Linked from Wichita’s Hidden Pioneer and the Battle for the McKnight Farm
Transcribed from: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-wichita-eagle-victor-murdock-eulogy/136538978/
This is an age of conformity to the customary. My friend, J. Hudson McKnight, did not always so conform. He was, among us, a strikingly unusual man.
Each of us must meet death. Most of us think of the moment with dread. A little while ago the feet of our friend reached the point in the path where the road drops sheer and, at the end of life, the chasm yawns. He, as each of us must, crossed it alone. There is then no hand to help, no companionship to support us. For at this point each soul proceeds alone. More than men ordinarily have he had intimation that the chasm was close at hand. Did he approach it with fear? He did not. Why was that so? I believe we shall find the answer to that in his temperament.
Here among us in Wichita he was notable for the intensity of his faculty for concentration. This is an age of diverting variety of interest and diffusion of plan and purpose. He was single in interest and single in plan and purpose. This is an age of ready and often ambiguous speech. He was either direct or silent. This is an age which in controversy seeks the easy cushions of compromise. I never knew him to compromise in anything. This is an age that more than all its predecessors prefers publicity to privacy. He indulged in no confidences to the public, and no person save to the beloved wife of his bosom. This is an age of wealth and the display of it. He had wealth, but he made no display. This is an age of careless and often unkindly judgement of fellowmen. I never knew him to judge a fellowman. This is an age of fleeting impressions. He had few impressions. He had many convictions.
All this measures the degree of the intensity of our fellow citizen. All intense personalities are necessarily introspective and all introspective personalities necessarily come to appear to be solitary.
J. Hudson McKnight always seemed a solitary figure to me. I knew that he did not seem so to himself or to his family. But he seemed that to me. He was not seen often in public place in Wichita or upon these avenues. Rather he paid the tribute of loyalty to the home he loved by passing every moment of his leisure within its walls. His soul passed from its portals to the skies and one of his last requests was that his body should be carried directly from them to the grave.
To me, in the general picture of our civil community, he seemed a solitary figure. This is a gregarious age. We gather together at the slightest call. We travel in crowds. He walked alone. In the fact that he walked alone I think we will find the explanation of his fearlessness before the chasm. By and large each of us is a strange composite. We are what we think we appear to be to other people; what we would like to appear to be to ourselves and what we really are. J. Hudson McKnight was no exception to this rule, but because of his intensity, his introspection, his solitariness, he was himself in an extraordinary degree. He relied upon himself. He never leaned on anybody or anything.
He had, as much as any man I have ever known, the mighty passion to search out his own identity, that tireless seeking for the thing in us that lies beneath our graces and our faults, our talents and our pretensions, our virtues and our sins, the thing which, in each of us, lies beneath all the tawdry trappings custom hangs upon us, the thing we call identity which naked must be the quintessence of the soul, the dim reflection, brightened always by faith, which shines upon the poorest, the weakest of us from the incandescent image of the eternal God.
So because of this, because of his intensity of temperament, because of his practice of introspection, because of his solitariness, he did not fear; he did not falter at the lonely trail.
Here at his bier, our vision can not follow him, but pausing this hour in a workaday world to say good bye to our friend, let us as men and women of humble and contrite hearts, believe that as the soul of J. Hudson McKnight passed from this sphere to a higher and happier one, his spirit merged into that communion which is beatific with the light of the countenance of the parent identity and shining with the beauty of the attendant angel hosts.
So we believe. For while this is an age of facts and often the facts of one century become the fables of the next, the mystery of identity whispers always to us that there is but one fact and that Eternity will prove that one fact is Faith.