USA > Indiana > Vanderburgh County > Evansville > Foundation stones, of the Church of the Unity, Evansville, Indiana > Part 4
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Some time ago a daughter of good old Saunders Hornbrook died and left the little meeting five thousand dollars toward a church, which is built now. The organization has grown, and taken in some of the best people of the town. The Rev. George Chainey is the settled minister, the congregation is steadily in- creasing, and Philip Hornbrook, at sixty-five and in broken health, but with the old, brave, hopeful heart, has come to the end of his long struggle for a church of our faith and order in his town, the germ of which was brought over, almost fifty years ago, from the Abbey Chapel at Tavistock, in Devonshire.
CHICAGO, 23d June.
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THE MOTHER CHURCH.
THE TAVISTOCK ABBEY CHAPEL.
SIR .- Mr. Collyer will, I am sure, be as glad to know that the Abbey Chapel at Tavistock is neither dead nor dying, as its congregation is to learn of the existence of its Transatlantic daughter. Our Tavistock brethren, under the good guidance of my friend, Lindsey T. Badcock, are doing right noble work for our Unitarian cause, and their ranks of late have received many valuable recruits. Like most of our country congregations, however, they give more than they receive. If any one believes yet that our help ought to be confined to large centres of popu- lation, he would be converted were he to learn how many per- sons who have joined the Treville-street congregation in the past three years owe their early knowledge of our faith to preaching heard in the Abbey Chapel. I am confident that every gift be- stowed by our denomination upon Tavistock has been returned a hundred-fold in the missionary influence of men who, like Philip Hornbrook, have carried away from it the energy that builds new churches in Indiana, and keeps alive old churches here.
PLYMOUTH.
WM. SHARMAN.
UNCROWNED KINGS.
ROBERT SPEARS.
Robert Collyer, with his inimitable style of emotional pic- turesque, sets before us in his communication of last week the outline of a real hero of our movement. Tavistock and the Abbey Chapel-still, we are glad to know, a thriving nursery of liberal minds-may well be proud of the strong scion of faith and good works that has taken a root in far away Indiana, and is bent on holding its own with such irresistible perseverance. Moreover, we do not think that Tavistock has yet forgotten the memory of good William Evans, whose long and steadlast pas- torate ended little more than a generation ago; and many sur- viving friends of the excellent old man will be pleased to hear of the perpetuation of his honored name in that Evansville of the distant South. So that, if there is stimulus in this story for our
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THE MOTHER CHURCH.
younger men, bidding them go forth with Philip Hornbrook's brave determination to let the truth be widely known, there is consolation and hope also for our quiet workers, who have long grown gray in patient service on the old lines. We would ren. der our unfeigned tribute of honor and respect to all such worthy pillars of our cause. With the advance and supremacy of the quick methods of our modern eagerness, a spirit of rapidity, of restlessness, and of change, has forced itself into our religious habits and expectations, and we wonder at the slower pulse of the age before our time, which plodded along under such very different conditions.
A pastorate of over forty years, in charge of one and the same congregation, is a marvel in our midst ; it was common enough when pastors of the type of William Evans supplied the effect- ive strength of our ministry. And perhaps we do not suf- ficiently estimate the variety of good qualities which went to- gether to produce the kind of men capable of prolonging this inwardly sustained and outwardly unremunerative labor in such narrow fields for so extended a period. It is easy to enumerate what we may call the characteristic faults of such a class. These lie upon the surface, and strike every careless eye. The grave, ' methodical divines whose regular and little animated preaching paced diligently the well-known round of rarely exciting topics from year to year, began life no doubt with the ardor, perhaps even with the enthusiasm of youth. The glow of their sacred calling was kindled brightly upon them in the morning of their day. They were not always old and formal. Reading their biographies, one finds now and then that the early temperament of many a solemn preacher was deemed almost too lively for his chosen profession. But as the dyer's hand is subdued to what it works in, so, without any artificial process, often without con- scious restraint, the bounded sphere of customary duties re- pressed the fire, and moulded the manners, and gave the ac- quired character of a common type to the earnest men. They became what the unsympathetic observer finds them-rather dull, slow to move ; a little pedantic, it may be, in their utter- ances; provincial in their interests, old-fashioned in their likings.
Yet look into these men, and see what rich and ample virtues
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THE MOTHER CHURCH.
formed the secret core of their unpretentious lives. They had outlived ambition, and were content. The influence of their sober and yet genial morale penetrated far as a power for good, constituting them a salt of healthy savor, not only in the little communities to which they ministered, but in the town or vil- lage where reverence had gathered round them. They had seen generations come and go, had known habits and thoughts and interests change. If from the pulpit their voices seemed to speak familiar truths, with an accent which the rising age had outgrown, it often happened that in the intercourse of private life, their gentle wisdom, learned in the school of life's experi- ence, interpreted better the problems of thought and duty to the eager spirits of the young, than the newest and grandest phil- osophy could do. They were deep in a few subjects, which made no show, and had no desire to seem to shine beyond their range. For all their apparent resignation to a career of hopeless obscurity, they knew in their hearts full well that theirs was in truth the great calling, to which all other callings were insignifi- cant by comparison. Theirs was the simple search for truth- theirs the meek service of God-theirs the unwearying resort to humble and oft-hidden ways of benefiting and improving their fellow-men-not from fitful impulse, but from an altogether de- voted heart. They were, indeed, whether men recognized it or no, a royal race, a holy priesthood, "to offer up spiritual sacri- fices, acceptable to God, by Jesus Christ."
We sincerely thank Robert Collyer for recalling to notice one of the many ways in which men "builded better than they knew." Our times, busied and hurried, and rashly speculative in every sense, as they are, have still some representatives to show of the old faithfulness, strong in its simplicity. Some of the fathers are with us still. Long may they be spared to prosecute a work that deepens in its influence as the workers grow in age. Some, too, of the rising race have the spirit of the fathers- firmly may they tread in the old paths of Christian duty and Christian endurance, consecrating themselves anew with the ancient consecration of faith and love. The seed-corn cast upon the waters shall yet be bread for nations, "after many days."
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*IN MEMORIAM OF PHILIP HORNBROOK.
GEORGE CHAINEY.
By faith, Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed ; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in taberna les with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs, with him, of the same promise. For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God .- Heb. 8 : 9-10.
History, it is said, repeats itself. There is, no doubt, some- thing about every earnest and true life that illustrates and finds correspondence in all others of like character. In thinking over the life of our brother, in connection with his family history, I have been forcibly reminded of that of Abraham. In that olden time, of which we have but dim and uncertain record, there seems to have been a man living in Ur of the Chaldees, by the name of Terah, who felt that the place was too strait for him. What the influences were that produced that strange discontent that seemed to him like the voice of God calling him to go trom his kindred, break with the associations of childhood, youth and middle-age in search of a land of greater promise, I do not pro- fess to know. He may have been dissatisfied with the people around him. Earnest and devoted himself to the worship of one true God, it may have seemed to him that there was little chance to found a people ennobled through what seemed to him higher and nobler views of religion amidst the fetichism and sensual worship of the Chaldeans. In those days each father of a family was priest and prophet to his own household, while each ener- getic nature to whom had come the vision of a richer life would naturally aspire to be the founder of a people; to be the father of a tribe, which, though it should increase as the sand by the sea- shore in number, should ever, through its traditions and wor- ship, look back to him as the starting point of its life and glory,
#Funeral discourse preached in the Church of the Unity, January 31, 1877.
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IN MEMORIAM OF PHILIP HORNBROOK.
and call him blessed throughout all its generations. I cannot think that God ever designed or wished that our hearts should not take hold in desire of any possible good of glory or honor among men. The true heart will not set these first, but duty ; still, the true heart will desire them. This spirit of discontent with eager longing after something better in the future that got into the heart of that old patriarch, who was the father of Abra- ham, is the pivot upon which hinges the progress of the race- that perpetually saves the world from the evils of stagnation and fixity-pushing away, as it does, the old leaves that have served their time, in order to give place to the new life.
It is this principle that underlies the character and success of each great soul that has adorned and blessed our race. It is allied to every improvement in government, art, literature or re- ligion. It is of this that the author of the Epistle to the He- brews sings such heroic praise all through the chapter from which I have taken my text-Faith, the foundation or first step toward all higher life. And yet, grand as this principle is, and all others of like character, it runs parallel with all the simpler, tender and pensive relations of our earthly lives. How great is the principle of patriotism in its relation to the general good, and yet in the time of war how closely it is knitted to the heart-life of individ- uals! When the fond mother folds her darling boy for the last time to her bosom, and, with uplifted, tearful eyes to Heaven, sends him away with her blessing, to make one in the unseen ranks of the common soldier that are needed to stop up the gap of rebellion and save the nation ; or when the young lover, with bursting heart, tears himself from her who has promised to be the light and beauty of his home, the greatness of the principle may and does crown them with honor, but it does not take from them the pain, the anguish of the parting. And do we not- who believe in God-think of him as infinitely beyond the com- pass of our thought, and yet is He not near to each one of us ?- "Our Father," caring for us, in whose love and faithfulness we find our best comfort and only glimmering of hope in such hours of sorrow and gloom as are upon us to-day.
So great as this principle of faith is, divine as this discontent that leads the emigrant to seek a new home in a better land, or the individual to endeavor to plant a new thought of God and
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IN MEMORIAM OF
worship in the midst of the multitude of others that already claim the interest and devotion of the people, how closely it is interwoven with the very heart of the world-the family life and individual friendships of those concerned. Far away as the breaking up of the first home of Terah may seem to us, yet the human heart was the same in those days as in these ; different as his new ideas of religion may have been from those of his neigh- bors, there was doubtless many a friend to be left behind-many a fond association that seemed to hold them to the old place and the old ways. Go where they might, prosper how they may, it must be a long time before they will cease to feel, in that strange mystery and holy of holiest of the heart's life, that part of their life is still there, where they were born-first saw the flowers and sunlight-where all the experience of their lives, from the joy of love's return, to their sorrow, when they buried Haran, had been shared by those whom they left behind. And then how it must have touched the heart of Abraham and the rest of the family when Terah, the father, in whose heart had first dawned the new hope and desire to find a land of promise, died at Haran on the way there, before they had found the place that would satisfy the new life and purpose within him. That must have been a sad mourning for the children, when so much upon which the father had set his heart seemed to hang in uncertainty.
But how often it is that the faith and purpose of the father is born anew in the hearts of his children. Shakespeare was, as usual, true to human nature when he caused the thoughtless young Prince Henry to awake to manhood's claims and duties, by what he supposed to be the death-ded of his father. We are not born corrupt; nobility of character is conveyed from one gen- eration to another. The promise of life from every law of na- ture is unto us and our children. It is claimed by some that the children of the good are more apt to turn out bad than those of the wicked. Nothing could be further from the truth. Such an idea can only find support in an age when evil is called good and good evil. But the faith and purpose of Terah found new and richer life in the heart of Abraham; the same was to him as the voice of God. When as yet he had no children, he saw a nation as his descendants, as numerous as the stars of Heaven, inhabit- ing the goodly land of Canaan, to which his wanderings had
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PHILIP HORNBROOK.
brought him, and in which, for a long time, he did not own so much as a foot of land. But the principal glory of Abraham is in the fact that this purpose of his life was more than the ambition to make a name-to be the father of a nation. He wanted all other nations to be blessed through this one. That there were those before Abraham who believed in the unity and spirituality of God, we know. But it is very evident that the devotion of Abraham to this view of religion has preserved in the traditions of his posterity, had much to do with the superi- ority of their conceptions of God at a later age.
The facts of his life seemed, in the mind of the author of the letter to the Hebrews, to indicate that he and his children sought to find a city, or home, whose builder and maker was God. They not only recognized the human but likewise the divine qual- ities of life. They obeyed the instinct that led them to look to the Infinite Creator and source of all things for strength and com- fort. He who had made the heavens and the earth was their habitation; the best hopes and longings of their hearts were to them as the voice of God. All the promises of life and the fu- ture springing out of this quality of faith were to them as a covenant from Jehovah, meaning the Eternal, the I Am-He that was, and is, and ever shall be. It is, no doubt, a very frag- mentary and traditional picture that we have of the life of this patriarch. But such glimpses as we do get of it reveal to us qualities and characteristics that we would do well to emulate. I said just now that he did not forget the divine-neither did he ignore the human. All good is the gift of God, but he who secures it to enjoy must be industrious.
Abraham saw the power of wealth, and sought after it. He had great flocks and possessions. There are some who seem to think that to be religious one must live apart from the world in its concerns of politics and industries. Not so Abraham; nor did the cares of his wealth or its possession canker and corrode his heart. In his dealings with Lot, his nephew, we find evi- dence of a most unselfish nature. When the servants of Lot quarreled with his, he said to Lot: "Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen, for we be brothers ;" and then, though age and everything gave him the right of choice, he permitted Lot to
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IN MEMORIAM OF
take the richest part of the country, while he journeyed will- ingly in an opposite direction. There is one more glimpse of his character towards the end of his life that I cannot refrain from mentioning. Nearly all his life he was a stranger in a strange land. But at last death, which finds its way sooner or later into all familes, took from him his beloved and honored wife, Sarah, and he was in need of a piece of ground in which to bury his dead. But so honorable had been his life that he had endeared himself to the people, and when he sought to buy from them the field and cave of Macpeleh, they would fain have granted it to him without price.
But instructive as this family life is, I must now ask you to look from it to another. There are doubtless very many family histories that might be compared to this of Terah and Abraham in some respects. But it has seemed to me that there was no way in which I could say so well or so fitly what I wanted to about him to sorrow for whose love and to honor whose memory we are gathered here to-day, as by setting it over against this of Abraham's. Not that I mean to say that it has been the same in quality or will bear the same fruit in after days, but I am sat- isfied that according to his talents and convictions he traveled along the same path.
Nor does the resemblance begin with his own life. When but a lad there was another discontented Terah away yonder in Devon- shire of old England, who felt that the land was too strait for him, whose religious convictions as a dissenter and Unitarian, coupled with a desire to do better for his children than he could there, led him to look towards this new land of promise. Not that they were in distress, for they were in circumstances very far removed from those that impel most of the emigrants to these shores. Now, under any condition, it must require a good deal of this quality of faith, or divine discontent, to lead a man in middle life to take this step; but to me, knowing what I do of England and English life, how Saunders Hornbrook and wife ever acquired the faith to break with their life and friends in England and seek a home here, when the country was scarcely open to settlement, is a mystery; that they did so is pledge l sufficient that they were of heroic nature. I find that up to the year 1818, so few persons had as yet settled here, that scarcely
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PHILIP HORNBROOK.
anything is known of its history up to that time, while Mr. Hornbrook and family arrived here in the following year, 1818. Mr. Hornbrook settled in Scott Township, about ten miles from the then embryo village of Evansville, and, though we find him in the amount of land he took up and the opening of a store, while carrying on at the same time a wool and carding-machine and cotton-gin, doing his best to realize his expectations touch- ing the material interests of his life. We also find that he did not forget the divine, those of the spiritual. But there was little in common between the crude religious views of their orthodox neighbors and those of these educated English Unitarians. And so though they did their best to affiliate with those among whom their lot was cast in these matters, they were compelled to build their own altar to that same Divine Unity, Terah and Abraham worshiped of old. Of course there was no minister of their faith to be had ; but Unitarianism rests on no particular man or system, but on the heart and conscience of each individual; and so Mr. Hornbrook, when he could gather in a few neighbors, would hold his own service, reading to his family and small audience a sermon from some famous American or English Uni- tarian divine. It was, no doubt, the influence of this noble loyalty to religious convictions that has given to the cause of Unitarianism the constant and unswerving devotion of their son, and through their daughter, this church building. Though strangers in a strange land-no one about them for some time with whom they could find the fellowship that all earnest con- viction craves-they never lost sight of the fact that any home worth building must have in it a place for the Divine Builder. Though they were, doubtless, by many of their neighbors re- garded as infidels in creed, they were never accused of being infidels in conduct. I mention these things, because in almost every case the home of a child foreshadows the life of a man. But the faith and purpose of this Terah took root in the heart of his son. He was taught in his childhood that life had both human and divine wants. At his mother's knee, and by his father's counsel, he was taught that he was not only their child, but also the child of God; that to be a Christian was to live by the golden rule, having Christ before him as an example of trust in the Fatherhood of God and loyalty to the brotherhood of
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IN MEMORIAM OF
man. His life has yielded good and true fruit to this kind of teaching. There are but few who know the sacrifices he has made and the labor given for the purpose of establishing, in this town, the faith that was so dear to his heart. Nothing has con- tributed so much happiness to the declining years. of his life as the completion and dedication of this church, free of debt, and through it the faith that the work and devotion of a lifetime will not be lost.
But while he believed in and sought to live by the divine law, like this earlier Unitarian of whom I have spoken, he did not forget the claims of this life. His was no morbid piety, that robbed life of its ambition, that looked upon all its fame or honor as a worthless bauble, or thought it a sin to laugh or joke ; nat- urally of a cheerful disposition, everything that came into his hands of like character was made to contribute to the enjoyment of his friends. Though his educational advantages were not anything to boast of, yet such was the quality of his mind and strength of his memory, that I have seldom met a man so well informed touching the practical affairs of life, and with a more varied and precise recollection of the contemporaneous events of a lifetime. Any one with a sound mind and good heart could not help enjoying his society.
But while he was industrious and devoted to the practical af- fairs of life, these did not, by any means, possess the fullest love of his heart. If I am correctly informed, there have been but few of the citizens of Evansville who have done more for the public good than he has. In the interests of anything that had the advantage of the people in view, he was never sparing in his toil. Though entrusted with several offices of trust, he has always retained the confidence and respect of his fellow-citizens. But though so genial in his humor and public in his spirit, it was not every one who met him on the street who knew him truly. His heart was too large and overflowing with affection to be fully known outside of the family circle.
When we go into some houses we see at once that the father and husband has permitted himself to become so absorbed in his public life as to be almost a stranger to his family; but it was not so here. The cares of office or business were never per- mitted to cheat wife or children of their rightful share of atten-
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PHILIP HORNBROOK.
tion. All who have been admitted into the sacred seclusion of his home know that it was no niggard affection that bloomed therein. Since I have known it, the shadow of his failing health has rested upon it ; but I am sure that the tenderness and sym- pathizing devotion of his children to his every wish must have been rooted in a life-long affectionate care for them as a parent. But the ties that are broken at his death are more than the one that makes his loss so hard to the surviving members of his family circle. As you all doubtless know, he was long a loved and honored member of the order of Odd Fellows-a society the symbol of whose fellowship of hearts is the three links of friendship, love and truth. Many doubtless mourn his loss as that of a fellow-citizen whose patriotism and up- right life has, during a long lifetime, been contributed to the public good. But the brethren of this mystic tie who are here to-day, in respect to his memory, doubt- less feel that a still closer bond of union has been broken; that in his death they have lost a worthy and faithful brother, whose consistent life, with the principles of their order, has preserved inviolate the three golden links and cardinal virtues by which they seek to govern their lives. But there was another tie that was especially near to his heart, of which, if I should neglect to speak, I should be unfaithful to the trust reposed in me-I mean that of his church fellowship.
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