USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Danvers > Exercises in celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the First Church, Congregational, Danvers, Massachusetts: October 8th to 15th, 1922; with an address at the centennial of the Sunday School, November 17th, 1918 > Part 8
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The Bay Colony was the great force which accomplished the settlement of this country. Neither Jamestown, Plym- outh, Maine, New York, Providence, nor any other American colony compares in importance in accomplishments with the Bay Colony.
The purpose of the founders of the Bay Colony to obtain liberty for themselves was crowned and glorified by the Amer- ican Revolution when this country was made the asylum for all who were seeking liberty of conscience. America now holds out the only promise of equality and equal chance for
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advancement to all, and the background of this great privi- lege is the sacrifices and privations of the Puritans while seeking their own liberty and the public education of their children, and to sustain liberty when it was obtained.
They stood for the Bay Colony and its liberty and inde- pendence without thought of motherlands or fatherlands. They came here to forever rid themselves of European troubles, and following in their footsteps have come people from all parts of the globe for exactly the same purpose. Their strength of mind, noble hopes and sacrifices, are the foundation stones of the United States of America, which now guarantees liberty of conscience to all.
I wish to say a few words about the saintly personality of the Rev. Charles B. Rice, as I saw it.
I had the pleasure of knowing him in a way that was shared by very few others. It is because of my great esteem for him that I am here tonight. He was eminently a prac- tical man, but he trusted in God to a degree and with a confidence to which few rise. Citizens of all creeds in this community know of his great justice, his clearness of judg- ment and sympathy with poverty and suffering. What a face he had! Its great dignity inspired the full confidence of his fellow citizens. His life was that of one who felt himself always in the presence of God. He did not believe in aggres- sive sectarianism. He wanted every man to stand on his rights as an American citizen, no matter what church he attended, and no more. When any man's religion was at- tacked it was his duty to defend it, but he wanted no con- troversies. Charity and truth were all he asked. Long ex- perience taught him that there is no use in quarreling about religion. To dispute with a man in anger or speak to him in a hostile spirit about religion could have no good effect. Mr. Rice was a strong, steadfast, firm Congregationalist, ready to defend his faith, ready to speak the truth; and he demanded the same qualities and purposes in every man of a different faith before he would call him a friend.
We have plenty of things to forgive and forget on all sides. The man who is right can be patient, because God always is patient. Mr. Rice believed that we of different sects should approach each other in a spirit of conciliation,
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admitting that each had an equal chance to reach Heaven and equal rights and duties as American citizens.
The school children of this town were blessed by his long service as chairman of the School Committee. The town meetings and town government were helped by his strong will, his patience and his wisdom. His neighbors were cdified by his good life, and his friends were proud to be called his friends.
To Mrs. Charles B. Rice and to the Rev. Austin Rice I wish to say that no man who has lived in Danvers within the last fifty years has done more to encourage good citizen- ship and to bring neighbor and neighbor together than your husband and your father.
REV. EDWARD H. CHANDLER Secretary Twentieth Century Club, Boston
A few days ago, I had occasion to go down to the Cape. On the train my attention was attracted by a woman who was speaking. This is what I heard, "Well, I'm glad to get home. I'm going home, and when I get there I'm going to stay. When I want to set in the setting room, I'll set, and when I want to set in the kitchen, I'll set. There's no place like home." I sympathize with that woman in my feelings as I get back to Danvers. While I have had a mighty good caterer's supper to night, I confess that I'm a little disappointed, for I well know what the women of this church could furnish. This church has made a great repu- tation for suppers. I have recently read the statement that the two fundamental instincts of life are hunger and love. Everybody connected with religion seems to be always hungry. If you can only feed them everything goes well. As to the love business, how many romances have started around the church ice cream freezer !
I am not beginning a serious sermon. I'll leave that for the real ministers to do.
There is this about a supper, after all. It is only when people actually play and work together that they ever come into a fellowship that leads to any large results. When you have gotten to working together and playing together, then
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on that association you can build up splendid results. So many of our churches are dead in the country at large be- cause their people have never learned to work and to play together. The church supper not only is an association for work and play; it also aids admirably the two primary in- stincts.
Let me close with a little personal note in regard to Dr. Rice. He understood the meaning of this simple instinct of hunger. He used often to carry to Boston an old-fashioned satchel filled with fruit. It was my privilege to go in with him one day. After leaving the North Station he turned into one of those side streets filled with children and opened his bag, showing the contents. Soon along came a little girl ; then two more. A few boys came along, soon more arrived. Then there was a scramble for the pears! Dr. Rice was actually taken off his feet and when we got away said to me, "I guess the kids like pears."
IRWIN W. TAPLEY, Haverhill
It is a joy, as always, to return to my native town and to the church in which I had my spiritual birth.
We appreciate the weeks of effort which have been put in to prepare for this wonderful celebration, from the results of which we partake with such delight. Coming back as I do, I recall that I am one of a rather limited number yet re- maining who remember the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of this church. I had not then entered the High School, yet I followed the preparations and the results attained with unusual interest. I recall the setting for the occasion, the classic beauty of the house as it stood surrounded on the outside and decked within with the glorious colors of the autumn.
Across my vision pass Putnams, Prestons, Popes, Hutch- insons, Mudges and a multitude of others who here proved faithful to their trust.
Though I have since been a member of two other and in some respects more pretentious churches, I have not failed to venerate the men and women of this church in that day. Mighty men to the eye of youth, they come to be giants to my more mature judgment.
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THE " WHITE CHURCH, " INTERIOR Rear, before remodeling
FIRST CHURCH, CONGREGATIONAL, DANVERS, MASS.
Dr, Rice left upon this church and town not only his forms of speech and habit of thought, but the wonderful spirit of charity and tolerance which marks this whole com- munity. Thus we love to muse upon the past, but all glory is not departed. Here remain brave men and capable women who yet bear aloft the banner of the cross, serving here in every detail. While we look to the past and to the present and glory in the wonderful attainments of each, let us be mindful also of the future. If our present surround- ings would look strange to our fathers, so would the con- ditions of another fifty years be strange to us. Lo! even now a new generation, even two generations, are crowding us onward. Soon they will have our places. How we envy them their opportunity! How we would like to follow their efforts and behold their achievements! In the meantime, it behooves us so to build upon the foundation already estab- lished, that there shall be no weak spot which shall fail to support that which the new generations shall build upon it.
REV. ELLIOTT FOSTER, Athol
I wish that there were some way that I might retire after these most gracious words of introduction. I have no fault to find with your program except that I was included as one of the speakers. I have no words which are able to give adequate testimony as to the effective way in which the his- tory of this great church has been portrayed in these days.
Proud as all of us are, however, of the past history of the Old First Church, I suspect we think of this church mostly in terms of our own personal connection with it. Not least among those things for which we may well be proud is the fact that all along down through these 250 years of history this church has been having vital contacts with human lives, moulding and shaping these lives in Christian ways.
When my thoughts turn to old First Church, Danvers, it is to recall some of these personal contacts and the way in which my life has been shaped by them. Every nook and corner of this building is eloquent to me of that phase of the unwritten history of this church which looms so big in my own experience.
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If, for instance, we were meeting in the Banquet Hall downstairs (or the room we used to call the Banquet Hall), you would probably take little notice of the electric lights there. But those lights would remind me of an oyster supper cooked and served entirely by young men. For those lights were installed just before the supper in the unshaken faith on our part that we would make money enough out of the supper to pay for them.
I remember this church most for the people I knew here and with whom I was associated in the most critical period of my life. I would pay my tribute to those whose influence has been so potent in the shaping of my character. I am thinking of a boy chum, Harold Siner, a fine, upstanding Christian fellow who went out of this life at the very be- ginning almost of his college course. It was his untimely death and the loss sustained by his parents, this church and the world that brought to a focus in my thoughts the more serious considerations of life. I am thinking of a Sunday School teacher, a woman who not only upheld before her class high ideals of Christian character but insisted that those ideals were in their own minds and hearts and who "stood by" ever to help them. I am thinking of a minister who was not only an able preacher but a great man. We worked together in the church, we built two houses together, we played together. I have no words to give expression to my feeling for that man, Harry Adams.
Whatever you may put into the history of a church when you come right down to the actual work which the church is doing in the world, is there anything more important than the fact that here certain personalities make their impression on other personalities ; that Christian people are here brought into contact with growing boys and girls, young men and women ?
I am becoming increasingly convinced of the inestimable value of human personality. The gospel of Christ is the good news of God coming clear to the surface of life in the personality of a man, Jesus of Nazareth. It is the good news of salvaging personalities from the scrap heaps of humanity to lives of usefulness in God's great kingdom.
The method of Jesus was that of human contact. God
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works through human personality and human contact. If this is not the only way God works, it is by all odds the most effective. The work which Jesus came into the world to do and which he was unable to finish must be carried on by his followers. In this work we will always be needing new methods, new equipment and new ideas about God to fit an ever-changing thought world, but we need most of all to realize the importance of the impress of personality upon personality.
The only message I have to bring to you tonight is the call to us to strive to do our part toward speaking the words which God would speak to men and which God cannot speak unless we allow God to express Himself in our lives.
REV. ARTHUR J. COVELL, Wakefield
I am very glad to be here and certainly appreciate the privilege of sharing in these exercises. From the time when I arrived today until this hour everything has tended to increase my appreciation of the privilege. It is a great thing to be connected with a stable institution like this church.
It was an inspiration to me to realize how this church ral- lied from that witch-craft delusion. You came out into the sunlight, long hidden, and this church became a mother of churches in all this section. It gives us courage. I am re- minded, also, as I think of what was said Sunday afternoon and what has been said in connection with this gathering tonight, that they were great builders of men who ministered and served here. They have made of greatest value to us all this 250th anniversary.
And now a word concerning Dr. Rice, your pastor for a third of a century. I recall some things personal and some things that were not directly personal, and am reminded of the day when some suggestion was made that I should per- sonally take up work outside Massachusetts. Dr. Rice asked me to come into his office and spoke of his thought that I should succeed him in his work. I remember telling him that I lacked the two essential qualifications-gray hairs and Christian grace. I have attained one of these requisites.
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Dr. Rice on occasion had the ability to say some very clear and striking things. Throughout his reports may be found statements like this: "Not all the inscrutable ways of Provi- dence are to be attributed to the mal-administration of this Board." Experience in dealing with ministers and churches shows the need of such utterances.
But we remember him especially for traits of a different nature. We recall the kindly humor which served to cushion the jolts sure to come to a man in such work as his secre- tarial position and likely to come to any pastor who serves for a long time in one field. We recall his remarkable in- sight into human nature and the ability to appreciate the point of view of men who differed from him.
There are some things about Dr. Rice that we need to learn today and to continue to re-learn in all future days. For one thing, he was a man of unusual impartiality. There are not many men whom I have known into whose hands I could so confidently place my case in any particular issue with absolute certainty and unwavering confidence in their ability to reach a fair conclusion. He had clear discernment into the springs of action and an all-comprehending sym- pathy.
He had remarkable surpassing patience, and I recall upon coming to the office to take up the work he had laid down, asking the helpers whether they could recall an instance in which his patience had failed. In the years of association with him as pastor in the Essex South Association, and later in another part of Massachusetts, I can recall no such in- stance.
He was tolerant, not in the passive but in the active sense. He had capacity, not for enduring but for understanding another's point of view. I suppose you would call him a man of the old school theologically, and perhaps representing & type of life that is not conspicuous in these present days. Neverthless, he was able in a rather remarkable way to appreciate the new. He realized that we are not saved by the old or by the new but by the spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ. There are very few of the men trained as he was trained who have had such capacity to recognize the good in a somewhat different point of view. He was a mediator
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between the old and the new, and one whose friendship men came to esteem as one of life's choice possessions.
From such leadership as this, the Kingdom of Heaven is established on earth.
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OUR CHURCH HOME, FIFTY YEARS AGO
POEM BY MISS KATHARINE A. KEIFE, Asbury Grove
It seems to be some fifty years ago, When my small childish brain first came to know That comely and impressive edifice,
Which was our house of worship before this.
Perched high upon a creaking, rattling wain, I had been taken to the mill for grain; And points of interest, along the way, My father had revealed to me that day. Somehow I knew this one, ere being told: "Is that the Meeting House?" It was. Behold !
Clear-cut in memory, I see it still ; Its austere beauty crowns the windy hill, With no relieving shrub or turf or tree, To draw attention from its symmetry. It stands foursquare, no hint at compromise, With pillared portico, to draw men's eyes, That all may know, whene'er they walk abroad, This well set building is the House of God.
So much for the externals! Step inside ! The auditorium was deep and wide, With galleries extending left and right; The choir-loft, with its organ-goodly sight !- High up, behind the congregation, too; It seemed the choir was meant to hide from view; But lest this deprivation cause a pang, We were allowed to face them when they sang!
That was a famous choir, in days of yore, Elzephan Davis, with his daughters four, And eke Frank Pope, with his two daughters fair, With Alfred Hutchinson and others there;
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The matchless voice of Edward Hutchinson, The alto part of Julia Swinerton.
It is worth much, across the rolling years, To hear again, as one in childhood hears, That chorus lift-so sure, so strong, so sweet !- Those grand old hymns, like "Harwell," or "Retreat,"
Old "Coronation," "Lenox," "Ariel," Or "Antioch," "Saint Thomas," "Ortonville." It seems to me those tones go singing on, Through time and space, through this world-and beyond !
In front, not much below the galleries, The pulpit reared aloft its harmonies ; And here, for many years, did Doctor Rice Set forth the Word of Life with sage advice. He was his own best sermon ; that good life Set all of us example against strife ; The children that grew up while he was here Had seen religion lived and found it dear!
Below the auditorium were found Vestry and Sabbath School rooms, all year round. The Vestry was the place for mid-week prayer, And Friday evening found the faithful there; But here the males from females did divide, And each sex had its several, separate side, Save when some pair, long wedded, chose to sit Together, and old custom sanctioned it. Mr. Augustus Mudge, I well recall, Sat thus, with his wife, in front row of all.
There was an instrument, to aid in song; To Mr. Samuel Tucker did belong The gift to charm this organ into sound; A gentler saint than he was never crowned ! Within that parlor organ lived a mouse, Whose wont it was to wander through the house. When we had primly settled in our places, A stricken look would change the women's faces. Strange, how a woman hates a messy mouse!
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She has no use for one about the house ! This church mouse came out once too often; he Sneaked swiftly off toward the men's side, and we Looked for his loathed returning all in vain, But knew not that the enemy was slain. Mr. George Peabody had done the deed, By which the women's souls from fear were freed !
That Sabbath School ! I never found its peer, Though taking part in many, far and near. Attendance would exceed two hundred head On any pleasant Sunday ; when that's said, It doesn't tell us half ! The personnel Was what made our school differ; mark it well, For more than half the regulars enrolled Were grown-up, middle-aged, or even old !
We always had, of course, a Christmas tree, With Santa Claus and candles and great glee ; My first tree and the doll that came my way Still live, in tarleton and blue ribbons gay !
But fairer far than winter Christmas tree, The summer picnic bore us to the sea; It always had to be Nahant, of course; Maolis Gardens claimed us-nothing worse !- Because of two black bears, that climbed a pole, And had our school inspect them, as a whole. How many years we went I could not tell, And yet, poor Bruins seemed to bear it well!
A great event would crown each happy year- The Harvest Festival we held most dear ! It ran two nights: Supper and speeches first, And entertainment second, much rehearsed. The vegetation from the parish farms Was borne in evidence by men-at-arms. John Swinerton would show what he could do, George Pratt, and William Henry Kimball, too. The biggest cabbages and pumpkins came, To give our Harvest Festival its name.
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,
Mirth and good cheer prevailed, and at the door, The boy who hadn't found his tongue before Stood waiting till a certain girl should come, To ask if he might see her safely home! And then the Hunter's Moon hung, big and bright, But in two minutes, they must say good night !
Dear friends, I ask you, of your courtesy, To overlook the freedom used by me, In calling o'er the names of not a few Who passed on, beyond our mortal view. It seems I should have mentioned all or none, And yet so great a task could not be done. A few names only trickled from my tongue, Of many that I used when I was young; But in my heart they live, a cherished host, And nearest when I needed them the most; The glorious company of the elect,
Whose work of grace on me they never recked !
The old First Church ! A backbone and a brain ! She has not lived her centuries in vain, But while in grave affairs she plays her part, She keeps untainted still her loving heart. She's sound. She's true. For her I have no fears. She'll do her duty yet, five hundred years !
A feature of the evening was the giving by Dr. Rice, in behalf of the people, of a generous purse to the pastor, Rev. A. V. House. Mr. House was himself innocently responsible for this. In calling upon Miss Sarah Mudge some time be- fore he had said to her that he thought it desirable to dupli- cate, so far as might be, interesting features of the celebra- tion fifty years before. Miss Mudge, in reading the diary of her father, the late Edwin Mudge, learned that a sum of money had at that time been given Rev. C. B. Rice for his labors in preparing the Historical Address. Forthwith, she acted upon the suggestion and became the prime mover in arranging for Mr. House a similar token of appreciation for his toil in preparation for the anniversary. Mr. House was taken entirely by surprise. In replying to the words of the
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toastmaster, he said that the people of this day were trying to preserve the old-time spiritual character of the church and that they cherish the hope that it will have in the future, as in the past, men and women of notable Christian strength to give it character and success.
The company broke up at 11: 00 o'clock, all feeling replete with the good things of mind and soul as well as of the body.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11 HISTORICAL PAGEANT
Probably the largest audience ever gathered in the church, over five hundred, crowded the auditorium Wednesday evening to see the Historical Pageant. This displayed a number of striking and significant scenes from the history of the parish and was calculated to reveal its spirit and development. The conception of the pageant was wrought out in conference ; and, for detail of plan and staging, the services of Miss Lillian R. Hartigan, instructor in Elocution and Pageantry in the Cambridge Latin School, were invoked. Some of the pro- logues were prepared by Miss Hartigan, who, in addition to the personal touch, made use of poems already in hand, that of Andrew Nichols, given at the centennial of the town of Danvers, 1852, being generously drawn upon. Other pro- logues, as they appear in this publication, were composed by Mr. House. Miss Hartigan was tireless in drilling the par- ticipants and read the poetic prefaces with brilliant effect.
The presentation of the pageant was preceded by a short organ recital by Miss Bessie Cleaveland. The following se- lections were rendered :
Organ Hymn. Piutti
Andante Cantabile Tchaikovsky
March Triumphal Lemmens
Miss Cleaveland also gave the musical accompaniment to the scenes. A glance at the list of musical numbers will disclose how fittingly this part was carried out, the suiting of the music to the themes being one of the most interesting and charming features of the evening.
The lighting of the stage was well cared for by Mr. Fred E. Sawyer.
In all scenes the participants were in costume appropriate to the time represented.
REV. CHARLES B. RICE, D.D. Pastor, 1863 - 1894
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PROLOGUE TO PAGEANT
People of Danvers, ye who come to see Enacted here some hours of Pageantry Where Time long since has reaped, and Change has wrought Transfigured pages in the Book of Thought,- Where in recessional has passed away Full many a pageant in the world's wide play,- Where those pale pilgrims, who were counted blest,
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