USA > Washington DC > The centennial of the beginning of Presbyterianism in the city of Washington > Part 3
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11
29
the everlasting gospel to all people. I am sure my younger yoke-fellow here most heartily joins me in this. It seems to me like a vision let down from heaven to cheer us as we close the present century and enter on the vast career of the coming years. It is to me, personally, the final sunburst of my evening sky, and I feel like saying with old Simeon, "Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen thy salvation ! "
In closing this reveiw I thank God for all his mercies, private and public, and for the privilege to look out once more upon this magnificent city and upon an undivided country, a marvellous people and an aggressive, ever vital, ever recuperative Christ- ianity, over whose future prospects I see frowning to-day, but one dark cloud. Amen.
MONDAY EVENING, NOVEMBER 18th.
Rev. A. W. PITZER, D. D.
PRESIDING.
FELLOW PRESBYTERIANS :- With hearty good will and grateful appreciation I accepted your kind invitation to preside on this occasion and partici- pate in these observances.
I belong to the youngest branch of the great Presbyterian family ; our corporate existence dates only from December, 1861, when the Southern Gen- eral Assembly came into being in Augusta, Georgia.
I have never seen the time when I had any apology to make for being a Presbyterian. Not that I care for a name or a denomination " per se," but believ- ing as I do with all my soul that Presbyterian doctrine, polity and worship are fully and firmly founded on scripture ; nay more, that the Presbyter- ian Church is nearer the pattern given in God's word than any other, so far from apologizing for the Presbyterian Church or disparaging her confession or government, I rise up before God and men and call her blessed.
Prior to 1861, your church was our church ; your faith, our faith; your fathers, our fathers. In dogma, in tradition, in history, in blood we were one. For years I have advocated the warmest fra- ternity and the closest and most cordial co-operation in all Christian work.
31
At the General Assembly at Atlanta, Georgia, in 1882, I.inaugurated a movement for fraternity, and aided in formulating a basis on which such fraternity could stand with stability and honor; that basis was in brief-" receding from no principle ; but withdrawing all aspersions on Christian charac- ter."
Had that fraternal offer been adopted by the Springfield Assembly without the addition of the unfortunate "explanation," it is my own belief that before this day the reunion would have taken place on the basis of the concensus of the standards of the two bodies.
But, brethern, after all we are one in the two great works committed to us by our Blessed Lord. Dr. W. M. Paxton in his sermon before the Presbyterian Council in Philadelphia, in 1880, speaking to the representatives of all the branches of the Presby- terian family in the world, called special attention to the fact that this church was a "witnessing church." Our Lord says-" Ye are my witnesses." We testify for Him during the period of His bodily absence. We testify in our creeds, our confessions, our catechisms, in our lives, and this testimony has been heard in the flames, and it has been sealed with blood. Whenever and wherever the fire has been hottest and the conflict fiercest, there has been seen in the forefront the heroes and standard bearers of the bonnie blue flag.
When Dr. Radcliffe was installed Pastor of New York Avenue Church, President Patton said
32
at the beginning of his sermon-" We Presbyterians are a 'preaching' church ; we believe in ‘ preach- ing.'"' Others may magnify the altar, the ritual, the music, or something else; we magnify " preaching." That is our business ; that is what we stand for as a church in this lost world. It has pleased God that men shall be saved by the foolishness of "preaching."
To bear witness then to the facts, the truths, the duties set forth in the infallibly inspired scriptures of the old and new Testaments ; and to do this by oral preaching is the glorious mission of the Pres- byterian branch of the Holy Catholic Church. Ye are witnesses unto me ; preach my Gospel.
These anniversary exercises began yesterday with a masterly and magnificent historical address by the beloved pastor of this people who for forty-three years has gone in and out among us, honored of all for his steadfast devotion to the church of his choice.
We have with us this evening one whose reputa- tion as a successful minister on the banks of the Missouri river reached across the continent to the Pacific and the Atlantic ; who was called to one of the leading churches in the great city of New York ; whose worth and services made him mod- erator and orator at the Centennial General As- sembly, and it is now my pleasure to introduce to this audience, Rev. Dr. Charles L. Thompson, pastor of Madison Avenue Church.
PRESBYTERIANISM AND THE NATION,
BY REV. CHARLES L. THOMPSON, D.D., OF NEW YORK CITY.
Monday Evening, November 18th, 1895.
The theme assigned to me for to-night is appro- priate to the place and the occasion.
The one hundredth anniversary of Presbyterian- ism in this city furnishes us an appropriate occasion for looking back upon the beginnings of our church in this country, and the nation's capital, is surely not an inappropriate place from which to regard the relations which Presbyterianism sustains to the history of the nation.
Years ago Mr. Herbert Spencer said, "It may, I think, be reasonably held that both because of its size and the heterogeneity of its components, the American nation will be a long time in evolving its ul- timate form, but that its ultimate form will be high. One result is, I think, tolerably clear. From bio- logical truths it is to be inferred that the eventual mixture of the allied varieties of the Aryan race, forming the population, will produce a more pow- erful type of man than has hitherto existed, and a type of man more plastic, more adaptable, more capable of undergoing modification needful for com- plete social life."
34
History sustains Mr. Spencer's prophecy. The better types of manhood have resulted from the mingling of race varieties.
The splendid Germanic races, so long the domi- nating forces of Central Europe, grew up slowly out of many varieties. The Roman Empire was preserved awhile from the effects of its own deteri- oration by the daring incursion of the Northern races. England is the standing historical illustra- tion of what a blending of races can do toward developing national character. But there is no nation whose beginnings are so significant as those of our own. The value, as well as the interest, of these beginnings is illustrated by a remark made by Mr. Gladstone, when he declared that the birth of the American states was of more interest than any other it was possible to study, and added that "whenever a young man desirous of studying politi- cal life consults me, I always refer him to the early history of America."
Specially will this study become interesting and important to those who shall agree with Mr. Glad- stone when he says again, "I incline to think that the future of America is of greater importance to Christendom at large, than any other country."
Indeed there can be no intelligent understanding of our present position, nor a clear outlook toward our future estate as a nation, unless, with somewhat of the insight of a philosopher, we shall be able to to take wise account of the various historical ten- dencies that have resulted in our nationality. For
35
to-night, however, we are to study our national origin in the light of one question. What influence have Presbyterian ideas and men had upon the ruling principles and characteristic institutions of this republic ? Three factors, speaking broadly, may be said to enter into the formation of any nation : the principles at its foundation, the insti- tutions that have been built into its growth, and the men who have illustrated those ideas, and founded those institutions. Let us speak along these three lines, successively.
First, what principles characteristically Pres- byterian can we trace in our national beginnings ?
Every nation has its own personality. That per- sonality is the outcome of certain ruling ideas. Our country is peculiar in tracing its origin not to any one people of Europe. The line of its history is not, therefore, a single line, and is not to be traced as you might trace the strong current of a river. It is the resultant of the combined life of half a dozen European nations. The problem, therefore, of find- ing out what are the ruling principles that have entered into the formation of this republic is not a simple, but a complex one. At the same time the facts stand out so clearly in our own history, and are so distinctly marked as that history is traced back to the lands whence it came, that it will not be very difficult to mark out, at least in a general way, what have been the national characteristics across the ocean, that have determined this last- born of great nations.
36
In a general way, historians are in the habit of saying that the chief factors of national life have come to us from England, Scotland, France, Ireland, and Holland. As the fingers come to the wrist, these nations have come to a certain solidarity in our own country. It is necessary, therefore, to inquire what are the essential truth elements of these respective nations. Of what ideas of truth, tolerance, education, and liberty were they re- spectively the exponents when the great Reforma- tion that quickened all Europe from the Orkneys to the Tiber had done its work, and the historian had had time to look about over the countries which it has influenced. Certain leading truths so devel- oped and new to the world are called Reformation Truths. Some of them had existed ages before, were an inheritance from Roman law and primitive Christianity, but had been swept away or covered up by the general flood of ignorance and oppression. Now with the lustre of new ideas, fresh born from Heaven, they emerged to gladden the world. As now we follow these ideas in their historic develop- ment we perceive that as you can trace the various streams that through the flats of Holland slip into the sea to the one strong river that clave the German hills, so you can follow the doctrines of personal liberty, rights of conscience, human brotherhood, and free government, springing up in Scotland and Holland and France almost simultaneously, toward one sourceful fountain, until at last you see it rush out from beneath a hill at the foot of the Alps, as
37
the Rhone to-day rushes along the same hill's base; for it requires no very profound or prolonged study of historic tendencies to discover that emigrants from Scotland, and the Netherlands, and England, and France, drank their first drafts of intellectual and spiritual liberty in the new-born republic of the city of Geneva.
Greene, in his History of the English people, rec- ognizes truly the genius of the new life of Europe, and of the Reformation when he says, " As a vast and consecrated democracy it stood in contrast with the whole social and political framework of the European nations. Grave as we may count the faults of Calvinism, alien as its temper may be in many ways from the temper of the modern world, it is in Calvinism that the modern world strikes its roots, for it was Calvinism that first revealed the worth and dignity of man. Called of God and heir of Heaven, the trader at his counter and the digger of the field suddenly rose into equality with the noble and the king."
Democratic government, free institutions, free schools, popular education, are the nerve ideas traceable to Geneva and John Calvin. The marks of their origin are distinctly upon them. They go down from that elevation to Holland, Spain and England, and so to the United States by way of Southhampton and Delfthaven and Londonderry and Havre.
Notice for a moment, that this tendency may be clear in our minds and our obligation to that centre
38
may be distinctly recognized, how these nerve ideas reappear successively in the lands whence our fathers came. It will illustrate to us how through
" The ages one increasing purpose runs ;
And the thoughts of men are widened by the process of the suns."
When the Scotch recalled John Knox from Geneva to resist, as they felt no army of the Highlands could resist, the encroachments of queens and prelates upon their national liberty, what was the word he brought them which should stand them in- stead of battalions but this, " No king but Christ." ? It was in Geneva he learned to say that. When the Covenanters, driven first to Ireland, and from Ireland to the United States, settled all the way from New England to South Carolina they were the earliest and staunchest friends of American in- dependence. They who first held Derry against James, were ready to hold the liberty of the United States against all the armies of the Georges. The line is straight from the banks of the Delaware past the banks of the Boyne and the Firth of Forth, to the waters of the Rhone.
Another stream descended from Geneva to the dikes of Holland, in that little land which was the scene of the first struggles for liberty and which for many years defied the army and navy of Spain. " Brave little Holland," as she has well been called. The land of an unconquerable love of civil and re- ligious liberty, of indomitable courage, absolute democratic principles and habits of life, and mar- vellous and prodigious industry which alone had
39
served to wrench the kingdom from the grasp of Neptune. Are we not indebted to her settlements in New York and New Jersey, as well as to her indirect influence on the settlers in New England for much of moral fibre and intellectual strength upon which our nation rests to-day ?
We are accustomed to say that we are dependent largely for national strength on English laws and English spirit, but the grandest contribution which England made to the life of our nation, was in the Puritan's ideal of a universal kingdom of right- eousness and truth. The superb ideal which they furnished came to us through the Puritans from Southampton and the Pilgrims from Holland.
Strenuous effort has been made recently to prove that the British influence on American life came to us by way of the Dutch Republic. While this obligation is large, it probably is historically true that the chief obligation of New England is not to the few pilgrims who settled the Plymouth colony (though those one hundred souls undoubtedly gave a stamp which never was effaced from colonial his- tory) but to the Puritans who at the English Rev- olution in large numbers came to our shores and formed the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They com- prised the very best elements of English society. The twenty thousand who, with Hooker, Winthrop and Mather between 1630 and 1640 settled New England, gave us the distinctive type of Puritan life which, with all its faults, has been one of the grandest ever impressed on a young nation, and
40
the source of much of the intellectual and moral power which made New England eminent in colon- izing energy, all the way to the western prairies. But this superb ideal of a universal Christian king- dom on earth was dreamed long before by the great Genevese reformer in his " Institutes of Religion."
It is some times said that Presbyterianism and Puritanism had not very much in common in their settlement of this country. But if, as the histor- ian Green says, "the religious temper which sprang from a deep conviction of the truth of Protestant doctrine and of the falsehood of Catholicism, was Puritanism," then these two were indentical in the substance of their religious convictions and together shared their glory and their peril. Their common persecutions made them oblivious of the difference between them and fused those two sections of Brit- ish reform into one. With both, the one chiefly in Scotland, the other chiefly in England, the supreme purpose was to bring policies of kings to the tests of reason and the gospel. Though sometimes at variance, they wrought together more solidly than they knew. The Puritan in England broke the despotism of the English monarchy, and the Pres- byterians in Scotland broke both the power of the King and the Pope. Thus our country is the last result of time ; the product of energies whose theatre was all northern and western Europe, but whose goal and home was the wilderness of Amer- ica. How marvellously God works! The opening of his word, and the opening of the new world are
41
synchronous; each was fitted to and for the other.
Second Institutions. An institution is a human personality writ large, and with indelible ink. An institution is the lengthened shadow of a man. Where the sun of progress shines, that shadow is sharply cast, and surely remains.
We have considered some of the principles which underly the American nation, and have tried to find their origin in the old world. These principles, the exponents of convictions, have become incarnate in certain characteristic American institutions. Let us try to define them, and then trace their genesis.
Matthew Arnold said, "The more I see of Amer- ica, the more I find myself inclined to treat their institutions with increased respect. Until I went to the United States, I had never seen a people with institutions which seemed expressly and thoroughly suited to it. I had not properly appreciated the benefits proceeding from this cause."
American institutions are peculiar to American soil.
Every people must develop their own, and as are the institutions, so will be the character of the people, because institutions are only incarnate principles.
We have said that one of the germanent ideas of our Republic was the equality of men. It is declared in the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence. It was declared first in the doctrines of the Genevese reformer whose "sacred democ- racy stood in sharp contrast to the whole social
42
and political framework of the European nations." It resulted in the political framework of the Ameri- can nation.
The first institution that grew out of it in America, as in Geneva, was that of an independent church. To secure that independence Holland made her first fight. Scotland made the Grampians ring with martial music and martial tread. For it, the Pilgrims went to Holland and afterwards came to the United States.
For awhile the constitutions of the different States differed from one another in this respect- Some provided for a State church ; some provided against it ; some were neutral. But it was of the very genius of the principles underlying our Gov- ernment that union between Church and State could not long abide, and, therefore, New York in her first constitutional convention in 1777, repealed all such parts of common law, and all such statutes as " could be construed to establish or maintain any particular denomination of Christians or their min- isters."
A few years later Virginia and the other States followed; the new States coming into the Union since the adoption of the Federal Constitution have all, of course, come in under the banner of abso- lute separation of Church and State. Who can fail to trace the common origin of that separation between the Church and the State, which has been the pride of both ? Who can fail to here recognize the identity of republicanism and Presbyterianism ?
43
No wonder Charles II declared Presbyterianism a religion unfit for a gentleman. It was that doc- trine which in half a dozen European countries was the deadly foe of tyranny and despotism, which stood guard over the cradle of American liberty in Holland and Scotland, and nurtured liberty to its manhood in the United States.
Again, one of the institutions of our country is the representative structure of our Government, resting on a stable, written Constitution. Because Great Britain has no written constitution, because her so- called constitution is the growth of abstractions, traditions, and often contradictory parliamentary proceedings, her eminent statesmen have, of late, been looking with refreshing admiration to this document, the palladium of our liberties. The well known remark of Mr. Gladstone, "So far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain of man, is the American Constitution," is the mature judgment of the man who of all other men has struggled for constitu- tional liberty in Great Britain.
Upon that written Constitution, at once the pride and glory of our nation, stands a system of republi- can Government crowned by that magnificent insti- tution peculiar to our country, the Supreme Court, the guardian of all legislation and the power that stands for the purity and stability of every depart- ment of our Government. A recent writer claims that our representative system is copied from Hol- land. The claim is too large to be allowed in its
44
fullness. But Dutch history was doubtless studied by the framers of the Constitution, and such features as a Senate-a form of a Supreme Court-freedom of religion and of the press-were doubtless present to their minds.
It is, however, too much to claim that any one country gave us the pattern of our great institu- tions. The impulse toward them came from many lands. But the institutions are American.
Notice what has so often challenged attention : the parallelism between these, our political institu- tions and the corresponding ones in our church.
Our Constitution and the National Constitution were twins at their birth in Philadelphia. The first step taken toward the formation of our church constitution was taken in 1785. On the 16th of May, 1788, the Synod of New York and Philadel- phia adopted and ratified the immortal document and organized the General Assembly. On the 17th of September, 1787, our Federal Constitution was completed and its adoption was consummated in 1788. So the workers in the two spheres, the civil and religious, wrought side by side, and the product of each reflects many of the characteristics of the product of the other; stability is written on them both.
Our Constitution rests upon essentially the same principles as that of the State, and it remains to-day, without essential change, the basis of all our legislation. Rising from it are our representa- tive church courts in direct connection with the
45
people, and at the summit is our Supreme Court guarding the rights of individuals and the stability of church government.
It is not important in the pursuit of our parallel to trace the national origin of our form of govern- ment, whether it came to us by way of England or Scotland or Holland. Since it is perfectly manifest that the pattern of it was first seen on that mount which has given the pattern of so many good things to American civilization, which rises from the shores of Lake Leman. This is conceded by Bancroft and other historians.
It required a revolution to firmly establish these institutions of a free church and a free state and a free constitution and republican Government, " but what was the Revolution " as Bancroft has said, but the application of the principles of the Refor- mation to our civil Government ?"
Another of our institutions without which this Republic could not exist, since intelligence lies at the basis of independence, is our common School System. In 1642 it was the law of Puritan New England that "None of the brethren shall suffer so much barbarism in their families as not teach their children and apprentices so much learning as may enable them to perfectly read the English tongue." And in 1647 it was ordered in all Puritan colonies, "to the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers, that every township after the Lord has increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall appoint one to
46
teach all children to read and write, and when they shall have increased to the number of one hundred families, they shall set up a grammar school, the master thereof being able to instruct the youths so far as they may be fitted for the university.
The eminence of New Enland lies originally, not in her great colleges (though her liberality to higher education has always been conspicuous) but in her common schools. I think Connecticut, under the lead of Hooker, has the honor of first securing free schools supported by government. Every child as it came into the world was taken in the arms of the country's guardianship, and received for its in- heritance the pledge of mental and moral training. Whence came our system of common schools ? "The common school system was derived from Geneva, the work of John Calvin, was carried by John Knox into Scotland, and so became the prop- erty of the English speaking nations." The his- torian might have added, it was taken from Geneva to Holland and Sweden. In Sweden in 1637 not a single peasant child was unable to read or write. At the outbreak of the war with Spain, the peasants in Holland could read and write well, and in the first Synod of Dort, 1574, it was directed "that the servants of the church obtain from trustees in every locality permission for the appointment of schoolmasters, and an order for their compensation as in the past."
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.