USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > History of the Old South church (Third church) Boston, 1669-1884, Vol. II > Part 57
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died a day or two before. Addresses were made by Mr. Manning and the Rev. Mr. Means, of Dorchester, with affection- ate allusions to the late senior deacon, and Dr. Blagden offered the prayer of dedication.]
1 Chapter 270 of the Statutes of 1874 removed all legislative restrictions as to the sale or lease of the meeting-house, and provided that the Supreme Court should have jurisdiction over the mat- ter : -
"In any suit in equity brought before the Supreme Judicial Court to obtain the sanction of the said court to a sale or lease or other transfer or disposition of the Old South Meeting-House and the land under and adjacent to the same, the said court shall possess and exercise the same powers and be governed by the same principles of equity law as if the said land had not been the subject of any special legislation concerning power to lease the same."
2 Mr. Walley published a long article in the Boston Daily Advertiser, which concluded with these sentences : -
" There never was, and never can be, any change made in any religious or other corporation requiring legislative
sanction, where there will not be more or less dissenting votes, and if the present legislature is to establish the novel pre- cedent that such non-contents can get a law passed giving the control to the minority, and thus contravening the will of the majority, the present and future legislatures will find their hands full of business. We had supposed that the fearful struggle we had recently passed through in this country, had taught the lesson that majorities should rule, and minorities submit, so forcibly and clearly as that, at least, the present generation would not expect that minorities should be allowed to secede and take a division of the property upon their own terms and against the will of the majority. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts objected with a good deal of blood and powder to such a doctrine, and the his- tory of the rebellion and its causes are rather too fresh in memory, we appre- hend, to warrant the present legislature in virtually enacting a law to allow mi- norities to rule, and, therefore, we are well satisfied that they will not look with any favor upon the bill offered in the senate as a substitute for the report of the committee."
533
THE CASE OF THE MINORITY.
ticular plan originated does not appear ;1 but, if we may judge from the numerous instances in the religious history of Boston, in which churches have been established by seceding minorities, as minorities, no essential difference in doctrine or practice being involved, it could have ended only in disastrous failure.
The remonstrants against the removal of the Old South Church to the Back Bay may be grouped in three classes : the minority in the parish ; ministers and others in the denomination ; and persons outside the denomination, who represented or claimed to represent the public.
Looking back over the past twenty years, it must be apparent to everybody who examines the question, that the course pointed out and insisted upon by the majority was the only course that the church and society could wisely take. But at the time the case was not so clear, and there was abundant room for an honest difference of opinion. There was much to be said on the side of the minority, from its point of view ; but the great mis- take which was made by it, as we apprehend, was in not aban- doning the contest when the decision by votes proved to be against it. When it was proposed to take down the first meet- ing-house in 1728, Judge Sewall was deeply grieved, and he pro- tested earnestly and with dignity against the change, and then, finding that the general sentiment in the congregation was against him, he said no more. Some of the minority in the later controversy acted in the same spirit, and much ill feeling and strife would have been avoided, if all could have done so. At the meeting of the society held immediately after the fire, when it was determined by a majority vote to lease the meeting-house to the government, one of the brethren 2 who had argued and voted on the other side said, "The matter has been fairly de- cided by a majority of the pew proprietors ;" and, at once, he moved that the building committee be instructed to proceed
1 In arguing this point before the legis- lative committee, Mr. Linus M. Child said of the proposition to divide the Old South, "that no member of that church, no person who ever had any affection for that church, no person who ever took upon himself the covenant of that church, would ever desire or ask that it should be divided by an act of the legislature." He referred to the judg- ment of Solomon, and to the ready assent of the woman who was not the
mother, and who knew that she was not the mother, to the division of the child ; and he continued : "The Third Church of Boston, the Old South Church, di- vided ! No, sir. I believe that no man lives, who ever belonged to the Old South Church, or who was ever a mem- ber of that congregation, but would say no to that proposition, from the beginning to the end."
2 The Hon. Alpheus Hardy. He died August 7, 1887.
534
HISTORY OF THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH.
with the erection of a new house of worship, which had been talked about, but in reference to which nothing had been de- cided down to that time. Another brother,1 testifying at a hearing before the Supreme Court, at chambers, in 1876, spoke thus of the change, and of his attitude towards it : " I opposed it from my love of the old place, from my associations with it, and from, perhaps, some of my antiquarian tastes. I loved the old house; I was slow to see any good reason for leaving it; and it was only when I was slowly convinced, against my will, that we were not prospering there, and could not prosper there, that I gave way and felt that I must go with the majority."
It seems to us, also, that the minority should have given more credit than it did to the majority, for a proper appreciation of the historical associations of the old building. Dr. Manning, we believe, was thoroughly sincere when he testified to the court in 1876: " It was a great sorrow to me when I felt com- pelled in the providence of God, to turn my face away from that old building to another spot, in order that the living spirit of the church, the body of Christ, might be saved." At one of the hearings at the State House, in 1874, Mr. Frederick D. Allen, a deacon then, and the senior deacon now, said : "Do they [the minority] not suppose that these, too, [the majority,] have tender memories of the past? And have they not left the sanctuary of their fathers, many of them with deep feelings of regret ? They have gone, not because they wished, but because the prov- idence of God as plainly indicated to them their duty, as the pillar of cloud and fire taught Israel of old, that they must take up their sanctuary and remove to another place. Will it not be much better for these friends to come with us, and help us to rebuild the walls of our Zion in the new place ?" It was not without an effort that Mr. Samuel H. Walley, who was a de- scendant of John Walley, the friend and associate in the church of Samuel Sewall and Wait Winthrop, and whose family name appears in the register in every generation from the beginning to the present day, could bring himself to favor a removal from the old site. Mr. Charles Stoddard, also, for more than twenty years the senior deacon, bore a name that was historic in the church, and his ancestor, the Rev. Solomon Stoddard, had often preached from its pulpit. A few months after his death Mr. Linus M. Child thus described, before a legislative committee, the working of his mind on the subject : -
1 Dr. George F. Bigelow.
535
THE SPIRITUAL AND THE MATERIAL.
It was no easy matter, as every one knows, for the venerated Dea- con Stoddard to make up his mind that it was his duty to remove the Old South Church from the old meeting-house. For years this matter was considered, for years it was talked about, in every social meeting, in every evening meeting, and at all times, when, not the property, but the purpose, position and condition of the Old South Church were considered, and what the reason was of the decrease, the want of energy, the want of growth in that church. It was considered over and over again, and it was through the course of years that men came to make up their minds that they must consent to this thing. There- fore, I say, it was that many a time I have heard Deacon Stoddard say that, while he admitted that some time or other the church must be moved, it should not be in his day, and that he should die, as he had lived, within the walls of the Old South Church. But, sir, before that time came, he saw more clearly that it was his duty ; and he then and there, when the question was finally settled, as he walked out of the chapel where the vote was taken, said to a friend, "Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." For he did know and believe that his religious duty, and his love for the spiritual church of the Old South, required of him that great sacri- fice, -for it was a great sacrifice to him, -that they should move from that old building, where for so many years, morning and after- noon, Deacon Stoddard was found in his seat.
It is not to be denied that in the progress of the controversy, as Dr. Manning and his people were met with a disposition, on the part of many, to imperil, if not to sacrifice, the spiritual for the sake of the material, - the Third Church for the sake of the meeting-house, - they were tempted to speak of the old building with less veneration than previously, and even to refer to it on one or two occasions as only so much " bricks and mortar." For this they were sharply criticised ; but was not this precisely the light in which the Puritans, and before them, the reformers, in England, came to regard the grand old cathedrals and abbeys with their wealth of ornamentation in wall and column and win- dow? As they thought, the gospel in stone and glass was exalted above, if it did not altogether supersede the gospel in " the book ;" and, in order that the latter might be saved, they did not hesitate to destroy the former. And at a far distant period in the history of the church, we have another illustration of the same spirit : seven centuries before the Christian era, the reforming king Hezekiah brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made, which had served to symbolize to the Jewish people the greatest event in all the ages ; "for unto
536
HISTORY OF THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH.
those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it : and he called it Nehushtan," that is to say, a piece of brass.1 Dr. Manning, in the first years of his ministry at the Old South, had done more perhaps than any other man to awaken an interest in the public mind in the meeting-house as an historical building; and now he felt obliged to withstand the sentiment which he had done so much to evoke.2
We come now to the remonstrants who appeared in opposition to the church as members of the Congregational body. They were ministers, for the most part; the absence of prominent laymen on that side at the hearings was significant. We recall only one layman as a witness, outside the Old South parish. It was very natural that many of the ministers of New England should express the hope that the Old South would be able to maintain itself on the old site, so intimately associated with the history of Congregationalism for two centuries ; the pastor and members of the Old South, as we have shown, could understand
1 In a speech in the Massachusetts Senate, April 23, 1874, by the Hon. Henry S. Washburn, we find the follow- ing suggestive paragraph : -
" Our sympathies are largely with those who regret that these monuments of the virtue and piety of our fathers are doomed to pass away in the improve- ments rendered necessary by the growth of Boston, as the chief metropolis of New England. It is the love for the old building, for its antique architecture, for the hallowed memories its presence awakens, that moves the remonstrants to ask at our hands that it may be pre- served a while longer, a little longer, till they, too, to whom it is so dear, have passed away from the cares and respon- sibilities of earth. Such sentiments are natural, and I am the last man to esti- mate them lightly. They do honor to any community; but, nevertheless, plan as we may, we cannot avert the hand that sooner or later lays low every work of man's device. We may treasure these relics of the past, never so sacredly ; we may watch over them with all the solici- tude of the mother for her babe; but pass away they must, and take their place among the traditional memories of men. Such is life; such are the inevita-
ble laws which govern and control all human affairs. We ourselves, and the works of our hands, and those of our fathers, will form no exception to the in- exorable fiat of the hand of Time."
2 Other houses besides those of brick and stone disappear under the remorse- less touch of the hand of time. In the Oxford peerage case, which arose in 1626, on the death of the eighteenth earl, Lord Chief Justice Crewe gave a decision in which he said :.
" I have labored to make a covenant with myself, that affection may not press upon judgment; for I suppose there is no man that hath any apprehension of gentry or nobleness, but his affection stands to the continuance of so noble a name and house; and would take hold of a twig or a twine thread to uphold it. And yet Time hath his revolutions; there must be a period and end to all things temporal, - finis rerum, - an end of names and dignities and whatsoever is terrene ; and why not of De Vere? - for where is Bohun? Where is Mowbray ? Where is Mortimer? Nay, which is more and most of all, where is Planta- genet ? They are entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality." - North Am. Review, vol. xcvii. (1863), pp. 51, 52.
537
QUESTIONABLE ZEAL.
the feeling and appreciate it thoroughly. It was not natural, however, that a few ministers, representing, we believe, a meet- ing held for the discussion of religious and social questions, should appear in opposition to their Christian brethren at the very first public hearing which was held, just after the fire, and that without previous consultation with the pastor and officers of the church and society, and with, at the best, a superficial acquaintance with the circumstances of the case, they should endeavor to thwart these brethren in their plans, and to coerce them to the adoption of a policy which their judgment con- demned. The meeting at which these ministers were named as a committee, and the committee itself, before taking a position of antagonism against one of the oldest churches in the denomi- nation, and against brethren who had long been honored and trusted in it, might, at the least, as a preliminary to further action, have asked for information from those best qualified to give it. It might have been assumed that the pastor and dea- cons were as well informed upon and as much interested in everything relating to the prosperity of the church as any of their neighbors were likely to be; and the plainest dictates of Christian courtesy would seem to have required that some of these gentlemen should have endeavored to inform them- selves in reference to the considerations, the motives, the pur- poses, under the controlling influence of which their reverend brother and his people had been moved to take the step which they were taking. When the hearing was given in 1872, the pastor and brethren of the Old South had had this step in con- templation as a possible necessity for more than six years. Was there one of the ministers who appeared so unexpectedly at the State House in opposition to them, and who led off in the movement which was to involve them in long and painful and costly litigation, who could say that he had given six hours to reflection upon the questions at issue ? As it was, no one had a practical plan to suggest as an alternative for that which the Old South had worked out for itself. Some thought that there should be a " free church" on the corner of Milk Street ; one gentleman proposed that "an abnormal church " be sustained there ; some one else (not, we believe, a member of the denomi- nation, but making common cause with those who claimed to speak for it), offered this recommendation, in substance, towards the close of the controversy : "That the floor of the house should be kept clear for town meetings, so that if there was any
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HISTORY OF THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH.
radical who had anything so radical to say that he could not get into a church, he should say it there, or any Roman Catholic so Roman Catholic that he could not be permitted to go into a Roman Catholic cathedral, he might say it there, and so as to political questions."
We would not for a moment question the good faith or the honorable intentions of the ministers who opposed the Old South at this time. We cannot help thinking, however, that they were led to do as they did, by their own interpretation of the teachings of Congregationalism upon the mutual duties of the churches related to each other in denominational fellow- ship. For, if the local church cannot take care of itself, and if neighboring churches may intervene at their pleasure to recom- mend it what to do and what to refrain from doing, and if they may threaten the withdrawal of fellowship from it if it refuses to heed their admonitions, then those who believed that they knew better what was for the good of the Old South Church than did the church itself were justified in taking its concerns into their special keeping, and, perhaps, also, in undertaking to explain to the legislature and the courts precisely what Mrs. Norton's intentions were, at the foundation of the church, and in invoking the power of the secular arm in compelling compliance with her (and their) wishes. This is what some among us seem to understand by "the fellowship of the churches," - the right to intermeddle, to dictate, to overrule. When the Old South came to settle a pastor a few years later, a disposition was mani- fested by some of the same parties to take it again under their care and supervision, and to instruct it as to what it ought and ought not to do, and, again, Mrs. Norton's parchments were ex- pounded for their benefit.
The remonstrants in the third class or group - persons out- side the denomination - could not be expected to be thoroughly informed in reference to what was necessary to the best pros- perity of the Third Church, or to feel a very deep interest in it. Their interest was in the meeting-house as an historical build- ing, and in its history not as a house of worship, but as a build- ing in which three or four memorable town meetings had been held, and which had been occupied by some of the British troops during the siege of Boston. This interest on their part was not only legitimate, but creditable ; and they, as all others, had a right to their opinions, whatever these were, as to what the church might or ought to do. The only question is whether
539
MRS. NORTON'S INTENTIONS.
they were justified in trying so persistently to compel the church, contrary to the will of the majority, through the legis- lature and the courts, to maintain worship in the old building, and, in any event, to bear the cost of its preservation. When it was proposed to buy and preserve the home of John Han- cock, the Commonwealth was to meet the expense; it is to the City of Boston, as a municipality, that we are indebted for the preservation of the Old State House; the thought of preserv- ing the Old South meeting-house, except by a general subscrip- tion, should never have been entertained for a moment. To have compelled the society, by act of legislature, to preserve the building for the benefit of the public would have been confis- cation. It would also have been an unwarrantable perversion of Mrs. Norton's funds ; she gave her land "for the public worship of God," and she was moved to the gift by "the love she bore to the Third Church in Boston." When the bill of 1874 was pending in the State senate, an honorable member of that body said : "If you would look for the subversion, for the annihila- tion, for the destruction of Madam Norton's trust, you will find it in the sentiment which opposes the passage of this bill; in the sentiment which would divert this property from its mis- sion, - the salvation of souls, - in order to preserve and per- petuate a monument of the history of our Revolutionary days. This, clearly, was not the purpose of Madam Norton's bequest. She had never seen nor heard of Otis or Adams or Warren ; she died a hundred years before, loyal to her king and sov- ereign."
There was an impression abroad in the community that be- cause a former generation in the parish had been so public-spir- ited and patriotic as to open the doors of the meeting-house to the citizens of Boston in a great emergency, the public had thereby acquired a sort of ownership in the building, with the right to say what should be done with it. In the later stages of the controversy, after a sale of the building had been made, the legislature was asked to override the conditions on which the transaction was based, because the society had "acted without proper consideration of their relations to the public." In a paper prepared by the learned counsel of the society, the Hon. Benjamin F. Thomas and Mr. Linus M. Child, it was said on this point : -
That is to say, if the owner of property desires to sell it or to make a sale upon conditions, he must see to it that it meets the wishes of
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HISTORY OF THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH.
" the public." It is not enough that the conditions are valid in law and equity, that the highest courts have and would uphold them ; but they must be agreeable to "the public." It may well be asked, Who are " the public," to whose will and pleasure the most sacred rights of property are to be subordinated, and which every owner of property must consult before he sells or devises his estate ? Nothing can be of more indefinite meaning or meaningless than this phrase, " the public," and nothing easier than for certain classes of very good men to satisfy themselves that they constitute "the public." If it were important to inquire, the society submit that there is no evidence before the com- mittee or the legislature that the people have any especial interest in the matter of these conditions, one way or the other. The people have a profound interest in the question whether property is to be held under uniform and " standing laws " or not ; and whether, whenever men buy property upon perfectly well-understood and lawful conditions, they can turn round the next day or the next month and ask the legislature for help to annul or evade them. The proposition that these condi- tions, valid in law, are to be annulled and made of no effect because the society acted without proper consideration of their relations to what men choose to call "the public," is simply agrarian. Such a policy would unsettle the foundations of property, - would be, in fact, a denial of the right to be protected in its enjoyment by standing laws, secured to every citizen by the Constitution.
The society was subjected to a vexatious and expensive course of litigation, which, in one form and another, was protracted through five or six years, and to a serious loss in the sale of its property, because of a technicality in the tenure by which it held the land which had come down to it from the foundation of the church. If at the beginning the Third Church had re- ceived a grant of land from the town, as so many churches did during the first half of the seventeenth century, and as it might have done, its right to remove to another site at its pleasure would not probably have been called in question before the courts.1 But instead of this, its land was given to it by one of
1 In the matter of the proprietors of the New South Meeting-House in Bos- ton, 13 Allen, pp. 497-520, land having been granted by the town of Boston for the erection thereon " of an edifice for a meeting-house for the public worship of God," to be held by the grantees and "their associates and successors for the use aforesaid forever," the court said : " Doubtless the original and primary intention of the founders of the parish
and of the town of Boston was that the land granted by the latter should be im- proved for this purpose; but we fail to see anything to indicate a design to make the continuance of the trust de- pendent on the perpetual use of that par- ticular site or locality for a house of worship ; nor can any such inference be reasonably made, from the facts dis- closed, concerning the origin and history of the parish."
54I
A PRIVATE TRUST.
its first members, Mrs. Norton, "for the love she bore " to it ; and we are not to suppose that her generous intention was to be so construed as to work a hardship to the church, which it would not have suffered if it had received a grant of land from the town of Boston. Of course, as there was no corporate body to which the land could be conveyed, Mrs. Norton was obliged to convey it to certain individuals as trustees, and, in so doing, to declare the general purposes of the trust, one of which related to the site to be occupied and used by the church. It was the opinion of the Hon. Benjamin R. Curtis, and the Su- preme Court so decided afterward, that the trust did not require " the devotion of this particular land to the special use indicated, forever and without change in the mode of investment of the gift. There goes along with such a trust," he said, " the power, and under some circumstances the duty, of so changing the mode of investment as to prevent the objects of the gift from being wholly defeated or greatly impaired."
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