USA > Ohio > Cuyahoga County > Cleveland > Annals of the First Presbyterian church of Cleveland, 1820-1895 > Part 3
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But Christ is speaking of the wider relations of a man to his fellows and to the world he lives in, to the way in which fathers prepare the way of their children and they in turn influence them that come after; to the way in which one generation of men steps into the work of former generations, and leaves to another its own unfinished plans.
As concerns individual character this day's living reports itself immediately. To-day's debauch writes its story to-day on nerve, and tissue, and tendency. Out in the wide world-field, building up a nation, a city, a church, evangelizing a land, one generation may spend itself in obscurity, successive generations may seem to be moving at a snail's pace towards the distant goal, and would absolutely have lived in vain but for that continuity of life and influence which sets one generation in the steps of the receding, and allows no break. A great principle is touched here, old as time and broad as the world, which it is of great consequence to get hold of-of the utmost interest, as well.
See the foreshadowing of this weighty matter in the building work of a world as outlined in Genesis. Out of chaos to build a universe, and whatever may be true of other worlds, to get one ready for the divine-imaged man to act his part on. One, two, three, four, five great stages of preparation, each running through vast periods of time. Two built upon one, three built up on one and two, five, on all the four
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preceding. All five needed to make a dwelling-place for the man who is coming. One Aeon sows and another reaps; also, sows for the next to reap. The principle of succession holds, even though a man interprets the six days as of twenty-four hours each.
But see how human history evolves after the same fashion. Suppose that with the departure of each generation the decks were cleared of their work and of the records of their experience, for a new one to begin its work. They shall not enter into the labors of their ancestors. They shall do their own work and live their own life, detached from all that went before and is to follow. There could then be no history, no progress. History and progress are possible because each succeeding generation is heir to all that has gone before.
Hebrew history begins with Abram, but Abram does not leave Ur of the Chaldees empty-handed, empty-headed. He has a great fund of experience to draw upon. The libraries of this book and priestly city of Ur contain the gathered wisdom of the past. The voice that comes to him from God and the urgency that is upon him, come through the traditions of a still more primitive age and people. They have a hand in the making of this man Abram, soon to be styled, Friend of God, and Prince among men, father of the faithful through teeming centuries. In character reaping as he went the harvest of his sowing, as Paul says; as related to the Hebrew people and the purpose of God that in him should all the families of the earth be blessed, sowing for others to reap, as he was
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privileged to reap the wisdom of centuries before him.
We speak of the glory of the age of Solomon, but without a David there had been no Solomon. The glory of the Solomonic age is shot through with the glory of the Davidic. David getting ready the material of the temple for Solomon to build it, is typical of what is going on everywhere. David sowed stones and cedar trees, gold and silver, conquests of enemies round about through bloody wars, amicable relations with great powers to the north of him, that Solomon might reap peace and wealth from the tribute of the conquered, and build the temple and the royal palaces, and ships to go to Ezion-geber, and pursue the studies congenial to himself, meanwhile himself sowing the seeds of discord and corruption of the faith, and mesalliance with alien blood, for his son and the people of Israel to reap in a dismembered kingdom; and even David is only the culmination of a series, and his work is possible because of Saul, and Samuel, and Moses. They are all here, in that august hour, when the finished temple is filled with the glory of Jehovah, the proudest moment of Solomon's life. And there is not a church called by the name of the Christ, nor a mosque from whose minaret tower issues the call to prayer in Allah's name, that is not linked with this same temple, where for the first time Jehovah's name was associated with structures of wood and stone.
Any one can see that the Victorian era of English history, whose marvellous strides have no parallel elsewhere, and which throws into shadow by its exceeding brightness, all that went before through a
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thousand years, is the harvest-time of the sowing of all that long travail of generation following generation, whose resultant is the English nation of to-day. This little island has all been fought over. Norman, Dane, Celt and Saxon have all had a hand in its making. Feudal castles everywhere tell of a stage in this building process, once vital, long since passed away. The civil and religious liberty of this day is the price of martyr blood that flowed like water. This throne and sceptre, for half a century so honored, what a succession trends away back into the past. Go to Westminster Abbey and see. Great cathedrals all over England tell of a religious cult no longer extant, but represented in the Church of England, whose child she is.
Not to enlarge; all through, it is one generation, one reign sowing and another reaping, the last gathering up all the best of all that went before, and sowing the world with the ample resources, the gathered wisdom, the open Bibles, the civil rights, the sense of justice, the civilization of the most wondrous era of the world, thus far.
To come closer home, no one will pretend that our Pilgrim fathers reaped what they sowed from 1620 on. Nor did they of the Colonial period, through the slow-moving century and a half to the war of Independence. They avowed their unselfish purpose to spend themselves for posterity. They were happy in the thought that others would enter into their labors. They gloried in the vision of a ripened harvest, which only whitened to their faith. These
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sentiments were voiced by the nation's leaders, all through the period of the revolution, and echoed back from the firesides where sacrifice left its scars and wrote its heroic annals. They had, indeed, reaped a harvest from the sowing of the seed of the kingdom in martyr-blood, harrowed into the soil of ther lives by persecution. They gathered of the precious grain in the full belief that to sit down and munch it all in selfishness was to rob the world and impoverish the generation that was to be.
No harvest is gathered that is not meant, in part, to be the mother of harvests yet to be. Every reaper must be a sower, or rob the world of a harvest that is its due. They had no quarrel with the plans of God and the ordering of His world. They had reaped the harvest of a costly sowing, they would sow the seed of one no less precious for their children to reap. And so it came to pass that the expatriated of the old world became the founders of the new ; and the colonies grew into the nation, and the nation struggled on, through con- flict of opinion, and strife of words, and clash of arms, till the years of a century are numbered, but the whole hundred are garnered into the last, the winnowed wheat, the residuum that came out of the fires un- touched, and somewhat of the evil that always goes with the good, the harvesting of the latest born.
This is the way the church has grown from one hundred and twenty, in an upper chamber in old Jerusalem, a church not yet out of the broken shell of Judaism, into a world-wide faith. It is a broken shell,
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this Judaism. It cannot hold for long the imprisoned life. This church inherits much from the past. It owes much to the future. How much do I owe the future ? All I have got out of the past, with interest. This church of the first generation must sow that the next may live, and reap, and sow again. This is life's process everywhere.
Centuries of religious stagnation lie between us and the apostolic age, because this principle was not duly honored. Content to harvest, and not sow that others might also reap, their selfishness avenged itself in degenerate life. We reap to live, but we sow to make it worth while to live, and to make possible a better and brighter future, for the world. But for this law obeyed, the church had never gotten out of Jerusalem. The beginning had been the end. No- body that plucks the fruit from this tree of life but is bound to sow the seeds that other men may live. There is not a continent, nor an island of the sea, nor a tribe or people, made Christian except as this law of life has been honored.
Because it has never been allowed to drop out of sight, the Christendom of this closing decade of the nineteenth century is seen to be linked with Pentecost, and the church which persecu- tion scattered abroad. What is this Christendom of today? What that was, is told in a few paragraphs in the Acts. No most gifted pen can fully outline this and not write a volume. It sweeps all climes, all continents, all seas, all races of men. One in three of all the world's populations professes, in some sort, to
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own the name of Christ. The great civilizing forces of the age, the leash that holds in check the mightiest armies of history, the word of command that controls the fleets that sail all seas, rest with Christian powers. They practically dominate all lands and peoples.
What is behind it all? What has made this cen- tury so essentially different from the first? It is obedience to the command of our Lord Christ. "Go, teach all nations! When one falls let another take his place, and sow the seed of the kingdom which is the word of God. Harvesting will follow." They went. They scattered themselves, these of the loyal legion, over Europe, Africa, America, the islands of the sea, one generation sowing and another reaping, and so on and on. That is how it came to pass that there is a Europe, an England, a United States of America, a Cleveland and a First Presbyterian Church in it. And yet, some people do not believe in missions!
And now that I have, at last, got to Cleveland, it is scarcely necessary to do more than remind you of its history-which is all too young not to be familiar- to have you see, that we have come to this hour, gen- eration following generation, working along this line. In no manner else could we have got here. This gen- eration cannot say, see this great city that we have builded. The building of this city goes back of early settler and red man, to the time when God was plow- ing out the valley of the Cuyahoga and making possi- ible a harbor for a great fleet of ships. Nor is there any sundering chasm between straggling, miasmatic, uncanny hamlet, and thrifty village, and populous
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city, aspiring to be the first in the commonwealth. The villager is here. The men of the twenties are here in the nineties. Other men labored, and we have entered into their labors. Badger and Brad- street, and Aiken and Goodrich and Mitchell are all here in the First Church, and the noble generation of men and women whom we have followed to their graves, one by one, live on amongst us, through that continuity of life and influence which finds its fullest, noblest illustration in institutions-the church and the nation.
We should, by all means, now gather up some lessons of practical worth. 1. Rightly appre. hended, here is ground for a true humility. Boasting is excluded when no man can say of anything signifi- cant in his life or doing, "this is exclusively mine. It has no roots in the past, and partnership in any other, there is none!" Of what can this be said? First of all, every sane man sees that for what he is must be recognized, in some degree, often in great degree, the character of the family tree of which he is a branch, and what was done for him in the cradle and thence forward. And then, beginning to work, no matter where or on what, he could make no absolutely new start. Who, a builder in church or state, in schools of learning or avenue of trade, does not know and gladly recognize his indebtedness to the past; and but for that past, his work must have been quite other than it is. Fix your eyes on the college that was transplanted from Hudson, or this church established here among the alder bushes, now standing in the
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heart of a great commercial city, and tell me who is so conceited as not to own to himself-"I have a mis- sion because my forerunners made history in their day. Had they not sown, my harvest had been thin. Nine-tenths of this structure lies behind me. Let me not be high minded, but humble."
2. So far from paralyzing effort, herein lies its great incentive. True, I cannot separate and view apart the fruit of my own effort; it goes into the common stock of effort that is building up the church, the school, the community. But nothing so surely conserves all worthy effort as institutions which are to live on in some form or other. The form may change, but the thing in its essence abides. A little pulley is a small affair in the great network of machinery, but without it there would be friction. A boy is a small force among a hundred men, but the boy may be essential to the best use of the hundred. And boy and pulley tell for far more because of their partner- ship with others in a great work, than could they, worked apart from all such co-operation.
We are often concerned about our little doing. It seems insignificant, and even so, we cannot gather it up. We think of them who pass away in an untimely hour as it seems to us. They were not permitted to reap the harvest of their sowing. They saw not the land of promise towards which they toiled. But it was worth while for Moses to bring the children of Israel out of bondage and to the border of the promised land, though he, himself, might not enter. He was work- ing on a very broad plan, which he could not begin to
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comprehend, and his part was vital to its fulfillment. It was worth while for David to gather up the material for the temple whose walls and golden spires he might not see. But David went into the temple. The essential David, and Moses went into Canaan, and they both walk the earth wherever the living oracles are taken abroad, and the sweet songs of Israel are sung, and the ten great words are said. So the fathers are with us, and the mothers in our Israel, the young men and maidens, and the stalwart in their prime-all they who, first and last, have sat within these walls and wrought here for Christ. O yes, a great cloud of witnesses, their work and our work knitted into the same web, one and entire unto this day. When we see truly we shall understand that this is the true glory of life, that, so far from being set apart to a little task, all by ourselves, to write our name upon when done, we are taken into a great, glorious, divine fellowship, upon a building of God whose topmost stone shall be brought forth with rejoicing, and sowers and reapers shall be glad to- gether in one hallelujah shout-"Glory to God in the highest." No worker, ever so humble, nor honest effort though weak, will fail of being gathered into the structured kingdom, upon which the saints of all the ages have wrought.
3. Rightly viewed, as we see, our work thus goes on when our visible presence is no more a part of it. Indeed the best of it may issue in result after we are gone. It could not be if everything had stopped when the fathers went, or were to stop when we retire.
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To the superficial view, men never seem of so little consequence, as when we see how, their bier having passed by, the great tide of affairs moves right on, un- resting. A moment men pause and look up-"Gone !" and settle down to their work, till their time comes. Nobody seems essential to anything. We thought everything rested on the shoulders of such an one, and lo! there is no collapse, nor scarce a tremor, now that those shoulders are withdrawn. It is well that the affairs of the world do not stop, when, to human view, we stop.
But we do not stop. The men who have shepherded this flock in days gone by still wield their crook over it. Livingston is more alive today than when, wan and in rags, he knelt to die in the thatched hovel of Illala. We make our stand upon such as he, that we may learn to see that this is true of all genuine life. Sherlock J. Andrews is just as much alive to me as when he sat down there in the pew, a listener to inspire a preacher; and I said-well, if such a man can get anything out of discourses like mine, I'll peg away. To me these aisles are full of men who will never die. They make sacred the work to which we put our hand; the steps into which we put our feet. Beware ye who enter into the labors of such as these, in pulpit and in pew, that in no mean way ye enter.
4. First in the family, and next in the church, this principle of continuity and partnership in interest holds with supreme force.
How many of us must say, if we speak truly- "Our parents, our grandparents, labored, and we have
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entered into their labors. Our inheritance from them has made us what we are. These things that stand in my name do not represent my industry and economy. I am one who entered into a door that another hand set ajar, and here I am." True, wherefore art thou here? It takes a deal of sense to enter into the labors of others. Our own labors, if we have any, we know the cost of-we know not the cost of others' labors. What do we know of the cost of pioneer life? But for pioneer life, where were we? Try to know the cost of your inheritance from the past that you may know how to carry yourself therein. For some seem to have no sense of privilege and responsibility in the labors of others into which they enter. They shut the door quick behind the retreating form, and set them- selves down in the midst of the toils and economies of past generations, as a grub burrows in a nut till the meat is all gone-and is a grub still.
Nay, nay! This thy harvest of other men's labors is thy seed-corn to sow the world with, that other men may reap in due time, also. Wouldst thou make thy harvest, the last? Shall the sickles of the next gener- ation lie rust eaten because the grain lies hoarded in thy bin? Wouldst thou breed a famine of the bread of noble deeds and words by which men live? Thy measure of privilege and of obligation towards the world is the measure of thy inheritance, plus what you can make of it. Hoarded gold gathers no interest. Wheat, in mummy chests, ripens into no harvest. Scatter, that other men may reap even as thou dost. Labor, that when thou goest the way of all the earth,
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there may be something worth while for other men to enter into.
This is the great incentive to the realization of life's end in the family, in society, and in the church of God. We need sense to see it and grace to use it- and all as parts of one great whole not yet disclosed, all as bearing upon the one, enduring kingdom of our Lord Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and in earth are named. This it is that gives significance to such an anniversary as we now approach. And while we duly honor the past, let us be more concerned to honor the future, for the future is always greater than the past.
I can have but scant sympathy-nay, none what- ever, with a man who, in full vision of what this church has been to this community and the world, to individuals and households for three-quarters of a cen- tury, is not stirred up to do her honor. Not every one among us has been saintly, not everything, prob- ably, has been wisely planned and carried out. If we are after the flies in the ointment we can most likely find them. But is this the best way to honor a church which has enrolled nearly four thousand souls, and ministered to vastly more in those matters which we profess to believe of chiefest concern to us and to all men? Is this the best way to send her on her forward path with courage and hope? Fulsome adulation is hateful. Boasting is unbecoming. A hypercritical spirit is always unfruitful, but a candid recognition of a worthy service, worthily rendered, is honorable alike to all concerned.
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SEVENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY SERMON. 1820 -- 1895.
PREACHED BY THE PASTOR, SUNDAY MORNING, OCTOBER 20, 1895, FIRST CHURCH OF CLEVELAND.
Isaiah 60:22:
The little one shall become a thousand, and the small one a strong nation : I, the Lord, will hasten it in its time.
It is not my intention this morning to enter into the history of this church, except in a casual way. I shall not speak of those who have been making history here for seventy-five years. This ground I have trav- ersed with you many times, and in the program of the week, justice will be done to the leaders and the led in the story of our past. Rather would I turn, first of all, to a glance at some features of the period through which this church has held on its way.
I. It will help us to get our bearings to recall that when this church was planted, James Monroe was President of the United States, twenty-three in all, with a population of less than ten millions. John Marshall was Chief Justice, Salmon P. Chase was a school boy in New Hampshire, Abraham Lincoln a boy of eleven in Kentucky, and Grant was not yet born. California belonged to Mexico; we had no Pacific coast, and no highway over the Rockies. In politics it was the year of the Missouri compromise, designed to put a limit to the area of slavery. In England, George the Third dies and is succeeded by
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George the Fourth. Napoleon languishes on St. Helena, to die a year later. Alexander II is Czar of Russia, and Mahmond II, Sultan of Turkey, is the terror of the East. The unveiling of Africa is scarcely begun, Japan and China are practically closed to the outside world, and India, through great tribulation, is being brought under the sceptre of Great Britain. There was neither railroad nor telegraph. Indeed, the first stage into Cleveland came through from the east in 1820, and not till two years later did the first steamer plow the waters of Lake Erie. The village of Cleveland had a population of one hundred and fifty, and stretched ambitiously towards Erie street, but could not reach it. There were now two churches in the village, too weak to be self-supporting, a house of worship for either of them being a thing of the far- away future.
The land-marks of 1820, wherever seen, on the face of this habitable globe, set in the light of our day, seem to take us back among the ancients. So much has been wrought in three-quarters of a century, the annals of the years are so crowded with momentous events, the mind, conscious of its limitations, confesses its but partial grasp of the prodigious movement which has changed the face of the world.
It will be seen that this period covers the Victo- rian era, the brightest in British annals ; the unveiling and partition of Africa ; the bringing of the Asiatic continent into touch with the civilized world, and the transformation of Japan ; the occupation of Australia and the Pacific Isles; the overthrow of slavery in the
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States, and the beginning of the end every where ; and the commemoration of the centennial of this nation in a manner never before parallelled since time was young.
These events, far and near, constitute the environ- ment of our church life through these eventful years. They have had their effect upon us. They have made their impress upon the thinking and the character, the individual and collective life of hamlet and village and city. The history of this church is a part of the history of the world.
Tucked into this little corner of Lake Erie, gradu- ally overshadowed by the city's greatness, as these towering, many-storied blocks belittle warehouses, once thought to be stately, we may seem to have lived our life in seclusion. We may think it far-fetched to link the life of a church with another hemisphere; as if it made any difference with us who is on the throne of England, France, Russia, or what is going on in Asia or Africa, or what the issue of the wars that in this our day, beyond all the wars of the ages, have rocked Europe, Asia and America.
The fact is that, just as the rising tide finds and fills every little nook and cranny of the great coast line of the sea, so the changed conditions of empire, the great upheavals of society, the birth and decay of nations, the benediction of letters, music and art, make themselves felt in remotest hamlets, and nurse into greatness by humblest firesides, the susceptible spirits of the men and women of the future. And many an obscure cottage or artisan's bench, in towns too insig-
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