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 9
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The absence of a liturgy was almost a foregone conclusion. The liturgy was the distinctive feature of the mother church, it is true, but English Puri- tans had long tired of it. At the very formation of the English Church, a powerful party, including
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bishops and clergy as well as laity, had protested against preserving any portion of the Romish ritual ; and from that hour there was a spoken or unspoken protest within the church against all liturgical forms. Church music fell under the same disapproval, and for the same cause. Under Queen Elizabeth, as far back as 1586, a pamphlet was addressed to Parlia- ment, praying that "all cathedral churches may be put down, where the service of God is grievously abused by piping and organs, singing, ringing, trowl- ing of Psalms from one side of the choir to the other, with the squeaking of chanting choristers, dis- guised in white surplices." The prejudice against organs as part of the Romish ceremonial began, as such passages show, long before our ancestors' times. For a long time, as you know, there was no music whatever in our New England churches, unless the singing of Psalms without accompaniment could be called music ; and many now living can remem- ber when the bass-viol and violin, which for some strange reason were thought less idolatrous than the organ, were still heard in our country churches. The first American organ was built in 1745.
The most marked feature of the new worship, how- ever, was the preaching. Where all else was simple, here was something formidably artificial and elabo- rate. Knowing as we do the insignificant place which preaching holds in most ritualistic services, and the short exhortations to which our early preachers must have been wont in the English Church, we cannot help asking how it was that they fell at once
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into such new and strange ways. What was the source of the Puritan sermon ?
It came about evidently as a reaction against that very neglect of preaching to which I have just al- luded. Till that time preaching had never held an important place in the Christian Church, while in most ages it had been shamefully neglected. Great pulpit orators there have been in the Catholic Church from time to time, but through the periods of Cath- olic supremacy as a whole, until the influence of Protestantism began to be felt, we hear little of preaching. The cathedrals or large parish churches were ill adapted to it, while at the same time the mass of the clergy were too ignorant and untrained for any such service. For many ages nearly all the sermons or homilies used by the priests were written for them. In the sixth century (529) a church covenant enacted: " If any presbyter be unable to preach, the homilies of the sacred fathers are to be read by the deacons." In the Middle Ages large collections of these homilies, arranged by Sundays, were almost universally employed.
The English Church, as our fathers knew it, had inherited, with the rest of its ritualistic patrimony, much of the Catholic sentiment about preaching. The church prepared its collections of homilies at once. Its preachers seem to have been for some time few and poor. According to one authority, " not one beneficed clergyman in six at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign was capable of composing a ser- mon." The Bishop of Bangor declared that he had
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but two preachers in all his diocese. In a certain county, we are told, " not a sermon was to be heard within the compass of twenty miles." "In the large town of Northampton, somewhat later, there was not one preacher, nor had been for a considerable time." It was calculated in 1586, after the Church of Eng- land had been in existence nearly thirty years, that for ten thousand parish churches there were then only two thousand preachers ; so that, if persons would hear a sermon, they must go five, seven, or even twenty miles, and be fined 12d. beside, for being absent from their own parish church. Indeed, so far from trying to remedy this state of things, the church encouraged it. Preaching was looked upon as the main device for spreading false opinions. Queen Elizabeth declared that "it was good for a church to have few preachers," and acted accordingly. When James I., on his accession, met the Puritan clergy to hear their complaints, the Bishop of London fell upon his knees, and begged his Majesty "that all parishes might have a praying (rather than a preach- ing) ministry ; for preaching is grown so much in fashion that the service of the Church is neglected. Besides, pulpit harangues are very dangerous. He therefore humbly moved that the number of homilies might be increased, and the clergy be obliged to read them instead of their own sermons, in which many vented their spleen against their superiors."
That there should be a revolt against this condi- tion of things as soon as the Puritan clergy were free to act for themselves, is not astonishing. That this
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reaction should go so far, that the scorned and ne- glected sermon in the far Western Continent, with nought to hinder and abundance of time for spiritual recreation, should take upon itself somewhat colossal dimensions, is only in accordance with human nature. With the extraordinary characteristics of the Puri- tan sermon, you are all familiar. The hour-glass be- came a regular part of the pulpit furniture, and the congregation always expected to see it turned once at least before the preaching ended. Thomas Shep- ard speaks in one of his sermons of certain hearers who " sit in the stocks when they are at prayers, and come out of the church when the tedious sermon runnes somewhat beyond the hour, like prisoners out of a jaile." The literary structure of these dis- courses was as unexampled as their length. Start- ing with numerous grand divisions of his theme, the preacher advances first to various subdivisions; under each subdivision meets objections from fancied dis- believers with their appropriate replies; passes on then to the so-called Uses of his theme, which Uses are subdivided perhaps into reproofs, exhortations, comfort, and choice ; then sums up the doctrine that he has been unfolding to his hearers; and finally urges upon them, under many heads, its personal applications. In the shortest of my predecessor Shepard's sermons that I can find (" The Saint's Jewel"), are three divisions of his text, - viz. a lov- ing appellation, a gracious invitation, and an argu- ment for investigation, -followed by three Reasons for the doctrine; - these followed by four Uses ;
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under Use two, thirteen Objections with Answers ; under Use three, two general subdivisions, with two Objections and Answers, one Exhortation and one Warning ; under Use four, six divisions ; - followed by five Considerations, and five Helps ; - the whole being concluded by two Reproofs.
In all this we find, I think, in spite of its forbid- ding form, a tremendous earnestness, at whose quaint expression we allow ourselves to smile, yet which we feel was the natural outgrowth of the apostolic fervor of an apostolic age. The contemporaries of our Puritan preachers, however, judged these effusions differently, and found in them the material for in- finite merriment and ridicule. To give you this outside view, let me quote the following passage from Robert South, an English divine who was born just as Shepard and his companions arrived upon these shores (1633), and who was himself a direct and brilliant result of the fresh impulse given by the Puritan movement to English pulpit oratory.
" First of all," he says (in a sermon called " The Scribe Instructed "), these new lights "seize upon some text, from whence they draw something (which they call a doctrine), and well may it be said to be drawn from the words; forasmuch as it seldom nat- urally flows from them. In the next place, they branch it into several heads, perhaps twenty or thirty, or upward. Whereupon, for the prosecution of these, they repair to some trusty concordance, which never fails them, and by the help of that, they range six or seven scriptures under each head ;
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which scriptures they prosecute one by one, enlar- ging upon one for some considerable time till they have spoiled it; and then, that being done, they pass to another, which in its turn suffers accordingly."
But preaching was not the sole form which this new-born zeal for holy discourse assumed. Each church had not only a pastor, but also, if fully equipped, a teacher, -a provision based, like all their other appointments, on apostolic authority, but which it proved impossible in the end to maintain. The original intent was apparently that the pastor was to preach the sermon, the teacher, also fully trained for the ministry, to expound the Scriptures, either before or after the sermon. Sometimes the preacher of the morning service became the teacher of the afternoon; and, in general, although the dis- tinction was long insisted on as purely scriptural, the two offices seem to have been gradually blended, and the teacher eventually disappeared. This church, for some reason, seems to have satisfied itself from the beginning with a pastor only.
A still more curious result of this return to apos- tolic authority, joined with the unappeasable hunger for the spoken word which seems to have seized our Puritan ancestry, was the office of prophesying. The Epistles of Paul have much to say about " prophesying," which in those days of the church seems to have been the name for any earnest, spon- taneous speech. It meant probably almost exactly what we mean by extempore preaching. Our Puri- tan fathers, eager apparently to multiply the occa-
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sions for sacred oratory, recognized in this a distinct office from preaching or teaching. Prophesying meant scripture exposition with exhortation, and was a privilege accorded in cases of exigency, as when the pastor was absent, or distinguished strangers were visiting a church, to certain of the more gifted laity. Governor Winthrop tells us of visiting Aga- wam, and spending the Sabbath with the people, as they were without a minister, and "exercising by way of prophecy." He tells us also that his own pastor, Mr. Wilson, on returning to England, " commended to his people the exercise of prophecy in his absence, and designated those whom he thought most fit for it, viz. the Governor, Mr. Dudley, and Mr. Nowell." Some idea of what it meant to attend church in those days of " prophesying " may be got from an account given in a private letter from Amsterdam in 1606, describing the order of Sabbath services among the English Puritans there, apparently in the absence of the pastor : " I. We begin with prayer ; after, read some one or two chapters of the Bible, and give the sense thereof, and confer upon the same; that done, we lay aside our books, and, after a solemn prayer made by the first speaker, he propoundeth some text out of the scripture, and prophesieth out of the same by the space of one hour or three quarters of an hour. After him standeth up a second speaker, and proph- esieth out of the said text, the like time and place, sometime more, sometime less. After him the third, the fourth, the fifth, etc., as the time will give leave. Then the first speaker concludeth with
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prayer, as he began with prayer, and with an exhor- tation to contribute to the poor, which collection being made, is also concluded with prayer. The morning exercise begins at eight of the clock, and continueth unto twelve of the clock. The like course and exercise is observed in the afternoon, from two of the clock unto five or six of the clock. Last of all, the execution of the government of the church is handled."
This account of the peculiar religious customs of two hundred and fifty years ago would be incomplete if I were not to add one point more, to show the ex- treme length to which, at the very first, the revulsion from Popery carried these pious worshippers. In the mother church, basely following Romish ante- cedents, marriage was an ecclesiastical sacrament. The Puritan, on the contrary, declared it a civil con- tract. Was there any passage in scripture, he asked, which made marriage part of the minister's function? Then the minister must not perform it. It must be done by the civil magistrate as a secular rite. No marriage by a minister is found on record in New England before 1686. Strangely enough, burials came under the same category. What warrant in scripture for burying the dead with religious rites ? Nay, would not such an observance encourage the Popish mummery of prayer for the dead ? Funerals, accordingly, were without scripture, psalm, sermon, or prayer. The bell was tolled, friends carried the remains quietly to some churchyard or roadside en- closure, and silently laid them away. The reason
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for this seems to us absurd ; yet, when we compare the tender simplicity of such a rite with the profes- sional formalities and elaborate display attending many a modern funeral, who will say that we have not something still to learn from the Puritan ?
I should be sorry if my brief allusion to Thomas Shepard suggested any feeling towards him on my part but that of hearty admiration and reverence. His autobiography, one of the most interesting per- sonal memorials which remain to us of that period, reveals a nature of singular transparency and sim- plicity, deeply sensitive, profoundly conscientious, absolutely consecrated to its high calling. All the early allusions to him, which are many, confirm this impression. Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia, calls him the Pastor Evangelicus. £ A contemporary writer, quoted in full by Dr. Newell in his " Farewell Sermon upon Leaving the Old Meeting House," speaks of Shepard as a "poore, weake, pale-com- plectioned man," but with a power of speech which made deep impression on the soul. Winthrop, as we have seen, in his account of the founding of this church, speaks with enthusiasm of his "heavenly prayer." His sermons, though severe of course in their theology, and cumbrous in construction, after the fashion of the time, yet show a thoroughly prac- tised hand, and great intensity of conviction, with touches here and there of what would no doubt seem to us, if our ears were more attuned to the prolixity of seventeenth-century speech, great pungency and directness. Altogether, he appears to us, in the
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dimness of distance, a fine combination of delicacy and strength, nobly fitted to head the list of pastors of this First Church of Cambridge.
How this saintly spirit of the olden time would regard us, his descendants, could he revisit these earthly scenes, it is not easy to conjecture. Unless his sturdy Puritan instincts had died out within him, we may well doubt whether he would have found anything, either in the city whose foundations he helped to lay, or in any of the churches to which his labors here have given birth, of which he could fully approve. Yet one thing we cannot doubt would have given him pleasure, - that the memory of his beau- tiful ministry, after two hundred and fifty years had passed, had power to heal the differences between his spiritual children, and bring them together after long separation in an act of filial reverence.
THE END.
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