USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > North Adams > Addresses and papers presented at the Diamond Jubilee, 1827-1902, May 11-14 (First Congregational Church of North Adams) > Part 9
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mercy. It has cultivated and encouraged fellowship among Christians of whatever name. It has stood for the exercise of liberal thought in the interpretation of Biblical truth, while remaining steadfast to the common, funda- mental principles of Christianity. It has not been afraid to recognize and to adopt from other sources ideas and practices which have been found useful in common worship and in extending the kingdom of God and His Christ. And it has given to others of that which in its own faith and order has proved helpful to the same end.
Therefore it is that we gather gladly here with greet- ings of affection and esteem from every quarter, and we say with one heart and mind, God be praised for this Congre- gational church and for the place she has so worthily filled. And though she has passed the period of three- score years and ten, may she, through the infusion of young blood, continue, with unabated vigor, to lift up the standard of the cross, win multitudes of souls to Jesus Christ and prove a still greater blessing to this community in the years that are yet to come. .
Greetings from the Parent Church
REV. WILLIS H. BUTLER
I regret that Dr. Bascom can not be here in person to speak himself, as my own recollections do not date back from the remote past. Moreover it is a hard matter to fur- nish any responsible statistics about our church in the old days, as the old records were destroyed by fire in 1860. We have men in the parish with good memories, however, and the records that they give us all point to an honorable history. The old white meeting house on the hill was a centre of spiritual influence and a landmark for many years. There many a student heard eloquent words from good preachers that influenced him to better himself in his future life. During the most memorable period of the old church, when Rev. Ralph Gridley was the pastor, 600 names were added to the church register, and it was at this time that the church in North Adams was established. This was a period noted for its strength of spirit in church work in the whole parish. While the parent church looks with enviable pride upon its child, yet it does not take all the credit to itself, as perhaps it was because the young church had the courage to depart from the old ways and take a new start that it got its great growth and influence. It is natural for us to suppose that we are on the decline in Wil- liamstown, as in a few years we celebrate our 150th anni- versary, yet we prefer to regard it as a starting point, and we confidently look forward to an even more progressive future for the Congregational churches of North Adams and Williamstown.
Greetings from the Fostering College
PRESIDENT HENRY HOPKINS, D. D.
I have every reason to feel most warmly toward this church and the congregation, not only because they once felt moved to call me to this noble succession of men, but also be- cause of many other acts of kindness and good fellowship, as I have come here from time to time. I do not know but it is possible to trace the connection between the college and this church further back than has been mentioned. There is a tablet sacred to the memory of Ephraim Wil- liams in the chapel at Williamstown, and it is recorded on this tablet that he was stationed at Fort Massachusetts. I remember Edward Everett saying at the college when speaking of this that the women of the Connecticut valley clasped their infants closer to their bosoms when they heard that Fort Massachusetts was in danger. It is reasonable to suppose that while he was there he con- ceived the thought of benefiting this especial part of the community by his plan for education. He had in mind, not only Williamstown, but this whole valley west of the Hoosac mountain as the part of the county to which he . devoted his accumulated property.
I have been exceedingly interested in the history that I have heard of the first pastor of this church. There was certainly a touch of real heroism in his life that he should have without remuneration maintained his ministry here so long ; that he should while a teacher in the college have constantly attended upon his religious duties here, seeking
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in absolute self-sacrifice to help men to the better life; that he should have himself gone about to secure funds for the erection of the building. This is certainly a record of rare worth, and I believe that he left behind something of his inspiration and faith and strength of purpose to those with whom he was associated yonder at the college. I have learned with great interest tonight that he was a classmate of my own father and that the succeeding pastor was a classmate of my uncle, and I have found that in the suc- ceeding pastors of the church there were several who were Williams men. Dr. Crawford, Rev. Mr. Ballard, Washing- ton Gladden and Lewellyn Pratt were among the honored alumni, and I think that upon Dr. Coyle and upon Dr. Munger were degrees conferred by the college.
Aside from this, I am sure that if we could have had the records at our disposal for the settlement as well as the dismissal of a pastor, we should find that other men from the college have been here. They have preached sermons, they have given the charge to the pastor and there has been a close and very real connection. I am here tonight, not to recall historical facts, for I have not the historical information at my command, but I am here with a very joyful heart to bring you the greetings of the college, and it is a great gratification to me that one of the first acts in my new position should be the expression of good neighbor- hood feeling, and that I am permitted to have a small part in this wonderful birthday occasion-in this expression of confirmed and renewed fellowship; and it will be my desire and purpose that the past history shall be verified and continued in time to come.
As I was coming into the church this evening, a man said : "The present pastor is a good fellow and a westerner."
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I confess ( turning to Mr. Tenney ) that this commended you to me. I have not lived twenty-two years in the great valley of the Missouri without becoming a western man. I have not left my heart in the west, but the time will never come when I shall not share the great hopes and purposes of that great central region, and tonight I feel a little warmer to you because you are a western man. ( Then addressing the audience) I hope I shall see your faces often and shall hope and pray that there may be as in the past the best and most helpful fellowship between the college and the church here in North Adams.
1866-REV. WASHINGTON GLADDEN-1871
Witnesses of the Light
REV. WASHINGTON GLADDEN, D. D.
In the mystical proem of the Fourth Gospel we read of one who came for witness, that he might bear witness of the light. You do not forget the connection in which these familiar words occur. The writer is speaking of the Logos-the word-the expression or manifestation of the divine thought and life.
From the beginning God has been manifesting Him- self. Self-revelation is the law of His nature. It is only another way of saying that God is light, and that is an- other way of saying that God is love. This manifestation has had many forms, but the heavenly radiance was con- centrated in Him who called Himself the Light of the World, and who declared that His mission was to reveal the Father. In Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of men. And the Light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness apprehended it not.
The inability of men to receive the revelation thus vouchsafed them is the one tragedy of the universe. The misery of the world today is not so much the unwilling- ness to give good gifts as the inability to receive them. That proposition may reverse our customary thinking, but reflection will verify it.
Begin at the beginning. Is not God Himself infinite Love? Is there any good gift that He would withhold from any of His children ? Why are so many of them in
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destitution and misery? Must it not be because they are in some way incapable of receiving what He waits to be- stow upon them ?
Here is Mother Earth with her lap full of riches. Why are any of her children poor ? Simply because they are unable to take what she wants to give them. It is true that this inability is not always wholly the fault of the in- dividual ; the misdoing of one often cripples another ; bur- den and incapacity are entailed ; heredity and environ- ment play their part; nevertheless, it holds true that God and Nature are ready to provide man with every comfort and delight of life, and that it is man's inability to receive the good of life which is the cause of all his worst priva- tions and distresses.
In more intimate and personal ways we often feel the truth that the good givers are not so rare as the willing and intelligent receivers. What is the cause of the deep- est trouble between parents and children? It is not in so many cases the unwillingness of the parents to give good gifts to their children as it is the unwillingness of the children to receive them. Doubtless there is often great unwisdom on the part of parents; many of those whose resources are abundant do not know how to impart what they possess ; but those who are wise and patient and self-denying often find it very hard to get their children to take at their hands the good of life. The real trouble is not, as our Lord intimates, that when children cry for bread their parents give them a stone, or that when they beg for fish they receive scorpions; it is rather that they so often insist on having the stones and the scorpions when their parents are eager to give them nourishing food.
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Much of the same experience is shared by those who engage in any kind of philanthropic work. If people who need help would let us help them, if they were willing to be helped, we could do far more for them, in the vast ma- jority of cases, than we are able to do. Our greatest diffi- culty is with those who are not willing to take the kind of assistance that they most need, and who clearly wish to have us bestow upon them that which we know would in- jure them more than it would profit them. They do not wish to be helped ; they wish to be pampered and degraded.
Putting it all together we shall see that the trouble of the world is due far more to the lack of ability and willing- ness to receive the good of life than to the lack of ability and willingness to bestow it. And this was surely true of those to whom the Light of the world sought to impart His divine radiance. The record of the gospels shows us on every page the light shining in the darkness and the dark- ness apprehending it not. If only the minds of those people had been receptive of the truth, proper media for the transmission of the light, how soon the world could have been transformed by its life-giving energy !
For this fatal inability the writer of the Fourth Gospel hints at a remedy. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. The same came for a witness that he might bear witness of the light that all might believe through him.
"To bear witness of the Light." Is not this indeed a superfluous function ? Is not light its own sufficient wit- ness? Is there need that any one should go around calling attention to the sun in the heavens at noon, or to the dazzling arc light that hangs over the street at night? No, it is not a superfluous function. There is a great deal
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of this kind of work to do. Not only is there sometimes need that the light be kindled and its flame kept burning ; not only is there need that it be set in a candlestick and carried aloft that men may see it ; there is also need that testimony be borne to it by those who have beheld its glory and have learned to walk in it; there must be witnesses of the light by whose evidence its radiance shall be made serviceable to benighted souls.
For it must not be forgotten that there are still great numbers of people sitting in darkness, not because the true light is not shining, but because they have immured them- selves in cellars or dungeons or caverns where its pure ray cannot reach them. It is quite possible for a man to put himself where he cannot see the light, and thus to become, after a while, unaware and even incredulous of its existence. To such as these, witnesses must be sent who will bear testimony that it is shining and lead the benighted out into its beauty and gladness.
The writer of the Fourth Gospel says that this was the work of John the Baptist. The Light of the world was shining then with marvellous power, in the cities of Galilee and the streets of Jerusalem, but the people to whom John spoke were so shut into their own narrow ecclesiasticism that they could not behold it. There is no cavern darker than that in which the bigot hides, whether he be a religious bigot or an irreligious bigot. You know some whose ideas are so encased in traditional orthodoxy that no new light ever finds entrance to their minds ; and you know some who advertise themselves as the most liberal of the liberals, who are wholly incapable of seeing or telling the truth about the people whom they spend their lives in misrepresenting and berating. The worst
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bigots I have ever known have been men who hated the churches so bitterly that their hatred made them stone blind. It matters not of what the walls of prejudice are built-whether of affirmations or negations-if they are so opaque and windowless that truth cannot pierce them, there is need that those who dwell within them should somehow learn of the ampler heaven that is above them and of the light that fills it. There is many a traditional- ist and there is many an agnostic, who has shut himself into his own narrow enclosure, and supposes that the wis- dom of the universe is all mewed up with him in that small compartment where he keeps his pet beliefs or dis- beliefs. The breaking of this shell is the most merciful thing that can happen to him. This was the service which John the Baptist rendered to the men of his generation. With a rude hand he smote the Pharasaic conceit and ar- rogance. "Ye offspring of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance; and begin not to say within yourselves, we have Abraham to our father, for I say unto you that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. And even now is the axe also laid unto the root of the trees; every tree therefore that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire."
Such fierce invective may have been deserved by these smug and self-righteous religionists. They might never have come out into the light, if their refuges of pride and formality had not been demolished.
It was no wonder that this relentless preacher brought them to their knees with the cry "What then must we do?" Then was his time to point them to the Light of the world; to testify of One coming after him who should
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baptize them with the Holy Ghost and with fire. There is no doubt that the testimony of John had a powerful effect in turning the attention of the people to Jesus, and in opening their eyes to see in Him the Prince of Life and the Savior of the world. His witness to the light was needed by those who had wrapped themselves in the darkness of a traditional formalism ; it brought a good many of them out of their hiding places into the daylight of a living faith.
Whether the objurgatory methods of this witness would beseem your lips or mine may be doubted. Jesus said that John was the greatest of the prophets, but that the least in the Kingdom of Heaven was greater than he. Perhaps He meant that the clumsiest persuasion, born of love, is stronger than the most polished and stinging invective, born of wrath. At any rate it is not for us to resort to violence of speech in our testimony. Whatever may have been John's justification for his severity of speech, you and I are not required, as witnesses of the Light, to resort to similar methods. Yet there are inany, all about us, whose minds are immured in traditionalism and formalism and intellectual pride and religious and irre- ligious prejudice, and who need nothing so much, for the correction even of their intellectual defects, as to learn what Matthew Arnold calls the method and the spirit of Jesus ; to breathe in His gentleness and sweet reasonableness. To come out of their narrowness into His breadth, out of their dogmatismn into His catholicity, would be indeed like com- ing from darkness into light. And somehow, we ought to help them to find this light. We ought to be able to show them that there is a kind of life which makes men broader minded and fairer minded; which teaches them to rejoice in truth wherever they find it, and to praise goodness who-
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ever practises it. To convince them that the Christian life is such a life as that would be to bear witness to the Light in the most effectual way.
But the Light needs witnesses, not only because of the bigotry and obscurantism of multitudes, but also because of the fact that its first appearance is often faint, and not easily discerned. The psalmist tells us that "light is sown for the righteous," and the germination of this seed, like that of every other, begins in feebleness :
Behold a sower ! from afar He goeth forth with might ; The rolling years his furrows are, His seed the growing light. For all the righteous it is sown, It springeth up alway ; The tender blade is hope's young dawn, The harvest love's new day.
There is need, therefore, of witnesses who can see the beginnings of this beautiful growth and teach men to dis- cern them and rejoice in them. Our own great Congrega- tional protagonist, John Robinson, who is known to but few of us as he deserves to be known, has left one prophetic word which we have all heard,-"I am persuaded that God has more light yet to break forth out of His Holy Word." But this breaking forth of light from the Word which was written on parchment, and the Word which was written in rocks and leaves and constellations, is not in full bursts of splendor; it comes to us in faint streaks and glimmering twilights. "Hope's young dawn " is always the forerunner of "love's new day." And, if we can keep our metaphors, for whose mixture I am not responsible, from getting too much mixed, it will be well to remember that in these germinant dawns, which spring from the light that is sown for the righteous, there is danger that the tender blade be
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trampled under heedless feet or plucked up and thrown away for worthless weeds.
The gradualness of revelation is a fact which is illus- trated not merely in the Bible but still more abundantly in the perennial unfoldings of God's truth. The history of doctrine and of morals shows how constantly the thoughts of men are widened and their standards of conduct elevated. We find it difficult to put ourselves in the places of men of past ages and judge their conduct justly, because our regu- lative principles of conduct are so different from theirs ; the ethical evolution has carried us far from their point of view. Abraham and Deborah deserved praise for acts and sentiments which would be infamous if we practised them or uttered them; they were faithfully living by the best light they had. Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards expressed ideas which to us are horrible because the larger ethical conceptions of the Kingdom of God had not dawned upon them. New words, and new definitions of old words, here and there appearing through the centuries, mark the advance of moral and spiritual ideas. Max Muller, I think it is, has said that Plato and Aristotle never used any such word as "mankind ",-that the conception which it conveys was foreign to their minds. Take a word so familiar as justice, as it was used by Augustine and Calvin and Edwards it had a very different connotation from that given to it by Bushnell or Brooks or Martineau. It has become evident that a mere compensatory measuring of equivalents is not justice; that as between man and man, and not less between God and man, there can be no justice which is not mixed with love, since the primal debt of father to child, of child to father, of brother to brother, is the debt of love, and he who gets no love gets less than
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is due him. We now know that, simply because God is just, he cannot do the kind of things which not long ago he was represented as doing "to the praise of His glorious justice."
The development of ethical ideals and of spiritual con- ceptions is constantly going forward; the providential training of the race keeps this end constantly in view; by all the overturnings of the peoples, by all the discoveries of science, by all the collision and pressure of economic forces, the thoughts of men are elevated and their stand- ards of judgment are corrected. "This orderly march of humanity toward spiritual perfection, " says Mr. Pike, "is the highest evidence that there is a divine meaning in the world and that, in keeping with it, man is growing constantly nearer the time when that God whom he has so long known and in part shall be more perfectly apprehended. The conception of man as reflecting God in his own na- ture, implies a succession of stages in which this conscious- ness shall work itself free as the constructive power of his life. Inasmuch as this is a process in history it is not nec- essary that man in the beginning should be more than capable of God. Under appropriate conditions, however, this latent power will be evoked, the obscure will become intelligible, and under the influence of divine fellowship and instruction, man will attain unto increasing conscious- ness of God. All theories which ground the idea of God in ancestor worship, nature worship, dreams and similar phenomena, utterly fail in presence of the indisputable truth that the religious instinct and the conception of God grow in strength, clearness and nobility in proportion as the race grows away from the obscurities and limitations and undeveloped conditions of the primitive state of society
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in which are found the materials whereon such theories depend. This observed progress finds its simplest explan- ation in the idea of a vital relationship between God and man, wherein man is being gradually led by the spirit of God to ever growing capacity to receive the continuous revelation which God is evermore making. "
It is this fact that revelation is continuous and pro- gressive which calls for a constant succession of Witnesses of the Light. Paul, the apostle, going forth with the mes- sage of the gospel to the Jews that are scattered through Syria and Asia, finds an unexpected preparation in the minds of the Gentiles for the truth which he has to pro- claim. They seem to think that this gospel is for them also; that they need pardon and help and comfort not less than them that are of the house of Israel. And Paul is quick to discern the significance of this fact. It had been revealed to Peter also, by a miracle, but Peter's mind was hardly large enough to take it in and hold it fast ; he seems to have grasped it for a little and then to have let it go. But Paul is able to receive it. His clear vision dis- cerns a new light breaking forth out of God's holy word, and his heart burns within him to tell of the dispensation of the grace of God which has been given to him,-how that by revelation has been made known to him the long hidden mystery, "to wit, that the Gentiles are fellow-heirs, and fellow members of the body, and fellow partakers of the promise in Jesus Christ through the gospel." That was the day-spring from on high which had appeared in Paul's horizon, and at once he becomes the witness of the new light which he has seen. "Unto me, " he cries, "who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ,
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and to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which from all ages hath been hid in God who created all things." There is no passage in the letters of this great-hearted apostle more eloquent than that in which he pours forth his thanksgiving for the grace of God vouch- safed to him in permitting him to be the herald of the dawn of this new dispensation, in which the middle wall of partition between Jews and Gentiles is broken down, and the Christians are no longer a Jewish sect but mem- bers of the universal household of God.
It was a great reform-the greatest perhaps, as yet, in the history of the church ; and it was wrought through the consistent witnessing of this apostle to the Light whose dawning he had clearly seen.
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