USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Framingham > Memorial of the bi-centennial celebration of the incorporation of the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, June, 1900 > Part 3
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But the outward history of a church is of little consequence compared with the history of the progress of its thought. To understand this we must take a general survey of the relig- ious thought of New England during these two hundred years, and then we shall be able to see more clearly the work done here.
The discussions in the New England churches were not at first of a theological character, but were confined chiefly to matters pertaining to church polity or government. This was natural, as they were departing widely from the usages of the reformed churches. The first churches in New Eng- land were bound together by a covenant and not by a creed, and, while on friendly terms, were wholly independent of each other. There was nothing in the covenant of the First Church at Salem that an ordinary Unitarian would object to. Indeed it is inscribed on the walls of the church today and reads as follows :- " We Covenant with the Lord and one with another ; and do bind ourselves in the presence of God, to walk together in all his ways, according, as he is pleased to reveal himself unto us in his Blessed word of Truth."
These discussions finally culminated in the Synod of Cambridge in 1648. The churches were all but two repre-
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sented and adopted with singular unanimity a platform prepared by Richard Mather. It laid down the doctrine that every candidate for church fellowship must satisfy the church as to his knowledge of Christian doctrines and the reasons therefor, and have experienced what was called regeneration. The standard of the Westminster Assembly of Divines was adopted and the churches of New England became hot-beds of dogmatism and intolerance.
After the settlement of the question of church polity the people turned their attention to theology and became the most Calvinistic people in the world, with perhaps the ex- ception of the Scots. The five points of Calvinism covered the whole field of their thoughts.
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It is a very striking illustration of the complete revolution that has taken place in religious thought in New England that the themes which occupied the attention and thought of the fathers have lost all interest for the children. They have disappeared from the life of today and hardly left a wreck behind them. There are probably very few persons in this audience, if any, or in this town, whether orthodox or heterodox, who could name " the Five Points of Calvinism." We are not told by any high authority in spiritual things that : " The times of this ignorance God winked at but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent." "But brethren I would not have you ignorant " of what the fathers thought vital to salvation. The Five Points are as follows :-
I. Predestination, or particular election.
II. Irresistible Grace.
III. Original Sin, or Total Depravity.
IV. Peculiar Redemption.
V. The final perseverance of the Saints.
It was a period of astonishing theological activity. In illustration of these frightful themes whole bodies of divinity were published, but they were first delivered as sermons. Samuel Willard left a work entitled "A complete Body of Divinity," which was published in a huge tome of nine hundred and fourteen pages, each page having two columns, in small and compact type. It was all delivered in two hun-
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dred and fifty sermons in the nineteen years, extending across the period of the organization and early years of this church.
But whatever we may think of the theology of John Calvin, we must acknowledge that Calvinism has produced a very remarkable race of men, and has left to us a royal inheritance of political institutions and liberties. It was not a bad mental stimulus and the child was early exercised and trained in it. He was not sent to a girls' school, but he was given the catechism of the Rev. John Cotton,-" Milk for New England Babes Drawn from the Breasts of both Testaments for their Spiritual Nourishment." You may think that there was little milk in it, but you may be assured of this one thing,-there was no water. The child had a rugged training and acquired a mental culture of inestimable value. He was taught to think clearly and deeply. Thus Calvin- ism nursed, educated and armed with invincible might an antagonist who by and by would question not its reasoning but its premises.
But Calvinism as exhibited in Puritanism not only exercised the reason, it strengthened the domestic affections, and through them brought into the field of church polity another factor. In the Puritan church everything culmina- ted at the communion table, and no one could approach it but a member of the church who was sound in his belief and had had personal assurance of his own regeneration, and only such had a right to bring their children forward for baptism. But the younger generation, although good men living blameless lives and who had themselves been baptised in infancy, did not join the church. The position of their children was pitiable enough; they were little pagans who had strolled into the services of a Christian church, but were outside its guardianship and beyond "the ecclesiastical inspection " that goes with baptism.
The parents were anxious to have their children baptised, and, on the ground that they were born into the church and entitled to its care and nurture, the church yielded and parental affection triumphed over orthodoxy. This is known in our history as "the Half-way Covenant." It met with
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little opposition, as the grandparents who had the matter in their hands wished to have their grandchildren baptised and see them under the protection of the church.
The half-way covenant theory is usually looked upon as the mother of that brood of heresies known as Unitarianism. However this may be, it introduced into the polity of the church of that time a new principle, a principle that announ- ced that the church was made for man and not man for the church. It was the beginning of a movement which in time changed the church from a little private party of "visible saints," who thought they had been elected from the foun- dation of the world to be the especial recipients of divine favor, and made it an organization of men and women whose object it was to succor, and cultivate all noble aspirations after the divine and quicken and energize all kindly feelings towards the human.
It was the beginning of a great advance in thought, feeling and practice. Some of the bars were removed and not even Jonathan Edwards could put them back, and he lost his pulpit at Northampton for trying to do so. Let me quote on this point the words of an accomplished historian whose recent death we all have reason to lament. The Rev. George Leon Walker, D.D., in a lecture delivered to the students of a theological school has said :
" It is no exageration to say that, though the Congregational churches of New England have rejected the Half-way-Cov- enant theory, they are today generally admitting to full communion a membership which exhibits less clearly under- stood and realized convictions of sin and of the necessity of atoning grace as the only hope of lost men than under that system were often expected of those who came only halfway within the covenant doors." - ( Some Religious Aspects, 174.)
In the fourth decade of the eighteenth century it was noticed that a marked decadence of religion and morals had taken place and a thorough reform was called for.
The man was at hand to organize the crusade and restore the old discipline and rigidity. The powerful genius of Jonathan Edwards now came to the front. He was unsur-
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passed as a dialectician, but his clear, calm, cold and mer- ciless logic was reinforced by an imagination that the great- est poets might have envied, which gave to everything he said an intense realism. He appealed at once to the mind and heart, to the reason and to the feelings. The dogmas of Calvinism in his hands ceased to be mere theological abstrac- tions that might lie dormant in the soul until the day of judgment, but dreadful realities of imminent and supreme importance, and he introduced and emphasized with great skill a new feature, the personal responsibility of the sinner for his graceless state. "The Great Awakening " was the result of his preaching. Whitefield came from England with his blazing oratory to swell the influence until the country was in a whirl of religious excitement of the greatest intensity. " The dry bones of the prevailing orthodoxy rattled, and the people came to Christ in flocks," as Edwards said.
The excesses of the movement were very great, and some questioned the spirit, whether it was of God or no. Among these was Charles Chauncy, one of the leading ministers of Boston. He opposed the whole movement, publicly de- nounced Whitefield, and entered into a discussion with Edwards himself. But the Lord's Supper was more strictly guarded and the road to church membership was made more difficult and thorny than before. The result, however, was not encouraging. When the excitement subsided and men began to think once more, a reaction set in which produced astonishing results.
The reaction brought together scattered influences that had been working for a long time in silence. The clergy and the laity began to study in the spirit of real investigation, and heretical views ceased to be feared. At the close of the "Great Awakening," a Boston bookseller brought out an edition of Emlyn's " Humble Inquiry," in which was stated very cogent reasons for not believing the doctrine of the Trinity. The great teachers began to give reasons for the opinions they taught, and did not depend upon scriptural proof-texts. The War of the Revolution had a tremendous influence upon the religious thought of the people, for of
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religion it may be said, as Hosea Biglow said of its great coadjutor :
"civlyzation does git forrid Sometimes upon a powder-cart."
The humanities began to come into the foreground and scholastic dogmas sank into the background. When the alarm was sounded it was too late; the great majority of the people in the leading churches had ceased to be orthodox.
The legitimate result of these reactionary and advancing forces was American Unitarianism. As a movement it was open to the influences of all the ages, and has been so far open to the influences of the age that was present as time advanced. It allowed human nature its right to speak on the high problems of the soul, of time and eternity, and it affirmed with all its strength the veracity of its intellectual, moral and spiritual convictions. It has drifted, rather than been guided by any human hand, through many stages of experiences and many phases of thought, and has been vexed by many sharp controversies, but its discussions have seldom descended to wrangling. At last it has taken a position upon which all can stand.
The youngest church in christendom, it has accepted the oldest and the simplest statement of faith and practice in the world. This statement is an affirmation of the aim of all the various manifestations of religion on earth. It is so broad that it takes in all the races of men and is good for all time and eternity. Its disciples may be denied the name of Christian, they may themselves think they are or they may think they are not ; it is not a matter worth discussing. But it is well to remember that you have the only bond of union and liberty in christendom, that has the express and unequiv- ocal sanction of Jesus of Nazareth. He said of the two great commandments of the law which are inscribed on your ban- ner : " Do this and thou shalt live."
When we pass from the broad stream of the general history of the Church to the history of individual churches, we find ourselves very often, alas, in eddies, whirled about by angry waters that chafe and foam and fret and are dark with mud, and full of floating debris which has drifted in from all 3
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directions. Men are never absurd on purpose, but a church quarrel comes very near the line that divides the reasonable from the great inane. I have never heard one cited as an evidence of " total depravity." Perhaps it would prove too much and weaken the cause.
It is not worth our while to rake the ashes of the past for the dying embers of old church quarrels. They are in their origin usually of a personal nature, and they try to invest themselves with ecclesiastical dignity by putting on a dress clumsily patched up out of so-called Christian doctrines. It is astonishing how pious and orthodox men will grow when they are like to get worsted in a church quarrel. They are then just in a condition to do an incalculable amount of harm, that does not die when the original actors are dead, buried and forgotten, but illustrates the truth of Mark Antony's saying :- "The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones." But the kingdom of God suffereth violence and violence taketh it by force. There is no better evidence of the vitality of the church than that it can stand a succession of these rackets. This church has great vitality.
The original covenant of this church, signed by eighteen persons (men) on the 8th of October, 1701, is a document of about two hundred words in one sentence. (Forty years later Jonathan Edwards proposed a covenant of one thousand five hundred and sixty-eight words.) It began in the con- ventional form of the time with a confession : - " We do, under a soul-humbling and abasing sense of our utter unworthiness of so great and high a privilege as God is graciously putting into our hands, accept of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for our God in covenant with us," and so forth.
The humility expressed in the early covenants, so foreign to our thought and feeling, was not of the Uriah Heep type. The familiar couplet of the New England Primer: -
"In Adam's fall We sinned all,"
is very democratic in its spirit; it puts kings and priests on a level with the lowest, poorest and weakest, and humility is
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the only becoming state of mind, for " all are made liable to all the miseries of this life, to death itself, and the pains of hell forever." Humility is the only possible state of mind for him who believes this and sees the everlasting glories on the one hand and the everlasting fires on the other.
There was a time when men believed that they were born children of wrath, but that God had opened a way of escape and had given them assurance of it. We today, both ortho- dox and heterodox, are prone to forget that the infinite Originality is equal to any condition a human soul may be in and can give it the peace of heavenly places if it looks up to God.
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This covenanting with God is at best a matter of legality, and belonged to the thought of a people who clung to the idea of commercial relations in spiritual things. There is a vastly higher relationship folded up in the familiar words taught us at our mother's knee, "Our Father who art in Heaven." The simple question for us to settle is whether we feel the latter as strongly as our fathers did the former.
It was without doubt understood that the creed of the Church was the Confession of Faith adopted at Boston in 1680. But the Church was not up in all respects to the requirements of organized Congregationalism. The office of Elder does not seem to have been provided for. The theory was that the will of Christ ought to govern in the Church. But who was to interpret that will? In the New England theocracy it was not revealed to the church members but to the elders. When the elder ordered business or administered admonition, every faithful soul was expected to assent, and if he did not he was held as "factious and ob- stinate." The elders have been rightly called "a speaking aristocracy in the face of a silent Democracy.'' With this class of ecclesiastical tyrants this church would have nothing to do. The church was right, for the office of elder has no foundation in either Scripture or reason, and was an inven- tion of John Calvin. But the rejection of this functionary caused a great deal of trouble and was one of the causes of two secessions from the church. The spirit of dissension ran so high at one time that the Lord's Supper was omitted, and
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at another time that a day was set apart for humiliation and prayer on account of dissensions.
It is a very significant fact that while the Great Awaken- ing was in progress and the churches in the neighborhood were aroused, and Edwards himself preached in this imme- diate vicinity, he was not asked, so far as I can find, to occupy this pulpit; Whitefield preached in town once but not by invitation of this church. The people seem to have objected to the methods pursued, and the name of their minister is not among those who signed the great declaration of approval.
But quite as significant of the tone and temper of the people is their action at the ordination of their second min- ister, the Rev. Matthew Bridge. A committee was selected "to be the mouthpiece of the church at the council." They proposed to the candidate two questions; one of a general nature as to church government, and the second was, "if in important matters he was willing to take the vote of the church with uplifted hands." His answer was satisfactory to the great majority. But a protest was sent to the council against the ordination of the candidate on the ground that "the scope and tenor of his preaching was unsatisfactory, that many such doctrines, as we esteem of greatest import- ance, are wholly omitted or at best slightly touched upon in his sermons, particularly the doctrine of original sin, the imputation of it; the total loss of the image of God in the fall of Adam; the wrath and curse of God consequent thereon," and six other doctrines that have the genuine ring of the faith once delivered to the saints by John Calvin.
Mr. Bridge was, however, ordained, as he said, "on the old foundation." The dissenting brethren seceded and form- ed a new church which had a short history, and the newly ordained minister was left to pursue his work in peace for years to come. After his death the church was without a settled minister for some years, but at the close of the Revo- lutionary War the people called the Rev. David Kellogg. He was a conservative man who held orthodox views, loved peace, and did what he could for union. He reinstated the reading of the Scriptures as a part of the church services,
OLD MEETINGHOUSE
FRAMINGHAM.
Drawn
SEPTEMBER
1843
By W.H.BOYNTON
E
Erected 1807
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which was looked upon as "unedifying " in the churches of New England, and the town granted eight dollars to purchase a Bible for the pulpit. He was also instrumental in inducing the people to use Watts's Hymns and Psalms.
This church as an organization, like many others at that time, was steadily declining in numbers and power, owing to a very gradual and silent change that was taking place in the minds of men. During Mr. Bridge's administration, extend- ing over twenty-nine years, from 1746 to 1775, eighty-one men had joined the church on confession of faith. During the administration of Dr. Kellogg, extending over forty-eight years, from 1781 to 1829, there were only sixty-nine.
A crisis was approaching and its coming was accelerated by a meeting held on the 24th of April, 1826, at which a parish was duly organized according to law. From this time all connection between the town and the parish ceased, and the church became independent of civil authorities. This movement opened the way for the parish to take a hand in the management of affairs and have a voice in the proceed- ings, and the need of an assistant to the now aged Dr. Kel- logg afforded an occasion.
It was, however, soon apparent that the church and the parish were not likely to agree in the selection. They sought to bridge over the difficulty by employing preachers of the old and the new school to occupy the pulpit alternately. But the experiment was a failure, and nothing remained but a trial of strength, and the parish was victorious. The minority seceded. This was the third secession from the church in its history. The first two were failures, but the third was a success. It took the name of the "Hollis Evangelical Society"- a name sacred to Unitarians, and we have to thank them for educating the Rev. Minot J. Savage for our ranks.
The people of the First Parish immediately erased the names of the second and third persons of the Trinity from their covenant and called a minister. Their intelligence and their theological position is clearly indicated by the character of the men they invited to take part in the ordination of their new minister. They named for the sermon Dr. Channing or
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the Rev. James Walker, for the ordaining prayer Dr. Lowell, and for the concluding prayer the Rev. Ralph Waldo Emer- son.
Now that the noise of the controversy has died away it is pleasant to note the undertones of kindly feeling that have come down to us. The First Parish put on record an express- ion of their sorrow that so many of their fellow-worshippers and their old minister had left them. Dr. Kellogg was invited to sit with the council at the ordination of his success- or, but declined on account of the infirmities of old age. He was invited to occupy his old pulpit afterwards and did. At his funeral the minister of this church, the Rev. William Barry, the conscientious and graceful historian of the town, took part in the services. It had been decided by the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth that a church separa- ting for any cause from a parish loses its existence in the eye of the law, and, therefore, that the seceding body could have no right to either the name, furniture, records or property of the church. The First Parish appointed a committee to confer with a committee of the new church and instructed them to make this proposal : - That the records go to the First Parish and the communion service to the new church ; it was accepted. The time is coming when the proud and opinionated with their egotism will vanish and only the bright side of these old stories will find a place in our remembrance.
It would be pleasant, did time permit, to look in upon the charities of the church, - and there are plenty of illustrations of the great human heart that was in it,-and to speak of ยท private generosity that with wise foresight has blessed the present and the future. It would be pleasant to speak of those men of culture and deep moral convictions who have stood in this place and spoken for God and duty, and to remind you of those brave men whose hearts "on war's red touchstone rung true metal,"- and among them stand two of your own ministers, Matthew Bridge and Charles A. Humph- reys, who ventured their lives, one to throw off the yoke of an English king, the other to redeem the land from the more odious tyranny of a slave-holding oligarchy; it would be
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pleasant to speak of those men of affairs who have taken no unimportant part in the great business of the world, and of those who have been interested in the world of letters, one of whom, Lorenzo Sabine, has become the conscientious and painstaking historian of an unpopular cause,-the Loyalists of the Revolution.
It is a pleasant duty to pause in the rush of affairs and commemorate the heroic virtues of the men and women who toiled in the past and made the summits of the present accessible to their children; summits where the air is invigorating and bracing, and the outlook is wide, and where the native spiritual instincts of the soul, those
" High instincts, before which our mortal nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised ; Which be they what they may, are yet the fountain Light of all our day ; the master light of all our seeing,"
can act with greater freedom and power.
It is indeed a blessed privilege, as well as a duty, to give thanks for the organization through which the fathers wrought with such beneficent results for us and those who come after us. We celebrate today the formation of that Organization two hundred years ago. What are its relations to us now? Is it like "a Pine-tree Shilling," valuable chiefly on account of its age, or is it about to enter upon a larger field of action and exert a greater influence than ever before with the coming in of another century ?
It has helped the fathers to deliver themselves and their children forever from the thrall of cruel creeds, and from those grim idols "graven by art and Man's device," called theological dogmas, some of which had a striking resemblance to Moloch, " horrid king," who " made his grove
"The pleasant valley of Hinnon, Tophet thence And black Gehenna called, the type of Hell."
Their efforts have left us an atmosphere unpoluted by brim- stone-fumes, and a sky without a trace of apocalyptical phan- tasmagoria. It was, indeed, a great work, but a greater
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