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 7
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ward more and more into posts of eminent public service. I think this is a tendency wholesome alike for these public ser- vants themselves and for the communities which they serve. More and more the people desire great serviceableness in their officers. It is a reasonable hope and belief that university studies promote this serviceableness. Education, however, whether elementary or advanced, ought to promote something besides serviceableness : it ouglit to promote enjoyment. So- ciety thinks more and more of enjoyment as a legitimate object of life -individual enjoyment and social or public enjoyment. To enable the child and the man to enjoy life more fully and rightly is just what school and college training ought always to do.
Harvard University has been the guest of Cambridge for two hundred and sixty years, - ever since the little town gave the infant college its first site which now makes part of the college yard. In all these years the college has had protec- tion and endless favors from the town and city, and the uni- versity hopes and expects that these affectionate relations between the university and Cambridge will continue forever. The little town and the little college were humble and poor together for two centuries and a half. We hope they will grow ever stronger and more prosperous together for centuries to come.
Cambridge offers hospitality every year to thousands of youth who come to her from all parts of the country. I desire to take this opportunity to thank the city for this wide hospital- ity. Some of these youth who come from afar are so attracted by Cambridge and Massachusetts that they spend their lives here ; others carry away with them a lasting affection for the city and its environs, and all their lives make pilgrimages to this shrine of their early love.
I wish also to express the pleasure I experienced this morn- ing in riding with the governor of the commonwealth and his honor the mayor through the streets of the city. It was a delightful thing to witness the evidences of respect and affec- tion given to these magistrates by the assembled populace. I never before received so strong an impression of the general courtesy and fine bearing of the men, women, and children of the city assembled in great numbers for a public festivity.
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REVEREND FRANK OLIVER HALL.1
" A city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God." - HEBREWS xi. 10.
IF God were to build a city, what kind of a city would He build ? What would be the foundations of this city of God ?
Of one thing we may feel sure. God speaks to us through experience, and the experience of the world has proclaimed the fact that no stones are heavy enough, that wood is not durable enough, that gold or iron is not stable enough, to stand as the foundation of the eternal city. Again and again men have undertaken to build a city on material wealth or on material strength; but the cities of the world have met the judgment and been found wanting. The walls of Babylon were three hundred feet high, and so wide that one might drive four chariots abreast of four horses each around the city. These walls were manned by thousands of men. Within was treasured unlimited wealth. But all this strength and all this wealth did not save the city.
" They say the lion and the lizard keep The courts where Jamshyd reveled and drank deep !"
And so the history of the world is one long narrative of the futility of force or wealth as the foundation of a state or a city. The city of God will stand upon a different foundation. I purpose to specify the essential foundation stones of the city of God and to raise the question, Is Cambridge builded upon such a sure foundation, - will it endure ?
First let me say that these foundations will be laid not out- side but within the soul of man, - in his conscience and affec- tion. This was the thought that was in the mind of the apostle when he exhorted his fellow believers to be living stones of which should be made the temple of the living God.
It is true of Cambridge as Emerson said of Boston : " It is not an accident, not a windmill, or a railroad station, or a 1 Sermon preached at the Third Universalist Church, May 31.
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cross-roads tavern, or an army barracks grown up by time and luck to a place of wealth ; but a seat of humanity, of men of principle, obeying a sentiment and marching loyally whither that should lead them ; so that its annals are great historical lines, inextricably national, parts of the history of political liberty."
1. Let us say that the first foundation stone upon which the city of the living God will rest must be liberty. I feel sure that we have undertaken to build our city upon this founda- tion. It was in the cause of liberty that our fathers came over the sea to brave the terrors of the wilderness, - a desire to find liberty to worship God according to the dictates of conscience, - and Cambridge has always been first in the struggle for a wider liberty.
But liberty is a grace into which men have to grow. It is natural to demand liberty for self. It is perhaps as natural to undertake to restrict the liberties of others. At any rate we know that hardly had the founders of Newtowne settled in this district before they thought it necessary to curtail in others what they were so strenuous in demanding for themselves. If they had found it hard to worship according to another ritual and creed, others found it just as hard to conform to theirs ; and against such. these men, brave and true to their convictions but not yet having entered upon the full appreciation of liberty, were very bitter and severe. It seems incredible to us that a first president of Harvard College should have been deposed from his office for persistency in the " damnable heresy " that the Bible did not teach the efficacy of infant baptism, and that his kinsman should have been tried and punished by the grand jury for neglecting to have his children baptized; but such is the fact. And such were the ideas of liberty held by the men who laid the foundation of our city.
It may help us to value our present privileges, to remember, too, that one citizen of this town endured for twenty years almost constant persecution because he was a Quaker. He was fined repeatedly, whipped in the public square, thrown into prison, and there retained for a year in spite of pleadings for liberty, and all for desiring on his own account the very privilege for which his persecutors had fled their homes, - to worship according to his own convictions. I note such in- stances only to show that liberty is a slow-growing virtue and
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that it has taken us long to arrive at the present degree of freedom.
How strange in our cars sound the words of one of the first pastors of the church in Cambridge, a scholarly, a noble, and a kind-hearted man, but the creature of his age, as are we all. He was speaking, mind you, of Quakers and Baptists, fierce and awful ereatures, as our experience has taught us, when he said : " Those beasts that break down the hedge of our civil govern- ment do not design to do it merely because they are angry with the hedge, but because they would break in and devour all that is precious and dear to us. The loud outcry of some is for liberty of conscience, that they may hold and practice what they will in religion. Such liberty of conscience is even a liberty of perdition." With what horror would this good man have been filled if he could have foreseen that the very church of which he was pastor would one day be a Unitarian organization, standing for absolute liberty, and that the college of which he was president would shortly become the most notable institution in all the land advocating perfect freedom of investigation, of thought, and of expression. All of this goes to show that progress has been made here in Cambridge until we have arrived at a point where even the most orthodox of our day would have been considered by Pastor Oakes as the most inconceivable heretics and infidels, fit subjects for the dungeon and the whipping-post. I do not think it possible for a community to attain to any wider religious liberty than that which the inhabitants of this community enjoy. There are here ehurelies of all phases of thought. There is even in our midst an organization which would have been considered pure paganism a eentury ago. It is possible for a man to advocate atheism from the platform of onr largest theatre in Boston. There are in our educational institutions men who are avowed materialists. And yet we are not afraid. We have come to feel sure that the human mind was made to ascertain the truth, and we are perfectly willing to have all sides presented in the faith that human reason can weigh all evidence and at last come to a just conclusion.
But let us remember that liberty is not a thing valuable in itself. It is, indeed, only a means for the attainment of an end. Liberty is like money. There is a eertain satisfaction in feeling that you are free, as there is a satisfaction in feeling
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against your breast the bulge of a well-filled pocketbook. But in itself the paper in your pocketbook is valueless, - so many soiled and worthless sheets. In itself the liberty that we pos- sess is valueless except as we use it to the highest ends, - the attainment of truth, of happiness, of life. Woe unto the man who stops with being free and knows not what to do with his freedom. Perhaps we were wrong in naming freedom as an element in the foundation of the city. The attainment of lib- erty is merely clearing the ground, making ready for the laying of the real foundation stones.
2. Many have thought - some still think - that with the at- tainment of religious liberty religion itself would lose its hold upon the lives of men, and if we were to judge by the percent- age of church attendance such has been the fact. The time once was when the entire population of Cambridge took part in public worship. That time has gone, and there are thousands of people in our midst who seldom - some never- see the inside of a church. But it has always been a question in my mind as to how much compulsory piety is worth when a man might not absent himself from Christian ordinances without being shortly called upon to tell his reasons to the magistrate. If church attendance were compelled to-day under the penalty of a heavy fine and imprisonment, our churches might be filled as of yore, but that would not make the people more religious. We often, in trying to estimate the past, mistake superstition for religion. If people worshiped much they were nevertheless very cruel and very unreasonable. Here is an instance of the religiousness of this community some two centuries ago : -
There lived in Watertown a man by the name of Goodman Genings. He had a sick child and hired a woman for nurse. The child died, and the nurse testified that a Mrs. Kendall of this community had bewitched the child. The only apparent reason for thinking so was that Mrs. Kendall had come to the house in which the child was sick, and petted and made much of it. That night the little one died, and the nurse testified that Mrs. Kendall had bewitched the little one to death. The pious magistrates, seemingly without so much as inquiry into the character of the nurse or calling the parents of the dead child to corroborate her testimony, put Mrs. Kendall to death as a witch in the public square of our town. But afterward some true soul thought to inquire of the parents what they
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thought about the affair, when, behold, they affirmed that in their opinion the death of the child was not caused by anything Goody Kendall did, for they esteemed her a good woman and a good friend, but that the nurse had neglected her charge and that the little one died in consequence. It afterward transpired that the nurse was but a disreputable creature, and she was cast into jail, where she died, - probably from privation. Alas for that religion which excuses cruelty !
So I am not afraid of a comparison of the general life of Cambridge of to-day with the life of Cambridge of the past. It would be impossible for a case like the foregoing to happen in these times. I verily believe that there is more of kindness, more of forgiveness, more of all the qualities by which Jesus tested religion, in Cambridge than ever before. Women that were at one time persecuted are now helped and encouraged. Men that would have been driven into the wilderness are now punished, not for revenge but for reformation. It makes us sure that there is more real sympathy in the world when we read an account like this: As late as 1755 there was still slavery in Massachusetts, and two negroes, belonging to Cap- tain Codman of Charlestown, - we know not what tyranny aggravated them, - murdered their master. They were drawn on sleds to "Gallows Lot," and Mark, a young man of thirty, was hanged, and Phillis, an old woman, was burned at the stake. It is possible still to burn negroes in some parts of our country, but in Cambridge such a thing would now be so repug- nant to Christian sentiment as to cause a revolution.
Would that we were more faithful to our church obligations of worship and consecration, but I am sure that this is a reli- gious city inasmuch as the hungry are fed, the naked clothed, the sick visited, and the poor comforted.
We have been in recent years changing our thought of what constitutes religion, and we have come to feel that religion is not ritual, not the burning of incense or the wearing of robes, not even the making of prayers and the singing of hymns, - surely not signing a creed, - but that the essence of religion, that which is of most worth, consists in brotherhood, in the service of sympathy, and in the offices of affection. Cam- bridge has conie to be a symbol of all that throughout the coun- try. The phrase which has come to be a kind of watchword among us, " The Cambridge Idea," stands for the best part of
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religion. It means brotherhood. It means active help. It means honesty in private life and the same degree of honesty in public affairs. It means humanity before party. It means enmity to intemperance and nucleanliness, and especially to the institution which is the embodiment of both, - the saloon. It was a religious campaign, a campaign of the churches, that overthrew the saloon, and it is religion that keeps this institu- tion down. That the moral life of our city is higher than it used to be, as far as temperance is concerned, must be apparent to all people whose memory runs back fifty years. We have the testimony of so keen a man as Colonel Higginson that the moral standard is higher than it was in the days when he was a student.
" Public opinion," he declares, " would not now tolerate the spectacle of members of the 'College Company' staggering out of the ranks, falling by the wayside, or of members of the graduating class clustered about Liberty Tree the afternoon of Class Day welcoming all other students to their buckets of punch." To see a man intoxicated on our streets is now a spectacle to arouse surprise and indignation. Fifty years ago it was not extraordinary and did not meet with any loud popu- lar disapproval. And if we go back to earlier days, we find a time when President Dunster of Harvard gave his official ap- proval to Sister Bradish because she sold such comfortable mugs of beer. Then afterward a college brewery was erected near Stoughton and Hollis halls to supply the needs of students
- and professors.
It is affirmed in some quarters that beer is sometimes drunk in the college even now, but a brewery under the direction of the college faculty, or a dram-shop stamped with the approval of the president, even though kept by a deacon and his good wife, would hardly meet with the sanction of the citizens of Cambridge.
Truly we are making some progress toward laying the foun- dation of our city in that substantial part of religion called temperance.
3. But if there is one thing for which Cambridge stands and always has stood, that one thing is education. It seems to me that the most characteristic and noble record of the doings of the settlers of Massachusetts is with reference to the estab- lishment of Harvard College. Let us remember that the date
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of the settlement of Boston was 1630; that the land was a wilderness inhabited by savages ; that the men who had come to this wilderness were poor and had a prodigious task before them in the mere subduing of the land and the planting of homes. We ought to think with pride that these splendid men, having hardly gained a foothold on the land, began to think of the welfare of the state and the future well-being of their posterity. In 1630 Boston was settled. In 1631 New- towne was begun. Five years later the General Court agreed to give £400, which exactly doubled the publie tax for the year, toward a school or college. The next year the college was ordered to be built at Newtowne, the name having been changed to Cambridge. And a year later, as the quaint record puts it, " It pleased God to stir up the heart of one Mr. Harvard (a godly gentleman and a lover of learning, then living among us), to give one half of his estate (about $4000) and his library toward the erecting of a college." It is with pride, too, that we remember that this has been a democratic institution from the start. It was for rich and poor, learned and ignorant ; " for the education of the English and Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godliness." And the first brick building on the ground was given to the Indians, and in it was printed the apostle Eliot's translation of the Bible into Indian dialeet. It speaks well, too, for the heart and the head of New England that while Harvard has received from the state in sums of money some $216,000 in all, and much land from the town of Cambridge, by far the largest por- tion of her wealth, $11,000,000, has come fromn gifts of private individuals. And the college has always been what it started to be, a democratie institution, where intellectual and moral merit have been of first importance. It is its boast, and a true one, I think, that no young man who has sincerely and earnestly desired to take the course at Harvard has been allowed to leave because he was poor. With all the cheap criticism of Harvard as a "rich man's college," patronized principally by rich and idle youth, it is true to-day, and always has been true, that a boy without a dollar may win his way and graduate with honor from any of its courses. The men who laid the foundation of the college, I think, would be aston- ished at many things could they return and witness the out- come of their work. For the results have been far greater
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than the wisest could have foreseen, and like the roads running into the interior, the paths leading from the college have gone beyond the wildest imaginings. On a memorandum in possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society, one may read that in the early days the persons appointed to lay out roads into the interior did it as far as the brook by Mrs. Biglow's in Weston, and that this was as far as would ever be necessary. it being seven miles from the college in Cambridge.
They would marvel at the increase in wealth, at the increase in the number of students, and, above all, in the absolute re- versal of the spirit of the institution. The supreme motive for starting the college was "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity ; dreading to have an illiterate ministry to the churches. when our present ministers shall lie in the dust." The college then was principally to equip ministers. To-day the divinity school is one of the smallest of the departments, while science, law, medicine, all overshadow the clerical depart- ment. There is something to be regretted in this, but also something to rejoice in, inasmuch as we have learned that the doctor, the lawyer, the scientist, may also be ministers of the most high God.
But the most radical change of all is seen in the alteration of method. At first the object of the student was merely to be- come familiar with what men had thought in the past, to know the Greek and Latin classics and what the fathers of the church had taught. That was learning, and all that any man ought to desire. Individual investigation looking toward dis- covery of new truth was frowned upon. To-day the student is led to feel that the main object of studying the past is that by learning what men have thought he may press on to the discovery of new truth. We are beginning to know that truth is an ocean in which men have so far but dabbled. With free minds. thoroughly equipped for investigation, what may we not expect from the future? You know how from this first im- pulse have sprung all the various institutions of learning in our midst. How from Elijah Corlet's grammar school, which he taught faithfully for a salary of $37.50 per annum, with a pittance from each scholar, to the thirty schools, 200 teacliers, 10,000 pupils, and expenditure of $250,000 a year, is an increase which may well make us believe that it is possible for every girl and boy in this community to win for themselves an educa-
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tion which would fit them to be citizens of the most splendid of cities.
4. I may not leave this subject without calling attention to another fundamental principle, that is, patriotism. It is espe- cially appropriate that this word should be spoken just after Memorial Day, and just before we begin our celebration of the birth of our eity.
It is one of the reasons for especial pride in our city that her sons have always been ready to sacrifice their all, property, limb, life, upon the altar of their country's need. If we would find the beginning of the manifestations of patriotism on the part of the citizens of Cambridge, we must go back to a date far anteceding the granting of the eity eharter. Who ean for- get, standing as we do upon this saered spot, surrounded by historie landmarks, - the very thought of which makes every American heart beat hard with honest pride, - that Cam- bridge was represented in every patriotie struggle in which our country engaged, and has ever been among the first to respond to the country's eall. It is right that on the 19th of April we should make our pilgrimage to Coneord and Lexington, and stand reverently beside " the rude bridge that spans the flood," and pay our tribute to the embattled farmers who perished there. But let us not forget that the honor of that memorable battle, that historie vietory, belongs not to Coneord nor to Lexington alone, but to Cambridge as well ; that the sons of Cambridge were there with their flint-loeks and powder-horns ; and that, as the British retreated, their path was made a gauntlet of fire by your forefathers. Yea, let us elaim for Cambridge the honor due to her, and eall attention to the fact that the hardest fight- ing of the day was upon her soil, and that as many men were sacrifieed here in that first great struggle for liberty as in both Coneord and Lexington put together.
And though, as it happened, no memorable battle has taken its name from any of our landmarks, the men of this community have always had their share in American struggles. When on the 17th of June, 1775, oeeurred, in the neighboring distriet of Charlestown, the battle of Bunker Hill, with which we always associate the name of the martyred Warren, next in rank to him among those who fell upon that day was Colonel Thomas Gardner, a eitizen and seleetman of Cambridge, and a member of the first Provincial Congress. None were braver than he.
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" He led his regiment to Bunker Hill," says Swett, the his- torian, " and was just descending into the engagement, when a musket-ball entered his groin, causing a wound which proved mortal. He gave his last solemn injunction to his men to con- quer or die ; and a detachment was just carrying him off the field when he was met by his son, second lieutenant, though a mere youth of nineteen, and the interview which ensued be- tween them was melancholy and heart-rending, but at the same time heroic. The affectionate son, in agony at the desperate situation of his father, was anxiously desirous of assisting him off the field, but was prohibited from doing this by his father, who, notwithstanding he was conscious that his wound was mortal, yet encouraged his son to disregard it, reminding him that he was engaged in a glorious cause, and, whatever were the consequences, must march on and do his duty." It is with a feeling of admiration, mingled with wonder, that we learn that out of a population of less than 2000 at the time of the Revo- lution, Cambridge furnished more than 450 soldiers for the Revolutionary Army, which must have been nearly every able- bodied man of military age in her entire population.
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