USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge > Services at the celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the organization of the First church in Cambridge, February 7- 14, 1886 > Part 6
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FIRST CHURCH IN CAMBRIDGE.
It is proper that a representative of Harvard College should take part in these commemorative exercises. The College owed its foundation to the non-conformist ministers who came hither with the first emigration. It was founded, as Thomas Shep- ard said, that "the Commonwealth may be furnished with knowing and understanding men, and the churches with an able ministry." For the first ten years of the life of the College three fifths of its graduates became ministers in the established Con- gregational Church of the colony, and for a whole generation more than half of its graduates entered that ministry. Two hundred and fifty years have wrought a great change in this respect. Instead of more than half of the graduates becoming Con- gregational ministers, not more than six per cent become ministers at all; and this small contingent is scattered among a great variety of denominations. In 1654 Henry Dunster, the first President of the College, was indicted by the grand jury and turned out of office because he had become a Baptist ; now the two oldest professorships of Divinity are held in peace by Baptist ministers. When I came hither to the collation this afternoon there walked beside me a birthright Quaker who is the Dean
of the College Faculty. I fear that Governors Dudley, Endicott, and Winthrop, and Ministers John Wilson and John Norton would not have been pleased to see a Quaker in charge of the College. I fear that if the young minister John Harvard should now visit his posthumous child,
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the College, with his ideas of 1636 undeveloped, he would wish at first sight that the institution bore some other name.
There has been a tone of exultation and triumph in our celebration, as if we thought that the Puri- tans exulted and triumphed. I do not think they did. They were terribly straitened, and were full of fear and anxiety. They saw nothing of the great and happy future. What they knew was that their lives were full of hardship and suffering, of toil and dread. Even their own precious liberty, for which they had made such sacrifices, seemed to them in perpetual danger from oppressors with- out and heretics within. How crushing must have been the constant sense of their isolation upon the border of a vast and mysterious wilderness! The Puritans were a poor and humble folk. Thomas Shepard was the son of a grocer in a small English village. John Harvard was the son of a butcher in one of the most obscure parishes of London. There were very few men among them of birth or station. In the early years they were often pinched for food. What must they not have suffered from this bitter climate! They lived at first in such shanties as laborers build along the line of new railroads in construction, or in such cabins as the pioneers in western Kansas or Dakota build to shelter them from the rigors of their first winter. They had nothing which we should call roads or bridges or mails. Snow, ice, and mud, and the numerous creeks and streams isolated the scattered
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villages and farms, and made even the least com- munication difficult for half of the year. We are apt to think of the men who bore these hardships as stout and tough, and to waste no pity on them, because we cannot help imagining that they knew they were founding a mighty nation. But what of the tenderer women? Generations of them cooked, carried water, washed and made clothes, bore chil- dren in lonely peril, and tried to bring them up safely through all sorts of physical exposures without medical or surgical help, lived themselves in terror of savages, in terror of the wilderness, and under the burden of a sad and cruel creed, and sank at last into nameless graves, without any vision of the grateful days when millions of their descendants should rise up and call them blessed. What a piteous story is that of Margaret Shepard, married young to non-conforming Thomas, braver than he, confirming his faltering resolution to emigrate, sail- ing with him for these inhospitable shores, although very ill herself, and dying here within a fortnight of the gathering of the church over which her hus- band was to preside! Let us bear her memory in our hearts to-night.
But I dwell too much on physical hardships. The Puritans had other fears and anxieties. They dreaded the exercise here of English royal power. They watched with apprehension the prolonged struggle of the Catholic with the Protestant powers in Germany, giving thanks for mercies vouchsafed to the churches of God whenever the Protestants
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obtained a substantial success. But worst of all, they did not feel sure of themselves. They were not always confident that they could hold to their own ideals of life. Within ten years they had serious doubts about the success of their civil and religious polity in the few settlements they had made. In 1639 "the 4th of the 2d month was thought meet for a day of humiliation, to seek the face of God, and reconciliation with him by our Lord Jesus Christ, in all the churches. Novelties, oppression, atheism, excess, superfluity, idleness, contempt of authority, and troubles in other parts to be remembered." John Pratt, of Newtown, must have given expression to a very common feeling when he wrote in an apologetic letter to the Court of Assistants these words: "Whereas I did express the danger of decaying here in our first love, I did it only in regard of the manifold occa- sions and businesses which here at first we meet withal, by which I find in my own experience (and so, I think, do others also) how hard it is to keep our hearts in that holy frame which sometimes they were in where we had less to do in outward things."
The Puritans did not know from day to day what should be on the morrow; and this uncertainty only makes their heroism seem greater. Examine the list of evils against which they prayed on the 4th of the 2d month in 1639, and consider what they would think of the state of our generation in regard to the same subjects. " Novelties ! " Is
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there any people on earth fonder of novelties than we? The American people is the only people I have ever lived among which takes the statement that a thing or a project is new as a recommenda- tion. We like and welcome novelties. "Oppres- sion !" They were in constant fear of oppression exercised by King and Church. That form of op- pression we have escaped from, only to find our- selves compelled to be on our guard against another form, - the oppression, namely, of bewildered and misled majorities. " Atheism!" There are many excellent persons within these walls to whom the word atheists would have been applied by the men who ordered this fast. I do not believe that Gov- ernor Dudley or Governor Endicott would have tolerated the opinions of the most orthodox person here present. We all know that to-day there are millions of men of the Puritan stock whom the Puritans would have called atheists and treated as such. "Excess! Superfluity!" Think what they meant by these words. To their minds these evils had already invaded their society. This order was passed only nine years after the landing of the Winthrop colony. They had been through great sufferings from hunger, cold, and disease. They tried to regulate prices and consumption. They prohibited slashed clothes, large sleeves, laces whether of gold, silver, or thread, embroideries, long hair, and cakes and buns in markets and victualling-houses. They laid heavy taxes upon sugar, spice, wine, and strong waters, because they
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held these things to be unnecessary indulgences. What would they think of our way of living? of our women's apparel, our church decorations, and our houses full of bric-a-brac? We who are in danger of having our intellectual and spiritual life buried under the weight of our luxuries and trivial possessions may well reflect upon the Puritans' idea of excess and superfluity. " Idleness !" They prayed against idleness ; yet it is said of them that they worked sixteen hours a day, and for recreation laid stone-walls. The notion that eight hours make a working day they would probably have accounted a mischievous whimsey. "Contempt of authority !" Our social system would seem to them full of dan- gerous license and pestilent toleration.
Neither the civil nor the religious polity of the Puritans succeeded. It was impossible to constitute a state on the basis of church membership; it was impossible to make life all duty without beauty. The society which they strove to found was an impossible one; for in their social aims they ignored essential and ineradicable elements in human nature. The Crusaders did not succeed, and the infidels still hold Jerusalem. The Puritans did not succeed, with all their sacrifices and struggles, in realizing the ideals which they had at heart. Why, then, do we so honor them? It is not simply because they were stout-hearted. Many a soldier of fortune, many a free-booter or robber chieftain, has been stout- hearted too. It is because they were stout-hearted for an ideal, - not our ideal, but theirs, - their ideal
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of civil and religious liberty. Wherever and when- ever resolute men and women devote their lives and fortunes not to material but to spiritual ends, there and then heroes are made, and, thank God, are made to be remembered. The Puritans thought to establish a theocracy; they stand in history as heroes of democracy.
We cannot help asking ourselves if we, their descendants, may possibly be remembered two hun- dred and fifty years hence for any like devotion to our own ideals. Have we ideals for which we would toil and suffer and if need be die? The Civil War gave one answer to that question. But I believe that in peace as well as in war our nation has shown that it has ideals for which it is ready to bear labor, pain, and loss. I believe that no people ever sees clearly those steps in its own progress, those events in its own life, which future generations will count glorious. Yet I think we can discern some moral ideals towards which our generation strives. We strive towards a progressive improve- ment of human condition, an amelioration of the average lot. We begin to get a realizing sense of that perfect democratic ideal,-" We are all members one of another." The gradual diminution of the exercise of arbitrary authority in the family, in edu- cation, and in government is another ideal towards which we press. We have come at last to really believe that he that would be greatest among us must be our servant. Finally, I think that we are working upward towards a truer and more beautiful
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idea of God, and that these very times may be remembered in later generations for the furthering of that better conception. We no longer think of God as a remotely enthroned monarch, who occa- sionally intervenes in the affairs of men, or even as the Lord of Hosts. More and more we think of him as the transcendent intelligence and love, in whom we and all things, from instant to instant, "live and move and have our being."
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REMARKS
BY DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES ON READING HIS HYMN.
IF we would sing this hymn in the spirit in which it is supposed to have been written and sung in the year 1636, we are to forget the scenery that sur- rounds us and imagine ourselves with them in the borders of the great untried wilderness. All the abodes of wealth and comfort which make this city beautiful must melt away and disappear like the baseless fabric of a vision.
All these stately edifices, monuments of the en- lightened liberality which has made Cambridge, leaning on the arm of her great commercial sub- urb, Boston, the educational and literary metropolis of the continent, must vanish from before your eyes.
You are in the edge of an unexplored forest. The bear, the wolf, and the far more welcome moose are your not infrequent visitants. The red man is lurking in the wild woods, armed with silent but deadly weapons. You have met with these few godly men, who have come to lay the foundations
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of a church which may perish from earth by exter- mination, or may abide until the second coming of Him in whose name it is founded. Perhaps some voices are tremulous; for who knows that the song may not be broken in upon by that fearful war-cry which those who have once heard can never forget ?
Let us thank God for all those mighty changes which have transformed the wilderness into our goodly heritage, and join our voices in singing to his praise -
THE WORD OF PROMISE.
[SEE PROGRAMME, PAGE 22, FOR HYMN.]
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FIRST CHURCH IN CAMBRIDGE.
ADDRESS.
BY HON. HORATIO G. PARKER.
MR. CHAIRMAN :
I HAVE observed, in assemblies of this nature, that those who are called upon to speak among the last are expected, as perhaps their chief duty, to indorse all that has been said by the earlier speakers.
I wish therefore now, lest I should hereafter for- get it, to fully indorse alike all that was said in the other church this afternoon and all that has been said here this evening, in praise and commendation of Thomas Shepard and those who upheld his hands and helped and cheered him in his labors two hun- dred and fifty years ago, as well as those who, when he fell in the furrow, took up and carried forward the work so well begun, as being every word true, according to my best recollection. I will go fur- ther, and say that as to all that has been this day said in favor of those good and great men, and their purposes, works, and deeds, neither I nor, I am fully confident, any one present, has any recollection to the contrary.
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Being asked by our Pastor to say a word here to- night, I desired to do so, if I could say anything of interest to any one who should stay long enough to hear me. The question was what that anything could or should be. It cannot be education, morals, freedom, or patriotism, appropriate as either of them would be, for they all will have been already spoken of so much better than I can speak of either of them. It must be something so common that every one will say it is proper, so just that every one will say it is true, so natural that no one will say it is new, or I had better not try to speak at all of those good men whose name and modest fame passing centu- ries seem only to make us the better remember and revere.
While so thinking, I had in my hand the story of a nun who having spent years in a nunnery had been liberated by those whom we might term the Puritans of the day of Luther, and was again at home with father, mother, family, and friends. She was asked if she saw any changes. "Yes," she said, " I see changes, but they are the changes of life. Where I have been the past ten years, the only changes were those wrought by the slow but sure finger of decay and death. I see the mother's hair is silvered, her cheek is whitened ; but here is a home of taste and comfort, with well-trained and comely daughters. She would not turn back these changes of life if she could; they are her love and cheer. The father's shoulders are bended, and his hair is frosted; but the forest has fallen and given place to
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blooming orchards and fields of bending grass and grain, while the bounding boys have become lithe and sturdy men, his pride and stay. They are the changes of life; you are all the happier and the world the better for them."
I thought the nun had suggested to me what all would agree was the peculiar credit and honor of the Puritan. As you view his course while he lived, and trace the effect of his teachings and life down through the centuries, you say the changes the Puritan produced upon the face of the land, upon men and women, upon society, government, and all human institutions, were all the changes of life. Nothing has perished of all he put his hand to.
We admit many changes; and if they are not all what the Puritan planned, wished, and hoped for, still he infused the life and proclaimed the freedom which have produced them.
How he favored education, that constant ener- gizer in society, and with his scant means estab- lished institutions to promote it that have con- stantly advanced in character and influence, has been already so well told that nothing can well be added.
The Puritan knew that government is a necessity for man, and almost his first step was to put himself under its authority; still with the conviction that that government must improve and keep pace with the growth and needs of a thinking, growing, inde- pendent people.
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The Puritan had his faith, - a faith he was true to, and a belief which he abided by and loved. He insisted upon individual opinion and private judg- ment; but he never reached the conclusion, some- what prevalent to-day, that man had no obligation to faith, no duty as to belief, -for the Puritan saw neither light nor life in believing nothing. You know, Mr. Chairman, that I would not criticise him for this.
The Puritan believed in and strove for the mate- rial development of the country he dwelt in. He would open and cultivate it, and bring the parts of its wide-spread domain together by ways and chan- nels of trade, travel, and communication. It would not surprise us to learn that Thomas Shepard wrought with the members of his parish upon these roads about us. And why not? One of the most gifted of modern New England divines has said that the roads of a country are a fair indication of its civilization and progress.
The Puritan, too, encouraged trade, commerce, and adventure. At the close of the Revolution the country was poor, and trade and commerce lan- guished. Puritan energy and Puritan industry, however, soon brought prosperity and plenty out of feebleness and want.
But the Puritan did not busy himself in the larger and public affairs of life alone. He knew of no duty of common life to any one that was not a duty to himself. He helped the poor, he ministered with his hands to the sick and distressed, he loved and cared for children and youth.
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These busy life-workers of two hundred and fifty years ago have gone. Their works do testify of them that they wrought only for the cheering and healthful changes of life; and we know that though their personal presence is lost to us, it is the angel of life, not of death, that has found them, and that they in these common duties of energetic life found the gate of heaven.
They are no longer of us. We know not whether they know or know not of and about us. But we know of them; and could they hear us, we might well greet them. Hail and cheer, bright spirits ! Hail and cheer, grand spirits! Now, as two hun- dred and fifty years ago, the prize is still before you, - a life never ending, a kingdom of glory.
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ADDRESS.
BY REV. NATHANIEL G. CLARK, D.D.
THERE is little occasion for me to add anything to what has been already said so wisely and so well of the Puritans. Yet after the very kind refer- ence of the chairman to my connection with For- eign Missions, it may not be deemed improper for me to allude to the missionary purpose which en- tered into their motives in coming to this country. This purpose finds expression in the original char- ters of the Plymouth and of the Massachusetts Col- onies. In the charter given the latter, it is expressly said that "to win and incite the natives of that country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Saviour of mankind and the Christian faith, in our royal intention and in the adventurer's free profession, is the principal end of the planta- tion." The seal of the colony had as its device the figure of an Indian, with the words of the Macedo- nian cry, " Come over and help us." The mission- ary purpose, therefore, entered largely into the thoughts and plans of the early colonists. The
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Plymouth and Massachusetts Colonies were great foreign missionary enterprises, - the first in modern times. They were not unmindful of their trusts. In 1636 the Plymouth Colony had enacted laws to provide for the preaching of the Gospel among the Indians ; and ten years later a similar act was passed by the Massachusetts Colony. In the same year John Eliot began his labors at Nonantum. The first translation of the Bible into a heathen language, in modern times, was made in this colony and printed here at Cambridge.
The object of a foreign mission is twofold, - the conversion of the native population, and the intro- duction of Christian institutions and of a Christian civilization. The first was realized here so far as a native population could be reached ; and before the close of the century thirty villages of Christian In- dians were reported, and churches organized, con- taining not far from three thousand members. In the wars that followed, the Christian Indians were scattered, regarded as disloyal by their own people, and looked upon too often with unjust prejudice by the colonists. Yet the labors of Eliot and the May- hews were not forgotten. Cherished in many a Christian home during the next century, they stirred the heart of Brainerd, of Sergeant, of Jonathan Ed- wards, and later of the mother of Samuel J. Mills. The original missionary purpose, never wholly lost, was to come forth anew at the opening of this cen- tury in the organization of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and in the
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other great missionary enterprises which characterize our time.
The second part of missionary work, the estab- lishment of Christian institutions, was to have here the grandest and completest illustration the world had ever seen. Two distinct elements entered into it, - loyalty to Christ and the best culture of the time. Never before, save in the immediate neigh- borhood of the great universities, had there been brought together so large a number of university men in proportion to the population, as in the Mas- sachusetts Colony ; and especially here at Cambridge. According to Professor Dexter, in his admirable pa- per on " The Influence of the English Universities on the Development of New England," not less than sixty graduates of Cambridge and Oxford came into this colony between the years 1630 and 1639, the larger part of whom settled in Cambridge and in its immediate vicinity. These men had shared in the awakened intellectual life and power of the seven- teenth century, - that grandest period in English history. They brought with them advanced ideas of Christian life and of human freedom. These were the two elements essential to the best civiliza- tion, - Christian ideas in their simplicity and purity on the one hand, and on the other, cultivated men to set them forth. Here we have the secret of that power which has made New England what it is, and given it its influence in our national history, -an influence felt from the Aroostook to the Golden Gate.
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Some years ago, in crossing the Atlantic, I had for a fellow-voyager a distinguished Western politician, a man who had served several terms in Congress and was not unwilling to serve his country in a higher position should it be offered him. He was therefore very careful and guarded in his statements, lest anything should be turned to his prejudice in his future career. Yet he did not hesitate to say, " You people of New England govern this country. We can vote you down in Congress, but somehow or other you always get the mastery." This witness was true! The best thought of the time, joined to the best culture, has prevailed and does prevail in this country, -determining its intellectual life and the character of its institutions. The Church of Christ first, the press and the school next in order of time, yet in closest connection, - Christian ideas and Christian culture. So was it here in Cambridge; so be it always and everywhere.
In the same spirit we are now carrying on For- eign Missions in all parts of the globe. We send the most cultured men and women we can secure, and we introduce the ripened thought of the time. The difference between the work of to-day and that of the early colonists in this country lies in this : then the field was a vast country, with but a scanty population ; in our modern missions we have vast countries, and vast populations also. But the two missionary elements are the same, - loyal devotion to Christ and cultured mind. The missionary pur- pose of the Massachusetts Colony waits its full real-
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ization when the Christian civilization of this country shall serve as a base for the evangelization of the world. Our fathers planned more wisely than they knew. Here were to be developed Christian insti- tutions which in their beneficent results to the mil- lions that were to occupy a continent were to be the admiration of mankind, and to give a prestige to the Christian name.
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