USA > Illinois > Kane County > Geneva > Fifty years of Unitarian life : being a record of the proceedings on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the organization of the First Unitarian Society of Geneva, Illinois, celebrated June tenth, eleventh and twelth, 1892 > Part 5
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In the interim of 1862 to 1865 a large part of the so- ciety's life was given to work for the Sanitary Commis- sion. During that of 1870 to 1874 the Sunday School was kept up in such an active and earnest way as to win the sympathy and respect of all concerned, the special ser- vices of Christmas and Flower Sunday being of the great- est success. It was in the last year of this period that Miss Esther M. Orton and Miss Rebecca Eddowes deter- mined that the building should be renovated, and by their efforts in various ways, by January, 1874, had rais- ed $150 for that purpose. There is record of a meeting held that month to appoint a committee to make estimates as to what amount was necessary to make the church com- fortable. Later, at a meeting called to hear the report of the committee, Miss Eddowes and Miss Orton were added to the committee. It strikes your historian that the un- written history of the matter would justify me in saying that the committee were added to the above mentioned ladies, as by their further efforts $1,054 was raised and the repairs completed by the middle of the April follow- ing. The story of the raising of the funds ought to be told by some one having the talents of Edward Everett Hale for showing how. improbable things happen in a probable way. The account of the way in which the enthusiasm spread from one to another until Mrs. Polly Conant (widow of Eben Conant) gave $100 and the Uni- ty church of Chicago $100 is well worth hearing. The names of Thomas J. Clark and S. W. Curtis, who were of our membership of the spirit, should be mentioned as those of the two men who stood most gallantly by the la- dies.
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Historical Sketch.
So whatever have been the intervals of time between pastorates this has never been a dead church. It cannot indeed be said to have even had periods of suspended ani- mation. The fire on the church hearth. may have been low at times, but there has always been some friendly hand to draw the coals together and keep the life. in them till the right time came to let the air in upon them. When a little more fuel has been needed to keep the flame alive, it has been mostly woman's hand that has brought it. When the flame has burned merrily and the society has basked in the glow of prosperity, it has been mostly woman's breath that has fanned the flame to its greater life.
The record does not do full justice to the part won- an has borne in keeping up the society, but it is a satis- faction to note, the first name of a woman who was offici- ally appointed in the society is that of Mrs. Samuel Clark. She was placed upon an advisory committee which was meant to be a sort of pastor's cabinet. The next official mention is of the appointment of Miss Eddowes and Miss Orton on the committee for repairing in 1874. In 1890 Mrs. Julia C. Blackman presided at the annual meeting and Mrs. Julia Plato Harvey was elected chairman of trustees, and in 1892 Miss E. H. Long was chosen treas- urer. Other women have been appointed on different committees for the church work since' the adoption of ethical work in 1885; these are the first officers.
It was under Mrs. Harvey's efficient chairmanship that the most successful term of lay service, covering eight months, was sustained, and in connection with Mrs. A. O. Hoyt and Mrs. H. Medora Long, that the latest renovation of our church interior was so tastefully carried out.
It is further to be noted that this has always been a
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By The Way.
harmonious church. The article of our declaration which says that we have associated ourselves together, not as agreeing in opinion, has been well lived up to, as there have been. differences of opinion among us and serious ones too; but there has never been a church quarrel about them. We have had no factions to divide us. Although Mr. Conant, after sixteen years of devotion to this church and the cause, left it mainly on account of difference of opinion on political subjects, yet I have never heard that there was anything that might be called a personal bitter- ness called out by it. I suspect that his was a nature as incapable of exciting such a feeling as of retaining it. I know, that when some years later six or seven families withdrew from my ministration for similar reasons, that there was nothing of the kind between them and myself. It was an honest difference of opinion, and their with- drawing until such time as another should fill my place, was a wise and wholesome thing to do. Since that time I have found that there was never a break in the mutual personal regard we had for each other, and we have stood shoulder to shoulder, working for the cause and the church with never a thought of the past to disturb our harmony. I trust that this reference to bygones is not ungracious, but I could not find a better illustration of the fine unity of the spirit that underlies the agreement to dis- agree.
We have always been an honest church. It is a mat- ter of pride and satisfaction that we can say that the church has never been in debt. I have already mention- ed that it is somewhat of an aggravation that the earlier records should be so largely confined to financial matters, but this very explanation of all things else, seems to show how dear the honesty of the society was in those days; it is to be inferred that they considered keeping out of debt
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Historical Sketch.
the chief end of the society. There is more than one mention of a deficiency, and the appointment of com- mittees to raise funds, but, there is no record of a deficien- cy that was not met, and no appointment of committees to raise funds for debts which had been contracted beyond the society's ability to pay.
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Anniversary Dymn.
WRITTEN FOR THE OCCASION BY JAMES H. WEST, PASTOR FROM 1884 TO 1887.
O TEMPLE sacred to the Past, - And sacred to the Present too! Thy walls, which Fifty Years outlast, To-day we consecrate anew: Anew to God, anew to Man, To Love, to Helpfulness, to Truth; While more in each of these we scan. Than those who knew thee in thy youth.
Oh, blest that as the centuries fly Man's soul doth deeper, higher roam! Yet feels the more' that earth and sky Are but a vaster temple-home: Temple that needs no sun to thrill, So grand its inner, fadeless Light; The Godlike in the human still Redeeming it from evil plight.
Honor be thine, O walls grown gray, That Freedom here was ever given To prophet-souls to point the way To higher God and higher heaven. With Freedom still thy Word be twined, O reverend aisles, to us so dear! And other Fifty Years still find The voice of Progress echoing here.
Above the clamors of our day, Which fain would drown the still small voice, We hear a mightier Presence say, Rejoice, O sons of men! Rejoice! Be open still to prophets' cry; Go on to keener insight yet! Much still remains of Deep and High Ere suns and stars of God are set.
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Character Sketch.
OF THE FIRST PASTOR, REV. A. H. CONANT, BY MISS FRANCES LE BARON OF ELGIN, ILL.
I accepted this position on the program with much reluctance, for I knew that there were others who could write this memorial in a more scholarly way; but when I considered that it would give me an opportunity to ex- press my deep love for the man and my intense gratitude for the blessed privilege it was to sit under his ministra- tions, I felt I had no right to refuse. Often in my mis- sionary work, I have received letters from those of our own faith who have spent their childhood surrounded by strict Calvinists, who had to stay away from churcli and Sunday School, or go where they were labored over as surely among the lost, and were forced to listen to doc- trines from which their souls revolted. These experien- ces have made me realize my early privileges, and have given me an almost painfully intense feeling of grati- tude, to Mr. Conant and the nucleus who organized this church and gave me the blessing, accorded to so few in this western world, of growing up in an atmos- phere of freedom, where I need not believe a thing be- cause I was told to do so and on pain of everlasting tor- ment if I could not believe.
In a letter to Rev. James Freeman Clarke under date
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Augustus D. Conant.
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Of The First Pastor.
of May 30, 1842, while organizing this society, Mr. Con- ant says: "It is a day of small things, but even these small things are full of promise. May we not hope they are the germs of a greatness that shall yet be commensu- rate with the religious wants of a great people ?" Though this greatness, as far as Geneva is concerned, is not visi- ble in brick and stone, nor in silver and gold, it is visi- ble in the hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives that have gone out from this town, lightened from the dark cloud of Calvinistic theology by the reasonable religion preached in this little church, by the high, spiritual teachings, empha- sized as they were by the noble and beautiful lives of its members, which have permeated every family in the
town. My subject is properly Mr. Conant, the man and the minister, and I leave the consideration of his mission- ary labors more especially to Rev. Lorenzo Kelsey, his brother-in-law, and co-laborer; and his army life to Col. J. C. Long, who was with him.
Mr. Conant was rather below medium height, but in his pulpit one lost that impression from the earnestness and intensity of his manner and, as the high and noble thoughts came pouring forth in terse, vigorous, pointed sentences, the whole man seemed to rise to the occasion and his audience gave no thought to his stature. No mat- ter if the first impression was unfavorable, he soon swept that away by his zeal, his genuineness, his self-forgetful- ness. One story is told of him when preaching in Boston. He was for a moment almost overwhelmed by the impos- ing church and the large audience, all of them strangers, but. recovering himself he said: "You have probably noticed my embarrassment, but you will please remember that I am not used to so large a church and so many peo- ple. I am in the habit of preaching to a few people in log school houses and backwoods parlors." The people
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Character Sketch.
all smiled and, as he felt the sympathy of his audience, his embarrassment disappeared.
Another picture we have of him among the Eastern friends comes from Mrs. Eastman, sister of Charles and George Patten and Mrs. Samuel Clark. In a letter writ- ten to Mrs. Cleveland, now Mrs. Wm. Conant, under date of Roxbury, June 7, 1846, she says: "I wish you could have been here to see what a general favorite Mr. Conant is in this region; and how admirably he appears, even in our highest places; for instance, at Chauncey Place giving the Thursday lecture, that most venerable institution where the clergy from Boston and neighboring towns assemble every week to hear each other preach. The construction of the church is peculiar, and the , light in which the preacher stands very favorable and Mr. Conant looked large as life and like one inspired. He was entirely free from embarrassment and positively graceful in his oratory His subject was, 'The Condition and Wants of the West.' You would all have been proud of such an advocate. I think he must be exalted a little in self esteem from his remarkably favorable reception here and that will do him no harm. I must tell you the remark of an eccentric but excellent lady, when Mr. Conant preached for Mr. Putnam. After service she came to me and said, 'Well, if this is a specimen of your western pets, I should like to see more of them.' Mr. Putnam was much pleased with him which we think no small praise."
When, at the age of thirty-one years, he began his ministrations in Geneva he was so boyish in his appear- ance that Mr. Scotto Clark thought him some young boy of the neighborhood and had grave doubts as to his ministe- rial ability, but when he heard him preach his doubts van- ished and he said sometime later, when arranging for his salary: "We are glad to have you among us and, though
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Of The First Pastor.
we cannot give you much money, we will try to give you plenty of bread and butter. " One is reminded of this re- mark when, in looking over his journal of amounts receiv- ed, we find "cash" occasionally, but more often such en- tries as these: "Rented Squire Miller's house for $50 a year and call his subscription to the church paid; bought of Mr. B., on account, two bushels buckwheat at 75 cents; of Mr. C., 13 pounds butter at 8 cents, $1.04;"' and so on. It was at this time that he said to his wife, "I am willing to make a ten years' trial of preaching and if I fail, I will seek some other employment," but she never heard him express any desire to give it up.
He was very methodical in all he did and his class- mates at Cambridge remember the amount of work he ac- complished by utilizing every moment. It seems almost incredible the amount of practical work he did in Geneva in addition to his pulpit and pastoral duties. He was a natural mechanic and helped with his own hands on the carpenter work of this building. He made furniture at odd moments, not only for his own family but as gifts for his parishioners,
It was never necessary for him to go to Europe, or to go out camping for his vacation. He rested from his mental labors by contact with Mother Earth, working on his farm and in his garden day by day. That he could combine pleasure and rest in this way was most fortunate, as it enabled him to aid very materially in keeping the wolf from the door by supplementing with the fruits of his garden the meagre income of $200 or $300, which was all the peo- ple could raise during most of his pastorate. He also in- structed his sons in the pleasures and profits of rural labor, and one interesting story is told of a bit of family discipline in this connection. One warm day, when he and his two sons were working in the garden, one of them complained
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Character Sketch.
of his hard lot in having to work, when his companions were off playing. Mr. Conant sympathized with him and sent him into the house for a chair and an umbrella. All the rest of the afternoon he had to sit in the chair with the . umbrella over his head, while his father and brother went on with their work. It seemed to him that there never was such a long afternoon and that his father never had so many callers, who had to come to the garden to see him, and we venture to say he never complained again of having to work too hard.
That he was a dear lover of children their strong love for him proves, and many of his sermons were to, or about them, showing his thorough sympathy with them. He says: "In the deep interest we take in the accom- plishment of our own schemes, in the magnitude of im- portance which they assume to our minds, we are in great danger of overlooking the interests of others and espec- ially of little children. We are in danger of esteeming their affairs of little consequence, of doing them injustice by disregarding the importance of their employments and amusements, by a want of sympathy with their plans and purposes, their desires and efforts, their hopes and fears. We are in danger of undervaluing the importance of those circumstances and influences which form the opinions, habits and character of the infancy of manhood, of neg- lecting the intellectual and moral education of children. Against this danger we have need to be on our guard. *
* We ought to remember that they have like capacities and powers and affections to our own. That in their little world they have their trials and conflicts and temptations, their hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, as much as those who live in the great world above them. That they are experiencing, in the main, the same disci- pline and learning the same lessons with those who are
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Of The First Pastor.
older and, in fact, are but a few steps behind us in the endless path of knowledge and improvement. We laugh at their toys and despise their ignorance and simplicity, and the vanity of their pursuits, and think not that, in the eye of a more perfect Wisdom, our own ignorance and. folly are as strikingly apparent." This was written at a time when children were kept out of sight, were severely, often cruelly disciplined and before the dawn of the pres- ent period of autocratic children and obedient, or disobe- dient parents.
His sympathy with children was only a part of the large-hearted sympathy for the whole human race, and the animal kingdom as well, that was one of the most marked characteristics of his nature. It was this, com- bined with his entire forgetfulness of self, that drew peo- ple so strongly to him, that made every one respond when he appealed for help in his-missionary work, and that called about him little groups of parishioners in a dozen or more towns in Northern Illinois and Southern Wiscon- sin. If only more such devoted spirits could have been found to foster the germs that he brought to life the liber- al cause would have flourished amain, but such spirits are rare, and the seed he planted in some places lacked nour- ishment.
Mr. Conant was generous to a fault, and many are 1 the stories told of him to illustrate this characteristic. When he came to Geneva with his wife and two sons, he could find no abiding place except two rooms in Mrs. Herrington's house, that stood by the spring near which Mrs. Thad. Herrington's house now stands. For these he paid $2 a month. In a day or two he found a man who, with his wife and child, could not afford to pay any rent, and he gave them the use of one of the rooms.
A poor cobbler came to Geneva after they had set-
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Character Sketch.
tled in their own place, and Mr. Conant built him a house with his own hands, found him work and looked after and helped him as long as he lived. One evening he came home late to tea, looking flushed and heated, and explained that he had been splitting some tough knots of wood for a poor widow who needed the fuel. When cloth was sent him for a suit of clothes, he took half for a coat and sent the other half to a neighboring minister who needed help. Rev. Rush R. Shippen recalls that, when a student at Cambridge, a friend gave him some handsome cloth for a coat which he took to a tailor and exchanged for more yards of an inferior quality, that he might give a coat to a fellow student who was in need. Also, that during this time his family were staying with relatives in Vermont and a friend gave him money to go and visit them. He saved the money for his college expenses and walked from Boston to Northern Vermont. In the army, when the officers were to have a banquet, he declined to take part but, with the money he would have contributed to the banquet, he bought delicacies for the hospital. Many more such stories could be told as his life was full of just such incidents.
His position upon political subjects was always on the highest platform. He had no patience with the spirit that kept so important a class of interests entirely outside of, and separate from all religious considerations. In 1858 Fourth of July fell on Sunday and he took that oc- casion to make a Fourth of July oration for his sermon.
He says: "Men sometimes wish to make an entire sep- aration between things of religion and things of ordinary life. Especially would they keep politics and religion apart from each other; but this birthday of our nation, this day of glory, gratitude and joy, in the natural order of things and of. God's great Providence takes its turn of
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Of The First Pastor.
Sundays in the week, just as though one of these days belonged to Him as much as the others, and just as though He felt no impropriety in bringing religion and politics face to face. True religion, I am certain, has no occasion for a feeling of diffidence in the presence of the genius of American Freedom, and our American Goddess of Liberty ought not-to blush in the presence of the religion of Christ. For American Liberty is the daughter of Christianity. It was born of the sentiment of our text, 'All ye are brethren.' It is the offspring of the doctrine of Divine paternity and human brotherhood. The des- potisms of the old world rest upon assumptions of special Divine rights and the possession of power. But our na- tional union is an attempt to found and govern a state on Christ's idea of brotherhood, and Christ's doctrine of equal rights of humanity and of equal justice to all men. It disclaims the assumption of lordship and a natural right of authority of one man over another. It makes every man free of all but God. It is an endeavor to realize Christ's idea and carry out Christ's principles in political action and natural life. Such being the character of our / national union, the great idea and object of our govern- ment, we have no occasion to suspect the existence of any incongruity between politics and religion. We have therefore, no reason to feel that it is out of place for the Fourth of July, our national birthday, to come on Sunday. We have no reason to feel that a consideration of national and political interests is out of season, in connection with our holiest religious sentiments and services."
He then goes on to show that, as Jesus' teachings were so far in advance of his times that now, nearly two thousand years later, we are only beginning to compre- hend and to live up to them, so the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created free and equal,
LLIKO
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Character Sketch.
was so far above the heads of the people at that time that, when the constitution came to be made, the framers found it impossible to make it as high in its character as the declaration, published to the world eleven years before. * * * The people loved freedom for themselves. They scorned to bear even a light yoke of political servi- tude but, under the constitution, based upon the Declara- tion of Independence, slavery was permitted an existence and a silent recognition. He then proceeds to deal sledge- hammer blows on the inertness that still allows slavery to exist, with a bravery that we of to-day can hardly ap- preciate, and exclaims:
"If we have not christian principle enough to act in accordance with our great ideas of justice and the rights of man, if we have not conscience enough to make us defend the oppressed and down trodden but, for the sake of union and our own peace, we would be willing to let the African race remain in everlasting bondage, this in- stitution of slavery will by no means fail to reach where we shall feel it, to take hold of us where we are alive and I. to compel us, for our own personal freedom and safety and self interests to rise up against it and reassert the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence."
This and other sentences in this discourse, written four years before Lincoln was elected, show a prophetic spirit possessed by few even of his co-laborers in the pulpit. We now point to him with pride as one Unitarian minister, who stood bravely by his colors, the red, white and blue, and by the eternal principles of right. It is almost impossible, even for those of us who lived through it, to realize the courage, the absolute fearless- ness of this and other equally brave sentences in this and similar sermons. He felt that every sin was his special opponent, that the more near it came to his flock, the
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Of The First Pastor.
more he must expose its dangerous proximity, even though he knew that in all probability it would sever his connection with these dear friends.
And here I must say, for the credit of the little band to whom Mr. Conant in a special manner belonged, that some were in sympathy with him fully, and the rest to the extent of giving him the fullest freedom to speak his boldest and strongest thought; but new families liad come in, who had not had the privilege of living with this hardy pioneer band and absorbing their independence and of becoming imbued with their spirit and with that of their pastor. And Mr. Conant could not work against even a small number of disaffected ones, when he was used to entire confidence and sympathy. I am impelled to make this explanation lest it seem that Mr. Conant's person- ality was weak and valueless, instead of being strong and vigorous. Without doubt, the very ones who were most active in their disaffection would have taken an entirely different course had they had the good fortune to have listened to our blessed pastor a few years, instead of a few months.
But he was even more prophetic upon other subjects. Over forty years ago he took time to learn stenography and used it some in his sermons and he was even then strongly interested in spelling reform. While Fræbel was yet struggling with an adverse public opinion in Europe this Unitarian minister, far off on the Illinois prai- ries, had solved and `was urging his principles. Among the many progressive ideas he expressed on this subject, I can take time for but one.
He says: "Childhood and youth are the most vital, susceptible and appreciative periods of human life. X
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