USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Trinity church in the city of Boston, Massachusetts : 1733-1933 > Part 3
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That noble group of church buildings, well located and amply spaced, was indeed a monumental achievement. But material possessions ought always to be related to and be an expression of real spiritual growth. The greatest service of the group of laymen who removed and built our Trinity Church was that, in 1868-1869, they had the wisdom to choose as rec- tor the young and notable Phillips Brooks, and then to wait for his acceptance, despite his first refusals-a great man, an inspirer and leader of men in spirituality, for following the Christian Way. For 136 years, Trinity Church in the City of Boston had a history which was useful and eminently respect- able, perhaps honorable. Occasionally only did it rise above the conventional. When Phillips Brooks came in 1869 to be its eighth rector, it became one of the few churches known throughout the Christian world.
We turn now to Mr. Brooks's own summary of the his- tory of Trinity Church up to 1877. Then we shall look at Bishop Lawrence's word portraits of the seventh and eighth rectors. Each served long. The old era of Trinity ended with Eastburn. The new and great era began with Brooks!
* In Monographs of American Architecture, Number V, Ticknor & Co., Boston, 1888, are twenty-three large views of Trinity Church, outside and inside, with a portrait of Richardson.
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II HISTORICAL SERMON BY REV. PHILLIPS BROOKS, D.D. Reprinted from Consecration Services of Trinity Church, Boston Printed by order of the Vestry, 1877
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TRINITY CHURCH, SUMMER STREET Looking toward Washington Street OPENED FOR WORSHIP IN 1829
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Historical Sermon
The Lord our God be with us, as he was with our fathers: let him not leave us, nor forsake us. I KINGS VIII. 57.
A T last the work is done. The cares and perplexities which have filled these last four years, the unsettle- ment and restlessness are over, and we stand, a strong and happy parish, in this noble Church, which on last Friday we consecrated to Almighty God. I see to-day for the first time, your well-known faces in the unfamiliar pews, which yet have given you such a large, motherly welcome, that it does not all seem strange. We look around upon these walls which are to make the home in which we shall more and more love to live. This first parish service opens the long series of thousands of such services, in which we and those who come after us shall here worship the Lord in whom we trust. Let us ask together that, in fulfillment of the Psalmist's prayer, the Lord may indeed "send us help from the sanctuary, and strengthen us out of Zion."
I want to-day not merely to look forward with you, but to look back. My text is taken from the great prayer which was read at our Consecration Service, the prayer of Solomon at the dedication of his completed Temple. At the end of the chapter which precedes that prayer, there is a verse which always seems to me to be full of significance and beauty. We read that "So was ended all the work that King Solomon made for the house of the Lord. And Solomon brought in the things which David, his father, had dedicated; even the silver, and the gold, and the vessels, did he put among the treasures of the house of the Lord." The sacred things of the father were brought into the temple of the son. It is a picture of the way in which the piety of the generations always must be bound together. We would not have our Church unblessed by all the past faith and devotion of our parish. It seems to me that to-day is the time for us to remember what has gone
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before us in the history of Trinity Church, and so in our way bring in the things which our fathers have dedicated, and put them among the treasures of this house of the Lord which we have built. I think that there is no fitter use to which I can give this first Sunday morning sermon.
For a parish has a continuous life, which is not broken by the change of generations. And a parish which for years has filled a place and done a work like ours in Boston, cannot for- get its past. This is the same old parish which your fathers loved. These walls repeat the walls in which they worshiped. We must not let the historical continuity be broken. It has been rich in strong, wise and good men. It has blessed many souls, and enriched the life of our beloved city for almost a century and a half. Let me to-day, then, try, in such brief out- line as a sermon will allow, to tell its story so that we may see upon how deep a foundation of the past we are to build the future, with the hopes of which our hearts are full.
The beginning of the Episcopal Church in Boston was not hopeful. The Puritans, who had brought from the mother country a prejudice almost amounting to hatred forthe Church of England, were naturally jealous when they found that Church desirous of establishing itself on this new soil, and so one attempt after another came to nothing. It was not till the year 1686, when Boston was more than fifty years old, that the first Episcopal services were held in the Town House, which stood where the old State House now stands. There "Mr. Rat- cliffe was granted the east end of the Town House, where the deputies used to meet, until those who desire his ministry » shall provide a fitter place." He was refused the use of either of the three meeting houses of the town. The same year Sir Edmund Andros came to Boston, and, after various fruitless negotiations, in the next spring he tyrannically took posses- sion of the Old South meeting house for the worship of his own Church; and on Good Friday, March 24, 1687, the sexton opened the doors of that Puritan temple under the command
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of Andros, which ordered him "to open and ring the bell for those of the Church of England." On Easter Sunday the Gov- ernor again occupied the same place, and had the full service; and during the rest of his administration the Governor used this house as a place of worship, whenever he wished.
The next step was the erection of King's Chapel in 1689, with gifts and privileges from the crown. From that time the worship of the Church of England may be said to have been fairly established in our city. It was not the worship of the people. It belonged to certain classes, but always there were people here who loved it, and it grew. An attempt to have Bishops consecrated for this country was made, but failed. The Church labored under the inconveniences of dependency. Every minister must go to England to be ordained. Yet still it grew. The King's Chapel was enlarged in 1710, and in 1723 the number of Episcopalians had so increase'd that a new Church was founded in the north part of Boston, and called Christ Church.
So stood our town in 1728. An old wood cut shows the King's Chapel, a hard, angular, wooden building, with a low, square tower, surmounted by a tall finial bearing a crown, and, far above the crown, a cock for a vane. The new Christ Church stood as it stands in venerable dignity to-day, and as we hope it may stand for many years to come. But in this year, 1728, "by reason that the Chapel is full, and no pews to be bought by new comers," the first steps were taken for the building of a new church to be called TRINITY. The land was bought at the corner of Summer street and Bishop's alley for £ 514 75.2d., and the 'corner stone was laid on the 15th of April, 1734, by the Rev. Roger Price, Rector of King's Chapel, and commis- sary of the Bishop of London. The first service was held just one year from that day. "The Rev. Mr. Roger Price, his Lord- ship's commissary, preached the first sermon," so say the an- cient Records, "from the tenth chapter of the Hebrews and twenty-third verse :- 'Let us hold fast the profession of our
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faith without wavering,' which sermon was preached before a large number of people, his Excellency, Jonathan Belcher, Esq., being present, and likewise were the subscribers, ThomasChild, William Price, Thomas Greene, Committee." And so, in a service like that which we are holding here to-day, the career of Trinity Church began, April 15, 1734.
That first structure is not beyond the memory of many who are with us. It was of wood, ninety feet long and sixty broad, and the old pictures of it show us an exterior of such exem- plary plainness, as would delight the souls of those who grudge the House of God the touch of beauty. "It had neither tower, nor steeple, nor windows in the lower story of the front. There were three entrances in front, unprotected by porches." In- deed, its exterior is almost exactly what one sees in multitudes of Pennsylvania Quaker Meeting Houses. But the interior, as all bear witness, was bright and pleasant and impressive. Its roof was a great "arch, resting on Corinthian pillars, with handsomely carved and gilded capitals. In the chancel were some paintings, considered very beautiful in their day." On the whole, no doubt, a goodly, sober, pleasant Church, where the people worshiped, and the children grew up with happy love for the Gospel which they heard, and for the place in which they heard it, and their children followed them, gen- eration after generation, for almost a century.
The first minister of Trinity was the Rev. Addington Dav- enport. He had been assistant minister of the King's Chapel, and became Rector of Trinity Church soon after it was opened. " He was born in Boston, and was a graduate of Harvard. He was the brother-in-law of Peter Faneuil, and that distinguished citizen occupied, we find, Pew No. 40 in old Trinity. During his brother-in-law's Rectorship, he gave the Church £100 towards the purchase of a new bell; and about the same time Governor Shirley presented the Communion plate which we still use, and the table cloths, prayer books, and other gifts,
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which show the kindly feeling that existed toward the new Parish. Evidently it had taken at once a most respectable posi- tion in the town.
Of our first Rector we do not get a very clear impression: all that we hear of him impresses us with good sound sense. He evidently knew how to be firm and yet conciliatory. In some trouble which occurred between Mr. Price of the Chapel and the new Church, Mr. Davenport bears himself with quiet dignity. There are on record some conditions which he made when he accepted the Rectorship, which show his foresight and judiciousness. Inall that he did he evidently intended work. He was Rector for six years, and then, in failing health, he went to England, where he died in 1746.
What was the character of the preaching which they heard in those days in that ancient Trinity, it is not hard to guess. The Church in the Colonies echoed the Church in England, and the Church in England, during the first half of the eight- eenth century, has a character that is clearly marked. It was not a time of ardent piety. From the time of the Restoration, enthusiasm had been in disesteem. The philosophy of John Locke held sway in the schools. Christianity had come to be considered as perpetually on the defensive, and the religious literature of the time consisted in large part of the statement of the external evidences of the faith, the reconciliations of its requirements with human reason, the historical arguments for this or that form of government, or the enforcement of some moral duty. There was great ability and learning among the theologians and the preachers. The age of Barrow, and Tillotson, and South, was past, but Waterland, and Berkeley, and Doddridge, and Sherlock, and Warburton, and above all, Bishop Butler, were keeping high the intellectual standard of their time. But everything shared in that uninspired character which has fastened itself irrevocably to the early part of the eighteenth century.
The English Deists were uttering what they called the re-
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ligion of common sense. It was the time of which it has been said that it was "an age destitute of depth or earnestness, --- an age whose poetry was without romance, whose philoso- phy was without insight, and whose public men were with- out character:" an age of light without love, whose very merits were of the earth, earthy. The credibility of the Chris- tian religion, and the advantages of virtue, -- these were the perennial topics. The infidel was convicted of unreasonable- ness, Sunday after Sunday. The sinner was proved to be un- thrifty, over and over again.
These were the subjects, beyond a doubt, to which your fathers listened from the lips of our first ministers. It was not the loftiest preaching. It did not go to the deepest motives or results. It dealt with no profound experiences. It had nothing rapt or mystical about it. It was clear as crystal. It was cold, no doubt, as marble. Under its coldness was preparing the great spiritual outbreak which the last quarter of the century wit- nessed in many forms. But while we see that it was not the highest preaching, we may still own that there was in the preaching of those days a sturdy common sense, and a stout moral fibre, which could not help bringing forth good results in the natures which were ripened under its influence.
But to return to Trinity. Our second Rector, the successor of Mr. Davenport, is a man who stands with considerable dis- tinctness before us. The Rev. William Hooper had been Pastor of the West Congregational Church, in Cambridge Street, ever since it was gathered in 1737. Suddenly, in the autumn of 1746, without the slightest notice of his intention, he broke away from his old associations and became an Episcopalian. It must have made a great talk in the little town. He had been beloved and honored in his Church, and everybody was filled with surprise. At once the proprietors of Trinity Church chose him to be their Rector, and he sailed for England, and came back in 1747, in full orders. He took charge of our parish im-
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mediately, and retained it for twenty years, till in 1767 he sud- denly fell dead as he was walking in his garden.
He seems to have been thoroughly a man of his time. He left the Congregationalists, partly because of the argument for Episcopacy, but mainly because of the more liberal and rational theology which he had imbibed. The latitude of the Church attracted him. The Scripture and natural reason were his oracles. He was an honest and brave man, and his ministry must have been thoroughly wholesome. One of his succes- sors, Dr. Bartol, the present minister of the West Church, wrote of him twenty years ago, "If he had faults, of which the reg- ister does not appear, though some may think his desertion of his people implied them, I am confident they were not those of hypocrisy or double-dealing in any form; and his sum- mary leave-taking of his charge, showed, perhaps, only a na- ture whose first necessity, like that of all great natures, was conformity between its action and its thought." It does not sound strange to us, after this, that his son was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
It was during the ministry of Mr. Hooper, that the Greene Foundation for the support of an assistant minister was es- tablished, by the gift of the heirs of Mr. Thomas Greene, supplemented by the contribution of other members of the parish. It has done good service, and has brought into con- nection with us many men of great ability and eminence. Its last and best work has been the re-establishment of the par- ish of St. Mark's Church in this city, which is now so full of hope and promise.
The first Assistant Minister on the Foundation was Dr. William Walter, and on the death of Mr. Hooper he became the Rector of the parish. He had been bred a Congregation- alist, but became a member of our Church, and went to Lon- don for ordination. For ten years he served Trinity with faithfulness, and then the beginning of the Revolution came.
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On the 17th of March, 1776, Boston was evacuated by the British, and the minister of Trinity went with General Howe and the British troops to Halifax, in Nova Scotia, where he remained until the Revolution was over. Then he returned to Boston, and became the Rector of Christ Church. He died in 1800, and his funeral sermon was preached by his successor in Trinity, Dr. Parker. That sermon gives us a good idea of the faithful and earnest parish minister, and though in those hot days of patriotic zeal there was no chance for one who was out of sympathy with the cause of the Colonies, to be the preacher here, the very fact that when the war was over the royalist could come back to Boston and become again the Rector of a parish in the town, bears witness to the honor in which. he must have been held.
The Revolution then had come. The English Church, which was to the people here the Church of their oppressors, most naturally fell into dislike, even greater than that with which the old Puritan feeling had regarded it. Every patriotic soul distrusted it. It was a hard time for Episcopacy here in Boston. Christ Church was closed from 1775 to 1778. King's Chapel was shut up, after its minister had fled to Halifax, un- til, by a poetic justice which seemed to revenge the arbitrari- ness with which the Old South meeting house had been seized and used by Sir Edmund Andros in the century before, the Old South people worshiped in the Chapel from 1777 to 1783. Only Trinity stood through the war, always open for worship and keeping alight the endangered fire of the Church.
This post of honor, this good record, she owes mainly to . Dr. Samuel Parker, who had been the Assistant on the Greene Foundation from 1773, and who became minister of the Church after Dr. Walter's sudden departure. His long ministry gives a large part of its character to our history. He is the first of the three personages who stand out clearest and strongest in our picture. His calm, judicious, dignified behavior, evidently made possible the continuance of our services in Revolutionary times.
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His catholic spirit is evident in all his actions. Once he even allowed a Requiem Mass, with the full Roman Catholic cere- monial, to be celebrated in Trinity Church, to the great dis- gust of at least one of his parishioners. He was a clear, strong, unbigoted Churchman, to whom the Churches naturally looked for counsel and example, and to whom in his later life they turned by ready instinct when they were seeking for a Bishop. His children's children, and their children, are with us now; and his family, in every generation, has made a large part of the strength of Trinity.
It must have been a strange, exciting day, when on Thurs- day, the 18th day of July, 1776, Dr. Parker called the Wardens and Vestry of the Church together, and told them that "he could not with safety perform the service of the Church for the future, as the Continental Congress had declared the American Provinces free and independent States ; had absolved them from all allegiance to the British crown, and had dissolved all politi- cal connection between them and the realm of England." The news had evidently just arrived from Philadelphia. "He told them that he had been publicly interrupted the Sunday before, when he read the prayers for the King. He was sure that he could not read the service as it then stood, another Sunday. He begged their counsel and advice." The Wardens and Vestry were wise and prudent men. Probably they were also Ameri- cans and patriots. They concluded that "it would be more for the interest and cause of Episcopacy, and the least evil of the two, to omit a part of the Liturgy, than to shut up the Church." And they hoped "that, in this sad alternative, it will not be im- puted to them as a fault, or construed as a want of affection for the Liturgy of the Church, if under these circumstances they omit that part of it in which the King is mentioned." So Trin- ity threw in her lot with the country, and under her wise Rector lived through those troublous times. "To the noble conduct of our deceased friend," said Dr. Gardiner of Dr. Parker, in his funeral sermon, "must doubtless be attributed
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the preservation of the Episcopal Church in this town." So that we to-day owe him a debt which is easy to trace, and pleasant to acknowledge. In this new chancel a memorial window is to tell of his perpetual honor in the parish.
So time passed by. The open doors of Trinity welcomed those few who would still attend the English service ; and after a while the war was over. Independence was secured. The Col- onies were States. The nation had begun to live. Then came the long and doubtful struggle whether the Episcopal Church in this country should still maintain its life. This is not the place to tell the story of that struggle. It was the existence of a few parishes like this of ours, which mainly insured the possibility, and ultimately brought about success. Slowly the Church renewed its life, and rooted itself among the people, changing its character to meet the changed times, making it- self an American Church. It has grown with the growth of the country from that day to this. We can never be thankful enough for the wisdom that directed her then. Keeping her reverence for all sacred associations of the past, she did genuinely cut herself free from all authority of the Church of England. She enlarged the freedom of her standards. She simplified the methods of her government. She established herself a free Church in a free State. Therein was her strength and hope. Therein her hope and strength must always be. If ever our Church goes back, and cumbers herself with the precedents, and submits herself to the influence or authority of the Eng- lish Church, her power in this land is gone. She must be part and parcel of this people. She must be in heart and soul Amer- " ican, or she is nothing. She must have her sympathies here, and not across the sea. She must have her gaze and enthusiasm fixed upon the future of America, and not upon the past of England: or else she loses that fair heritage, which the eye of faith might have seen opening before her on the day when the Wardens and Vestry of Trinity voted that they would not close the Church, but that they would cease to acknowledge the
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King; voted, in a word, that they and their Church would be American.
Dr. Parker was chosen Bishop of Massachusetts in 1804. But he died in the same year, before he had done any Episco- pal service in his diocese. Before his death another ministry had begun, which was destined to be long and influential in the history of Trinity, and which reached to a period which not a few of those who are now listening to me can well remember. The Rev. Dr. John Sylvester John Gardiner was chosen assistant minister of this Church in 1792, and in 1805 he was made its Rector. He was in charge of the parish when he died in England, where he had gone to seek for health in 1830. Through those twenty-five years Dr. Gardiner admin- istered the affairs of the parish alone, letting the income of the Greene Foundation accumulate, that it might be sufficient to render to the parish the aid which it has since afforded.
Dr. Gardiner's ministry must always be one of those which give character to the history of our parish. His broad and fin- ished scholarship, his strong and vigorous manhood, his genial hospitality, his kindly pastorship, his fatherly affection, and his eloquence and wit, made him for forty years a marked and in- fluential person, not merely in the Church but in the town. Dr. Doane, who was his successor, preached a sermon at his death, in which he commemorates the man, the scholar, and the Christian minister, in terms of glowing eulogy, which evi- dently appealed with confidence to the affection of those who listened, for their full justification. It is pleasant to know that the memory of Dr. Gardiner, too, will be honored by one of the memorial windows, which before long will fill our chan- cel. The remembrance of his ministry will never pass away, and we pray that his descendants may always make a valued and honored part of our parish, as they do to-day.
The events of such a useful, honorable ministry as his are few. What events there are, melt together, as we look back upon them, into one smooth and even flow of prosperous life.
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In 1811, the Church reported fifty baptisms and one hundred and fifty regular communicants. In 1819, the movements be- gan which led to the establishment of St. Paul's Church, which has done so much good work, and is now gathering itself up anew for a work as good, as noble, as any that it has done be- fore. All this was full of interest for Trinity.
But now the time came when the old Church building,which had stood almost a hundred years, was growing weak with age. Perhaps the town, also, and the parish were growing rich and luxurious. The old sanctuary no longer satisfied the people, and those first movements which portend the building of a new Church beganto show themselves. We, who have labored for the last four years, and watched with such anxiety and satisfaction the rising of this House of God, can understand the experiences of our fathers. The Proprietors voted, in 18 28, to take down the venerable structure, which Mr. Commissary Price, long since gone back to England and gathered to his fathers, had dedicated almost a century before, and to build a new one. This new Church was finally consecrated by Bishop Griswold, on the 11th of November, 1829. There were some ancient people who never ceased, up to the day when the flames wrapt its granite walls in glory, and devoured the painted pride of its interior, to call the building where we worshiped till within five years, "the new Church."
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