USA > Iowa > Dubuque County > Dubuque > Semi-centennial celebration of the First Congregational Church, of Dubuque, Iowa, May 12th and 13th, 1889 > Part 3
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and are so obedient to the guiding of the Spirit that they see at once why duties are duties.
In order therefore that the Bible may be to us of this day all it ought to be, we must not depend so much upon the men of the past, as to what that Bible means as upon that Spirit promised to guide us into all truth. No one man, or any council of men in the past or present can so formulate the doctrines of the Scriptures as that they shall be received as the creed of the Church in all coming time.
Men of the present are already beginning to see deeper into the mysteries of godliness than the fathers did, and the form of expression must of necessity be changed. Serfdom and slavery were once thought to be consistent with brother- ly love in the Church of Christ ; but such is the case no longer. Godliness has a wonderful power to make wicked men see the hand-writing of God upon the walls of doom. In the light of facts men come to see the profitableness of godliness, because it demonstrates itself in the life that now is. Men cannot avoid the logic of incontestable facts. And this is the great field open to the present and future Church of Christ.
The world may call in question the truthfulness of the doc- trinal statements of the Church ; the validity of the scriptu- ral records may be denied; the future home of the redeemed saints may be pronounced an apocryphal vision, but a religion which revolutionizes the human soul and delivers from the law- lessness of tyrannical passions, and sharpens the keen edge of the discriminating conscience and restores the beclouded reason to its native power to discern the mysterious laws of causation forever beyond the ken of the material senses, -a religion which emancipates the will from the dominion of sin and death, and re-establishes its power of self-command on every line of human responsibility and obligation,-a religion which secures the righteous action of every affection of the heart, and attribute of the mind, and function of the body,-a re- ligion which constitutes its subject the humble, affectionate
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and obedient child of God, and a kind, honest, upright and godly brother among his fellows of every class and condition, -a religion which purifies and sanctifies the home in which the children and youth begin their endless life, and then reaches out into society, into neighborhoods, towns, states and nations, and permeates every civil, judicial and educa- cational institution, and makes the law of righteousness the one law of life everywhere; is a religion which will be accepted as the natural religion of the human race on earth.
If Christianity proves itself the true friend of the human race in its present condition in time, in its social, financial, mental and moral relations, it will be endorsed by the thoughtful everywhere; but so long as the Christian life is pre- sented as a life of painful self-denial and irksome cross-bearing in this world with the hope of gaining a crown in the future world, that life will be entered upon with great reluctance; for the conviction of men is that a righteous life ought to bring forth joy, peace and good will among men.
If men hunger and thirst after righteousness, they ought to be filled with all manner of good things. To do the will of God should be the very aliment of the whole being. It must be shown therefore that the religion of Christ calls men away from idleness and wasteful prodigality and final starvation, into the industry and frugality, the obedience and service, the good cheer and rapturous joy and overflowing feasts of the Father's house. It must be shown that religion emancipates mankind from the thralldom of sin and launches them into the full liberty of the sons of God. And it devolves upon the churches of America for the next fifty years to make the clos- ing argument in favor of the claims of the religion of Christ to be accepted and adopted and promulgated as the only re- ligion which does or can meet all the needs or demands of the human race.
To no other nation on the globe has God said so emphati- cally as He has to us, " Behold I have set before you an open door and no man can shut it." The door is open to all possi-
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ble progress in truth and righteousness. Whatever is just and true and equal for all men can here be attained when the peo- ple will it. When the people are bound together in holy and Christian brotherhood, they shall demand what they will and it shall be done. It remains for the Christian Church to prove in sight of all people that the religion of Christ secures such brotherly love between the capitalist and the laborer, between the employer and employee, between those who work with the brain and those who work with both brain and motor muscle as makes them a unit in aim and design, a unit in confidence and fidelity, a unit in love and esteem, a unit in rights and prerogatives and perquisites and rewards. And when the Church has thus illustrated before the world that the religion of Christ is not only a system of things to prepare persons for death and judgment and eternity, but also a system guiding and inspiring with the fore-casting and constructive wisdom, impartial beneficence and self-sacrificing love of God in all the practical affairs of human life on earth and in time, making them so thoroughly partakers of the di- vine nature that they shall carry that nature in them into all domestic and social and civil and business every day life, as did Christ himself ;- when the churches of Christ have so manifested the practical working of the two great principles of the moral and religious law, assimilation to God, and one- ness among men as to permeate and fuse the masses into one righteous brotherhood ;- when Columbia the peerless queen steps out upon that marvelous pedestal of the attained ideal of a Christian nation, upon which is sculptured in characters of dazzling brightness, Faith, Hope and Charity, and stands surrounded by her fifty daughters in an unbroken circle, each robed in the red, white and blue of national integrity, and each representing a sovereign State, with its free schools, and colleges and churches, and rapidly increasing intelligent mil- lions ;- when, I say, Columbia shall thus stand, thus sur- rounded, and shall present to the astonished world the symbol of the first fruits of Christianity's attained ideal in a sheaf of
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ripened grain, bound by an indissoluble band upon which is inscribed, "The United States of America, the sample sheaf of a redeemed and united world ;"-and when the kingdom of God has so far come, and the will of God has been so done as to give some idea of what that kingdom will be when it
REV. LYMAN WHITING, D. D.
shall reach its culmination of glory and power in universal dominion among men, and God shall be recognized as a Spirit personally present with every one of his children upon earth, caring for them as a true father cares for his children, then shall be realized what that transcendently glorious condition
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is, of which the penticostal scene at Jerusalem was only a germ. To have God always present to our consciousness when we speak to Him as He was to the consciousness of those disciples in that upper room, to be conscious of abiding with Christ and of His abiding with us, to be constrained by His love in all our work, and sustained by His grace in all our trials and afflictions, perfect at-one-ment with God in all things temporal and eternal, are some of the things to be realized when we have gained that realm of the higher life which God has ordained for us while still in the body.
After an anthem by the quartette Rev. C. E. Harrington, of Keene, N. H., was introduced and spoke at length, with great ability on "The Heroic Age of Congregationalism."
This paper and that of Dr. Lyman Whiting, will greatly encourage those who hold to the simple form of church gov- ernment which the Pilgrims brought to Plymouth Rock, Many will find here a new conception of that great move- ment for civil and religious liberty, which gave the world "a church without a bishop and a state without a king."
ADDRESS : " The Heroic Age of Congregationalism."
REV. C. E. HARRINGTON.
Six hundred and seventy-six years ago to-day, King John of England, by royal edict, formally submitted to papal power, and so planted the seed, all unknown to either him- self or pope Innocent, to whom he submitted, which germi- nated and grew into the tree of ecclesiastic freedom. And we are the descendants of the freemen, celebrating on this an- niversary of the surrender, the jubilee of a free church.
I am asked to speak to you of "The Heroic Age of Con- gregationalism." The utmost I can hope to do with a sub-
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ject which might well occupy volumes, will be to give you outlines and trust that you will verify the statements by fur- ther and patient reading.
If Congregationalism be studied historically, it will be found to present itself, first as a form of church government, or a polity ; and secondly, as a distinct religious denomina- tion. As a polity its origin is found in the words of Christ and his apostles; as standing for a denomination, it begins with William Bradford and his associates, that little handful of men in the north of England who gathered around Brewster in 1606.
As a polity it includes the Congregationists, the Baptists, the Wesleyan Methodists, the Unitarians and the Universal- ists with a few others-in all from two-fifths to three-sevenths of all the churches in America ; as a distinct denomination, it is represented by about four thousand five hundred churches and four hundred and seventy-five thousand communicants in this land, and by others in Europe, Asia, Africa, Polynesia, and Australia.
In the beginning no fundamental principle was formulated and announced ; but there was such a principle in operation, viz : "the word of God is the supreme objective authority in all matters of doctrine and government." Accompanying and modifying this was a second principle, viz : "the imme- diateness and the fullness of that relation which exists be- tween the spirit of Christ and the Church of Christ, extends to every congregation of true believers and to the soul of every Christian."
The first age of Congregationalism as a polity was a heroic age-the period covered by the first three centuries of the Christian era.
That polity was then represented by a little handful of men, without wealth, learning, social position, political power, arms, or of any of those helps which men are wont to look upon as essential to the success of an enterprise. And yet these men with Scriptures given by inspiration of God, be-
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lieving themselves to be the recipients of divine illumination, had the courage to set out under the command of their cruci- fied, but risen and soon to be glorified Lord, to bear witness to him, "in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth."
Not a foot of soil upon which they were to tread was theirs. Wherever they went they were to be regarded as aliens and invaders. Their only weapon was the simple story of their slain and risen Chief.
The proclamation of that story involved the conquering of fierce and inveterate hatred for foreigners in their own hearts. It involved defiance of the supreme council of the Jewish nation. It involved the breaking down, the obliteration of all those differentiating barriers which had hitherto kept men apart on the earth, and made the race seem to be a disjointed, if not a hopelessly dissevered mass of human beings. It meant that there was nothing in national descent, in religious training, in the beliefs which had been built into the souls of men by centuries of discipline and ceremony, in heathen cus- tom or idolatrous practice, in the civilization of Rome, the culture of Greece, or the degredation of the ruder barbarian which should interpose for the detention of the new evangel, or limit the area of its proclamation. It involved a conflict not only with themselves and the chosen people out from whose midst they had come; but also a conflict with Rome. It must be admitted that to all human eyes, it seemed a most unequal struggle and it was not strange that the proud mis- tress of the world dreamed of an easy victory. Before the conflict ended, all the forces which enemies could suggest had been adroitly arrayed against the new faith. But that faith deepened. The territory over which it held sway widened. The number of adherents multiplied. Rome surrendered; and the representatives of the once feeble and despised band took the throne as a Christian emperor. If there is anything in the history of the church more heroic than that conflict of simple disciples with the mistaken Jews, with hating Samari-
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tans, with powerful Rome, I know not where it is to be found.
But it will be more in harmony with the spirit and design of this occasion, if I speak at greater length of Congregation- alism as represented by that religious denomination to which this church belongs. It might be questioned by some whether this denomination ever had a heroic age especially in this country. For in this day when so much stress is placed upon numerical quantities, it might be suggested that a religious denomination which makes such a statistical ex- ibit as ours must lack heroism. It is true that the Congrega- tional churches started at the beginning of our national exist- ence with an uncommon prestige. They had learning and wealth at their command. They had the confidence of the people. And yet at the end of the first century of our na- tion's life they had fallen from the first to the fifth place in rank so far as numbers go.
These figures are not flattering. I do not think they are even creditable. But they are explainable. A part of the blame, if there be blame, is to be laid to the character of the preaching of a hundred years ago and more. That preach- ing was too theological, controversial, dogmatic, intellectual and metaphysical to result in lengthened church rolls.
Sufficient importance was not attached to polity. Thou- sands of Congregational church members came from the East to the West from the care of liberal minded pastors who had instructed them to believe that the Congregational church and the Presbyterian church were about the same, the principal difference being church government and that was of but lit- tle importance. And these pastors never suggested that, in- asmuch, as these churches were so alike Congregationalists should try to persuade the Presbyterians to unite with them. It was easy under these circumstances to effect a union be- tween Congregational and Presbyterian churches to provide religious privileges for the new settlements west of New Eng- land. The result was that two-thirds of the money was furnished by the Congregationalists and two-thirds of the
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churches were gathered by the Presbyterians. High Presby- terian authority said, some years ago, that "not less: than 1,500 of our churches are essentially Congregational in their origin and habits." And Dr. Patton, of Washington, says that, " had it not been for this union and had the Con- gregationalists on leaving their early home, adhered to their own polity, our numbers now would have been twice or thrice what they are and the empire states of the Interior would have been a second New England in their ecclesiasti- cal character."
We have suffered from the great lack of anything like de- nominational " esprit de corps."
I do not agree with a minister who once said at a public meeting, in my hearing, in this city, though he was not a pastor here, "The man who says he does not care what church a person unites with, provided only he be a Christian, is either a fool or a liar."
It can be truthfully said that Congregationalists hold the progress of Christianity to be vastly more important than their own numerical increase. I was once present at a meet- ing of the General Association of Congregational churches in New Hampshire when this question was discussed: "How shall more loyalty be secured among our church members in sustaining and extending the principles of our denomina- tion ? At that time one of the ministers said: "I was once a farmer and kept sheep. I never put a name or brand or mark upon those sheep. But I kept them so clean and white that, if they ever strayed from my flock and entered another flock, I could immediately pick them out by reason of their superior whiteness." "Now brethren," he added, "I do not believe in trying to make Congregationalists by putting a brand upon our members; but I do believe in trying to make their hearts so pure and their lives so Christ-like that, no matter where they go, they can be seen and distinguished at once." After the hour had passed, the Moderator of the. Association said : "Brethren, I have been looking for a Con-
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gregational hymn with which to close this discussion; the best I can find is this, 'I love thy kingdom Lord;' let us rise and sing it." And they did rise and they sang with what ap- peared to be " the spirit and the understanding."
Our slow growth during the past century is to be attributed, in part, also, to our unfavorable geographical position. Then too with a polity which taught the equality of all men our denomination was excluded from the entire slave-holding States, embracing one-half the territory of the nation. And last of all, Congregationalism is modern-not in its origin, but in its practical expression.
But I would remind you as the late Dr. Noyes of Dart- mouth College has well said that "a slow growth, by no means indicates an essential weakness. The noblest trees have a tardy growth; the animals that are slowest to mature have the longest lives; and the systems of human society which unfold by slow degrees, under the shapings of divine Providence, are the most divine. Other systems ' have their day and cease to be;' this, in its essential principles, is im- mortal-the abiding order of the church whether militant or triumphant."
There are effects which can never be expressed in mathe- matical terms. At this centennial season we are wont to measure our greatness by the number of square miles of our territory, our railroads, our mines, our agricultural products, our telegraphs and our banks.
But, at the celebration in New York on the 30th of last month, James Russell Lowell said : "I am not insensible to the wonder and exhileration of a material growth without ex- ample in rapidity and expansion; but I am also not insensible to the grave perils latent in any civilization which allows its chief energies and interests to be wholly absorbed in the pur- suit of a mundane prosperity. I admire our enterprise, our Inventions, our multiplicity of resource; no man more. But it is by less visible remunerative virtues, I persist in thinking, that nations chiefly live and feel the higher meaning of their
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lives. Prosperous we may be in other ways; contented with more specious success; but that nation is a mere horde, sup- plying figures to the census, which does not acknowledge a truer prosperity and a richer contentment in the things of the mind."
We have but to transfer our thought from the nation to the denomination to get an idea from these wise words which it will be well for us to ponder. Congregationalism might be rich in figures; it might still lead the list and distance all the other denominations so far as relates to the number of its churches, ministers and members, and yet carry about with it the element of weakness, if not of overthrow.
I do not offer this in order to excuse our shortcomings. I believe we should have done better than we did during the first century of our nation's history. I agree with Dr. Ladd, that "Great ideas and principles need concrete expression ; the greater the ideas and principles, the more numerous the concrete forms in which we may duly expect to find them ex- pressed. And, inasmuch as Congregationalism magnifies the office and value of the particular visible church, the demand is just that it shall evince, besides a few general principles, many particular churches embodying those principles; be- sides invisible ideas, visible men and women working amidst the hard conditions of life, and under the intelligent domina- tion of those ideas."
If the invisible church is not visible, to modify a sarcasm of Schliermacher, the church that is visible is mostly not church.
But members are not the only criterion of strength or influ- ence; and I believe in spite of our comparatively meagre figures we can point not only with satisfaction, but also with pride, to the achievements of modern Congregationalism, since that bleak December day when the Pilgrim Fathers first set foot on Plymouth Rock, which "is now, and ever will be, one of the most conspicuous objects on the broad bosom of the world's history."
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For centuries the Roman Catholic Church had been the prominent, the controlling power of Christendom. That church had been built into strength by a long line of learned men, distinguished colleges and councils, and had been sanc- tioned by a noble army of martyrs and numerous miracles.
"So much was she, for these reasons, lifted above the com- mon crowd, that it is not surprising if, to them, her utter- ances had all the force of law, while she, herself, claimed to be infallible.' Not content with spiritual supremacy, she as- pired to temporal dominion. She demanded tribute from all nations. She arrayed armed legions for her own use; she made and unmade kings. She became the umpire of trade. She dictated laws and treaties. At all Christian courts her legates took precedence and soon assumed to represent that divine right-that supreme authority by whose sanction alone princes were supposed to govern. This supremacy was claimed also by virtue of her age. Had she not, for a thou- sand years, stood firm on the rock whereon Christ himself had set her, amid changing empires, the rude assaults of bar- barism and the decisions of hostile councils? Had not her edicts become the recognized theology of the greater part of the civilized world? How could she be in error who could point to a history like this ?
But God has ordained that in this world, at least, "the evening and the morning" shall be one day. Daylight fol- lows darkness, and with the revival of learning, brilliant dis- coveries, the spirit of enterprise, especially the introduction of printing, human thought received a wonderful impulse, and a new era was introduced, distinguished as an era in modern history.
At this time the Fathers and the founders of Modern Con- gregationalism were born and reared. They were men of prodigious power. Mighty as preachers, learned as divines, able as disputants, they wielded an influence which few can realize. From such heroic souls we have a right to look for a heroic age; and in this case we are not disappointed. Their
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first heroic deed was to deny the divine right of dictation in religious matters to the pope, bishop or presbyter, and to claim that in spiritual concerns, every true believer is a king and priest, and that the church composed of such, meeting on a level, is a "chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a peculiar people." Drawing their authority from the word of God, and their inspiration from the Holy Ghost, they dared to set themselves in opposition to the prevailing opinion of centuries. It was the heroism of the first three centuries reproduced. Till then, for a thousand years the Christian church had believed that a church could originate only with the bishop or presbytery. But they were courageous enough to announce their belief that any number of Christian people could become a Christian church, by organizing themselves into a community under a common profession of faith, to a common Christian life; and they proceeded to reduce their belief to practice by actually organizing. History says " they were regarded by the courts as offenders against the Queen's supremacy and the majesty of the state; and, in the tribunals of the church, as offenders against Christ, in the person of his priestly representatives. It had never been thought or heard of for more than a decade of centu- ries that a company of laymen could by any possible method originate a church. Such a society could never be more than ' a secular association, profane and abhorrent in the eyes of all good Christians for the audacious pretensions' which it as- serted, its officers being guilty of the sin of Korah and Abiram and its sacraments being strange fire before the Lord."
It is not to be wondered at that such people as these suf- fered at the hands of the High Communion during the reign of Elizabeth. They were simply paying the price which the pioneers or the discoverers of truth have always been obliged to pay for being pioneers or discoverers. They were perse- cuted, imprisoned, and detained without trial, release or bail. Their houses were entered at night and ransacked and rifled under pretense of looking for seditious and unlawful books.
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