USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge > Cambridge fifty years a city, 1846-1896; an account of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 2-3, 1896 > Part 4
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ORATION BY JOHN FISKE.
her manufacturing enterprises due, and all agree in acknow- ledging it."
Among Cambridge industries, two may be mentioned as especially characteristic and famous. Of the printing estab- lishments now existing not many can be more venerable than our University Press, of which we have spoken as beginning in 1639. Of the wise and genial founder of the Riverside Press - who once was mayor of our city, and whose memory we love and revere - it may be said that few men of recent times have had a higher conception of bookmaking as one of the fine arts. These two institutions have set a lofty standard for the Athe- næum Press, which has lately come to bear them company. The past half-century has seen Cambridge come into the fore- most rank among the few publishing centres of the world, where books are printed with faultless accuracy and artistic taste.
The visitor to Cambridge from Brookline, as he leaves the bridge at Brookline Street, comes upon a pleasant dwelling- house, with a private observatory, and hard by it a plain brick building. That is the shop of Alvan Clark and Sons, who have carried the art of telescope-making to a height never reached before. There have been made the most powerful refracting telescopes in the world, and one of the firm, more than thirty years ago, himself acquired fame as an astronomer for his discovery of the companion of Sirius.
From this quiet nook in the Port one's thoughts naturally turn to the Harvard Observatory, which in those days the two Bonds made famous for their accurate methods of research and their discoveries relating to the planet Saturn. The hon- orable position then taken by the observatory has been since maintained, but as we note this, we find ourselves brought to the consideration of the university and its last half-century of growth. And here my remarks cannot help taking the form, to some extent, of personal reminiscences.
When I first came to Old Cambridge, in 1860, it still had much of the village look, which it has since been fast losing. Pretty much all the spaces now covered by street after street of wooden Queen Anne houses, in such proximity as to make one instinctively look for the whereabouts of the nearest fire alarm, were then open, smiling fields. The old house where the Shepard Church stands was rural enough for the Berkshire
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CAMBRIDGE FIFTY YEARS A CITY.
Hills, and on the site of Austin Hall, in the doorway of a home- stead built in 1710, one might pause for a cosy chat with the venerable and eourtly Royal Morse, whose personal reeollec- tions went baek into the eighteenth century. The trees on the Common were the merest saplings, but an elm of mighty sweep, whose loss one must regret, shaded the whole of Har- vard Square. Horse-ears eame and went on week-days, but on Sunday, he who would visit Boston must either walk or take an omnibus, in which riding was a penanee severe enough to atone for the sin. "Blue Laws" in the university were in full foree; the student who spent his Sundays at home in Boston must bring out a certificate showing that he had attended divine serviee twiee; no diseretion was allowed the parents.
College athleties were in their infaney, as the little gymna- sium still standing serves to remind us. There were rowing matehes, but baseball had not come upon the scene, and foot- ball had just been summarily suppressed. The first college exercise in which I took part was the burial of the football, with solemn rites, in a corner of this Delta. On Class Day there was no need for elosing the yard ; there was room enough for all, and groups of youths and maidens in light summer dress, daneing on the green before Holworthy, made a eharm- ing pieture, like that of an ancient May Day in merry England.
The examination days which followed were more searching than at other American colleges. The courses of study were on the whole better arranged than elsewhere, but during the first half of the course everything was preseribed, and in the last half the eleetive system played but a subordinate part. The system of examinations did not extend to the Law School, where a simple residenee of three terms entitled a student to receive the bachelor's degree. The library at Gore Hall had less than one fifth of its present volumes, with no eatalogue aeeessible to the publie, and one small table aeeommodated all the readers. For laboratory work the facilities were meagre, and very little was done. We all studied in a book of ehem- istry ; how many of us ever really looked at such things as manganese or antimony ? For the student of biology, the provision was better, for the Botanie Garden was very helpful, and in the autumn of 1860 was opened the first seetion of our glorious Museum.
1
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ORATION BY JOHN FISKE.
Here one is naturally led to the reflection that in that day of small things, as some might call it, there were spiritual influences operative at Harvard which more than made up for shortcomings in material equipment. There is a kind of human presence, all too rare in this world, which is in itself a stimulus and an education worth more than all the scholastic artifices that the wit of man has devised ; for in the mere con- tact with it one's mind is trained and widened as if by enchant- ment. Such a human presence in Cambridge was Louis Agassiz. Can one ever forget that beaming face as he used to come strolling across the yard, with lighted cigar, in serene obliviousness of the university statutes ? Scarcely had one passed him, when one might exchange a pleasant word with Asa Gray, or descry in some arching vista the picturesque figures of Sophocles or Peirce, or turning up Brattle Street encounter, with a thrill of pleasure not untinged with awe, Longfellow and Lowell walking side by side. In such wise are the streets and lawns of our city hallowed by the human presences that once graced them ; and few are the things to be had for which one would exchange the memories of those days !
My class of 1863. with 120 members, was the largest that had been graduated here. It would have been larger, but for the Civil War, and a period followed with classes of less than one hundred members, a sad commentary upon the times. Boundless possibilities of valuable achievement must be sacri- ficed to secure the supreme end, that the commonwealth should not suffer harm. How nobly Harvard responded to the de- mand is recorded upon the solemn tablets in this Memorial Hall. For those who are inclined to dally with the thought that war is something that may be undertaken lightly and with frolicsome heart, this sacred precinct and the monument on yonder common have their lesson that may well be pondered.
The vast growth of our country since the Civil War has been attended with the creation of new universities and the enlargement of the old ones to such an extent as to show that the demand for higher education more than keeps pace with the increase of population. The last graduating class in our Quinquennial Catalogue numbered 350 members. The univer- sity contains more than 3000 students. The increase in num- ber of instructors, in courses of instruction, in laboratories and museums, in facilities and appliances of every sort, has wrought
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changes like those in a fairy tale. The Annual Catalogue is getting to be as multifarious as Bradshaw's Guide, and a trained intellect is required to read it. The little college of half a century ago has bloomed forth as one of the world's fore- most universities. Such things can come from great opportuni- tics wielded and made the most of by clearness of vision and vast administrative capacity.
To this growth of the university must be added the most happy inception and growth of Radcliffe College, marking as it does the maturing of a new era in the education of women. We may well wish for Radcliffe a career as noble and as useful as that of Harvard, and I doubt not that such is in store for it. A word must be said of the Episcopal Theological School, based upon ideas as sound and broad as Christianity ; and of the New-Church Theological School more recently founded. We must hail such indications of the tendency toward making our Cambridge the centre for the untrammeled study of the most vital problems that can occupy the human mind.
But the day we are celebrating is a civic, not a university occasion, and I must dwell no longer upon academic themes. We are celebrating the anniversary of the change which we once made from government by town-meeting to city govern- ment. Have we good reason for celebrating that change? Has our career as a civic community been worthy of approval ? In answering this question I shall not undertake to sum up the story of our public schools and library, our hospital and charity organizations, the excellent and harmonious work of our churches Protestant and Catholic, our Prospect Union warmly to be commended, our arrangements for water supply and sew- age, and our admirable park system (in which we may express a hope that Elmwood will be included). This interesting and suggestive story may be read in the semi-centennial volume, " The Cambridge of Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-Six," just issued from the Riverside Press. It is an enlivening story of progress, but like every story it has a moral, and I am going to pass over details and make straight for that moral. Americans are a bragging race because they have enjoyed immense oppor- tunities, and arc apt to forget that the true merit lies not in the opportunity, but in the use we make of it. Much gratifying progress can be achieved in spite of the worst sort of blunder- ing and sinning on the part of governments. The greater part,
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indeed, of human progress within historic times has been thus achieved. A good deal of the progress of which Americans are wont to boast has been thus achieved. Now the moral of our story is closely concerned with the fact that in the city of Cam- bridge such has not been the case. Our city government has from the outset been upriglit. intelligent, and helpful. We are satisfied with it. We do not wish to change it. Now in this respect the experience of Cambridge is very different from that of many other American cities. The government of our cities is acknowledged to be a problem of rare difficulty, so that it has begun to seem a natural line of promotion for a successful mayor. to elect him governor. and then to send him to the White House ! In some cities one finds people inclined to give up the problem as insoluble. I was lately assured by a gentle- man in a city which I will not name, but more than a thousand miles from here, that the only cure for the accumulated wrongs of that community would be an occasional coup d'état, with the massacre of all the city officers. So the last word of our boasted progress, when it comes to municipal government, is declared to be the Oriental idea of "despotism tempered by assassination "! Now to what cause or causes are we to ascribe the contrast between Cambridge and the cities that are so wretchedly governed ? The answer is, that in Cambridge we keep city government clear of politics, we do not mix up muni- cipal questions with national questions. If I may repeat what I have said elsewhere, "since the object of a municipal election is simply to secure an upright and efficient municipal govern- ment. to elect a city magistrate because lie is a Republican or a Democrat is about as sensible as to elect him because he believes in homeopathy or has a taste for chrysanthemums." Upon this plain and obvious principle of common sense our city has acted, on the whole with remarkable success, during its half-century of municipal existence. The results we see all about us, and the example may be commended as an object- lesson to all who are interested in the most vital work that can occupy the mind of an American, - the work of elevating the moral tone of public life. For it is neither wealth, nor power, nor cunning, nor craft that exalts a nation, but righteousness and the fear of the Lord.
REVEREND EDWARD ABBOTT, D. D.1
" Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen ; and ye receive not our witness." - JOHN iii. 11.
IN the trial of the Christian religion at the bar of public judgment, to determine the reality of its historical facts and the truthfulness of its teachings, there are two chief witnesses for the defense. For the establishment of the historical facts we depend on testimony, but for the truthfulness of its teachings upon experience. The great and final appeal of Christianity is to consciousness. "We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen." This is the twofold declaration of every one who stands forth before men as a witness for the kingdom of God. It was the declaration of Him who is the supreme wit- ness of God to men. It was the declaration of the apostles and prophets, of Isaiah and St. Paul, of the fathers and martyrs, as it has been of reformers and missionaries; it is the universal declaration of all who, in different parts of the world and at different ages, have borne witness to the religion they professed, and have sought to make a new and deeper place for it in the hearts and lives of mankind.
It was to bear such witness to the great facts and truths of the Christian religion, and to enjoy to the utmost the privileges and blessings of that in which they believed and to which they thus bore witness, that our New England fathers crossed the sea and founded in what was then a wilderness, unsettled and even unexplored, a new political and religious order. In poli- tics these fathers, from whom we have inherited the privileges we enjoy to-day, were dissenters from the established state of England upon such points as the claims of kings and the right of the few to govern the many, and they contended for the prin- ciple that all men are born free and equal, and are invested with the right of self-government as an inalienable possession. The history of their experiment has not yet proved the sound-
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1 Sermon preached at St. James's Church, May 31.
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EDWARD ABBOTT.
ness of the principle, and it remains to be seen whether govern- ment by a pure democracy is the form of government which is best suited to the nature of mankind, and the one that can best bear the tremendous strain to which government must be sub- jected by the passions of the human heart. In religion the differences of our fathers with the establishment in their native land were not so much differences of doctrine as they were dif- ferences of organization and administration. Generally speak- ing they had no quarrel with the theology of the Church of England ; what they disliked was the outward constitution of that church, - its episcopate, its lifeless formalism, its empty sacramentalism, - and what they rose against was the worldli- ness. the sordidness, the heartlessness, the immorality of its clergy. All these things they proposed to leave and did leave behind them when they crossed the sea to find a new home in the new world ; but the truth as it is in Jesus, the truth to which the Scriptures bore witness, the truth into which they had been born and baptized, and which had been sealed in the blood of generations, they clung to as their most precious property, and that they brought with them, if they brought anything with them, to be their light in the dark places of the wilderness and their strength and comfort in the arduous and perilous under- taking to which they had devoted their fortunes and their lives. " We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen," these men most confidently declared, "and because ye receive not our witness " we turn from you to build up on new ground a new social and religious fabric that shall fulfill our vision of the truth of God.
We here to-day of this communion, which represents in its historical and corporate capacity the body out of which these New England fathers came, can rejoice over and for all in which they and we agree, and there is no point at which that agree- ment is more marked, emphatic, or unalterable than that pro- found, fundamental, and all-embracing truth, the doctrine of the Trinity, the commemoration of which we reach on this Sun- day in the course of our Christian year. Nor is there any geo- graphical point in all our New England field - indeed, in the whole American field - with which that doctrine, and the wit- nesses to it, and the experience and life and service that grow out of it, are more closely and inseparably associated than our city of Cambridge. The city of Cambridge, and the institu-
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tions which have distinguished it, and the contributions it has made to the growth of national character and life, arc a distinct fruit of the Trinitarian planting here more than two hundred and sixty years ago. And so it comes to be that on this eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the chartering of Cambridge as a city, and in the discharge of the duty which this pulpit in com- mon with the other pulpits of the city owes to this event, I may rightly ask your attention to this single point, and attempt to combine the observance of Trinity Sunday and the civic anni- versary in one.
I, therefore, lay down this proposition and proceed to speak to it, namely, that Cambridge was founded in the faith of the great truth which we signalize to-day, and that the institutions which have given the town its fame were originally and imme- diately conceived and born in this faith, and designed to serve and extend it, and the religious system which centres in it, in the development of the new world.
Looking upon the letter of history, the intention in the plant- ing of Cambridge was the establishment of " a fortified place " for the better protection of the infant colony then springing up along the shores of Massachusetts Bay, and as a more secure site for the seat of government which at first had been located on one of the other sides of the bay. But looking beneath the letter in search of the spirit that actuated and guided these pioneers, it is not difficult to discover, and the discovery is con- firmed by the first steps in the history of the "New Town " as it was called, that the destiny of Cambridge was to serve as a " Fortified Place " in the spiritual sense as well, for the de- fense, the promulgation, and the perpetuation of the great re- ligious truths, and of the religious system wrought out of them and upon them, loyalty to which had torn these men from their old home and brought them over to a new one.
Six events in the early history of Cambridge determined its character and settled its future for all time. They all occurred within the first thirty years of its corporate life, and so may be regarded as its foundation stones. And as the position of the foundation stones of a building fix its outlines, and their strength and solidity and the eare with which they are laid govern the durability and usefulness of the structure that is raised upon them, so these six events thus early fixed what the Cambridge of the future was to be. We are living as we are, because of
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them, to-day. Our town is what it is now because of what was done then. And those six events were as follows : -
1. The planting of a Christian church. I use the word " church," not in its general and historical, but in its local and accommodated sense. To the New Town, as it was at first called. removed from Mount Wollaston what was known as the Braintree Company, which was, in fact, a fully organized Chris- tian congregation, with its own minister, the Rev. Thomas Hooker. A meeting-house was built, and Mr. Hooker and his assistant, Mr. Stone, were regularly installed. Thus began the religious life of the New Town. It was begun upon a Trini- tarian foundation. An Episcopal church it certainly was not, but it and the religious society which succeeded it under the ministry of the Rev. Thomas Shepard, when the former re- moved to Connecticut, stood distinctly for the evangelical faith, the corner stone of which was the doctrine of the Trinity.
2. The second event was the founding of Harvard College. In 1637, before the New Town had rounded ont a week of years, the General Court designated it as the seat of the col- lege, the instituting of which it had agreed upon the year before ; and when in 1638 the name of Cambridge was substi- tuted for that of Newtowne, and Jolin Harvard of Charles- town, dying, bequeathed his library and other endowment to the new college, the conditions of propriety were complete for giving it its name, and Harvard College it formally became by act of the legislature in 1639. In the course of its history Harvard College has had three seals. The motto of the first of them was " Veritas," that of the second " In Christi Gloriam," that of the third " Christo et Ecclesia," and the latter is the seal that is in use to-day. A seal is a very sacred and solemn instrument. It is a sacramental form. It is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual principle. To flourish a seal, to the pledge of which the user does not profess or pro- pose to conform, is a species of dishonesty which it would be hard to excuse. Until Harvard College changes its seal, that seal and its predecessors bear witness to the ideas to which it is consecrated, and those ideas are rooted in the Evangelical doc- trines that centre around the cross and are grounded in the doctrine of the Trinity and the related truths of the incarna- tion and atonement. "The Truth," the "Glory of Christ," and "Christ and the Church," these are the basal rocks on
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which our great university, historically, theoretically, and pro- fessedly rests. Only as it is truc to the function set forth in these terms is it true to the intentions of its founders. A century ago, the institution passed as a Unitarian institution. The policy, if not the boast of its government to-day, is to make of it an un-religious institution having no doctrinal or ecclesiastical relation whatsoever. But its history and its herit- age anchor it to Christ, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, the eternal and incarnate Son of God, and to the church which He has purchased with His own blood, and to the truth of which that church is the pillar and the ground, and to the glory of Christ, of which it is the body; and every officer who attempts to swing the college away from that moor- ing, every teacher who uses his high position and opportunity to sow the seeds of agnosticism, of doubt, of unbelief, is perverting a high and solemn trust of which the college is the expression. Once more, let us hope and pray, may Harvard College respond to her original constitution, and proceed to the fulfillment of her glorious destiny, and become the Christian and church college of the country, dedicated in deed and in truth to Him who is the manifestation of God to the world.
3. The third event was the Cambridge Synod. In 1637 the town was the scene of the first general council of the New England churches, as at the beginning of the fourth century the Asiatic city of Nicaa was the scene of the great council of Nice, and this, as was that, was for the settlement of disputed questions of doctrine, the condemnation of erroneous opinions, and the declaration of the orthodox faith. In matters of order, I repeat, the New England churches were far from being in accord with the Church of England, but in matters of faith they were largely at one, and so far as doctrine is concerned the Cambridge Platform, as it is known, put forth by the New England churches in 1637, here in this town of ours, was the first authoritative utterance of the organized religious life of the colonies, and it was indisputably sound and true upon the great central proposition which we commemorate to-day ; an unequivocal confession of the true faith, acknowledging the glory of the eternal Trinity and in the power of the divine majesty worshiping the Unity, and a prayer that God would keep his people who should gather here steadfast in this faith unto the end.
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4. The fourth event was the planting of the printing-press. This mighty engine of modern civilization was then little more than a hundred years old. It was yet rude and awkward, but it was already a power. The printing-press in Cambridge, which was set up here in 1638 or early in 1639, was the first press known in the English colonies of North America. For nearly forty years it was the only printing-press in New Eng- land. And from 1640 to 1675 the printing-press of Cambridge did all the printing for America. It was distinctively a college press. It was set up in the president's house, and it was run more or less under the president's supervision. It was a part of the machinery for serving Christ and the church. It, like the college, was dedicated to truth. Its function was to ad- vance the greater glory of God in Christ.
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