USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Salem > The first centenary of the North church and society, in Salem, Massachusetts > Part 7
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· I am continually reminded of Salem at the West, for just as far as your Salem is from Cambridge, just so far from the Michigan University there is a Salem. The university excels Harvard in numbers, and about once a week I see a man who comes down from Salem to talk to the boys, and tell them about his money. He gives liberally, and about the only thing he really loves to talk about is what the town of Salem did during the war, when the draft was made, and they all subscribed so liberally that there was no draft at all, and he boasts of the money he gave himself. The students there ask me about Salem, and they have an idea that there were witches in Salem at one time. Salem witchcraft is the very first idea they get hold of, and I tell them that if they want to see the witchery, they must come down here and go out on Essex street some Sunday afternoon, when all the young ladies are out, and then they will see the true witchery of the nineteenth
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century. Some of them, too, have an idea that there is a queer old house that everybody ought to go and see with its seven gables, and people say it is the old house of Hawthorne, and think of it sometimes as the place where a dreadful murder was once committed, but we will say nothing about that.
My friends : I have nothing left to say except to thank you and my friend Mr. Willson for the privilege of being here. If you come to Michigan, and it is a pleasant day, I will drive you to Salem, where forty or fifty years ago there were plenty of Indians, and where even to-day the bears are not all gone, but where in hard winter they sometimes unfortunately find themselves in pits and traps set for them by the inhabitants.
THE PRESIDENT.
The relations between the Unitarians of the old country and the Unitarians of this country have always been very intimate. She has furnished us with good literature and also with good men ; and I congratulate you and myself that we have a gentleman here to-day who learned his first lessons in Unitarianism in England, who can tell us about the movement there, and who has furnished the literature of our denomination with a rich supply of refined thought and elevated sentiment. I present to you with great pleasure the Rev. WM. MOUNTFORD.
ADDRESS OF THE REV. WILLIAM MOUNTFORD.
The Unitarians of England and those of America have a common ancestry, not merely as to blood, but politically and religiously. We are much more intimately connected than is commonly known. The founders of the first churches in Salem, Plymouth, Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, were mostly of the same Puritan connection, and the same temper generally, as were the two thousand clergymen of the Established Church who, in the year 1662, forfeited their livings rather than violate their con-
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sciences, and disown the headship of Christ by submitting them- selves to the act of uniformity as to public worship, which had been made law over their heads by an unscrupulous parliament and a poor, faithless, almost perjured king. It is from these men and others of like mind, that the Unitarians of England derive their religious ancestry and, very commonly also, even their lineal descent. After thirty years of grievous persecution, the people who had been ejected from their churches were allowed to build chapels for themselves ; and it was their peculiarity, as distin- guishing them from all other dissenters, that they deliberately and strenuously repudiated the use of a creed, or any other bond in common than acceptance of the Bible.
In so many of the earliest churches of this region, there has been a development of that spirit which was in John Robinson, at Delft-haven, when he said his last words to the future founders of Plymouth ; for he spoke of his persuasion, of God's having still much fresh truth to burst forth from his Holy Word. Many more persons than did would have followed after the early settlers of New England, but they were prevented by one cause and another, and some of them by the Government, and among the latter class, it is said, was Oliver Cromwell. As compared with what their friends in England had to undergo for many long years, your forefathers had not such a very hard time, while taking pos- session of broad acres and getting their own way as to Church and State.
It was from England that Dr. Bentley of this city got much of his sympathy as a Unitarian, and generally it was from English writers that American divines got initiation into Unitarianism - writers, such as Hopton Haynes, the intimate friend of Sir Isaac Newton, and Duchal the preacher, with whose writings Dr. Chan- ning was well acquainted. Dr. Franklin presented a quantity of books to some little town in New England - Franklin I think - as a public library, and of the books a curiously large proportion
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were theological, and of those that were theological, a striking proportion were by English Unitarians. The father of William Hazlitt was the author of two volumes of good sermons ; he was a zealous Unitarian, and a great good man as to Church and State in England, by the way of opposition. For two or three years, while his son William, the celebrated essayist, was a little boy, he lived hereabouts ; was familiar with Kennebunk, and preached occasionally at King's Chapel in Boston. The first christian congregation in America, gathered together as Unitarian, was in Philadelphia, and it was in connection with the preaching there, of Dr. Priestley ; and of the earlier members of that congregation, several of the chief were English Unitarians. The Unitarian congregation at Washington had English people among its first members, and its first clergyman was an Englishman, who had been a Unitarian minister at Birmingham, in England. Dr. Priestley was also from Birmingham ; he was, ecclesiastically, a refugee ; as, in a way, was many another Unitarian, who migrated to this country between the years 1790 and 1820. Before Dr. Priestley came to this country he had been driven from Birmingham by a mob, and not without the connivance of the magistracy. His house, library and laboratory had been burned ; the houses also of some of his more immediate friends; his chapel and two other places of Unitarian worship. After his expulsion from Bir- mingham he went to London, but there he got no peace, and it was in the bosom of Pennsylvania that he found rest at last and died. Since then, however, and recently, by the repentant public at Birmingham, and elsewhere in connection with science, monu- mental testimonials have been erected to his memory. Of the connection between England and the Unitarians of America, I could readily adduce many more illustrations ; but from what I have said you can see, that though the Unitarians of England are, by time, but like distant cousins, yet that they and you, by origin, are of the same old household of faith. I will add one thing for its
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singularity. The grandfather of a schoolmate and friend of mine, Mr. Russell, was a fellow-sufferer with Dr. Priestley, and he under- took to accompany him to America ; subsequently, in quieter time, he went back to Birmingham; but while he was in this country he would seem to have been much more at home, relig- iously, in New Haven than in any other city of New England.
Perhaps in no country in the world has there been as much improvement, ecclesiastically, as there has been in England during the last fifty years ; though, to be sure, the commencement was from very low down, and from what was very bad indeed. I remember the time in England, and I was more than ten years old then, when no person could be a member of a municipal government, be a mayor or alderman, be an officer in the army or a justice of the peace, be a member of the Cabinet or an excise- man connected with the Customs, without his producing a certifi- cate, for which he had paid a fee to an Episcopal clergyman, showing that he had taken the sacrament in a church connected with the Establishment. At a later time even than that, it was not possible for Unitarians, nor even for Trinitarian dissenters, to be married, except at the Episcopal church and by an Episcopalian clergyman. Nor was there any legal registry as to the birth of children, except at the Episcopal church. I remember the time when horrible things happened in London, because of the fewness and smallness of the burial grounds which there were for an enormous population, growing every year at a tremendous rate. The bishop of London, in the House of Lords, resisted a Bill for terminating the horrible, shocking use of some of the little church- yards in London, with a view to the employment of cemeteries in the suburbs ; and as to this opposition, he was resolute, except on condition that, wherever a person died, a sum should be due to the Episcopal clergyman, equivalent to a burial-fee, and on the pay- ment of which, the friends or executors should be free to carry the body away and bury it as they pleased. It is even now less than
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thirty years since an assault was made, involving the tenure of almost every Unitarian church in England and Ireland. But it was stopped by the Prime Minister of the time, Sir Robert Peel ; who introduced a bill into Parliament, by which Unitarians were emancipated from the disqualifying effects of an old persecuting law, by which, formerly, every person, for impugning the doctrine of the trinity, was liable to fine and imprisonment, and for doing it a third time was liable to the confiscation of all his property and to be imprisoned for life. Sir Robert carried his Bill through Parliament triumphantly and amidst the acclamations of the leaders of all parties, and yet also against an opposition, more numerous as petitioners, than was ever made against any Bill or any law. When I was a youth, I was offered an education at Oxford, one of the great national universities. But my way was barred by the Episcopal church - the church Established by Law as the phrase used to be. At that time, a young man might have had a birthright title to a scholarship and been the best candidate of the year, as regards literary and moral qualifications ; but he could not be matriculated, without signing the Thirty-nine Articles. A man could not even begin the study of theology, at the univer- sity, without having first avowed and signed his belief in those Thirty-nine Articles. Of abuses and oppressions, such as I have been referring to, the larger part, though far from all -but the larger part- are now abolished. Now is not that a great advance as to church-matters? Well, it is really, that is to say for England.
Those Thirty-nine Articles ! What multitudes of hypocrites they have made in England ! What souls in vast armies, they have straitened and tortured in conscience ! Oh, that some man of wide personal knowledge, somebody like Dean Stanley, would write on the subject his reminiscences and experiences, before it is too late ! What flippancies he would have to tell of, and what agonies ! It is said that Theodore Hook, being asked at Oxford by the vice-chan-
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cellor whether he was prepared to sign the Thirty-nine Articles, replied "Oh yes ! Forty, if you wish."
We are getting now to understand that there is no knowing well what a man is theologically, by simply what he can sign or say. It may very well happen sometimes that the more a man knows, the less there will be by which he would willingly swear to abide. And again, the same truth, in one man's mind, may be no better than a prejudice, while in the mind of another person, it may be like a quickening soul. We are getting to understand that signing and assenting, and that even without meaning any harm, is a very different thing from believing ; and it is what many a man has been a party to, who had no more soul of belief than the pen he wrote with, whether goose-quill or steel. Any man can sign, in a way, the Articles of the Church of England, for instance ; but understanding them, as the framers meant exactly, is not quite so easy ; and believing in those articles by a right discernment of the logic which they involve, and by the best helps reasonably accessible from learning human and divine,- to that, probably, in all Eng- land there are not five hundred persons competent, and on the Episcopal bench, not eight, as it would seem.
People talk so strangely about faith and believing ! What would be the gain as to science, or the world's progress, if every boy on going to school should be made to subscribe his belief in the elements of geometry as developed by Euclid ! Faith, every earnest soul is competent to-on the most important points, relig- iously ; but faith as to conclusions drawn from metaphysics, faith as to such things in any proper sense of the word, is what few people can profess without making themselves ridic- ulous. Of the merely conjectural, or of the unknowable, however plausibly expressed as to seemingness, what is got by exacting or giving a profession of belief? Offuscation moral and mental -- that is all.
It is not what creeds and history a man can swallow that is
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good ; but what he can inwardly digest and have his soul quickened with. To profess an article of faith is what, apparently, in a light way, most people are able; but thoroughly to understand it is something not quite so common ; and inwardly to digest it, so as to live by it-think, hope and pray -that may be something still more rare. Horne Tooke would have us think, that believing a doctrine is our having such a sense of it intellectually and morally as that it can be be-lived by us. It is the believing temper, or rather it is the temper which grows on a man with believing ; this, that is so rarely looked to, is the ultimate true test as to creeds, professions, pretensions, inquiry and conviction. Not will merely, nor recklessness, nor arrogance, nor loud voice in statement, helps a hearer as to belief, but soul only,- the soul, that is alive with the wisdom of the past, and sensitive as to the future - the soul, as it quickens with the Divine Spirit, and throbs, too, with its fleshly connections.
No doubt, the constitution of free churches has its exposures and liabilities, like everything else that is human ; but they are no more than what are capable of being readily treated among people of any honor, not to say even of christian grace. But I have been asked, what security has a free church against the inani- ties and vagaries of some conceivable clergyman. There is the Bible ! And twenty creeds could not make it more binding, or plainér. And besides, after all, why should ineptitudes, and igno- rance, and crass ignorance be accounted a greater scandal to Liber- alism than it is to Orthodoxy, or than when it is preached in white sleeves? As to preaching, there are no better guarantees than common sense and good faith, and truthfulness even simply as to the text, "We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord : and ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake."
But now, yet another word still as to church freedom : and for comfort I prefer to argue it as though on foreign ground. At the present time, in the Church of England, the ablest man theologi-
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cally, next perhaps after Dean Stanley, is Professor Jowett, now known perhaps by some higher title. His work on the " Epistles of Paul " is a fine, scholarly production. As to interpretation, it is old Unitarianism, mostly ; but it has a grace of its own. Cer- tain special passages in his work having been complained of, he was summoned by the vice-chancellor of Oxford to renew his subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles, which he did at once. Two days afterward, in the London newspaper called the "Times," were published, in parallel columns, the passages in his two volumes which had been complained of, and also such extracts from the Thirty-nine Articles as they were supposed to conflict with. And plainly the two columns were in flat contradiction. The complaining Dr. Golightly, with his companion, added some- thing like this : "What is a safeguard worth as to the Church, when a man will publish in two serious volumes, what he will practically repudiate within a fortnight, and yet still continue to go on publishing and selling?" True enough! Quis custodiet custodes ? The old trouble ! But yet Dr. Jowett might say, " Always are we to be ruled by fools? Am I, because of my know- ing more than some other people, and being wiser than the old creed-makers of the dark ages, to forego place, honor and advan- tage, and turn dissenter, and get down into the dirt?" There is something in that ; and let it go for what it is worth. But how about the persons who have stayed outside the university of Oxford, with all its wealth and high places, because they were unwilling to enter it dishonestly? It is a curious sign of the times that Dr. Jowett should be able to be the Head of a college in Oxford, and be ready to sign the Thirty-nine Articles any day, and yet publish the works he does, and get the kind of praise he gains. He is to be pardoned, perhaps, because of extenuating circumstances, but still more certainly he is to be pitied. The sadness of such a case, and there have been hundreds and perhaps thousands very like it-I say, the sadness of such instances is
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evidence as to the wisdom which waited on the foundation and development of the North Church in Salem.
Oh the wisdom more than worldly, as to which the founders of your church had some sense ! For in an ordinary way how could they have anticipated, what yet they were providing against, as to friendly meeting- this flood of knowledge which has been pouring in upon us, since Newton was wondered at, and ceased from this world? What could they have known of the way in which this earth was about to unbosom herself as to her secret history, as concerning time and make? How could they have foreseen such facts as the discovery of that ancient and, to a certain degree, authoritative manuscript, connected with the Scriptures, called Sinaitic? What could they have foreknown of the speculative effects of having the universe, through science, widen round us so familiarly, as that we mortals on our earth can feel ourselves but like the occupants of some one out of-what the Psalmist may have meant when he said " The chariots of God are twenty thou- sand?" How could they have foreseen, what yet is so absolutely certain, that even theology itself would have to be born again ; born not of the will of man nor of creed-makers, but of the Spirit -in Christ Jesus, a new creature? All honor to the men who were ahead of their age, and whose faces were set aright as to the coming dawn !
The coral insects begin building from the floor of the ocean ; they shape for themselves little cells that become their tombs ; and with building cell upon cell, and tomb upon tomb, slowly the surface of the sea is reached. And prompted by an instinct greater than what might suffice for their little lives, these insects build up islands and rampart them about, against seas wild with the whirlwind ; islands where man can land and live, and which the orange can perfume with its scent, and brighten with its golden fruit. And a hundred and two hundred years ago the founders of churches, free as to what are called creeds, acted from
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a perception of right, and yet also more wisely than they knew, as to the future. For what could they possibly have anticipated as to what was to be after them, with the widening disclosures of science and history and archæology and also experience ? "The Bible," they said among themselves, " the Bible is our creed, open always for study by all the light that time may let in upon it, or the heavens vouchsafe." Wise master-builders, they ! And now Protestant churches, bound by the creeds of preceding centuries, can live only by ignoring their fetters, or else by a debasing tam- pering as to the meaning of words and phrases ! All honor again to the good men who forestalled all that, as to peril !
And now as the successors of these honorable men, what is due from us? Distinctively, honesty and simplicity as to profession, and reverence and carefulness as to the study of the Scriptures ; and could I say, also, leadership in the church as to thinking? But that last thing is of the gift and call of God, and not of mere fleshly willing. And yet if we were as good, as to time and circumstance, as our forefathers were, it is from among us that teachers should rise, who might be competent to the philosophy of the Scriptures as to revelation, and who might interpret concur- rently the marvel of Christ's resurrection and the marvellousness which does so clothe the lily of the field, and which lies latent through the winter in every acorn about to become an oak, and in every grain of mustard-seed which in Palestine is to become a tree, whereon the birds can alight and sing. And if our school of thought were as well open to light as it ought to be, apparently it might be in connection with us that the earliest teachers would be heard as to that rainbow of promise which the sun of science makes in even the fogs which accrue from earthly change and decay.
And now I will say, by way of a moral, that because of pride in ancestry we are liable to spiritual apathy, and perhaps at the last to find ourselves glorying in mere negations. There have been times when denial, ecclesiastically, was almost as grand as the
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prophet's "Thus saith the Lord." But those times are past, and to-day boys of sixteen are very often ready to deny and dispute anything religiously, and a community like yours, as to education, has all the notions of Strauss and Buchner in the air, as it were, and latent in the minds of the children. Free-thinking is nothing now as a peculiarity, except as it explores the way to the temple of truth, and now and then ushers a high-priest of thought into the holy of holies, and prepares us all for the 'lively oracles' of a living God. The liberty which does not ennoble us and quicken us as religious thinkers, we are unworthy of. For thinking, in a church, can be straitened and enslaved not only by old, complicate, intricate creeds, but also by prejudices unconsciously entertained, or by inherited predispositions of feeling or by the subtle man- agement of perhaps two or three persons more bigoted than scrupulous.
What the better are you for being Unitarians, unless there abide in you that spirit of truth which is guidance, and prompting and willingness as to all truth ?
In England, on such an occasion as this, there is a Sentiment which is never forgotten-Civil and Religious Liberty, all the world over ! and in olden times, when George the Third was king, it was, no doubt, familiar to your forefathers as a post-prandial toast. " Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord," says the Psalmist, and happy are the people who are strong in the same great truths which their fathers lived by! Happy the persons all, who can triumph in the same great cause, which their forefathers loved and struggled for !
Oh ! those words that come to mind so forcibly to-day : "Your fathers, where are they ? and the prophets, do they live forever?" Yes, they do, all of them forever and ever, withinside of the spirit- ual and invisible ; and in those spheres of being which collectively we call heaven ; and from within which, it is possible that they may be cognizant of us, at this very moment - like as it is writ-
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ten as to some of the incidents of revelation "Which things the angels desire to look into." Alive forever! Yes, they are, and even in this world, in a way, they survive themselves, in the true principles which they elaborated, in the institutions which they founded, and in the continuation of the churches, forth into which went their earnestness. "Other men labored, and ye are entered into their labors," or you ought to be. They who strive for the right, and who live faithfully by what light they have, follow after the great army of martyrs and confessors, to find, on passing the gateway of death, that they have been sharing in a struggle with sin and darkness, greater perhaps and more wonderful than they had ever thought.
There is plan and purpose in the world's ongoing, as much as there ever was in the shaping of our earth. For every sowing in tears, there is always somewhere, at sometime, a harvest of joy. No man lives all to himself; and no man dies merely to himself. Striving, hoping and believing-that is the temper, as to which through nature and through Christ, God would be shaping us. Clouds and darkness are round about him ; but justice and judgment are the foundations of his throne. Oh, there is no knowing at what rate swings the slow pendulum which regulates the course of human progress, nor what the circumference is of that face, round which creeps the finger which indicates the hours of reform and advance. Nor can a guess be hazarded as to that millennial hour, when again the morning stars will sing together, and when the angels of heaven will cry "The war of man with man, and of creed with creed-earth's warfare is accomplished : and the kingdoms of that world have become the kingdom of our Lord and his Christ." But with every sunrise it is nearer earth -that blessed time! and with every pulse that throbs our veins, it is nearer to us-that coming time ! And oh, it is so surely nearer to us, with every good life that is finished, and with every good and perfect thought that comes down from above, into a good man's mind !
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