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 6
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This land grows weary of her inhabitants, so as man, who is the most precious of all creatures, is here more vile and base than the earth we tread upon ... all towns complain of the burden of their poor ... and thus it has come to pass that children, servants and neighbors, especially if they be poor, are counted the
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greatest burdens, which if things were right would be the chiefest earthly blessings. Why then, should we stand striving here for places of habitation, many men spending as much labor and cost to recover or keep sometimes an acre or two of land, as would procure them many and as good or better in another countrie, and in the meantime suffer a whole conti- nent as fruitful and convenient for the use of man to lie waste without any improvement?
No wonder that a new world, in which even the poorest might expect to acquire some land, looked attractive. Nor were they the first to consider America's economic possibilities. The new world had hitherto been looked upon wholly as a field for European exploitation. The Span- iards had brought home fabulous amounts of silver and gold from Mexico and Peru. English explorers were confidently looking for similar treasures along our Atlantic seaboard. The humble codfish and more aristocratic beaver were already proving profitable to the occasional fishermen and traders who visited the North Atlantic shores. During the years when the misdirected and ill-fated Jamestown Colony was striving to maintain itself, its English backers were constantly looking for some means of securing a large financial return, first hoping for wines and silks, and presently finding the desired profits in tobacco. The Pilgrims came in part
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because they hoped to improve their economic conditions, and the Puritans who followed shared that hope, which in the long run was abundantly justified. The author of "New England's Prospect," writing in 1634 of condi- tions in the Puritan settlement, devotes himself, like a modern real estate agent, to describing the economic opportunities of the new land. It is noteworthy that he says not a word about politics, which would not have been prudent, and that his only reference to religion is a casual remark that the Indians sometimes came into the meeting-houses to listen to the preaching. The Puritans would not have been the normal human beings they were if they had not carefully weighed the chances of making a living here, and a better living than they could make at home. They were embarking on a highly peril- ous adventure, into which most of them were putting all their worldly property, besides risk- ing their own lives and those of their families. The earlier English attempts at colonization had not been encouraging. Those at Jamestown and Plymouth had indeed been able to survive; but the former was chiefly a dreadful warning of the perils which awaited injudicious plans and per- sons' unsuited to hardships, and the latter was not yet an economic success. The Puritans who
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came to Massachusetts Bay succeeded, beyond the expectations of friends and enemies alike, because of the care and intelligence with which they used their resources and managed their affairs, and also because no company of people has ever left European shores who were better fitted to be the founders of a commonwealth.
It was their religious idealism which was the culminating motive in their coming hither, as it was the primary factor in the rise of Puritanism in England. As has been already stated, the Puritans were the progressive religious thinkers in sixteenth-century England, who wished to carry out the principles of the Reformation to what seemed to them its logical conclusions, instead of stopping with a few half-hearted changes. Within Puritanism, in its more inclu- sive aspect, there were wide varieties of opinion, which cannot be discussed within the limits of this paper. But most Puritans in the sixteenth century accounted themselves members of the Church of England. They were Calvinists, of course, but in their theology they did not differ from most other Protestants in England. The Puritan controversy arose over questions of order and practice. Down to the reign of James I, the Puritans generally accepted the episcopal form of church government, and prob-
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ably would have continued to do so had the more moderate form of the episcopacy which prevailed under Elizabeth been continued. But under James and Charles prelatical claims were heightened, and Archbishops Bancroft and Laud were, in ever-increasing measure, instru- ments of the Stuart tyranny. The response of the Puritans was to urge the more democratic form of church government offered by Presby- terianism in England, while the Puritans who migrated hither speedily adopted the Congre- gational system, thanks to the influence of the Pilgrims and the practical exigencies of the sit- uation. The bitterness with which the Puri- tans here, two generations later, opposed the introduction tof Episcopalianism, is sufficient proof of the completeness with which the epis- copacy had been identified in their minds with those Stuart policies which they most feared and hated.
The Puritan protest against matters of prac- tice included a wide variety of details. So far as morals were concerned, it was a demand for a much higher ethical standard than was preva- lent. Such an attitude is never conducive to popularity. But there can be little ground for dispute that in many respects morals in sixteenth-century England were at a low ebb,
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and that the Puritans had good ground for their protest. A great deal has been said about their narrowness in abolishing the supposedly inno- cent pastimes which are alleged to have made "merrie England" such a joyous place. Ma- caulay, in a famous sentence, declared that they put down bear-baiting not because that pastime gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Quite true - they opposed it because the kind of pleasure which it gave the spectators was degrading. So we to-day prohibit cockfighting, not so much for the sake of the game-cocks, who, for aught I know, may enjoy what is at least a natural exercise of their powers, but because the sport is morally debas- ing to the human on-lookers. The plain fact is that Puritanism permanently raised the moral tone of the whole English people, and its benefi- cent results remain to this day.
So far as church practices in matters of wor- ship were concerned, their protest was primarily a demand for the omission of those things which seemed to them to be superstitious relics re- maining over from the old religion. If James I at his accession had had the wisdom to grant the very moderate requests of the Puritans to the extent of making the debated practices optional, all the more moderate Puritans would have been
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satisfied. His insistence on those practices as es- sentials which must be accepted was just as much a magnifying of trifles as was the scruple of the Puritans in refusing them. And for the Puritans it must be added that the vestments, the cross- ings, and the observance of feast-days, to which they objected, were not what they are to us to-day, merely matters of taste or of dramatic effect, but were vivid symbols of an ecclesiastical bondage from which England had but lately made her escape. And their demands for a preaching ministry and for the abolition of pluralities were aimed at genuine abuses in church life.
It was the ardor of their religious convictions, and their despair of any reforms in England that would permit them to worship God as they saw fit, which provided a motive for migration even more powerful than the political and economic conditions. In Winthrop's "Reasons for New England" the first item is the importance of establishing a church there which shall be a bulwark against Catholicism and a refuge from persecution. Not that the Puritans had any idea of providing a place where general toleration of all religions should be practised. That was a conception held by very few persons at that time. What they naturally desired was a place
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where the form of church in which they believed could be set up and maintained without interfer- ence, as an integral part of a social order. That was a quite rational desire, and the methods by which they sought to secure it were those which their background and ideals suggested. Though they came intending to set up a "particular church," they did not at first intend a separation from the Church of England, nor did they dream of separating church and state, for that again was an idea far in advance of their time. They intended a "theocrasie," and to secure that "rule of God" they deliberately adopted the Mosaic law alongside the English common law. It is easy to deride the notion that a code de- veloped among Jews in Palestine two thousand years earlier could be made to work among English pioneers on a new continent. But we must remember that they held the universally accepted belief in the inspiration of the scrip- tures, which in all sincerity they sought to put into practice. It was, at least, a "noble experi- ment." To their action is attributed much of the alleged harshness of the Puritan rule. But, as a matter of fact, the Mosaic law as a whole is a code far more humane and enlightened than any other which has come down from the ancient world, and in many respects was less
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drastic and cruel than the laws of England at the time of the Puritan emigration. For every act of cruelty or injustice on the part of the Puritans who came hither, a dozen instances as bad or worse can be cited in the other colonies or in England. Their religious ideals, and the in- tensity with which they held them, no doubt gave them ground for the severity with which offenders were treated, but that same religious idealism fortified them in the face of perils and hardships.
The fact is that the Puritans as a whole were not a peculiar, fanatical sect, obsessed by strange notions. Fanatics there were among them, as there are in any religious group, from Catholics to Quakers, which takes its religion very seri- ously. But as a whole, the body of Puritans which migrated hither between 1630 and 1640 represented a picked lot of Englishmen of vari- ous social grades, from younger sons of the gen- try and university-trained ministers to yeomen and small tradesmen and artisans. They were of the same type that remained at home, men like Sir John Eliot, Hampden, and Milton, and the rank and file of Cromwell's "Ironsides." Those who came here were picked by natural selection - those most independent and determined. They came on no light-hearted adventure, but
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knowing that life anywhere is to be taken seri- ously, and doubly so when one is leaving home and country, friends and kinsmen, in an enter- prise full of hazard. Men engaged in such an undertaking have small inclination to frivolity and little toleration for any notions or ways of conduct which hinder or seriously threaten the success of the business in which they are en- gaged.
That is the light in which we ought to view them. They were seventeenth-century English- men, holding the views and the prejudices of their age, and not more intolerant than other religionists were then intolerant. But they were practical, capable, intelligent men, passionately determined not to turn back from the furrow which they had set their hand to plough. In an easy-going age, far removed from all the dis- comforts and perils which they underwent - an age which exhibits much of the laxity and moral decay of the England which they left- we cannot but respect and honor their courage and their fortitude.
OUR RICHEST INHERITANCE A SERMON PREACHED BY REVEREND ABBOT PETERSON SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS, JUNE 3, 1929
OUR RICHEST INHERITANCE
I KINGS VII, 51. And Solomon brought in the things which David, his father, had dedicated.
W E New-Englanders are sometimes taunted with the charge that we indulge in ancestor worship, that we unduly magnify the significance of a past which, instead of being romantically adventurous, was really rather prosaic, and that our reverence for the achieve- ments of our forebears is largely based on senti- mental imagination.
Mencken and Louis Bromfield and others of their kind take a malicious pleasure in ridiculing people whose genealogical passion has become an obsession and whose pride of ancestry has made them indifferent to the needs and issues of their own day and generation.
Most of us are willing to admit that, in certain isolated instances, there may be justification for such cynical criticism, but we are not ready to admit the justice of the critic's wholesale con- demnation. The cynic's attitude is usually the result of his complete misunderstanding of the underlying motive for our veneration of the past!
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Any civilization which is deeply rooted, and which has achieved a sense of historic perspec- tive, naturally cherishes the memory of its dif- ficult beginnings and finds inspiration in the heroic record of its founders. To be descended from stock which for generations has been up- right and self-respecting is not merely a matter for self-congratulation, but also an incentive for profound searching of heart. To bear an hon- ored name is more than a cause for vainglorious satisfaction - it is a grave responsibility.
Above all, in an age that has cast off many of the old restraints and restrictions which formerly helped to safeguard community righteousness, to live up to the ethical and moral standards of one's forebears is an increasingly difficult busi- ness.
Underlying the outward, joyous celebration of an occasion like this, therefore, there must always run the deeper current of genuine hu- mility. We have to live up to an exalted and difficult standard. More is expected of us than we can possibly perform.
All of us who are gathered here to-day have accepted the invitation of this ancient parish for a combination of reasons.
The first and obvious reason, of course, is that we may share in the rejoicing of the members of
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this church on such a significant anniversary. To have completed three centuries of existence is in itself an achievement and a legitimate occa- sion for congratulation. None of us would.will- ingly miss such a birthday celebration.
The second reason is that every one of us here to-day, no matter what his denominational label, has a deep personal interest in this church and a stake in its welfare. It belongs to us all, in the sense that we all share in the many and varied inheritances which it has so generously be- queathed. It is the mother church of many New England parishes. It has set the stamp of its influences upon ten generations.
This is not the time for extended historical survey, but the Episcopalian who sits in these pews to-day will remember the words of the Salem company as it set sail: "We esteeme it our honour to call the Church of England, from which we rise, our dear mother."
He will remember also that Skelton and Hig- ginson, the first two ministers of this church, were regularly ordained priests of the Church of England and brought with them to these shores the tradition of the dignified language of devo- tion which survived all subsequent changes of ecclesiastical allegiance.
The Baptist will glory in that affirmation of
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parochial independence which this parish shares with his communion, and will remember that Roger Williams's name appears on the list of ministers of this church.
The Congregationalist will gratefully recall how this church joined hands with the Plymouth Pilgrims in determining the rules and usages of Congregational polity and in inaugurating independent self-government among the New England churches.
The Unitarian will rejoice as he remembers the covenant of this church: "We covenant with the Lord and one with another ... to walk together in all his ways ... "- a covenant so simple and so broad that later generations, with- out let or hindrance, could follow the gleam of truth wherever it might lead.
These are some of the inheritances which we gratefully acknowledge to-day.
It is not of these, however, that I would speak this morning, but of another bequest which this church has left to posterity - a bequest which contains the richest inheritance of all.
When a man dies, his last will and testament is usually an enumeration of the possessions which he passes on to his heirs. There is one bequest, however, which is seldom specifically stated. It is the inheritance by the son of his 106
father's unfinished task. The son not only in- herits material wealth, but also falls heir to his father's incompleted work.
The son may ignore or refuse to accept that particular bequest. Nevertheless, acceptable or distasteful, as the case may be, the task his father left unfinished is bequeathed to the son for completion.
Into this heritage of unfulfilled projects, all of us are born. We find ourselves enmeshed in a network of unsolved problems, half-completed enterprises, and unrealized hopes handed down to us by the preceding generation.
In a single sentence our text expresses this eternal principle of inheritance: "And Solomon brought in the things which David his father had dedicated."
David could set great forces in motion; he could lay the foundations of a mighty kingdom; but when death ended his strenuous reign, certain projects, dear to his heart, necessarily remained unfulfilled. The exactions of constant warfare had left no time for making Jerusalem the city of his dreams, and, most disappointing of all, had prevented him from realizing his dearest ambition - the building of a worthy temple where men might worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.
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Solomon, consequently, inherited from David more than land and wealth: he fell heir to his father's dreams.
Thus, my friends, it has always been and al- ways will be. Truly worthy accomplishments are larger than any one individual life or any single generation.
Three centuries ago our forebears chose this spot for their settlement, built their wharves, made their first rough clearings here in the wilderness, and broke ground for their first cornfields.
And even before they completed the roofs over their heads, they took counsel together that they might provide for the worship of God.
They landed here with a sense of high destiny. They dreamed of an ideal commonwealth, a true province of the Kingdom of God - a commu- nity of Christian believers, closely united by a common purpose and a common faith. Here the world was to have a new birth of righteous- ness, brotherly love, and peace. Here on these bleak shores, a fresh start was to be made and a new beginning of better things inaugurated.
And so that first generation toiled through winter's bitter cold and summer's scorching heat, and, dying, bequeathed to their sons and daugh- ters the heritage of their dream. Like David,
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they found that one lifetime was not enough. Their unfinished task had to be passed on to a new generation.
It is a noble privilege to be included in a tradition so rich, so lofty, so adventurous. To accept an inheritance like that ought to provide an incentive unfailing in its stimulus.
But, alas! what ought to be and what is are two very different matters. After these three centuries, the unthinking crowd takes the church of God for granted, as a permanent, impregnable, established fact. And yet the church, like a school or a college, is at the mercy of a single generation. Let one generation, through care- lessness, or indifference, or preoccupation, re- fuse to accept this inherited responsibility, and centuries of self-denial and consecration are ren- dered fruitless.
The church of God is ours in another sense than that of accident of birth or of formal affiliation.
It is entrusted to our stewardship.
It is ours to strengthen or to weaken, to make or to mar.
It is not something static and fixed and un- changing.
Instead, the spiritual needs to which it min- isters are constantly growing and expanding.
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Its mission is never completed; its work is never done.
Religion, therefore, bequeaths to us, as its eternally unfinished tasks, the most significant endeavors in the whole range of human life.
To teach a careless generation renewed re- spect for the moral law, to inspire the hopeless with new incentive, to bring comfort to the bereaved, to secure justice for the oppressed, to provide a spiritual interpretation of life's problems, to help the seeker after reality to find God - these are religion's never-completed tasks bequeathed to us from the past.
This is your richest inheritance. And your highest incentive is the realization that upon you depend the permanence of religion, the stability of the moral law, and the continuity of faith in the living God.
It is a solemn inheritance. To you is entrusted all that mankind through the centuries has held dearer than life itself.
All this, my friends, is implied in to-day's New Testament lesson. No great task is ac- complished once for all. Instead it is a never- ending continuity of effort.
The great benefactors of the race make their contributions to human welfare, but even their heroic achievements are not final. Their succes-
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sors share in their accomplishments. The in- escapable fact, concludes the author of Hebrews, is " that apart from us, they should not be made perfect."
That is the same as saying that every work of the past - all that men suffered and died for - is forever incomplete unless we of the present lay hold of it and carry it on.
What a compelling challenge to youth's chiv- alrous idealism and to manhood's sense of re- sponsibility lies in that solemn realization !
Institutions that are worthy to survive, truths that are worth learning, work that is worth doing, a religion which gives meaning, dignity, and incentive to human existence - all these are handed down to us and committed to our keeping. None of these are perfect. All are more or less incomplete and partial.
Granted that we find much to criticize. All the greater, then, the challenge!
On this significant anniversary, as this ancient parish begins the fourth century of its existence, we come to this service, not only to bring the tribute of our reverent appreciation of all it has meant in the religious life of New England, but also to consecrate ourselves anew to the fulfil- ment of the dreams of its founders.
We, like Higginson and Skelton, would make
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this land a province of the Kingdom of God, a spiritual commonwealth, a beloved community of hope and faith. We would dedicate ourselves to the mission of helping bring to fulfilment what the past has entrusted to our keeping. With profound searching of conscience, we would accept our richest inheritance and strive to be worthy of its challenging implications.
Almighty God, by whose guidance our fathers crossed a stormy sea and by whose grace were enabled here in a wilderness to lay the founda- tions of this commonwealth, we, the heirs of their dreams and the inheritors of their ideals, ask for strength to fulfil the unfinished tasks that have been laid upon us.
Send down upon all ministers of the gospel and all congregations committed to their charge such a sense of their stewardship that they may do their part to bring in Thy Kingdom and to establish Thy rule of righteousness and love.
AMEN.
Services in connection with the THREE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY of the gathering of the FIRST CHURCH IN SALEM
SUNDAY EVENING, MAY 26, 1929
7:15 In the Church, before the service, the following programme of music for Organ and Violoncello will be given:
Meditation Squire
Elegie
· Faure
Hymnus
Holter .
Berceuse Squire ·
Ave Maria
Schubert
Cantilena
Goltermann
Berceuse
Delensky
Mr. JOHN H. QUERY, Violoncellist
7:45 There will be a service of worship conducted by REV. HARRIS G. HALE, D.D., Minister of the Old North Church in Marblehead, the oldest of the daughter churches.
DR. BILLINGS will speak on "The First Church" The music for the choir will be:
Anthem: Psalm 150 Franck
Response: At Thine Altar Lowly Kneeling . Hanscom
Tenor Solo: My Hope is in the Everlasting . Stainer
Postlude: Dedication
· Popper
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TUESDAY EVENING, MAY 28, 1929
7:45 In the Church, Mr. JOSEPH N. ASHTON will play the following programme on the Organ:
Choral Prelude Karg-Elert
Scherzo in D
Rousseau
The Little Shepherd · Debussy
Suite in F
Corelli
Prelude in G
Bach
Scherzo (Fifth Sonata) .
Guilmant
8:15 Mr. STEPHEN WILLARD PHILLIPS will read an address on "The North Church." Following the address, the historical exhibition will be open and refreshments will be served.
SUNDAY MORNING, JUNE 2, 1929
10:15 A programme of music for Organ, Violoncello and Harp.
10:45 The Third Century Service and sermon. REV. SAMUEL ATKINS ELIOT, D.D., minister of the Arling- ton Street Church in Boston, will preach the Century Sermon.
SUNDAY EVENING, JUNE 2, 1929
7:15 There will be an Organ Recital by Mr. GEORGE J. PERRY, with the following programme:
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