USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > History of the First church in Boston, 1630-1880 > Part 4
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life, in the training of the devotional sentiments, and in the guardianship of public morals. Certain it is that only their type of piety and morality was equal and fitted to their, stern enterprise.
The full issue and outcome of the method of church institution, organization, and discipline initiated by the founders and members of the First Church in Boston, was what has since been called Congregationalism, as dis- 'tinguished from the prelatical system. The fellowship here formed would have been far from claiming that there was any novelty in its method, or that in any single feature or principle of it, it would have the character of an untried experiment. They heartily. and profoundly believed that they were reviving the original, apostolical, scriptural pattern of a Christian Church. Nor was it only here, or for the first time, that in the planting of the First Church in Boston there had been an intent of reverting to the original pattern of church institution. There had been many previous examples of it in Protestant countries on the continent of Europe, several in scattered, humble con- venticles in England. And on this New England soil the same method had been substantially adopted ten years before by the fragment of the Leyden Church at Plymouth, one year before by the church in Salem, one month before by the church in Dorchester, and a church was instituted in Watertown on the same day as was that in Boston. The most full and emphatic recognition of what seemed to be novel principles of church institution was, however, made here. The conspicuous position of this Boston church, the influence and character of its members, and the eminent qualities of its first ministers, as has been said, gave it the lead as an example to be imitated, and makes it responsible, speaking in general terms, for the setting up and enforcing of Congregationalism as the New England church pol-
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ity. The field was free for the experiment. Opportunity favored. The readiness and earnestness with which the opportunity was turned to account show how strong were the impelling motives to it, and how well prepared were those who engaged in it to insure success for the under- taking. And we should note with emphasis the very sig- nificant fact, that though it seemed to be among the prime essentials for the exercise of the zeal and ingenuity of the Puritans, to keep themselves constantly occupied and troub- led about the incidental workings of their church system, they never manifested the slightest distrust or dissatisfaction with its fundamentals, or betrayed any backward lookings or longings toward sacerdotalism or ceremonialism. Their simple concern was to become more and more complete and consistent in their Congregationalism. How thoroughly the First and all the other early churches of Massachusetts, at least, had become weaned from the sacerdotalism and ritualism of their mother church, is manifest to-day in the characteristics of the heritage which they have left here. Notwithstanding all there is of grace and beauty, of dignity and devoutness, of adaptation and comprehensiveness, in the present Episcopal Church, the soil of Massachusetts and the qualities and habits of its native population have proved so utterly uncongenial with it, that there are at this time scarcely more than a score of flourishing parishes of that communion, free of debt and hard struggles, now in the limits of the State, while the majority of the rest, served by most devoted and earnest ministers, are mis- sionary efforts.
It consists with the frame of spirit of some critics and historians in the Episcopal Church, when reviewing recent exponents of the Congregational polity, to ridicule it as a modern novelty, without three centuries of life, - a discov. ery and invention of quite recent date, compared with the
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hoar antiquity of the church system. It is hard to believe that these gibes and sarcasms are characteristics of the ignorance rather than of the conceits of those who utter them. The Puritans were concerned to identify their sys- tem with only one stage of antiquity, and that one, as they fully believed, at least one generation back of the starting- point of the prelatical system. It may be stoutly affirmed that if ever an intelligent, scholarly, and carnest body of men, with profound religious purposes to move them, were engaged in any work in the results of which they found full satisfaction, such a work, and so endeavored, was that of the Puritans, when with patient study, singleness of aim, and persistent prayer, they sought to revive, to recon- struct, and then strictly in every feature and clement to adopt, the mode of church institution and discipline which they found in the New Testament Scriptures as those of the first Christian disciples and assemblies.
Not the least among the grievances which the Puritans found in the exclusive and restrictive limitations within which the Church of England, as confessedly a reformed church cleansed from corruption, planted herself, was the reflection of disesteem and dishonor which she thus cast upon the other reformed churches on the continent of Europe. These also had sought to conform their constitu- tion and discipline to the New Testament pattern. What- ever penalties or disabilities, incident to the rupture of the unity of the medieval Church by the Reformation, they might have risked by having their lineage and descent in the ecclesiastical line cut off by disinheritance, they felt were fully compensated by their reversion to the original apostolic fold. In all the heats and passionate contentions and denunciations, the tempests and wars of the Reforma- tion epoch, Martin Luther, with equal calmness and as- surance, insisted that he belonged to the Holy Catholic
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Apostolical Church, -leaving out the Roman, - and that neither Pope nor Council, Emperor nor Devil, should alienate or excommunicate him from it. Our first church exiles did not leave out the word "English," in their tender parting from the abode of their mother church. But the epithet certainly did not stand with them as a substitute for the word " Christian."
It was but natural that the prelatical party in the Eng- lish Church should have been disposed to retain some of the elements and usages of the old system. They had a large amount of ecclesiastical materials left to them for which they would be disposed to find some use. Parlia- ment had made over to them all the cathedrals and churches and abbeys, with architectural arrangements, ornaments, and symbols, designed for quite another form of administration and worship. The cathedrals have al- ways been of very little use to the Church of England, except for " enthroning" bishops and for musical festivals, built and enriched with symbolic devices, as they were, for solemn throngs and processional array. The travel- ler from this country is always impressed with the striking contrast between the interiors of English and Continental cathedrals, - the former exhibiting large vacancy, the latter abounding with adorned altars, and paintings and statues. But the English temples had "stalls," and as these had to be occupied, canons, prebends, and arch- deacons had to be provided. The meaning of these terms may be found in a good dictionary. There were chancel rails also, and these continued in use the practice of kneel- ing at the sacrament, leaving the mother church and its daughter in America uncommitted as to whether the rails enclose a communion table or an altar. Doubtless clerical habits and vestments were retained by custom and com- promise, as the New Testament afforded no pattern for
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them. So also the fond associations which the English people connected with some of their church festivals, their half-secular, half-religious sports, their ganies on village greens, their May-day, etc., were survivals from the · past. The Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company provided that its great courts should be held on " Hilary, Easter, Trinity, and Michaelmas terms." Those words were brought hither in the Charter, but never appear after- wards in our records. Not a child in the first generation of our schools could have defined them. How many could do so now?
When we consider what charm in literature, in history, romance, and ballad, all allusions and associations attached to these English survivals of old sanctities and jollitics have for us, and how in our wanderings in our old home we linger lovingly upon their scenes and memories, we can but marvel at the thoroughness of that weaning from them all in love and regret, which was marked and mani- fested by our first Puritan fathers here. After much read- ing even of the most private things which they have left us from their own pens, I cannot recall from them a single ex- pression of melancholy, or tenderness, or heart-yearning for all such things which they had left behind them. Their food of thought was sterner stuff. Chief Justice Samuel Sewall, brought to this country as a boy in his tenth year, in 1661, spent a year in England in his manhood, in 1688. We have his Journal there. There is more of romance, sentiment, and pathos in his rhapsody on Merrimac River, written afterwards, than can be found in that whole Journal. Even the Episcopal Church in this country presents many marked divergences in aspect, ceremonial, method, and observance from those of the mother church. It is often the murmur of some of its ministers who love parade and form, that it has become Congregationalized. Indeed it
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would be difficult to point to any essential difference be- tween the method of its call, settlement, and tenure of office for its ministers, and those of Congregationalists. In noth- ing is a jealous watchfulness more observable than in the care of its laity, with whom substantially is the control- ling power, to limit the interfering agency of the bishop. It seems as if Puritan air was variously effective.
Reverting again to the ancient records of the First Church of Boston, it may be observed that when compared with those of many of the early churches of New England, - kept by the pastors or other officers, - they are notice- ably meagre in their entries. We fail to find in them a recognition of many matters which, as we reasonably infer, must, as they transpired, have been of great, occasionally of exciting interest. Reticence, reserve, stinted notice, often silence, are observable, where like records are full, and exhibit excitement.
Rich materials illustrative of the all-engrossing impor- tance of every detail connected with their religious feelings and usages by our early church members, are accessible, in our old church and parish records, to those curious in such researches. They exhibit with what sensitiveness, often strong resistance and sorrow, the nevertheless steady succession of changes and innovations in methods and customs was received before they gained tolerance or approval. With all their interest and mental energy con- centrated upon their religious affairs, in the lack of other resources for engaging their leisure and rest from bodily labors, they gave equal strength of feeling to their regular church routine and to anything which threatened to inter- fere with it, whether in the guise of improvements or in tokens of decaying zeal and love. So we may draw from most of the old Puritan church records a series of what to us may seem most trivial matters and occasions which dis-
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turbed the peace of parishes, and foreboded or realized alienation and division. These too were largely wholly apart from the creed. The rebuilding of the early meeting- houses, with questions of change in the location; the disposal of the congregation according to the social rank and dignity of the members; the slightest modification of the wonted order of the exercises, or the method of pro- ceedings; the introduction of a pitch-pipe to start a tune, and of additional tunes for their harsh psalmody; the reading of the Scriptures without exposition; the use of the Lord's prayer in public devotions; dispensing with the relation before the whole congregation of private religious experience as a condition of church membership, and with the confessions of members under censure; the successive changes of the Psalm Book; the addition of hymns of hu- man composition; the allowance of foot-stoves and other heating apparatus, - all these, and a multitude of other changes and innovations, with the discussions and variances which they involved, cover many pages of these old church records. In such entries the records of the First Church are singularly deficient, and reticence is observable where we might look for some fulness of detail. In none of the sister churches has there been more, if even so much, of a quiet modification and adaptation of itself, in all matters of custom and usage, to the necessary changes of convenience or those which could claim good sense and reason for their allowance. . Always excepting the direful commotion con- nected with the career of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson and the schism consequent upon the " Half Way Covenant," the First Church has had no quarrels, no imbittered internal strifes for record. The mild and wise advice of the ever . venerated Winthrop easily disposed the threatened divi- sion about the site for the second meeting-house, and the church never had to call a council to reconcile any strife
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among its members. Speaking relatively, we may say that self-respect, dignity, and a regard for peace and consistency characterize its internal history. These qualities are es- pecially marked in reference to developments now to be noticed.
In the more recent years of the history of this church, a matter of much interest to such persons still among us as are concerned in tracing the developments of religious opinion, will attract attention in what will be called its ." change of creed." The author of this renewed rehearsal of the line of its ministers, and of the principal matters chronicled in its records, has but briefly and incidentally referred to this subject. Some more extended notice of it may not be inappropriate here.
Corresponding to the process by which the First Church, when it was planted, essayed to revert to the original, sim- ple, scriptural and apostolical pattern in church institution and discipline, its internal history presents to us another process in quite a different range of opinion, which, at ·least to those most concerned in it, was conscientiously held to be also a return to the carly simplicity of the Christian system of belief. On the observance of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the church, there appeared, in some of the journals of different religious denominations, a few sharp criticisms reflecting upon its present doctrinal relations as having fallen away from the faith of the fathers to such a serious degree as really to have severed the tie of descent and kinship. So far as concerns a departure from and a disuse of the doctrinal symbols of their Puritan ancestry and the adoption of views which the Puritans regarded as heretical, the criti- cisms and censures have full justification. The catechism, the prayers, the preaching, the terms of admission to church membership, are not now, either in substance,
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tone, import, or conditions, what they once were. Hap- pily the original covenant, so sweetly and simply devout and fragrant in its phrase and aroma of piety, is still the same. And the church is still the same living witness and servant for the truths and works of Christ's gospel, never in all its history more earnest and diligent in such service, than now, with its quarter of a millennium of years.
For a hundred and fifty years of its history the church may be said, or at least inferred, to have retained the doc- trinal belief of its founders, as expressed in formularies, in the tone and language of devotional exercises, of sermons, exhortations, and standards for examining candidates. But those who have carefully searched in the primary sources of information the slow and gradual developments of opinion here on religious subjects, have found abundant evidence of the steady softening and modification of the old, sharp doctrinal beliefs. Reserve of utterance, a quiet silence on some matters, implied dissent, mark the passing away of shadows, till finally a bold and open rejection of views which were no longer accepted was the way of an- nouncing the attainment of new light. There was an acquired momentum in this movement just before the opening of this century.
. What is popularly known as the Puritan, or Orthodox, system of doctrine - and in recent years, by preference of terms, as " Evangelical" - was substantially wrought out, fashioned, and accredited for belief under quite a different philosophy of nature and of human life, and under quite a different estimate of the Bible, from those which now have an almost universal acceptance by intelligent persons in the exercise of serious thoughtfulness, with freedom and the helps of positive knowledge. This little globe of earth was then regarded as the representative orb of the universe, the suns and stars of heaven serving its use, as do our own
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street gas-lights. The population of the globe and the religions of its inhabitants were unknown.
Two fundamental and central doctrines underlaid and supported the Puritan, or the so-called Orthodox, creed.
1. The Divine Being created only a single pair of our human race. All the uncounted millions that have since come from them have been by natural generation, they having all existed " in the loins of Adam," as the " Federal Ilead" of our race. God staked the result of the experi- ment as to the character and destiny of humanity upon the carth as the lineage of Adam, for all ages, upon the result of his trial of it. His lapse from obedience wrecked all his race, making them the victims of sin at their birth and the heirs of eternal woe.
2. Instead of staying the progress of this awful calamity at its source, by substituting for the foiled experiment another under changed conditions, - as, for instance, dis- pensing with the serpent, -the infinite mercy of God, triumphing over his justice, had recourse to a mysterious scheme by which, taking a human form, he came to this earth and allowed some of our race to put him to death as a sacrifice to himself; though this tragedy of Deity by no means rectified or repaired the whole calamity of humanity, -- only those elected by the sovereign decrees of God hav- ing the benefit of this Divine atonement.
This Orthodox creed was elaborately wrought out, sys- tematized, and expounded in particulars, details, and cle- ments ; it was traced, stated, and certified by words, phrases, half-sentences, and sentences of the Bible, regarded as dictated verbally by God, and set in a mosaic of proof texts. Many who profess still to hold this creed with devout tenacity of belief wish the privilege of stating it themselves, and of doing so with explanations, qualifications, abate- ments, and palliatives which to them, at least, reduce the ter-
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rible significance that it has for those who utterly reject it This sensitiveness to a bald statement of the creed is a sig- nificant intimation of a difference between those who pro- fess it to-day, and the calm, bold, unflinching spirit of the old Puritans who gloried in giving it the sternest expression. A very apt and momentous suggestion here presents itself. We know that the foremost among our Puritan ancestors in all heroism, fidelity, and sacrifice, who firmly held that creed, and rejoiced in it as lifting them in privilege and divine favor above the wretched votaries of all heathen religions, were men whose nobleness of spirit we revere, whose manly and Christian virtues have 'secured for us the fairest heritage, on the earth, and to whom faithful philosophic historians of civilization accredit the highest service to the manhood of humanity and to popular liberty. We ask why they were not palsied and crushed in spirit by such a terrific creed. We can but answer that they were stiffened and reconciled to it by their intense, consummate, and all-enthralling loy- alty to the Sovereignty of the Supreme Being, who must work unchallenged his Divine will towards creatures who were but worms of the dust, hateful reprobates to be snatched only by a marvel of mercy from the yawning pit. Nor is it unfair to intimate that the most effective palliative to the terror of the creed was found in the belief that the most hopeful way of relief from its grim application to one's self was found in a desperate acknowledgment of its perfect equity and justice. One thing was certain, that the most direful infliction of doom would be visited upon those who doubted or stoutly denied its justice. The reason why the grim Puritan had no awe of man, prince or priest, monarch or pope, " whose breath was in his nostrils," and who was no way " to be accounted of," was because he had drawn his whole nature and being into absolute subjection to the dread Sovereign of Heaven. The Supreme Being,
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in the Puritan thought of him, combined and exhausted all attributes of power, awe, and terror. Reverently bowing before the fulness of these prerogatives in him, they would not quail before any fragmentary assumption of them in priest or potentate. In the Puritan alone, of all churches, the fibre and tone of piety in men exceeded the prevalence of its spirit and manifestation among women.
What proportion of the men and women in the Puritan, or in any subsequent generation trained under that creed as both law and gospel, heartily, thoroughly, and without reducing any of its terms, believed it, in the full sense of real heart-belief, it would be difficult to estimate. Nor would it perhaps be wholly fair to regard, for instance, the very small minority of the congregation of the First Church who, as the records in this history show, were received by covenant into church membership, as elect and saved, as defining that proportion. The influence of the creed is not to be measured wholly by that test. Where it did not win belief, it stirred a variety of impressions and feelings in those whose average of character and conduct was as upright and pure as was that of its firmest votaries. Con- sternation, terror, distressing mental and spiritual conflicts, doubt, and utter and defiant unbelief, were the phases and degrees of the effects wrought by the creed upon those who could not or would not assent to it. But we are concerned chiefly with those who did, doubtless by most thorough sincerity of profession, accept the creed; for it was through them and their successors, ministers and people, that the creed was softened, reduced, reconstructed, and finally sur- rendered. Of the mountain heaps in print and manuscript, devoted to what we call religious and polemical literature, which have come down to our time as a fragment of mightier masses of the old Puritan years, there is one most striking characteristic which belongs in common to
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them all, - book, pamphlet, sermon, diary, or letter. They all give proof of an amazing activity, fertility, ingenuity, and restlessness of mind spent upon working over the creed, in explanation, readjustment, or vindication. The efforts made for an elaborate statement and exposition of the Puritan system in all its roots, branches, twigs, and foliage of organic life, and to expound and certify its doc- trines and inferences by the Bible, composed what were called "Bodies of Divinity." It was understood that one who had studied any considerable number of these mighty folios would be expected to produce another. There would have been no object in patenting or copyrighting either of these bodies of divinity, for nobody but the author of each of them would wholly approve it. Bossuet would have found a rare triumph in his theme, " On the Variations of Protestantism," could he have gathered but one in any hundred of these ponderous volumes in a library.
It soon began to be realized that a general avowal of belief of the Orthodox system must be held consistent with infinite variations of opinion and construction, amid manifold expositions of its parts and elements. Hence the divisions of a sect into schools and parties. What appeared at first to have been mere branches of the central stock, striking off in somewhat eccentric growths, were soon found to have been secretly grafted and to be bearing fruit of a suspiciously heretical flavor.
The processes and stages by which what is known, in our local history of the developments of religious opinion, as Liberal Christianity or Unitarianism, found acceptance among those who succeeded in membership and as pro- prietors of nearly all the ancient churches in the neigh- borhood of Boston, must be traced in other pages than these. In no one of these churches was the change
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