USA > Connecticut > Fairfield County > Newtown > Newtown's bicentennial : an account of the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the purchase from the Indians of the land of the town of Newtown, Connecticut, held August fifth, 1905 > Part 12
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before and hold it up to-day for emulation and desire. Miriam, in the history of Israel, did her people a service in striking the cymbals in praise of high deeds. Strike the cymbals to-day in praise of the home. Strike the cym- bals to-day in honor of patient endurance of hardship and pain. Throw aside criticism, seek earnestly for something worthy to copy, and honor your God.
TRINITY CHURCH.
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COMMEMORATION IN TRINITY CHURCH
Sunday, August sixth, being the Feast of the Trans- figuration, the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for that day were used in the celebration of the Holy Communion. The Morning Prayer was modified to meet the occasion, Psalms 80 and 90 being used instead of those appointed for the day; the lessons, Deuteronomy 8, and 2 Corinthians 3. The Processional hymn was number 468, "From all that dwell below the skies," to Old Hundredth: the introit, hymn 196, "Our fathers' God, to Thee," to America; the hymn before sermon, number 418, "O God, our help in ages past," to St. Anne; hymn 231, "My God, and is Thy table spread," to Federal Street, being sung at the Con- munion. The Rev. J. Francis George read Morning Prayer and Rev. Frederick Foote Johnson celebrated the Holy Communion. The sermon was preached by the Rec- tor, Rev. James H. George, from Psalm 80, verses 8 and 9, the subject, "The Transplanted Vine."
THE TRANSPLANTED VINE
A SERMON PREACHED IN TRINITY CHURCH AT THE NEWTOWN BICENTENNIAL, SUNDAY, AUGUST 6TH, 1905
REV. JAMES HARDIN GEORGE
PSALM 80; 8 and 9: Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt; thou hast cast out the heathen and planted it. Thou preparedst room before it, and didst cause it to take deep root, and it filled the land.
It is most fitting at a time when we are celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of a new order of things in this town, when the land, which before that day had been the hunting ground of the Indian, was to become the property of a civilized race and to be cultivated; when we are thinking of the changes which time has made in the external conditions of the country, that we should study the religious history of the community; and especially, as we are gathered in our parish church, that we should review the history of our own communion in this town in the past two hundred years.
In doing so I trust that I shall not be led into saying aught that would wound the feelings of any of our neigh- bors and friends. Thank God, the bitterness and rancour which in portions of that period characterized religious controversy have passed away, as a broader conception of religious truth has brought men more closely together.
It is a law of the spiritual nature that it must make its own growth from within. External circumstances which may cramp it will inevitably result in serious consequences.
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The inborn freedom of our nature rebels against restriction. Moreover, our sense of the value of liberty makes us ready to take the part of the oppressed, though we may have little sympathy for the cause in which they suffer. If the soul may lie open and respond to God's truth, and take the form which God gives it and have its normal growth, the divinely appointed result will follow.
In the history of the Anglo-Saxon race we find a certain character and religious ideal. It may under certain circumstances and restrictions be stunted, made one-sided, dwarfed, or abnormally developed. It seeks a certain roundness and proportion, which if denied it, it will rebel. There is a type to which it would revert under favorable circumstances, towards which it is constantly pressing. If we bear this fact in mind, we shall have a key to the history of religion in this community.
The words of the Psalmist, of which the motto and court of arms of our State are an application, represent the transplanted vine, and assure us of God's protection from external danger. Not less do they assure us of His law within our nature which will seek its normal growth and generous fruits. Whatever may have been the circum- stances which have made it one-sided, or dwarfed some essential character, it will revert to its type.
Two hundred years ago there was not a place of worship or a minister of our Church in the Colony of Connecticut. The reason of this is not far to seek. Religious intolerance, which was a characteristic of the time, had driven the early settlers of New England from the mother country to seek the practice of their own faith in this land. They came here for freedom to worship God; but it was for freedom to worship God in their own way, not for a general freedom for all to worship God in the way in which it should seem best to each. Consequently they did not permit others the freedom which had been denied them.
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But there was in the make-up of the race a sense of fair play, which doubtless brought into the company of the leaders of the Puritan movement many who did not sympa- thize with all their religious views, though feeling that they were entitled to hold them. There was also in them that type of spiritual character which belongs to the race, and which has constantly pressed forward to be realized, that roundness and balance which has made it so strong in every department of life and given it the leading place in the world. There is in the race that blending of loyalty to order and authority with that insisting upon personal freedom which has shown itself in its political history. It is the race which has wrought freedom under law, and produced the Constitution of the United States, the most perfect model of all political institutions, because it combines a strong central with a free local government.
In the realm of religion it has settled upon the model of the Primitive Church, which recognizes a divine authority in its order, creed, and worship, with the sense of the personal responsibility of the individual soul and its freedom of approach to God. It is not satisfied with either of these lacking; so that we see in the religious history of the race these two tendencies, the one to value the divine authority and ordinances of the Church, whereby it has sometimes been led to suppress personal freedom and ignore the access of the soul to God; the other to go to the extreme of denying any outside authority what- soever, whereby not only the order of the Church and the Christian creed, but also the Scriptures, have been regarded as useless, and the claim made that the soul is its own guide in searching for truth, and its feelings the only test of righteousness. Circumstances have caused the one or the other of these two forces at different times to prevail; but where one has been suppressed it has generally resulted in strong reaction in its favor. The blending of these two
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tendencies in the normal specimens of the race, and their due recognition, has satisfied its spiritual wants. It was the existence of these two cravings in the spiritual nature of the settlers of New England which caused the rise and growth of the Church in a region where she had been hated.
For the Church in this Colony was no exotic. It was not the result of a propaganda from outside; but it was the natural returning of some of the noblest and best minds in the Colony to that normal spiritual condition which could alone satisfy them. When Cutler, the President of Yale College, and his associates declared for the Church and went to England for ordination, they reached that point because they had outgrown the one-sided teaching of Calvinism and felt the lack of a sense of divine authority in its ministry.
Our religious bent, as did our civilization, came from Stratford, and the seeds of both were in the early settlers.
It was in this very year 1705, and in the very month, July, Old Style, that Rev. George Muirson, the missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel sent to Rye, in the neighboring province, landed in New York. About this time a request was sent from certain members of the Church of England in Stratford to the Rector of Trinity Church, New York, asking him to visit them. He, by reason of the distance from his home, referred the matter to Mr. Muirson.
Mr. Muirson had in Colonel Caleb Heathcote, one of his parishioners, a devoted adherent of the Church and anxious to do what he could for it in Connecticut. With this faith- ful and influential layman he visited Stratford in the summer of the following year and on September second held the first service of the Church in this Colony.
In 1694 the Rev, Messrs. Keith and Talbot had visited the Colony and spent a Sunday at New London. They were hospitably received by Mr. Saltonstall, the minister of the
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town, and at his request preached for him that day. But it is not likely that the Prayer Book service was used.
On this occasion Mr. Muirson preached to a very numer- ous congregation morning and evening, and baptized twenty- four persons. He found a number well inclined to the Church, and with its presentation, others were drawn to it, so that through his occasional visits a parish was formed in April 1707. A man of prudence, modesty, and ability, he did a good work, and in spite of opposition, extending even to legal notice from the town authorities to refrain from officiating, there was created such an interest in the Church that the Congregational minister himself was favorably disposed towards it, and thought of applying for holy orders. But his good-will cost him opposition and final loss of his place.
To meet the growing tendency towards the Church, the Independents called the Rev. Timothy Cutler from Boston, a man of culture and high standing, and one of the best preachers in the two colonies ; and the death of Mr. Muirson in 1708 left the Church people to occasional ministrations. But the leaven was at work, the need in the spiritual nature of the community and the race was too deep-seated to die out. Cutler himself became uneasy under the old doctrine and order, and though he served the community well for ten years, and was then made Rector, or President, of the College in New Haven, he ultimately came into the Church.
It was not until 1722 that the Stratford parish had its first resident minister in the person of Rev. George Pigott, sent by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and under his faithful ministry the Church in Stratford flourished.
It was during these years, from the first visit of Mr. Muirson, that our own town began to be settled, and the men who came here represented the town from which they came. On the one hand was the established order and the old
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Calvinism. On the other the reaction from the old doctrine and a leaning to the Church's ways. It was not the fault of Mr. Toucey, the first minister of this town, that there was dissatisfaction and division. It was because of this division brought from the mother town and the general feeling of unrest in the Colony. Nor was there trouble because there were professors of the Church of England who made division. A large and growing number of the people were inclined to receive Mr. Pigott's services. He officiated here six times during his first year, and reported to the Society that all the adherents of the Church in Newtown had conformed from conviction, none being by inheritance of the Church of England. Of these there were twelve heads of families who petitioned the Society for a minister of their own. The defection to the Church in 1722 of the President of Yale College and his companions gave it a standing and influence before this impossible to be obtained. About this time Mr. Pigott was transferred to Rhode Island, and the Rev. Samuel Johnson, one of Cutler's companions, was sent after his ordination in England to Stratford. He served a long and faithful ministry, officiat- ing in Newtown and other places, and was finally chosen to be the first President of King's, now Columbia, College, in New York.
The history of the Church in Newtown is now for fifty years bound up with the life of one man, John Beach, him- self an example of this tendency and characteristic of our race which forms the subject of my sermon. A native of Stratford, of old Puritan stock, imbibing its love of liberty with his mother's milk, and held by all the sacred traditions of that movement, he grew up in the atmosphere of the town where the new movement was going on. Cutler was his pastor and friend, and persuaded his parents to give him a college education. It was under him and Johnson, who was a tutor of the college, that
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he studied. Their influence on his life both before and after their conformity to the Church was deep, but he held the old way, and graduating in 1721, he studied for the ministry of the standing order.
It was this very popular and ingenuous young man who was called to fill the place of Mr. Toucey in Newtown, and to reconcile all differences. The choice proved a happy one ; for he not only healed all differences among the adherents of the old way; but he reconciled to his ministry those who could not sit easy under the old doctrine. The movement towards the Church of England was stopped, and although there were five families who continued to receive the ministrations of Mr. Johnson, the larger number of those attached to the Church of England and those leaning that way were satisfied with him, for he preached the simple Gospel.
But the growth in him had begun, and those familiar with the Prayer Book recognized that much of his prayers were in the words and all in the spirit of the liturgy. At last the natural bent of his mind and diligent study brought him to the conviction that his place was in the ministry of the Church, and in 1732 he conformed and on Easter day was received into the communion of the Church by Dr. Johnson in Christ Church, Stratford.
Going soon to England he was ordained, and returning in September took up his work in the town where he had already spent eight years of a fruitful ministry. His first service was held under a large sycamore tree at the foot of the village street where the Bethel road crosses the turnpike, no public place being open to him.
That a man of his sensitive nature should have felt deeply grieved at the coldness of former friends is not strange ; nor is it strange that they should thus have treated him. Old prejudices were still alive and were not to be changed by one man in a short time, however honest and sincere he
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may have been known to be. That he should have met opposition and misrepresentation and abuse from the more violent partisans was what might have been expected.
But he took up his work in the old spirit. He knew the people and loved them. He knew their prejudices and had shared them. There was no wish in him but to do them good. He was led into controversy by attacks upon the Church, but this was mostly from those without the town. He lived in peace with his neighbors and ere long his work began to tell. Beginning with the five Church families to whom he ministered in his own house, his congregation grew. Each communion, which he celebrated twice every month, saw new members added to his flock. Sometimes several families came at one time to his ministry. One of his parishioners losing her Prayer Book on her way from service, it was picked up by a neighbor, who pronounced it a mass book. Others eager to see what it was like found it to contain a large part of Holy Scripture and such prayers as Mr. Beach had used in his former ministry, and to breathe a wholesome religious spirit. As a result eight families were added, bringing the number of the flock to seventy souls.
The need of a church building now became imperative, and a small wooden structure twenty-eight by twenty-four feet was erected. The frame was raised on Saturday, the roof- boards were nailed on, and on Sunday the service was held under its scant shelter, the worshipers sitting upon the tim- bers and kneeling upon the ground. It stood on the com- mon a few rods from the lower end of the Street. This building served the congregation until 1746.
The growing influence of the Church in the town is shown in various acts of the town, among which is one passed in 1743. Mr. Beach had, when he conformed to the Church of England, surrendered all the grant of land which was given him at his settlement, excepting his home lot, which
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was freely granted him in recognition of his past services. The town now gave him from the land set apart for the support of the ministry the proportion which would come from the adherents of the Church, an act as much to the credit of the town as his first surrender of land was to him.
The great revival which swept over the country under Whitfield threatened to injure the Church, but the excesses to which it led drove a yet larger number of the more sober people to its worship. It is interesting to note that follow- ing upon this great awakening the size of the congregation necessitated the erection of a new and larger church, "a strong neat building, forty-six by thirty-five feet." This was situated in the Street opposite the present "Brick Building," so-called. The Church continued to prosper, and by the time of the Revolution its adherents numbered one half of the population of the town.
In the troubles with the mother country the sympathy of the Church people of the town was with the Colonies, and their minister, with his clerical brethren, did all in their power to influence the English government to redress the grievances of the Colonies; but Mr. Beach had at his ordination taken a solemn oath of allegiance to the Crown from which he felt that he could not absolve himself, and a majority of his people, as of the inhabitants of the town, were of the same mind. But there was no factious or seditious opposition to the colonial government, or refusal to give it support of men or money. Mr. Beach went quietly about his work as he had done in the past, preach- ing the Gospel and ministering to the spiritual needs of the people, and within his cure was the only place where the prayer for the King was heard within the lines of the colonial government. Like other clergymen he might have fled to the loyalist lines or gone to other lands ; but his duty lay here. The threats against his life and the attempts to
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silence him were vain. If these came from individuals in the community, they did not represent it.
Mr. Beach passed to his rest at the close of the Revolu- tion and in the fiftieth year of his rectorship. More than any other one man he left his impress upon the people of the town, and his influence is abiding.
In spite of the general unpopularity of the Church in the New England Colonies, as being indentified with the English government, it seems to have had no ill effect upon this parish. At its close a new and larger church, sixty-eight by forty-eight feet, was built on land just north of the present edifice and was consecrated by Bishop Seabury in 1794, and served its people down to the present generation. But the old church had a special honor before giving way to the new. Within its walls, under the rectorship of the Rev. Philo Perry, who succeeded Mr. Beach, the Convocation of the Bishop and clergy of Connecticut met on the last day of September, 1790. The subject for their consideration was the changes made in the Prayer Book by the General Convention the year before. These changes were such as were made necessary by the independence of the Colonies, and the change in the Communion Service conforming it more nearly to the primitive liturgies, which Bishop Seabury pledged the Scottish Bishops who consecrated him to endeavor to bring about. The subject had the fullest con- sideration, and on the next day, October Ist, the Prayer Book was ratified and became the rule of worship for the diocese.
Of the subsequent history of the parish it needs not that I speak with great particularity. It has been my purpose to cite certain facts of the history of the Church in this town to illustrate a great truth of our human nature.
At the close of the Revolution the parish took its place as one of the leading parishes of the diocese, and at one time the largest; and the Conventions of the diocese have met
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here from time to time. Its rectors have been men promi- nent in the councils of the Church, and as a rule spending many years in the midst of a contented people.
Early in the last century the parish outgrew the limits of one clergyman's strength to administer, and in 1830 St. James's Church was built in Zoar to serve that part of the town. And when it was given up the parish of St. John's, Sandy Hook, beginning first as a Sunday School work, and then a mission, was made a separate parish in 1870.
Under the rectorship of Dr. Marble, who for more than twenty years went in and out among this people, the new and beautiful stone church in which we worship was built, a true type of the blessed and lasting influences of his ministry.
For more than half a century now, in the changes which have taken place in our civilization whereby the rural dis- tricts are deserted for the cities, the parish has suffered with the town. But its good work has not failed, and its influence on the community has not waned.
And the reason is that it has held true to the great ideals of the race. History moves on, and great changes come in civilization, in men's manner of life, and in their thought. But their spiritual needs remain the same from generation to generation. To meet these needs men must have the same old standards of duty to a living God, and love to the breth- ren. The due balance of loyalty to authority and freedom of conscience are required to-day as two hundred years ago; and it is found in the reverent devotion and order set forth in this parish. It is the standard to which men must come for rest and peace, and for vitalizing and progressive power.
We have used the same service this morning that our fathers used two hundred years ago. It is the same that our children will use in the generations to come. It has served under monarchy and republic, under a rude and pioneer civilization and under all the changes which wealth and
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progress have made. It cannot wear out, because it is true to the nature which God made in his own image.
With gratitude to Him for his mercies in the past, and with a firm faith in his over-ruling providence, let us go on to make this church a blessing to the community in which it is placed.
With a hearty good will to all Christian men, with a just pride in the devotion and steadfastness of those brave men who for conscience sake crossed the ocean and planted a religious community in this land, let us hold them in undying reverence. It is from such a stock that true religion springs; and from this vine God will cause to come the peaceable fruits of righteousness which are, by Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.
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