Some of Machen's "enemies" admired him
Now and then, even the worldly see the nobility of a principled man
“We have lost a man whom our times can ill spare, a man who had convictions which were real to him and who fought for those convictions and held to them through every change in time and human thought. There was power in him which was positive in its very negations. He was worth a hundred of his fellows who, as princes of the church, occupy easy places and play their church politics and trim their sails to every wind, who in their smug observance of the convictions of life and religion offend all honest and searching spirits. No forthright mind can live among them, neither the honest sceptic nor the honest dogmatist. I wish Dr. Machen had lived to go on fighting them."
Such was the tribute of novelist and former liberal missionary Pearl S. Buck who won both the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes. J. Gresham Machen was a critic of much of what she represented.
“In the days when he was hot upon the trail of my own too liberal soul, I received from him, in the midst of his public protestations, a private letter saying that he hoped I would not misunderstand his denunciations or in any way interpret them as being at all personal to me. He had, he said, the utmost respect for me as a person, but no respect at all for my views. I replied that I perfectly understood, inasmuch as this was exactly the way I felt about him, the only difference being that he had the same right to his views that I had to my own. He wrote again to say very courteously that I was completely mistaken, since views were either right or wrong, and his were right.”
In a day when many assume all conflict is bad, we ought to consider Buck’s respect for Machen, the fighter. Even his acerbic atheist curmudgeon contemporary H.L. Mencken lauded Machen in his tribute-obituary “Dr. Fundamentalis.” After describing the events that drove Machen from Princeton he said:
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.
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.
To learn more about Machen’s fight we heartily recommend Reformed Forum’s recent series with D.G. Hart, Machen and the Presbyterian Controversy.
"He wrote again to say very courteously that I was completely mistaken, since views were either right or wrong, and his were right.”
Love it!! I think I will adopt this as my own.
It's hard to know how much to credit things like this. It's bad form to speak ill of the dead, so it's not particularly surprising that people who criticized him in life would back off after his death. More than that, Buck won. Costs her nothing to be magnanimous after the point where saying something nice about Machen might make a difference.