packed up and came down to the dock, fully intending to come to America. But when they reached the ship, the skipper told them that the Mayflower would hold only one hundred and one passengers. Then my sixty-four great, great, great, great grandfathers said they would not go without the sixty-four great, great, great, great grandmothers, so they all picked up their bags and walked straight back to their homes."

I have traced my own parentage back in this fan-shaped way, and then traced my descent, also fan-shaped, from all these forebears, and the general effect of the two fan movements—one back and up, and the other forward and down, is to reveal that I am at least a thirtieth cousin to every Anglo-Saxon man and woman. I have no doubt whatever that should I trace these geneological fans back to the Ark instead of the Mayflower, I would find myself a one-thousandth cousin to all mankind upon the face of the earth.

And so, Cousin, this front door autobiography of me that you think you are reading is really a back door biography of you.

In assembling my own great-grands, I am not going to assemble all of them. I admit that I am doing a lot of picking and choosing. Out of the past there looms one picture which I treasure above all others. It was brought to me in the words of Herbert Booth Smith, former Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of America. The black plague that devastated London was sweeping over Scotland, he writes. The people of Dundee saw it approach from the west in the form of a great black cloud. They fell on their knees and cried to the cloud to pass them by, but it came ever nearer. Then they looked around for the most holy man among them to intervene with God on their behalf. They wanted a holy man—somebody whose prayer-handwriting God was acquainted with—somebody who didn’t have to be introduced to God. All eyes turned to George Wishart and he stood up, the old account tells us, stretching his arms to the cloud, and prayed, and it rolled back.

This holy man, who later became the teacher of John Knox, the founder of the Presbyterian Church, was described in the words of Knox, as a man of such graces as before were never heard of within this realm, yea, and are rare to be found yet in any man.

One night he and John Knox were driving to Dumbarton together. Arriving there, he turned to Knox. Good-by forever, he said. I go to where danger awaits me. If I should die, I shall ask the Blessed Savior to give all Scotland to you.

The young man never saw him again. But from that time on, Scotland belonged to John Knox.

George Wishart became the first martyr to the Protestant church in Scotland. What did he think about as he was lashed to the stake, as his eyes looked far off, south and west? May he not have seen dimly in the prophetic light which had come to him so acutely in the past few hours, a new, daring race! I can almost hear him saying, Lay fast on God, as he saw that new land unfolding into its own across the seas; Lay fast on God, lay fast on God, and so he died.

He did not see tiny me—three hundred years away—across that sea, across that time. All he saw that hour was God. Only as I grow close to God will he ever see me. It matters not that there was blood in him that day that is now flowing in me. Only as the love of Christ that was in him that day is now flowing in me are we truly related. For who is my mother and my brother and my sister and my descendant but he that doeth the will of the Father?

Another ancestor whom I treasure highly is Jonathan Edwards, not because of his masterpiece, The Freedom of the Will, which has been called the one large contribution which America has made to the deep philosophic thought of the world, not because he was the first president of Princeton, but because of his beautiful home life and the profound love and devotion husband and wife had for each other. The Edwards’ home has been described as one of the very few examples of a spiritual leader whose wife was in perfect accord with her husband in all things. Socrates had his Xanthippe and Charles Wesley had his Sarah, and in between comes a long list of saints, whose martyrdom did not always consist of the lions or the burning stake. The love of Jonathan for his wife was just a little less than his love for God, and she in turn merged herself into his life with absolute devotion. The children from such a union, conceived in the love of God as well as in the love of man and woman, are the kind of children who will ultimately nourish the life and spirit of their nation unto the thousandth generation.

These ancestors were not perfect. They had their faults; they made their mistakes. Much of the persecution they encountered, they undoubtedly brought upon themselves. Wishart’s condemnation of beauty of form and of ritual, Edwards’ sermons on the horrors of hell, awoke revolt not only against the speakers, but against the entire religious and spiritual program of their day. Every effort to define, to limit, to corral, to point judgment, was as barren as dead stocks of corn after the grain has been garnered. But now that they are gone, nothing but the seed corn need be treasured.

Three cousins of mine sat in the White House: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Rutherford B. Hayes. Each one got in by the skin of his teeth, and each one went out with a bang. Not one was re-elected.

Of these three, it is my cousin Rutherford B. Hayes, whose administration I would especially commend to every incoming president as a fitting model upon which to plan his administration. He had the distinction, according to all historians, of appointing the most perfect cabinet that any president ever gathered around him.

His biographer, H. J. Eckenrode, writes:

He brought to an end the scandal of the reconstruction period. He cleansed the government of the pervasive corruption which had established itself during the Grant administration, he re-established the authority of the president over the Congressional oligarchy, he put the war-inflated currency back on a sound money basis, he introduced the previously scorned element of good faith into the nation’s dealings with the Indians, he defied and vetoed the attempts of California to exclude the Chinese until after a mutual treaty with China had made such a policy accord with international fair dealing, and he brought sadly lacking standards of morality into public life. Of course, in doing all this he made his renomination for a second term impossible. But that seems never to have bothered Hayes. He was that rare phenomenon—a public man who always did what he thought was right simply because he thought it was right and without the least regard to personal consequences. Hayes was beyond question one of the half-dozen great presidents of the United States.

When I was a boy there was only one man I wished I had descended from but couldn’t because he never married. He was George Rogers Clark. But this bachelor hero of mine had an uncle who married twice, and had thirty children, twenty-eight of whom were boys. As my great, great grandfather Clark came from the same county in North Carolina where these twenty-eight grew to manhood, and as this county at that time was sparsely settled, I don’t see how I could have escaped being related to them! True, this is what the courts would call circumstantial evidence, but here I believe that the circumstances are somewhat numerically in my favor.

Because I am deeply interested in the spiritual welfare of this nation, I am deeply grateful to God for letting my ancestor, James Wilson (with the aid of Gouverneur Morris) write the final draft of the Constitution of the United States. Few people know that he used the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church founded by John Knox under the guidance and inspiration of George Wishart, as his chief model, making comparatively few and only minor alterations necessary for adapting a religious document to a political situation.

Another ancestor of mine who sat with Wilson and Adams in the famous Continental Congress was Roger Sherman of Connecticut, the only one who signed all four major documents in American history, the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Ordinance of 1787.

I like to think of myself, and of you, my cousin reader, as born with our bodies swathed and supported by sinews made strong by the energy of forebears who created with ax and plow a new nation, physically and materially, and with our brains, grooved by brain paths made by forebears who had carved and created a new nation mentally and spiritually.

But before I came into this world, an amazing interlude occurred between the period of the founding of the nation and the creation of the modern world into which I was to be born. It was one of the most startling reversions of history that the world has ever known.

People reared in a civilization of the very highest, bred and nourished in a culture that had created a Shakespeare, a Spenser and a Milton, were plunged again into a darkness of the wilderness. Having once emerged from the forest trails of the Goths and Saxons and from the Viking ships of the Scandinavians, these pioneers rose to the heights of the Elizabethan civilization and produced in the British Isles a highly enlightened Empire. Then suddenly a whole section of that population was plunged again into the wilderness of a new world where most of the old cultures were cast aside. Those of them who found their way into the southern mountains remained in this semidarkness for several hundred years. Those who took the northern trails in covered wagons were lost in the shadows for only a century.

As I look backward over the time that has elapsed between the establishing of the Constitution and now, this is what I see:

A splendid, cultured group of folk stepping from the very highest known sphere of literature and culture of England and Scotland into the forest frontiers of North America. I see them discard all their delicacies, refinements, and cultures as a man sheds a garment before he takes a dip in the sea. Then I see these adventurous folk a generation or two later emerge with big rough hands, a primitive callousness to blood, their own or another’s, cutting the throat of their swine, shooting down the wolves that preyed too near their cabins, laboring in grease and sweat, vigorous, tremendously vital and alive. I see them receiving as a beggar receives, the stint of religion doled out to them by the coarse-grained, good-intentioned circuit riders who followed in the footsteps of the Wesley disciples. These riders with the Bible in their saddlebags were lean, earnest devout men, but without their leader’s culture and restraint and charm. Theirs was a shouting, emotional religion much like the strong cider that in those days found its way to the stomach and veins of the pioneering men.

I can picture one of them, a pioneer sitting in the back of a country store, talking politics with a gathering of his neighbors, telling stories or listening to them—wincing just a bit at times as echoes of his cultured ancestors wakened in his nervous system little twitches of rebellion against the coarseness and crudeness of it all, but compromising slowly with his environment, coming down, down, down to the primitive, a little closer each day.

And his wife, bending over the kitchen stove, using far too often the frying pan, a crime against digestion and sound judgment unknown to the simpler Europeans, expressing her frustration in impatience, sharpness and driving energy as she worked away her life—a life consisting chiefly of breeding and rearing many children. I can see my own Grandmother Clark with her suppressed craving for higher things receiving her only intake through the Bible and Saint’s Rest while all about her was nothing but grinding toil. I never saw this grandmother of mine who descended from George Wishart, tied in holy matrimony to my grandfather who was related to George Rogers Clark, but I have seen a daguerreotype, and oh, how the Hamlet cried out in the face of that suppressed grandmother of mine!

There they came, my ancestors, my father’s and my father’s fathers’, like creatures crossing the Stygian pond, while the devils of their primitive and savage environment fly above them with three-pronged forks to thrust down their heads whenever they try to lift them high enough to catch a glimpse of the blue sky of culture and the open vistas of beauty and the arts.

CHAPTER II—I Assemble My Parents

MY GRANDFATHER, Glenn Clark, was born in Kentucky April 2, 1800. Nine years later, almost within a stone’s throw of where he lived, Lincoln was born. A year later, in the same locality, Jefferson Davis was born. Thus my grandfather acquires geographical distinction.

The first of the three to leave this locality was Abraham Lincoln, and, by a throw of fate, he moved north into Indiana. Next the family of Jefferson Davis left this territory, and by a throw of fate, moved south into Mississippi. Finally in 1825, my grandfather with his wife and a little newborn baby moved across the Ohio into southern Indiana not far from where Thomas Lincoln, a poor carpenter with a kit of tools and several hundred gallons of whisky and a little child named Abraham, had previously moved. Grandmother rode in the wagon, driving the horses, with the cow tied to the tail gate, and grandfather walked, driving a small bunch of sheep. Five years after grandfather reached Indiana, Abraham Lincoln moved on into Illinois. Years later Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were destined to lead the two halves of this great nation into the bloodiest civil war of all history. And while the four brothers-in-law of Abraham Lincoln chose to march under the banners of Jefferson Davis, the four sons of my grandfather chose to march under the banners of Lincoln. So closely interwoven are the lives of all Americans and yet so far apart!

Grandfather had saved a little money with which he bought one hundred and twenty acres of land from the government for two dollars an acre, fifty cents cash down and the balance over a long time. When the family reached their land they were alone in the forest, only one other family within ten miles.

To build his cabin grandfather cut logs out of trees the same size, twelve feet long for the ends of the cabin and fourteen feet long for the sides. He laid the two first end logs at the proper places, trimmed or edged the upper side near the ends, so as to fit perfectly a corresponding notch cut on the underside of the first two logs for the sides. When these four logs were thus placed in position the foundation for the cabin was complete. He then prepared logs enough for the entire house with edges and notches to fit into each other when the cabin went up. When all the logs were thus prepared, he mounted a horse and struck out to find men to come to his first house-raising.

After the house was up, grandfather split or rived boards three feet long and six inches wide with which to make a roof. There were no shingles or nails. The first course of boards was laid and a straight pole placed on them and tied or secured in position to hold this course firmly in place. Then the second course was laid lapping six inches over the first and secured in like manner with another pole, and other courses were laid until the house was completely covered. The floor was mother earth. The chimney was built of sticks, but well plastered on the inside with mortar made of yellow clay and water.

The windows were square holes cut in the walls and covered with thin paper or thin white muslin. The single doorway was an opening cut in the wall, eased with a slab of wood secured by wooden pegs driven into the ends of the logs. The door was made of split boards, which was hung on wooden hinges and swung out. It was fastened by a wooden latch which fell in a notch in the inside, and was raised from the outside by a string which always hung out.

A necessary article of furniture for this cabin was a bedstead. Only one post was required. It was set up four feet from one wall and six feet from another wall. Two large holes were bored into this post two feet from the ground; and two holes opposite these in the walls, and into these holes were inserted two poles, smoothed with a drawing knife, one four feet and the other six feet long. This structure constituted a frame upon which were placed split boards for the bed to rest upon.

With a cabin for shelter and a bed to sleep on, the next indispensable thing was bread. My grandfather knew his bread was in the ground, beneath the forest where he was to dig for it. In digging for that bread he began by cutting out the underbrush and cutting down all the trees that were eighteen inches or less in diameter. When the timber was cleared off and the ground ready for planting, the stumps were so close together that the hoe was the only instrument with which to plant and cultivate the first crop. This was the heaviest timbered region in all the state, and the labor of clearing the ground was my grandfather’s absorbing work for many years. When he had finally got a little patch cleared and raised his first crop of corn, then began a fight with the squirrels and raccoons to save his hard-earned grain. He kept his loaded rifle always close at hand, and shooting squirrels in self-defense furnished plenty of squirrel meat for the table. The coons ravaged the corn at night, which made it necessary to provide himself with dogs to hunt them down. Thus coon-hunting by men and boys at night with their own coon dogs furnished fun and excitement. No need of theaters and moving picture shows when a coon hunt was in sight!

After my grandfather had a little farm established, he built a log blacksmith shop. He drove one hundred miles to Lawrenceburg, a trading station on the Ohio River, and secured the tools and iron for everything he needed. He made horseshoes and horseshoe nails. He shod his own horses and those of his neighbors, made plows, harrows, hoes, shovels, forks—in fact, everything necessary for use on the farm. He also brought home from Lawrenceburg a shoe-makers outfit. During rainy days and evenings he made shoes for grandmother and the girls and boots for himself and the boys. When he found he needed a good deal of leather for shoes, harnesses and other things, he constructed a tanning vat, gathered the kind of bark necessary to make good leather, collected a few hides and made the leather required for all the needs of the farm.

Grandmother took the wool which my father sheared from the sheep, dyed it with the walnut ooze, carded it by hand cardboards into rolls, spun it on a large spinning wheel into yarn thread, wove it on a hand loom into a web of durable jeans cloth. She then cut this cloth and made of it winter garments for each member of the family, including headwear for males and females. From the yarn she knitted stockings and socks for all alike in the family. She also wove blankets for all the beds from this homemade yarn.

To provide sheets and summer wear, my grandfather each year raised a patch of flax. When the flax was ripe, he pulled it by hand and spread it in rows or swathes on the ground for the straw to dry and rot. He then broke and hackled it, thus producing a quantity of clear, clean fiber. This fiber grandmother spun on a small spinning wheel into fine linen thread. From this thread she wove great webs of strong, durable linen cloth, from which she made sheets and summer clothing for everyone of the family. From this thread she also knit summer socks and stockings for all. Also from hemp grandfather made rope of different sizes for clotheslines, bedcord and other purposes.

The winter caps were made out of the jeans cloth and the summer hats were made out of oat straw, braided into narrow strips and sewed into wide-brimmed hats fitted to the heads of little and big girls and boys and parents.

The artificial light in my grandfather’s home came from the open fireplace, or from a rag in a saucer of lard. Tallow dips or molded candles were a later innovation. Bread was made from a coarse corn meal, produced by a hand grater. Wild turkeys, squirrels and an occasional deer furnished the meat. The only drink was milk and water, with now and then a tea made from spice brush or sassafras.

There was always, once a year, a hog-killing time when meat was provided for the entire year. That day was followed by the putting up of sausage and the smoking of the hams, shoulders and sides in the old smokehouse until they were beautifully cured and browned, so that they kept sweet and good until hog-killing time came again the next December. That day was an event each year. From eight to ten young hogs were required for the family. It was a hard and exciting day’s work, commencing before daylight and closing after dark—leaving a row of white, clean porkers hanging in perfect line to become cold in the frosty winter night.

Suspended to the joists in the cabin hung a framework of nicely smoothed poles one foot apart. On these, in the early winter season, rich golden pumpkins hung in long thin slices to dry for pies and stewing. And later on, when the orchard trees began to bear abundant fruit, the roof was covered with apples and peaches nicely pared and cut into suitable sized pieces for sun drying, and in quantities sufficient to last until the fruit season came around again. Thus grandfather and grandmother, always frugal and forehanded, provided dried pumpkins, dried fruit, and filled the cellar with apples, potatoes, turnips, cabbages and other vegetables, besides a barrel or two of cider, a quantity of popcorn and other things needed for winter use.

For years corn meal was the only provision for bread. Kentucky corndodgers and hoecake furnished the staple bread supply. Mush and milk, which provided the evening meal for the family, was a luxury after a hard day’s work, and was sufficiently soporific to make sleep sound and restful. Later on a grist mill was set up, at which wheat could be ground into flour. Then the family began to raise wheat in small quantities. A fine grove of sugar trees was found in the wood pasture and from the flow of the sap in the early spring they made sugar and syrup enough to last the family through the year. Thus my grandparents could have built a Chinese wall around their farm and have lived comfortably within its boundaries, asking favors of no man.

Twelve children were born into this home (besides the one who died in Kentucky), eight daughters and four sons. About every fourth or fifth year another log cabin was added on to make room for the new arrivals. But by 1851 the family had outgrown the little farm of one hundred and twenty acres, and by that time they began to hear of beautiful prairie lands in Iowa with its rich acres ready for the plow, where there were no forests and stumps and rocks to contend with. And so in 1855, selling his little farm for $100 an acre, and putting in a claim for Iowa land that could be purchased for $1.20 an acre, Glenn Clark put his little family consisting now of eight—as most of the oldest daughters had married as soon as they reached the age of fifteen—into two covered wagons and an open buggy, and joined the great caravan going west. They started the journey in August and reached their destination in October of that year, a two-months’ trek which in a modern, six-cylinder covered wagon would require one day.

By the year 1860 both my grandfather and grandmother had died. Then my father, nineteen years old, sold his only belongings—a calf and a saddle—and with that money as sole asset entered Iowa Wesleyan where he worked his way through a year of college. That spring he answered Lincoln’s first call for volunteers and took part in the first Iowa regiment’s march to Wilson’s Creek to save Missouri for the Union. After participation in seventeen battles, during four years under Grant and Sherman, he took part in the last battle of the Civil War, the charge on Fort Blakely, fought several hours after Lee had already surrendered to Grant on the same day.

It was not until his regiment marched into Selma, Alabama, on the 21st day of April, over a week later, that news reached him of the surrender of Lee’s army and of the trace between Sherman and Johnson. Father was not well, and a kindly gentleman invited him to occupy a room in his house. That day news came that Lincoln was assassinated, and in the evening father’s host revealed the fact that he was Colonel Todd, a brother of Mrs. Lincoln, and an officer of the Southern Army. He spoke of Lincoln’s assassination with great grief, and then in that courtly, cultured Southern fashion of the day, quoted from Macbeth, substituting the name of Lincoln for that of Duncan:

Besides, this Lincoln

Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been

So clear in his great office, that his virtues

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu’d against

The deep damnation of his taking-off:

And pity, like a naked new-born babe,

Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, hors’d

Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

That tears shall drown the wind.

At the same identical hour, on the same identical day, in the little town of Carlinville in southern Illinois, my grandfather Egbert Page closed his store for the day and secluded himself in his room in a day of mourning for his beloved friend.

Eight years before, Grandfather Page and Lincoln had met for the first time. One day my mother, then a little girl of five, was looking out of the window and saw her father, who was a tall man of six feet two, talking with another man taller than he. Grandfather brought his guest into the house and left him seated in the front room with my mother while he went to the kitchen to bring his wife in. While he was gone the stranger picked my mother up on his lap and told her stories. When her parents returned, grandfather introduced him to grandmother as Abraham Lincoln.

In 1942 I visited Carlinville for the first time and in the front yard of my mother’s childhood home I saw a huge rock with the inscription, Here Abraham Lincoln addressed the citizens of Carlinville in 1858 in his campaign against Douglas for the Senate. Mother told me how the people crowded her front porch and of the deep impression Lincoln made upon them all. When the war broke out a few years later she vowed that when she grew up she was going to marry one of Lincoln’s captains and she renewed the vow at the time of his death. Little did she know that the captain