History of Essex County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. I, Part 204

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton), ed. n 85042884-1
Publication date: 1888
Publisher: Philadelphia : J. W. Lewis & Co.
Number of Pages: 1538

USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > History of Essex County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. I > Part 204

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From his sixth year until he entered college, he supplied himself "with books from a library of sev- eral hundred very good books, the proprietors of which were assessed fifty cents a year." His earliest teacher, to whom he owed much, was Miss Joanna Prince, who later married Ebenezer Everett, of Bruns- wick, Me., and was the mother of Prof. Charles Car- roll Everett. He was also a pupil of Miss Hannah Hill in the first Sunday-school in the United States, which these two ladies had gathered in Beverly, and had the satisfaction later of teaching Miss Hill Greek in her old age, in fulfillment of her desire to read the New Testament in the original tougue. A child of precocious promise, he was on the point of being sent

1 See Bond's Genealogies and History of Watertown ; Stone's " History of Beverly "; Quincy's "History of Harvard University" ; the New England Hist. and Genealogical Register for January 1885 ; the Heraldic Journal, Boston 1865; Wright's " History of Rutlandshire "; Blore's " History of Rutlandshire ;" and Drakard's "History of Stamford."*

* By Edward I. Browne.

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to Exeter Academy, when the wise minister, Dr. Abbot, persuaded his mother to have him prepared for college at home under the teaching of Mr. Bernard Whitman, who was then pursuing his studies for the Unitarian ministry with that distinguished clergy- man, and he was fitted for college in a year, passing the examinations for the Freshman class in 1823, and returning to live in Beverly under the same teaching another twelvemonth, in which he went over the studies of the first two years of the college course, returning again to Cambridge to join the Junior class in August, 1824, and graduating in 1826, in the same class with his cousin, Hon. Robert Rantoul, Jr. No less than fourteen members of this class entered the Christian ministry, among them the theologian Oliver Stearns, the eloquent preacher George Putnam, and Nehemiah Adams, the Calvinistic divine. His father had set him apart for the ministry, as far as it could be done, by a request on his death-bed, but the boy who had graduated at fifteen, finishing his academic course at an earlier age than any other graduate of Harvard College, with the possible exception of Paul Dudley and Cotton Mather, was too young to begin his theological studies, and the following three years were spent, the first in study at Beverly, teaching in the winter the same district school in Middleton where his father had first taught, the second as private tutor in the family of Mr. Huidekoper, of Meadville, Pa., where not a few eminent men have both given and received much, in a home of patriarchal simplic- ity and manorial beauty, and the third in teaching in the academy at Portsmouth, N. H. In 1829 he en- tered the Cambridge Divinity School, graduating from it in 1832, The next year was spent as college tutor of Hebrew and mathematics at Cambridge. At this time his first publication appeared, "Address on Taxation," being No. 1, Vol. 1, of the " Workingmen's Library."

President Quincy desired to secure Mr. Peabody for permanent academic service. He had, however, been preaching in various places during the year, be- ing called to settle over churches in Fall River and Framingham, and accepted an invitation to become minister of the South Parish in Portsmouth, N. H., as colleague with the Rev. Nathan Parker, D.D., one of the most honored clergymen of his time in New England, whose lofty character, distinguished alike for wisdom and for goodness, has left an abiding mark upon that intelligent Christian community. Mr. Peabody took charge of that pulpit September 1, 1833. His previous year spent in Portsmouth as a teacher had brought him into such personal relations with Dr. Parker as to make him appreciate, as a spe- cial privilege, the opportunity of laboring in such companionship, but the hope was sadly disappointed, as Dr. Parker's rapidly failing health did not even permit him to take part in the ordination of his col- league and successor in October, 1833, and his death a few days later left the young clergyman alone in charge of a most important parish.

The South Church, which was the second in Ports- mouth, had its origin, as was the case in many of the older parishes in New England, in a dissension about the best locality for a new meeting-house. It early leaned to Arminianism, while the North Church, long under the ministry of the elder Buckminster, held fast to the more strict theology ; and at the separation of the Congregational body in the carlier years of this century, the former had become a leading parish in the " Unitarian movement." Under the serious evangelical preaching of Dr. Parker, it had been strengthened and increased in numbers till not long before his death it had built one of the most beautiful and costly stone churches of the time in New Eng- land, which was filled with worshipers. This respons- ible charge was borne by the young minister, and prospered in his hands. The further increase of the congregation, to the number of two hundred and fifty families, made it necessary to enlarge the church ; a handsome chapel was built for the large and flourish- ing Sunday school, and all the signs of professional success in a high degree were evident.

On September 12, 1836, Mr. Peabody was married to Catherine Whipple, daughter of Edmund Roberts, of Portsmouth, who, as Envoy of the United States Government, negotiated the first treaty between this country and Siam and Cochin China, the journal of whose travels in remote Eastern lands, at that time almost unvisited, was published after his death, which took place in 1837, while abroad on public business. Of the eight children of this marriage, two sons and two danghters died in early childhood, and four daughters are living. Mrs. Peabody died in Novem- ber, 1869.

The Portsmouth pulpit, as filled by Mr. Peabody, was metropolitan to New Hampshire. While the most important part of a faithful minister's labors is silent and hidden in the endless round of pastoral duty, the calls to public services outside his parish multiplied upon him in the educational and charita- ble duties which fall in such a community to the minister of a prosperous and influential congregation. He early became a trustee of Exeter Academy, hold- ing that position for forty-three years. One of the earliest of the many addres-es which he gave on aca- demic occasions, that on "Conversation: its faults and its graces," delivered before the Newburyport Female High School, and first printed in 1846, be- came a classic on the subject. Meantime, in the re- ligious discussions which were being earnestly carried on in the Unitarian Church, Mr. Peabody soon be- came a recognized leader, in 1845 giving the address before the Senior class in the Cambridge Divinity School on " Anti-Supernaturalism," and being widely known as a preacher of positive spiritual Christianity. In 1844 he published "Lectures on Christian Doc- trine," which became a handbook of the belief of the evangelical portion of the religious body to which he belonged, while a wider congregation than his Ports-

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mouth parish was addressed by his "Christian Con- solations: sermons designed to furnish comfort and strength to the afflicted," of which the first of many editions was published in 1846, and by his "Sermons to Children," published in 1867. He also was an ed- itor of the Christian Register for two years.

In 1852 he received from Harvard College the de- gree of Doctor of Divinity. During all this period he was a frequent contributor to the Christian Exam- iner and the North American Review, and in 1852 he became proprietor and editor of the latter publica- tion, which duties he retained till 1863, when he was succeeded by Professors Lowell and Norton.

The invitation to the Plummer professorship of the heart and of Christian morals in Harvard College found Dr. Peabody in a happy and successful ministry at Portsmouth, over a parish to whom he was bound by ties of mutual attachment, such as no other call could have been strong enough to break. He had seen the first generation of his people pass away and give place to children and grandchildren, whose feel- ing toward him was not lessened by his removal to the large sphere of duties which Cambridge offered. On September 1, 1860, he assnmed the Plummer pro- fessorship, and when, after a generation had inter- vened, on September 1, 1883, the fiftieth anniversary of his settlement at Portsmouth was celebrated by his former parish, it was with a joy and sympathy not dimmed by the lapse of time.

The new work on which Dr. Peabody now entered, as successor to the Rev. Frederick Dan. Hunting- ton, D.D., was waiting to be shaped by him into a large and unique opportunity of service and influ- ence. The wise munificence of Miss Caroline Plum- mer, of Salem, had been led to endow the "Professor- ship of the Heart and of Christian Morals," by the conviction that the "dry light" and unsympathetic methods of college training needed to be snffused with the warmth and glow of a personal influence, exerted by a Christian minister of wide and ready sympathy, hearty interest in yonng men and belief in them, not a teacher only nor a preacher only, though both of these he was to be, but one who should find what possibilities existed in Harvard Col- lege for the function of pastor to the most difficult class of persons in the world to reach .- youths of the student age. It had been the conviction of this ex- cellent lady that such a place could be created and filled by a wise, devout scholar, in whom the weight of gennine character and the persuasiveness and charm of Christian faith should be a "living epistle, known and read of all men," but no one could have ventured to anticipate the way in which Dr. Peabody was to grow into the place and the place to grow round him, or the degree in which his influence was destined to pervade the Cambridge atmosphere like sunshine, do- ing more perhaps than any other single cause to sof- ten and change the temper of mutual antagonism and mutual distrust which largely affected the relations of

the faculty and the students. This condition of things was, of course, not without shining exceptions on both sides, and as a survival from the semi-me- devial conditions of the college in Puritan times. The years of Dr. Peabody's incumbency of the one position which was created to be mediatorial between the two elements, witnessed a change for the better greater than had been wrought in the two previous centuries. This process went on side by side with the great enlargement of the college on all sides, trans- forming it into a veritable university, with the free- dom and opportunity of the elective system ; and it is not too much to say that Dr. Peabody's presence and influence at Cambridge did more than any other thing to inspire confidence in the whole community that these changes would only give opportunity for growth in Christian manhood, and leave the college freer to become a training-school in virtue and good- ness and faith. The proper official work of the Plum- mer professorship had included the duties of preacher to the university and some slight teaching of each class at the beginning of the Freshman and at the end of the Senior year, while the pulpit services were lightened by being assumed by the president (when he was a clergyman) on one Sunday of each month. Except during the presidency of Dr. Hill, however, the burden of the University pulpit now fell wholly upon Dr. Peabody, and for twenty-one years was so borne as to keep that distinguished place at the height of its reputation, as the voice in sacred things of the mother and chief of American colleges.

The degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred upon Dr. Peabody by the University of Rochester in 1863.

The publications of Dr. Peabody during the period after his removal to Cambridge may be in part noted here. In 1861 he delivered and published a course of lectures before the Lowell Institute, entitled ." Chris- tianity the Religion of Nature," and in 1873 a volume of sermons on "Christian Belief and Life." Besides a multitude of single sermons, lectures, ora- tions, discussions in the influential reviews of great questions of public interest and memoirs of distin- guished persons, the following volumes have also been given to the public by him: "Manual of Moral Philosophy," 1872; "Christianity and Science," a serios of lectures delivered in New York, in 1874, on the Ely foundation of the Union Theological Semi- nary, 1874. The Baccalaureate sermons which he preached to successive classes on the Sunday before commencement, and which were long a marked fea- ture of the academic life, were gathered up in a vol- ume embracing those preached in snecessive years, from 1861 to 1883, when the emeritus professor might well have supposed that his long service in the inter- esting duty was ended, but in 1885 and 1886 the grad- nating classes still felt that from no other conld they ask the farewell word in behalf of their alma mater. A part of the fruit of his ethical instruction in the divinity school and in the college appeared in his translations

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of Cicero's De Officiis, De Senectute, De Amicitia, and the Tusculan Disputations, published in 1883, 1884 and 1886, and of Plutarch's De Sera Numinis Vindictâ, published in 1885. In 1887 he published further fruits of his college teaching in the valuable work on Moral Philosophy, which embodies a portion of the lectures given by him to the senior class in col- lege and in the Divinity School at Meadville, Pa.

The Cambridge life devolved upon Dr. Peabody, be- youd the duties of his professorship, not a few such obligations as seek a public-spirited citizen with heavy demand upon his time. On the school com- mittee he gave many years of service, and in other matters which furthered the cause of good govern- ment of the city, he was never backward. Only an exceptional endowment of health and a bodily frame strong as iron which was able to bear habitual labor far into the small hours of the night, could have en- dured the toil.

As a teacher, the work which fell into his strong and willing hands naturally broadened more and more. The subject of ethics belonged strictly to his department as religious teacher to the university, but in addition he taught logic, political economy until the appointment of Professor Dunbar, and had the care of the senior forensics for some years, also filling gaps when they occurred in the college and in the divinity school. A portion of this labor bore fruit in several of his printed works.

Meantime, the friendly and fatherly relation in which he stood to the students had beneficent re- sults. When the wise generosity of Mr. Nathaniel Thayer provided the means for reviving in a better form the old "Commons," furnishing good food to the great mass of the students for a moderate sum, the task of organizing this large enterprise and of its supervision for a considerable time was undertaken by Dr. Peabody until he had proved that it was a wise experiment and had established it on a perma- nent basis at the public tables of Memorial Hall. The thoughtful and abounding private charities which sought his aid as almoner in finding and relieving needy students who deserved such aid, a form of col- lege benefit which escapes all public record, were very great in amount and were alone sufficient to oc- cupy much of the time of a busy man. It would be impossible to overstate the quantity and quality of his service in personal and private relations as adviser and confidential friend to the multitude of young men who sought his help in any kind of trouble and never sought in vain. For all this the unsolicited reward of a love and veneration, such as it is the privilege of few to win, was poured forth upon him. No one can have heard without a thrill the cheers, ringing with the enthusiasm of youth and of personal affection and rising again and again as if they would never cease, which greeted the mention of his name or welcomed his presence on all public occasions of the university.

The Plummer professorship also offered an oppor-

tunity to bring the university into religious relations with the whole community by making its pulpit not the property of a single sect, but hospitable to all branches of the Protestant Church, which Dr. Pea- body's large and sympathetic Christian temper ful- filled to the utmost. While himself recognized as a leader in his own denomination, he had the gift of winning the Christian fellowship and conciliating by his own reconciling spirit the friendly respeet of churchmen of all names, welcoming them to the col- lege chapel and being welcomed as a preacher in their pulpits, while he was sought to give addresses on the public days of the theological schools of Newton, Bangor and Andover, representing various Christian bodies; and the catholic system of administration of religion in Harvard University, introduced in 1885, in which a group of the ablest preachers of different churches are associated in the care of spiritual interests which are recognized to be so large and various as to demand their united care, is the legitimate outgrowth of the spirit in which Dr. Peabody admitted this great religious opportunity.

The most important part of Dr. Peabody's public services at Cambridge still remains to be mentioned. The death of President Felton, in February, 1862, not only removed his closest personal friend in the col- lege, but devolved upon him most laborious and re- sponsible duties as head of the university, being ap- pointed by the corporation acting president, and dis- charging the duties of that office until the installation of President Hill late in the following autumn. On the resignation of Dr. Hill, in September, 1868, he was again ealled to the same responsibility, and con- tinued to preside over the university until the inaug- uration of President Eliot. His administration as acting president thus covered two periods, amounting in all to about two years, while he was specially as- sociated with the counsels of his immediate prede- cessors in the office, and in the plans which marked their administrations and which resulted in the aboli- tion of the old "hazing " system and the introduction of a healthier spirit of mutual regard in the instruc- tors and students, and the first broadening out of the college curriculum beyond its narrow limit by intro- ducing the elective system. The success of Dr. Pea- body as an administrator was marked, and it seemed natural that he should have been elected to the per- manent incumbency of the office which he adorned ; the strong secular tendency in college affairs had, however, predetermined that the office should not be held in any event by a clergyman.

In these very important duties Dr. Peabody re- mained at his post for twenty-one years, with an in- terval of travel in Europe from June, 1867, to March, 1868, which he accomplished by compressing the work of two terms into that of a single one after his return, and of which he published, in 1868, a record in his "Reminiscences of European Travel." A briefer visit to Russia, and the neighboring countries

Engdy AH Ritchie

Aller Thorndike

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in which he shared the hospitalities enjoyed by Gen- eral Grant, was made by him in the summer of 1876, and a longer sojouru in Europe with his family after resigning the Plummer professorship, from June, 1881, to September, 1882. His resignation had gone into effect after the commencement of 1881, but he was at once appointed professor emeritus, retiring from the burdens of his official position, but in no sense from his place in the heart of the college nor from the opportunities of service which awaited him.

The key-note of Dr. Peabody's public services is given in the paper already quoted, where he men- tions three biographies to which he has been specially indebted. The first is that of Niebuhr :

" If I have been able, in things secular and sacred, as to reports of cur- rent and records of past events, to steer a safe way hetween credulity and skepticism, I owe it in great part, not to Niebuhr's 'History of Rome,' but to the virtual autobiography that gives shape and vividness to his ' Memoir.1 If I remember aright, he expressed his confidence in the substantial anthenticity of our canonical gospels, and, however this may he, I owe largely to him my firm faith and trust in them.

" I would next name the 'Life of Thomas Arnold.' When I read it I was pastor of a large parish, with many young persons nuder my charge and influence, and I was at the same time chairman of a school-board, I had nu need of Arnold to awaken my sympathy with young life, hut he has helped me to understand it better, and to minister more intelli- gently and efficiently to its needs and cravings. His 'Rugby Sermons' have a great charm for me, and while I have not been guilty of the &h- surd and vain attempt to imitate them, I have felt their inspiration both in the pulpit and in the lecture-room. I have also, in a large and diver- sified experience in educational trusts and offices, felt myself constantly instructed, energized and encouraged by Arnold.

"My third biography is that of Dr. Chalmers, fruitful of beneficent example in more directions than could be easily specified, but to me of peculiar service in his relation to poverty in Glasgow, with its attendant evils and vices In his mode of relieving want in person and in kind, of bringing preventive measures to hear on the potential nurseries of crime, and of enlisting the stronger in the aid and comfort of the feebler members of the community, I found many valnable suggestions for the local charities wbich came under my direction while I was a parish minister."

It is allotted to few men to fulfil with conspicuous ability so many and various kinds of public service as have fallen to the lot of Dr. Peabody. As a parish minister, building up his church in the prosperity of numbers and in the better welfare of a spiritual growth, never stronger in his hold on the affections of his people than when he parted from them, and always remaining the pastor of their affectionate regard ; as a preacher, devout, earnest, persuasive, a powerful expounder of the truth of the gospel, and never more effective or listened to with more interest than in the years after he had passed threescore and ten; as a theologian, strong in his grasp and luminous in his statement of the central verities of Christianity ; as an ethical and moral teacher, lucid, eloquent and con- vincing ; as the incumbent of the most difficult posi- tion in Harvard College, turning its difficulties into unrivalled opportunities and creating an exceptional work ; as a successful administrator, numbered among the honored heads of the university ; it has been his to win the love and reverence of the successive gen- erations among whom his work has been wrought from youth to age.

181

WILLIAM AND ALBERT THORNDIKE.

The Thorndikes of America are descended from a Lincolnshire family, at one time lords of the manor of Little Carlton. The first recorded signature of pedigree was made at the visitation of Heralds, in the year 1634; but the pedigree itself is traced at least a hundred and fifty years earlier, to the middle or end of the fifteenth century. The ancestor of the American family was John Thorndike, who was one of the twelve associates of John Winthrop, Jr., by whom the first permanent settlement at Ipswich was commenced, in 1633. John Thorndike was the brother of Herbert Thorndike, Prebendary of West- minster, a distinguished clergyman of the Church of England. It is not probable that John Thorndike's emigration proceeded from religious motives. He never joined a New England Church, he sent his only son to England, to be baptized by his uncle, the prebendary, and he himself went back to England to die, and was buried by the side of his brother, in the cloisters of Westminster. He had passed thirty- years in America. From Ipswich he went to " Brooksby " (now Peabody), where he is mentioned in 1636 as a grantee of a hundred acres of land. This grant he relinquished the same year for one of a hundred acres in Beverly, then a part of Salem, and in the following year his holding was enlarged to a hundred and eighty-five acres, extending back from the shore at the point afterwards called "Paul's Head," from his son Paul.

Paul Thorndike was prominent in the town affairs of Beverly, and discharged the various offices of se- lectman, captain of the military company, deputy to the General Court and the like. But he, like his father, never became a member of a New England Church, and not until ten years after his death did his oldest son, John, the first Puritan in the family, make " public profession." Paul's three sons, John, Paul and Herbert, probably lived upon the land which had come to them through their father from their grandfather. But they all had numerous chil- dren, and the parental acres gradually departed from the family under a series of petty subdivisions and alienations. Nothing now remains to indicate the original ownership but the mere name "Paul's Head."

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History of Essex County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. I, Part 204

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton), ed. n 85042884-1 Publication date: 1888 Publisher: Philadelphia : J. W. Lewis & Co. Number of Pages: 1538

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton), ed. n 85042884-1
Publication date: 1888
Publisher: Philadelphia : J. W. Lewis & Co.
Number of Pages: 1538