USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Waterbury > A century of history in the First Baptist Church in Waterbury, Conn > Part 2
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ancient landmarks of reason, of thought, of faith, of tradition, were suddenly set aside or effaced.
We are probably yet too near those events to pronounce judgment upon them. But we know that they did tremendously influence the whole civilized world, and more than any other move- ments they prepared the way for the nineteenth century, which marked the high-water stage in the tremendous rush of the world's civilization. "Liberty!" was the battle cry of those uprisings, and although in some instances, and especially in France, the men who were contending for liberty became themselves monsters of cruelty and op- pression, yet they gave a new emphasis to the in- herent right of every man to think, and, within the limits of good order, to act as he chooses. So upon the very threshold of the nineteenth century there stood, burning and blazing, unfettered mind wedded to free conscience, nerved by humani- tarian and patriotic sentiments to deeds of ro- mantic heroism !
In America a natural wilderness but sparsely populated was to be cleared and fitted for the habitation of men, and in Europe a political wild- erness was to be reconstructed and made self- governing. In America, where there was room
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and opportunity, enforced by necessity, this free century was to work out its greatest miracle of progress. The Anglo-Saxon, always a worshiper, a lover, and a hero, in whose blood beat the conquest of many a wilderness before, " the wild- erness of Britain, the wilderness of Normandy, the wilderness of the Black, of the Hercynian forest, the wilderness of the frosted marshes of the Elbe and the Rhine, and of the North Sea's wildest wandering foam and fury," had buildéd here his house and raised his altar. For ages the mastodon had trodden this dust, and for ages later the bison, and for ages after that, a people over whose annihilated graves had grown the trees of a thousand years, holding in the mighty grasp of their roots the dust of those long-lost secrets. And centuries after that, through these forests had crept, or rushed, or fled the Indian, and at last appeared the white man, before whose imperious will and resistless strength all weaker races may bow and accept the civilization he brings, or may offer resistance, only to become extinct. The face of the Anglo-Saxon dawned upon the darkness of the Western world, and at last he was king of the wilderness ; and at the beginning of the nineteenth century his genius
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OUR PULPIT.
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had gone forth to conquer and subdue the forest, to convert it, not into a garden, but into an empire, in which the fierce and free spirit of the eagle should be dominant.
Victor Hugo has said: "The nineteenth cen- tury has for its august mother the French Revo- lution. This redoubtable blood flows in its veins. It honors men of genius, and, if need be, salutes them when despised, proclaims them when ig- nored, avenges them when persecuted, re- enthrones them when dethroned; it venerates them, but it does not proceed from them. The nineteenth century has for family itself, and itself alone. It is the characteristic of its revolution- ary nature to dispense with ancestors. Itself a genius, it fraternizes with men of genius. As for its source, it is where theirs is, beyond human ken. The nineteenth century is the birth of civilization. It had a continent to bring into the world. France has borne this century, this cen- tury bears Europe. The greatest of the begin- nings of the century is a democracy, the United States, whose first tender growth was fostered by France in the last century. France founded a republic in America before making one in Europe."
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When one comes to review the historical events of the first decade of the century but a few years past, one is moved to exclaim : Surely heaven and earth conspired to make this the mightiest age of man! Giants were born in those early years, and that first decade, which dates the beginning of this church's history, was a nest nurtured by the God of nations, from which came a brood of mighty ones. In the year 1800 Samuel Finley Breese Morse was ten years old, and he gradu- ated at Yale in 1810, and after failing as a por- trait painter, became immortal as a mechanic by the invention of a device which has made the lightning cure the sick and carry the news. About the year 1800 the cotton gin was only be- ginning to hum its song of industry in the South, and without it we could not today clothe the world with a fleece but sparsely found elsewhere, nor could we hold our place as the greatest commercial nation on the globe. Down in the state of Ken- tucky, in the goodly county of Hardin, in the year 1809, a baby was born whose innocent home- liness was the talk of the neighbors. But his parents believed he was born to greatness, and predicted that he would some day be captain of a flatboat on the Ohio - which he never was;
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but he astonished the prophets, who prophesied better than they knew, and covered with confu- sion the unbelievers, who knew better than the prophets, by becoming Abraham Lincoln, presi- dent of the United States, statesman, emancipator, and martyr. A year or two prior to the birth of this heroic infant, Henry Clay, son of a Baptist preacher, was elected to the United States Senate from Kentucky, and in that same year Robert Fulton, another youth who failed as a portrait painter, awoke to find himself famous as the first captain of the first steamboat on its first cruise, and all the navies of history have not done so much for the universal brotherhood of man as that navigation of the Hudson from New York to Albany. Among poets, the first decade of the last 100 years contributed Tennyson, Whittier, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Poe, and Long- fellow. Among scientists and philosophic writ- ers, Emerson, John Stuart Mill, and Darwin. Among novelists and essayists, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, and Hugo. Among soldiers and patriots, Kossuth, Disraeli, Gladstone, Gari- baldi, Robert E. Lee, Farragut, and Mazzini. Among musicians and musical composers, Men- delssohn. Among agitators and orators, Garri-
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son, Sumner, and Phillips. If we look at the cradles of the first decade in the light of subse- quent events, we shall see there the budding greatness of the mightiest century in all history.
The year of our Lord 1803, with which we are more particularly concerned, was a year of large beginnings. The echoes of the election and in- auguration of Thomas Jefferson, the expansion- ist, as president, were still lingering in the air, and that year a tract of land, embracing New Orleans and extending westward from the Mis- sissippi River to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Gulf of Mexico to British America, was pur- chased from the French. That was the year of the Emmett insurrection in Ireland, and of the re- newal of war between Great Britain and France. And while our planet was swinging on its way, making its daily revolution, coming in on schedule time with twenty-four hours marked against each of its inhabitants, never hurried a second by the most startling emergency, and never delayed a minute by all the strikes that ever demanded an extra tomorrow in which to do something which should have been done yesterday ; while Father Time was busy with the sands of his hourglass, he turned the pages of his big book in which he
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makes his entries and cancellations, until he came to a page marked November II, 1803, whereon he wrote, among other memoranda for future reference, " Organized at Waterbury, New Haven County, Connecticut, a Baptist Church ;" and then he hurried on, for there was so much to do and so much to undo, that he and his two co- workers, Death and History, were kept on the go day and night, weekdays and holidays and Sundays. Death, the reaper, was getting ready for harvest, which was booked by Father Time to be ripe and ready in the year 1812 on the high seas, in a war between England and the United States! And history, with becoming dispatch, was preparing to make a change of front in Eu- rope, for Napoleon Bonaparte, a terrible leader of mighty armies, had risen above the horizon of the world !
So far has our age been given over to inven- tive and progressive mechanics that we are as- sured, ever and anon, that the poet and the prophet are impossible now; likely enough in days of drowsing luxury and dreaming supersti- tion, but quite out of time in the age of elec- tricity and steam. We, who have brought down the wild lightning from writing fiery doom on the
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walls of heaven to be our errand boy and penny postman, have dull ears for prophecy and poetry. In this day of newspapers and electric tele- graphs, when common sense and ridicule can magnetize a whole continent between dinner and tea, we say that such a phenomenon as Mahomet were impossible - and behold Joe Smith and Dowie. To call the nineteenth the century of invention and commercialism in contrasting it with past centuries is to emphasize its material advancement so as to eclipse in our sight that which is of first importance, namely, our social and religious progress. We think that we have been "born out of due time "; that there has been a feast of imagination formerly, and that the Golden Age of poets and prophets is in the remote future. We hear that there is no poetry in railroads and telegraphs; but the fact is the steamboat and the telegraph were both invented by students of art. It is a curious illustration of the practical side of the imaginative Shakes- peare that in the very same year the mulberry tree was brought into England he got one and planted it in his garden at Stratford-on-Avon.
Every age has had its poets, and, indeed, it is impossible for man to live in this world without
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DEACON DWIGHT L. SMITH - p. 165.
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some poetry of some sort or other. Men will have music, for the heart is rhythmic in its beat- ing, and the ear delights in harmonious sounds. Our continent will begin to sing by and by, as others have done. We have had the practical forced upon us by our conditions. We have had a whole hemisphere to clear up and put to rights. We are descended from men who were hardened and stiffened by a downright wrestle with neces- sity.
Wait a little! Give time for the realization of that element of social well-being now impending - free and compulsory education. How long will it take? A quarter of a century! Imagine the incalculable sum of intellectual development implied in this single expression: "Every one can read." The nineteenth century has made that one of the achievements possible in the twentieth. Once there were many writers and few readers. Free and compulsory education will spread the book wide open, and all the prophets and all the poets and all the philosophers will become the teachers and guides of men. Hu- manity reading is humanity knowing, and know- ing humanity will be civilized, and, let us hope, Christianized. Open the first statistics you come
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across. Here is one fact which I find under my
hand : Toulon Penitentiary, 1862, 3,010 pris- oners. Of these 3,010 convicts, 40 knew a little more than to read and write, 287 knew how to read and write, 504 read badly and wrote badly, 1,779 could neither read nor write. In this wretched crowd, all the merely mechanical trades are represented by numbers decreasing as you rise toward the enlightened professions, and you arrive at this final result : Goldsmiths and jewel- ers in the prison, 4; ecclesiastics, 3; attorneys, 2; actors, I; musicians, I; authors, not one. Poets and preachers are heralds of light! Ragged people do not go to church, for the very good rea- son that "when they go to church they soon cease to be ragged," as an editor of London Punch once said.
Our great century past is one in which ma- terial development is conspicuous. The enter- prise, the thrift, the wealth-producing power of this nation is something almost past conception, much less computation. One must take the cars and sweep all day and all night through fields every clod and foot of which is mellow with fer- tility so deep the plow cannot penetrate it; one must cross the Mississippi Valley, the boundless
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prairies of the West, the mountains and the plains beyond these by continued weeks of travel before one can begin to have any conception of the 3,000 miles of cultivable territory which lie be- tween ocean and ocean. During the past century sixteen thousand acres were opened to the plow every day, and we organized twenty-nine com- monwealths, any one of which is larger than England and Wales. The upspringing of im- provements, the outcropping of minerals, the evo- lution of resources in this country is truly won- derful.
The story of the nineteenth century's contribu- tion to invention would make a new chapter in the legends of mythology.
We can hardly realize the extent to which the anxiety of life has been allayed by the invention and cheap production of lucifer matches. Fire, which was once deemed a direct gift from the Almighty, and was fabled to have been stolen from the gods for the benefit of man, and the preservation of it regarded a sacred duty, is to- day cheaper than water. The power to make fire at will is one of the fundamental necessities of man's existence. The use of electricity in the instantaneous communication of knowledge is es-
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sential to present conditions of society, and in fact the telephone and the telegraph have trans- formed the commercial world. The discovery of chloroform and other anæsthetics has married the humane ethics of Christianity to the science of medicine, and the result - miracle-working surgery! In nothing has the nineteenth century marked greater progress than in the science of remedies. A country horse doctor would not now inflict on horses the treatment used for the cure of typhoid fever in the eighteenth century.
Let us never be deceived into believing, how- ever, that the welfare of the human family is dependent upon modern discoveries and inven- tions. The printing press can never take the place of the mother, nor libraries the place of the living voice, nor wealth the place of virtue, nor outward greatness the place of personal honor. It is not by any amount of material splendor or prosperity, but only by its moral worth, by its ideals, by works of imagination, that the nine- teenth century will live. One church like this, full of prayer and good works, will do more to preserve that century in the memorials of the dateless future than all the Godless cities it has builded. No voice comes to us from the once
DEACON A. J. SHIPLEY -p. 165.
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mighty Assyria but the hoot of the owl that nests . amid her crumbling palaces ! Of Carthage, whose merchant fleets once furled their sails in every port of the known world, nothing is left but the historic deeds of Hannibal. She lies dead on the shore of her once subject sea, and the wind of the desert only flings its handfuls of burial sand upon her grave. But how large is the space oc- cupied in the maps of the soul by Palestine, with its obscure Bethlehem and wall-less Jerusalem!
John Quincy Adams, making a speech at New Bedford many years ago, reckoned the number of whale ships that sailed out of that port, and, comparing it with some former period, took it as a type of American success. But alas ! it is with other oil that those far-shining lamps of a nation's true glory which burns forever must be filled.
The best measure of any century since the Christian era is its pulpit. By this measurement the nineteenth century does not suffer in com- parison with many others. The coldness and deadness of the pulpit and pew of the eighteenth century was warmed into life and power in the latter half of that century by the consecrated elo- quence of Whitefield and Wesley. The fire of that great revival, which amounted to a new
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Reformation in England, swept clear across the nineteenth century and is still burning on two continents.
The Christian spirit of the first century, whose motto was "Each one win one," was revived anew after long apathy in the nineteenth. The very first pages of the New Testament - earliest in the date of their writing -tell the story of missionary adventure, launching from one con- tinent to save another. They tell how a great Christian hero, nobly born, with ancestry rooting back in the ancient days of patriarch and prophet, bred to culture and piety, renounced pride and prejudice and quit his native land for heathen shores. Some one has said : " Democracy crossed over into Europe in the boat which carried the Apostle Paul;" and it was even so, for a re- deemed Pharisee was by life and sacrifice em- phasizing the brotherhood of men, and teaching that need and love forget all ranks.
So in the nineteenth century the revival of the Pauline spirit inspired the heroism of the " humble missionary; " who has pushed explora- tion in Africa beyond the hope of return, and carried the Bible in Asia to men who had in- herited a paganism that was already old in the
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days of Babylon's glory. All of this the " humble missionary " did in the face of the bigoted, bar- baric opposition of Christian civilization. He was opposed by universities that called them- selves Christian, and governments that dated their coin by the years of the Advent. The " humble missionary," without the aid of the cannon's voice, or the help of an ironclad, but by the gentle knocking of patient, persistent prayer, gave to the world the " open door," and indeed ripped the doors from their rusty hinges, so that the ancient miseries could no longer be hidden from the modern world. While Carey was preaching in India, his fellow-Britishers, members of the East India Company, were re- pairing heathen temples and moulding idols for the heathen to worship. Christian synods that deemed themselves inheritors of the work of the Reformers pronounced gravely and indignantly that civilization must go in advance of evangeliza- tion, and that steam and gunpowder must pre- pare the way for the Holy Spirit. But He who is wont "by the things that are not to bring to nought the things that are " has so wrought with- out, and often in spite of, the theologian and politician, that no man can write the story of the
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nineteenth century without devoting at least one chapter to the work of the " humble missionary." Civilization to precede Christianity? Nay, before the flag goes the cross! After the missionary has blazed the way, tamed the savage, subdued the pagan, translated the language, then the modern world very superciliously bids us take our Bible out of the way till the powers have partitioned the land! Philosophy and science and materialism and pantheism bid the humble herald of the light-bearing cross hold his peace till they have settled the right of Jehovah to speak. Yes, in many instances the fires of persecution have descended upon the head of the " humble mis- sionary," because he and the cross stood in the way of the sordid ambition and consuming greed of the world powers, but the cross-bearer was " as David, and David as the Angel of God." The conversion of Pagan Rome went on while Nero was beheading Paul, and in spite of the exile of the aged and last surviving Apostle on barren Patmos.
The modern missionary movement, the revival of the Pauline spirit, has marked a new era in social progress, and the herald of good news has done more than diplomats to unify the races
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of mankind. No longer is geography a barrier to sympathy ; and men not only know, but feel, that they are brothers all. The doctrine of the one God, and He the great Father, has touched to tenderness the universal heart, and the discharge of the warrior has been signed. World-wide peace is today something more than the diplomatic catch-theory of a Pagan monarch ; for the conscience of humanity has been sensi- tized. A gloomy region, where no cries for help can be heard, produces the tiger. War is a blind beast, armed and hungry. It makes us laugh if a Prince assume the name of an animal! The world ridicules the Emperor of China for having himself styled " His Majesty the Dragon "! This shows how far a century has removed us from the savage ; and yet one day the pictures of eagles, bears, panthers, and lions will be erased from the banners of nations; iron guns will be masked, and instead of cargoes of powder and lead the man-of-war will carry bread! For these world- wide results, who can deny that the missionary of the Cross, whose field is the world, shares a large measure of the honor and responsibility ?
In the forefront of every patriotic, humani-
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tarian, and educational movement of the last hun- dred years stands the pulpit. It led the agitation for popular education, espoused the cause of the slave, pleaded for world-wide missions, and cham- pioned the cause of temperance, law, and peace. In advance of the on-sweeping tide of popula- tion westward went the missionary, and among the Indians and the cowboys he lived and wrought for God and humanity. No doubt, just as large, if not larger, audiences had assembled to hear individual preachers in other centuries, but never in the history of the Christian religion had the living voice of the pulpit penetrated so far and turned so many hearts to right living, nor had there been so much preaching in so many places and languages as in the nineteenth cen- tury.
The nineteenth century witnessed the great popular movement for the education of the min- istry among the evangelical denominations, so that today the preacher and his profession of preaching are fully intrenched in society. All movements have their evil tendencies, and so in the 'educated ministry, no doubt, there is an inclination to overestimate culture. Character must always weigh in the pulpit more than mind,
DEACON JAMES H. MINTIE.
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as there love is paramount to reason, and heart, rather than head, must sway the man. The pul- pit could not be expected to live through the in- tensely materialistic and skeptical life of the cen- tury just past without being somewhat contami- nated with the contagion of the age, and some preachers may have their doubts. But the future abounds in hope, for the present is full of rich promise of a better time. The critical age is now passing into the creative, the age of skepticism into the age of assurance. Men have discovered that he who analyzes a bouquet destroys its beauty. The pulpit is more popular today than ever before, and preaching is one of the inviting professions. Much emphasis is being put upon literary training for the ministry, and the taste for letters is considered in some quarters the highest mark of a man's call, and herein is one of our perils.
In literature and in recorded history, the great men of the pulpit during the hundred years of this church's witness in the earth, will live so long as there is ability to appreciate consecrated and inspired mind. In England and Scotland a noble line of brilliant and inspired leaders served the world in the ministry of preaching. It was
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an extraordinary epoch in ecclesiastical history which produced Hall, Chalmers, Robertson, Mel- ville, Newman, McLeod, Spurgeon, Liddon, Parker, and McLaren. To her statesmen and jurists England in the day of her supremacy owes not a greater debt than to these men of prayer and power. In America our preachers have enriched our libraries, planned and founded our great institutions of learning, promoted our philanthropies, and helped to raise by voice and life the nation to a place of proud dignity in the world. There are our great pastors and writers, like Beecher, Hale, Bushnell, Storrs, Hall, Brooks, Deems, Fuller; great teachers, like Dwight, Wayland, McCook, Alexander, Thorn- well, and Broadus. No estimate measured by facts and figures can declare the effects of their words and labors.
And now from this pulpit of a hundred years, let the message of love and faith and hope, old as humanity, yet young as human joy, sound forth. All abiding and permanent things are ever old and ever new. Material things live through their little day and pass out, but the things of the Spirit abide. Men exchange the hut for the palace, but home and love follow
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them. The scythe gives way to the reaper, but the old hunger for bread remains. The humble homes of Enoch Frost and others may evolve into the domed temple, but the multitudes will still need the old gospel.
What of the Church in the future? Has the nineteenth century done so much that the twen- tieth has nothing to do? Never were the oppor- tunities of the Church so great, nor its duties so exacting as in the first decade of the new cen- tury. It is the function of the Church today to demand the cessation of war, the promotion of amity between the peoples, and the establishment of international tribunals. The readiness with which even Protestant powers submit disputes to the arbitrament of the Pope suggests the enor- mous influence which the federated Church of entire Christendom might wield as the empire of God among the nations. " The Church may be led to realize a civic ideal, as in the Geneva of Calvin, or may become a state-founding agency, as in the case of New England Pilgrims and Pennsylvania Quakers. Entirely without coercive power, without so much as one shred of legal con- nection with the state, the Church may exercise a weighty and invariably a decisive influence in the choice of public men and measures. It can
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