USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880, Vol. III > Part 60
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 | Part 57 | Part 58 | Part 59 | Part 60 | Part 61 | Part 62 | Part 63 | Part 64 | Part 65 | Part 66 | Part 67 | Part 68 | Part 69 | Part 70 | Part 71 | Part 72 | Part 73 | Part 74 | Part 75 | Part 76 | Part 77 | Part 78 | Part 79 | Part 80 | Part 81 | Part 82 | Part 83 | Part 84 | Part 85 | Part 86 | Part 87 | Part 88
1 [See Mr. Goddard's chapter in the present volume. - ED.]
449
THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH.
church. The next year there was a larger meeting held in Philadelphia, - what may be called the first convention of the Episcopal Church in the United States, -when delegates from seven of the thirteen States were assen- bled. This was on Sept. 27, 1785. Evidently the fragments of the church had life in them, and a tendency to reach toward each other and seek a cor- porate existence. From the beginning, too, there evidently was in many parts of the church a certain sense of opportunity, a feeling that now was the time to seek some enlargement of the church's standards, which would not prob- ably occur again. Under this feeling, when the time for the revision of the liturgy arrived, the Athanasian Creed was dropped out of the Prayer Book. The other changes made were mostly such as the new political condition of the country called for. These changes were definitely fixed in the conven- tion which met in Philadelphia in 1789.
But before that time another most important question had been settled. There could be no Episcopal Church in this country without bishops, and as yet there was not a bishop of the Episcopal Church in the country. In the colonial condition various efforts had been made to secure the consecra- tion of bishops for America, but political fears and prejudices had always prevented their success; but no sooner was independence thoroughly es- tablished, than a more determined effort was begun. In 1783 the Rev. Dr. Samuel Seabury was sent abroad by some of the clergymen of Connecticut, to endeavor to secure consecration to the episcopate to which they had elected him. After fruitless attempts to induce the authorities of the Church of England to give him what he sought, he finally had recourse to the non- juring Church in Scotland, and was consecrated at Aberdeen on Nov. 14, 1784. He returned at once to America and began to do a bishop's work. The first ordination of an Episcopal minister in Boston, which must have been an occasion of some interest in the Puritan city, was on March 27, 1789, when the Rev. John C. Ogden was ordained in Trinity Church by Bishop Seabury.
Meanwhile, further south, a similar attempt was being made to secure Episcopal consecration from the Church of England, and with better success. On Feb. 4, 1787, the Rev. Dr. William White, of Philadelphia, and the Rev. Dr. Samuel Provoost, of New York, were consecrated bishops in the chapel of Lambeth Palace. Thus the Episcopal Church in the United States found itself fully organized for its work. On May 7, 1797, the Rev. Dr. Edward Bass, of Newburyport, was consecrated in Christ Church, Philadelphia, to be Bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts ; and the churches of Boston became of course subjects of his Episcopal care.
It must have been a striking, as it was certainly a novel scene, when Bishop Bass, on his return to Boston after his consecration, was welcomed by the Massachusetts Convention which was then in session. He was conducted in his robes from the vestry of Trinity Church to the chancel, where he was addressed in behalf of the members of the convention by the Rev. Dr. Walter, now returned from his exile in Nova Scotia, and made rector of
VOL. III. - 57.
450
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
Christ Church. The bishop responded " in terms of great modesty, pro- priety, and affection." Sometime after, the Episcopal churches in Rhode Island, and subsequently those in New Hampshire, placed themselves under his jurisdiction.
It had not been without reluctance, and a jealous unwillingness to sur- render their independence, that the churches in Massachusetts had joined their brethren in the other States to accomplish the reorganization of their church; but in the end two of the Boston churches became identified with the new body. To Dr, Parker indeed, of Trinity Church, a considerable degree of influence is to be ascribed in harmonizing difficulties, and making possible a union between the two efforts after organized life which had be- gun in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Before, however, the general Consti- tution of the Episcopal Church was agreed upon in Philadelphia in 1789, the oldest of the three parishes in Boston had changed its faith and its asso- ciations, and begun its own separate and peculiar life. It was before the Revolutionary war was ended, and while their house of worship was still used by the congregation of the Old South, in September, 1782, that the wardens of King's Chapel-Dr. Thomas Bulfinch and Mr. James Ivers- invited Mr. James Freeman, a young man of twenty-three years of age, then living at Walpole, to officiate for them as reader for six months. He was a native of Charlestown, had received his early education at the Boston Latin School, and had graduated at Harvard College in 1777. At the Easter meeting, April 21, 1783, he was chosen pastor of the chapel. The invita- tion, in reply to which he accepted the pastorate, said to him: "The proprietors consent to. such alterations in the service as are made by the Rev. Dr. Parker; and leave the use of the Athanasian Creed at your discretion."
The new pastor and his people soon grew warmly attached to one an- other; and when, in the course of the next two years, Mr. Freeman told his parishioners that his opinions had undergone such a change that he found some parts of the liturgy inconsistent with the faith which he had come to hold, and offered them an amended form of prayer for use at the chapel, the proprietors voted, Feb. 20, 1785, that it was necessary to make some alter- ations in some parts of the liturgy, and appointed a committee to report such alterations. On March 28 the committee were ready with their re- port; and on June 19 the proprietors decided by a vote of twenty to seven "that the Common Prayer, as it now stands amended, be adopted by this church, as the form of prayer to be used in future by this church and congregation." The alterations in the liturgy were for the most part such as involved the omission of the doctrine of the Trinity. They were princi- pally those of the celebrated English divine, Dr. Samuel Clarke. The amended Prayer Book was used in the chapel until 1811, when it was again revised, and still other changes made.
Thus the oldest of the Episcopal churches had become the first of the Unitarian churches of America; and now the question was how she still
451
THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH.
stood toward the sister churches with whom she had heretofore been in communion. Her people still counted themselves Episcopalians. They wanted to be part of the new Episcopal Church of the United States. Many of them were more or less uneasy at the lack of ordination for their minister. In 1786 Mr. Freeman applied to Bishop Seabury to be ordained; but Bishop Scabury, after asking the advice of his clergy, did not think fit to confer or- ders upon him on such a profession of faith as he thought proper to give, which was no more than that he believed the Scriptures. Mr. Freeman then went to see Dr. Provoost at New York. The doctor, who was not yet a bishop, gave Mr. Freeman some reason to hope that he would comply with
TREMONT STREET LOOKING NORTH.1
his wishes; but in the next year, when the wardens of the chapel sent a letter to Dr. Provoost, who in the meantime had received consecration, " to inquire whether ordination for the Rev. Mr. Freeman can be obtained on terms agreeable to him and to the proprietors of this church," the bishop answered that after consulting withi his council of advice, he and they thought that a matter of such importance ought to be reserved for the consideration of the General Convention.
1 [This view of Tremont Street, looking toward King's Chapel, follows a water-color pre- sented to the Public Library in 1875. A letter from Mr. B. P. Shillaber, dated March 17, 1875, on the files of the Trustees of the Library, says it was painted by a daughter of General Knox, and belonged to the late Miss Catharine Putnam ;
and was painted certainly before 1806, and per- haps about ISoo. The arch in the Common fence is where the present West-street gate is.
A view from the other end of the vista, show- ing King's Chapel, as looked at from the north, and taken about 1830, is given in Greenwood's History of King's Chapel, 1833- - ED.]
1
452
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
This ended the effort for Episcopal ordination, and on Nov. 18, 1787, after the usual Sunday evening service, the senior warden of the King's Chapel, Dr. Thomas Bulfinch, acting for the congregation, ordained Mr. Freeman to be "rector, minister, priest, pastor, teaching elder, and public teacher" of their society. Of course so bold and so unusual an act excited violent remonstrance. A protest was sent forth by certain of the original proprietors of the chapel, to which the wardens issued a reply. Another protest came from Dr. Bass of Newburyport, Dr. Parker of Trinity Church, Mr. Montague of Christ Church, and Mr. Ogden of Portsmouth in New Hampshire; but from the day of Mr. Freeman's ordination the King's Chapel ceased to be counted among the Episcopal churches of Boston.1 There still remained some questions to be settled with regard to the bequest of Mr. William Price, the founder of the Price lectureship, of which the King's Chapel had been the original administrator. These questions lingered until 1824, when they were finally 'disposed of by the arrangement between the King's Chapel and Trinity Church, under which these lectures are still pro- vided by the latter.
It was a severe blow to the church, which was with such difficulty strug- gling back to life, that one of the strongest of her very few parishes should thus reject her creed and abandon her fellowship. The whole transaction bears evidence of the confusion of the ecclesiastical life of those distracted days. The spirit of Unitarianism was already present in many of the Congre- gational churches of New England. It was because in the King's Chapel that spirit met the clear terms of a stated and required liturgy that that church was the first to set itself avowedly upon the basis of the new belief. The at- tachment to the liturgy was satisfied by the retention of so much of its well- known form; and the high character of Mr. Freeman, and the profound respect which his sincerity and piety and learning won in all the town, did a great deal to strengthen the establishment of the belief to which his con- gregation gave their assent.2
Christ Church and Trinity Church alone were left - two vigorous par- ishes - to keep alive for many years the fire of the Episcopal Church in Boston. In 1792 Dr. Walter returned to Boston and became rector of Christ Church, where he remained until his death in 1800. In the same year (1792) the Rev. John Sylvester John Gardiner became the assistant of Dr. Parker at Trinity Church. Dr. Gardiner's ministry is one of those which give strong character to the life of the Episcopal Church here during the century. Born in Wales, and in large part educated in England, he was
1 [See Dr. Peabody's chapter in the present volume. - ED.]
2 'Twice since the chapel changed its liturgy and ordained its own minister, the service of the Episcopal Church has been held by Episcopal clergymen within its venerable walls. The first occasion was in 1858, when for Iwo Sundays the Church of the Advent, whose building was being
repaired, was kindly given the use of the chapel for its services. The second was in 1873, when, after the great fire in which Trinity Church was destroyed, the annual series of Price Lectures was, by the cordial invitation of the minister and wardens, preached in the chapel by the bishop of the diocese of Massachusetts and various Epis- copal clergymen of Boston.
453
THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH.
the true Anglican of the eighteenth century. For thirty-seven years he was the best known and most influential of the Episcopal ministers of Boston. His broad and finished scholarship, his strong and positive manhood, his genial hospitality, his fatherly affection, and his eloquence and wit made him through all those years a marked and powerful person, not merely in the church but in the town.1
J. S. J. GARDINER, D.D.
After the year 1790 the diocesan conventions of the Episcopal Church in Massachusetts became regular and constant. They were generally held in Boston, - their religious services mostly in Trinity Church, and their business sessions usually in Concert Hall. The business which they had to do was very small, but every year seems to show a slightly increasing strength. In 1795 the Rev. Dr. Parker and Mr. William Tudor were sent as delegates to the General Convention which was to meet in Philadelphia in the following September; so that the church in Massachusetts had now become entirely a part of the general church throughout the land. In
1 [See a memoir of Dr. Gardiner in Quincy's History of the Boston Athenaum. - ED.]
454
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
1797 a committee was sent to Samuel Adams, the Governor, to ask him not to appoint the annual Fast Day in such a way that it should fall in Easter week, in order that it may not " wound the feelings of so many of the citizens of this Commonwealth as compose the body of the Protestant Episcopalians." In various ways one traces the slow growth of the church ; yet still it was a very little body. In 1800, at the meeting of the convention of the diocese, " in the library in Franklin Place," it was only five clergy- men, of whom one was the bishop, and six laymen that made up the assembly.
In 1803 Bishop Bass died, after an administration which was full of good sense and piety, but which had not enough energy or positive character to give the church a strong position or to secure much promise for its future. The only other man who had stood at his post during the Revolution, -the man to whom, as his successor, Dr. Gardiner, said of him in his funeral ser- mon, "must doubtless be attributed the preservation of the Episcopal Church in this town,"- Dr. Samuel Parker, of Trinity Church, was chosen to be the successor of Bishop Bass; but he died on Dec. 6, 1804, before he had performed any of the duties of his office, and the diocese was once more without a bishop. Indeed, in these early days it was not by any special oversight or inspiration of the bishops that the Episcopal Church was growing strong. It was by the long and faithful pastorships of the ministers of her parishes. Such a pastorship had been that of Dr. Parker. For thirty-one years Trinity Church enjoyed his care. "I well remember him," writes Dr. Lowell, of the West Church, " as a tall, well-proportioned man, with a broad, cheerful, and rubicund face, and flowing hair; of fine powers of conversation, and easy and affable in his manners. He was given to hospitality, and went about doing good." He too was a man of the eighteenth century, not of the nineteenth; but he was thoroughly the man for his own time, and the Episcopal Church in Boston will always be his debtor. In the year after Bishop Parker died, another of the long and use- ful pastorates of Boston began in the succession of the Rev. Asa Eaton to the rectorship of Christ Church, where he remained until 1829.
It was not until 1811 that it was found practicable to unite the Episcopal Church in Massachusetts with the same church in Rhode Island and New Hampshire, under the care of the Right Rev. Alexander Viets Griswold, who was consecrated bishop of what was called the Eastern Diocese. With Bishop Griswold a new period of the life of the Episcopal Church in Boston may be considered to begin, - a period of growth and enterprise. Up to this time the church had been struggling for life, and gradually separ- ating itself from the English traditions which had haunted its thought and hampered its usefulness. It had been a weak and in some sense a foreign church. Now it had grown to considerable strength. Its ministers were true Americans. It prayed for the Governors and Congress of the Union with entire loyalty. It took, indeed, no active part in the speculations or the controversies of the day. Its ministers were not forward in theological
455
THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH.
or political discussion. It rested with entire satisfaction upon its completed standards, and contributed no active help to the settlement of the theological tumults which were raging around it; but it was doing good and growing strong. It had won for itself the respect and confidence of the community ; and when the first returns are made from parishes to the diocesan conven- tion in 1812, the two Boston churches report a considerable number of communicants. Christ Church has sixty, and Trinity Church has one hun- dred and fifty, and on the great festivals as many as three hundred.
The second period, the period of growth and of some enterprise, may be said to extend from 1811 to 1843. The carliest addition to the number of churches, which had remained the same ever since the departure of King's Chapel, was in the foundation of St. Matthew's Church in what was then the little district of South Boston. That picturesque peninsula, which now teems with crowded life, had in 1816 a population of seven or cight hundred. In that year the services of the Episcopal Church were begun by a devoted layman, Mr. John H. Cotting; and two years later a church building was consecrated there by Bishop Griswold. The parish has passed through many vicissitudes and dangers since that day, but it has always retained its life and done good service to the multitudes who have gradually gathered around it.
In 1819 another new parish began to appcar, formed principally out of Trinity Church; and on June 3, 1820, the new St. Paul's Church in Tre- mont Street was consecrated by Bishop Griswold, assisted by Bishop Brownell, of Connecticut. The first rector of the new parish was the Rev. Samuel Farmar Jarvis, a native of Connecticut, an ecclesiastic of sincere de- votion to his church, and a scholar of excellent attainments. St. Paul's Church made a notable and permanent addition to the power of cpiscopacy in the city. Its Grecian temple seemed to the men who built it to be a tri- umph of architectural beauty and of fitness for the church's services. "The interior of St. Paul's," so it was written while the church was new, " is re- markable for its simplicity and beauty; and the materials of which the building is constructed give it an intrinsic value and an effect which have not been produced by any of the classic models that have been attempted of bricks and plaster in other citics. The erection of this church may be considered the commencement of an era of the art in Boston." On its building committee, among other well-known men, were George Sullivan, Daniel Webster, David Sears, and William Shimmin. When it was finished, it had cost $83.000. The parish Icaped at once into strength; and in 1821 it reports that "it has ninety communicants, and that between six and seven hundred persons attend its services."
In 1824, when Boston had reached a population of fifty-eight thousand, the four Episcopal churches which it contained numbered in all six hundred and thirty-four communicants, -certainly not a great number, but certainly an appreciable proportion of the religious community.
456
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
In 1827 Dr. Alonzo Potter succeeded Dr. Jarvis at St. Paul's; and he brought with him that broad, strong intellect and noble character and earnest zeal which made him all his life one of the very strongest powers in the Episcopal Church of the United States. In the same year the Rev. George W. Doane, who was afterward the successor of Dr. Gardiner at Trinity, came to be his assistant. These were both notable additions to the church's ministry in Boston. They were men of modern character; they put new life into the now well-established church. The very dryness of the tree when it was brought hither from England had perhaps made it more possible to transplant it safely, but now that its roots were in the ground it was ready for more vigorous life. In quite different ways, with very dissimilar characters and habits of thought, Dr. Potter and Dr. Doane represent not unfitly the two great tendencies toward rational breadth and toward ecclesiastical complexity, which were beginning to take possession not merely of this church but of all the churches. The Rev. John H. Hopkins, who in 1831 became the assistant of Dr. Doane at Trinity, was another of the strong characters who showed the church's greater life.
Another name of great interest in the church history of Boston ap- peared in 1829, when the Rev. William Croswell came from Hartford, a young deacon just ordained, to succeed Dr. Eaton at Christ Church. Dr. Eaton's ministry had been long and useful. He had established in 1815 the first Sunday-school which ever existed in this region. His parish had no doubt already begun to change with the changes of the city's population ; but when Mr. Croswell came there it was still strong, and, though his most remarkable ministry was to be elsewhere than in Christ Church, his coming there marks the first advent to the city of one of the most interesting men who have ever filled its Episcopal pulpits.
The slow addition of parish after parish still went on. In 1830 Grace Church, which had been struggling with much difficulty into life, appears at last as an organized parish, and is admitted into union with the Convention. At first the new congregation worshipped in Piedmont Square, and then in Bedford Street. It was not until 1836 that its new stone church in Temple Street was finished and consecrated. In Roxbury the first movement toward the establishment of an Episcopal Church began to appear as early as 1832 ; and, after worshipping for a while in a building called the Female High School, the new parish finished and occupied its sober, serious stone struct- ure on St. James Street in 1834. Its first rector was the Rev. M. A. De Wolf Howe, who is now the bishop of the diocese of Central Pennsylvania. While these new parishes were springing into life, the old parish of Trinity was building its new house of worship, which was to stand until the great fire should sweep it away in 1872. The solid, battlemented Gothic church, which for so many years stood and frowned at the corner of Summer and Hawley streets, was consecrated on Nov. 11, 1829. The next year Dr. Gardiner, for so many years the honored minister of the parish, died in
457
THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH.
England, where he was seeking his lost health, and Dr. Doane became rector of Trinity Church in his stead.
In these years also another man appears for the first time, who is after- ward to hold a peculiar place in the life of the church in Boston; to be, indeed, the representative figure in its charitable work. It is the Rev. E. M. P. Wells, who is in charge of the House of Reformation Chapel at South Boston. Indeed, now for the first time there began to be a movement of
NYRICK.
THE RUINS OF TRINITY, 1872.
the Episcopal Church toward the masses of the poor and helpless. Up to this time it had been almost altogether the church of the rich and influen- tial. It had prided itself upon the respectability of its membership; but in 1837 St. Paul's, which had now passed into the earnest and fruitful ministry of the Rev. John S. Stone, had a mission-school of between sixty and eighty scholars on Boston Neck, and there was a Free Church in the Eleventh Ward-Room in Tremont Street, and Mr. Wells had his work at South Boston. The movements were not very strong nor very enduring, but they showed a new spirit, and were the promises of better things to comc.
VOL. III. - 58.
458
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
In 1840 there were the beginnings of two new parishes. The church at Jamaica Plain was as yet only a mission of St. James's in Roxbury, and was under the charge of the rector of that church till 1845, when it secured a minister of its own. In Charlestown a few Episcopalians met in the Con- gregational Church, and organized a parish under the charge of the Rev. Nathaniel T. Bent. The corner-stone of their building was laid in 1841, and the building was finished the next year. Both of these parishes were named St. John's.
Thus in 1843 there were in what is now Boston seven Episcopal par- ishes. In that year Bishop Griswold died. When he was chosen bishop, in 1811, there were only two parishes; and, besides this increase in the number of organized churches, there had begun to be, as we have seen, some movement of missionary life. These thirty-two years had been a period of growth and quiet enterprise. There had been no marked stir of active thought; men' had believed and taught much as their fathers had before them. There had been no disputes or controversies about faith or worship; but all the time a fuller and fuller life was entering into the whole church. The evangelical spirit, which was the controlling power of the Church of England, ruled the parishes here, and inspired the system which under the churchmanship of the eighteenth century had been so dead. Of all this time the type and representative is Bishop Griswold. He stands, indeed, at the head of the active history of the church in Massachusetts to give it, as it were, its true key-note, - somewhat as Bishop White stands at the start of the Episcopal Church in the United States at large; or, we may say, perhaps, as Washington stands at the beginning of the history of the nation. He had the quiet energy which the times needed, a deep and simple piety, a spirit of conciliation which was yet full of sturdy conscien- tiousness, a free but reverent treatment of church methods, a quiet humor, and abundance of " moderation, good sense, and careful equipoise." He had much of the repose and peace of the old Anglicanism, and yet was a true American. He had patience and hope and courage, sweetness and reasonableness in that happy conjunction which will make his memory, as the years go by, to be treasured as something sacred and saintly by the growing church.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.