USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > Hartford > Centennial memorial of the First Baptist Church of Hartford, Connecticut, March 23d and 24th, l890 > Part 9
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Looking through the hundred years, viewing the church of the century as one, my glance has had to be hasty. Only such outline features could catch my eye as you may see in the first interview with one you have been taught to revere before you met him. Any broad analysis would be impossible. Some elements have seemed to stand out. These I will indicate.
I see an erect manly bearing, broad shoulders, strong arms and sturdy strides in untried paths. Our fathers were pioneers. They must have been or they would not have proposed the organization of this church. Pioneers are sturdy men, brave men, men of enterprize. Travelers, they take their journey through roads not
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always well made, well worn, with sign boards tacked up here and there at cross paths. The pioneer carries a compass and a map and a pick and an axe. He makes his road. Like John he goes out into the wilderness to prepare a highway for his God. He levels the moun- tains, exalts the valleys, makes rough places smooth. And the glory of the Lord is revealed to him. He does not so much consult precedents as make them. His chart is the word, his compass the holy instincts born of an indwelling divine Spirit. He has learned to take bear- ings from heavenly observations. The pioneer spirit is Christ-like. It is eternally Christ-like. It belongs to early times. It belongs to all times. It is the spirit of all truly individual life. Each new life must find some new path or it is not a new life.
There were no precedents which bade dear old Grand- father Bolles walk eighteen miles before breakfast on Sunday morning to attend church. But he walked from Hartford to Suffield and made precedents. The old law of the land required him to go to church and his spiritual instinct told him where to go.
The formation of a Baptist church in intolerant times was a brave act, braver than it seems now. It was an opposition meeting of course in the eyes of our fathers of the established church. The wonder is not that some one proposed to good Dr. Strong, to have the thing stopped but that the doctor did not try to stop it.
And because our fathers were pioneers they were missionaries. Themselves missionaries, they had the missionary spirit. They read brotherhood all about them, in the state, throughout the nation as rapidly as
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they could. They spelled out brotherhood in the utter- most parts of the earth by the light of the great com- mission. "Of one blood," said Luther Rice, August 31, 1814, when Daniel Wildman sat in the chair and Elisha Cushman and Gurdon Robins, then 28 years old, were secretaries of the meeting called from all over the state to organize the second foreign missionary society in our denomination in America. Asa Tallmadge was there, Jonathan Goodwin was there. Our thirteen year old brother Dimock was there. "Of one blood," said this man from the far east. "Amen," responded our fathers, "Of one blood they are." And Hartford seconded Bos- ton's motion that the great commission included India. Miss Grew, the daughter of our second pastor, went forth herself, as the wife of Dr. Jones to share with him the privilege of teaching salvation in Burma. Later on Samuel M. Whiting and wife went from us to Assam. And still later James Hope Arthur laid down his life in like service in Japan. They did not stop to discuss whether the heathen could or could not be saved. But they went out to help save them. It was meet that our own Dr. Lucius Bolles should be the first executive officer of the new Missionary Union. It is right that our own Dr. Murdoch should sit in his chair to-day. For he is ours too and married our oldest daughter.
Nor did this missionary spirit impoverish us. We had love still left for home, love for Hartford and our chil- dren's children have been gathered around the mother's board to-day; love for the state; the convention was brought into being here. The missions of the state were under the immediate oversight first of Brother Howard,
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of Dr. Sage, of Brother Bronson. Dr. Turnbull spent the closing five years of his life in care of the missionary churches of the state and died in that service.
And in what part of America may you not find our boys and our girls? Yesterday and to-day hearts quivered with affectionate remembrance of the home church throughout the land. I cannot name them again for you know them all, those who have manned Christ's pulpits in America preaching the gospel they learned to love in the pews of this church. Said a prominent gentle- man in Philadelphia to me, "Some of the laymen in your church have helped to make our denomination what it is to-day." We owe it to tread in the paths of our fathers and catch their mantles as they ascend and the son's portion of their spirit.
Because they were pioneers, our fathers wanted their sons to be better educated than they were themselves. And where schools were wanting they said, "Let us arise and build." And where schools were at hand they said, "Let us use them and make them better." Our fathers did not despise the gift of God in the mind any more than the soul. And because he made it and gave it they said, "Out of this talent make one talent more." Mr. Nelson our first pastor was a graduate of Brown University, and became a member of its corporation. So did Dr. Davis after him. And Brother Howard is there now .* Dr. Davis was the Daniel O'Connell who waged the agitation which produced our institution at Suffield. Brother Dimock was the provisional treasurer who trans-
* Since the above was spoken, the Hon. James G. Batterson, of this church, has been added to the Board of Trustees of Brown University.
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ferred the property to the Board of Trustees when the organization was perfected. Suffield was our mother. What were we doing but bringing back our children to have the grandmother train them at the old family hearth-stone? We said, " You take them and we will help make the chimney corner larger." Suffield is near to us now, not even eighteen miles away in our hearts. We have lost nothing by Suffield. She has given us back brighter boys and girls. She has sent out to us Dr. Johnson and Professor Smith. And many of those who were taught first steps in learning there, seem to be our boys as well as hers. It will be strange if Principal Scott shall not soon be thinking that the balance of credit has got over to his side and that it is time for him to be passing around the hat again for an additional ten thous- and or so on the endowment. And it will be stranger if Hartford allows him to go away empty, provided he ask in a proper manner.
From our church has come an enrichment to the boards of instruction of the best colleges of the land. Our fifth pastor Dr. Sears taught at Madison and at Newton and at Brown. He edited the Christian Review and in 1834 he baptized in the river Elbe that great Baptist apostle in Germany, the revered devoted J. G. Oncken. We gave Henry E. Robins, to Colby and to Rochester ; James R. Boise to Michigan University and to Morgan Park Theological Seminary. We borrowed Dr. Sage for a precious thirteen years and then Morgan Park claimed him. Edwin H. Bronson, the lamented founder of the "King's Household of Bible Readers," was one of our boys. That King's Household of his has brought open eyes to
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the open Bible. Through the eye, light came to the heart and the truth as it is in the word was made part of the heart. And this almost without limits of latitude or longitude in our broad land. Mr. Bronson gave to this work a singular power of organization and for it he laid down his fresh young life. Dr. Lucius E. Smith when on the staff of The Courant was a member of our church and school. At Bucknell he was my own professor of rhetoric. On The Examiner and now for years on The Watchman, he has been making the electric thrill of his facile pen felt without bluster, almost unseen but con- stantly, positively part of the heart-beat of the educational life of our churches. The Christian Secretary was really a child of our church. And it is an agent of education and evangelization wherever it goes, always reverent, always scholarly, and never speaking to you until you ask it to. Last but not least you heard yesterday how that Hartford's Patriarch and Baptist Archbishop Dr. George M. Stone learned how to study Greek verbs aright in Bro. Willis S. Bronson's Bible class in our Sunday-school.
I mention a characteristic feature of the church as it has been, of the church as it is, which we do not always associate with pioneer life. I think I have been able to observe traces of it away back at the beginning of the hundred years. I have found traces of nothing contrary to it in the four months of my personal contact with these dear people with whom I have already begun to fall in love. There seems to have been handed down and tenderly preserved to the present hour, a pervading sense of the sacredness of the church as the body of
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Christ along with a courteous self-forgetful self-control on the part of the individual which has spared the first century of our history any blotted, tattered pages of the story of schism. The church was a holy thing. And it has been in accord with the consensus of the four or five thousand whose membership has through this century made up its constituency, that no man should defile the ark of God with the unhallowed touch of his own petty or personal grievance. Not that our fathers have felt tramelled in personal independent thinking. Not that they have ever suffered a censorship over the fullest enjoyment of free speech. But they have thought reverently. They have thought with devotion to God's church and with self-control. And out of the fulness of the heart's thinking their mouths have spoken. It has been good form, good sense and essential by common consent, to stand by the church because it was Christ's. And in like manner it has been and is the sentiment which long custom has made obligatory upon each, as he answers to his own conscience, that he hold up the hands of whoever may happen to be the pastor of God's flock. If ever a stray sheep became fevered and discontented or unhappy and wandered outside these walls of the fold which were not walls of a prison house but walls of defence and protection, the poor sheep was allowed to wander unhindered unrebuked long enough to be tired of his own folly. Then some one of the flock would go out after him and lovingly bring him back. I have not been told that any shepherd was ever made arrogant by this attitude of the church toward him or that he ever appropriated the loyalty to the office he held as his per-
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sonal property. But that the tendency was to make him sensible of a profound trust thus laid upon him a trust he would gladly share with every other brother pastor of every other sister church.
I gratefully mark another feature in this personal church life. It seems to be in its very blood. If there were a microscope that could examine this blood I fancy the corpuscles would reveal the mark in the outline and size of each disk. This church is a religious church. It lives a spiritual life in Christ. It touches the world not to be made worldly but to invite the world about us to a like precious faith. It touches the life that now is in order to use it as a handmaid of the life which is to come. Our fathers were strangers and pilgrims here, as their children are, citizens of another country and the church, the vestibule on earth to the glorious temple in heaven. It would be insufficient to say that our fathers emphasized religion. Religion was the living principle of their whole being. They have received forgiveness of sins through Christ along with a life in him that is real, a life laid hold of by the powers of the world to come. It would be untrue to say that they despised doc- trine. They believed in theology in so far as religion could use theology. They tested their theology by its relation to religion. Perhaps if they ever came to a dis- agreement, it was with a pastor whose theology forbade his praying in the presence of an unconverted person. This did not seem to be a religious theology in the eyes of our spiritual minded fathers. They would not suffer doctrine to supplant life. Doctrine was for life not life for doctrine. This church has seemed never to lose the
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ring of those great words of the Rev. John Hastings of Suffield when our John Bolles was under examination for membership with the mother church. The account which Grandfather Bolles could give of the philosophy of the plan of salvation in general or its development according to time in his own case in particular was not over satisfactory to the good men who were attempting to dissect his relation of experience. And Mr. Hastings cleared away the mist by saying, "It is evident that Brother Bolles is in the way and this is more important than the question when or by what means he got into it." "More important," these words are precious words. This church has always held that life was more impor- tant than a birth certificate.
In these features of transmitted church personality have any been enumerated which are not clearly Christ- like? Has undue credit been given to the fathers past or present? It is our great debt to preserve intact each divine feature of this wondrous heritage, this living legacy. It would be false to the fathers as well as false to our children if we do not hand it down as glorious as we have received it.
Second. Our fathers' conquests were hindered by the limitations of their times. We owe it to them that our own labors be even with the new possibilities of our times. Sometimes they could only begin the work which has been given to us to complete. They ploughed in some fields where we must sow. They planted some which we may reap. They began some towers for us to finish. They built not Babels; but laid the corner stone of temples founded on a rock and that look toward the
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heavens. The broods they tended were not always of the earth, earthy, with wings that cannot soar; but they were eagles of the air. It may be that some of them have been handed over to our care that we may teach them to lift their wings and train them how to rise.
Our fathers occupied the south land of our city. They occupied the west. Children's children hold the field still farther south. They reached out toward the north. It took more than one expedition to find the north pole. It took more than one expedition to find the lost search- ers for the north pole. We have sent out explorers. They have gone as far as Suffield Street. They have established a little cache there for stores. They have a ship and a crew. They cry to us to occupy the land and possess it. It is not cold like the ice fields of the Arctic. It is not barren, but flows with milk and honey, a goodly land. And from the sermon preached by Dr. Turnbull when this house was dedicated there echoes down these thirty-four years the cry of old, "Go in and possess the land."
Going away back, we find that our fathers met the limitations of a young untried civilization. It seems strange that our grandmothers ever wore short frocks and tended dolls, or that our grandfathers coasted down New England hills, and clambered up again with sleds unhelped by walking sticks. It seems strange that this glory of the nineteenth century, this free government with liberty enlightening the world, could ever have been a child. But when this church was constituted, the Declaration of Independence was not fourteen years old, and George Washington had been president less than eleven
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months. Josiah Strong had not written "Our Country," for no Josiah Strong could have found our country, then in an undeveloped continent, with but a single human being to each square mile. Liberty was a full grown word, a house finished and ready for an occupant. But the idea of liberty was so small, so weak, so puny, that we wonder almost how our fathers fought for it. They lived amid the barbarisms of human slavery, the auction block and the whipping post. There were Wendell Phillipses and William Lloyd Garrisons and Harriet Beecher Stowes in those days. But they heard no cry of wrong. Uncle Tom's back smarted and bled then. It was only Lagree who heard his cry and death groan. The hearts that ached with slavery's bitter cruel- ties then were most of them black men's hearts.
Our civilization has grown old enough to study pro- blems now. Our fathers had but dreamed of them. In- temperance, so far from being a problem of the times, hardly suggested an exclamation point. The drink habit was so universal and so respectable that nobody asked for Dr. Strong's resignation because he eked out his salary with dividends from a distillery.
Immigration had no dangers then. There were no steamboats on the one side of us to tap the sewers of European crime, or railroads that touched the western prairies on the other side of us. Three days after this church was constituted the first naturalization law was passed by the Federal Congress. There were just two conditions in its provisions. The one sprang from the cruelty of the times, the other from the ignorance. The alien who would be adopted, must be first white, and
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second, he must have resided a bare two years in the country.
Popery was a well fed, satisfied institution, with tem- poral power that did not reach this far. It was still fal- lible in things spiritual, and not yet a menace to things political hereabouts.
The perils of cities were largely the perils of villages with ungraded streets, unlighted by night, and no drain- age. Burglary was so rare that the burglar was uni- formly hung. And up to that time the best thief-proof safe of which I have found a record was one that grew in our city, and stood where it grew until thirty-four years ago the wind uprooted it, on Charter Oak Place.
Hartford's sweet singer, Mrs. Sigourney, was not born until a year after our organization. And the literary men had to get along without Webster's Unabridged. For the author was a young man of thirty-two, interest- ing himself at the time with the problems of political life as a member of the town council of Hartford.
We are assuming nothing but the responsibilities that are about us, to glance at the fuller light in which some truths of the divine revelation, written or unwritten, stand forth to us.
Take, for example, the relation of things spiritual to things material.
It has been taught by them of old time that the body is "the tomb of the soul." Building on a gross and literal interpretation of the scripture statement, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh," it was supposed that things material contained the essence of evil or of sin. As to wealth it was said, "The love of money is the
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root of all evil." It was dangerous to possess wealth. But if possessed, religion was still a thing of the heart. We could give God our hearts, but that need not mean our pocket-books. Things spiritual were apart from things material. Business was one thing, religion another. There was no need of business principles in religion, or of religious principles in business. The possibilities of wealth consecrated to God were small, for wealth was small. With the large accummulations of later times, we have been forced to discuss the prob- lems suggested by a religious point of view. We are discussing them now. Some new light has come to us, or some old light come back to us. We remember that our Lord while on earth was clothed with a material body, and like him we are tabernacled in the flesh. Christ healed men's bodies as well as their souls. On the resurrection morning he will say to those souls, Be clothed, and to these bodies, Arise. We have begun to learn that if the Spirit of God is to use us at all, he must use us body and soul; and that we cannot be blessed by him unless our wealth is blessed of him. We do not so often misquote the scripture referred to above, but read it aright, "The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." If it becomes an idolatry, it opens the evils of any other idolatry.
Take, for another example, the relation of the young to the kingdom of heaven. When they brought young children to our Lord, and he, taking them in his arms, blessed them, we read that the disciples re- buked those who brought them. Have our good Bap- tist ancestors sometimes in recalling this incident,
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remembered only the rebukes of the twelve? This were an error as grievous as to teach that the only way a child may come to Christ is by the faith of him who stands as its godfather. Does the child understand all he is doing in confessing Christ? Can he know the philosophy of the plan of salvation? We have come to see that the child knows more and sees more if he has been properly taught than an untaught man. But we have been gradually recognizing in a new way that the little ones who have been brought to a living, loving, personal Savior, may sit down to eat of things spiritual at the Father's table before they had comprehended the laws of spiritual digestion. We have come to see some- thing of the sweet economy for the kingdom and for the child, in saving both the lost years of wandering without a heavenly guide, and in laying hold of the early training years not only for the schools where the rudiments of this world's knowledge may be taught, but where the child may be trained when it is easiest to train for the king- dom. And we have come to a sounder theology and a wiser philosophy as well.
Take also, as an example, the relation of that sublime truth, the sovereignty of God to human responsibility.
There is a Calvinism which lays on the Heavenly Father a responsibility he has not consented to as- sume, and is itself satisfied with speculating upon the contents of the unopened books of his eternal decrees.
It is no strange thing that men have reflected their own hardened hearts into the guesses they have been so bold in making as to God's heart. This may be called the unrevealed doctrine of divine sovereignty. And
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there is a revealed side of this eternal truth. The dis- ciple, sitting in its light, reads that he who called him to his vineyard and to service is his divine and sovereign Lord. Such a call from such a Lord he dare not ignore. There is a Calvinism which shifts all responsibility on God. This ignorantly brings God down from his throne, and leads those who hold to it to idleness. There is a Calvinism which accepts the responsibility this sovereign God lays upon us, and leads to a service that makes us heirs with Christ and fellow-workers with him. We live in times which seem to reveal to men a responsibility resting on God's eternal sovereign right to reign.
Our centennial was ushered in yesterday morning by rain drops which fell from the clouds and the darkness. There was no occasion for complaint, for the showers that water the earth were from above, and fell in mercy. As the day drew on, the clouds floated away to the south- east. The sunlight shone out. The day closed, and with it the old century, just as this day and the new cen- tury opened in the glory of the bright sunshine. It is the mission of the sunshine to warm the earth the showers have moistened, to join its light and heat to the service of the rain, in making the new bud to swell into larger life. It is the business of the sunshine and light of the new century to co-operate with dews of heavenly blessing of the old century, and to bring larger life from both. The rain without the sunshine brings a death-dealing flood. The sun without the rain brings death-dealing drouth. ยท Rain and sunshine together are each other's debtors harmoniously and beautifully to clothe this earth with green, and hasten on the harvest day.
LETTER OF DR. CRANE. [Read by Mr. HOWARD.]
Hon. JAMES L. HOWARD.
DEAR BROTHER :- I continually regret that the state of my health for- bade my acceptance of the honorable part in your approaching anniver- sary which your committee assigned to me, but I gladly furnish you with a few reminiscences.
It has always seemed to me of the ordering of a gracious Providence that my first pastorate, extending from 1860 to 1878, should have been in the city of Hartford. Dr. Horace Bushnell, the man of marvellous might and valor and piety, had cleared the theological atmosphere of all that region. He had made it safe for a minister to think honestly and inde- pendently, and to speak fearlessly. Having been myself trained by Dr. Martin B. Anderson, just translated to the skies, and Dr. Ezekiel G. Robinson to be honest with myself and with all men, I found it easy in Hartford to be practically loyal to those two great teachers. What an honest, and, therfore, what a powerful pulpit the Hartford pulpit was in those days, and is now. The ministers were consciously free men. I am sure that in that first ministry of mine I formed the habit of independent thought and speech, which has been of utmost service to me until this hour.
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