USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The West Church, Boston; commemorative services on the fiftieth anniversary of its present ministry, and the one hundred and fiftieth of its foundation, on Tuesday, March 1, 1887, with three sermons by its pastor > Part 1
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Gc 974.402 B65bo 1506655
GENEALOGY COLLECTION
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 00084 0956
n
E
Commemoratibe S erbices
AT
WEST CHURCH, BOSTON
THE WEST CHURCH. 1806-1887.
THE WEST CHURCH, BOSTON'
Commemorative Services
ON THE
FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF ITS PRESENT MINISTRY
AND THE
ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH OF ITS FOUNDATION
ON TUESDAY, MARCH 1, 1887
WITH THREE SERMONS BY ITS PASTOR
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BOSTON DAMRELL AND UPHAM 1887
University Press : JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.
1506655
CONTENTS.
-
PAGE
PREFATORY NOTE .
9
THE WEST CHURCH : HISTORY AND MINISTRY. SERMON BY
REV. CYRUS A. BARTOL, D.D. Preached Feb. 27, 1887
13
Commemorative Services. MARCH 1, 1887.
PROGRAMME
29
MINISTERS OF THE WEST CHURCH 32
COMMITTEE OF ARRANGEMENTS 33
USHERS
33
ADDRESS OF REV. CYRUS A. BARTOL, D.D.
37
" REV. FREDERICK H. HEDGE, D.D. 41
HYMN .
48
ADDRESS OF GOVERNOR AMES
49
REV. GEORGE E. ELLIS, D.D., LL.D. 51
" JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, D.C.L., LL.D. 58
REV. A. A. MINER, D.D. 64
BABU MOHINI M. CHATTERJI
68
HYMN BY MISS MARY BARTOL 71
ADDRESS OF REV. GEORGE A. GORDON 72
REV. CYRUS HAMLIN, D.D.
75
",
REV. ROBERT COLLYER
76
LETTER OF REV. PHILIP S. MOXOM
79
THE TIDINGS: SERMON BY REV. CYRUS A BARTOL, D.D. Preached March 6, 1887 85
OUR FELLOWSHIP : TWO SERMONS BY REV. CYRUS A. BARTOL, D.D. Preached April 3 and April 17 . . 101, 113
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
EXTERIOR OF THE WEST CHURCH, 1887
Frontispiece
PORTRAIT OF JONATHAN MAYHEW
16
" SIMEON HOWARD 18
"
CHARLES LOWELL
.
20
THE WEST CHURCH, 1775 1.
56
PORTRAIT OF CYRUS A. BARTOL 84
1 This woodcut from the "Memorial History of Boston" is printed by the courtesy of the publishers, Messrs. TICKNOR & Co.
PREFATORY NOTE.
A S a religious society is formed for perpetuity, and as ecclesiastical like other edifices are meant to serve more than one generation, so a long pastorate belongs to the book of chronicles, and scarce amounts to aught better than a chronological virtue. It had accordingly been my wish that this memorial volume should be confined to an account of the public week-day exercises which were hinted by a concurrence of dates. But the judgment of the West Church committee prevails in determining its contents ; and I find that my own words are to occupy a position and fill a space my reason for disclaiming which was the per- sonal way in which, before and after the wider observance, I had spoken as to my own family and household of faith, preaching to whom has become frank and friendly domes- tic conversation, in the style in which an old servant under the roof is sometimes indulged. What is said, however, in a pulpit is addressed to the community ; what is printed is published ; and on no ground of privacy can its faults, if explained, be excused. Yet, as from our Chairman's suggestion come also these introductory lines, I may be permitted in them to add some acknowledgment of the debt I owe to my calling and to my parochial charge. By the harness that galls the load is drawn. A member of any profession - divinity, medicine, or law - will in the
2
IO
PREFATORY NOTE.
course of many years have seasons of being weary and sore in the yoke; but let him not forget or fail to own how he is educated in that by which he is tried. The parish I have been so identified with and should hardly know myself apart from, could as soon doubt its own as my loyalty and love. My ministry is a privilege in which, to my mind, obligation on either side disappears. Nothing I have rendered to the flock can equal what I have received from its heart and at its hands. If any influence has gone forth to the land from the old place of its assembly, still in its desk was the vantage-ground.
10th June, 1887.
C. A. B.
The quiest Church : History and Ministry. -
A SERMON
BY THE REV. CYRUS A. BARTOL.
PREACHED FEB. 27, 1887.
SERMON.
AND YE SHALL HALLOW THE FIFTIETH YEAR, AND PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND UNTO ALL THE INHABIT- ANTS THEREOF. - Leviticus xxV. 10.
YOUR minister completes to-day a half century's public service, and this West Boston Society rounds out a century and a half, a three-fold jubilee, of its existence as a church. God hides the germs of every living thing. We cannot give a nation's date. No record holds the moment by the clock of any scientific discovery. Banquo's question to the witches, if they can look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow, hints the secrecy of every embryo of matter or mind. In regard to the religious foundation on this spot, we but know that early in January, 1737, less than a score of persons, - just seventeen, - from six worshipping bodies, at diverse points of the compass, with two preachers - Prince and Foxcroft - to help, like a detachment of bees began to swarm, put their heads and hearts to- gether and chose a minister, William Hooper, whom they did not ordain till the 18th of May ensuing, then chipping the shell. It is curious to observe,
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THE WEST CHURCH, BOSTON.
however, that the recent law of weekly payment for labor in this Commonwealth had so early the force of custom, -an old yellow leather-bound record showing that on the 27th of February - just a hun- dred and fifty years ago- Mr. Hooper received in English currency eight pounds. In default of other register, we may fancy it took a month or six weeks - a much lesser period than has been used in many more recent cases -for the company to have a right by ownership to dedicate the ground and altar, and to come into a solvent and responsible relation to a pastor, who after a nine years' service, having already listened to an invitation from the proprietors of Trinity Church, suddenly on a Lord's day, without notice to his own parishioners or among them any discontent, sailed in the man-of- war "Chester" for England, there received Episcopal ordination from Bishop Benson in 1747, returned to Boston, and on the 28th of August became rector of Trinity Church ; so that the present rector of that church and your humble servant here have, if they need it, excuse and apology for their own mutual good-will from a common ecclesiastical an- cestor. One of Hooper's sons - his namesake a graduate of Harvard College- went to North Caro- lina, was delegate to the Congress that declared our national independence and signed the instru- ment, a portrait of the clergyman, of which I regret we have no copy, being in the possession of the Rev. Dr. Hooper in that State. Why our primate
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HISTORY AND MINISTRY.
and first shepherd deserted his innocent unoffend- ing flock has been a hard riddle; and what abso- lution they granted him does not appear. That they did not complain or proceed in any way against him, is proof what consistent protestants against arbitrary power to hold or bind a man con- trary to his own will and conscience they were ; and perhaps they found reason to forgive this bolting by their teacher from his peaceful charge in outside theological interference, - like that by which in lower ranges of the animal kingdom some intruder drives a fish or bird from its own shell or nest. Hooper had preached a Thursday lecture expressing more liberal views than were as yet accepted of the divine attributes, and protesting against the idea of aught vindictive or revengeful in the character of God. Some of the Congrega- tional ministers were hit or hurt, and expressed by letter to him their displeasure. He was of a gentle but noble mien and temper, yet not a person to be cowed by their wrath; and to one of his corre- spondents, who had cited in support of the doctrine of fear the trembling of Moses at Mount Sinai, Hooper replied he did not know that the shaking of the prophet "was mentioned to his honor," - a double stroke of wit and self-respect which makes our heart warm to him, and discloses his motive in a preference of the lords bishops to the lords brethren, whose little finger in our history, after the figure of the young men to Rehoboam, was
16
THE WEST CHURCH, BOSTON.
sometimes thicker than the prelatical loins. So Hooper - as I solve the conundrum - escaped from a heavier to a then lighter yoke with a motion which in these days and in this place there is for such a spirit nothing to tempt. His wife was the twin sister of John Dennie, an eminent Boston merchant and forefather of a family never without representatives in this sanctuary, - George Dennie being the only survivor of those by whose vote your present minister still holds his place.
Hooper departing like one that shakes the dust from the shoes of his feet in the autumn of 1746, the West Church opened its doors in 1747 to Jonathan Mayhew, first preacher in Boston of an untrinitarian God; most potent clerical assertor in America of civil and religious freedom; pre-emi- nently famous in the pulpit on these shores, not as a maul of heretics, but as a flail to thresh the British hierarchy and crown with repeated blows that had transatlantic echoes; a master-workman, Christ-like, who broke down the partition-wall between civil or secular and religious affairs; peerless in intellect, espousing human privilege, who had in the council of patriots no superior ; a torch-bearer who lighted from the sparkling shrine of prayer the watch-fires of a country's redeemers; a communicant who, fresh from the table of the Lord's Supper, wrote to James Otis, "Communion of the churches! why not communion of the colonies?" the people's unfallen Lucifer, -
REMARKS ON AN ANON-TRACT P-LXXXH
A
1 AM"
VOOR MA
=
IONATHAN MAYHEW, D.D.PASTORYOF THE WEST CHVRCH IN BOSTON, IN NEW ENGLAND, AN ASSERTOR OF THE CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTIES OF HIS COUNTRY AND MANKIND, WHO, OVERPLIED BY PUBLIC ENERGIES, DIED OF A NERVOVS FEVER, IVLY VHIL MDCCLXVI, AGED XXXXV
MDCCLXVK. .
I7
HISTORY AND MINISTRY.
"Who rose, where'er they turned their eye, The morning-star of liberty ; "
and who, as the inscription on this admirable picture - a photographically enlarged reproduction of the old engraving -informs us, overplied with public energies, died at the age of forty-five, of a nervous fever. He had in Thomas Hollis a kindred soul and coadjutor. By his radical spec- ulations in theology, his brethren in the ministry were touched but not alienated; and when one of them, holding his hand as the pulse was in the last flutterings, asked if he still held fast to the ten- ets he had maintained, he answered, " My integrity I hold fast and will not let it go." As a compound battery reduplicates the flash and force of a single cell or wire, so Mayhew was born to feel and speak and strike with manifold energy for a million of men. Eloquence has been called logic on fire. But when the flame of genius is kindled by the principle of justice, and the cause of humanity con- secrates supreme ability, and a man makes a better than Hebrew holocaust of every faculty and oppor- tunity to display and enforce the rights of men to be governed in equity, and everybody to have room of opportunity, as none can put forth his strength or talent with the elbow bound, and to think on their own business for themselves, -then comes utterance like John Milton's; then periods roll out from a little pen like peals of thunder. And some of Jonathan Mayhew's are as solemn and
3
18
THE WEST CHURCH, BOSTON.
sublime as Milton's own. He declares he will not be "religiously scolded or pitied or whipped out of any principles or doctrines rationally held on Scripture authority," and not postpone that to all the good fathers of the church, even with the good mothers added. The only effectual arguments from the illiberal, he said, were the stones that knocked out the brains; and he saw no reason why the "Song of Solomon" was in the canon, and the " Wisdom" out, but that men love songs more than wisdom. He complains that there is a saint- ship without sanctity, which it takes a trip across the Atlantic to comprehend; an impious bargain between the sceptre and the surplice, - Christ not preached, but Charles, who was called a saint not because he was a good man, but a good church- man. And when Secker, archbishop of Canterbury, contemptuously described him as a poor man, he answered, "Such I am indeed, but have through my people's generosity a comfortable subsistence and contentment, which, if attended with integrity and godliness, is all the gain my soul aspires after in this world." In his sacred fury he cries,-
" Will they never let us rest in peace, except where all the weary are at rest? Is it not enough that they perse- cuted us out of the Old World ? Will they pursue us into the New? What other new world remains ? Where is the Columbus to pilot us to it before we are consumed by the flames, or deluged in a flood of episcopacy? For my own part," he continues, "I can hardly ever think of our being
Simcon Howard
19
HISTORY AND MINISTRY.
pursued thus from Britain into the wilds of America, and from world to world, without calling to mind, though with- out applying, that passage in the Revelation of St. John, ' And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into the place where she is nourished from the face of the serpent. And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood.'"
Mayhew died July 9, 1766. While he lay at the point of death, every clergyman in town prayed for his life. Even the church clergy composed collects to that end.
In 1767 the private-public man, as he was called, was succeeded by Simeon Howard, a man of milder make, yet as by heredity the same apostolic and audacious lover of liberty. In a few years fell the Revolutionary whirlwind, which Mayhew and other soaring spirits had been at once the stormy petrels to announce and the inspired zealots to provoke. The British troops held Boston, and turned the old wooden building first raised here into a barrack, dispersing the congregation. In 1775, on suspicion that the Continental troops in Cambridge had been signalled from the steeple, a few feet from the line where the square belfry now stands, the soldiers razed it to the ground. A remnant of the society with its unflinching pastor sailed for the Bay of Fundy. On landing, Howard was arrested as hav- ing no permit to leave Boston, and taken to Hali- fax. On the return to the New England capital the
20
THE WEST CHURCH, BOSTON.
impoverished survivors of the flock, feeling unable to give their shepherd any support, proposed to dissolve. He replied he would stand by them with any compensation, or none, "while three families remained." In Nova Scotia, seeing certain young men putting stones, to increase the weight, into some bundles of seaweed hay meant for their mili- tary friends and British compatriots in Boston, he persuaded them to desist from the dishonesty, though designed against his and his country's foes. I may be pardoned some personal pride in the disinterested fairness and charity of Howard, that grandfather and great-grandfather by marriage of me and mine, who, with the treasurer of the society for his rival, won for his wife Mrs. Mayhew, the widow of his predecessor. When John Quincy Adams, in his own glowing way, pronounced to me a panegyric on Dr. Howard, whom he had heard preach, I having at the time the same gold fasten- ings on my wrists which Howard was wont to wear into the desk, made answer to the great ex-president and most famous of Massachusetts' representatives on the floor of the House in Washington; and I said, " It pleases me, sir, to hear your eulogy on my forerunner. I cannot claim that the mantle or aught of the spirit of Howard has fallen on me, his grandson-in-law; but I at least have got his sleeve- buttons." I wear them still.
On the first of January 1806, Howard having died in his seventy-second year (in 1804), was
Tor , affectionately
٢
2 I
HISTORY AND MINISTRY.
ordained Charles Lowell, the third inheritor and worthy upholder of those liberties of which he had enough, yet not a jot to spare, in his own blood; and this now almost antiquated temple was soon reared for the new service, after thirty-one years of which the minister, as greatly beloved as any one in the annals of this town, desired a colleague, - in choosing whom, so dear was he to his charge, they seemed to concur in his opinion ; and he on whom the lot fell finds in this favor of his colleague some added title to self-respect. For a quarter of a cen- tury this relation in all love and harmony held, ending in hand-clasps and kisses with him in his sick-room and on his death-bed in 1861. It is a pleasure always to me to have his image in my mind, and his name on my tongue. The good, holy, loving, faithful man was one of those whose infirmi- ties, if he had such, could not be seen, his virtues so stood in the way, - as when the sun eclipses the moon, or mortal features, because our eyes are misty, are half hid with mimic stars and rainbows on their lids. I remember his shining glance across the room, at the house of one of his daughters still living among us, on his return from a three years' travel in Europe and the farther East. After his affection for all his parishioners, his, like his predecessors', master passion was still for the liberty of his church. Next to the two great commandments was his posi- tive undenominational will. He insisted that the Boston Directory, or any Year-Book, should give no
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THE WEST CHURCH, BOSTON.
title but " Independent Congregational " to the West Church, which should never be Unitarianized or Trinitarianized, so help him God! He quoted in self-defence Paul's refusal of subjection to the cir- cumcising brethren, even for an hour. He was on such terms of exchange with the Old South Church that Wisner, about to be settled there, begged of him the "right hand of fellowship." But by the gods of creed, rising like ghosts on the Merrimac and Connecticut, the Lord's heritage was ready to be parcelled out ; a rigid sectarianism was drawing the lines, and in the ordaining council a motion was made to set aside Lowell and override the can- didate's wish. Dr. Osgood the moderator, so Low- ell himself informed me, declared, "I won't put the motion." But it was put. Afterward meeting Wisner he said, " We can shake hands in the street, if not in the pulpit."
Yet Lowell, excluded on one side, did not join the other. As in the White Hills sixty years ago the Willey House stood while the roaring avalanche parted on either side, so he and his remained amid the slides and convulsions of party spirit, unmoved. He resembles that centre of a storm which is said in the spiral whirl not to stir. Channing and Norton and Ticknor were with him in this first re- luctance to organize and associate against the Cal- vinistic yoke. But he alone persisted, remonstrated, and asseverated that he would not belong to a party, - no, not even to a no-party party ; and so
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HISTORY AND MINISTRY.
abode to the end of his days. He was no schis- matic. He had a healthy Christian catholicity in his heart and on the brain. When it was proposed to divide the Convention one of whose functions was to raise and distribute funds of charity to the poor widows of deceased members, he rose and declared he could go with neither section. "If in consequence of any separation these widows shall come to want," he exclaimed, " their groans shall not disturb my slumbers, their blood shall not cleave to the skirts of my garments." I give his language as cited to me by Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the clergy at the time. Lowell himself told me that Dr. Lyman Beecher, having in the sessions of the same body referred to those " who had de- parted from the faith of the fathers," he Lowell in- quired " if any portion still adhered to the faith of the fathers," - to which Beecher, with a cough and stammer, could only reply, "Yes, for substance." That substance, in Andover and elsewhere, is a convenient substantive still. But Lowell fled into freedom of the spirit; like Lot out of Sodom he forsook all bondage of the letter, never turning back at the risk of becoming a pillar of salt. He abjured sect. He was no heretic. He craved and appealed to a larger sympathy. He held, not to Orthodoxy, but orthopraxy. Points of doubtful disputation he abhorred.
To this sketch of the West Church ministry let me add two or three lay-figures. When I was
24
THE WEST CHURCH, BOSTON.
settled, one of the first to greet and cheer me was George C. Shattuck, then living almost under the sanctuary eaves, -a man of genius in the medical calling, with an intuitive divination of disease, who, when his young minister's first vigor was spent, put him on horseback with a companion, and with- out medicine restored health. I bear in mind his searching gaze while, lost in thought and still as a statue, he considered his patient. As thus rapt and motionless in his usual listening way he once in a company, after a half-hour, turned a little his head, one on the other side of the room said, " It moves !" Of all my early parishioners he was the most original in manner of conduct and style of speech. He said : " It makes one look stupid to think." " I keep my boy's head to grind-stone," he told me, " that I may secure for him the healthy stimulus of prospective want." " Madam, I have a diluted responsibility," he said to a mother of whose son he was guardian, when she questioned his course in discharge of his trust. His character combined strength with sensibility, and united gen- erosity to thrift. But he deputed to no agent to prescribe his task or make the channels in which his abundant bounty should flow.
Another figure prominent among my friends was that of Charles G. Loring. Loring was a lawyer devoted to his client, but declining any bad case, not wishing to win by technicality, not using argu- ments that had no weight to his own mind, and not
25
HISTORY AND MINISTRY.
brow-beating, as is the fashion of some, witnesses on the other side. He was courteous in court. Nor could he take any sort of bribe however dis- guised, or even endure reward of merit for his fidelity. A wealthy gentleman now deceased, in whose favor, not in court but in consultation, Mr. Loring had pronounced, told me he sent him a splendid silver pitcher after the decision, in token of his thanks. The next morning the pitcher was returned. That was Charles G. Loring, Superin- tendent of our Sunday-school. Into the noble and indispensable profession of the law have gone some of the brightest spirits, and out of it have come for long ages many of the best and a few of the greatest men ; however, as also do the clerical and medical folk, it presents some bravoes, and has its share of hypocrisy and fraud.
I cannot quite omit one other name, Joseph Willard, the erect, upright, handsome clerk of the court, as pure and devout and fair to look on as Lowell himself, with whom near forty years ago I sat up so many nights preparing the collection of hymns, now in our use.
The woman of Endor, whom Saul requested to fetch up Samuel, saw gods ascending from the earth ; and men have believed in gods because of the divine of their own number, whose lives they could not otherwise account for, and whose existence they must hold to, beyond the grave. " These all died in faith,"-says the writer to the Hebrews of the wor-
4
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THE WEST CHURCH, BOSTON.
thies on his list. When I think of Mayhew I hear a sound of trumpets, and as if some angel of judg- ment held the last one to his lips. The story of Howard reads like a mediaval romance. Lowell's pastorate seems a pastoral symphony. Part of the record of this church was swept away, as with a broom and besom of ruin, in the tempest of war. But the spirit is movement, and the Church Univer- sal is no fixture of article and form, no treadmill of repetition and routine. In its outward changes and adaptations to human need on this restless sea of life it rather resembles that sort of light-house, - one specimen of which we have on the north bay of yonder Cape, - where the unceasing stir under the hammer of wind and wave on the vast dunes or heaps of sand necessitates occasional change of the site of the building, in order that with its blazing guide it may front the storm-tossed sailor and show the secure path to the laboring ship. Our West Church is not an architecture of tenets or ordi- nances, dove-tailed into a covenant or liturgy. At the beginning the Christian Church was sometimes figured as a vessel heaving on a voyage. So in the catacombs, or hunted from their homes, the first Christians must have felt it to be.
Will you accept these estimates from your min- ister, your servant for Christ's sake, as but his contribution to your own better thoughts ? He does not in any wise consider them as complete or final even in his own mind. Man's judgment, as
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HISTORY AND MINISTRY.
Paul thought, is a small thing. He that judgeth is the Lord, who hangs the constellation Libra, the scales in the sky. We are all of us weighed like every atom and orb. Do we complain of being unappreciated or wrongly dealt with? My friend, thou canst not suffer injustice or any real harm. There is One who will see you righted, though the sun faint and the heavens fall. What saith the Lord to every one? Have patience; bear ex- hortation. Be gentle men and women ; not beastly or brutal, with smooth faces that are but painted masks. Pretences will not pass. You can be com- bative and destructive without sword or gun. You can use no poniard, yet stab in the dark. If you injure, repent and confess. The tongue, says Goethe, is the only weapon that can heal the wounds it makes. Where you have bruised, bind up. Par- take not the temper of your enemy ; else you are infected with the sin you so righteously denounce. Feel and offer the love and forgiveness you implore. We have each one his burden; and the weight lifted depends on the lever's length. Our moral ful- crum is a moment of time; the motive, an eternal reach; the purchase, in the soul. "On this rock will I build my church." Was ever before meaning so great held in a play upon words? Very early in my ministry Charles Sprague, the banker-poet, said to me respecting the future, "I want more light, but your kingdom is passing away." What a ' sentence from a flitting mortal on the Christianity
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