USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 34
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It was new for Northfield to be a centre of a nation-wide interest ; new for it to find itself daily on the first page of metropolitan news- papers, often to the amazing extent of two or three columns; new to have the characteristics and religious opinions of its people displayed for the world's edification, justified, as it seemed, by a wide curiosity as to how far a revival would move a New England town in compari- son with the great industrial centres of England. A corps of New York reporters were devoting themselves quite as much to picturing that effect as to the stories of the meetings, the sermons of Moody and the songs of Sankey.
Through the news columns of the New York Tribune, the people of the town were told that it had been called a stronghold of Unitarianism. Such it was, in the sense that the First Parish church had continued the home of the larger part of the people; but there had been such an absence of doctrinal dispute in recent years that its continuance in its tradition of liberalism was a commonplace, only to be a matter of comment by a stranger. Now, as the newspaper report revealed, Mr. Moody had "signified his intention of directing his efforts squarely against this denomination of unbelievers, as they
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seem to him." Mr. Moody had made no public proclamation of the sort but there was circumstantial support for this statement of his purpose in the fact that an invitation to him from the minister of the First Parish to occupy its pulpit had been refused. It was soon evi- dent that doctrinal differences were to be sharpened, with what new alignment of the townspeople remaining to be revealed.
The First Parish church had been the home of the Moody family. Dwight had been baptized there and been a boy in its Sunday school. His mother was a member; his brother Samuel, up to this time, the parish collector ; the older brother, George, a pew holder and his wife's sister, a member of his household, a teacher in its Sunday school. The withdrawal of these immediate relatives was to be expected and hon- ored. If it should be followed by the departure of all the relatives, the congregation would be seriously depleted; but there were no indications that the Holton uncles, Deacon Charles and Cyrus, would change their allegiance, and as to the one Moody uncle, Medad, any suspicion of defection was quite emphatically put to rest. Beyond these, the fulfilment of the design of the evangelist, if he cherished one against the congregation of unbelievers, became at once a prob- lem of interest. Thus far, even with the tightening of denominational lines, there was no antagonism, and personal relations between the people of the town and Mr. Moody were mutually cordial.
In offering his church to Mr. Moody the Unitarian minister, Rev. J. T. Sunderland, recalled that they had worked together in Chicago. In opening his pulpit to one whom he regarded as an old friend, he recognized it as a fact that notwithstanding there were pivotal dif- ferences between the theology of Mr. Moody and that of his church, yet the deeper truths, the foundation stones of religion, were identical with both of them and any sincere man trying to make humanity purer and better was a co-laborer with him and should be free to preach in his house of worship. Such was the nature of the offer as it was reported in the newspapers, followed by Mr. Moody's reason for refusal. "He could not reconcile himself to the belief that Uni- tarianism was anything akin to the religion of Christ which he preaches and felt that he could not allow himself to stand in a pulpit from which its doctrines were promulgated." Such was not the lan- guage Mr. Moody would use, however truly it stated his reason. More characteristic were the words reported to be his, "Those who
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believe in Unitarianism insult Christ, and whoever insults Christ in- sults me."
If the evangelist had waited for an invitation of the same cordiality from the Orthodox church, he would have found himself without a pulpit in his home town. There were those among the Orthodox people who were doubtful of revival methods. The newspaper men in their study of the town found that "of the members of this very church some of the most prominent were decidedly opposed in theory and practice to revivals and have very reluctantly given their consent to holding the daily meetings under the auspices of their society." Conservative in their faith, they were as much so in their notion of the way it was to be preached. Sharing the common loyalty to their worthy minister, they had no relish for his displacement by one unordained to the ministry.
Neither obstacle, prevalent heresy nor pious caution, was to re- strain Moody from trying to reach the hearts of men in his own town. He had encountered both, in larger fields and through years of campaigning. He had been rebuffed from both heretical and churchly camps from the outset of his devotion to the saving of souls. They could not disconcert him, nor restrain him, nor give him pause. He was already preaching to such throngs of people as the town had never before seen gathered. In the first fortnight of the next month he had brought into action the full resources of his own being and the aid of his fellow workers, Sankey, Bliss, Whittle and a coterie with less familiar names. The meetings had overflowed from the church to the street, the broad steps had become his platform, and the collapsible melodeon, which was Sankey's one instrument, had replaced the church organ.
From Sunday the meetings had overflowed into the week. A cam- paign had developed that stirred the town. Its climax was reached in an evening meeting, Tuesday, September 14, the last when Sankey would sing and the last before the departure of Bliss for his home in Chicago.
The broad street is filled from fence to fence, on a typical Sunday afternoon, with the people who have come from all the region to share for the first time in a religious meeting, while they still sat in their wagons and carriages or crowded about and upon the church steps. From the moment of Mr. Moody's bustling arrival there is not
IRA D. SANKEY
P. P. BLISS
REV. GEORGE F. PENTECOST, D.D.
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a second of pause. He is in full control, restless, eager, abrupt, in deadly earnest. There was a short prayer by an unclerical Boston man, Henry M. Moore, short of stature, red-bearded, all nerves. He is identified to some of the townspeople as the proprietor of the Boston hat store, where he had learned the business from its former owner, Joseph Callender, now living at the foot of "the street," clerk of the First Parish. There were songs from "Winnowed Hymns," the collection which had done service in the English meetings-"I am so glad that Jesus loves me" and "I love to tell the story." So much is preliminary. Mr. Moody takes charge.
"Well, we'll begin by asking Brother Bliss to sing 'Hold the Fort.'" Already the charm of the singing of P. P. Bliss is familiar. The song is known to everybody. Into its chorus, with the final "By Thy grace, we will," every man, woman and child throws his utmost voice. Mr. Sankey sings "Let the lower lights be burning." Mr. Bliss follows with "Pull for the shore." Everybody pulls-everybody feels the pull of the aroused spirit. Mr. Moody preaches on "Grace." Grace, he defines as unmerited favor. His preaching is to the unconverted man in the throng. It drives home upon him the hopelessness of his state. It rebukes his self-content. It punctures his notion of his own worthi- ness. Grace is unmerited favor. "We must realize our utter desti- tution of any right to mercy and then we will be ready to go straight to God." The sermon, short, direct, personal, ends with a prayer that every soul here today shall sense its own lack of deserving and through its destitution come to the Lord.
Sankey and Bliss have gone but Moody remains and on Thursday night he preaches in the church on "Heaven," an actual Heaven, a place, the abode of the saved. This night, it is significant that the service opens with a prayer by the minister of the Orthodox church, the Rev. Theodore J. Clark. The following Sunday, the Rev. Mr. Clark's morning sermon had direct reference to the evangelists and sought to fortify them in the support of their effort. Now, at the morning service and again when Mr. Moody speaks at four o'clock, the organ is played by Miss Dutton, daughter of Deacon Samuel, good token that the reluctance of the people of the church to embrace Mr. Moody has been overcome. The obstacle of conservative unwel- come has been removed.
Moody's preaching had left no common ground for him and the
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people of the older, the Unitarian church. To him they were the unregenerate. To them, he was the denier of reason, the denouncer of salvation by good works. Had he not singled out, in one of his outdoor sermons, one of the pillars of the First Parish, a citizen uni- versally respected, to tell him in this public fashion that "he would some day find that his good works were but filthy rags"?
To the minister of the church, the challenge was clear and not to be refused. On that September Sabbath, when the Orthodox con- gregration was given visible token of the full alliance of its minister and his people with Moody, the Unitarian minister came to the de- fense of liberal Christianity in a vigorous sermon from the text (Acts XXI), "After the way they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers." The obstacle of rationalism remained.
Mr. Sunderland delivered his sermon to a large congregation. The town was astir as to religion. The young minister of the First Parish was popular and not in a generation had the church had such an at- tendance as was gathered here regularly. Today there were no absen- tees, for it was known that the minister was to cast aside all restraint in dealing with the doctrines enunciated by Moody. None was dis- appointed. Literal acceptance of the Bible, its infallibility, the effi- cacy of sudden conversion, the denial of the saving power of good works, these were arraigned and against them was placed the faith that revered God without defying the exercise of His gift of reason.
It was a militant sermon but it did not meet with the approval of all who fully shared its doctrinal assertions. Not yet had they given up the hope of religious peace in the town which had long rested in cheerful agreement to disagreement. They sensed the fact that Moody was not primarily engaged in establishing doctrinal views. His own were outright enough and vigorously enough stated albeit his aim was not at doctrines but at men. He was bent on saving their souls. Tested by the standard that good lives were the proof of Christianity, if he could make bad men good, if he could turn sinners into even comparative saints, there was no cause to dispute his methods nor to quarrel over his literal acceptance of the stories of the Bible and his unsparing scorn of "modern philosophers," a term he contemptuously applied alike to the theologians who were promulgating the "higher criticism" at Andover, and the scientists like Darwin who were giving the world a greater age than did the Bible. Northfield had its sin-
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ners, viewed either as unregenerate by Moody's test or as doers of evil by the common test of righteousness in conduct.
In a month's time Mr. Moody had established a new classification of the people of the town. "Are you a Christian?" was the question made familiar. It was to be answered in the affirmative by those only who had yielded to his test. The word took on new meaning. At any previous time, the division would have been by a horizontal line between the men of reputable life and the violators of the moral code. It was now vertical-on one side the converted, on the other the un- regenerate. The Christians included not a few who had poorly quali- fied for the title by all their previous lives ; the non-Christian included not a few, indeed the larger number, whose lives had been honorable, upright and pure. It was consistent that a girl of a First Parish fam- ily, confronted with the personal question at one of the revival meet- ings, "Are you a Christian?" had answered "No, I'm a Unitarian." The classification was commonly accepted, with full allowance for the unfamiliar use of the word.
Whatever else he gained or failed to gain in the town, Mr. Moody won the affection of its people. There was a common pride in his ar- dor, his unquestioned sincerity, his bigness of heart, his democracy, his goodness of will towards his neighbors, his genuine cordiality in contacts alike with those whom he won and those who were unmoved by his appeal.
Early in his stay in Northfield, Mr. Moody had called what the newspapers fittingly named a "council of war." The country was calling for him and from its cities there came a group to consult with him as to his next field of action. Brooklyn, New York, was chosen and there he went in October to conduct his first campaign in America, elaborately planned but at once so effective as to prove that even the daring which marked his every venture had underestimated the response of the people to his call.
Northfield, after a thrilling experience, settled to the ordinary course of life. Only there were new claimants to the title of Christian and new, highly respected and well behaved "Heathen," a designation the unconverted, almost jocularly, took upon themselves.
CHAPTER XL RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL LIFE MINGLE
Travel Newly Enjoyed, Temperance Newly Incited, Moody Opens New School
IT WAS THE CENTENNIAL YEAR for the nation. It was being cele- brated by a world's fair at Philadelphia and by travel to attend it on the part of people who had rarely or never travelled before, least- wise not to such distance. Northfield had taken its travel vicariously -by reading. In the Social Library were tales of travel in foreign countries, generally by Englishmen, dry in detail, unexcited, but read with devouring interest and perfect content to stay at home. The reading was as little likely to incite to journeying as the stories of Kane's explorations in the Arctic regions or Livingstone's into the interior of Africa would arouse ambition to follow these exploits.
Aside from Moody and Sankey, whose recent visit to the British Isles had been with quite another than tourist interest, the people who had crossed the Atlantic were the older Irishmen, who had come as immigrants and settled as firmly on the soil as the descendants of the founders. Members of the Silas Field family had been in the East India trade and had lived in Calcutta. Benjy, familiar style for Ben- jamin F. Field, Jr., had recently been caught in Paris during the Prussian siege and had the thrill of escape in a balloon. But these were Boston relatives. Lieutenant Marshall Stearns, besides having had a large share in winning the war for the Union, had been twice in California and told generally unbelieved stories of his experiences. One of the most substantial members of the Mattoon family had spent a few years on the Pacific coast and was to go through life under the familiar designation of California John. Charles Xenophon Janes had sailed the seas; what seas and with what thrills would not be learned from him.
But these were adventurers, not tourists. There was no nomadic strain in the New England blood. Not ten in Northfield's population
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had seen New York ; hardly one had reached Philadelphia ; not since the war had any been in Washington; a journey to Boston was a much noted event. The prudent Belcher sisters went there once a year, on "stock day," when their holdings of Vermont and Massa- chusetts shares entitled them to free transportation for the annual meeting. Middle-aged citizens, elected to the legislature, saw Boston for the first time, reaching it on the free pass supplied by the patriotic railroad corporations.
Travel to Philadelphia in the summer of 1876 took on the feature of being a patriotic duty, made the easier of discharge by excursion rates offered by the railroads at alluring cheapness. The tour itself was a new experience, by railroad to New London, by boat thence through the night to New York City, transfer by bus across the city and by ferry across North River, then in the cars of undreamed ele- gance on the Pennsylvania road. In Philadelphia, a room was to be had in any one of countless hotels at one dollar a day-with the ex- treme luxury of one built for the Centennial to be admired but not patronized at the unheard-of rate of five dollars. There were travel forward and back in crowded horse-cars-and the boundless wonders of the great fair, with buildings brilliantly lighted by gas, so far apart as to be reached by the narrow-gauge steam road, and within them the marvels of the world. The travellers brought home descriptions of the fraction they had time to see, the great Corliss steam engine, operating all the wheels of the vast machinery hall, of a machine operated by keys which would write, of a device by which the human voice was carried on a wire, of a printing press fed from a great roll of paper and delivering folded newspapers ready for the mail, and of the people from the earth's four corners in their native garb. The programs for the next winter's literary meetings were assured. Chiefly, the people had been baptised in travel.
In company with the entire country, even a farming town, as Northfield continued to be, was feeling the strain of the re-adjustment after the inflation period during and following the Civil War. The dollar was an uncertain quantity but was getting towards stability. The panic of 1873, a purely money panic, had brought widespread bankruptcy but was by 1875 being rallied from, even though there was a political disturbance which widely upset the old order, giving Massachusetts a Democratic governor and, in 1876, putting the presi-
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dential succession in doubt. Northfield had its due proportion of Greenbackers, noisy advocates of paper money and resisters to the restoration of the paper dollar to a gold equivalent. In spite of them, gold which had been at a premium of nearly three to one was ap- proaching par and Congress had committed the country to a resump- tion of specie payments by 1879. The immediate effect was a shrink- ing of commodity prices, not cheerfully accepted by country mer- chants or even those of larger centres. It was this fact that gave life to the development of the Grange, the Patrons of Husbandry as they chose to be called. Adopting mass buying and distribution at cost among their members, the grange store came into being and where it did not exist certain of the merchants sought to capture the trade by giving the grangers a percentage discount.
The Northfield grange was one of the earliest in the State. It carried "Number 3" on its charter. Its members took full advantage of the trade facilities of the order and presently set up their own agency for the purchase of all manner of merchandise. The upshot was the addition of another general store, needless in a town with four already in business, unless it should serve to reduce prices and to keep trade in the town which otherwise would go to the larger towns, Brattleboro, over the Vermont line, and Greenfield, the county seat.
The principal store in the town was the one that had come down in succession from the days of Shammah Pomeroy's harness shop, through the proprietorship of Bowen and Prior, when it was con- nected with boating on the Connecticut, then of William Pomeroy, distiller as well as merchant, later that of the Hastings Brothers and now that of Lewis Taylor Webster. It maintained all the traditions of the old country store, with its boundless variety of merchandise, its generous extension of credit, its probity and gentility of tradings, and the centre of the town's politics and gossip.
There were lesser establishments-S. Y. Walker's, now somewhat in decline as its dashing proprietor turned his trading skill in the direc- tion of buying tobacco; Windsor L. Fay's little shop, somewhat dese- crating the corner of the former home place of Timothy Swan, the composer of sacred music; across the street the one-man establishment of the scholarly and dignified leader of the town's unwavering Demo- crats, Charles Osgood. The new store, built in 1877 on land that
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had been his garden, was the venture in his advanced years of Albert C. Parsons. It entered the field with another of the inclusive stocks, which omitted almost nothing in the range of merchandise. The cost of building in this period is indicated by the fact that the store, 50 x 25 feet, two stories, completely equipped with shelving and counters, cemented cellar, roof of slate, floors of southern hard pine, was fin- ished for occupancy at a total cost of just one thousand dollars. The skilled carpenter wage was $1.75 for a ten-hour day.
Exceptionally among towns of its size, or smaller, Northfield had but two church spires. Its traditional liberalism in religion had made its old church broad enough for the satisfaction of all shades of belief not strictly orthodox. The Second Church was equally hospitable to the adherents to evangelical religion, in disregard of those credal dis- tinctions which separated Methodists, Baptists and Congregationalists within even the smallest communities. In minor groups the town had, however, its differences of faith ardently enough held. There were devout Second Adventists, locally known as Millerites, after some leader in the trust in the return of Christ and the end of the world, more or less imminent. Spiritualists, who not only held to the faith in communication with those who had departed this life but demon- strated it by frequent manifestations to their own apparent satisfac- tion, had become numerous.
Nearness to Lake Pleasant, the resort in the next town which had been appropriated as a camp ground by the Spiritualists' national organization, stimulated and sustained the interest of the neighbor- hood. There were supplied the evidences of psychic communication in mysterious rappings, table-tipping, writing of messages on securely locked slates and an occasional materialization. All this was minutely reported by the adherents to the faith but somehow failed to occur at times when the unbelievers were present. It often had to be said that the presence of a doubter created an atmosphere disturbing or quite defeating the psychic flow. Public demonstrations were made by mediums who, after getting themselves into a trance, would "seem to see" departed friends of persons in the audience, the identification being built up by responses to the slightest clue until there was no room for doubt. Then would follow messages which to the unbeliev- ing seemed sufficiently indefinite to fit any conceivable situation. No faith was ever more ardently held and none more scornfully rejected.
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In a high and spreading tree, an oak or maple, on the Farms road, near the Gage place, there remained the platform upon which had gathered at some time in the recent past a company of the Miller- ites to await the end of the world. They had accepted as authentic one of the dates from time to time ingeniously arrived at as the one when the faithful few would be carried up to Heaven while the faith- less multitudes would be destroyed. The little group of the elect in their robes of white had awaited their ascension, none but they knew how long, before abandoning their arbored exaltation. No such de- feat, however often repeated, damaged their faith that the world was soon to end and new dates were readily accepted for the postponed event.
Each year the Millerites camped on Beers Plain and fervently ex- horted and speculated. Some straggling adherents came from other states, enough to make up with the local faithful a sufficiently self- inspiring company, not too sure of being undisturbed by the town's irreverent boys. The Book of Revelations was their grand text and its allegories were subjected to the most definite interpretations. Such an exhorter as Michael Malley knew Revelations by heart, along with all the prophetic passages in the other books of the Bible. Michael was a Protestant Irishman, small of stature, brilliantly red headed and red bearded. He had married a daughter of Zebina Marsh, a slow- moving and slow-speaking old Yankee, who also knew his Scripture. She was twice Michael's size-muscular and active, but apparently her physical superiority led her to indulgence towards him rather than command. They were Millerites and Michael's ingenuity in Biblical support of a definite end to the world had free play.
Just now the approaching year of 1877 was one of unmistakable significance. The magic figure seven was worked to its full promise. It might have been Michael Malley who discovered that the name of the first book of the Old Testament and that of the first book of the New Testament each contained seven letters. It was the cryptic but conclusive evidence that this '77 was the fore-ordained year of the destruction of the world and all of its people save only the elect, of which the campers on Beers Plain were a contingent.
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