USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Old South church (Third church) Boston. Memorial addresses, Sunday evening, October 26, 1884 > Part 3
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" Satterday March 14 1701-2 At 5 p. m. Capt. John Alden expired ; Going to visit him, I happened to be there at the time."
Captain Alden was twice married. His first wife, Eliz- abeth, died before 1660. In this year he married Elizabeth, daughter of William Phillips and widow of Abiel Everill.1 She died in the winter of 1695-96. Sewall says :
" Feb. 7, 1695-6. Mrs. Alden is buried. Bearers were Mr Chiever, Capt. Hill, Capt. Williams, Mr Walley, Mr Ballentine.
After his wife's death, Captain Alden lived with his daugh- ter Elizabeth. She married, first, John, son of John Walley, mariner, and secondly, Simon Willard, a son of the second minister of the South Church. Her son, Abiel Walley, be- came a prominent merchant, and in 1721 was appointed comptroller of His Majesty's Customs in Boston. He joined the South Church in 1717, and afterward was a leading
1 1660. " John Aldine & Elizabeth
Everill, widow, relict of Abiell Everill,
deceased, were married Ist Aprill by John Endecott Gov." Town Records.
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member of the New North Church. Zechariah Alden grad- uated at Harvard College in 1692, during his father's impris- onment in Boston. In the catalogue he ranks second, in a class of six.
Thus briefly have we traced the history, so far as it is ac- cessible to us, of two of the men who laid the foundations of this ancient church. They and their contemporaries seem very far away from us ; historically, we are as widely removed from them, as they were from the times of the first Tudor king in England, from the earlier years of the reign of Charles V., from the days when Ghent was still a proud and free city, when John Tetzel was selling indulgences in Germany, when, like distant thunder, the first proclamation of a pure gospel by Luther was making itself heard in Rome. And yet, how much more have we in common with the New England fathers of the seventeenth century, than they had with the men who lived at the beginning of the sixteenth. In their circumstan- ces and conditions externally, Scottow and Alden, Rawson and Oliver, were very different from ourselves ; but not so much so, in their inner experiences, and in the springs and forces of their spiritual life. Their trials were not just like ours ; we have no personal knowledge of Indian massacres and witchcraft terrors ; but we have troubles, temptations and forebodings of our own, and these are perhaps no less, certainly no more, hard to bear than were theirs. Assuredly, in their love for this Church, we who are one with them in its goodly fellowship, would seek to be altogether like them, and in their steadfast devotion to Him who is its Lord and Head.
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SAMUEL SEWALL
BY THE
REV. GEORGE E. ELLIS, D.D., LL.D.
"STATELY AND SLOW, WITH THOUGHTFUL AIR, HIS BLACK CAP HIDING HIS WHITENED HAIR, WALKS THE JUDGE OF THE GREAT ASSIZE, SAMUEL SEWALL, THE GOOD AND WISE. HIS FACE WITH LINES OF FIRMNESS WROUGHT, HE WEARS THE LOOK OF A MAN UNBOUGHT, WHO SWEARS TO HIS HURT AND CHANGES NOT; YET, TOUCHED AND SOFTENED NEVERTHELESS WITH THE GRACE OF A CHRISTIAN GENTLENESS, THE FACE THAT A CHILD WOULD CLIMB TO KISS ! TRUE AND TENDER AND BRAVE AND JUST, THAT MAN MIGHT HONOR AND WOMAN TRUST."
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SAMUEL SEWALL.
IT would not have been at all a matter out of course or reason, if the name of Samuel Sewall, instead of finding a separate place of honor on a commemorative tablet in this Church, had appeared on the roll of its ministers, preceding that of his son and some others. In his time the ministry was the first thought of young graduates of Harvard, like him- self, of the original New England stock, who had a serious purpose for a useful and honored life. Some of his own most eminent contemporaries-like Governors William Stoughton, Joseph Dudley and. Gurdon Saltonstall, had first had the min- istry in view. Two of these had preached, as had many others, who afterwards found, high magistracy, teaching, or other service preferable to them. In fact, Sewall did, once at least, make trial of his gifts at the desk. He records that in April, 1675, four years after he had graduated, he " helped preach " for his old teacher, Mr. Parker, of Newbury, the min- ister of Sewall's parents. Carried away by the exuberance of his thought and feeling, he writes-" Being afraid to look on the glass [the sand glass in the pulpit] ignorantly and unwittingly, I stood two hours and a half." Though he had entered upon mercantile business, he was urged by some friends to engage in the ministry. He remained, however, through all his life, the most ministerial layman in this com- munity, where there were many such. Very few, if any, who filled the desks, surpassed him in biblical, theological, or classical attainments. His library was of solid stock, large
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and rich in the learning of the time. Classical works, com- mentaries, theological treatises and sermons, imported by himself, and especially works on the Prophecies, his favorite theme, engaged his study and profound thought. He loved to present choice volumes to the College, to poor ministers, to converted Indians, and to others who could well use them.
His religious relations in his youth were, of course, those of his parents in Newbury. He united himself with this, the Third, or South Church in Boston, at the age of twenty-five, in 1677, and made a simple relation of his religious experi- ence in accepting the Covenant. He was probably led to this choice by the membership here of the family of Mr. John Hull, whose daughter he had married the year previous. He lived happily with his excellent wife, the mother of all his fourteen children, forty-three years. He says she avowed to him that she had set her heart upon him when he was de- livering his Commencement part. She was the heiress of that time.
For fifty-three years, seventeen of them under the pastor- ship of his honored son, Sewall was in membership here. It may safely be affirmed that in all the brotherhood of the Church, including even the five pastors whose ministry he shared, there was not one to whom the sanctuary with its of- fices, its divine services, its holy ties of sympathy and help, its work of edification, its benevolences for the poor and the ill, the African slave, the Barbary captive, and the Indian, were more endeared, more jealously, more watchfully cared for, than by himself. He might well have been called upon, at any moment of emergency, to occupy the pulpit. His piety and dignity and high repute would have graced the of- fice of deacon. Humble as was his estimate of his musical talent-and though he confesses he was apt to fall into a dif- ferent tune from that with which he started-he seems to have for many years given satisfaction as a precentor. Good parts of your church records-births, baptisms, marriages, deaths, admissions to the communion, and special occasions of ob- servance-might be supplied from what he set down by his
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own hand, as responsive to the watchful interest of a warmly sympathetic heart. Though his love and zeal were intensely centred here, he was the medium of kindly and hospitable rela- tions between all the ministers and churches of the town, and indeed of the Province. He loved to attend the frequent do- mestic occasions among his immediate friends for their sober fastings or glad thanksgivings, and was constant with psalm, or prayer or exhortation at the set meetings of a group of families seeking edification in their homes in turn. There was no variance or break, no stagnation or ebbs in his reli- gious life. This was continuous and uniform, in his closet, his family circle, the church, the court room, in college business, the council chamber, the town meeting, and the school visita- tion. His frequent professional journies, with the discomforts and perils of those days, on rough roads, across ferries, often of icy waters, over marshes and by inner seas, made welcome the restful firesides of friends-with something warming for food and drink. When he returned home from these exposed journies, he would enter in his record with a calm devotion, his " Laus Deo." His gravity was habitual. Rarely, though sometimes, do we come upon a trace of what he calls a "pleasancy." He was too good and serene a man to deny himself smiles and joys : too sedate to indulge the boisterous laugh.
Some of you may be asking how we know all this about a man who passed from life more than a century and a half ago? The answer, full and true, will soon come. Judge Sewall is better known to us in both his outer and in- ner being, in all the elements, composition and manifes- tation of character, in his whole personal, domestic, social, official and religious life, than is any other individual in our local history of two hundred and fifty years. And this is true not only of himself, but through his pen, curiously ac- tive, faithful, candid, kind, impartial and ever just, his own times stand revealed and described to us, as if by thousands of daguerreotypes and repeating telephones. His surround- ings and companions, his home and public life, the habits,
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usages, customs and events, and even the food which we can almost smell and taste, the clothes and furnishings, the modes of hospitality, of travel, the style of things-all in infinite detail, the medical practice, the military service, the formal ceremonials and courtesies, the excitements, panics and disas- ters, the secret and public movements in affairs, the doings, the worth and repute of contemporaries-all these have come to us through Sewall's pen, with a fullness, vividness and old time flavor and charm, which we might in vain seek to gath- er and put together from many hundred volumes. And all this comes from Sewall's having kept a daily journal from 1674 to 1729-fifty-five years.
These surviving journals from the generations gone are very risky, sometimes worthless or mischievous, and often objectionable, productions. Sometimes they are slanderous, trespasses upon the rights and repute of those who can make no defence. In those cases, they always reflect reproach upon the writers of them. It was the habit of a class of men of Sewall's time and training to keep diaries, and those of a religious spirit made them the repository of their self-reckon- ings as under the eye of God, the record of their introspective searching of themselves, their heights and depths of feelings, their unveiled faults and short comings. Some of the writers indulged themselves with more or less of freedom in express- ing opinions about the character and course of other persons. Quite a list might be made of men in position or office who, having accumulated masses of such materials in their active life-time, took care that the fire should destroy them before the writers died. A serious question arises as to the rightful- ness or expediency of publishing these self-confidences and self-revelations of men who left such records behind them, either by accident or design. The question must be decided in each case by the contents and spirit of the record, if a good judgment is exercised in the decision. The excellent Dr. Doddridge was made ridiculous by his kinsman who made public his private secrets. The diaries of Sewall's contem- poraries, Increase and Cotton Mather, are extant, but only
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extracts of them have been printed. Much in them is wisely suppressed. Increase, though a most faithful, devoted and eminently serviceable man, was morbid, censorious some- times, and suffered as if unappreciated. The younger Mather was often jealous, spiteful, rancorous and vengeful in his daily records ; and thus the estimate of his general worth is so far reduced through materials furnished by himself.
When, some eighteen years ago, Judge Sewall's papers came, by purchase, into the possession of the Massachu- setts Historical Society, the writer had been dead some hun- dred and thirty years. The MSS., passing down in a branch of his family, had been highly prized, gathering an increasing value. They had been kept with much re- serve, sparingly yielding to earnest inquirers the infor- mation they were known to contain. Did the writer ever have in view or imagination, that what he wrote in his privacy -never, so far as appears, subjecting even a page to any eye but his own-would be copied, printed, published, and put within reach of all who might wish to read it? We may be safe in answering that he did not. Do we wrong him in thus bringing his secrets to the light? There is no entry in his papers from which we could infer either a permission or a pro- hibition to give them to the world. But I may answer the question by saying frankly and gladly, that while we gather from his papers matter of incalculable value and interest for historians and the searchers into the curious things of the past, neither Sewall himself nor a single one of all those whom he names, suffers any harm or reproach from the disclosures. Not a line or a word in those records reveals anything but a pure and unstained soul, a most tender and scrupulous conscience, a loving and child-like heart, a walk in life spent and conse- crated as under the All-Seeing and Holy Eye. There are no grudges, no animosities, no malice, no bitter musings, no aggravating reproaches of those-some very near to him-who caused him loss and grief, but ever efforts to reconcile, by forbearance, remonstrance, and forgiveness. Having in view some passages-we may call them queer, to be referred to
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presently-the question pressed with some misgiving upon the Editors of the papers, whether they should be set forth in print. Bearing in view that such documents are not de- signed for school-books, but primarily as materials for digested history-the rule is accepted, that the reason which justifies the printing of them, covers also the exaction, that they be literally and faithfully set forth.
The deepest impression made upon me in the pleasant use of the leisure of five years in the editing and annotating of the Judge's journal, was that of the profound and consistent devoutness of his spirit, and the tender affectionateness of his nature. He was pure in heart, and so had divine visions. He was touched by all the infirmities and griefs of others. Unknown to them they had his prayers, when he heard of their trials. He had his daily errands of help and sympathy to the poor and suffering. The capacious pockets in the outer garments of those days, were, in his case, never empty when he went out of doors. They must have been most miscellaneously crowded with sermons, trinkets, sweetmeats, fruits and other delicacies. Generally figs, oranges, or " Mar- malade " or "Chockalett" accompanied a little religious tract. One is a little startled on reading, that on a visit of courtship to a rather hesitating widow, he left with her " Sibbs' Bowels." But we are relieved on learning that it was a harmless tractate, by Dr. Sibbs, with the full title-" Bowels Opened ; or, a Dis- covery of the Union betwixt Christ and the Church." He was the constant visitor of all of his own widest circle, lofty or hum- ble, confined to the house or the chamber. He was the first on our soil to write and print against the enslaving of Africans. His interest for the Indians so earnest, warm and constant, was shown in his administration of a charitable trust for them, and in visiting their fading remnants in their woful settlements. I cannot say whether he would have been in or out of sympathy with all that is included in the " woman-question " of our time. I think he would wish to divide it. But we have an unpub- lished MS. of his in which he pleads for women as the joint heirs of the heavenly mansions, and indignantly argues down
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the notion of their exclusion. "Talitha-Cumi-Young Wo- man, Arise !" is the felicitous title of his essay. Sewall cer- tainly had what seems to us a morbid addiction to attendance on funerals, and to serving as a Bearer of defunct persons. Standing recently by the ancient grave, in the cemetery of the town of Revere, of Dean Winthrop, the last surviving son of Governor Winthrop, I recalled Sewall's record, that he " helped let down the body into the earth." But it must have been in pathetic memory of the vanished family of the ever honored first magistrate of the Colony. Indeed, Sewall gives his fondest and tenderest words to his farewells, one by one, till he reaches the last, of the survivors of the first English comers here, especially to those of them, who were " true New Eng- land people," and " dear lovers " of this heritage. Still tombs and graves had a fascination for him. As his tomb in the Granary was so often opened in his bereavements, he tells us how, seated upon some relic in it, he was " entertained" by his father and mother Hull. In the widest compass of read- ing, it would be hard to find a more pathetic utterance than that which this man of station and dignity, when nearly fifty years of age, gave forth to the neighbors gathered round his mother's open grave in Newbury :
"Nathan1 Bricket taking in hand to fill the grave, I said, Forbear a little, and suffer me to say that amidst our bereaving sorrows we have the comfort of beholding this Saint put into the rightful possession of that happiness of living desired, and dying lamented. She lived com- mendably four and fifty years with her dear Husband, and my dear Father; and she could not well brook the being divided from him,1 which is the cause of our taking leave of her in this place. She was a true and constant lover of God's Word, Worship, and Saints; and she always with a patient cheerfulness submitted to the Divine decree of providing bread for herself and others in the sweat of her brows. And now her infinitely Gracious and Bountiful Master has promoted her to the honor of higher employments, fully and absolutely dis- charged from all manner of toil and sweat. My honored and beloved friends and neighbors ! My dear Mother never thought much of doing the most frequent and homely offices of love for me; and lavished away many thousands of words upon me, before I could return one
1 He had died eight months previously.
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word in answer. And therefore I ask and hope that none will be offended that I have now ventured to speak one word in her behalf, when she herself is become speechless. Made a motion of my hand, for the filling of the Grave. Note, I could hardly speak for passion and tears."
If one would have a vivid sense of the doctrine of the Di- vine Omnipresence, as a felt reality every where and always, let him follow Sewall in his instantaneous recourse to prayer on every moment, occasion and incident of life. He made full, incessant, persistent trial of it-by his own lips and those of others. The oldest daughter, the only unmarried child left in his home, was long a bed-ridden sufferer, with a com- plication of ills. His faith and patience were sorely tried by her case. He had summoned successively one by one, all the ministers to pray by her bedside, and he adds-" I think now all the ministers of our communion have been here. The Lord help us, that we may not trust in Men, but in God." It is not often that a bereaved father takes a full grown son after the death of his mother, into the garret, to pray with him on the wise selection of a substitute or successor for her. When he was absent from home, on the recurrence of his birth-day, his rule was to go alone into the Meeting-house for a season of private prayer. He often gives us the themes of his devotions in his special fast days. He left many little books crowded with notes of sermons to which he had listened.
Though Sewall habitually spoke and wrote with an awed solemnity and submission under the mysterious ways and workings of Divine Providence, in its delays and disappoint- ments of human schemes and efforts, yet he drops many quaint hints of his intent to hold a " covenant keeping God " as bound to perform his part of a work, after man had done his best in it. There is even a touch of grim humor in the following hint. Sewall, as already stated, was one of the Commission- ers of the English Society for the conversion of the Indians, and most devotedly did he labor in a work which was very dear to his heart. He retained his faith and zeal in it, not- withstanding his grievous sense of its slender fruits of success.
and
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to cra car
Wr he Am Go in read WOF N. bui sua tuna not it p ten the S us a 8 Pa yes an
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Writing to his uncle, Stephen Dummer, in England, in 1686, he says :- " The best News that I can think to speak of from America, is, that Mr. John Eliot, through the good hand of God upon him, hath procured a second Edition of the Bible in the Indian Language, so that many hundreds of them may read the Scriptures. Lord sanctify them by thy Truth, thy word is Truth. As to the Design of Converting them, we in N. E. may sorrowfully sing the 127 Psalm : Except the Lord build the House, they Labour in vain that build. I am per- suaded 'twould be a most acceptable sacrifice to God, impor- tunately to beseech Him to put his Hand to that work, and not in a great measure as it were to stand and look on." Is it possible that if the revering Sewall had completed the sen- tence with the thought in his mind, he would have written the words-" and not do anything to help "?
Sewall's family discipline was that of his time, regarded by us as severe. It followed the counsel of Solomon. Here is a specimen of it as practised upon his son, afterwards the Pastor of this Church. He was then three months in his fifth year. "November 6, 1692. Joseph threw a knop of Brass and hit his sister Betty on the forhead so as to make it bleed and swell, upon which, and for his playing at Prayer time, and eating when Return Thanks, I whip'd him pretty smartly. When I first went in (call'd by his Grand-mother) he sought to shadow and hide himself from me behind the head of the cradle : which gave me the sorrowful remembrance of Adam's carriage." Genesis iii. 8-10.
And here is a specimen of his abounding hospitality to others than his " rich neighbors."
Judging that the birth of his fourteenth child, on January 2, 1702 (N. S.) would be the last of like events in his family, he makes the following record on January 16: "My wife treats her Midwife and Women : Had a good Dinner, Boil'd Pork, Beef, Fowls : very good Rost Beef, Turkey-Pie, Tarts. Madam Usher carv'd, Mrs. Hanah Greenlef (the Midwife) Ellis, Cowell, Wheeler, Johnson, and her daughter, Mrs. Hill our Nurses Mother, Nurse Johnson, Hill, Hawkins,
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Mrs. Goose, Deming, Green, Smith, Hatch, Blin. Comfor- table moderate weather ; and with a good fire in the Stove warm'd the room."
Here were sixteen professional "Women," presided over by a Lady. Doubtless there was a generous supply of the liquids dispensed respectively from glasses and cups. It was a scene for the pen of a Dickens.
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Besides all the infinite, minute and trifling details relating to private, domestic and social life, and the incidents of passing days-from which one might reconstruct the aspect and method and the whole experience of the time from Sewall's journals, they contain matter of prime authority and value to the his- torian, on critical points in public affairs, secrets of state, so to call them, intrigues, rivalries, cross purposes, alienations personal and partisan, workings of sub-currents, and compli- cated movements, in the little commonwealth. Sewall filled all but the highest office in the local government, and could look beneath the surface, and interpret some things which were mysteries or puzzles to others. He lived under both forms of administration, by the colonial and the provincial charter. His position in the royal council brought him into deli- cate relations with that somewhat duplex personage, Governor Joseph Dudley-the man of strong friends and strong enemies. Sewall's son had married Dudley's daughter-a union not congenial-faults, perhaps very grievous ones, on both sides- with temporary separation. The Judge's course in the mat- ter was patient, forbearing, mediatory.
There was a new spirit of relaxing of old restraints, of lib- eralism, of enlargement and moderation, working in the time ; the central object then contested was the control and method of administration of the College. The liberalizing party won in the struggle. Sewall's sympathies were strongly, yet not passionately on the conservative side. But he was calm and moderate. His general frame was that of sadness, of despon- dency, over every sign of what was to him, a falling away from the old love-a decline of the original New England spirit. The exceptions which we should be inclined to make
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from a full sympathetic estimate of the character of Sewall, would not in the least attach to any moral infirmity, any fault of temper, any lack of the most thorough integrity or sincerity, or any side-allurement of self-seeking. Quite otherwise. There was a slightly morbid element of timidity, foreboding and superstition in his nature. His scruples attached to im- aginations as well as to realities. He identified the true and right with his own standards, his limited outlook. Yet he was constantly seeking to restrain and rectify such weaknesses.
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