USA > Connecticut > Contributions to the ecclesiastical history of Connecticut > Part 2
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The adsessor of James Noyes in moderating the synod, was THOMAS BUCKINGHAM, pastor of the church in Saybrook. He was a son of Thomas Buckingham, one of the "seven pillars" who were chosen to begin the church in Milford. As he does not appear among the alumni of Harvard College, it may be presumed that he received his education in the New Haven "col- ony school." He appears to have commenced his ministry at Saybrook, not far from the year 1667, when the candlestick had been removed out of its place, by the migration of the church with its pastor to Norwich. Before 1669 another church had been gathered in Saybrook, and soon afterwards Thomas Buckingham had become its pastor. At the date of the synod he was sixty-two years of age, and had been in the pastoral office not far from forty years. All the indications of his character and position that appear upon the documents that have come down to us from that age, show that he was one of the most conspicuous among the clergy of the colony. To us assem- bled here, it is an interesting fact that the honored and beloved chief magistrate of this ancient commonwealth, at the present time, is his descendant.
Where there were two moderators, it is not strange that there were two scribes. These were STEPHEN MIX, of Wethers- field, and JOHN WOODWARD, of Norwich. The former was at that time about thirty-six years old. He was a native of New Haven, the youngest son of one who was a young man among the earliest inhabitants of the town. Educated at Harvard College, a graduate of 1690, he became pastor of the Weth-
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ersfield church in 1694, when he was only twenty-two years of age ; and in that place the traditionary remembrance of his ministry, and especially of the authority with which he ruled the people, was long maintained, and I dare say is not yet ex- tinguished. The other scribe, John Woodward, was a still younger man. He had been less than nine years a pastor, though he had been fifteen years a graduate of Harvard.
Another aged pastor, deputed by the council of New Lon- don county, was present in the synod, namely, MOSES NOYES, of Lyme. He had been minister in that place from the be- ginning of the settlement there, forty-two years; but he had sustained the pastoral office only fifteen years, for, from 1666 till 1693, though public worship was maintained in Lyme, and a minister supported, without aid from any Home Missionary Society, no church was instituted in that settlement. It seems difficult to reconcile such a fact with another equally attested fact, namely, that the man who labored as minister of the gospel twenty-seven years in a single parish, without gathering a church, and therefore without any administration of sacra- mental ordinances, was nevertheless a man of mark among the clergy of the colony, a Calvinist without reproach in his doc- trinal scheme, and esteemed by the best judges that knew him, a man of great and extensive learning, an excellent Christian, and judicious divine. He was three years younger than his brother the moderator, but the two were classmates at Harvard College in the class of 1659.
Two other members of the synod, the next after Buckingham in the order of age, were also classmates at Harvard, in the class of 1675. SAMUEL ANDREW, of Milford was at that time in the fifty-second year of his age, and was just completing the twenty- third year of his pastorate. He was the acting rector or presi- dent of the Collegiate School, which office he continued to hold without resigning his pastoral charge, till after the removal of the school to New Haven, and the completion of its first col-
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lege building there in 1718, when his son-in-law, the pastor of Stratford, was appointed rector. His ministry at Milford, pro- longed through more than half a century, seems to have been steadily prosperous, and the effects of it upon the habits of the people are visible at this day. His classmate, TIMOTHY WOOD- BRIDGE, of Hartford, was a son of that John Woodbridge who came to New England in 1634, at the age of twenty-one, and was pastor for a little while at Andover, but resigned his charge and returned to England while Puritanism was in the ascendant there, and then, after many years, came back, and was settled in Newbury as colleague with his aged uncle, Thomas Parker, and successor to his kinsman, the father of the Noyeses. Timothy Woodbridge was ordained pastor of the First Church in Hartford, on the same day on which his college classmate was ordained at Milford. He came into the pastoral office in that church, only nineteen years after the decease of Samuel Stone, the surviving colleague of Thomas Hooker. How well he bore himself in that office, and to what degree of honor and public confidence he attained among his contemporaries, is amply testified by the eulogium which Timothy Edwards pronounced upon him, when preach- ing the election sermon before the authorities of the colony, the week after his death, [1732.] Both the Hartford minis- ters had died within the year, and both were commemorated by the preacher, standing in the pulpit where both had been for many years accustomed to sit on the occasion of that great solemnity. Having spoken first of the pastor of the South Church who had died six months before, he proceeded to speak more at large of " that aged and eminent servant of Christ, who died in this town this last week, who was one of the principal men of his order in the land. Him, we that were his contemporaries in the sacred work of the evangelical min- istry in the towns about him, generally considered as one much our senior and superior ; and in cases of weight and difficulty
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advised with and hearkened to him as our head and guide, yea very much as to a father, who was indeed one of the chief of the fathers of that tribe in Israel which he, by office as a minister of Christ, stood especially related to." All this might seem to be no more than the common-place eulogium that naturally follows the hearse of an aged and respected minister. But when we remember that the preacher who said all this, was himself well advanced in life, these strong ex- pressions of veneration for a departed leader and father, become more significant. Nor was all this enough for his own feeling, or for the expectation of his hearers. He went on to speak of the departed more particularly : "the goodness of his natural temper ; the gravity, greatness and superiority that appeared in his countenance ; his bodily presence being so far from being mean and contemptible, that it was great, much above what is ordinary, his proper stature, (he being taller than the common size,) with his comely and majestic aspect, being such as commanded reverence ;"-" how wise and judicious he was ; with his great prudence, his entertaining freedom, oblig- ing courtesy and affability ; his superior learning, reading and knowledge ; his liberal, bountiful, generous and public spirit ;"' -"his great ability for, and readiness in giving counsel in diffi- cult and important cases, and how much the care of the churches and of the College lay upon him ;"-"and how happy a hand he had in managing of controversies and differences ; and what influence, sway, and authority he had with ministers and people ;"-" and how from place to place he carried the bless- ing of peace with him ; and how ready and willing he was with love to serve men and do good to all." The hearers were furthermore reminded of " his orthodoxy and soundness in the Christian faith, and how much he savored of a gracious spirit-particularly in his great love to our Lord Jesus Christ, his blessed master ; his holy zeal for God and against sin ; his humble submission and resignation to divine sovereignty ;
[and] his great mortification to the world." It seemed not ne- cessary to tell them, but only to remind them, " for how many years and how well he filled the pulpit, and (in our councils and associations, ) the moderator's chair ; and with how amiable a conversation he adorned his profession ;"-" and how becom- ing a Christian and a minister he carried himself, both living and dying." When such men die," exclaimed the preacher, " we may well weep over them, as the king of Israel wept over the holy prophet, ' O my father, my father ! the chariots of Israel, and the horsemen thereof !' "
I may add that he who was the subject of all this eulogy, left in print one specimen of his ability in the ministry,-an election sermon preached in 1727, when he was already far advanced in age. An attentive examination of that sermon, especially in the light of the testimony given so soon after- wards over his recent grave, shows that he was a strong and deep thinker, and that he must have been to an intelligent con- gregation an eminently impressive preacher.
Another class of graduates from Harvard, that of 1681, gave three members to our little synod, namely. JAMES PIERPONT, of New Haven, NOADIAH RUSSELL, of Middletown, and SAM- UEL RUSSELL, of Branford. The first of these is traditionally reported to have made the original draught of the articles adopted by the synod. At the house where some of his de- scendants live on his old homestead in New Haven, his coun- tenance-slightly shaded with a look of sadness yet expressive of whatever quality can win affection, gentle and scholarly yet full of manly beauty, with the high, thoughtful forehead, the delicately chiseled features, and the dark, keen eye-still looks upon us from the canvas. And well do the rich masses of hair falling upon his shoulders, the neat white bands, and the scholar's gown with its loose folds, set off the serions beauty of that countenance. One printed sermon remains to tell us with what force and fervor, as well as doctrinal sound-
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ness, he performed his work in preaching the word. The time at which he came to the pastoral office in the New Haven Church, required in the pastor peculiar gifts of influence and of wisdom, and especially a manifest eminence in the wisdom that cometh from above. The generation that came out of England had just passed away. Eaton and Goodyear, Greg- son and the Newmans, and others like them who had first en- countered the temptations of the wilderness, and had laid the foundations of what they hoped would be a glorious temple, had left behind them none that could be called their equals. The first pastor Davenport, seventeen years before, had forsaken the church in his old age, not only because he felt himself called to do battle in a broader field for what he esteemed an essen- tial principle of the Congregational way, but also because, in the midst of thickening disappointments, he was depressed and discouraged. His colleague, Street, had labored on alone six years, and his death had left the church for the first time with- out a minister. Ten years of trouble, of discouragement, of division, and of steady declension followed, and then, by the kind providence of God, the young man came to them, in whom, after a few months of probation, their hearts were united. His wisdom, his gentleness, his faithfulness, carried that church through a perilous crisis in its history. His public spirit, as well as his eminent gifts, made him conspicuous in the colony. It was out of his consultations with his two next neighbors in the ministry, Andrew, of Milford, and Russell, of Branford, that the movement came which resulted in the founding of a college under the humble name of a collegiate school. In the words of Cotton Mather, "New Haven valued him-all Connecticut honored him." When he came to the commencement at Saybrook, in 1708, making his slow jour- ney through the woods that had as yet receded from the shore only at distant intervals, and discussing the affairs of the col- ony, the college, and the churches, with his friend and class-
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mate Samuel Russell, as they rode side by side from Branford to the river, he was less than fifty years old, but he had been more than twenty-three years in the pastoral office. He died six years afterwards, at the age of fifty-five, when the college of which he was a principal founder had not yet found its per- manent abode, and when the system of church government which he helped to frame had not yet begun to show what it could do. But his usefulness has survived him in his descend- ants to this day. His beautiful and gifted daughter, Sarah, a great grand daughter of Thomas Hooker, was like a minister- ing angel to her husband,* that wonderful preacher and theo- logian, whose name is to this day the most illustrious in the church history of New England, but who could never have fulfilled his destiny without her. A grandson of hist enriched our New England theology with his unanswerable exposition and defense of the divine fact of the atonement for the sins of men. A great grandson of hist presided over the college for more than twenty years with eminent success and wide re- nowu, and left to all the evangelical churches that read or worship in our English language, the only System of Theo- logy that ever has become in two hemispheres a popular reli- gious classic. Nor is this all. The humble collegiate school, which in 1708 was sending out a class of three graduates, and which, when James Pierpont died had not yet dared to call itself a college, has grown into a university with five distinct faculties of instruction, with almost six hundred students, and with more than three thousand living alumni ; and its beloved and honored president, with those various gifts of genius, of learning and of grace, which so adorn the office made illus- trious by his predecessors, is a great great grandson of the same James Pierpont.
Of Pierpont's two classmates, the Russells, we know less ;
* President Edwards. t The younger President Edwards. # President Dwight.
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but what we know is of the same sort with what we know of him. The church of Middletown was in its stage of early weakness when Noadialı Russell became the pastor there. His only predecessor in office had died after a ministry of only sixteen years, and an interregnum of four years had followed. That was, as I have intimated, a time of greater depression, and greater peril in church and state than any other time in the history of New England. Just then it was that Noadiah Russell, whose childhood and early youth had been passed under the ministry of Davenport and Street, in New Haven, began his ministry in Middletown. How well he performed his work, how effectually he molded the character, aud formed the habits of the people, and how much he had of their grate- ful affection, may be inferred from the fact that when he died, in the fifty-fifth year of his age, and the twenty-ninth of his pastorate, his son became in a few months his successor, and labored there for almost fifty years-the entire period from the ordination of the father to the funeral of the son being more than three-quarters of a century. In like manner Samuel Russell, son of the first minister of Hadley, came to the pas- toral office in Branford at the re-organization of the church there, twenty-two years after the removal of Abraham Pierson with his flock to New Jersey. He became the second father of the town. His ministry, peaceful and prosperous, was pro- longed forty-four years, till his death in 1731, at the age of seventy. It was at his house that the ceremony of founding the college, by the ten ministers who had been designated for that purpose, took place in the year 1700.
Of the twelve clergymen in our little synod, I have already mentioned ten. The two that remain to be commemorated, were contemporaries in college, though not classmates,-CHARLES CHAUNCEY, who graduated in 1686, and JOHN DAVENPORT, who graduated one year later-the one being a grandson of that Charles Chauncey who, in the first generation of our New
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England history, was President of Harvard College, and the other being the only grandson of the first pastor of New Ha- ven. The first was forty years old in 1708; the second, one year younger, they being the youngest members of the synod with the exception of the scribes. Chauncey was pastor of the Stratfield church, now the First church in Bridgeport. He was born in Stratford, where his father, the youngest son of President Chauncey, was pastor. He was twenty-seven years old, and had been nine years a graduate, when a new parish was instituted, which received the name of Stratfield as signi- fying that part of it was in Stratford, and part in Fairfield. At the organization of the church in that new parish, he was or- dained to the pastoral office over a people among whom he had been known from his childhood. In that office he continued till his death in 1714. John Davenport, pastor of the church in Stamford, was not inferior in ability to any other member of the synod. In his own church and town, and among the ministers and churches of that county, he had a commanding influence. In the election sermon for 1731, his death, which had taken place three months before, was spoken of by the preacher (Samuel Whittelsey, of Wallingford) as " the remo- val of one eminent for learning, and who was a bulwark and a barrier upon our frontiers." Nor was this an unmeaning eu- logy. As to his learning, it was testified at his funeral, by one of his neighbors in the ministry, (Samuel Cooke, the successor of Chauncey at Stratfield, ) that "he had the advantage of an accurate knowledge of those languages wherein the scriptures were given by Divine inspiration, probably far beyond the com- pass of any of his survivors within many scores of miles every way ; and so could drink immediately out of the sacred foun- tain, those languages being almost as familiar to him as his mother tongue." And that he was not a scholar merely, but a man of action and of influence, was largely testified. His rela- tions to the civil interests of the colony, to the college, (of which
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he had been for fourteen years a trustee, ) and to the ecclesiastical commonwealth at large, as well as to his own parish, having been referred to, and his ability and bold fidelity as a minister of God's word, having been commemorated, the speaker went on to say, he " was both our crown and our bulwark" ;- " it was many years since looked upon by the serious and judicious as a special favor of Divine Providence that a person of such dis- tinction was seated so near the western limits of New England as a bulwark against any irruptions of corrupt doctrines or manners."
Of the four lay messengers who were delegated to that sy- nod from the several constituent councils, little can be reported. " The council of Hartford county sent JOHN HAYNES, Esq., of the First church in Hartford, who was a son of the second pastor of that church, and a grandson of the first governor of that colony. He had been liberally educated at Harvard Col- lege, and was eminent in civil life, being a Judge and an " as- sistant." " From the council of Fairfield county" came Dea- con SAMUEL HOYT, an officer of the church in Stamford. "From the council of New London county" there were two, of whom one was ROBERT CHAPMAN, of Saybrook, a man who often represented that town in the colonial legislature, and whose memorial among his descendants is that "he walked with God;" and the other was Deacon WILLIAM PARKER, of whom I have been able to find no traces elsewhere.
The synod, consisting of these sixteen members, was con- vened by an order from the civil government of the colony. Such a call was in accordance not only with the ideas then prevalent, but with all the precedents in the history of New England. It was universally understood in those days-and rarely was there an election sermon in which it was not explic- itly or implicitly repeated-that Moses and Aaron were to embrace each other in the mount; that Christian magis- trates were to care for the peace and purity of the churches ; and
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that those who were entrusted with the government of the com- monwealth were to be regarded, and were to regard themselves, in their relation to the churches, as episcopi quoad externa. Ac- cordingly, in May, 170S, the legislature entered upon the rec- ord of its doings an order which not only convened the synod, but prescribed its duties, and which should therefore be read in full on such an occasion as the present.
" This Assembly, from their own observation, and the complaint of many others, being made sensible of the defects of discipline in the churches of this government, arising from the want of more explicit asserting of the rules given for that end in the Holy Scrip- tures, from which would arise a permanent establishment among ourselves, a good and regular issue in cases subject to ecclesiastical discipline, glory to Christ our head, and edification to his members, hath seen fit to ordain and require, and it is by the authority of the same ordained and required, that the ministers of the several coun- ties in this government shall meet together, at their respective coun- ty towns, with such messengers as the churches to which they be- long shall see cause to send with them, on the last Monday in June next, there to consider and agree upon those methods and rules for the management of ecclesiastical discipline, which by them shall be judged agreeable and conformable to the word of God, and shall, at the same meeting, appoint two or more of their number to be their delegates, who shall all meet together at Saybrook, at the next commencement to be held there, where they shall compare the results of the ministers of the several counties, and out of and from them to draw a form of ecclesiastical discipline, which, by two or more persons delegated by them, shall be offered to this court, at their session at New Haven in October next, to be considered of and af- firmed by them ; and the expense of the above mentioned meetings shall be defrayed out of the public treasury of this colony."
The alleged occasion of this ordinance, and the ends which it was expected to answer, require some attention on our part if we would fully understand this important chapter in the church history of Connecticut. "Defects of the discipline of
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the churches" are referred to as obvious and notorious, but are not described or specified. What were those defects, so noto- rious that there was no need of naming them ? It is affirmed that those defects, whatever they may have been, "arise from the want of a more explicit asserting of the rules given for that end in the Holy Scriptures." What rules for the discipline of the churches are those which, as the framers of this ordinance thonght, are given in the scriptures, but which were not suffi- ciently asserted in the then existing platform of the Connecti- cut churches ? It was expected that from the more explicit as- sertion of those rules, there would arise "a permanent estab- lishment" in Connecticut. What was the meaning of that phrase " permanent establishment ?" Establishment-of what ? And how was that expected establishment to differ from the establishment then existing ? It was furthermore expected that from this more explicit asserting of scriptural rules, there would arise " a good and regular issue in cases subject to ecclesiasti- cal discipline," as well as " glory to Christ and edification to his members." What did this language mean as used by the framers of the ordinance ? If we can fairly answer these ques- tions I think we shall understand the views and aims of the men who projected the Saybrook synod.
We may get some help in our exegesis by remembering what former synods had been held in New England, and with what results. The first-that of 1637-was held that the churches, and their ministers, might come, by discussion and fraternal consultation to some united judgment concerning an enthusias- tic antinomianism, which had become a perilous and disorgan- izing heresy in the Boston church, and was mixing itself dis- astrously with all the interests of the colonies. The second- that which met in 1647, and again by adjournment in 1648- was called to digest and set forth a system of principles for the guidance of the churches in matters of discipline, and its result was the Cambridge Platform. In this as well as at the first sy-
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nod, the churches, not of Massachusetts only, but of the other colonies, were represented. The platform elaborated by the synod had not indeed the authority of a constitution or of a code of laws ; it was law to the churches, only in the sense in which Kent's Commentaries or Story on the Constitution is law to courts of justice. It was nothing else than an " expli- cit asserting" of rules given in the scriptures. As such it was accepted in Connecticut not less than in Massachusetts, and was held to be full and sufficient for the guidance of churches in their self-government, and in their relations to each other. Even now, after a lapse of more than two hundred years, that platform, (notwithstanding its errors here and there in the ap- plication of proof texts, and its one great error in regard to the power of the civil magistrate in matters of religion,) is the most authentic exposition of the Congregational church order as given in the scriptures. At first, it was the more effectually commended to general acceptance because it was understood as having satisfactorily adjusted whatever differences on the subject of church discipline had been developed in New Eng- land. But not many years had passed, when difficulties arose in the churches on the Connecticut, and especially in the Hart- ford church, from which the admired and venerated Thomas Hooker had recently been removed by death. That passage in our church history is an obscure one, the documents by which it might be illustrated having mostly perished. But we may be sure the conflict was not by any means a merely per- sonal collision between the Teaching Elder Stone and the Ru- ling Elder Goodwin, or between any other, individuals who were involved in it. Whatever may have been the beginning of it, the controversy itself was a conflict between opposite principles of ecclesiastical order. It is often said that there was a Presbyterian element or tendency among the original Puritans of New England ; and so there was, but what was it ? None but the shallowest and most ignorant readers of our his-
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