USA > Ohio > Hamilton County > Cincinnati > The First Congregational church (Unitarian) of Cincinnati; a historical sketch with some account of the Church of the Redeemer, and Unity church > Part 2
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field for the planting of a society of the new liberalism; and the fact that the eventual title of the church, in its act of incorporation omitted the word Unitarian, an omission of which considerable importance was made in later legal contro- versies, gives color to the belief that Mr. Flint's influence was weighty in placing the church upon a basis which might invite membership from all shades of dissent from the severity of doctrine of other denominations.
William Greene, Timothy Walker, James Ryland, John R. Child and Nathan Guilford, were influential men of affairs, in law and trade, whose heirs have survived to our time among the most honored citizens of the community. Messrs. Greene and Walker, especially, became through the following years of the vicissitudes of the church, its most devoted guides and counselors. Judge Walker remained through his life a resident of the city, but Mr. Greene returned to his native Rhode Island in his later days and died there.
The first minister to be settled in the pastorate was Edward Brooks Hall, a graduate of Harvard College, in 1820, and minister of the church in Northampton, Massachusetts, from 1826 to 1829. His service lasted for only eight months, from September, 1830, to June 13, 1831. From November, 1832, he was the pastor of the important church in Providence, Rhode Island, in which office he died, March 3, 1866.
A vacant pulpit of nearly a year welcomed an untried minister of twenty-five years of age, Ephraim Peabody, a graduate of Bowdoin College, in Maine, whose pastorate began May 20, 1832, and ended in February, 1836. The sermon of installation was delivered by Rev. James Walker, long the President of Harvard College and a notable preacher. Another participant in the services from New England was Rev. Francis Parkman, of Boston, who, although pastor for many years of one of the foremost of the Boston Unitarian churches, is more distinctly preserved to fame through his son, Francis, the author of the many brilliant and fascinating his- tories of the conflicts between the European settlers of North- western America and the Indian tribes. In the printed order of service for that day no names of participants are given; but of two original hymns written for the occasion, the first is reputed to have been from the hand of the candidate for
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Installation, and the second from James Handasyd Perkins, then new to the city but for many subsequent years a striking and influential personality in the intellectual life of the city and of the church.
The hymn ascribed to Mr. Peabody is as follows:
O Thou before whose glorious brow, With veiling wings archangels bow, May our deep trembling prayer To mercy's ear accepted rise, Through the rich music of the skies, And blend harmonious there.
Thou wert not in the earthquake's crash, Nor in the bannered lightning's flash, That flamed o'er mount and grove; But in the low, soft breath that stirred The conscious leaves Thy voice was heard, In mercy and in love.
Lord let that sweet and holy strain Breathe through this dedicated fane, Thy blessing here descend; While praise and incense heavenward roll, Fill with Thy glory every soul, Our Father and our friend.
May he whose pastoral hand shall guide This flock where living waters glide, Here angel-strengthened be. With unpolluted lips impart Immortal truths, and lift each heart Adoring unto Thee.
The hymn which is printed among his compositions, in the memoir of Mr. Perkins by his friend, William Henry Channing, is as follows:
That voice which bade the dead arise, And gave back vision to the blind, Is hushed, but when he sought the skies, Our Master left his word behind.
'Twas not to bid the ocean roll, "Twas not to bid the hill be riven; No-'twas to lift the fainting soul, And lead the erring mind to heaven.
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To heave a mountain from the heart; To bid those inner springs be stirred. Lord, to Thy servant here impart The more than wisdom of that word.
Dwell, Father, round this earthly fane, And when its feeble walls decay, Be with us as we meet again, Within Thy halls of endless day.
There is but scanty record of the activities of this ministry. As has been said above, the new pastor promptly organized the association of communicants, which from olden time in the Congregational churches, had existed in distinction from the parish, or company of attendants upon the Sunday worship, who helped to fill the pews and to pay the cost of maintenance of the services. It was a church within a church, made up of those who had passed through some distinctive phase of emotional exercise and become regenerated so as to accept the bread and wine of the communion or Lord's Supper which was usually observed upon the first Sunday of each month. One of the earliest sources of discontent with this somewhat arbitrary division between two classes of worshippers was the extent to which the Sunday morning congregation separated into a minority, who stayed in the pews upon the invitation of the minister given to "all those who deemed themselves worthy" or "those who believed in and loved the Lord Jesus Christ," and the majority who went to their several homes at once. That minority in the liberal churches became increasingly small; the wife often remaining while the husband went out; the moral difference if any was distinguishable, being hardly such as would affect the outside world's estimate of the merit of the two persons.
In the critical year of the schism between the Liberals and the Orthodox in Massachusetts, 1820, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts was called upon to decide betwixt the claims of the two orders of parishioners to a possession of the property of the parish. The decision was in favor of the majority, who quite invariably were those who were not church members, a truly democratic judgment, which however, sometimes, it is feared, did injustice to the most faithful and generous sup-
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porters of the religious life of the community. When this majority, who retained possession of the church building, included few or none of the "communicants," it became neces- sary according to the tradition of the age, to form a new associa- tion of communicants whose bond of union was greatly simpli- fied over the ancient creeds, but which still, with some feeble- ness and reluctance, kept up the old separation between "members" and "parishioners." Such was the association to which Mr. Peabody gave the foregoing statement of beliefs. The usual office of deacon was temporarily filled by Messrs. Timothy Flint and William P. Rice.
In the first six years of its life, the church had already made two changes of ministry, a process which was to be unhap- pily frequent for the next ten years. Benjamin Huntoon, of whom there is no further record, served the society from August, 1837, to May, 1838. And it was another year before William Henry Channing, a nephew of the famous Unitarian leader, William Ellery Channing, received an invitation to become the pastor of the flock, the call to the office being signed by a new set of Trustees, viz: Nathan Hastings, John C. Vaughan, Charles Fisher, Benjamin Urner, John S. Childs.
For the first time in the church's history the dignity of a formal council of Congregational Churches for considering the merits of the pastoral candidate, was conferred upon the con- gregation on the 10th of May, 1839, representatives of five liberal Congregational churches taking part in the deliberations. These were Rev. Frederick A. Farley, of the Westminster Congregational Church of Providence, Rhode Island; a lay delegate, a Mr. Rowland, from the Brattle Square Church of Boston; Mr. Samuel St. John, Jr., from the church in Mobile, Alabama; Rev. James Freeman Clarke, of the Church of the Messiah, in Louisville, and Rev. William G. Eliot, of the Church of the Messiah, in St. Louis. The Council found no difficulty in approving the merits of the candidate, and the service of installation was completed by the participation of the visiting ministers. The sermon was by Mr. Farley; the prayer and right hand of fellowship by Mr. Clarke; the charge to the minister-elect and the address to the people by Mr. Eliot; and the two hymns of the occasion were contributed by the ever-ready lyrist of the congregation, James H. Perkins.
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Mr. Channing had been a boyhood friend of Mr. Perkins and it was through the recommendation of the latter that the new minister begin his activities here. Channing had gradu- ated, in 1829, from Harvard College and had served for a year in New York City as Minister at large, that is, in service among the poor, before the Cincinnati invitation. He found a congregation of some two hundred persons, drawn from fifty or sixty families. The Sunday School had fifty children and fifteen teachers. With the enthusiasm of youth and of a highly emotional temperament he entered upon the task of shaping the new church according to high ideals of what the religion of a new age in the spirit of democracy should seek to accom- plish. Forty years later, in 1879, from his home in England where he passed some twenty-five of his last years, dying there in 1884, he wrote to a commemorative service in this his former church, "There is coming a new era of Christiandom, the celestial signs of which will be the revival of real Christian life. Our nation of united freemen may be, if only wise enough to will it, the elect people to realize that divine ideal and so fulfill the desire of all nations, by organizing in every township of our Christian Commonwealth, perfect societies as heavens on earth."
Among his projects for carrying into effect that vision of the perfect church was the proposed organization of "The Church of the Christian Brethren," as a substitute for the existing communicants' church, which had apparently failed to enlist the co-operation of some of the most valuable attendants upon the services of worship. This new organization was to meet upon the first Sunday afternoon of each month, for the observance of the Lord's Supper, joining in social worship, conversing and hearing addresses upon subjects of religion and philanthropy, and contributing to the charitable funds of the association. The members could exercise their discretion as to whether they would or would not partake of the Supper. The accompanying pledge of faith, required to complete the act of admission, was not essentially different from that already in force from the beginning of the Peabody pastorate. Inas- much as Mr. Channing's ministry ended not long after the formation of this association of Christian Brethren, its life was limited to the period of his presence in the church.
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But matters of more stirring interest distracted the mind of the Congregation from its private aspirations after the elevation of the religious thought of the nation. No right-minded Uni- tarian minister, then or thereafter, could be contented to stand apart from the struggle for promoting social righteous- ness which had assumed widespread activity throughout the free states of the Union, as contrasted with the temper of those parts of the nation which were under the influence of the system of negro slavery which put under a ban all agitation of troublesome political and social problems. The two topics which pressed to the front of discussion, in which the Unitarian pastor felt morally bound to take part, were intemperance and slavery.
Hard drinking had for a long period threatened the moral fibre of the nation and produced an awakening of public sentiment in favor of its severe control which, for many years, especially in the best educated portions of the Union, assumed much of the character of a revival of religion, with campaigns of oratory conducted often by eloquent reformed inebriates of a picturesque and pathetic quality, and the circulation of literature. The epoch of prohibition agitation and legislation had not yet come; moral suasion, the stirring of the sensibilities and of reasonable self-respect, was the dominant reliance of the agitation for moderation in drinking, if not of total abstinence.
Mr. Channing, who was always ardent and zealous in what- soever cause he had at heart, preached much in favor of total abstinence; but although this sort of discourse was not received with the full approval of his hearers, its effects were not pro- foundly disturbing upon his congregation, unless perchance distillers were among its members. But his advocacy of the immediate settlement of the institution of negro slavery in the South by a national act of emancipation, and his frequent presentation of the horrible features of the working of the insti- tution, not alone in its cruelties to its victims but in its corrup- tion of the entire spiritual life of the white communities in which it existed as well as of the national politics, touched to the quick the sensibilities of the city. To large numbers of of our people slavery bore the aspect not chiefly of an offence against the first principles of republican government and
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of human rights, but rather of an economic inheritance in which were implicated many elements of the national existence which could not be rudely altered, at the summons of abstract theories of justice. That is to say, slavery had come down to the present generation from a period when toleration and approval of its existence were world-wide, and in the formation of the United States, although the evils and incon- gruities of the system were beginning to be the occasion of much heart-searching, even at the time of the adoption of the American Constitution which compromised the growing dif- ferences of opinion upon the subject between the North, where it had wholly disappeared, and the South, where it continued to be agriculturally profitable, yet the right to hold slaves was by national consent. Therefore, to threaten its existence and to stir up the temper of rebellion among the slaves aroused anger and fear, not only among the slave owners whose material prosperity was involved, but among all who felt the obligations to maintain the solemn pledges of the fathers of the nation, that the institution should be let alone in the states which had inherited and preserved it.
Possibly if the true spirit of the founders of the Consti- tution, of accepting slavery as an unavoidable inherited disease of the body politic, not attempting to force its abolition upon the Southerners, but leaving it to die slowly of inanition, through the exhaustion of the soil cultivated by the shift- less methods of slave labor and the inability to obtain recruits from Africa for the supply of the needed workers, had pre- vailed in the South, there would not have been much violent agitation against it. But in an evil hour its friends began to assert its divine origin, as eternally meant for the weaker races in contact with the stronger, and to intrigue in Congress for its spread into newly acquired territory in Central America and on the Pacific Coast outside of our original bounda- ries, and even for the right to carry slaves, at convenience, into any northern community which the slave owner might be temporarily visiting. A slave was like any other domestic animal, to go with his master wherever business or pleasure called. In short, the slave system became aggressive, grasping for the extension of its domains, contemptuous of all moral ideals other than those which pertained to the economical welfare of the slave-holding community.
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Hence the rapid rise in the free states of a new class of critics of slavery, besides that other company, known as aboli- tionists, who had long announced that any toleration of slavery, by the founders of the republic or their successors, was inde- fensibly wicked, and that the thing to do at once was to cast out the accursed thing from the land. This new class was composed of moderate minds who held that slavery had no right to extend itself, although it might be left undisturbed in its old territory. This latter class grew in numbers and in the high character of its members, until it attained control of the national government by the election of Abraham Lincoln as President. But the conservative multitude with its inflamed temper did not draw many nice distinctions between the two classes; it labelled them all abolitionists and Union destroyers.
In view of the emotional quality of Channing's speech it may well be believed that his utterances were not concilia- tory of this excitable mood of the public. Not only did he preach upon the subject oftener than his unwilling congregation liked, but he gave notice from the pulpit of anti-slavery meetings and urged that speakers of that policy should be invited to occupy the pulpit. And at the Presidential election, in 1840, he voted for the candidate of the anti-slavery or Liberty party, James G. Birney. It does not appear that this attitude toward the crying public problem directly caused Channing's short pastorate, but with other influences it made him dis- satisfied with his ministry; and his period of service closed in May, 1841.
His friend, James Handasyd Perkins, a member of the congregation, was to bear the burden of spiritual guidance of the church for the larger part of the next ten years, although some of the most promising of the rising preachers of the Unitarian body came to supply the pulpit, some of them for several weeks, yet no choice of a permanent minister was made, and this, most likely, because Perkins entirely satisfied the needs of the congregation, if only he had been satisfied with his own fitness for the place. Born in Massachusetts, his education had been in private schools, and then in the commercial house of his grandfather, who was one of the mag- nates of the East India trade in which New England long held pre-eminence. But his ambitions were literary rather
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than commercial, and, leaving the countinghouse, he came to our city in 1832, at the age of twenty-two, seeking that fortune which was frequently supposed by ardent imaginations in the Eastern states to await every seeker in the virgin fields of the unexplored West. While awaiting his opportunity of finding the niche for his talents, he was invited to study law in the office of Timothy Walker, and there he worked diligently until his admission to the bar, in 1834, and his mar- riage in the same year to Sarah Harte Elliott, of Guilford, Connecticut, whose acquaintance he made in one of the Uni- tarian families which she was visiting. His praises as to his high promise of distinction and his vigor of intellect were in the mouths of all who became intimate with him. Judge Walker records at a later day that Perkins' first appearance in a case in court left upon his memory that the young lawyer's argument was one of the most effective to which he had ever listened. But the practice of the law, especially under a good many of its associations with small minds of the profession, quickly became distasteful; Perkins could not conscientiously do much that was expected of an attorney in the advocacy of dubious causes; and he soon abandoned the profession and sought some other means of livelihood. He became by turns farmer, teacher, writer of reviews and stories for magazines, lecturer, worker for the better treatment of the poverty of the city. In this latter field he was more widely known by the community than for his other talents. The most important agency for poor relief upon rational principles which long existed as the channel of the public benevolence, the Relief Union, was devised by him and he served for many years as its Presi- dent. His literary versatility was great, he wrote upon a large variety of subjects, scientific, philosophic, and political, in prose and poetry; he seems to have been the official poet for occasions requiring recognition in verse. Especially was he effective in lectures upon popular themes; his voice was musical, his personal presence attractive; and whenever he occupied the Unitarian pulpit in relieving his friend Chan- ning, he was always acceptable as a religious teacher. The only reasons, then, why he did not immediately succeed Channing in the pulpit charge and find for himself a settled occupation with fair emoluments, were that he was to the end
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of his life morbidly distrustful of his moral fitness to be a spirit- ual guide and that he was unwilling to be classed as a theolog- ical sectary, even of the Unitarian type.
After his several years of intermittent service as pulpit supply, the occasion of his surrender of the office was his strong hostility to the establishment of a church which should call itself anti-Trinitarian or Unitarian. He wished for a church which should be as nearly as possible unsectarian, comprehending in its positive articles of faith the doctrines which were fundamental to all genuine Christianity, and which any person of tolerant spirit might join without the sacri- fice of the right of private opinion. That desire, as we have seen, actuated some of the founders of the Cincinnati church, in so far that the name Unitarian was not included in its corporate title. But when such critics of the alleged sectarian- ism of the word Unitarian sought other refuges for their longing to be free from bonds, they invariably wandered in vain, and were apt to be content to return to the only organized Christian society which did not impose upon its associates any test of soundness of theological opinion, whatever name it might prefer as a sign of the branch of fellowship among the truth seekers which it most honored. For the name, Unitarian, then as ever since, has covered less any aggressive hostility to the doctrine of the Trinity or other speculative opinions of orthodoxy than the spirit of Pope's verse "He can't be wrong whose life is in the right."
But Perkins had entered upon a stormy stage of the church's history in its relation to the anti-slavery controversy which then overshadowed all other questions. He wrote in the begin- ning of his pulpit service to his friend Channing, in the East: "Unless you return, this Society will go to pieces. My clerical position here is most anomalous-ordained by the Trustees, never educated for the place, no pastor at all, uncertain how long I may stay; during the next six months I suppose some more certainty will be reached by our Society of their wishes and my connection with them; meanwhile I hang literally by my eyelashes." He also speaks of tempestuous times in the community over abolitionism, in which, however, although his views were unmistakably opposed to the aggressions of slavery, he made no demonstration which offended the sober
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minded of the congregation. In the intervals of the visi- tations of candidates and of pulpit supplies who were not candi- dates but were interested in verifying the roseate accounts which had been spread in the East of the beauties of the Ohio Valley, and the exceptionally generous hospitality of some of its choice families, Mr. Perkins filled the gaps, ministering to the needs of the congregation, burying the dead and marrying the young.
In 1846, five years after Channing's departure, Cornelius George Fenner, a Harvard College graduate, twenty-four years old, accepted the ministerial office, but after five months of service interrupted by sickness, from June to November, he died of consumption in the following January. Then in 1847, Mr. Perkins resumed the pastoral care, and entered upon its duties with energy so that the survival of the church through a period of discouragement must be ascribed to his devotion. His life came to an untimely end by accidental drowning from an Ohio River ferryboat, December 14, 1849. The little farm upon which he had lived since 1845, upon the Madison road, which he named Owls' Nest, was occupied by his widow until her death, in 1885. The estate was later made a memorial gift to the City, by the children of Mr. and Mrs. Perkins, residing in Massachusetts, and is now dedicated for the pleasure of posterity as a public park under its old title of Owls' Nest.
For the interest of those who have memories of the distin- guished leaders of the Unitarian body it is worth while to record that during the waiting periods when the church was without a regular pastor, some of the most notable Unitarian clergy- men of the country were its guests. Aaron Bancroft, Presi- dent of the American Unitarian Association and, like another minister above-mentioned deriving much of his fame from his more widely known son, George Bancroft, historian of the United States in its formative period; Henry W. Bellows, Cyrus A. Bartol, Samuel Osgood, Oliver Stearns, Andrew P. Peabody, Thomas Hill, were some of the best known of these visitors, whose presence gave distinction to the church and largely compensated by the power of their pulpit utterances, and the pleasure of hearing famous men, for the lack of pastoral oversight.
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The difficulty in securing the minister who should be modest in his expectations and able to represent the rising faith of reason to a community which had in its population, for all the frontier limitations of some, men and women of fine critical intelligences, was increased beyond that ever-recurring lack of the right man for the important place, by the practical distance of Cincinnati from the chief source of supply of Unitarian ministers, New England; for distances are not measured so much by miles as by the time and inconvenience incurred in the travel. Massachusetts is now, by fast train, only twenty-four hours from Southern Ohio. In 1830 and 1840 it was at best some five days; at worst much longer. A narrative of hardships during the journey from Baltimore to Cincinnati, in the summer of 1830, survives in a letter of Judge Timothy Walker. In the first part of the account he narrates, with a thrill of wonder, his experience in riding over the first portion of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, of which but a short section of the stretch towards Wheeling was in use. "We rode at the rate of twelve miles an hour without the least jarring. I think I could have written easily during the most rapid motion. When this great undertaking is finished I shall then be able to come from Cincinnati to Boston easily in five days." His actual journey was more tedious. "On Thursday, July 29th, at one in the morning, Cook and I left Baltimore for Wheeling in the mail stage over the Great Cumberland Road. We travelled night and day, stopping only long enough to eat, and reached Wheeling in seventy hours. We were twenty-five hours crossing the Alleghanies. Here the weather was sensibly cooler, but the road was the roughest I have ever travelled. On the whole I never was so much fatigued as when I reached Wheeling. We arrived at eleven Saturday night. Our fellow passengers were very agreeable and the time passed as cheerfully as we could expect. We told stories, talked politics, made our observations on the country, and now and then caught a short nap. We found the water in the Ohio so low that boats could not navigate without great difficulty, and it seemed that we should have to take the stage for another three days of excessive fatigue. We shall depart tomorrow at twelve, arriving in Cincinnati in two and a half days, that is on the 5th of August."
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