USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The story of the Second Church in Boston, the original Old North; including the Old North Church mystery > Part 4
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
36
STORY OF THE SECOND CHURCH
prosperity. The Second Church in Boston settled down and de- veloped a staid congregation which attracted many of the city's elite.
America moved into the throes of the Civil War. The slavery issue drove to the heart of the country's moral character. Mass immigration from Europe was producing new problems of minorities and prejudice, housing and urban change. Fabulous inventions and the new industrial age were shaking up the old society.
On these great issues and epochal events the pulpit of the Old North Church was strangely silent. Chandler Robbins re- jected the prophetic ministry of the Mathers and Ware; scorned the bold Unitarianism of contemporaries like Channing, Emerson, and Parker; and remained largely aloof from the social issues boiling around him. It was a quiescent period for the Second Church in Boston, echoing the pastorates of Joshua Gee and Samuel Checkley. Unfortunately it was impressing a stamp of social and theological conservatism upon the character of the church that would endure deep into the twentieth century.
One parishioner, Frederick Walker Lincoln, threw a redeeming light over this priestly period. The grandson of Paul Revere, he was twice elected mayor of Boston, serving with distinction through the Civil War. In his civic influence he can be listed be- side William Ellery Channing, Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. Few philanthropic or charitable institutions failed to receive his guidance. He was instrumental in founding the Young Men's Christian Union, building the City Hall, and bringing into existence the fine Bay Bay residential area.
New England was at the height of its most notable literary peri- od. Giants strode the Boston landscape: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Curiously enough, each of these contributors to the golden age of American literature was a Unitarian.
Gifted with the pen, Chandler Robbins wrote hymns that found their way into the hymnals of various Christian faiths and articles that were published by several national magazines. In 1855,
37
IN FIVE BUILDINGS
Harvard honored him with a Doctor of Divinity degree. He was a conservative without being dogmatic, a man of cultivated mind, a classical scholar who concentrated his attentions upon his own learning and his congregation, giving little heed to the problems of his community and the world outside. He often said that his aim was "to preach Christ and Him crucified." His religious views were of the most conservative order.
He isolated himself and his congregation from close affiliation with the Unitarian denomination and from sharing in the direction or responsibilities of its religious work. This further closed the doors of fellowship with the great liberal waves of his own era. His detailed, 320-page book, published by a committee of the church in 1852, A History of the Second Church, or Old North, in Boston, studiously avoids reference to Unitarianism in general or to the Unitarian thinking of his pulpit predecessors.
Although fundamentally conservative by nature, Dr. Chandler Robbins, like other New England Unitarian clergymen of the time, seems to have been reacting against what he regarded as a sacri- legious theological radicalism sweeping the denomination. He felt a marked distaste for the widely-published 1819 Baltimore sermon of Channing, the 1838 Harvard Divinity School address of Emerson, and the 1841 South Boston address of Parker. He knew and liked the men personally but not their revolutionary thinking. These three historic addresses clarified the Unitarian position on the errors of the Trinity, the humanity of Jesus, the moral enormity of the atonement, the discovery of truth through experi- ence and not via authority or the supernatural, and the theological misuse of alleged miracles. In reaction against the outspoken Theodore Parker, who was influencing thousands weekly in his huge congregations, numerous local Unitarian clergymen like Chandler Robbins tried to appease and attract the orthodox. New England Unitarianism, in consequence, became markedly conserva- tive while the rest of the country ironically flew ahead upon the theological wings of Boston's own Channing, Emerson and Parker.
Apparently the congregation of the Church of the Saviour brought with it a liturgical worship service. Records indicate that in 1854, the year of the merger, Dr. Robbins introduced, in place of
38
STORY OF THE SECOND CHURCH
the simple Unitarian-Congregational order of worship, a liturgical service that was to be changed and developed by succeeding ministers. It became increasingly Episcopalian in form and con- tent as the years passed. Could they have known, the Mathers would have arisen from their graves in righteous wrath. The Puritan worshipers in Boston had abhorred all semblance of Church of England rites. Ralph Waldo Emerson looked on with gentle disapproval: his former church was transgressing further and further from his ideal of a purely spiritual and unadorned service.
A visitor to Bedford Street, today, knows that it is lined with stores, office buildings and warehouses. The inroads of business and the egress of parishioners prompted the society in 1872 to sell its valuable church property there and purchase a lot at Huntington Avenue and West Newton Street. But the Boston fire of November 9, 1872, caused a change of site to Boylston Street in busy Copley Square. We cannot help questioning once again the judgment of the peripatetic parson and his parishioners in their new choice. They were moving almost next door to two flourishing Unitarian churches, the First Church in Boston and the Arlington Street Church, not to mention the Church of the Unity and the South Congregational Church, both Unitarian, a little farther away.
In 1872, the beautiful Bedford Street Church was carefully taken down, the materials marked with numbers and all parts put in storage. In due time everything was transported to Copley Square - the stones for the walls, the pews and pulpit, the stained glass windows and organ. The church was reassembled in some- what different arrangement while retaining the former style of architecture.
The interior of the restored building was in the shape of a Greek cross. Although finished in black walnut, it was not dark or gloomy. Over five hundred persons could be seated in the main floor and gallery pews. In addition to a small chapel off the main sanctuary, there were meeting rooms, a kitchen, and a fine parlor located in the church basement.
During the interval of construction, the congregation accepted
39
IN FIVE BUILDINGS
an invitation from King's Chapel, a church in its own conserva- tive tradition, to worship in its sanctuary. The following season the members met in the Children's Mission Hall until the new Copley Square edifice was ready. It was dedicated on September 17, 1874.
The Second Church: in Copley Square 1874 to 1912
Old age and encroaching blindness prompted the kindly Dr. Chandler Robbins to resign his pastorate of forty-one years on December 4, 1874. He had led his band of worshipers in five different church buildings, beginning as a youth in the North End with the famed old New Brick Church and ending in the eve- ning of his life at a centrally-located church in Copley Square in downtown Boston. We are grateful that, despite errors of judg- ment, he had displayed the courage to move his church and keep it alive when other congregations had remained stationary and died. Just eight years later both Chandler Robbins and his prede- cessor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, passed away. They expired just
40
STORY OF THE SECOND CHURCH
a few months and miles apart. But their minds, up to the end, were still separated by an incalculable distance.
Chapter Seven IN COPLEY SQUARE
Excited by the fresh opportunities of the Copley Square loca- tion, the congregation eagerly called to its pulpit a man serving a, church across the seas in England. Robert Laird Collier was born in Maryland and had begun his ministerial career as a Meth- odist clergyman. Finding his theological views closer to Uni- tarianism, he changed denominations and enjoyed a fruitful pastor- ate in the Church of the Messiah (now The First Unitarian Church) in Chicago. Poor health prompted his resignation. He sailed to England and there accepted the leadership of a Unitarian church in Leicester. From that parish he was called to the Second Church.
The theological conservatism typical of the time is exemplified in two sentences in the call extended by the Standing Committee to Dr. Collier: "We profess to be a church of Christ, believing him to be our Master upon earth, and rejoicing in the hope of a glorious immortality through the message which he brought from our Father in heaven. Your religious culture, piety, and sound theological opinions founded on the Holy Scriptures seem emi- nently to fit you at the present time for the wants and responsi- bilities of a Boston pulpit."
On Wednesday evening, March 15, 1876, Robert Laird Collier was installed as the eleventh minister of the Second Church in Boston, and the first pastor to serve in its seventh building. Notable names in Unitarianism were among the speakers helping to celebrate the milestone: Edward Everett Hale, James Freeman Clarke, Robert Collyer and Henry Wilder Foote.
Attacking his responsibilities vigorously, Dr. Collier succeeded in clearing the new edifice of nearly all its fifty thousand dollars indebtedness to building contractors. He was dissatisfied with the service and hymn book written for the church in 1854 by his predecessor, Chandler Robbins. Securing a copy of the famed Book of Worship compiled by two of Great Britain's most illustri- ous Unitarian leaders, Dr. Martineau and Dr. Sandler, he revised and adapted its ritual and sacraments to the needs of the Boston congregation. The influence of the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer was evident throughout, although the theology was not
41
42
STORY OF THE SECOND CHURCH
Trinitarian. This work, together with a short collection of hymns, was published bythe church and served it for the next forty years.
Ill health again assailed this dynamic clergyman, forcing his resignation in August 1879, after a ministry as short as Ralph Waldo Emerson's. Eleven years later he died in Maryland, the interval having been spent in England and, for three years, in Kansas City, where he served the Unitarian Church as minister.
The Second Church reached only a few miles, into Hingham, to find its next pastor. Under Edward Augustus Horton, who was installed on May 24, 1880, the church grew strong, attracting numerous distinguished Bostonians into its pews. Among his parishioners were governors of Massachusetts like Oliver Ames, John D. Long and Thomas Talbot. Occupying neighboring pulpits were such giants as Phillips Brooks and Edward Everett Hale. It was a golden age for churches in the Copley Square district.
Dr. Horton had gone into the ministry after seeing considerable action as a sailor during the Civil War. He had fought aboard the Union warship Seneca and taken part in the assaults on Fort Sumter. Before reaching the Second Church he had obtained de- grees from the University of Chicago and the Meadville Theo- logical School and had studied at Brunswick and Heidelberg in Germany. A slender, graceful gentleman with long, flowing hair, Dr. Horton was sometimes mistaken for the noted actor, Sir Henry Irving.
On December 26, 1889, the beautiful organ was dedicated which still serves the Second Church in the twentieth century. It was given in memory of Florence Adams Sawyer by her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Sylvanus A. Denio, at the suggestion of Dr. Horton. It seems difficult to imagine that only sixty-seven years earlier, on November 2, 1822, popular prejudice in the Second Church against such instruments, which were scorned as "boxes of whistles", had diminished enough so that the first organ could be installed. Even then, very few of the twenty-eight churches in Boston had taken so bold a step forward. This church had come a long way from the days when its founding fathers had brought to this land only five tunes that they felt were suitable to be used in the worship of God.
43
IN COPLEY SQUARE
Dr. Horton resigned his pastorate on February 1, 1892, seeking to regain his health by a change of occupation. The Second Church continued to bask in the reflected glory of its minister emeritus' additional contributions to Boston's civic and religious environment. For many years thereafter he served as director and president of the national Unitarian Sunday School Union, and as executive secretary and president of the Benovolent Fraternity of Unitarian Churches which was engaged in social service work throughout Boston. Like his predecessors, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Chandler Robbins, he was chosen chaplain of the Massachu- setts Senate, the oldest continuous legislative body in the United States. He proved so able that he served the unprecedented number of twenty-five years, finally retiring at his own request in 1929. The Senate then unanimously elected him the only chaplain- emeritus in its long history.
So busy was Edward Augustus Horton that at one point while working in his office at the American Unitarian Association, he controlled the extension of churches, the settlement of clergy in their parishes and the production of educational materials for the young. He would not recognize the complicated headquarters organization of today! Dr. Horton developed Sunday school courses, prepared the Book of Song and Service used nationally for many years, authored numerous hymns and poems, and wrote more than fifteen books. Despite these labors, he lived into his eighty-eighth year, dying in Toronto, Canada, on April 15, 1931.
At the time of Dr. Horton's departure from the Second Church, a suggestion was received from the Church of the Unity on Newton Street, led by Dr. Minot Judson Savage, that the two institutions merge into a single church in Copley Square. Since the combined total of the congregations each Sunday reached nearly fifteen hun- dred persons - a number the Copley Square Church could not ac- commodate - and no desire developed to build a huge new edifice, the plan disintegrated.
On Tuesday evening, April 4, 1893, the Second Church installed a handsome young man whom it had called directly from a notable ten-year ministry on the Pacific coast. Thomas Van Ness was born in Boston and graduated from the Harvard Divinity School.
44
STORY OF THE SECOND CHURCH
He established an excellent reputation in the Second Church as a preacher, lecturer, writer and organizer. But it was his mis- fortune, as the twentieth century approached, to find population movements and the inroads of business causing a visible shrink- age of his following.
The two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the church was observed on November 19 and 20, 1899, with three brilliant serv- ices of worship. Addresses were delivered by Roger Wolcott, the Governor of Massachusetts; Charles W. Eliot, President of Har- vard University; Francis G. Peabody, distinguished Harvard pro- fessor; and Edward Everett Hale, grand old man of the American liberal pulpit.
Three superb memorials were unveiled. On the upper wall behind the pulpit was placed a stately, life-sized mosaic figure of Truth in the graceful drapery and cowl of the Byzantine period with a golden key of knowledge suspended from the neck, the sword of truth in the right hand and a burning torch to illuminate the world in the left hand. Over this art masterpiece by the Tiffany Studios of New York City was inscribed: Know the truth and the truth shall make you free.
Tall, slender windows of stained glass were introduced on either side of the chancel. The left side picture represented cour- age and charity - in the figures of St. Martin, a Roman warrior, cutting his mantle in two to share it with a poor boy, and of the apostle Paul's friend, Dorcas, taking two fair-haired children under her protection. The opposite window, illuminated with equal richness, depicted the memorable protest of Dr. Increase Mather, before the British commissioners in London over the sur- render of the colony's charter.
The third memorial, presented by the young people of the con- gregation, was a handsome marble bust of Ralph Waldo Emerson. These distinguished memorials were transferred into the next edifice of the congregation, in 1914, where they can be seen to- day. The anniversary occasion was honored by publishing, in a well-bound and illustrated 206-page volume, all the addresses given during the week's activities.
For three years, beginning in 1909, meetings were quietly held
45
IN COPLEY SQUARE
with trustees of Edward Everett Hale's former church, South Congregational (Unitarian), located at Newbury and Exeter Streets, looking toward a possible merger. By then both groups faced dwindling congregations. They decided to retain the historic name, Second Church in Boston, but neither group would agree to give up its own minister. Negotiations reached a stalemate that was never resolved.
Finally in March 1912, the Standing Committee of the Second Church decided to accept an offer of $475,000 from private busi- ness interests for its Copley Square property. Too many liberal churches clustered in an increasingly mercantile area. The con- gregation was forced to this decisive action if it was to survive.
With the money now at its disposal, it could consider three plans for the future. The congregation could amalgamate with the South Congregational Church and erect a magnificent new edifice not unlike the Mother Church of the First Church of Christ Scientist. It could construct a large office building, similar to Tremont Temple, that would contain the sanctuary, several meet- ing rooms and rentable office space. Or it could move the entire Copley Square structure out into a prosperous center such as Kenmore Square.
In order not to stand in the way of whatever plan might be chosen, Mr. Thomas Van Ness resigned on July 1, 1912. The church extended the date to July 1, 1913, giving him leave of absence during the extra year, so that he might thereby claim a full twenty-year pastorate. A farewell gift of ten thousand dollars was presented to him.
In his final sermon on May 12, 1912 before the dismantling of the edifice began, Mr. Van Ness mustered the courage to advocate changes in the form of government followed by the church. He decried the slow, subtle process through which government by the congregation in many New England churches had gradually been supplanted by the paternalistic administration of a little group of pew-proprietors. General subscribers to the maintenance of the church and its many activities no longer had any voice in the policies, guidance or plan of administration. Church members were not given the right to select the type of worship services or
46
STORY OF THE SECOND CHURCH
clergymen they might prefer. The time had come, he advised, to break up a system of government that failed to be representative, democratic and congregational in temper and spirit. A Boston Herald editorial favorably echoed his remarks.
Prior to 1893, it had been considered a virtue to keep out of the pulpit anyone who was not a Christian. Mr. Van Ness liber- ated his congregation's thinking on this matter, and thereafter Jews, Moslems and Hindus were given an attentive hearing in the church. In later years this clergyman traveled widely, visiting Russia five times, and interviewing many leading revolutionists. At the time of his death in Boston on March 14, 1931, Thomas Van Ness was preparing for publication impressions he had re- ceived in private meetings with ten important personages, in- cluding Count Tolstoi and Sun Yat Sen, founder of the Republic of China. He had already authored The Religion of New England.
Chapter Eight A NEW SPIRE ON BEACON STREET
Proudly the Standing Committee of the Second Church in Boston announced in January 1912 that it had decided to purchase some choice land at the corner of Beacon Street and Audubon Road (now called Park Drive). An architect would be commissioned to design a new building surpassed in beauty by no other Boston church. It would be located in a notable residential area near Brookline, three blocks from Boston University and only two miles from Copley Square in downtown Boston. A liberal church here might become a strengthening influence in the lives of students from a school soon destined to become the nation's ninth largest.
The church constituency remained together loyally during the next thirty months when it lacked a worship home of its own. Services were held regularly in Boston University's Jacob Sleeper Hall on Boylston and Exeter Streets. The list of guest speakers at these hours of worship reads like a Who's Who of American Unitarian ministers.
Before the building was completed, Samuel Raymond Maxwell was called from the Unitarian Church in Greenfield, Massachu- setts, and installed as the fourteenth pastor on May 20, 1914. The First Church in Boston lent its sanctuary for the occasion. Participating in the service were a number of Unitarian leaders: Charles E. Park, Samuel A. Eliot, Louis C. Cornish, Sydney B. Snow, and Edward Augustus Horton.
What happened to the carefully dismantled Copley Square build- ing? Its attractive front wall stones, all carefully numbered, were carried to Helms Place in 1918 and reassembled without change as the face of the new Church of All Nations. It can still be seen serving faithfully the Morgan Memorial's well-known center of worship.
The excitement that hung over Boston on Sunday afternoon, November 8, 1914, was not caused by the great war that had just broken out in Europe. Hundreds of people were converging on 874 Beacon Street for the dedication of an architectural master- piece, sometimes described as one of the most stately and dis- tinctive structures in America. The architect was Ralph Adams Cram, designer of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New
47
48
STORY OF THE SECOND CHURCH
York City. Into this eighth building of the Second Church in Boston stepped the presidents of Harvard University, Boston University, Radcliffe College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the deans of the four major New England theologi- cal seminaries and dignitaries from many faiths and walks of life.
From afar they had glimpsed the English Georgian stone steeple of Sir Christopher Wren design, rising 157 feet into the air (six feet higher than the Statue of Liberty in New York). The church sanctuary and parish house of Indiana limestone and Harvard red brick were derived from English and American Renaissance de- signs of Georgian colonial style. The worshipers that Sunday thrilled, as countless thousands have ever since, to the impres- sive and expansive feeling of the interior. Because the windows were of clear, not stained glass, natural light of the outdoors flooded the sanctuary, dramatically disclosing its balanced form and color lightness.
The sanctuary of the Beacon Street edifice
49
A NEW SPIRE ON BEACON STREET
European visitors noted that the barrel-vaulted side aisles and the high nave were reminiscent of Italian Renaissance, rather than English. The placement of the Ionic colonnades and the coffered ceiling of the clerestory reminded them of the lovely church of San Lorenzo in Florence, Italy. A sense of height and airiness was achieved by the clerestory above the nave. The building was loftier and narrower than any true colonial structure although the raised pulpit was in the Early American fashion. "A building of intellectual type, yet designed for a rich art of worship," was the verdict placed upon the new edifice by a promi- nent art critic.
From that dedicatory day to this, the church has stood as a proud landmark on Boston's Beacon Street, an inspiring home for the Hub City's second oldest congregation. The basement and three floors of the parish house are connected by the first ele- vator ever installed in a Boston church. The top floor contains a nursery room, kitchen and dining room, the latter named for Paul Revere. On the middle floor are the senior minister's study and a single large room, with fireplace, named for the Mathers. An oil portrait of Increase Mather, his face ruddy from a fire's glow as he sat for the painter through winter afternoons, hangs above the fireplace mantle. Interesting mementoes from the early days of the church's existence adorn the walls.
On the main floor of the parish house is the large Lathrop Room with a stage and a painted portrait of John Lathrop, "the Revolu- tionary Preacher." Offices for the Minister of Education and Church Secretary adjoin this popular room. The basement houses six School of Religion classrooms, a choir room, a fireproof vault for historical records and the Franklin F. Raymond Memorial Chap- el for Children. This beautiful little sanctuary, complete with air-conditioning, an organ, a chancel and pew space for sixty, is the regular worship center for part of the Sunday School.
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.