USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The story of the Second Church in Boston, the original Old North; including the Old North Church mystery > Part 2
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Into this unique ecclesiastico-civic environment had stepped Cotton Mather. He was but twenty-three years old when he be- came colleague, in Boston's leading church, to an illustrious father whom he was soon to outshine. Before his life was to ter- minate forty-two years later he would have built up the largest private library in America, produced some of the most significant literature in existence on colonial times and left a legacy of 382 printed works, many of them sermons. Benjamin Franklin stated that he attributed his own eminence and usefulness to what he learned reading Mather's Essays To Do Good.
Such avalanches of opprobrium have been heaped by history upon Cotton Mather for being the arch-representative of an age that almost universally subscribed to a superstitious belief in witchcraft that it is just and wise to balance this with a des- cription of this great man's opposite, and notable, achievements. His community services were legion, his charities beyond number. He anticipated by at least a century a long list of reformatory and benevolent societies. He struggled to improve the condition of seamen in the busy port of Boston. He constantly advocated the increase of education and more rights for women. To provide opportunities for the slaves then being held in New England, he established a school for them and paid all the expenses out of his own purse. He urged the establishment of libraries and associ-
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ations to further the interests and character of tradesmen. His theories on the education of children bear a remarkable resem- blance at many points to the more progressive attitudes of our own day. Twentieth-century clergymen would heartily rejoice in Cotton Mather's innumerable works in the public welfare.
America owes much to Dr. Mather's courage and persistence for the eventual vanquishment of smallpox. In the course of his enormous reading schedule, the minister learned of a method of inoculation successfully employed in Turkey. He persuaded Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to test the method which ultimately proved suc- cessful.
No one expected that the other physicians of Boston, backed by an angry citizenry, would react so violently to the experiments. Mather and Boylston were denounced publicly as murderers and hunted by mobs carrying ropes and threatening to lynch the inno- vators. A makeshift bomb, capable of killing the minister and destroying his home, was hurled into his bedroom while he slept. Fortunately the fuse was dislodged before the explosive could detonate. A note tied to the lethal object read: "Cotton Mather, you dog. Damn you, I will Enoculate you with this, with a Pox to you". To this day, men of science and religion occasionally suffer public wrath when they advocate experiments in advance of their time.
During Cotton Mather's long ministry the Second Church in Boston enjoyed uninterrupted fame, influence and mass support. Mather's industry was ceaseless: reading, studying, writing, speaking, and working. Visitors who did not realize the value of time were quietly reminded by a sign on his study door: BE SHORT. Yet no one was ever turned away or deprived of a chance to speak his business fully. In an effort to come nearer to God in sacred meditation and gain a quickened sense of his own in- adequacies, he regularly fasted two or three days each week.
It is curiously heartening to trace the gradual liberalization of the Mather family as it served the Second Church. Increase Mather was always stern, narrow and dogmatic in his Calvinist theology and attitude toward science. From his father Richard, he had inherited an unbending zeal in perpetuating doctrine un-
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THE GIANT WHO WENT WRONG
changed. In contrast, Cotton Mather threw off many of his own earlier superstitions and traveled far in advance of most ecclesi- astics of his time on nearly all of the main issues between re- ligion and science.
Cotton Mather accepted the Newtonian astronomical theories despite the charge that they were atheistic concepts. He de- nounced the idea of a divine origin for Bible punctuations. He resisted the notion that comets are signs and wonders. His broad tolerance of other faiths is manifest in his decla- ration that "persecution for conscientious dissent in re- ligion is an abomination of desolation." He wanted no rails about the "Lord's Table": anyone could partake of com- munion. He insisted that the Quakers, whom he personally disliked and who were perse- cuted by the community, must
COTTON MATHER'S Chair in today's church chancel be treated with utmost civility.
The loosening of Calvinist shackles from the Mather family minds reached its climax in Cotton Mather's son, Samuel. After nine years' service in the Second Church, he became the only minister to suffer a forced resignation in the parish's long history. The charge: looseness of doctrine! Old Richard and Increase Mather probably revolved in their graves over this ultimate heresy; but I suspect that the harried scholar Cotton Mather only sighed deeply. The Mather family dynasty in Boston began in orthodoxy and ended in liberalism, a pattern that delights the modern Second Church.
Posterity has the tragic habit of remembering men for their mistakes and obliterating the good that they have performed. The memory of Cotton Mather is overly soiled by his singular role in the fiery witch-hunt orgy that swept New England. A leading
3 1833 03016 6042
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Biblical scholar of his age, the clergyman took literally the Judeo-Christian injunction: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." He was aware that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries leading thinkers of Europe firmly believed that the Devil worked among men through witches. In those two centuries, 100,000 "witches" were put to death in Germany, 75,000 in France, and 30,000 in the British Isles.
A sorry product of his age in this respect, Dr. Mather wrote his Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts in 1689 while still a young man. By continual, eloquent preachments, he stirred the imagination and inflamed the passions of the public. Neither ambition nor vanity, but a genuine conviction that he was fighting evil, drove him on. He must shoulder the principal responsibility for inciting the colony to its actions. Fortunately, the witchcraft craze lasted only forty years and took but thirty-two lives in New England - a modest tragedy compared with the two centuries' blood bath in Europe. But a deep and popular revulsion soon oc- curred that blighted the remainder of Cotton Mather's life and hastened the end of Puritan theocracy in New England.
The influence of the Mathers was over.
Increase Mather continued his ministry in the church until his death on August 23, 1723. His son, worn down by the vitriolic public reaction to his part in the witch hunts, survived him by only four and one-half years, dying on February 13, 1728. He was buried with his father in the Copp's Hill Burying Ground not far from the church that they had made so prominent.
Thus ended an unparalleled period in the history of Boston's Second Church.
Chapter Three A NEST OF TRAITORS
At the head of the long narrow triangle called North Square, formed by the junction of Prince, Sun Court, Garden and Moon Streets - poetic names all - the rebuilt Second Church in Boston stood from 1676 until 1776. Due to its age and location, it be- came known not only as "The Church of the Mathers" but as "The Old North Church."
In colonial days the North End surrounding the church was the residence of Boston's leaders in social, military and religious affairs. When Increase and Cotton Mather walked out of the small wooden parsonage in North Square (on the site of which a succes- sor building would be purchased in 1770 by a silversmith named Paul Revere) they could see dwellings nearby that eventually would house such dignitaries as Sir Harry Frankland and Governor Thomas Hutchinson.
By the closing years of the Mathers' lives, they were aware that Boston had become the largest town under British government anywhere in America. Yet the ministers could have walked to the farthest parishioner's address in forty minutes; the community was barely two miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide.
The streets, except in the crowded North End, were broad, regular, and often paved, a unique feature among communities of the colonial period. The Mathers lived to witness Boston's slow transition from seventeenth-century wooden buildings to eigh- teenth-century brick structures. Enough wharves jutted out into the harbor, from the bulbous peninsula on which the port was chiefly located, to handle simultaneously many score sailing vessels from the world over. Thirteen churches were erected during Boston's first century; only seven of these are still alive and active at this writing.
The remarkable longevity of the Second Church, despite its numerous problems, is attributable to its faculty of choosing or receiving superior ministerial leadership at critical points in its history. The passing of Increase Mather and the decease of Cotton Mather within four years of one another could have written an end to the church's story in the early eighteenth century. For- tunately, productive and even more exciting days lay only fifty
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years away.
Within four months after Increase Mather was buried, a young associate joined Cotton Mather. Joshua Gee had been brought up in the Second Church under the direct tutelage of both Mathers. He had graduated from Harvard College in 1717 at the age of sev- enteen and impressed the clergy and public of that day with his learning, intellect, and argumentative powers.
A dogmatic Calvinist, he engaged furiously in the theological controversies of the day, supporting the most conservative posi- tions. George Whitfield's revivals delighted him. He increased the number of prayer meetings in the church and entered into serious contentions with the majority of the Congregational minis- ters of the area. He appears, however, to have been indolent by nature, hypnotized by conversation and debate rather than moti- vated by a crusading zeal to act and build, and this probably pre- vented him from unloosing his otherwise exceptional abilities.
At the outset of Mr. Gee's ministry, his compensation was about four pounds a week, plus forty pounds a year to defray the cost of firewood, and a liberal allowance for rent. So that he would not be beset by the financial woes that had constantly harried Increase Mather, generous monetary presents from the "church- stock" were handed him whenever necessary.
One year before Cotton Mather's death, Joshua Gee proposed to him that a library for the church be formed under their pastoral care. Dr. Mather headed the list of subscribers, and the library for church members and future pastors was established. This collection of books enjoyed a curious and fertile history. It sur- vived the destruction of the church edifice and the dispersal of the congregation during the American Revolution. In 1821, though many volumes had been lost, there were 123 books in the library of which 63 were of considerable consequence. Exactly one century after Mr. Gee had suggested the library, the incumbent minister of the Second Church, Henry Ware, Jr., proposed that his congregation help build up a library in the new building of the Theological School in Cambridge. Favorably impressed, the Second Church in Boston "voted that the pastor be authorized to select such volumes as he may think proper from its library, and
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A NEST OF TRAITORS
make a donation of them to the Library of the Theological School, with the proviso that the ministers of the Second Church shall always have free use of the library of the Theological School."
From Cotton Mather's death on February 13, 1728, until the ordination of Samuel Mather as JoshuaGee's colleague on January 28, 1732, the Second Church had but one minister.
Samuel Mather was the fourth child of the second of Cotton Mather's three wives. Though a sensitive and sickly child, he had volunteered to let Dr. Boylston test the smallpox vaccine upon him. When the brave boy nearly died, his father had been jeered in the streets with shouts of "assassin."
Samuel graduated from Harvard College at the age of seven- teen, seemingly a traditional Mather Habit, and tutored profes- sionally for a number of years before entering the ministry. De- spite this commendable background the congregation split seri- ously over his candidacy. He was called by only sixty-nine votes out of one hundred and twelve. Perhaps the witch hunt odium still clung to the Mather reputation. More likely, the conservatives had recognized the developing liberalization in the Mather family and were afraid.
Their suspicions were valid. Within nine years Samuel Mather had lost the support of both the reactionary Mr. Gee and of many parishioners on the ground that he was loose in his doctrines and conduct. At the request of the Second Church, which had been unable to arrive at a decision, an ecclesiastical council made up of representatives from other Boston churches considered the charges. Samuel Mather was absolved of the charge of impropriety of conduct which, though we are not told, probably concerned a disregard of those narrowly conceived ministerial duties and ob- servances considered essential in colonial Calvinism. His theo- logical views as expressed in conversations and sermons were found distinctly nonconformist. During a trial period, in which a reconciliation was sought, he could not be false to his own view- point. He found it impossible "to be more frequent and distinct in preaching on the nature, and pressing the necessity, of regener- ation by the Spirit of grace."
He was no longer acceptable.
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Samuel Mather, liberal thinker, noted scholar, bearer of a proud name, was the only pastor ever dismissed from the Second Church in Boston. He departed the parish on December 21, 1741. Lin- gering doubts and twinges of guilt must have partially prompted the congregation's acceptance of the Ecclesiastical Council's suggestion that he receive a severance pay of one year's salary. Thirty men and 63 women, members of the church, withdrew with him, leaving a membership with Mr. Gee of 80 men and 183 women.
The true Old North Church of Paul Revere's lanterns.
These figures tell us that the total membership of the Second Church in Boston in the mid-eighteenth century was about 356 persons. If this number seems small for a leading Boston church, it must be remembered that under the Calvinist doctrine of the elect the majority of people might, and did, find that they lacked the proper qualifications for admission into membership, although they attended services regularly. The entire concept of church membership differed from that in today's liberal church. In that
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A NEST OF TRAITORS
period membership was often not granted until the candidate had successfully passed the church's searching inquiry into his doc- trinal knowledge, outward blamelessness, spiritual estate and conversion of soul.
The faithful flock of the excluded pastor erected for him a church building, the Tenth Congregational Church in Boston, on the corner of Hanover and North Bennet Streets. Like his fore- bears, Samuel was a prolific writer, although he did not ven- ture outside the field of theology. Harvard College honored him with the degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1771. His deathbed plea, in 1785, that his church disband and rejoin the historic Second Church of his ancestors, was heeded.
His heart had always been with that church, and now he was pleased to see its congregation repudiating the orthodoxy of Joshua Gee. Under John Lathrop, it was becoming one of Boston's more liberal churches. Most of Mather's followers obligingly returned to the parent congregation, bringing it added strength and enthusiasm.
None of Samuel Mather's sons evinced an interest in theology or became a church leader. The remarkable family dynasty of ecclesiastical giants, after one hundred and fifty dynamic years, had finally ceased to reign.
Samuel Checkley, the promising son of an eminent minister of the Old South Church, was ordained on September 3, 1747, as assistant to Joshua Gee. The senior minister had already wit- nessed the departure of two other associates, Cotton Mather and Samuel Mather. In declining health, the Rev. Mr. Gee passed away one year later in his fifty-first year; he had served his con- regation almost twenty-five years. The church still retained a position of leadership in New England ecclesiastical affairs, being sought after for advice and assistance by other churches, and was still held in high regard by the entire city of Boston. The theological position of the church may be judged from the kind of minister the parish expected, and received, when it called Mr. Checkley: "He shall appear to the church to be a person of experimental piety, who embraces the doctrines of grace according to the gospel, and the Confession of Faith of the churches of
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New England, and the discipline of the Congregational Churches, exhibited in our well-known platform, and the consociation and communion of churches."
Mr. Checkley's ministry, despite his unusual skill in conduct- ing the devotional portion of the services, proved weak, and the church sank slowly. Only one of his writings, a funeral sermon, was published, and the records of the church were left so incom- plete that we can judge little concerning what occurred during the twenty-one years of his service. In 1760, however, we find the first notation of the congregation as a whole being given the right to participate in the church's government. Perhaps, in view of Mr. Checkley's ineptitude, their help was imperative.
If life was quiet within the Second Church in Boston, it had begun to boil fiercely in the American colonies. Taxation im- posed from overseas was at the root of the matter. England had found herself deeply in debt after the Peace of Paris in 1762. Lord Bute decided that the best way to meet the national debt would be to tax the colonies. The people of Massachusetts plead- ed in vain that their charter protected their basic liberties, but an inflexible monarch, George III, would brook no compromise. Seven English warships anchored off Nantasket; three regiments of soldiers entered Boston; and another vessel came into Boston to impress some American seamen.
Amidst this excitement a strong, vigorous young man named John Lathrop, only twenty-eight years old, arrived from Connecti- cut to supply the pulpit for the ailing Samuel Checkley. A few months later, at midnight on March 18, 1768, the anniversary of the repeal of the Stamp Act, with the sound of beating drums and exploding guns in his ears, Mr. Checkley passed away. Both the Second Church in Boston and the American colonies were unknow- ingly on the threshhold of violence, death and a rebirth in freedom and power.
The colonies needed a stirring preacher who could voice with prophetic fire the angry frustrations and patriotic hopes smolder- ing in thousands of hearts. No one would have believed that the youthful new pastor of the Old North Church would become that man. A week after the British had virtually clamped Boston under
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A NEST OF TRAITORS
martial law, John Lathrop was asked to preach the "election" sermon to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company that crowded into his church.
"Should the British administration determine fully to execute the laws of which we complain," he cried, "we have yet to fear the calamities of a long civil war. Americans, rather than submit to be hewers of wood and drawers of water for any ministry or nation, would spill their last drop of blood."
Unafraid of the soldiers patrolling the streets outside, he con- tinued: "Those principles which justify rulers in making war on rebellious subjects justify the people in making war on rebellious rulers ... War is justifiable when those in Government violate law and attempt to oppress and enslave the people. The fate of Ameri- ca depends on the virtue of her sons."
"The Revolutionary Preacher" was the title bestowed that day upon John Lathrop. Later generations might well have labeled him the Tom Paine of the Revolutionary War clergymen. As an increasing number of patriots began to associate themselves with the minister, and as his outspoken preachments continued, the British accused his church of being "a nest of traitors." It was to pay dearly for this epithet.
The trials of the Second Church began on March 5, 1770. A parishioner, James Caldwell, was shot to death in the famous Boston Massacre. The problems increased with the printing and distribution of the inflammatory sermons preached by the minister from his historic pulpit. Many Boston families and their pastors felt obliged to move out to remote towns to escape from a war that was unmistakably near. The disintegration of the congrega- tion soon became complete. At last came the crowning disaster.
On December 18, 1775, orders were given by British General Howe that the Old North Church building itself, standing for practically one full century, and now temporarily bereft of pastor and flock, was to be destroyed. The edifice was pulled down by the King's soldiers, on January 16, 1776, according to some records, the only church in Boston to receive this fate.
It was a heartbreaking era for the Second Church in Boston. Yet, since its steeple had almost certainly been used for the
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betrayal lanterns of Paul Revere nine months earlier, it could have expected this fate, a time-honored method of avenging signal towers. *
PAUL REVERE Patriot and Second Church leader
JOHN LATHROP the "Revolutionary Preacher"
A full account of the author's research in connection with the steeple lanterns incident is given in Appendix A of this volume.
Chapter Four GOOD-BY, CALVINISM! HELLO, UNITARIANISM!
General George Washington marched back into Boston soon after the British had evacuated the city on March 17, 1776. The joy of the Second Church parishioners at being able to return safely to their homes was mitigated by the discovery that their meeting house had been destroyed. Dr. Ebenezer Pemberton, invalid pastor of the enormous New Brick Church on Hanover Street, not far from North Square, who had been serving his North End church for more than twenty years and, before that, the First Presbyterian Church in New York City, for twenty-two years, invited John Lathrop and his congregation to hold joint worship services with his own group. Due to Dr. Pemberton's aged and almost helpless condition, the leadership of the parish soon de- volved upon John Lathrop's capable shoulders beginning with the first joint service on March 31, 1776.
On May 6, 1779, the congregations of the Second Church in Boston and the New Brick Church, both thinned considerably by losses during the war, voted to merge. They incorporated under the name of "Old North, the Second Church in Boston," with the popular John Lathrop continuing as their pastor. Thus were solved the problems of the leaderless, impoverished New Brick Church congregation and of the strongly lead but homeless Second Churchmen. Death claimed Dr. Pemberton just four months later.
Actually the congregation of the Second Church in Boston, in moving into the New Brick Church building, was simply drawing unto itself the building and worshipers of its own grandchild church. In 1714, the Second Church had grown so large and af- fluent that some of its members withdrew and established the "New North Church" on Hanover and Clark Streets. The nick- name "Old North Church" was used by many people thereafter for the Second Church to distinguish it from its offspring. Other persons continued to refer to the North Square institution as the "North Church". To place the Second Church's blessing upon this new congregation, both Increase Mather and Cotton Mather had assisted in the ordination of the New North Church's first pastor, John Webb.
Only five years later discord had arisen over the choice of the
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minister, Peter Thacher, who was proposed as Mr. Webb's col- league in the New North Church. The controversy became so violent that the group opposed to Mr. Thacher withdrew from the church and proceeded to erect its own edifice on the east side of Hanover Street between Richmond and Prince Streets. It was dedicated on May 10, 1721, with Increase Mather giving a prayer and Cotton Mather the sermon. William Waldron, the first minister of the church, was the last man to receive ordination from Dr. Increase Mather, then in his eighty-third year. The New Brick Church, as it was called, was to stand for the next 123 years and realize post-Revolutionary eminence under the ministries of John Lathrop, Henry Ware, Jr., Ralph Waldo Emerson and Chandler Robbins. Such was the magnificence of the building for those early eighteenth-century days that Cotton Mather's dedicatory sermon included this description: "There is not in all the land a more beautiful house built for the worship of God than this."
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