USA > Connecticut > Fairfield County > Newtown > The story of two centuries, with an account of the celebration of the bicentenary of the Congregational Church of Newtown, Connecticut, October 18, 19 and 20, 1914, 1714-1914 > Part 6
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the Church of God moves forward. May we of the present generation prove worthy of the charge entrusted to us. May we never falter as we follow the Banner of the Cross, till we also hear the "Well done" of our Master.
"I love thy kingdom Lord, The house of thine abode, The church our blest Redeemer saved With his own precious blood.
I love thy church, O God, Her walls before thee stand,
Dear as the apple of thine eye, And graven on thy hand.
Beyond my highest joy I prize her heavenly ways, Her sweet communion, solemn vows, Her hymns of love and praise."
ADDRESS
By Rev. WILLISTON WALKER, D.D., of New Haven
The admirable historical paper by Miss Scudder, to which we have just listened, gives me the text of what I shall say this afternoon. The historian has recorded that this church was long called Presbyterian, and that it was not till the pastorate of Rev. Nathaniel Urmston that the title "Congregational" became definitely attached to it. It was, nevertheless, always a Congre- gational church, as that term is now understood. Attached, indeed to the consociational system, established by state authority in 1709, its relations to the state and to other churches were unlike, in many respects, to those of the present day, but it was never Presbyterian as Presbyterianism is understood in Scotland or America. Yet popular usage in Connecticut, a century ago, designated our historic Congregational churches as Presbyterian, and the employment of the term in Newtown was but in con- formity to general custom. As a Congregational church this . body, whose two hundredth anniversary we celebrate, represented that great movement which peopled New England with self- sacrificing, determined men and women, who came not as is often, though incorrectly, said to establish religious liberty, but to organize churches on what they believed to be the pattern authoritatively set forth in the New Testament, in the pages of which they saw mirrored all that a church should rightfully be in membership, officers or government. In our easier time we may believe their interpretation too narrow. We may not see, as they did, any divinely prescribed model to which a church must invariably conform. We may hold that that vital and inward reality, the life of God in the souls of men, will seek vari- ous organization, from age to age, that it may the better advance the Kingdom of God. But we honor, none the less, their courage, zeal and devotion, and their fidelity to the will of God, as they understood His Word. That they dared much, and were accounted faithful, has given us the New England that we honor and love.
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New England religious history has not been, however, without its many controversies and divisions, and in those discussions this church of Newtown had, at least in its first century of exist- ence, a remarkably intimate part. It would seem as if little of ecclesiastical significance can have been stirring in eighteenth century Connecticut without having sent its ripples, and some- times it waves, to this Newtown community. At some of these larger movements, already spoken of by Miss Scudder, we will glance. But, before doing so, I desire to say a word, at this late day, in behalf of your first pastor, Rev. Thomas Tousey, whose relinquishment of the Newtown charge, in 1724, was followed by a long secular career of honor as physician, captain of militia and legislative representative. Such an abandonment of what has been often styled a "sacred calling" was undoubtedly exceptional, perhaps more then than at present. To a youthful graduate of our infant college, such as Tousey was, the ministry presented practically the only avenue of schol- arly employment; and it is no disparagement of his character if, having tried this path, he found other forms of service to the community more satisfying to his townsmen and more con- genial to himself. This change of life occupation had a con- spicuous illustration among Tousey's eminent Connecticut contemporaries. Elisha Williams, whom he must often have seen, left his pastorate in Newington in 1726 for the "rectorship" or presidency of Yale, to lay down that post in 1739, becoming a legislative representative of his home town, a judge of the superior court, and a colonel of Connecticut troops, thus com- bining as wide a variety of ecclesiastical, educational, legislative, judicial and military experiences as the colonial life permitted.
The relinquishment of the pastorate by Rev. Thomas Tousey for the duties and honors of civil life was followed by the settle- ment, in 1724, of Rev. John Beach, one of the most remarkable ministerial personalities in eighteenth century Connecticut. With him there was no question of the claims of secular life; but none the less six years after its institution witnessed the dis- solution of the pastorate. He had come to doubt the validity of non-Episcopal ordination, and for the next fifty years was to do valiant service in Newtown for the Church and King of Eng- land. Time has softened the asperities of the ancient contro- versy of which this division in Newtown was an episode.
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Congregationalists and Episcopalians in this commonwealth have long since learned to live and labor side by side in mutual respect and in ever-increasing good-will. But, in the days when John Beach renounced his Congregational ministry, the lines were indeed closely drawn, and the fear was widespread among the representatives of the older colonial religious order, that the introduction of the Church of England would lead to its estab- lishment by Parliamentary action, and that the overwhelming might of the mother country would be exerted in such fashion in this matter as the slender colonial resources would find them- selves inadequate to resist. Whether this fear was justified or not, it existed, and was not removed till the war of the Revolu- tion ended all possibilities of foreign control. Its existence accounts for much of the bitterness of controversy then aroused by the growth of a communion which many of the inhabitants of Newtown preferred to that which this church represents.
The brief pastorate of John Beach was terminated for reasons entirely honorable to himself, if highly unsatisfactory to the New- town Congregationalists, but the church seemed destined to have trying experiences with its ministers. Beach's successor was the Rev. Elisha Kent, whose work in Newtown began in 1732. In 1740, Connecticut, like New England generally, was stirred as it had never been before by the preaching of that youthful and marvellously eloquent evangelist, the early friend of the Wesleys, Rev. George Whitefield. He did not come to Newtown, but his persuasive voice was heard in Hartford, Middletown, New Haven, Milford, Stratford, Fairfield and Norwalk, and other towns in Connecticut, and the impulse that went out from his fiery evangelism resulted in that religious stirring of New England which lives in history as the "Great Awakening." Doubtless much of the work of the revival was of abiding value. But it had its decided ill effects also. Whitefield's victorious progress raised up many imitators, and Connecticut was divided as to the merits of their work. The churches and ministers fell, in popular classification, into "Old Lights," who disliked this novel evangelism, and "New Lights," who saw in it a special outpouring of the Spirit of God. Elisha Kent was a "New Light." He not merely favored the revival movement, but was forward in its support. His part in the formation of a Separatist, revivalistic, church in New Haven, in 1742, brought him much
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reproach; and it is believed considerable opposition in his own flock. His own conduct was otherwise subject to criticism, as Miss Scudder has indicated, though not sufficiently objectionable to involve any degradation from the ministry. These causes were potent enough to lead to his dismission from the Newtown pastorate in 1743, and the congregation was, for the third time, rendered pastorless by causes involving grave differences of opin- ion, and, in two of these cases, questions of widespread con- troversy in the colony at large.
It must be, I think, an echo of a larger controversy than any affecting Newtown alone that is to be seen in the action and publication of your next pastor, David Judson, who served from 1743, and, unlike his predecessors, died in office in 1776. In 1758, a controversy arose in Wallingford over the settlement there of Rev. James Dana, into the confused course of which it is not necessary for us to enter, but which ultimately involved a general discussion of the whole system of consociation into which the churches of Connecticut had been grouped under the provisions of the famous Platform adopted in Saybrook in 1708. To many, that system seemed tyrannical in its action, and one such opponent was evidently the Newtown pastor, David Judson. In a sermon preached here on August 5, 1770, and afterwards published, the author renounced his allegiance to the disciplinary portions of the Saybrook Platform. This action had the ultimate support of his church, which separated from the Fairfield Con- sociation in September, 1773; a course of conduct which was warmly defended by the pastor in a vigorous pamphlet issued in 1774. Doubtless the embers of this ancient debate have long since grown cold; but the spirit here manifested was one of ecclesiastical liberty befitting the days of struggle for political freedom which were dawning when David Judson took his part in an ecclesiastical battle that raged widely in Connecticut.
David Judson's relations with this Newtown flock had been harmonious, but the next minister of this church was to involve it in the turmoil af a new controversy, not originating here, or even on this side of the Atlantic, but disastrous in its results to the pastor, Zephaniah Hollister Smith, and to the church alike. Robert Sandeman was a Scottish religious leader, who continued and developed the work of his father-in-law, John Glas, and who believed that he was restoring primitive Chris-
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tianity. Coming to this country in 1764, he ultimately settled in Danbury, where he died in 1771; but not till he had won a considerable following in New England, especially in western Connecticut. Theologically, Sandeman represented the extreme Protestant revolt from any doctrine of work-righteousness. To his thinking, faith is "a bare belief in a bare truth"; that is, a man who accepts undoubtingly the facts of the Gospel message as presented in the New Testament, with the same intellectual assent that he receives the truths of mathematics, has a full saving faith. With this conception, Sandeman sought to combine a revival of the practices of the primitive church, instituting in each church a number of elders, holding a common meal weekly, which should reproduce the apostolic "breaking of bread" and be a true Lord's Supper, and practising, in imitation of Christ, the washing of the disciples' feet, and, according to the apostolic precept, the holy kiss. With this attempted revival of the usages of early Christianity, he combined a rigid examination of the membership of the church, and the vigorous exclusion of those deemed unworthy.
Though Sandemanianism had become discredited in Connecti- cut by reason of the loyalist sympathies of most of its adherents during the revolutionary struggle, the new pastor, Zephaniah H. Smith, began, soon after his settlement in Newtown in 1786, to manifest Sandemanian views. The church was rent by the ensu- ing controversy. Those who opposed him the pastor excommu- nicated; and the brief and disastrous relationship closed with his dismission in 1790. It was an unhappy episode for all concerned. When, after a very considerable period of delay, a new pastor was obtained in the person of Rev. Jehu Clarke, in 1799, the ruined church had practically to be reorganized. Surely the religious controversies of this commonwealth during the eighteenth century had borne heavily on the Newtown church.
With the beginning of the new pastorate a better day dawned. The nineteenth century saw Newtown involved in no such direct and disastrous fashion in its theological debates as it had been in those of the eighteenth. These controversies were of much general interest and were bitterly fought out, but the present speaker is not aware that the Newtown congregation was directly engaged in any of them. Yet they must have aroused interest here, and because such was undoubtedly the fact, a glance at one or two of them may be desirable.
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By the opening years of the nineteenth century the theological school of Jonathan Edwards was practically dominant in Con- necticut. All Congregational thinking in this commonwealth was essentially Edwardean. Yet in the Edwardean ranks there appeared, about the year 1825, a serious cleft. When the present speaker was a student in Amherst college, the honored president of that seat of learning, Julius H. Seelye, a native of your neigh- boring town of Bethel, desiring to illustrate the fashion in which contentions, important in their day, become forgotten with the lapse of time, asked the class if any of its members had ever heard of the Taylor and Tyler controversy. Senior student wis- dom is not great, and it is not surprising that none had any knowledge of the dissension. President Seelye then remarked that in his Connecticut boyhood little else was discussed in religious circles ; and what was true of Bethel was doubtless also characteristic of Newtown. The problems in dispute relate to the minutiæ of technical theology. Nathaniel W. Taylor, the eminent professor of systematic theology of Yale, a son of your neighboring town of New Milford, though standing on the gen- eral Edwardean foundation, taught that in a system of divine moral government, God could not, without denying to man real freedom, prevent the possible entrance of sin; but man could prevent it by not sinning. To many of the more conservative Edwardeans in Connecticut, led by Rev. Bennett Tyler, a native of Middlebury, these opinions of Professor Taylor seemed a denial of the full sovereignty of God. If God is the ruler of the universe, then all things, even sin, must be under His absolute control. The controversy, as it appeared to the popular mind, was doubtless well summed up in a description which the speaker once heard from an aged minister: "Dr. Taylor says man is sovereign, Dr. Tyler says God is sovereign." Remote and abstract as these discussions seem to us, they did not so appear to that robuster theologic age. All Connecticut was filled with the din of battle. A new and protesting theological seminary was founded in East Windsor (now long since removed to Hart- ford), in 1834, with Dr. Tyler as its president, and Con- necticut Congregationalism narrowly escaped division into rival denominations.
Probably this threatened division of religious forces in this commonwealth was averted by the rise of a new discussion which
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speedily eclipsed the Taylor and Tyler Controversy, and doubt- less aroused Newtown as it did Connecticut generally. Horace Bushnell was from your neighboring Litchfield, though his min- isterial service was to be in Hartford. Convinced that the revivalistic methods of his time were mistaken, he advocated Christian nurture, rather than a struggling conscious conversion, as the normal method of entrance into the Kingdom of God. Believing that the treatment of theology as primarily a field for logical intellectual demonstration then current, and employed by both Taylor and Tyler, to be erroneous, he based Christian truth largely on the affirmations of the religious feeling. It was a revolution in theologic thinking, the effects of which are not yet spent. It involved Dr. Bushnell in attack and heated contro- versy. To the honor of our Connecticut Congregationalism, however, the General Association of the State, gathered in Dan- bury in 1852, though far from sympathizing as a whole with his views, declined to abridge Dr. Bushnell's liberty. The result was most happy. Since that day our Congregational churches of Connecticut, though greatly interested in new presentations of Christian truth, and in the problems which modern Biblical criti- cism and historical study have raised, have never had a contro- versy which has seriously imperilled their fellowship in the common service of the Master's Kingdom, and in this relative peace the church in Newtown has shared.
The story which has been related may seem to be one of the quarrels of Christian brethren. If it has appeared so in the telling it is because the experiences of the Newtown church are closely bound up with the religious controversies of this com- monwealth, especially during the first century of this church's existence. But we can never forget the significance of the religious life here maintained for two centuries. What a wealth of prayer and consecration, what a story of sacrifice and of earnest Christian living, what a treasure of effort for the advancement of the Kingdom of God, what a service of the Master, the gathered experiences of two hundred years involve. They had their struggles, their keen debates, their sacrificial efforts to maintain the life of this church under discouraging conditions, their very human differences of judgment. But above all they who have here gone before us were faithful to our
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common Lord in their day and generation. Into the fruits of their labors we have entered. Theirs is the heritage which we enjoy. As we think of them to-day with honor, and reverence them for what they were, a question comes to each of us-Are we showing like faithfulness in our generation? Have we the spirit of consecration to the service of Christ which animated them? When the three hundredth anniversary of this church is celebrated will those then present look to us, as we now do to those gone before us, as having in spite of all our human infirmities and shortcomings, yet earned a good report, and transmitted unimpaired the Christian life which they have handed down to us? Shall we, like they, be found faithful?
CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR RALLY A RETROSPECT AND A PROSPECT
ADDRESS BY REV. O. W. BARKER
I appear before you to-night as a patriarch. I suppose the only reason why I find a place amid the brilliant galaxy of stars that crowd this programme, is that I am recognized as the founder of the local society. Then I can at once show my credentials for membership in the Honorable Order of Founders, and President Clark and I can shake hands. Who wouldn't be here, though, to-night and who wouldn't give his Puritan conscience a bit of a stretch in making the run by rail from Hartford to Bridgeport on a Sunday afternoon in order to catch the thrill of enthusiasm which goes with the Bicentennial? The hoarfrost of age has already begun to make its marks of life's winter upon my brow and to indicate to some of you good brothers and sisters, who were in the day of small things with me, that you have started on the down- grade. We shall not be here when another hundredth anni- versary rolls around, so we better make the most of this. I have come here, like the rest of you, to stand upon a mount and breathe in the good cheer that blows in the upper air. A brother dominie was called upon to attend a sick lady who did not belong to his flock. She was a person of some distinction, so my good friend was rather elated by the honor, but wondered a little at the call. A chance was offered him to investigate the matter, since he was detained for a few moments in the parlor with the little girl of the family. "May I ask," he inquired, "why your mother wished me to call? Is your own pastor out of town?" "No," was the innocent reply. "He's at home; but mother thought it might be something contagious and we didn't want to run any risks." I am willing to run all risks that may come from getting into the heart of a Christian Endeavor host.
If I pose as a founder, the way lies open before me to roll up the curtain of the past and take a backward look. Nearly
REV. OTIS W. BARKER Pastor, 1893-1905
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a score of years ago we founded the Endeavor Society in the room at the foot of those stairs, though, I confess, that, as I look around upon the present enlargement and equipment, I have to pinch myself to be sure this is not all a dream. Brother Allison Smith had given me a nudge that there was a long gap of silence after Sunday School was out. There was nothing to do then, the rest of the Lord's Day, but to read, doze, and keep quiet. Automobiles did not then sweep in continuous procession up our new state road and Sunday visiting had not come as the order of the day. I have always tried not to be over dull when a plain hint was thrust before me; and Brother Smith and I vied with each other in getting our names down first. This society has had many an ebb and flow, its enthusiasm swelling like the Solway and falling like its tide; but it still lives. Let me give to it and to all sister societies represented here my God speed to-night.
Christian Endeavor has not seen its best days. The black bats of evil prophecy have been fluttering their wings. Pessi- mism has been crying its piteous plaint from many a dark corner ; its finest note is a croak, its loftiest pæan a dirge. The Church is going to the wall, in country depleted by sweep toward the cities, in cities submerged by the great immigration tide. King George II said of the pastoral symphony which precedes the story of the Nativity in Handel's matchless oratorio of the Mes- siah that one could see the stars shining through it. I am glad that there are men who can see stars shining through any dark night. I heard Father Endeavor Clark, the other night, give one of his inspirational addresses. If he had not been a dyed- in-the-wool optimist, we should have gathered around the funeral pyre of Christian Endeavor long ago. He said: "I never was so hopeful for the Church of God; I never felt that I could so strongly depend upon the young people as to-day." Do you know Mr. F. C. Bidwell, our State President? He is a humble man, who never blew a single note on the trumpet in his own praise. Through his term of four years, he has traveled up and down the Nutmeg State in its highways and byways, holding to the spirit of idealism, like Nehemiah repairing the breaches in the walls of Zion and crying a Forward March. He has suc- ceeded in his work. In the international campaign for a Chris- tian Endeavor headquarters, Connecticut carries the banner at
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the head of the line for first being able to pay down in cold cash its full apportionment of $5,000. When the last dollar is paid in by the first of June next, to this plain, unobtrusive man, as much as to any other, will be due the impetus that has carried the work to the keystone of the arch. This is President Bidwell's word to us, as he stands ready to throw the honored mantle of his office upon other shoulders: "I greatly rejoice at the way God hath led and hath wrought for the prosperity and advancement of the work. Surely no State President ever had back of him a body of young people more united, more loyal, more ready with words of encouragement, more consecrated to the Master's cause. On the background of these four years of service with you I frame this creed: I believe in Christian Endeavor, its principles, methods, spirit, deeds, and future more thoroughly than ever before. I believe that the best days our cause has yet seen are now here and that there are better ones yet to come." I know President Bidwell well. He is the inspiring genius of the small Christian Endeavor Society in the Bloomfield Congre- gational Church, where my ministry now finds vent. President Bidwell is seldom there; but the helpfulness of his spirit and the impulse of his good deeds are ever there. His daughter, Ethelwin Bidwell, a bright High School girl, president of the Bloomfield Society, will be the genius of Connecticut in the fine pageant which is to crown the State Convention in the Elm City the latter part of this week. So, you see, like father, like daughter.
My looking backward is not to be content with the day of small things here. My brown study calls me to the fountain-head of the whole movement, the gathering of young people in the pas- tor's study of Williston Church, Portland, in February, 1881. President Francis E. Clark builded better than he knew, yes, for he had no idea of laying any foundations at all. As an instance of how little this movement was man-devised, it was upon a hectograph pad that this earnest young preacher, then under thirty years of age, wrote out the first rude draft of a constitu- tion. His church had just been blessed with a precious refresh- ing from on high; and this wise pastor was looking to see how these new converts might be given work that would save them from going to sleep too near the place where they got into the Church. The flames of enthusiasm had been fanned by the winds
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