USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Salem > Exercises in commemoration of the three hundredth anniversary of the gathering of the First church in Salem, Massachusetts. May 26-June 3, 1929 > Part 2
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It is not for me to-day to recount the story of the Puritan migration or of the founding of this historic church. I am rather to deal with the principles and motives of the New England adventure and to interpret them in modern phrases and twentieth-century application.
First of all, it is plain that we shall be false to the principles of our founders if we permit ourselves to be just spectators or mere admirers of their virtues. Nothing would make us less worthy of a Puritan lineage than to halt where our forebears halted. As Lowell wrote in "The Present Crisis,"
They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts, Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's; And we make their truth our falsehood, ...
Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee
The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the sea.
No need to say here that to cling to something which is no longer secure or fruitful has been the constant error and indolence of mankind. "Were
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I asked," said a thinker generally reputed to be very conservative, "what constitutes the extreme peril of any community, I should say, stagnant opinions; the formulae of one age me- chanically reproduced and repeated in an age that has outlived their significance." But we modern New-Englanders are not in much peril of such stagnant opinions. We are not inclined to drop our buckets into wells that have gone dry. We have no use for things that have be- come obsolete; but all the more should we not seek contact with principles that have proved their worth and with ideals that are still produc- tive and prophetic? I am interested, you see, in the Tercentenary of this Church and this Com- monwealth, not only as a memory, but also as a motive.
The early history of New England seems to many minds unromantic. No mists of distance soften the harsh outlines. The transplanting of a people breaks the successions of history. Our land is still lacking in some of the elements of picturesqueness and fabled association that make Europe interesting. Instead of the glitter of chivalry we have but the sombre homespun of hard-working pioneers. Instead of castles and cathedrals on which time has laid a hand of benediction, we have but the rude log meeting-
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house and schoolhouse. It seems a story at once plebeian and prosaic. What is it in the Puri- tan heritage, outwardly so bare and cold, that makes it intrinsically so poetic?
There was certainly no poetry in the rigid creed of our forefathers. Nor is there any poetry in the mere struggle for existence that marked the outward life of early New England. Our forefathers were often pinched for food. They suffered in a bitter climate. They lived in isola- tion. We think lightly of these things because we cannot help imagining that they knew that they were founding a mighty nation; but that knowledge was denied them. Generations of them sank into nameless graves without any vision of the days when their descendants should rise up and call them blessed.
Nor is there any inspiration in the measure of their outward success. I suppose it is accurate to say that the Puritans, judged by their own desires, failed. They tried to establish a theoc- racy - they stand in history as the heroes of democracy. Why is it, then, that we so celebrate them? Why all the honor that we pay them? "It is not," said a staunch descendant of the Puritans who in an exceptional degree inherited and illustrated their principles, - my honored father, - "It is not merely because in danger
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and in difficulty they were stouthearted. Many a pirate or soldier of fortune has been that. It is because they were stouthearted for an ideal - their ideal, not ours - of civil and religious liberty." Wherever and whenever men and wo- men devote themselves, not to material, but to ideal ends, there the world's heroes are born, and born to be remembered and to become the inspiration of noble daring.
Now, we live in a time when it is rather the fashion to regard our New England antecedents with amusement or a kind of contempt. We are given to understand that our forebears were just sanctimonious hypocrites, given to endless ser- mons and doleful psalm-singing. Well, Crom- well and his "Ironsides," if I remember rightly, did sing psalms to some purpose. " Arise, O Lord, and let thine enemies be scattered" - thus they sang and then proceeded to scatter the said enemies. Macaulay was no friend of the Puri- tans, but historic accuracy compelled him to confess that they were the most remarkable body of men in history. Carlyle did not share the Puritan's faith, but he declared that Puritan- ism was the greatest of the world's heroisms. Do we not always owe the advances that really count for something to those who stress the solitariness and imperative of principle?
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Of course, to many minds there seems to have been in the Puritan communities such a Spartan view of duty and such a rigorous observance of the Old Testament statutes that there is a sense of relief in our escape into a milder order and a more playful age. Some of their peculiar dogmas and methods have happily disappeared, but there was in Puritanism a moral virility and a spiritual intensity that ought to be more at work to-day. Those people had ideas whose glory has not faded. They believed in the sober, righteous, and Godly life. They believed in the home and in family love and integrity. They believed in the direct access, unmediated by priest or form, of the human soul to God. Though there were elements in their religious faith that seem to us sombre and severe, yet there is no evidence that their religion seemed to them a darksome restraint. Rather it was a victorious experience which gave epic dignity to their otherwise insignificant lives. The statutes of God were the songs of their pilgrimage. Life was to them an opportunity not so much for enjoying something, as for becoming something. Character was not a possession, but an attain- ment. So there was no grudging service; there was no reluctant obedience. They did not enlist under any false pretences, and they deceived no
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one into supposing that the Christian race was easy and the goal readily won.
There was no place in their vision for idleness and luxury. No eight-hour day for them. They worked twelve hours a day and then, for recrea- tion, laid stone walls. They knew that this world was not made for cowards. They did not study life as a problem, they mastered it as an experience. So every new venture, every migra- tion to alien shores and scenes, simply renewed their passion for the changelessness and time- lessness of God. Their strength, let us mark - for we too often get discouraged just because we get these things wrong end to - was not so much in their confidence in their knowledge of God - that was often weak, frail, insecure - no, their strength was in their assurance of God's hold on them. That was their sufficiency. That was what impassioned their minds and hearts and energized their wills and made them stead- fast and unafraid - and it might do the same for their descendants.
Oh, there are things in Calvinism that we do not want to see revived, - and that cannot be revived, - but we certainly need more of that commanding consciousness of eternal reality, with all that it implies of discipline and en- deavor. Would not that free us from our re-
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ligious provincialism? Would it not shake the easy-going complacency which is the special peril of people inclined to believe themselves free and enlightened - people like ourselves? We have escaped from the bondage of the archaic dogmas, we have been emancipated from the rigor of the Puritan conscience - and the ten- sion of spiritual effort is very easily relaxed. Things look pretty comfortable to us. We in- cline to cherish a rather soft and sentimental optimism. If I may quote Mr. Lowell again - in a less commendable mood -
"Tis heaven alone that is given away; 'T is God alone can be had for the asking.
Not a bit of it! Heaven is not given away; the sense of God cannot be had for the asking. Life is no soft experience, but a hazardous occupa- tion. "We are," as Cromwell wrote on the eve of the battle of Dunbar, "engaged upon an employment very difficult." The real reason why Christianity fails in these days to win a deeper loyalty is that it makes too slight an appeal to heroism. It is too invertebrate. You may think the Puritan's idea of God was austere; but there was in that idea of God something that could make men and women heroic. There was something there which made those people the
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builders of commonwealths and the unconscious pioneers of freedom.
The unconscious pioneers of freedom. Let me emphasize that. When we say that we owe our civil and religious liberties to this Puritan her- itage, pray do not misunderstand what hap- pened. Too many panegyrists, in their haste to vindicate the fathers of Massachusetts, have been reading into the purposes of the founders principles of which they knew nothing. The common error - common alike to those who censure and to those who praise, to those who patronize and to those who ridicule - is that the Puritans came here to establish and enjoy liberty of conscience. Let us frankly and emphatically affirm that nothing of that kind was in their minds. We must not put our meaning into their declarations, but their meaning. The great events of history are not single occasions. They have background and foreground. They are usually the beginnings of causes which reveal their significance only after the lapse of cen- turies. The founders of New England were men of the seventeenth, not of the twentieth, century. They were conscious of certain imperative im- pulses and of some enlarging ideals; but in just what forms of political and social organiza- tion those ideals would ultimately embody them-
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selves, they did not conceive. Do we not too often, in a kind of filial pride, make ourselves believe that they foresaw the grander liberties which were the inevitable fruits of the seeds they planted on these shores? I think the honest fact is that they neither saw nor desired such a destiny as was involved in the creative and prophetic principles which they had adopted. They did not grasp the amplitude and final applications of those principles. Instructive and germinal forces were at work in them and through them, forces which formulated the fu- ture of the great Republic. Again, "by their fruits," not by their roots, "ye shall know them."
Dr. Peabody once pointed out the close analogy between the story of the Puritan migra- tion and the story of ancient Israel. There was the same sacrifice for religious conviction; the same sense of divine control; the same migration to a strange land; the same limitation and ex- clusiveness of creed.
New England was, indeed, practically constructed on the model of the Old Testament. Its laws were Hebraic, and its children were baptized with the names of Barzillai and Ephraim, of Deborah and Mehitabel. And underlying all these likenesses of detail there is this other profound analogy - the unconscious and unintended preparation by the
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Puritans for better things. It was as if some band of sailors should plan to cruise along a well-known coast, and as if, in the night, a great current of the ocean should sweep their vessel away through the darkness, until they should wake to find themselves the discoverers of a land nobler than their own familiar shores, but which they never meant to reach. So the Puritanism of the letter was swept on by the current of the Puritanism of the spirit, with its un- conscious purpose in the hands of a greater destiny.
We often say that the Free State, the Free School, and the Free Church are our great in- heritances from our New England founders. That is, in some considerable measure, true, but in the mind of the Puritan the things were not separated. They were parts of one principle, and they were all just instruments or agencies for the advancement of the Kingdom of God. Church, School, Community, Home - all rep- resented aspects of that brotherhood of equal rights. To the meeting-house where the Puritan prayed on Sunday, he would go on Monday to vote or to take counsel about the affairs of the community. His altar of worship was at his family hearth more often than at his church. His daily tasks were done "as in the sight of God." The school and college were essential parts of his plan; for the stability of the New England adventure rested on an intelligent citi-
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zenship. The training of head and heart and hand all went together. The whole scheme is admirably set forth in John Cotton's farewell sermon to the Massachusetts Bay Company on the eve of the departure from Southampton on the voyage which ended here at Salem in June, 1630. "Go forth," he cried, "every man that goeth with a public spirit, looking not on your own things only, but also on the things of others. Look well," he added, "to the plants that spring from you, that is to your children that they do not degenerate"; for, as we need to remind ourselves to-day, "ancestors of a noble spirit" cannot save us.
Is not the need of our time the revival of that "noble spirit"? While we give ample room for the more playful temper and the kindlier senti- ments of our day, let us not fail in our Tercen- tenary celebration to put the emphasis where it rightly belongs. Let us reaffirm the value of the unintended bequest of our rugged forebears, and not lightly disperse our richest heritage. Let us not fail to remember that the secret of the Puritan spirit is in the virile and efficient com- bination of the moralist and the mystic - the combined sense of communion with God and commission from God. That is the potency of the Puritan achievement.
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If we are to celebrate our founders in a worthy fashion, must we not dedicate ourselves anew to their principles? Our world is still beset with stupid tyrannies, cruel oppressions, material ambitions, mechanical and cynical interpreta- tions of life. Shall we not have a rebirth of the spirit that refuses to conform to conventional ideas and recreant timidities and that is ready to dare untried paths? We must seek first, not the beaten way, the easy task, the quick profit, but "the Kingdom of God and his righteous- ness." We must trust not so much in great armaments or overflowing treasuries, in the whir of our machinery and the spread of our com- merce, but in invigorating ideas and inspiring ideals. We must be ready to take our part in the great moral dramas of our and every age, the everlasting battle of truth and error, good and evil. If selfish or timid people pile imaginary obstacles on the roads leading to peace and good-will among the nations, let Puritan pluck and persistence clear the way for freedom and fraternity. If the contrasts of poverty and riches and the vast accumulations of capital present new and grave problems to our generation, let the Puritan principle of "All for each and each for all" show us the way of enlightened co- operation. If citizens, in the name of personal
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liberty, seek to evade or obstruct the require- ments of the Constitution of the United States, let Puritan teaching remind them that the very cornerstone of all our liberties is loyalty to the law. If foolish cynics and false philosophies mock at the sanctities and disciplines of faith, let the Puritan sense of the sovereignty of God remind them that cooperation with the Divine Will is not only the beginning of wisdom but also the way of true freedom.
To dwell in the secret places of the Most High and abide under the Shadow of the Almighty, to believe in the deathless divinity of conscience, duty, and love - that is the higher patriotism into whose hands the honor and the peace of any people may be placed for safe keeping. We do not think now of the Puritans as theologians, or scholars, or just pioneer settlers. We think of them as the exemplars of that vitality by which God works in the world. The spirit they em- bodied is still our hope of progress and stability. That courage must take hold of our modern oppressions; that conscience needs to be applied to our perplexing problems; that industrious energy to our burdens of neglect; that coopera- tive good-will to our social reconstructions; that sense of direct intercourse with a divine inspirer must be the source of our strength and peace.
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Let one of our contemporary poets, speaking for the founders of Massachusetts, express for us the feeling and the assurance of our Ter- centenary.
God of our fathers, who has safely brought us Through seas and sorrows, famine, fire, and sword; Who, in Thy mercies manifold, has taught us To trust in Thee, our leader and our Lord;
God, who has sent Thy truth to shine before us, A fiery pillar, beaconing on the sea; God, who hast spread Thy wings of mercy o'er us; God, who has set our children's children free.
Freedom Thy new-born nation here shall cherish; Grant us Thy covenant, unchanging, sure: Earth shall decay; the firmament shall perish; Freedom and Truth immortal shall endure.
Father Divine, we give thee thanks for the three centuries of associated life and work. May we feel the touch of inspiring memories. May we find enriching fellowship with the resolute spirits who founded this church and Common- wealth. Strengthen us in the discharge of our present duties. May we wisely invest and mul- tiply the heritage of faith and righteousness com- mitted to us. Make us builders of the city which hath foundations, whose architect Thou art. AMEN.
THE FIRST CHURCH IN SALEM AN ADDRESS GIVEN MAY 26, 1929 BY THOMAS HENRY BILLINGS Minister of the Church
THE FIRST CHURCH IN SALEM
I TT is, of course, impossible in a talk such as this to cover in any detail the history of a society which has lasted, with manifold changes, through three hundred years. In the beginning, Salem consisted of a tiny group of English set- tlers on the edge of the sea, dreading pirates and other hostile invaders from the sea, and, land- ward, backed by the great forest, surrounded by the Indians, and haunted by the fear that these Indians were somehow children of the devil. The most intelligent among the settlers knew differently, and in the statements that were made of the purposes of the colony the conversion of the Indians is prominently men- tioned. But in spite of this, the majority of the early settlers hated and feared the Indians. The community grew rapidly at first, and settled country spread quickly on all sides. But it was one hundred years after the founding before the danger from the Indians had receded.
Almost from its beginning, the settlement was a trading centre, and at the time of the witch- craft delusion in the sixteen-nineties, Philip
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English was a merchant of substance. But about the middle of the eighteenth century a new era opened. Salem merchants began at that time their wider activity, and finally extended their operations to the Far East, India, China, Java, Sumatra, and the islands of the South Seas. During this period the community grew in wealth and importance. There arose within it a circle of cultivated men and women, of wide leisure, numbering among them leaders in the life of the later colonial period and the early days of the Republic. In the early days of the eighteenth century, Salem shipping was at its height.
But still other changes were in store. The glory of Salem as a seaport faded in its turn, and with the coming of the machine age the char- acter of the city again changed. It has shared with all the New England cities the great influx of European people, and to-day, in a city of approximately fifty thousand, only ten thousand are of the old American stock. Each of these periods has left permanent traces on the life of the city and on its very appearance. The old has rarely been destroyed, but has rather been ab- sorbed into the later life.
Through all these changes, influenced by each of them as they occurred, the First Congrega-
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tional Society has persisted. It is a moving expe- rience to use, on the first Sunday of each month throughout the church year, the old communion silver which for nearly three centuries and through such startling changes has expressed the devotion of a single group. Each Sunday we repeat together the Covenant that has been the basis of union for ten generations. I cannot to-day trace these changes in detail and shall not attempt to do so. I shall rather go over with you the story of the founding of the church and try to see the spirit which has informed and preserved it throughout its history.
We are fortunate in having early documents which tell the story of the founding. On July the thirtieth, 1629, Mr. Gott, later a deacon of the church, wrote as follows to Governor Brad- ford of Plymouth:
The 20th of July, it pleased God to move the heart of our Governor to set it apart for a solemn day of humiliation for the choice of a pastor and teacher; the former part of the day being spent in praise and teaching, the latter part was spent about the election, which was after this manner: the persons thought on (who had been ministers in England) were demanded concerning their callings; they acknowledged there was a two-fold calling; the one and inward calling, when the Lord moved the heart of a man to take that calling upon him, and fitted him with gifts for the same; the second (the outward calling) was from the
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people, when a company of believers are joined to- gether in covenant, to walk together in all the ways of God, every member (being men) are to have a free voice in the choice of their officers, etc. Now we being persuaded that these two were so qualified as the apostle speaks of to Timothy, where he saith a bishop must be blameless, sober, apt to teach, etc., so these two servants of God, clearing all things by their answers, and being thus fitted, we saw no reason but that we might freely give our voices for their election after this trial. Their choice was after this manner: every fit member wrote, in a note, his name whom the Lord moved him to think was fit for a pastor, and so likewise, whom they would have for a teacher; so the most voices was for Mr. Skelton to be Pastor, and Mr. Higginson to be Teacher; and they accepting the choice, Mr. Higginson, with three or four more of the gravest members of the Church, laid their hands on Mr. Skelton, using prayers there- with. This being done, then there was imposition of hands on Mr. Higginson. Then there was proceeding in election of elders and deacons, but they were only named, and laying on of hands deferred, to see if it pleased God to send us more able men over; but since Thursday (being as I take it, the 5th of August) is appointed for another solemn day of humiliation, for the full choice of elders and deacons, and ordaining them. Now, good sir, I hope that you and the rest of God's people (who are acquainted with the ways of God) with you, will say that here was a right founda- tion laid, and that these two blessed servants of the Lord came in at the door, and not at the window.
There are several things to be noticed in this letter. In the first place, the two men chosen as
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pastor and teacher were set apart with a cere- mony that to all intents and purposes was a second ordination. By thus ordaining its own ministers, and later by adopting its own basis of membership, the church set itself clearly and definitely in the group of those who separated from the Church of England. It is probable that they did not all realize the implications of what they had done. It seems most unlikely that Mr. Higginson, who left England a convinced op- ponent of separation, would so quickly change his mind. It may well be that in the eyes of many, Higginson included, the ceremony was like an installation ceremony of our own day. This ceremony recognizes the right of each con- gregation to call and settle its own minister and to set him apart with such forms as its members may see fit to use. A recognition of such a right means democracy in church government, but it does not necessarily involve the abandonment of all connection between the individual churches. It was a reform that was revolutionary, but it was still, in the eyes of some, merely a reform of the practice of the Church of England and not a separation from that church. It is some support to this interpretation of the action of the society that the final separation of Roger Williams from its ministry was due to Mr. Williams's uncom-
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promising stand on the question of fellowship with the Church of England. He refused to have communion with a society which maintained fellowship with the churches of Boston, on the ground that the Boston churches were still a part of the Church of England. But while all this may be true, it is equally true that the practical result was separation. The hope ex- pressed in Gott's letter seems to have been realized, and the Separatists at Plymouth saw no reason to consider the church's action as out of harmony in any way with their own practice.
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