USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Andover > History of Andover theological seminary, 1933 > Part 9
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The country churches depended on revivals for most of their accessions to membership. Again and again men wrote for their class report a record of scores and hundreds received into their churches by these special efforts. They shared in the special revival seasons of 1837 and 1857, and they had their own special awakenings locally.
Classes adopted the custom, even in comparatively early years, of collecting information from each member at the end of a certain period of years and printing the reports in a pamphlet for the benefit of all. Certain of the classes were distinguished by members who had gained eminence. Such was the class of 1819. Bingham and Thurston were mission- aries to Hawaii, King to Greece, Byington to the Choctaws. Smith, Wheeler, and Wayland became college presidents ;
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Ripley, Torrey, Warner, and Haddock were professors. Orville Dewey became a prominent Unitarian minister. The class of 1857 at graduation met in "Uncle Sam's" recitation room in Phillips Academy for its class supper. After supper they took one another into their confidence. "Every man be- trayed himself," runs the record, "told all he knew; whether he was engaged or not, and to whom; whether he had a call, and where, etc., etc. It was a merry time. School days were over. No more bells to prayers and recitations. Work, waiting, reward, these were before us. We went out to the first, to wait for the last, with a vote to meet in ten years."
The class of 1855 numbered thirty-nine. Abbe, Anthony, Colby, Fay, Foster, Loomis, Patten, Smith, and Webber, were pastors in Massachusetts. Moore and Ray settled in Vermont, Pratt in Connecticut, Bates in New York, and Grassie in Pennsylvania. Two were in the United States army during the Civil War. One was made consul to Newcastle-on-Tyne in England by President Lincoln. One became an Episco- palian. Hurlbut and Shaw had honorable careers as home missionary pastors, one in Nebraska and the other in Michigan. Two members of the class became college presidents, Bascom of the University of Wisconsin, after nearly twenty years as professor of rhetoric at Williams ; the other, Boardman, who after a similar professorship at Middlebury and two pastor- ates, became president of Maryville College, Tennessee. Two other members occupied professorial chairs, Marsh at the University of Vermont, and Mooar at the Pacific Theological Seminary. Aiken, Allen, Barnum, Bliss, Knapp, and Leonard, were all missionaries of the American Board, the last four for long terms of service in the Turkish Empire. Strong, after nineteen years of pastoral service near Boston, served for more than thirty years as editorial secretary of the American Board.
It is alumni records like these that gave Andover Seminary its eminence. The class of 1855 was not especially distin- guished. It can be duplicated more than once. The class of 1858 presents a wide variety of service. Baldwin was a pastor of Congregational and Presbyterian churches, chiefly in the
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Middle West. Batt was long time chaplain of the Massa- chusetts Reformatory at Concord. Bliss was secretary of the New West Education Commission, as Hamilton was of the American College and Education Society. Chamberlain was in the Christian Commission of Sherman's Army, and later in life an editor and chaplain of the Legislature in Iowa. Charles W. Clark spent thirty years of parish ministry in the Vermont town where he was born. James F. Clarke was for fifty years a missionary to Bulgaria, where he became principal of an institute, translator of textbooks, and an active agent in relief work for Bulgarian refugees. Anketell, Brown, Cruikshanks, Dickinson, Emerson, Fellows, were parish ministers. Fenn was minister of the High Street Church, Portland, Maine, for thirty-eight years. Goodell, as pastor of the Pilgrim Church in St. Louis for thirteen years, had a powerful influence in the Mississippi Valley. Howard was an army chaplain ; McGinley, a member of the Christian Commission at Antietam and Gettysburg. Meriam was murdered by brigands in Tur- key. Jameson became supervisor of Emerson College of Oratory in Boston ; Norton, superintendent of a ladies' college at Evanston, Illinois ; and Orton, professor of natural history at Vassar. Parker and Pike were country ministers, and Plumb had a long pastorate of thirty-five years at the Walnut Avenue Church in Roxbury, where he saw an attractive sub- urb become a ward of Boston, in which the people of foreign ancestry displaced most of the American stock. Perkins tried being a secretary for the American Tract Society and the Home Missionary Society for Colorado; Upham was for eleven years the secretary of the Presbyterian Ministers' Fund in Philadelphia. Thwing was a professor, Torrey a pastor in Maine, Twombly went to Honolulu, where he published books. Todd had an eleven years' pastorate in Boston and then one of twenty-one years in New Haven. Washburn was president of the Pasumalai Theological Seminary in India for twenty- two years, and then was president of the college there for nineteen years more. Willard was in home mission service. Young, after an apprenticeship of ten years of college teach- ing in the Western Reserve University, and a term of army
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service as captain of an Ohio company of volunteers, became a noted professor of astronomy at Dartmouth and Princeton for a combined term of nearly forty years.
Some of the ministers specialized in particular departments of Christian service. A century ago when Sunday schools were in their infancy, Jacob Little, who graduated from Andover about the time that the American Sunday School Union was organized, made Bible classes his chief concern in Granville, Ohio, where he was minister of the Congregational church for thirty-seven years. He studied his own lessons by using a round table on which he laid his Bible, with commentaries lying on the outer edge. It was a revolving table built for his convenience, and with its assistance he went through the New Testament and a part of the Old, taking about a day for the study of a single chapter. He held sessions of two classes on alternate Sunday evenings, one in the village and another on the outskirts. His scholars were over fourteen years old and were admitted to the classes only as they agreed to attend for a term of from three to six months. It was no vacation Bible school, or the experiment of a year. The number of scholars increased from sixty to two hundred and twelve in the course of seven years. Two-thirds of them were men and boys. The educational process resulted in many conversions. Parents saw to it that their children learned the selections from Scripture that they were expected to commit to memory, and in eighteen years "all but a sixth of them became pious."
Alumni of later years have had more opportunities in city parishes than did the men of an earlier day. Over a long period of time in a prominent pulpit individual ministers made a mark for themselves, either because they were able to build up a strong church or because they identified themselves with a civic cause. Some of them found special methods useful as means of advance. Such a man was Frederick A. Noble. Born in Maine, educated at Phillips Academy and Yale College, im- bibing theology at Andover and Lane Seminaries, he divided his ministry between the Presbyterians and the Congregation- alists. After thirteen years in St. Paul and Pittsburgh and then four years at New Haven, he reached the climax of his min-
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istry in a twenty-two year pastorate of Union Park Church, Chicago. It was his health that sent him West, but he did the work of a strong man in all his churches. He was a leader in the van of such modern movements as the recognition of young people in the church, the use of the catechetical method with children as a part of his annual program, the more efficient organization of the church and the denomination. He was elected a delegate from Connecticut to a National Council meeting in Detroit when no one else in his Association was enthusiastic enough about the Council to go. He believed in church representation on the foreign field, in the value of dea- conesses in the local church. He was chaplain of the Minnesota senate, and he recognized the civic obligation of the church. He found time to study and write upon Puritan history.
Alexander Mackenzie settled nearer his alma mater and kept an affectionate interest in it. His personal worth was tested by his long pastorate of forty-three years in the Shepard Memorial Church in Cambridge. He could not have remained there so long under the very shadow of Harvard College had he not been able to defend a staunch theology of his own or to harmonize his teaching with the best thought of his day. In reality he was liberal in his point of view, but he had inner qualities of spirit that kept him from becoming unevangelical. He had the mystical temperament, a poetic imagination, a culti- vated and fluent speech in the pulpit, and he had the reputation of being one of the great preachers among the Congrega- tionalists. His good judgment made his services sought as trustee of several educational institutions, including Andover Seminary.
Another minister who gained a reputation far beyond his own parish was Amory H. Bradford. Like Mackenzie, he had a great church back of him in a community that held high rank in wealth and culture. Like Noble, he was given prefer- ment among his ministerial brethren by being elected moder- ator of the National Council, but these advantages could not have been his had he not shown a consummate ability which warranted the confidence of those who knew him. He was a product of two seminaries, Auburn and Andover, where he
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was at one time Southworth lecturer. He had the advantage of a period of study at Oxford, which he enjoyed when on furlough from his church. For seven years he was able to give part of his time to editorial writing on the Outlook, and he ventured now and then into authorship, but his main task was a pastoral one, and his people at Montclair, New Jersey, kept him as their minister for the major part of half a century. Long pastorates are no mystery when the man fits the job. Bradford at Montclair fitted like a glove to the hand.
One minister found Finns in his parish territory, and was so interested in doing them good that he learned enough of their language to conduct their baptisms, marriages, and funerals in their tongue, greatly to their satisfaction. That made it possible to organize a Sunday School for them, with occasional preaching services and a night school. A number of ministers, with the new social consciousness in their hearts and minds, interested themselves in problems of industry as others were devoted to temperance or organized charity. Charles A. Dickinson in Boston made Berkeley Temple one of the earliest and best known institutional churches in the United States. A country minister in New Hampshire found that the local grange was not a helpful influence, but instead of denouncing it he organized a guild, which came to number two hundred and twenty-five members and to prove a real asset to the community, and in particular it paid the rent of a house for the minister for several years. A Long Island minister was among the first to try the method of answering questions sent in during the week at a Sunday afternoon ves- per service. Charles M. Sheldon in Topeka, Kansas, wrote "In His Steps," and read it to his congregation; it sprang forthwith into fame, and went around the world in sixteen different languages. Francis E. Clark brought into existence the Christian Endeavor Society as a local young people's organization in Williston Church in Portland, Maine. It was too good an idea to localize, too useful to be limited to a single denomination or a single country. It too went around the world to become domesticated everywhere.
Over against this worldwide fame stands this testimonial
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after a pastorate of thirteen years in the rural section of west- ern Massachusetts. "Few families in this scattered country parish fail to attend church. Seventy-five teams sometimes jam the horse-sheds of a pleasant summer Sunday. A class of men in the Sunday School has at times numbered seventy to eighty, and nearly the entire congregation remains for study. The pastor has given much help to the library, has done val- uable work for the literary club, conducts a young people's society that has been studying China recently, preaches thoughtful sermons, and has found time to serve as pastor" of a neighboring church since the death of its minister. This again is not a unique record, but merely one of many that have given honor to Andover and confidence in the alumni who went out from the Hill.
Long pastorates were more often possible in the country than in the town, though in either case the length of service depended partly on the man and partly on the people. Some churches grow restive under the guidance of the best of men, until like Dives they would not repent if an angel were sent unto them. Some ministers get restless in the best churches, and wander from place to place seeking satisfaction and find- ing none. Occasionally mere lethargy on the part of pastor and people accounts for a record of pastoral longevity, but usually a ministry of two or three decades in one church means real worth in a minister. Andover alumni did not soon exhaust their sermonic resources or have recourse to the bottom of the barrel. They knew how to study Scripture and problems in theology. They became seasoned veterans in the pulpit, trusted leaders in the churches, respected citizens in the com- munity. It is not strange that they were sought as chaplains in legislatures and reformatories, secretaries for philanthropic and educational organizations, trustees of educational institu- tions, speakers on public forums. To be an Andover man was strong recommendation for a candidate at any New England church, at least before 1880.
It would be possible to make a long list of single pastorates of unusual length, like Storrs, Bradford, and Robie. Edward Robie, for example, completed his course at Andover in 1843.
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Making his way to Europe at a time when few enjoyed the privileges of foreign study, he spent three years at the uni- versities of Halle and Berlin. Returning to his native town at Gorham, Maine, he taught in the seminary there for two years, and then was appointed instructor in sacred literature at Andover, where he remained four years, filling the place of librarian part of that time. In the year 1852 he went to Greenland, New Hampshire, to become pastor of the Congre- gational church. He had found his niche, and there he was content to remain. It is said of him that he was a reader of the Youth's Companion for eighty-five years. Though a coun- try pastor he was given the degree of doctor of divinity by Dartmouth and Bowdoin. William Salter at Burlington, Iowa, for more than sixty years, had one of the longest pastorates in the history of American Congregationalism. At the unveil- ing of his portrait in the state capitol of Iowa, the Governor said : "Men of his character and of his class are the men who have made Iowa what she is-a great, noble, peerless, Chris- tian commonwealth."
Taken at random the annalist notes Darius A. Newton, class of '82, more than twenty years at Winchester, Massachusetts ; Stephen M. Newman, class of '71, pastor of the First Congre- gational Church, Washington, D. C., for twenty-one years; Charles H. Cutler, class of '86, minister at Bangor for a quar- ter of a century ; Omar W. Folsom, class of '72, serving twenty-five years at Bath, Maine, and active in the state in missions and in the Interdenominational Comity Commission ; George B. Spalding, class of '61, after succeeding Horace Bushnell at Hartford, went to Syracuse where he built a new church edifice, remaining twenty-five years; Cyrus H. Rich- ardson, class of '69, at Nashua longer still ; Charles E. Cool- edge, class of '70, at Collinsville, Connecticut, for an equal length of time ; James B. Gregg, class of '74, holding an out- post of Congregationalism at Colorado Springs, Colorado, for twenty-seven years, and honored with the degree of doctor of divinity by Harvard University ; John R. Crane of the first Andover class of 1810, setting an example of long pastorates at Middletown, Connecticut, with one of his own which lasted
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thirty-five years; Lucius R. Eastman, class of '61, pastor of Plymouth Church, Framingham, for about forty years, "cul- tured, devoted, learned"; Charles L. Hall, class of '74, out on the northwestern Indian frontier at Fort Berthold, North Dakota, for approximately forty years ; Joel Haines, class of 1817, minister at Hartford for forty-six years, writing "Lec- tures to Young Men" and other books ; William R. Campbell, pastor for fifty changing years at West Roxbury, Massa- chusetts, and a Visitor of Andover Seminary.
Among city pastors whose influence was deep and abiding were a number of other alumni who graduated from Andover in the quarter century between 1868 and 1892. DeWitt C. Clarke had a distinguished ministry in the Tabernacle Church, Salem: Charles L. Noyes was pastor in Somerville forty years, and was actively engaged in civic interests. He edited the "Pilgrim Hymnal," was a trustee of the Seminary, and was an active participant in the plans of removal to Cambridge. Charles F. Carter is remembered at Burlington, Vermont, and Hartford, Connecticut. He was president of the Andover Trustees at the time of removal. Nehemiah Boynton of the same class was the eminent leader of Congregationalism in Detroit and Brooklyn, and was elected moderator of the National Council. Carl S. Patton had pastoral service to his credit before he went to the church in Columbus, Ohio, so long served by Dr. Washington Gladden. Two subsequent pastor- ates at Los Angeles were bisected by a professorship in Chicago Theological Seminary. He, too, has been honored with an election as moderator of the General Council. Fred- erick H. Page, after a journalistic career and a ministerial apprenticeship in Boston, spent many years with churches in Lawrence and Waltham, and then was promoted to be presi- dent of the Massachusetts Home Missionary Society. As president of the Trustees of the Seminary he had a large part in the planning and achieving of the affiliation of Andover and Newton.
To name these men is not to make invidious distinctions in a large body of alumni. They are but samples, a few more distinguished than the average. They could be duplicated more
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than once from living alumni other than those mentioned. It is enough to say of an unnumbered multitude : They wrought well and their works do follow them.
Alumni interest was stimulated by the organization of an alumni society in 1827, "for the purpose of holding such meetings and performing such exercises as shall be promotive of their mutual edification and the prosperity of the Re- deemer's kingdom." The Society drew up a constitution which provided for an annual meeting on Anniversary Week at the Seminary, with an address or a sermon. Dr. Storrs was chosen the first moderator. Vexations dogged the infant organization. The moderator was absent when the Society met the next year, the preacher failed to appear on account of ill health, and the alternate because he was not given "sufficient season- able notice." With but a single meeting a year it required some effort to keep interest in the Society warm. In 1834 a com- mittee of three was appointed to report a year hence on the best methods for producing more interest. At another meet- ing a standing committee was charged with the duty of pre- paring a necrology of alumni who had died within the year at the next annual meeting, but it failed to function. Another committee was named to secure portraits of Professors Woods and Porter to hang beside that of Stuart in the library, which students and friends had provided.
Necrologies were prepared after 1880, but the same diffi- culty of lack of interest prevailed among the alumni. The Association was reorganized in 1895 on a more definite basis, with an annual fee of one dollar. All officers of the Seminary, Trustees and Visitors, were eligible as members besides the alumni. The presidents of the two boards set the example by joining. All members were to receive the annual catalogue of the Seminary, the printed necrology, and the anniversary program. Two hundred and seventy persons were listed as members in 1897, and three hundred and twenty-eight the next year. Professor Park held the honor of being the oldest living graduate. The experiment of a social union of the alumni was held for a second time in Boston. The next year an alumni fund was proposed, which should be devoted first to a new
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issue of the General Catalogue, which had not been revised for twenty years. The Alumni Association was reorganized in that same year of 1903.
[To the people of the Atlantic seaboard the West spelled wider opportunity. America had meant that to their fathers who came from Europe, but the fertile valleys of New England were few and the Southern plantations were the property of a privileged aristocracy. With an expanding population America had to push out to the West. It was not only this centrifugal compulsion that drove, but an attraction that pulled. The West called to profit and adventure. Its broad plains, its lofty mountains, its majestic rivers, its sunset trail, were a magnet that drew from South and North alike. No young man could be oblivious to the attraction. Even theo- logical students at Andover saw opportunity in the West for both service and adventure.
Attempts had been made by the General Association of Connecticut to send out local pastors as itinerant evangelists for a few months. The Connecticut Missionary Society was the result, followed by the Massachusetts Missionary Society. Both came into existence before the year 1800. The other New England states organized similar societies within the next ten years. In 1801 the Plan of Union was arranged between the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians by which the two denominations were to combine forces for missionary effort.
The beginnings of settlement had been made in southern Ohio, and the Western Reserve along Lake Erie was develop- ing along with the fertile western part of New York. President Dwight of Yale regarded the westward movement as highly significant for the future of the nation, and he felt the Chris- tian responsibility "to lay out the streets and plant the founda- tions of literature and religion and to give shape to the insti- tutions of society." It was this sense of responsibility that led three Andover students to discuss the plan of a national home missionary society, as they were riding in a stagecoach to a funeral at Newburyport, and that evening to talk it over at the house of Professor Porter. Nathaniel Bouton, who origi- nated the idea, Aaron Foster, and Hiram Chamberlain were
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the students. Not long afterward Foster discussed the matter before the Porter Rhetorical Society, advocating the settle- ment of local pastors as well as the itineracy of evangelists. His appeals were seconded by John Maltby at a special meet- ing of the Society. He urged "planting in every little com- munity that is rising up men of learning and influence, to impress their characters upon those communities-a system that shall gather the resources of philanthropy, patriotism, and Christian sympathy throughout our country into one vast reservoir from which a stream shall flow to Georgia and to Louisiana, to Missouri and to Maine." The result was the application of six seniors for ordination as home missionaries. This resulted in the organization of the American Home Mis- sionary Society in 1826, as the appeal of the earlier Brethren had brought the American Board into existence.
Foster, Maltby, and Chamberlain were among the first to be commissioned. Jeremiah Porter, graduating in 1828, founded the First Presbyterian Church in Chicago in 1838. Artemas Bullard of the next class eventually became pastor of the First Church in St. Louis, outpost of civilization in the Mississippi Valley. Back in 1812-15, Samuel J. Mills, John F. Schermerhorn, and Daniel Smith, all Andover men, had made journeys of exploration under the auspices of the Connecticut and Massachusetts societies from Lake Erie to New Orleans. They reported only one. Congregational or Presbyterian minister in Indiana and none in Illinois. As a result Samuel Giddings, Andover, 1814, had been sent as mis- sionary to Missouri. He made far journeys among the Indians and founded churches in western Illinois. Howe and Ellis of Andover settled promptly in Illinois after graduation. Ellis started a seminary at Jacksonville, and with the help of en- thusiastic Yale men it became Illinois College. Truman M. Post, Andover, 1835, became one of its professors. Elihu W. Baldwin, class of 1817, dedicated Wabash College to Christ as he knelt in the snow of the primeval forest on a winter day. It was the temper of such men as these which made such a brave beginning.
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