USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The story of the Second Church in Boston, the original Old North; including the Old North Church mystery > Part 3
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After only fifty-eight years of independent existence under four ministers it officially became the Second Church in Boston, bringing together again congregations that previously had been one. Three famous nicknames long adhered to the church: the "New Brick Church" (because of its construction), the "Old North Church" or "North Church" (as the successor, after 1779, of the original "Old North"), and the "Cockerel Church" (be- cause of the magnificent cockerel weathervane atop its lofty steeple).
Members of the congregation had contributed old brass kettles to Shem Drowne, the noted maker of weathervanes, so that he could fashion for the steeple a beautiful golden cockerel with elegant golden plumage. Five feet, four inches high and weigh- ing 172 pounds, this jaunty bird faced the winds of Boston during the considerable lifetime of this edifice. When the "New Brick" was finally taken down the weathervane was sold to the First Church in Cambridge (Congregational). The 238-year-old bird crows tirelessly against the Cambridge sky to this day. A replica of this cockerel is perched on top of the present Second Church tower on Beacon Street.
The original bell of the New Brick Church was discarded after
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GOOD-BY, CALVINISM! HELLO, UNITARIANISM!
the union of the two congregations and the larger bell of the Old North Church was hung in its place. In 1792 the bell cracked but was skillfully recast by one of the church's most devoted laymen, Paul Revere, who inscribed on it: "THE FIRST BELL CAST IN BOSTON, 1792, by P. REVERE." (In 1901 the Second Church, incorrectly judging that it would never need the bell again, dis- posed of it to St. James Episcopal Church in Cambridge where it can now be seen).
The New Brick Church, third sanctuary in the history of the Second Church in Boston, had been painted for the first time in 1743. The structure was so large that porch entrances were placed in the south, east and west walls. Open grounds sur- rounded it on all sides.
The pulpit was centrally placed on the north side, fac- ing two enclosures - one for the elders and one for the deacons. Long benches for the aged were placed alongside the aisles in front of the square box pews. There were two lev- els of galleries on the west side, a women's gallery on the east and a men's gallery on the south. The uppermost gallery was the favorite haunt of little boys, as the adults seldom needed it to sit in. Apparently Model of the New Brick Church; Emerson's own church the building was acoustically excellent. Even the soft voice of the Rev. Ralph Waldo Emerson could be clearly heard when he was preaching in later years.
The New Brick Church had begun life in an exceedingly liberal manner. The creed attached to the covenant said simply: "We declare our serious belief in the Christian religion, as contained
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in the Sacred Scriptures." The doctrine of the Trinity was im- plied in the phraseology of the several obligations laid upon the members. The brief covenant demanded a promise to live a life of obedience to Christ, to love and watch over one another, to keep all the ordinances of the gospel, and to bring religious education to one's children.
The congregation had become sufficiently emancipated from orthodoxy by 1729 to permit the scriptures to be read in public services. This was a bold innovation for the period. The preach- ers still adhered to a schedule of two sermons and four lengthy prayers each Sunday.
When the nearby Baptist group under Dr. Stillman was without a house of worship from June until December, 1771, it had been hospitably taken in by the New Brick Church. The two congrega- tions worshiped together, and their pastors took turns conducting the services. This display of brotherhood augured well for the success of the 1779 merger with the Second Church itself.
The ministry of John Lathrop, spanning nearly forty-eight years, covered the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. It saw the establishment of the United States of America and the be- ginnings of the golden age of New England literature. In 1784 friends purchased for him a Doctor of Divinity degree from the University of Edinburgh. At that time this was not an uncommon way of showing esteem for honored clergymen. He served as a member of the Harvard College corporation for nearly forty years. Countless charitable and literary organizations in Massachusetts owed much to his leadership in their affairs.
Not a homiletic or scholarly giant, he still possessed rare wisdom and judgment, coupled with gifts of kindness and per- suasion, that caused his church to grow once more into one of the most powerful and flourishing in Boston. A man of serene dignity and almost apostolic appearance, his name became a household word in the North End.
The freedom-loving preacher who had courageously challenged political and economic tyranny during the American Revolution was an equally pioneering thinker in the theological revolution gathering strength in New England. At the start of his ministry
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he thoroughly believed in the Calvinist doctrines of the Second Church, not realizing that his notions of human freedom and equal rights for all men ran counter to the implications of the Calvinist dogma of original sin. The division of men into the elect and the damned in a world governed by a harsh, almost unrelenting, deity, did not at first offend his sense of justice.
He met and talked with the Rev. William Hazlitt, an English Unitarian minister then residing in Boston. His thinking began to change after reading tracts and books by the Reverend Joseph Priestley, the English Unitarian clergyman and scientist who had discovered oxygen and had been driven from his homeland as a religious heretic. Many conversations with the liberal James Freeman, minister of King's Chapel, disclosed that both men were rapidly giving up their beliefs in the Trinity, the deity of Jesus and the Apostles' Creed, as unscriptural, erroneous and detracting from the true message of pure Christianity. Dr. Lathrop knew that John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and other contemporaries of his had espoused the Unitarian theologi- cal position and that an increasing number of Calvinist ministers were slowly moving toward it.
These heretical and explosive ideas were bound to rock New England, especially such institutions as the Second Church in Boston. So persuasive and kindly was Dr. Lathrop's presentation of his revised views that gradually he carried his entire congre- gation with him into Unitarianism. By 1802, it had fully cast off Calvinism for Unitarianism, and in 1825, the church was to figure prominently and proudly in the establishment of the new liberal denomination in America. Increase and Cotton Mather would have proclaimed this a victory for the Devil could they have known what happened to their beloved Puritan church!
In the closing years of Dr. John Lathrop's life the population of Boston was still scarcely twenty-five thousand. The town had not yet developed the social and intellectual climate for which it would later become noted. A visitor remarked on the communi- ty's resemblance to an old English market town. Sidewalks and streets were paved with cobblestones. A few oil lamps provided the only illumination at night. Parishioners of the Second Church
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- like the wealthy Paul Revere, who owned a successful silver- smith shop and copper foundry, and Edmund Hartt, designer and builder of the frigate Constitution - wore colored coats, figured waistcoats, knee-breeches and long, white-topped boots.
It was a sad day for all Boston on January 4, 1816, when the venerable Dr. John Lathrop passed away. His remains were placed with many honors in the Old Granary Burying Ground. Paul Revere, who had prized deeply his longtime membership in the Old North Church and had served it faithfully as a trustee, was buried from its edifice just two years later.
Chapter Five WARE AND EMERSON
After nearly a year of searching, an exceptional twenty-three- year-old Hingham boy named Henry Ware, Jr., was ordained on January 1, 1817, as John Lathrop's successor. Under this in- defatigable worker and excellent pulpit speaker the congregation swelled, attracting numerous Boston leaders into the church.
The young clergyman paralleled the sermonic emphases of his friend William Ellery Channing of the Federal Street Church: the dignity of man and his sonship to God imply a definite moral " responsibility for the welfare of even the poorest among us; re- ligion should express itself in practical humanitarian activities to lift up the less fortunate. Inspired by the minister, the Old North Church and its laymen became known as a fountain-head for benevolent enterprises.
Projects included establishing a Sunday school for under- privileged children, organizing clubs for workingmen, arranging series of public lectures and making house-to-house visits to the sick and unemployed. Ware was too busy with his varied parish activities to take the direct leadership of these charitable ac- tivities, and so a layman, Joseph Tuckerman, was brought in from Chelsea to supervise them. From this small beginning, it may be said, began the concept of the Associated Charities system that is now found in almost every American city. The Benevolent Fraternity of Unitarian Churches still carries on this type of work in Boston and has included at least two ministers of the Second Church among its presidents.
Imbued with a genuinely progressive spirit, Henry Ware, Jr. flouted the then popular prejudice against the use of organs in church worship by installing one on November 2, 1822 - a daring innovation subject to outraged criticism. The Second Church was also one of the first ecclesiastical institutions in Boston to organize its own Sunday school for children. On June 22, 1823, the Rev. Mr. Ware received the first children into formal classes of instruction to be held each Sunday thereafter.
Through his writings Mr. Ware did much to advance the cause of education, peace and Unitarian theology. His tract called Discourse on Temperance enjoyed a major sale in this country
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and was in much demand in England.
A number of those Boston clergymen who were Unitarian in their thinking concluded regretfully that at last a formal break
must be made from the estab- lished denominations. These men were under constant har- assment by their orthodox brethren for their repudiation of Trinitarianism, and their claim that each individual has the right to freedom in reli- gious thinking. Henry Ware, Jr., joined William Ellery Channing and a number of other clergymen on May 25, 1825, to found a new denomination, the American Unitarian Asso- HENRY WARE, Jr. ciation. For eleven years Co-founder of Unitarian denomination thereafter Mr. Ware labored in the new movement serving as its part-time Foreign Secretary or as a member of its Executive Committee. From this small begin- ning developed the great, continent-wide Unitarian denomination of today that is about to merge with the Universalists.
Under the pressure of his many ecclesiastical responsibilities, the minister's health began to decline. In the twelfth year of his ministry, on a Sunday in December 1828, he tendered his resigna- tion. The church declined to accept it and persuaded him to re- main by securing an energetic colleague to lift from his shoulders many burdens of parish care. On March 11, 1829, the associate minister was ordained. His name was Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Hoping to regain his shattered health, the senior minister of the Second Church traveled throughout Europe from the spring of 1829 until the summer of 1830. The unusual quality of his work as a preacher, writer, and worker had so impressed itself upon Harvard College, that he was offered an appointment to the newly- created position of Hollis Professor of Pulpit Eloquence and Pastoral Care. Perhaps thinking that his frail constitution might
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stand up better under a professor's regime than in the ministry, he resigned his pulpit on October 3, 1830.
Four more Unitarian-minded professors were appointed to Har- vard in the following two years, transforming that institution into the foremost center of intellectual and religious liberalism in the country. This challenge to orthodox domination created a memo- rable storm. Orthodoxy in America exploded into action. The Andover Theological School was founded to counteract the new Unitarianism. Lyman Beecher was installed in Boston's Park Street Church to combat it. Years later Dr. Beecher wrote in retrospective annoyance: "All the literary men of Massachusetts were Unitarian; all the trustees and professors of Harvard Col- lege were Unitarian; all the elite of wealth and fashion crowded Unitarian churches; the judges on the bench were Unitarian, giv- ing decisions by which the peculiar features of church organi- zation so carefully ordered by the Pilgrim fathers had been nulli- fied, and all the power had passed into the hands of the congre- gation."
Unitarianism was, indeed, well launched in this country. To Henry Ware, Jr., at least, the cost was great. Through a period of controversy and declining health, he carried on his Harvard professorship for twelve years, only to die at the age of forty- nine on September 22, 1843. In his memory a distinguished au- thority in some intellectual discipline is selected to deliver each year the "Ware Lecture" to the official nationwide May Meetings of the American Unitarian Association.
Nine out of the eighty-three persons voting were opposed to calling Ralph Waldo Emerson to the Second Church pulpit. Per- haps his unorthodox views intimidated some members of a con- gregation that was beginning to retreat from the new liberalism. This scion of eight generations of Puritan clergymen was the son of William Emerson, the late pastor of the First Church in Boston, who had been known as one of the city's most liberal preachers. But the erudition and gentleness of the tall, thin young minister finally triumphed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's monumental contributions to liberal thought were to pour forth not during his service in this pulpit
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but in the fifty years afterward. Listeners of the time state that his manner of preaching was solemn and the content of his thought candidly and clearly expressed. His treatment of subjects re- flected the essay technique of which helater became a world- famed master. Among his other community services, he was chaplain of the Massachusetts State Senate and a member of the Boston School Committee.
Emerson feared that religion would strangle itself in life- less formality, creeds, ritual and ceremonial. Not overly impressed by tradition, he suggested that each man cre- RALPH WALDO EMERSON 1 Ninth pastor, famed writer ate his own Bible, writing into it verses from the poet of this culture, a chapter from the sages of that race, a sentence from the wisdom of another age, thus producing a book of spiritual resources that might "thrill him like the sound of a trumpet." The message fell on deaf ears. The once revolutionary Second Church in Boston was on the threshhold of exactly a century and a quarter of the most conservative theology and ritualistic formal- ism to be found in any American Unitarian Church.
After a ministry of only three-and-one-half years, Emerson advised a group of church members whom he had summoned to his home that he could no longer administer the "Lord's Supper," or Communion, in the traditional form. It should be a spiritual and not a material observance. Hence he proposed that the bread and wine be removed and that Communion become a simple com- memorative gathering. The congregation studied the proposal and rejected it while earnestly hoping that the minister would find it possible to continue as in the past. Shortly afterward, the twenty-nine-year-old Mr. Emerson preached a sermon fully explain- ing his unalterable position relative to the sacrament and his own
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conscience. Under the circumstances, he stated in his sermon, he had no recourse but to tender his resignation. It took effect on October 28, 1832. The entire controversy was carried on in a most gentle and noble spirit on both sides. The parting was genuinely sad and affectionate. "I had hoped to carry them with me, but I failed," he said quietly in later years.
Formalism had triumphed temporarily over freedom.
Although Ralph Waldo Emerson neveraccepted a call to another church, he nostalgically could not resist invitations to occupy various Unitarian pulpits for years after. In 1860 he preached several times for the enormous Music Hall congregation left leaderless by the death of Theodore Parker, one of the great Uni- tarian orators of all time. But writing and lecturing claimed most of his time - the pulpit's loss was the world's gain. Free of time-consuming pastoral responsibilities, he gained the opportuni- ty to compose the poems and essays that earned him fame as the foremost man of letters in American history.
Only six years after his resignation as the ninth minister of the Old North Church on Hanover Street, Emerson - his mind still creating revolutionary innovations in the realm of religious phi- losophy-delivered an address before the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School. It shattered the somnolent complacency of the New England churches and became one of the three most important sermons in American Unitarian annals. No New World theologian had so frankly challenged the traditional attitudes toward God, Jesus, Christianity, and the function of the church. Some of the Unitarian professors in the school shuddered.
It made a searing impression on Theodore Parker, who was sitting in the little audience: "It was the most inspiring strain I ever listened to, so beautiful, so just, so true, and terribly sub- lime! My soul aroused and this week I shall write the long-medi- tated sermons on the state of the church and the duties of these times." This man, Parker, whose sermons were eagerly sought by Abraham Lincoln, and whose congregations reached three thou- sand persons, was to preach in 1841 a third epoch-making Uni- tarian address. He too was years ahead of his time in challeng- ing popular orthodox theological ideas.
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The dramatic upheaval within Unitarianism caused by these searching addresses was to affect the denomination for decades. Though the unity of the movement was temporarily weakened, the ultimate result for all was a new freedom from narrow, outworn concepts. The churches of New England, though divided in their reception, tended to remain clear of the newer thinking of Emerson and Parker while the rest of the country generally embraced it with cautious, though marked, concern. The Second Church in Boston joined the reactionary wing under the aegis of its next minister, Chandler Robbins.
Chapter Six IN FIVE BUILDINGS
After searching thirteen months for a gifted pastor, the Second Church accepted the suggestion of Professor Henry Ware, Jr., that one of his brightest former students in the Harvard Divinity School be called. On December 3, 1833, twenty-three-year-old Chandler Robbins was ordained. His ministry was to last forty- one years, and to lead the congregation across Boston, where they were to occupy five different church edifices and four tempo- rary places of worship. A strange odyssey lay ahead for the North End church that had occupied only three buildings in the previous two centuries.
In the early nineteenth century the character of the North End began to change. Many old families long associated with the Second Church in Boston shared in the population movement southward. In 1832 Emerson had noted that half his parishioners now dwelled in the southerly areas and that many non-Protestant families were moving in around the church. The Roman Catholic hierarchy offered nineteen thousand dollars for the ancient house of worship. The congregation bravely, if unwisely, declined. It spent three thousand dollars to patch the building and prolong its life.
The city finally condemned the 123-year-old structure in 1844. In the ensuing debate over whether to rebuild in a more southerly location, where the more substantial families and majority of parishioners now resided, or to construct a new edifice on the same site despite the increasing undesirability of the location, Chandler Robbins sided with the "stay put" minority. It was decided to build a new church on the same Hanover Street lot.
Many a tearful eye watched as the venerable brick edifice was being demolished. The pulpit, sixty-four pews and the chandelier were purchased by the Unitarian Church in Billerica. The organ went to the Unitarian Society in Danvers. The famed golden cockerel weathervane and Paul Revere bell came to rest, some years later, in Cambridge churches of Congregational and Episco- palian background. A small model of the church was constructed from bits of its original wood and presented to Chandler Robbins. (It may be seen, inside a glass display case, in the Mather Room
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of the present Beacon Street building).
During the one-year interval, while the new brownstone build- ing was going up, the congregation worshiped by invitation in the sanctuary of the Old South Church. In grateful recognition of this hospitality, one of the original silver cups belonging to the com- munion plate of the Second Church in Boston was presented to the host congregation. It was inscribed:
The Old South Church In Memory Of Her Christian Hospitality To The Second Church 1844
In 1845, the Second Church in Boston reassembled in its or- nate new Gothic building, at first in joy, then in dismay. The cost of the edifice had exceeded all estimates. Many parishioners who had opposed the location withdrew, and only a handful of people, burdened with debt, remained. The congregation felt a moral responsibility to succeed and uphold the rich name of the historic Old North Church. A certain shame drove them on, for it was clear that they had exercised poor judgment in the site they had chosen and the building they had erected. Good intentions proved unequal to the size of their task. They finally sold their beautiful church only four years after it was finished. The Metho- dist purchasers worshiped there until the widening of Hanover Street in 1869 forced its demolition.
During this Hanover Street period, Chandler Robbins had served as chaplain of the Massachusetts Senate (1834), as chaplain of the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1835), and as editor of the Christian Register, official journal of the Unitarian move- ment in America, from January 1837 to April 1839.
The frequent shifts from one location to another, that were to characterize the next stage in the Second Church's history under his leadership, resulted partially from a lack of foresight in an- ticipating the direction of population changes. Mammoth altera-
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tions, caused by the explosive growth of Boston, were taking place in the city. Today's great metropolis was being molded. People were seeking new residential areas and breaking up older ones. Many churches experienced difficult times as their geo- graphical surroundings were gradually emptied of parishioners.
Thus, in 1849, the congregation became churchless. Public worship was maintained unbroken in the hall of the Masonic Temple until the spring of 1850, when a welcome offer was re- ceived from the deacons of the Freeman Place Chapel. The dis- tinguished Unitarian pastor of that parish, James Freeman Clarke, had long been in such ill health that the church was scarcely functioning. The Second Church in Boston purchased the chapel on Beacon Hill, installed Chandler Robbins as minister and wor- shiped there during the next four years.
In 1843, while the divided Second Church congregation had been reconstructing its ill-fated church on Hanover Street, a new religious society called the Church of the Savior had built itself a notable church on Bedford Street. Under the leadership of the Rev. Henry Waterson, this new society had engaged Hammat Billings to design an edifice of pure gothic architecture. It turned out to be the most beautiful ecclesiastical structure in Boston. Unfortunately, the churchmen were duplicating the mistake of the Old North Church in contracting for a sanctuary beyond the means of their small congregation.
Increased strength and diminished debts seemed possible through a merger of the congregations and assets of the Second Church in Boston and the Church of the Savior. The two churches became one in 1854 continuing under the original corporate name of the elder one, the Second Church in Boston. Its historic rec- ords, library, communion plate and other valued possessions were retained. The Second Church was repeating an earlier episode in which it had moved into the New Brick building in 1776, with its own minister, John Lathrop, taking over. In transferring to the lovely Church of the Savior building, the elder congregation's Chandler Robbins became pastor. Dr. Waterson, like Dr. Pemberton almost four score years earlier, went into retirement. This union produced a long period of self-centered activity and conventional
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