USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, Mass. : proceedings in commemoration of its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary, Feb. 7th and 8th, 1914 > Part 6
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During the Civil War a Northern woman said, "But Mr. Lincoln, you think God is on our side, don't you?" The President replied: "Madam, I hope that
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we are on God's side." Heman Humphrey's absorbing idea was to get God's point of view in every particular matter, as lie came to it. He delighted in search for the mind of God in nature and human nature as well as in the Scripures. That is the way he attained the sanctified common sense that Dr. Todd said he had sent around the world for fifty years.
We would not go home till morning if I quoted and expressed my appreciation of what his brethren have said of him. It makes one humble to read Dr. Todd's address at the golden wedding of Dr. and Mrs. Humphrey and his funeral sermon on Dr. Humphrey. The heart and capacity to write such tributes is akin to rightfully winning them. Could any man have really deserved such loving, honest appreciation of his friends? They were as much to him as he was to them. It was the mutual capacity for all that is best that made friend, pastor, men, women and children of Pittsfield so much to each other; and they molded each other in developing that capacity.
GENERAL MORRIS SCHAFF'S ADDRESS
Introducing General Schaff, the Pastor said:
Many of you will remember the Poem of the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Anniversary of this Church, entitled "A Prayer for Church and Town." We are honored and fortunate in having the author of that poem here to-night. This celebration would not have been complete without him. We all are glad now to listen to him, General Schaff.
General Schaff said:
I think I should feel more at ease if I were not up in this pulpit. [General Schaff then descended to the floor of the church].
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Surely, my friends, it is a great pleasure for me to meet with you once more, yet that pleasure is marred a bit by a reference to some lines I wrote, for, as you know, the man in a community who has the least weight is the fellow that tries to write poetry. But let all this be as it may, it was my fortune to be here at the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Anniversary of this venerable Church. It had then at its head Jonathan L. Jenkins, and it seems fitting and proper that at the very outset I should say a word about him; for besides being the best preacher I ever heard, one of the most sug- gestive talkers I ever met and one of the most con- genial companions that ever graced a table or a hearth, he was a very dear and steadfast friend. I need not recall to you who remember him his distinctively aristocratic personality, those flaming dark eyes, or that voice that rose and fell through all the compass of feeling. No, like all men of genius, he left his mark. Jenkins ! friend of other days ! we are here celebrating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of your old church. Tender are our memories. You are not for- gotten, and your old congregation wafts a greeting to you on that other shore.
Of all the elements in our being the spiritual is altogether the most vital and potent. The mystery of life, time and space, each in its way so vastly deep, impenetrable and immeasurable, yet and notwith- standing, under the realms of the spiritual they lie comprehensible and passive, passive as the fields under the sunlight. And as the sunlight warms and converts the soil of the fields into living form and being, clothed in strength and beauty, so up out of the soil of the heart the spiritual in man through creative feeling brings aspirations which from time to time bloom with visions, visions that penetrate life's mystery and then,
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leaping time and space, carry us into the presence of the infinite, the beneficent presence of God himself ; and only ceases its efforts when it has revealed a beau- tiful land-a reward for the righteous, a consolation for the weary and the tear-shedding poor.
No, friends, I am not trying to preach, but religion is not a figure of speech. It is a reality ; it is a living thing ; it is a valid, heaven-inspired, solemn truth, and its dwelling place is the heart of man.
If, to use the language of the Bible, we apply our hearts unto wisdom and turn from this rather blazing fireside of poetry to that of cold reason, it takes but a moment for us to discover that this old church of Pittsfield is an embodiment, as this church and all churches have been, of man's instinctive aspirations, and on those instinctive aspirations alone the founda- tions of all government and progress rest. Now, if this be a truth, and I believe it to be a very profound one, don't let us make any mistakes. Although you are proud of your mammoth General Electric plant, your banks, and your world-famous mills, yet they in themselves do not suggest justice, charity, or magnan- imity, the characteristics and the life blood of modern civilization, for they are essentially of and belong to the kingdom of mammon, while this church belongs to that other kingdom, the kingdom that is referred to in the Lord's Prayer by the Nazarene, that wisest counsellor and statesman, that best friend of the poor and heavy-laden, he who first opened the door to the hope of immortality, moreover the first and best gen- tleman that the world has ever seen.
Look, then, at this church from any point of view, worldly, social or spiritual, and you cannot help but see and feel what it is and what it must have been to the intellectual life of Pittsfield. In years it dates back to
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1764, the very dawn of the era of the greatest event that the world has seen since Luther's time. The voice of the ages spoke to its founders and out on the fields of the Revolution they fell for that new-born country. Their sons, leaders in state and town, by their courage and high standards of civic life, have given a pride to Pittsfield and to every man that hails from Berkshire.
Oh, Pittsfield friends of that kind and class of my own day-yes, of my own day-who worshipped here ! At the very thought of them that door opens and here they come marching down the aisle again. Here come the Colts, the Warriners, the Barkers, the Russells. I am afraid I shall forget some of those names-down the aisle they come. Robert Adam, Pingree, Dawes, Edward Learned, Ensign Kellogg, Taft, the Redfields, Plunketts, the Wests, Paddock and Hull, here they come. And last, but not least, here comes, too, my dear friend, the war-tried, gallant Joseph Tucker. Heavy and wooden is his labored tread, for you know he lost a leg at Port Hudson : a kindlier face, a warmer heart, never adorned a pew or a judicial bench than that of Judge Joseph Tucker. Hail, hail, I say to you, Tucker and all of those friends of my youth, all hail !
And O, old bell, in this steeple, I have heard you clang this town's and this nation's joy, I have heard you toll the town's and the nation's sorrow, and I have heard your tones die away over these leaning meadows and over these laurel-blooming and sky-propping hills. Ring on ! ring on in the days to come as you have rung to me in the days that have gone by! Ring on, calling us all to upright lives, to be generous and kind to one another, and inspire us to lead our town, and above all, our country in the path of righteousness, for righteous- ness exalteth a nation. God bless this old church this day and every day on to the end.
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In closing the meeting, the Pastor said:
I am sure that we must have felt that the words to which we have listened, especially those which have been spoken by the last of the friends who have ad- dressed us here, have been truly more appropriate to this church and this room than they could have been appropriate to the gathering about our supper tables ; and that we must go from this meeting with a new sense of the sacredness of the Church of Christ, of every church of Christ, of this church of Christ in so far as it is a true church. We are able to realize, all of us, a little more clearly than we have before, what it means in a community to have had for one hundred and fifty years consecrated Christian men and women wisely and faithfully led and served, and to have their children's children following in their footsteps, doing God's work in their own town. We have not begun to honor them all to-day. We have spoken but a few of the names ; we have told but a few of the noble words and deeds; but enough has been said to make us re- member more constantly, more conscientiously, I trust, our own duty to the church, to the community, to God, in the days that are just to come. May God's blessing go with us all from this meeting.
THE SUNDAY MORNING SERVICE
OPENING SENTENCE
"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth." (Ps. 121:1,2).
INVOCATION
God of our fathers, we their children lift up our hearts unto Thee in thankfulness, in faith, in hope, in love. Thou hast been mindful of us in the days that are past. We beseech Thee to bless us in the days that are to come; and above all to make and keep us ever mindful of Thee. We ask it in the name of Christ our Saviour.
PRAYER BY DR. CALKINS
Almighty God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ Who hast promised that whensoever Thy people meet together in prayer Thou wilt be present to bless them, and hast taught Thy faithful people that they should not forsake the assembling of themselves together, but that in every place where prayer is wont to be made there art Thou: Hear, we beseech Thee, the prayers and supplications of Thy people here present, and grant us, O Lord, our God, all things that are needful for this our present life and for our everlasting sal- vation. Hear our prayers of thanksgiving and of praise, O Lord, our God, for all that Thou hast done
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for us Thy children from the beginning of our lives and even to this hour. We do bless Thee for the beauty of the world which Thou hast made, for the succession of day and night, summer and winter, seed- time and harvest, and that Thou hast not left Thy- self without a witness in the world which Thou hast made. We do bless Thee for all those blessings tem- poral and spiritual which we have continually received at Thy hands, for food and for raiment, and all the comforts and conveniences of this life; but O Lord, our God, above all else, for Thy unfathomable love in that unspeakable gift of Thy son, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, who is our only means of grace, who is our only hope of glory. We do bless Thee that when Thou didst deliver him up for our offences Thou didst raise him again for our justification, by whose resurrection from the dead we have hope of everlasting life. For all the promises of Thy Holy Word, for all the comforts of our most holy faith, for our Christian baptism, instruction, upbringing, for those our parents, teachers, friends, who have com- municated unto us their faith and have given unto us the imperishable possessions of our lives, we offer our thanks and our prayers of gratitude and of praise. And O Lord, for Thy church that Thou hast placed in this world we do bless Thee. For the saints, apostles, prophets and martyrs who in every day and gener- ation have witnessed to Thy unchanging and un- dying truth, into the welcome and reward of whose labors we ourselves are entered, we thank Thee. Es- pecially we bless Thee for this church that Thou hast planted in this place, which Thou hast watched over by Thy holy spirit, guided by Thy presence and com- forted with Thy truth. We bless Thee for all those Thy servants who here from year to year and from
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generation to generation have broken the bread of life to those who have worshipped here, and have in- structed them out of Thy Holy Word: who have been true shepherds to the flock and have given us an ensample of a godly, holy life. We ask Thy bless- ing upon Thy servant who now ministers to this peo- ple. We pray Thee that he may be enriched by Thy spirit, comforted by Thy grace; above all that his may be such purity of life that he may adorn the doctrine that he teaches, that he may rightly and duly administer Thy holy sacraments and lead this Thy people into the fullness of Thy truth and the glory of Thy life. We bless Thee for all those Thy servants who, having witnessed here a good confession, have now fallen on sleep and are gathered unto their fath- ers; and we beseech Thee that a double portion of their spirit may rest upon us Thy children and upon our children's children, that we may imitate the ex- ample of their patience, and at last may enter into the joy of their resurrection. And now hear the prayers, we beseech Thee, of this people gathered in this Thy house. Thou, O Lord, dost know what are the deepest needs and desires of our hearts; Thou canst answer them every one. Hear the prayer of the penitent, O Lord, our God, that he may feel his sin to be forgiven, that he may feel himself to be washed and to be clean, to have a new heart and a right spirit given unto him, that henceforth he may obey the commandments and walk in the way of Thy truth. Hear the prayers of those who are tempted, and who feel themselves to be assailed by sins well known to themselves and to Thee. Help them, we pray Thee. to put on the helmet of salvation which is the word of God and to come off conquerors through Him who loved us and who gave Himself for us. Hear the
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prayers, O Lord, our God, of those who are conscious of some burden not known unto others, but well known to themselves and to Thee. Help them to lay their bur- den at Jesus' feet. Give them strength, O Lord, our God, to take it up again in memory of Him who bore the cross for us on Calvary, and to endure to the end with joy unspeakable and full of glory. And Lord, hear our prayers, we beseech Thee, for all sorts and con- ditions of men. We pray for those who know nothing of the story of Jesus and His love. Hasten the day, we beseech Thee, when the whole world shall be cov- ered with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea; and grant that this Thy church may be a light that is set on a hill, whose out-goings shall be to the ends of the earth. Hear our prayers for those our friends, our neighbors, members of our families, present or absent, whose names we now mention in our hearts in silent prayer before Thee. Bless, O Lord, our God, those that are sick of body, and if it be Thy will restore them to health and to strength, or else dispose their souls to Thy salvation. Hear our prayers for all travellers by land and by sea. Protect them in all dangers to which they may be exposed, and bring them at last to their homes in peace. Hear our prayers for young men and young women absent from their homes. Keep them, O Lord, in Thy faith and fear. Confirm and strengthen them in every good and holy resolution, that they may offer up themselves to be a living and a holy sacrifice in Thy sight. And O Lord, our God, hear us as we pray each for all and all for each, that this may be in very truth at this hour a house of God, a place of prayer, the gate of heaven; that here we may feel ourselves to be caught out of the stress and burden and sorrow and weight of this world and to be carried into the joy and glory and
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peace of Thy presence, into that secret place of the Most High where no plague can come nigh us or our dwelling, because the angels of the Lord are bearing us up in their arms lest we dash even our foot against a stone. Hear this our common prayer with the for- giveness of our sins. Answer not the words of our petition, O Lord, our God. Answer Thou to the deep- est longing and aspirations of our hearts, that we may be a people whose God is the Lord, and that we in the light of His life may continue, until our journey too shall end; that we may dwell in the house of the Lord forever; through riches of mercy in Christ Jesus, our Lord, to whom with Thee and the Holy Ghost be all honor and glory, world without end.
-Amen.
SERMON BY DR. CALKINS
Our text this morning is found in the book of the Revelation, the third chapter and the eighth verse:
" Behold I have set before thee an open door, which no man can shut."
This is the word of a prophet to a church in Asia two thousand years ago; but when a man opens his mouth to prophesy about the Church in the day in which we live he is very likely to invert that verse, and to make it read like this: " Behold I have set before thee a door that is shut and no man can open it." In other words, there are plenty of people who have their doubts about the future of institutional religion, in the day in which we live. That the spirit of Jesus Christ will survive, that the ideals of Christi- anity will prevail, they do not doubt; but they cherish the idea that the Church has for her chief possession not a present and not a future, but only a past.
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There is a very comfortable persuasion upon the part of most people who are outside of the Christian Church, and a very uncomfortable persuasion upon the part of some people who are inside the Church, that it has seen its best days. Our Lord said that He would found His Church upon a rock and that the gates of hell should not prevail against it; but if we are to listen to what a good many people say in our day we must incline to the persuasion that the gates of hell already have prevailed against it. We are sur- rounded by an insistent and by a voluminous senti- ment to the effect that the Church has fallen upon evil days and is in itself in a very bad way. To a great many people the Christian Church presents the spectacle of singing "Onward, Christian Soldiers," at the same time that it is itself steadily falling back- wards. Our papers and our magazines are filled with articles about the ebb of ecclesiasticism, and about the decline of institutional religion, and about the failure of the Church. Especially we are asked to cast our eyes behind us, and to contrast the plight into which we are now fallen with the Church as it used to be in the good old days of our fathers. We are reminded how the Church is put to it in our day to get reputable timber for her ministry, so that whereas we used to have wooden churches and granite ministers, now all too often we have granite churches and wooden min- isters. We are asked to contrast the position of the Church in the community as it exists to-day with the position which it used to possess when all but a frac- tion of the community would be found within the Church, and the fraction that was outside was the least influential portion of it; whereas now we are told there is only a fraction of a community that is interested in the Church and that too is the least in-
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fluential portion of it. So that too many people it seems like mere irony to quote this word of a prophet of the Christian Church, " Behold I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it."
I ask you on this anniversary occasion to look at the Church as it exists to-day in our modern social order. We have taken the backward look. Let us take the forward look. We have seen what our fath- ers have done. Let us see what there is for us to do. We have rendered account of whence we have come. Let us render account of whither we are going. We have seen what the Church was. Let us see what the Church is. And I have recorded my own persua- sion in the text which I have chosen. I announce as the burden of my message to-day the conviction that the Church not only is not moribund, but that she was never more alive; not only that she has a future, but that she never had such a future; not only that the door before her is not shut, but that it was never wider open. Not in irony, but in deliberate prophecy I give you the word of our text, " Behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it."
In the first place, then, let us try to rid ourselves of the delusion that there existed somewhere behind us a kind of an ecclesiastical paradise; that there was somewhere in the days of our fathers a golden age of the Church to which we must look back but to which we can never look forward. Really I do not know of any well-accepted idea which can so little stand the test of history. When I turn the pages of my church his- tory and try to locate an ecclesiastical paradise, I am as much put to it as the archæologist is when he turns up the soil of Mesopotamia and tries to locate a Garden of Eden. The fact is that each is a myth; that neither has any actual or historic existence.
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Summon to your aid all the church history that you ever knew or ever hope to know, and tell me where- abouts in the past you are going to locate the Garden of Eden in the history of the Church. Will you go back to the New Testament times? Well, already you find the story of a prayer meeting that ended in a brawl, and you find that all St. John can say of a certain church is that the Lord God would spew it out of his mouth. If you examine the halcyon ante- Nicene days, already you find the good old church fathers arming themselves to the teeth in order to defend nice points in theology, and find churchmen prepared to throw each other bodily out of the Church because of hair-breadth variations in the interpreta- tion of a single text. I suppose that the person who is even most in the grip of this delusion, that there does exist somewhere in the past an ecclesiastical para- dise, would pass over rather rapidly the middle ages, and even the days of the Reformation when Martin Luther threw his ink pot at a personal devil, and when John Calvin declared that unless the Lord God should descend from above, they would be engulfed in bar- barism. Now I think that most people when they try to locate this good old time in the history of the Church think of our New England days, and of the Church as it used to exist in the days of our New England fathers. But Mr. Fosdick in his recent ar- ticle in the Atlantic Monthly has pointed out how difficult it is to find good old church days even in the history of New England. Will you set it down, he asks, in those days when the Congregationalists of Massachusetts and when the Episcopalians of Virginia were trying to set up a state church that should be supported by a public tax? Will you put it as late as 1833, when Lyman Beecher bewailed it as an in-
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tolerable calamity that people of a different religious persuasion from his own were not compelled to con- tribute to his salary? Will you set it down in the days when no Governor Hughes could depend on any general sentiment to support him in his assault upon public gambling, but when many a meeting house went up in the city of New York erected by means of a public lottery? Will you put it down in the days when no such books as Jesus Christ and the Social Question, or as The Social Aspects of Christianity were so much as dreamed of, but when Tennyson's aunt could rock herself back and forth weeping copi- ously because she said the Lord God had elected her to everlasting salvation but had damned her neighbors who were just as good as she? Shall we go back to the days of Jonathan Edwards who pictured the Lord God holding souls over a brimstone pit, or shall we go back to the days of John Ruskin who declared that his Sundays used to cast their shadows upon his life three days in advance? If we go back to the good old days of John Higginson, we find him preaching in Salem and declaring that the cause of a pure re- ligion was exceeding decaying and expiring in this country, and when we listen to Cotton Mather, preach- ing in his good old days, we find him declaring that " the body of the rising generation is a poor, perishing, unconverted, and except the Lord God pour down His spirit, an undone generation." And I fancy that if we should read the letters and confessions of the min- isters who used to preach in what are called the good old New England days we should find more real pessi- mism and more lamentation than ministers are guilty of in even their most lugubrious moments in the days in which we live. The fact is there have been no good old days. The straight and narrow path has never
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been overcrowded. The kingdom of Heaven has never been taken by violence. When our Lord said that just one handful of seed was going to fall on good ground, He spoke a parable not only for His time but He spoke a parable for all time; and when he told his first band of twelve disciples that there would be many a house and many a city that would turn them out, he was speaking the truth not only for that apostolic band, but for every band of his true apostles. There never have been any good old days. If you will read the church history of your fathers, you will make up your mind that you would not bring back the Church of your fathers if you could. It was a good Church for their day, but it is not a good enough Church for our day. Perhaps their meeting houses were crowded two or three times of a Sunday; but these congregations had not begun to grapple with the problems of their world or the problems of our world, and they were not sending out one single missionary to testify of Jesus Christ in foreign lands. The Church of our fathers was a good Church, but the Church of their sons is a better Church, and one does not need to be a deluded optimist if he cherishes the conviction that the Church of our sons is going to be even better and stronger than the Church of their fathers. "Be- hold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it."
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