USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Proceedings of the Worcester Society of Antiquity, for the year 1881-1882 > Part 29
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I have followed the manuscript of this clergyman from his Alpha to his Omega and as I have no further use for it and the sermons, I take pleasure in presenting them to the Society.
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A regular meeting was held May second, with 25 persons in attendance. Thomas E. Bartlett of Cam- bridge, Mass., was elected a corresponding member, and Dr. C. Otis Goodwin and Maj. Edward T. Raymond of Worcester were elected to active mem- bership. Henry M. Smith read an interesting sketch of "Worcester in 1834," which was discussed by several members. Hon. Henry P. Upham of St. Paul, Minn., made a pleasing address, expressing his interest in the work of the Society.
The meeting for June was held on the 6th inst., with 24 persons present. Among the accessions presented to the library was a large and valuable collection of musical compositions, by their author, Mr. C. C. Stearns of Worcester, for which the Society voted its thanks.
The President was authorized and directed to organize an additional department in the Society, to be called "The Department of Military History."
The Society voted to publish "The Records of the Court of General Sessions of the Peace, for Worces- ter County, from 1731 to 1737," to be numbered XVIII. of the Society's Publications. Messrs. E. H. Thompson, Franklin P. Rice and Henry M. Smith were appointed to arrange for the annual excursion of the Society.
The Secretary, Henry L. Shumway, read the fol- lowing paper :-
AN OLD-TIME MINISTER.
BY HENRY L. SHUMWAY.
The men who were influential in public affairs in New England in the last quarter of the last century are far enough removed from us to be considered antiquarian. Science has made such rapid strides that their times seem quite primitive, and an insight into their thoughts and their everyday life is a curious and interesting spectacle. Of these men none were more influential than the country ministers. They were almost the only points of contact with literature and scholarship, open to the common people, and they had not then lost their hold upon public affairs. They were settled by vote of the town. and every man of property was taxed for their support ; and if he staid away from the preaching he paid for, he was called to a serious ac- count. If, being admonished, he persisted in his contumacious conduct, he was almost if not quite ostracized by good society. They were almost the dictators of public opinion. and naturally grew to feel that they possessed no little absolute authority.
The last quarter of the last century however. saw the begin- ning of a change in the ministerial office. The people began to have glimmerings of the idea that there was room in human thought for variety in religious opinion, and to think that reli- gion was not necessarily a matter to be complicated with the secular affairs of every township. They had not reached the point where they denied the minister all the rights he claimed in his pulpit ministrations, but they made what were ultimately successful objections to the union of church and town, which was almost as burdensome as the union of church and state which their ancestors opposed in the Mother Country. The change
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involved in the development of these ideas was not kindly re- ceived by the old-time ministers. They resisted all innovations, and fought a losing battle with great pertinacity.
Among these ministers, many of whose names are now buried in musty church-records and forgotten, was Rev. Ebenezer Chaplin, minister of the Second Parish of Sutton in this county, the Second Parish now being the town of Millbury, and the church now being the First Congregational church, located in the village of Bramanville. By chance a mass of manuscripts, including a portion of his diary during the struggle referred to have come under my notice and excited my interest. Some of his published works have also been preserved, and these, with such brief biographical data as I have been able to gather, are the basis of the sketch I have to present this evening.
Rev. Ebenezer Chaplin was ordained minister of the Second Parish of Sutton, Nov 14, 1764, and was dismissed March 22, 1792. He removed to Hardwick about 1803, and died there Dec. 13, 1822, aged 89 years. He graduated at Yale in 1763, and received the Degree of A. M. from his Alma Mater in 1767. He was delegate from Sutton to the convention which framed the State constitution, and which met at Cambridge in 1779. Thus much written history records of him. He is also credited with the authorship of quite a list of publications, most of which are like himself entirely forgotten.
Mr. Chaplin's largest work of which any record appears is "A Treatise on the Nature and Importance of the Sacraments," which was printed by Daniel Greenleaf at Worcester in 1802. It is not what may be properly termed a rare book, but is so infrequent that but few even of those who enjoy the dry theologi- cal disquisitions of the last century have ever seen it. Copies are in the library of the American Antiquarian Society, and of Harvard College, and I know of two copies in the libraries of members of this Society. In common with the New England orthodoxy of his time, Mr. Chaplin had what seems, to the more liberal vision of the present day. a very severe prejudice against the denomination known as the Baptists, and in the preface to his "Treatise" he admits "the principal inducement to write what is here offered ; was finding in several instances ; that
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persons who, for sometime, had been seeking to find the right Way, as to Baptism, without satisfaction ; were fully satisfied in their minds ; on hearing me explain it." We are not disap- pointed, in examining the volume, to find that its larger portion and its most prodigious argumentation are devoted to the de- molition of the Baptist doctrines. The Treatise is a sizable volume of nearly 300 pages, and it is as dry as it is possible for such a work to be, full of detailed argument which will most likely exhaust rather than interest and edify the modern reader.
As is proper in a book assuming to explain God's dealings with men, and the causes which made sacraments a necessity, Mr. Chaplin begins at the beginning and asserts the following :
"GOD the CREATOR eternally existed a SYSTEM or SO- CIETY OF DEITY. A Plurality in Unity ; possessed of most Perfect, and consummate attributes, and Perfections for general Good. The Deity did not exist in simple personality. For if he had ben, but a mere simple personality of Existence there could have been no possibility, of any such things, as are called the moral Perfections of God. There can be no such thing as Righteousness, where there is only, a mere simple personality of Existence. For Righteousness is a relative term : or a term expressing the Relation, of rational Intelligences to each other. In order for there to be, any such thing as Righteousness ; there must be a subject and an object. So also of Love, which is the foundation of all moral goodness ; there must be a sub- ject and an object ; a person to love and a person to be loved. We can have no idea of love when there is a mere simplicity of Existence. * However in all the things we are acquainted with, absolute simplicity cannot multiply or increase. Which affords another very considerable argument that the Deity did not exist in simplicity."
It is restful and refreshing, to one who looks at the mysteries of Deity, creation, and existence, with reverent awe, and a wil- lingness to leave their complete solution until the veil is lifted, to read the positive declarations of our author upon these topics. These things are not "too wonderful" for him. Having dog- matically settled the constitution of Deity, he finds no difficulty with minor topies like the creation of angels and men. Ile de- clares the creation of the angels at the time of the Mosaic crea- tion, although, to accommodate Job's allusion to the singing
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together of the morning stars, JJob XXXIII. 7, supposing those stars to be the angels, he says :
"I see nothing against their being created in these six days of creation of which Moses speaks. For they might be created the first day ; about the time of the first springing forth of light ; and be called morning stars in allusion to that ; in that view they would be eminently morning stars. rising the first morning that ever existed. And then they would have all the rest of the week, five days and a half to sing, and rejoice * But what they could be employed about, before any other creation besides themselves was progressing, no one can devise."
Our anthor evidently had reached the point of mental poise, more common, perhaps, at this later day, where he could con- fidently assume that whatever in Deity or in creation was be- yond his "devising" could not exist. He interprets man's creation, Gen. I. 27, thus :
"This is a plain assertion of God, that he made man in his own Image, as to PLURALITY in UNITY and Dominion. His expressing his own Plurality as a pattern, by which he would make the man : and making of man in the same terms both plural and singular ; plainly shows that the Union of Plu- rality, of the persons of the Deity ; was the principal thing, in the Image of which he made man ; At the same time evidences, that he made the whole system of man ; all that he should ever multiply into, in that man he then made."
He continues, not to argue. but to confidently explain that man as a finite being was made conscious of material things by personal contact with them. It was necessary, as God was invisible, and intangible to human senses, that there should be some tangible, visible means of making man conscious of his relations to God. Therefore God forbade the eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree, and the tree thus became a Sacra- mental Token, reminding man of the reality of the Divine ex- istence, and of his relations and obligations to God.
He proceeds, in the same confident manner, to explain the fall of man, giving an insight into the counsels of heaven which even the angels "desired to look into" He tells us that angels, as created beings, being finite could not comprehend the infinite God, and they too needed a Sacramental token, to maintain in
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them a proper sense of the Deity, and this token was God mani- fest in Humanity,-the Incarnation. This the angels were appointed to contemplate and believe. God's will in this regard being made known to the angels, and they being unable to in- vestigate and comprehend the sublime mystery of the Incarna- tion, one of the principal angels made a question of it, whether it could ever come to pass. If he had resolved it in the affirma- tive upon God's testimony, he would have kept his faith and not sinned. But he abode not in the truth and suffered his mind to fall into the negative. This was the first derangement in God's system of creation, which resulted in the rebellion of the angel and his expulsion from heaven. Having accepted the negative and given God the lie, he had set himself to make his part good against God. The quarrel between the Devil and God began about Christ the Incarnate God and has always so continued. The Devil's constant attempt to discredit the truth that the Son of God is come in the flesh, is a corroborating evidence that this was the ground of his original apostacy. Ilis first effort after expulsion from heaven was to attempt the se- duetion of man to sin ; supposing that if he could succeed he would defeat God of ever being manifest in human nature, or at least bring God into a dilemma, either to abandon His purpose or to unite His Son to a sinful nature ; supposing in either case that he would carry his point against God. Mr. Chaplin am- plifies the Biblical account of the fall of man as follows :
"And here in pronouncing the curse upon the serpent or Devil in him, God declares the humanity of Christ ; as a creative word, speaking that Divine seed to life, into this dead system : and deelares that he should finally conquer the Devil ; should bruise his head, which would be compleat conquest. God here speaks to the Devil of that seed as something that was known of between him and the Devil before. As something the Devil had begun a quarrel with him about, and it sounds as if what the Devil had been about there with the woman and the man. was an important thing in the Quarrel."
He gives several pages to a dogmatic account of what occurred in the Garden of Eden between Adam and Eve and the serpent, making the latter run up the tree to show his dexterity and to further increase Eve's admiration, and hoping that by arousing
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her anxiety lest he fall off and be killed, to distract her mind and secure her apostacy, by the cating of the fruit. In this he was successful, and the account has excuses for both Adam and Eve, that they were distracted and confused by the antics and spirit of the serpent, and sinned through inadvertence rather than by intent. Mr. Chaplin concludes his unveiling of the events of creation with the information that the question of the possibility of the Incarnation was vital amongt he angels until it was accomplished, and that doubtless those who took the nega- tive became devils. He suppoes there have been no new devils since, and that ever since the Resurrection the angels have been confirmed in their good estate.
He finds a third ante-Christian Sacramental Token in the ex- pulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, as it was a sign or token to them that they could only find salvation by a real transition of soul to a new state, and signifying the in- visible, moral or spiritual change, renovation, or transformation, that must be wrought by God on the soul in order to find salva- tion, but, he says, "this is incidental, and does not supersede the necessity of a perpetual Sacramental Token." His fourth Sacramental Token was the sacrifice of animals before the time of Noah ; the fifth was circumcision, and the sixth was the Jew- ish passover.
Having thus, in Part I. of his essay, disposed of numerous questions which have been considered perplexing by ordinary theologians in all ages, Mr. Chaplin devotes Part II. to the religious meaning and design, the proper subjects of and the proper mode of Baptism, in all of which we find him equally confident of having mastered all mysteries. At the outset he quotes I. Pet. III., "While the Ark was preparing, wherein few, that is cight souls, were saved BY WATER" and says :
"This being saved BY WATER has some obscurity in it, be- cause the Scriptures have not directly and expressly told, what the water saved them from. But the words here are express, that the Water Saved them * * And I think it cannot be a departure from Scripture, to conclude, that the Antediluvians, meditated the destruction, of Noah and his family ; and were preparing to effect it ; when the flood came suddenly and de- stroyed them all. * Noah and his family were shut in
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the Ark. Nothing as we know of, appeared, but they might easily set fire to it, and readily demolish the Ark and its con- tents. The Scripture asserting, that Noah and his family were saved BY WATER implies, or at least naturally suggests, that Fire was the instrument, or means, by which they were exposed to be destroyed ; since water is the direct proper element to extinguish Fire."
Ordinary preachers have found it sufficient to accept the idea that Noah was saved by water from the destruction caused by the flood, but Mr. Chaplin evidently felt it his duty to dig deeper and to find a hidden fountain of meaning. He spends much space in drawing a parallel between the salvation of Noah and that of the race through Christ. He finds that Israel was saved by water in the cloud, the cloud defending them by day from being destroyed by the heat. He says :-
"They were also saved by water in that cloud, in the night ; by the particles of water, being so arranged and composed, as to collect and transmit the rays of light : perhaps something in the manner of our northern lights. It was so that it appeared a pillar of fire by night. This, among other purposes, served to guard them from being destroyed by wild beasts of prey. which infest that country ; so that people cannot travel there. in the night, without carrying fire with them ; these beasts of prey being afraid of fire.'
In this also our author has gone deeper than the ordinary student will care to follow him. He recognizes Christian bap- tism as the successor of circumcision in the Jewish church, and defends infant baptism with the argument that God baptised infants with the rest of the Jewish nation. in the cloud and in the sea, and that infants were the special subjects of circumcision.
But it is when he reaches the proper mode of baptism that we find him most dogmatic and vigorous, and after quite a long discussion he declares :
"Hence. although we cannot directly determine, from those instances above considered. what the mode is. or ought to be ; yet we may, from those Baptisms, in some measure determine. what it is not ; or what cannot be the proper mode. And here. from the above Baptisms, performed by God himself: we may conclude that immersion. or plunging. cannot be the proper mode of Baptism ; for that is rather a figure or emblem of de- struction, than of salvation. And it was the real mode, in which
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God destroyed by water, those he took away, to baptize those he saved by water. Now it would be so incongruous to institute a mode, for a figure or token of Salvation, which God himself had used in Baptism as a mode of real destruction ; that we cannot suppose God would do it. It could never strike our minds as a Token of Salvation. Therefore we must conclude, that immer- sion is not a mode of Baptism, that God ever instituted or de- signed."
Having demonstrated the impossibility of immersion as a proper mode of baptism, the ordinary writer would be satisfied, and proceed to other topics, but not so with Mr. Chaplin. He would not only defeat, but would pulverize his antagonist. Therefore he says that immersions, to be efficacious should be of the naked body, which would be indecent ; he points to the "laver" in the temple and triumphantly declares that it was too small for immersion, and besides, standing on a foot or pedestal it would be upset by such nse. He alleges that John's baptisms were not Christain but Mosaic, and that the form used by the first Christians was copied from that of the Jews, the formula being changed. He is so confident that he asserts John's for- mula to have been : "I baptize thee unto repentance, believe thou on Him who shall come after me." He further annihilates immersion by showing it to be impossible for John to have im- mersed so many people. He assumes that he baptised a mil- lion people, and says that it would require ten minutes, on an average, to immerse an individual ; therefore thirty-six years, at twelve hours per day, would be occupied in the work ; then there could not have been provided sufficient clothing for so many to change, and for the people to change their clothes out there in the wilderness would be an obscene exhibition. But our author settles the question that John might have baptised a million people, in the orthodox form, in a year and a half ; he knows that he could get through ten per minute, for he has made the experiment. Ile further demolishes immersion by a classical disquisition upon the phrases "in" "into" and "out of," in the several Biblical narrations of baptism. He goes through the first five books of the New Testament, counting the prepo- sitions En, in ; Apo, ont of ; Eis, into ; and Ek, out of (plural) and finds them 2859 times. His diary shows, under date of
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Jan. 29, 1802, that he spent three weeks in counting these pre- positions. When this was done, he began to count "wash." "baptize," and "dip," but I find no record of the result. En is used 1033 times, of which 47 are adverbs; in 25 cases the sense is involved in other words ; the rest, 964, are rendered by seventeen different prepositions in English ; it is rendered at 53 times, by 44 times, with 42 times, among 45 times, and on 30 times. Apo he finds 423 times of which 406 are prepositions, rendered thirteen different ways ; it is rendered from 235 times, of 92 times, out of 42 times, for 11 times, and since 7 times. Eis he finds 955 times, of which 902 are prepositions, rendered seventeen different ways, into appearing 388 times and to 88 times. He finds Ek: 446 times, 435 being prepositions, render- ed thirteen different ways,-of 191 times, from 102 times, out of 77 times, on 30 times, with 17 times, &c.
From all this he argues that the use of the particular English prepositions do not prove anything regarding immersion. His grand summary is that there is no more need or sense in wet- ting the person all over for baptism, than in skinning him all over for circumcision. Part III. of the Treatise is devoted to a labored discussion of "covenants" in which there is a field for study and reflection, equal to that I have sketched from his meditations relating to baptism.
In the preface to the Treatise Mr. Chaplin proposes to attack no one, but simply to state his own conclusions, and he is care- ful to keep the pledge, but we must not conclude that he had no disposition to personal combat. He is credited with the author- ship of a pamphlet of which the following is the title :
"MODERN PHARASAISM, illustrated and proved-by Timothy Truth Esq., to which is annexed A CONCISE RE- VIEW of Elisha Andrews' brief reply to Bickerstatt's short. Epistle to the Baptists. by Christopher Duntaxat. LL. D., Sutton, Printed by Sewall Goodridge, Feb., 1811."
The book is a curious study of declamation against the Bap- tists, whom I fear, Mr. Chaplin assailed quite as vigorously as he did the immoralities of his time. He declares that in spite of the multiplication of so-called Christian seets, there is really nothing new. The Universalists are only the disciples of the
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false prophets under the Jews, and are nearly the same as the Originists of the first ages of the Christian church. The Method- ists are simply Pelagians, but the Baptists are the lineal descend- ants of the ancient Pharisees, as he proves, Ist, by their name, Separatists ; 2d, by their similarly mysterious origin ; 3d, be- cause they hold to the tradition of the elders, which have no foun lation in the Scriptures ; 4th, by their strong attachment to outward rites and ceremonies ; 5th, by their ostentation in religion ; 6th, by their zeal and assiduity in making converts ; 7th, by their confidence in their own righteousness ; 8th, by their contemptuous treatment and slandering of others. In the "Concise Review" he alleges that the Baptist people were not capable of writing five sentences of good English, and so got Andrews to answer Bickerstaff. In the same vein he paints the following portrait of a Baptist preacher :
"There are comparatively few of their preachments but what are interlarded with stories and relations of the preacher's own experiences and feelings. Ile will tell how he was first brought to know the truth : how he was tried in his mind abont baptism ; how he resisted his call to preach ; how humble, vile, and self- denying he is, and how unworthy to speak to others on the con- cerns of religion. All these things, delivered in an appropriate tone of voice, wonderfully tend to set off his own goodness, for the admiration of the gaping but ignorant throng. And it is no uncommon thing for the preacher to tell of some extraordinary suggestions. or supernatural revelations, with which he has been favored."
But he did not avoid preaching directly at his own people, even when the occasion and the theme led them to expect that some one else was to recieve the castigation. One of his print- ed sermons is
"The civil State Compared to Rivers : All under God's Con- trol : And what People Have to Do when Administration is Grievous. Sutton, 2d Parish ; Printed by Request ; Delivered Jan. 17, 1773, the Day Before a Town Meeting to act on the Letter from Boston. Prov. XXI. 2."
We can imagine the anticipations of the zealous patriots, chafing under the tyranny of the English king, of a hearty demonstration of king-craft and a hurling of old and new Testa- men anathemas at the "taxation without representation" party.
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But we can hardly imagine the impression made by the ser- mon. Its heads were, Ist, to consider and show wherein the king may be compared to rivers of water; 2d, to show that all these things are in the hand of the Lord; 3d, that all these things are guided by the will of the Lord. The application was, "See that the land from which the streams originate is pure," and his peroration was as follows :
"Look at home and see if this be not too much the case with us, one among another. Oppressing, overreaching, usurious contracts, all foppery, living upon other men's labor and proper- ty ; when a person goes beyond what he is able to pay for and pay his other dues, whatever schemes any take to get other men's property without equal consideration,-all these things are the very same things which we are complaining of in the civil administration * * * So great a work we have to do ; every one to put away the violence that is in his own hands ; and seek to God for a new heurt. "Till this is done no one can with a good face go to God or ask of Him that he would turn the king, or the civil power, to remove these measures we think are oppression, and contrary to our natural and constitutional rights, unless he first put away everything from his own doings. that is of the same kind towards his neighbor."
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