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 8
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In conclusion I would remind you that the New England His- toric, Genealogical Society has some manuscripts of Shepherd's in regard to church-members never yet printed. Then there is the list printed in Rev. Mr. Newell's Address in 1846, and Shepard's Autobiography, - accessible only in the rare volume issued in 1832 by Rev. N. Adams.
I would respectfully urge upon you to arrange for a committee to prepare a memorial volume containing all these matters, and whatever else can be gleaned relative to the early history of your church. I will gladly assist ; and I am confident that such a book will find sufficient patronage from those who are interested in the subject.
Hoping that these notes will be acceptable as pointing out new sources of information, I remain with much respect,
Yours very sincerely,
WILLIAM H. WHITMORE.
SERMON
BY
REV. EDWARD H. HALL, IN THE
First Parish Church,
FEB. 14, 1886.
.
SERMON.
THE LORD OUR GOD BE WITH US, AS HE WAS WITH OUR FATHERS. - I Kings viii. 57.
TE have just taken part, with a sister church, in an interesting commemoration. Two cen- turies and a half ago, as we are reminded, occurred the first gathering of our church and congregation ; and while the memories awakened by this anniver- sary are still fresh in our minds, it seems pleasant to review, at somewhat greater length, the incidents of that far-off occasion. This is no new theme. One of my predecessors in this pulpit, whose ministra- tions here are still so fondly and reverently remem- bered, went over the same ground, forty years ago, with a thoroughness and historic fidelity which leaves little for another to do. A more striking picture of the beginnings of religious life in New England could not well be given than was sketched for us by Dr. Newell, Feb. 22, 1846, in his " Discourse on the Cambridge Church-Gathering in 1636."
Still, whether already described or not, these old- time occurrences, in which well-known places and
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scenes appear in absolutely unfamiliar garb, have a charm for us not yet outworn. In their quaintness and simplicity lies a perennial beauty. Let me then, without further preface, carry you back once more to that moment, two hundred and fifty years ago, when the pastors and magistrates of the Mas- sachusetts Colony assembled here to establish their eleventh church. Governor Winthrop's detailed de- scription of that event has been placed before you so lately that I need not repeat it.1 Let us try to recall the scene this morning, speaking, first, of the place ; second, of the church ; and third, of the pastor.
First the place. The little hamlet in which this great event occurred was confined, as you know, within very small territorial limits. The spot where this edifice stands was quite outside the town, which occupied a narrow strip between what is now Har- vard Street and the river, bounded very nearly by what are now Brattle Square and Holyoke Street. Within these lines was planted what had been in- tended as the principal town of the Massachusetts Colony. But capital cities did not grow to order in those days, any more than now. Massachusetts has two striking proofs of this fact. In a little village of perhaps one thousand souls, among the hills of Worcester County, is to be seen to-day a wide grass-grown avenue, with side streets at right angles, which local tradition declares was laid out early in the century, when it was confidently expected that R., being the exact geographical centre of the State,
1 See Introductory Address of Hon. C. T. Russell.
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would finally, by imperious necessity, become the capital city. Our own village affords the second illustration. Within a year after Governor Win- throp's arrival in New England, he set himself, in company with several of the Assistants, to select a site for a fortified town, to serve as the residence of the colonial magistrates. Fearing the Indians ap- parently much less than they feared their more civil- ized foes who might attack them from the sea, they turned their steps inland, and after tramping through Roxbury and Watertown in their search, finally chose this spot as best meeting the requirements of a me- tropolis, and agreed among themselves to build their houses here the following spring (1631). Before that time, however, their plans had changed. Per- haps the distance from the sea (as one of the early chroniclers suggests) seemed on second thought a disadvantage rather than a safeguard ; perhaps the families already settled in Charlestown and Boston were reluctant to remove, even at the solicitation of the governor. In any case, the result was that Gov- ernor Winthrop, after erecting a house here, took it down and rebuilt it in Boston, while Dudley, the dep- uty-governor, was the only official to carry out the original plan. After many heart-burnings and some serious misunderstandings between the Governor and his deputy, the purpose was finally abandoned, and Boston secured the coveted honors intended for another place. The little settlement on Charles River, however, did not wholly lose its metropolitan character. For some time the " Courts of Assistants"
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met here, though at irregular intervals; the annual election of governor and magistrates was repeatedly held under the trees of our common ; a canal be- tween the settlement and the river was built at public cost, and a tax was levied (in 1632) on all the planta- tions of the Colony "towards the making of a pally- sadoe about the new Town." Indeed, our village can hardly be said to have had any individual char- acter at first. It had not even a special name, but was called, as we see, simply the new town (with a small n), which appellation grew gradually into New- town (with a large N), to be supplanted by its present title when the citizens finally took things into their own hands and determined upon their own name.
Little of the Cambridge of to-day, with its match- less informality of angles and lines, could be seen in the primitive settlement. The eight original streets ran at exact right angles with each other, and the rules for building were laid down with a punctil- iousness befitting an official and fortified residence. Two or three of the earliest chroniclers praise its admirable regularity. " Newtowne," says one (in 1634), "is one of the neatest and best compacted Townes in New England, having many faire struc- tures, with many handsome contrived streets." By
early votes of the town, houses were to range even and stand just six feet from the street, roofed care- fully with slate or board. No tree was to lie across the highway for a day, or else the tree was forfeited. All stubs of trees were to be taken up within the " town gates,"-the town gates being three structures
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which hardly resembled those of Quebec, probably, but which gave a certain additional dignity to the town, and which seem to have stood (in 1636) near Linden Street, Ash Street, and the site of this church. Outside the town proper ran the palisade already re- ferred to, extending, probably, a mile and a half, per- haps with a trench outside, and enclosing one thou- sand or more acres, for pasture, cultivated land, and commons.
It is interesting to remember that it was in the same year of the church-gathering which we cele- brate, though a little later, that the act was passed by the Court which was to change so entirely both the aspect and the character of this little palisaded village. In 1636, {400 were appropriated towards the establishment of a school or college, which in 1637 it was determined to found in Newtowne. Still a year later (1638), in consonance with this new order of things, the name of the town was formally changed to Cambridge. So, with the establishment of Har- vard College, the Cambridge which we know began its actual existence. All before this was purely preliminary.
And as the town had a double birth, so had the church, to which we turn our attention next. No New England settlement remained long without a church and pastor. In this case, as the existence of the town was decreed by public act, so an entire con- gregation was transferred into the place bodily, by order of Court, from another settlement. August 14, 1632, says the record, "the Braintree company
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(which had begun to sit down at Mt. Wollaston) was removed to Newtown;" and on the 30th of the month, to calm the hard feeling towards the Gov- ernor on the part of Deputy-Governor Dudley, who found himself officially alone at Newtowne, it was ordered that " the Governor should procure them a minister at Newtown and contribute somewhat to- wards his maintenance for a time." This happened in 1632, and in 1633 Thomas Hooker, whom the company already regarded as belonging to them, arrived, and was at once installed as their pastor. Hooker was one of the most noteworthy of our early preachers ; one whom Cotton Mather, in his annals, calls the Luther of the movement of which John Cotton was the Melancthon ; and who is described (somewhat more attractively than most of the grim Puritan clergy) as one "in whom everything was full of life : life in his voice, in his eye, in his hand, in his gestures."
Before Hooker's arrival the little meeting-house had been built, and provided with what no other meeting-house in the Colony could boast, a bell, and the first ministry began most prosperously. Within a year, however, the new pastor grew impa- tient of his narrow stockaded quarters, and made up his mind to remove his congregation to the more fer- tile region of Connecticut. It was a fundamental mistake, he declared, for the colonists to have set their towns so near each other; and Newtowne offered no accommodation for their cattle, and cer- tainly no chance to grow. Some have conjectured
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that the real reason was not so much want of space as a growing jealousy between the two leading preachers, Cotton and Hooker, each of whom felt himself entitled to the first rank in the Colony. In any case, the fact was, that, after sturdy resistance on the part of the Governor and Court, permission for the removal was at last granted, and, three years after the first organization of the church, both pastor and people pushed through the forests, carrying the pastor's wife in a litter, and milking their cows as they went, to Hartford, Connecticut. Thus the first church organization, being transferred elsewhere, became extinct in Newtowne.
Meantime, however, before Hooker's removal, an- other company of colonists had providentially arrived from England, and, finding an entire settlement about to be vacated, purchased the houses at once, and established themselves in this place; at first, as they thought, for temporary occupancy, but, as it finally proved, for a permanent home. It is worth while to notice, as showing that Cambridge held its own in the end as against the superior charms of Hartford, that Hooker afterwards offered strong in- ducements to his successor, Shepard, to follow him into the more attractive regions of Connecticut, but without success ; and that, a little later still, Jona- than Mitchel, on entering the ministry, being so- licited at the same time (1649) to become Hooker's successor at Hartford and Shepard's successor at Cambridge, preferred the latter, and became the second pastor of this church.
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Although in this way one church disappeared and a second came into being, there appears to have been no break in the religious services here. If the dates are correctly given, the two congregations must have worshipped together for some weeks, the two pastors perhaps officiating in turn; as, four months before Hooker's departure, the new church was ready for organization, and the event occurred in which Governor Winthrop was a participant, and which he deemed worthy, as we have seen, of such minute description.1
Whatever more is needed to bring this scene vividly before us has been added by Dr. Newell in the discourse to which I have alluded, where he sketches with rare felicity all the famous historical personages who made that gathering so memorable: John Winthrop himself with his oldest son, Thomas Dudley, Sir Henry Vane, John Cotton and John Wilson, Richard Mather, Hugh Peters, and others.
Turning from this attractive picture, however, let us inquire to-day, more prosaically, into the exact his- torical and religious significance of the scene. Here is a plain little meeting-house, with hardly any token of its religious uses; here is a church called into existence by the simple consent of magistrates and elders, and the offering of the right hand of fellow- ship ; here are long prayers and exercisings, with deep confession of sin and personal confessions of faith. All this is something new in the annals of the Christian Church. What, I ask, is its historic
1 No mention of Hooker is made in Winthrop's account.
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significance? Where does it belong in the develop- ment of Christian worship ? Where did these rites come from, and to what do they point in the future ?
The building itself has its significance, when compared with the cathedrals or parish churches to which many of the worshippers had been accustomed in their native land. This special building stood in the midst of the settlement, on the corner of what are now Dunster and Mt. Auburn Streets. We have no description of it. In comparison with the mud walls and thatched roof of its Boston sister, the log frame, with roof of slate or boards (according to the town ordinance of four years before), though probably far less picturesque, no doubt looked to our ancestors much more dignified and stately. A still further advance in church architecture was made when meeting-houses were surmounted (as at Hing- ham) by a four-square roof terminating in a belfry, a style reached in Cambridge some years later, in repairing the first edifice. The interior, if we look into it, we find as simple and unecclesiastical as the exterior. There is no altar, no choir, nothing even that in older countries would be called a pulpit ; only a desk, with seats before it for deacons and el- ders, and rows of benches beyond, for men on the one side, and for women on the other.
Indeed, it is plain at once that we have to do here, not with a church, but with something quite differ- ent. It is a meeting-house : a place, that is, where the people of the town shall gather for all common purposes, - six days to arrange their secular affairs,
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on the seventh to worship God. In the Plymouth Colony, the meeting-house (built nearly ten years before) was also a fort, the roof being a thick flat platform, with six four-pound cannon mounted on it ; the worshippers, on Sunday, assembling by beat of drum, and marching three abreast, with musket on shoulder, to their martial meeting place. In Newtowne, as elsewhere, the meeting-house was the town-house, where the church-members (the only voters) met for council once a month at least; at first, all freemen, afterwards (1634-35) only chosen delegates or " townsmen."
Turning now from the external to the internal affairs of our little church, we find it, in common with the other churches of the time, engaged in a very interesting work. It is, quite unconsciously to itself, initiating a new order of worship. As I have dwelt upon this point in another place, I will only remind you here that the Massachusetts colonists belonged to that party among the Puritans who had cherished to the very last the hope of carrying out its reforms within the English Church. Nor was this expectation by any means so chimerical, or this attitude towards the church so half-hearted or ir- resolute, as at first thought appears. When we con- sider that during the entire reign of Queen Eliza- beth the reform party within the church constituted probably, in spite of royal displeasure, quite half the clergy, - when we remember that at a convoca- tion held in the beginning of her reign (1562) the proposal to set aside surplices, give up kneeling in
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prayer, the use of organs, and the sign of the cross at baptism, was lost by a vote of 58 to 59 (deans and archdeacons being among the minority), - when we consider that at the accession of James I., after the intolerance and persecution of Elizabeth's reign, nearly one thousand of the English clergy pre- sented a petition asking for extensive changes in the church service, and that a radical reform was only prevented by the King's intolerance and obstinacy, - when we remember (to come nearer home) that John Cotton preached for twenty years as an avowed Puritan in the parish church in Boston (England), and for some time before leaving the church had discontinued the liturgy and vestments, and denied the authority of bishops, - we realize what good reason there was for hope, through that entire cen- tury, that the church would itself take in hand all needed ecclesiastical reforms. At the time of the settlement of Massachusetts the animosity between the Puritans who had left the church and those who remained behind was very strong. When Winthrop and his party set sail from England, they declared in their well-known address to "the rest of their breth- eren in and of the Church of England ": " We es- teem it an honor to call the Church of England, from whence we rise, our dear mother, and cannot part from our native country, where she specially resideth, without much sadness of heart." John Cotton, writing from this country to a friend in England, declared with some indignation that he was no Brownist, and pronounced even the name
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Independent as "too strait," and " no fit name for the way of our churches." Sixteen years later (1646) Winthrop speaks in strong disapproval of those in England who " went under the name of Indepen- dents, to whom such a vast liberty was allowed."
Nearly all the first pastors of the Massachu- setts Colony, we must remember, were ordained clergymen (or lecturers) of the Church of England. Thomas Shepard made his first open renunciation of Episcopacy in entering upon his pastorate here. John Cotton, as we have seen, served for twenty years under the Bishop of Lincoln as vicar in the English Church of Boston, and before leaving his flock "conferred with the chief of the people and offered them to bear witness (still) to the truth he had preached and practised amongst them ... if they conceived it any confirmation of their faith and practice." Hooker's ministry in the Church of Eng- land was much shorter ; but when it was found that the Bishop of London threatened to suspend him, a petition was presented by forty-seven "conformable ministers of the neighboring towns," praying for his continuance at his post.
The establishment of Protestantism in the Massa- chusetts Colony, then, represents the period when the Puritan party in the Church of England, after having loyally held its place through three hostile reigns, had been at last driven from its allegiance. What new form of church government and wor- ship should they adopt? In England at this mo- ment those who could not go all lengths with the
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Separatists were inclined to lodge the power taken from the bishops in the hands of a presbytery or board of ministers and elders. If England at any time during the reign of Charles I. had renounced Episcopacy, (as it seemed on the eve of doing,) it would have become Presbyterian. Were the Ameri- can Puritans of the same mind? Or would they, on reaching American soil, where no state power restricted their action, and where a pure Indepen- dency had already established itself, overcome their repugnance to these sectaries, and adopt their forms of worship ?
Nothing is more interesting than to see how this question worked itself out. It was done with very little friction, by perfectly natural and unconscious steps. Away from England, of course the old party names lost much of their horror. What was to for- bid their turning, as the Independent churches had done, directly to the Scriptures, and shaping their new worship by the apostolic model ? Already in Holland, as some of their own number knew, this had been long practised. Already in Plymouth it had taken root in New England soil. Without dis- cussion or dispute, therefore, (so far as the records show,) the first pastors were ordained to their new office by the laying on of hands by the brethren of the church, liturgies, surplices, and organs disap- peared from their Sabbath service, and the appoint- ment by each congregation of elders and deacons was accepted as a sufficient substitute for bishops or presbyters.
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Thus far, they were acting as purely independent bodies, and every step looking towards the associa- tion of churches into anything like the one Church whose power they had finally renounced, seemed likely to be hotly resented. And so at first it was. But circumstances are stronger than theories. The common sense of loneliness and of danger drew these pioneer churches into close alliance. In all exigencies they learned more and more eagerly to seek each other's sympathy and counsel. The iden- tification of church with state, whereby the members of the several churches found themselves constantly acting together in both the civil and the religious affairs of all the communities, accustomed them to concerted action. And so it happened that, in spite of constant protests from individual towns, jealous of their rights, there grew up by mutual consent a certain affiliation of the churches, and mutual con- cern in each other's welfare, which, however familiar to us to-day, was then something new in the world, and indicated the dawning of a new church polity. There is no space here to trace its steps of develop- ment. It is interesting for us, however, to remem- ber that the first announcement to the world of this new order of religious government, and, indeed, the first recognition on the part of the churches them- selves of the fact that they had committed them- selves to a common polity, was directly associated with our own church and its first pastor. The hour comes when every new movement, just becoming conscious of its own identity and its own purpose,
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takes to itself a name of its own. That moment came when the synod of Cambridge, assembling in our little meeting-house on Dunster Street, declared that the New England churches were not Indepen- dent, but Congregational.
So sprung up a new Christian order, - an order in which the individual churches, while preserving their individuality and claiming each congregation as the source of all ecclesiastical power, yet con- sented to invest the assembled churches with cer- tain authority over the several parts. It had been evolved, as we have seen, out of the practical exi- gencies of the situation. It had no justification in any previous traditions of church policy. It was very illogical, and showed in the statements and ar- guings of its own platform an uneasy consciousness that it was striving to combine things inherently incompatible. The churches were independent, yet they were not; each parish claimed the absolute right of controlling its own affairs, yet delegated part of its authority to councils or synods. With every new generation and at every new juncture down to the present day, Congregationalism has been forced to state its principles anew, and decide afresh just how much authority resides in the council and how much in the congregation. With the unity and ag- gressive power of an established church it has cer- tainly never shown itself able to compete.
Yet, logical or illogical, it was, as we have seen, very spontaneous, and it has proved itself singularly adapted to its work. In the new life of the West-
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ern Continent during those early centuries, if not throughout the nation's entire life, it was exactly what was needed. What it lost, as compared with Episcopacy or Presbyterianism, in sheer working power, it gained in elasticity and freedom. It has proved strong enough to hold together its scattered forces through the simple sentiment of brotherhood ; it has proved supple and free enough to adapt itself to the growth of democratic institutions and the spread of new religious thought. Congregational- ism, it must be understood, is the name, not of a doctrinal system, but only of a religious polity. It means, not believing certain truths, but governing churches in a certain way. The name belongs to- day to the liberal as well as to the orthodox churches which have issued from the Colonial stock ; churches which, however widely they have separated in doc- trine, have held with equal jealousy to the primitive Congregational idea.
And now we are inclined to ask just what was the humble ceremonial which took the place, in our Puritan meeting-house, of the stately worship to which those pastors and worshippers had been ac- customed. Where and how did these simple rites, which have come down almost unmodified to us, Originate?
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