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ON BEHALF OK

C^e tftrgt C^urclj in Wton,

Rufus Ellis, William F. Matchett,
G. Washington Warren, Thomas Minns,
George W. Wales,
Committee on iiWemorial Uolttme.

THE COMMEMORATION

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON
OF THE
COMPLETION OF TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY
YEARS SINCE ITS FOUNDATION.

FIFTH HOUSE OF WORSHIP.
CORNER OF BERKELEY AND MARLBOROUGH STREETS.
1868.

¦
THE COMMEMORATION

BY THE

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON

OF THE

Completion of Ctoo ^unDreo ano JFiftp gears

SINCE ITS FOUNDATION.

On Thursday, November 18, 1880.

ALSO

FOUR HISTORICAL SERMONS.

Mitt) Illustrations.

Printed by Order of the Society.

BOSTON:
HALL AND WHITING.
1 881.

CONTENTS.

Prelfmmarg Protect) t'n-gs. Page
Committees Appointed  xiii
Participation in City Celebration  xv
Invitations and Arrangements  xix
f^fstorkal Germans.
Rufus Ellis, D.D., preached Nov. 14, 1880  3
,, „ „ „ 21, 1880  28
» -» ,, „ „ 28, 1880  49

N. L. Frothingham, D.D., on the Two Hundredth
Anniversary  69
Commemoratt&e Serbtces.
Address of Welcome by Hon. Nathaniel Silsbee ... 92
Prayer of Rufus Ellis, D.D  95
Reading of Scripture by Joseph T. Duryea, D.D. . . . 96
Address of George E. Ellis, D.D  98
„ „ Hon. Robert C. Winthrop  113
„ „ Governor Long  122
„ „ Mayor Prince  125
Poem by William Everett, Ph.D  132
Address of President Eliot  136
Noah Porter  142

vi CONTENTS. Page
The Hundred and Seventh Psalm  *5°
Address of Rev. Grindall Reynolds  ISI
„ „ Phillips Brooks, D.D  J56
„ Prof. C C. Everett, D.D  161
„ „ Hon. Robert S. Rantoul  l67
„ G. W. Briggs, D.D  169
Hymn by Rev. Charles T. Brooks  J72
The Seventy-eighth Psalm  J74
GEorres-ponoence.
From the President of the United States, Secretary of
State, and Attorney-General  177
From Boston, England  178
From Ministers of First Churches and others . . . 183
From Commander Stevens and Captain Wyman of the
Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company . . . 196
&ppmTu'i.
Church Covenant and Roll of Ministers  201
Former Houses of Worship and Communion Plate . . 202
Ushers on Commemoration Day  204
Corner-stone Address by Rev. Rufus Ellis  204
Description of Church and Chapel Windows .... 208

ILLUSTRATIONS.

Page
Present Church  Frontispiece.
Card of Invitation  xv
Portrait of Rev. John Wilson  i
Church in Chauncy Place  69
The Old Brick Church  90
Portrait of Rev. Rufus Ellis  174
„ „ Nathaniel Thayer  199

PRELIMINARY PROCEEDINGS.

PRELIMINARY PROCEEDINGS.

A T the annual meeting of the Proprietors of the First
-^*- Church in Boston, held April 15, 1879, G. WASH
INGTON Warren, Moderator, having suggested the pro
priety of taking early measures to prepare for a suitable
celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of
the foundation of the church, which would occur next year
(1880), it was
Voted, " That the Standing Committee of the Parish, with
the Pastor and Deacons of the Church, be appointed a
committee to consider and report at the next annual
meeting, what day shall be selected and what arrangements
shall be made for the observance of the two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary."
The officers of the Parish and of the Church had several
meetings, at which the minister was present by their invi
tation. The result of their deliberations was embodied in
the following Report, which was presented at the annual
meeting of the Parish held on the third Tuesday of April
(20th), 1880, and unanimously adopted.
REPORT.
The Committee appointed to consider and report what
measures should be adopted for the due observance of the
two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of

xii FIRST CHURCH IN- BOSTON.
the First Church in Boston, and what day should be desig
nated therefor, respectfully report : —
They find that already considerable interest has been
awakened on the subject, and that a general feeling is
manifested in favor of a suitable commemoration. They
propose that Thursday, the 28th day of October next, be
selected for the services, that being about the time, as
nearly as can now be ascertained, when the church came
over from Charlestown to worship in Boston in 1630.
They also recommend that all the arrangements for the
commemoration be put in charge of a committee of twelve,
as at least four sub-committees will be required to carry
out all the details, as invitations and speaking, decoration
and music, entertainment and finance.
It has also been suggested that an historiographer be
appointed who shall collect and prepare for publication
the materials for a memorial of this eventful period in the
history of the church. It is understood that the First
Church will be invited also to participate in some way in
the Municipal Celebration of the 17th of September, and
that on the Sunday preceding the 28th October, our pastor
will deliver a Commemorative Discourse.
The Committee recommend the adoption of the accom
panying vote. Per order of the Committee, G. Washington Warren.
Voted, "That a Committee of Twelve be appointed from
the Parish, who shall make all the arrangements necessary
for the proper celebration, on Thursday, the 28th day of
October next, of the completion of two hundred and fifty
years since the foundation of the First Church in Boston ;
and that they also cause to be prepared a suitable memo
rial volume, containing the addresses and incidents of the
celebration, and such other historic matter connected with
the Church as may be deemed appropriate."

PRELIMINARY PROCEEDINGS. xiii
The Committee of Twelve were then appointed as
follows : —
Nathaniel Thayer. James C. White.
G. Washington Warren. Asa P. Potter.
George W. Wales. Joseph B. Moors.
Mrs. George O. Shattuck. Thomas Minns.
Mrs. George S. Hale. William F. Matchett.
Miss Gertrude Ellis. Thomas O. Richardson.
And to this Committee the minister was added.
The Committee was soon organized, and held frequent
meetings. It became apparent that, for various reasons,
the commemoration should be postponed to a later day
than that first decided upon.
On June 19th the following Report was made at a Special
Meeting of the Proprietors, called for that purpose, by
Thomas O. Richardson, on behalf of the Committee : —
SECOND REPORT.
That the Committee duly organized by the choice of
Nathaniel Thayer as President, George W. Wales as
Vice-President, THOMAS O. RICHARDSON as Secretary.
The vacancies caused by the declination of Mrs. George
S. Hale and Mrs. George O. Shattuck were filled by
the choice of Hon. GEORGE S. HALE and Mrs. Jacob C.
ROGERS, who have accepted the positions, and the Com
mittee is now full.
Before the Committee had proceeded far in perfecting
their plans for the celebration, it was observed that the
day fixed upon for the celebration, Thursday, the 28th day
of October, was just on the eve of the Presidential election,
which may prove to be a time of great political excitement,
and it was thought best by the Committee to ask the Society
to pass a vote authorizing the Committee to fix some other
day for the celebration.
It was also mentioned by those members of the Com-

xiv FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
mittee most familiar with the history of the past, that the
Society formed in Charlestown, Aug. 27, 1630, was not
fully removed to and established in Boston till November
of that year, and if the day of the celebration was now to
be fixed for the first time, November would be a more
appropriate month than October.
It was further learned that some whom it would be
very desirable to have take part in the celebration have
such engagements in other cities that their presence could
not be expected till November. Thomas O. Richardson, Secretary.
Whereupon it was unanimously
Voted, " That the Committee on the celebration of the
completion of two hundred and fifty years since the foun
dation of the First Church in Boston have authority, if
they deem it expedient, to fix some other day than Thurs
day, Oct. 28, 1880, for that celebration."
Under the authority of this vote, the Committee fixed
upon Thursday, November 18th, at two o'clock, P.M., as
the time for the commemoration. The following sub
committees were appointed, who were to report their
recommendations to the General Committee for their ap
proval : — On Speakers and Order of Exercises.
Nathaniel Thayer. Joseph B. Moors.
Rufus Ellis. George S. Hale.
George W. Wales. Thomas O. Richardson.
On Music and Decorations.
James C. White. Miss Gertrude S. Ellis.
William F. Matchett. Mrs. J. C. Rogers.
Thomas Minns.
On Invitations, Circulars, Tickets, and Printing.
G. Washington Warren. Thomas Minns.
Thomas O. Richardson.

PRELIMINARY PROCEEDINGS. xv
On Finance.
Joseph B. Moors. William F. Matchett.
Asa P. Potter.
On Memorial Volume.
Rufus Ellis. William F. Matchett.
G. Washington Warren. Thomas Minns.
George W. Wales.
In addition to the sub-committees, G. Washington
Warren and GEORGE S. Hale were appointed a com
mittee to confer with the authorities of the City of Boston,
as to the participation of the First Church in Boston in
the city celebration of its two hundred and fiftieth anni
versary, to be held on September ij, 1880. In the con
ferences which this committee had with His Honor the
Mayor and the Celebration Committee on the part of the
city, it was determined that the minister of the First
Church should be the chaplain of the day ; that its com
mittee should be represented in the city procession, and
also at the festival to be held in Faneuil Hall on the even
ing of September 16.
In pursuance of this arrangement, G. Washington
Warren was called upon by his Honor the Mayor to
respond on behalf of the First Church, at the festival in
Faneuil Hall, which he did in the following manner: —
ADDRESS OF HON. G. WASHINGTON WARREN AT
THE FANEUIL HALL RECEPTION.
Mr. MAYOR, — In responding to the call to speak in
behalf of the First Church in Boston, I may say that, like
that church and like this good town of Boston, I had my
origin in Charlestown. I was born, sir, within a stone's-
throw of the spot where the first Court of Assistants was
held, and where Governor John Winthrop for the first time
on the soil of Massachusetts unrolled the charter which he

XVI FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
brought over from England. It always has seemed to me
that a statue of Winthrop holding the invaluable charter
ought to be erected upon that spot; or, at least, some
memorial should be placed there to distinguish that great
historic event.
Before forming a town, however, and before taking
measures to constitute a commonwealth, the first thing
which Winthrop and his associates did was to form a
church, — showing that the chief object which they had in
mind, and what they came here under so many privations
to secure, was the free, unmolested worship of God, ac
cording to the dictates of their own consciences. And
this first work which they did has lasted to this day. The
First Church has now precisely the same form of covenant,
in precisely the same words, which was framed and signed
by Winthrop, by Isaac Johnson, — the husband of the
Lady Arbella, — by Deputy-Governor Dudley, by John
Wilson, the first minister, and the others. This was on
July 30, 1630. The first Court of Assistants was held on
the 23d of August following, at which the first thing deter
mined upon was how the ministers should be maintained.
This was fifteen days before Boston was named.
The difference between the first house of worship erected
by Winthrop and his associates, the low, mud-plastered
building at the corner of State and Devonshire streets, and
the tasteful temple which their successors now hold, at the
corner of Berkeley and Marlborough streets, marks, as
well as any other illustration which can be given, the ad
vance which these two hundred and fifty years have brought
about. But the most interesting memorial we have in our
present elegant architectural church edifice is the original
church covenant, inscribed on one of the stained-glass
windows. By this we testify that, whatever change "and
progress may be brought about by prosperity in material
things, there need be no change in the expression of Chris
tian fellowship. Governor Winthrop, we are told, often, in

PRELIMINARY PROCEEDINGS. xvii
the absence of his minister, exhorted in the church. And
this grace, or at least the faculty of exhibiting it, has been
shared by his successors in office.
We of the First Church in Boston cheerfully co-operate
with you, sir, and the other fathers of the city, in seeking
to pay honor to the memory of John Winthrop, your
founder and our founder. No character, during the cen
turies of modern history, is more illustrious for those pecu
liarly combined qualities of persistency and resignation, of
courage and meekness, of firmness and conciliation, which
he exhibited in the accomplishment of his great work, —
the founding of a Christian commonwealth. Moses, in
leading the Israelites through the wilderness, did not show
greater faith and courage than did Winthrop when he
pioneered his fleet of ten ships to these inhospitable shores.
Whatever good influence Massachusetts has exerted, what
she is and what she has been, may be traced back to the
good seed which he brought with him and planted here.
Mr. Mayor, the motto on our city seal — Sicut patribus,
sit Deus nobis — is an official acknowledgment of the provi
dence of God, and a perpetual prayer for its continuance.
This is the lesson of the hour. As long as in church and
in school and in daily life the providence of God is de
voutly recognized, we need fear no evil.
By a felicitous arrangement, the Commemoration Ser
vices on the part of the city, on September 17th, were
held in the Old South Meeting-house, so closely asso
ciated with many of the great historic events which trans
pired in Boston during its last century and a half; and, in
order to prevent any delay or confusion, they were ap
pointed to be held at nine o'clock in the forenoon, before
the splendid pageant of the procession. This, although a
novel, was a very judicious and appropriate course of
proceeding on the part of the city, and is worthy of imita
tion in the future.

xviii FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
As the minister of the First Church was spending his
vacation abroad at this time, his place as chaplain of the
day was supplied, at his request, by his brother Rev.
George E. Ellis, D.D., of Boston, formerly minister of
the Harvard Church in the Charlestown District of the
city, but at this time a parishioner of the First Church,
which he most acceptably represented on this interesting
occasion. In the oration delivered by His Honor FREDERICK O.
PRINCE, the Mayor, the following appropriate reference
was made to the historic connection of the First Church
with the old town of Boston, closing with a just tribute to
its present minister : —
" Among the first acts of the colonists upon their arrival
in New England was the formation of a church. The cove
nant was signed July 30, 1630, and this was the foundation
of the First Church of Boston. The meetings of the con
gregation were originally held under the shade of an oak-
tree, literally a house not made with hands. The first
meeting-house was built in 1632, and was said to have had
mud walls and a thatched roof. It was located in State
Street, where Brazer's Building now stands. In 1639 a
new house was built on the site in Washington Street, now
occupied by Joy's Building. The cost was paid by the
weekly church collections. This fact is interesting as show
ing that thus early the people of Boston initiated the policy
of supporting religion by voluntary contributions, without
recourse to rates or taxation bylaw. In 171 1 the house
was destroyed by fire and rebuilt. In 1808 the society
removed to a new meeting-house on Chauncy Street,
where it remained until 1868, when it removed to the
beautiful church on Berkeley Street, where, under the
charge of its present excellent pastor, it is successfully
performing its Christian work. Esto perpetua J '"

PRELIMINARY PROCEEDINGS. xix
In the procession whi'ch followed and constituted the
great public demonstration of the day, the First Church
was represented by the acting chaplain and a part of the
Committee, in the carriages with the other invited guests.
The foregoing brief account of the participation of " the
First Church in Boston " in the late imposing celebration
of the city is here included, not only for the reason that
the elegant edition of the Memorial Volume published by
the city is already exhausted, but also because it seemed
to fall within the province of the Committee, as indicated in
the first Report to the Parish, to make arrangements for
uniting in some way with the city authorities, and to put
upon their own record, as well, the results of their doings.
It will be seen that the close connection between the old
church and the old town of Boston was duly recognized in
both celebrations of their common jubilee.
During the absence of the minister in Europe, Mr.
ARTHUR B. Ellis attended, by invitation, the general
meetings of the Committee.
Invitations to the celebration of the First Church were
extended to the ministers of churches formed in Massa
chusetts before 1650, to the churches formed directly from
the First Church, to various ministers and bishops, Ro
manist and Protestant, of all the different denominations;
to the President of the United States, the Governor of
Massachusetts, the Mayor of Boston ; to many other prom
inent citizens, and to the Vicar of St. Botolph, and others,
of Boston, England. Admission to the floor of the church
was by ticket only; the gallery was thrown open to the
public. The half of the floor north of the broad aisle was
reserved for invited guests, the other half for the members
of the society and their friends. The arrangements were
so complete, and were so well carried out by the Com
mittee and the ushers in attendance, and the services ofthe
pulpit and the choir, the public addresses and the poem,

XX FIRST church in boston.
were all so excellent, so elevated and catholic in spirit,
that the occasion will be remembered as a fit observance
of one of the most interesting anniversaries connected with
the history of Boston and of Massachusetts.
Simultaneously with these proceedings, Mr. ARTHUR
B. ELLIS, son of the minister, was busily engaged in
collecting materials for a complete history of the First
Church in Boston ; and having received sufficient encour
agement, he announced his intention to prepare and pub
lish the work on his own responsibility. Rev. GEORGE
E. Ellis will assist him in the revision, and will write
the Preface. The Committee, therefore, took no steps
towards the appointment of an historiographer, as con
templated in the Report of the Standing Committee and
Deacons above-mentioned, and they have omitted in this
volume much matter which would otherwise have been in
serted. The work of Mr. ELLIS will be published in a
style similar to this volume, and may be deemed a com
panion to it. The two together may serve the important
purpose of perpetuating a worthy record of the most in
teresting events in the history of this ancient church, and
of the late most successful and satisfactory Commemo
ration. The Committee on the Memorial Volume, having been
intrusted with the preparation of this work, have caused it
to be illustrated by the views 7of the two former houses of
worship and of the present church edifice; and also by
photographs of the first and of the present minister, and
of Mr. Nathaniel Thayer, one of the descendants of
Rev. John Cotton, and one who for many years was
Chairman of the Standing Committee, and whose counsel
and valuable aid have always been liberally bestowed.

. CAHBON PHOTO. ALLEN & ROWEU.

^l^'VoC^fi'ft.

HISTORICAL SERMONS

ON THE OCCASION OF THE

Eixio HunireH anU jFtftietl) ^tmibersarg

First Church of Christ in Boston,

BY REV. RUFUS ELLIS, D.D.

HISTORICAL SERMONS.

'• For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose
builder and maker is God." — Heb. xi. 10.

/^\N Thursday of this week we hope to commem-
^^^ orate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary
of the foundation of this church ; but I must not
fail to say that the 30th of July, Old Style, or the
9th of August, New Style, and not the 18th of No
vember, was the birthday of our religious congrega
tion. We can plead as apologies for our delay only
those habits of modern life, even in our Northern
city, which make a midsummer gathering all but
impossible, and the fact that until the autumn of the
year 1630 the Sunday worship of First Church was
divided between Charlestown and Boston, and this
church had not become the First Church of Christ
in Boston. Our last Half-Century Sermon was
preached by my predecessor in this ministry, on the
29th of August, 1830; after the time, because, per
haps, the summers were already unfavorable to the
assembling of city congregations. You might ask
me to bring up the story of our church for the last

4 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
fifty years ; but this has already been done, — partly
when Dr. Frothingham took leave of you as your
minister, and partly by myself as we have passed
from one house of worship to another, or have come
to one and another stage of our journeying together.
And so I am rather moved to go back to the begin
ning, and from the beginning to advance a little
way forward through the years when this church
and this town were one, and the congregation not
only the First, but the only church of the infant
community, — that is, from July 30, 1630, to June 5,
1650, at which time the Second Church was gath
ered, — a very stirring period in the lives of the Old
and of the New England, — lives which were indeed
far more than now one life, though Old and New
were then weeks or months apart, and not, as now,
only moments.
On that midsummer day, which we recall as our
birthday, four Englishmen came together for a most
solemn act, in a spot on the north side of Charles
River, which the natives called Mishawam, and which
had already got the name of Charleton or Charles
town. All of them leaders, one of them, John Win
throp, who is richly entitled to be first named, was
the leader of some thousand men and women, who
crossed, between the spring and winter of 1630, from
England to the Bay of Massachusetts. Of these,
one hundred and fifty, under Winthrop's guidance,
had found their way to the banks of the Mystic and
the Charles, the germs of a new commonwealth in

HISTORICAL SERMONS. 5
their minds and hearts. They were loyal subjects
of England's king, and, in their free fashion, loving
children of England's Church ; but in the State and
in the Church they had found themselves straitened
in the dear old home. Conforming as far as they
honestly could to the ancient order, they still longed
for a larger liberty, and a ministry more according
to the Spirit as it moved upon their hearts. In many
instances they had found much indulgence from
church authorities. John Cotton makes a very ten
der acknowledgment of this allowance in a touching
letter to the Bishop of Lincoln. Indeed, not a little
of the Christian freedom, which was afterward ruled
out, and necessarily organized as Dissent, was in that
day enjoyed within the limits of the English Church.
Nevertheless, our fathers and mothers in this con
gregation, much as they loved the old religious home,
were no longer quite at home in it. It was not
enough for them to join in its common prayer and
to be members of its multitudinous Church, and to
live together in no closer religious communion than
it provided in the order of its Christian year and in
its beautiful ceremonial. For more than all else to
them was their religion, — not one of many realities,
but the one reality of their life, — and they must
build it into home and citv. So these men and
women were in the wilderness, — a worn, enfeebled,
and, with all their earnestness and singleness of pur
pose, a much depressed, though not disheartened
company. It was their day of trial, and to their

6 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
faith it was the very time for entering into the closest
religious communion, that they might be strong and
patient together. It had been their way in the old
country, so far as it was permitted, to supplement
the usual and obligatory ministries and observances
of the national Church by a kind of congregation
within the congregation, — a company of men ancl
women, covenanting each with the other, and all
with the Invisible Head, to live by the divine grace
and in all mutual love and fidelity. There was such
a company in the great Church of St. Botolph in
Old Boston, England, with which some of these im
migrants had been connected. Sunday afternoons
and on week-days, — notably on Thursdays, — these
congregations listened to lectures and joined in free
prayer, under the spiritual leadership of ministers,
some of whom still served in the English Church,
while . others had overtaxed the patience of their
bishops, and had been silenced for non-conformity
with the ceremonies, which seemed to these earnest
Protestants inseparably associated with the corrup
tions of Rome. Gradually these congregations be
came the realities of the living present ; the old
ritual was positively an offence to their fervid spir
its ; the Church was again the two or three met
together in the name of Jesus; and when they
found the ocean between them ahd their old home,
and were removed forever from the old places of
prayer, with their tender associations, and were no
longer under any temptations or obligations to con-

HISTORICAL SERMONS. 7
form, — it was inevitable that the new communion
should come into the place of the old, and an ex
treme simplicity supplant an extreme formalism. It
is interesting to note how careful they were, for a
time at least, not to discredit, or in any way dispar
age, the Church which they seemed to have out
grown ; and yet, none the less, it dropped away from
them as the husk from the ripe fruit, and, as time
went on, became to their fervid spirits a hinderance
and a stumbling-block.
So, as when Judaism became the simplicity of
Christ, they passed gradually and half-consciously
from ecclesiastical Christianity into a pure Congre
gationalism or independency, almost without priest
and ritual ; and, in our Bay of Massachusetts, four
chief men of the little company of emigrants came
together to prepare the way and make the beginning
of what they call a congregation or church, under
Christ their head, Christ the Invisible, mediated and
represented by no hierarchy. Four English gentle
men, one of them an ordained and highly connected
minister in the English Church, moved to prompt
action by the stress of the times, invited their fellow-
Christians of Salem and Plymouth to keep the 30th
of July (it was a Friday) as a fast ; and on that day
they prepared and subscribed the covenant of this
church as it stands forth upon one of our church
windows to-day. Following the signature of John
Winthrop, we read the names of Thomas Dudley,
Isaac Johnson, and Rev. John Wilson.

8 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
John Winthrop came of good English stock, and
was born in Groton, Suffolk County, in 1587, now
forty-three years of age, religious and wise, gentle
and steadfast, more than abreast of his time, — a
man in whom Church and State might well be at
one ; a governor whose name stands at the head of
the covenanted company, not for a form or a show,
but because he was indeed the head and front of
the fellowship. He lives still in some exquisite
letters, as well as in his sensible and careful record
of the experiences of the young colony, and most
of all in the State in which his best life was forever
embodied ; and it was most happy that a common
wealth so dominated by theologians was governed
by a statesman like Winthrop, who could be at
once a theologian and a man of large political wis
dom, common-sense, and sweet humanity. It is
recorded of him that, when a preacher could not be
found, he " exercised in the way of prophesying,"
that is, he preached ; and one cannot help wishing
that some of those lay sermons had been taken down,
especially as the pulpit literature of the time and
place are not for us very interesting or edifying.
By the side of Winthrop stands Thomas Dudley,
born in Northampton, England, in the year 1576, —
a man of a sincere temper and earnest, honest pur
pose, as we cannot doubt, but somewhat querulous
and exacting, and quite as ready to insist upon his
rights as to discharge his duties, nevertheless hon
orable and honored, if not so lovable as our admira-

HISTORICAL SERMONS. 9
ble first governor. He had served Queen Elizabeth
of England as a captain of English soldiers in the
French army under Henry IV., and had been the
faithful steward of the Earl of Lincoln. Isaac John
son comes next, — "a prime man amongst us, having
the best estate of any, zealous for religion, and the
greatest furtherer of this plantation," but a man fast
passing into the shadow of sickness and death, first
of his wife, the Lady Arbella, daughter of the Earl
of Lincoln, and soon after his own. " Dead since "
was presently written over his name as it stands
under the covenant ; and, as Dudley tells us, " he
made a most godly end, dying willingly, professing
his life better spent in promoting this plantation
than it could have been any other way. He left us
a loss greater than the most conceived."
The fourth signer is Rev. John Wilson, born in
1588. His father had been chaplain to the Arch
bishop of Canterbury, canon of Windsor, prebendary
of Rochester, and rector of Cliffe in Kent ; and in
the Chapel of St. George, at Windsor, there was,
until 1789, -a gravestone, a brass upon which marked
the place of his burial by the figure of a man, and
these fitting inscriptions : " To me to live is Christ,
and to die is gain," and "Who thinks of death in
life can never die." John Wilson had preached in
Sudbury, in Suffolk, some eight or nine years. He
does not write his name first. It is not his church.
He claims no precedence as a clergyman, though
he prized his orders. He is one of the brethren and

IO FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
a member of the congregation with the rest. I con
fess that I am greatly drawn to him, as to one who
was not given to much self-assertion, and might easily
have made for himself a greater name than has been
granted him. He had been sorely harassed in Eng
land for non-conformity, and came to this country
for freedom and peace. The first religious teacher
of the church, and then associated with the teacher
as pastor, he shared and survived the services of
two other ministers, — according to my poor judg
ment, a wiser and better balanced man, as I cannot
help saying, than the famous John Cotton, and,
measured by the standard of his time, of much mod
eration and gentleness. If his sermons, save here
and there one, have not survived him, they can
hardly have been less interesting than those of his
great colleague, whose expository discourses the
antiquarian still tries to read, not without a feeling
of gratitude that he did not yield to the urgency of
Hugh Peters and the rest, and devote himself exclu
sively to what they called " raising marginal notes
upon Scripture." So much of John Wilson, who
came over with the first company, leaving an un
willing wife, who remained behind until 1635, — " I
marvel," wrote Margaret Winthrop, "what mettle
she is made of," — the first teacher as well as pastor
of our church, very tender toward the old ways as
well as forward-looking and forward-moving, and,
as we shall perhaps see by and by, a good, sensible
politician in the best sense of that abused word, and

HISTORICAL SERMONS. n
able to stand between Winthrop and a fanatical
crowd in a day of trial for the infant common
wealth. It has been my privilege during the past summer
to spend a few days in that part of England which
was the home of these founders before they crossed
the ocean. In the shires of Suffolk, Lincoln, Rut
land, Northampton, Derby, you will find the places
that knew them while their feet pressed English
soil. I have stood under Winthrop's mulberry-tree
in Groton, and traced the fair record of his baptism
in the church of that parish which the generous
bounty of that good man's descendants in this
country is restoring and beautifying. I have been
hospitably entertained by the family of Johnson,
whose Isaac, known as the Puritan, came to this
new world with his fair wife, the Earl's daughter,
only to share with her its sicknesses and its death ;
and I learned that the Johnsons are still lords of
the manor as of old in Rutland, presiding over
the noble charities of the Archdeacon, the grand
father of our founder, patrons of famous parishes
and schools, as in the lovely towns of Oakham and
Uppingham, with their beautiful old churches and
castles. I have visited with great interest the larger
of these schools, and have tarried in Boston, as ten
years ago, to visit St. Botolph's cathedral-like pile,
and stand by John Cotton's pulpit ; our ^Unitarian
friends in that city extending the warmest hospi
tality, and sending to you kindest greetings for your

12 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
two hundred and fiftieth year of church life. I have
passed through Sudbury, where Wilson preached
several years, and through Northampton and Derby,
the birthplaces of Dudley and Cotton ; and even in
our changing world it has been easy to see from
how much that was binding, stately, and seductive
they went forth in obedience to heavenly visions.
They left a world which most men would have pro
nounced very good, to make another world which,
to their faith, hope, and charity, was unspeakably
better. Even in dear Old England they could not
do God's work as he would have it done. I do not
wonder that they clung to the old altars and the old
observances as long as they could. It was the bond
of life -long custom and usage, the dear habit of
childhood, and not constraint and calculation, which
made them at least partial conformists so long as
they were on English soil and within sight of the
old parish churches ; and they had scarcely the heart
to rear any chapels of dissent by their side. They
must cross the sea for this, and they could do so
only with a sad intensity. It was a day of faith, the
golden age of English piety. It was not good for
England that she could not bear with them. She
needs to-day, and in this very hour, the life that
made the New England out of the Old, and that
passed so lavishly into this church of our fathers, as
into so many other foundations upon which so many
generations have builded.
We find, then, in this meeting of these four

HISTORICAL SERMONS.

13

fathers of the Massachusetts Colony at Charlestown,
the fountain and origin of our church life ; and it
was undoubtedly the purpose and the hope of these
fathers and their associates that this church life
should be at once the mind and the heart, the in
most source out of which should be the issues of all
other living, — in the home, the market-place, and
the commonwealth. The congregation was to in
spire and guide, to supply voters, to call offenders
to account, to advise magistrates, to pervade and
occupy and possess all things, — the society of soci
eties, seeking in all faith to be a kingdom of God.
Of course there were difficulties in such an enter
prise, which all too quickly came to light. These
congregations were already not one, but many, each
with its own mind, and that a very decided mind.
Besides, from the very beginning, there were some
honest men and women who were not yet ready to
join any of the congregations and so qualify them
selves to be voters ; and what if the ministers should
be of one opinion and the rulers of another? But
as yet it did not appear whereunto all this would
grow, or how difficult it would be to maintain church
supremacy or in any way to blend Church and State
in a Christian commonwealth.
On the first Lord's Day after this memorable
Friday, five more names were written under the
covenant, and so on, week by week, until they are
sixty-four men and thirty-two women. The cove
nant and the signing are alike set down in our

14 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
church records for the 27th of August, probably
because this date marks a certain completing of the
enrolment and a formal organization of the church
in simple congregational fashion by the choice of
Wilson as teacher, Nowell as elder, Gager and
Aspinwall as deacons, — we of the congregation
chose them ; and upon each and the other were laid
ordaining hands, Mr. Wilson, the teacher, distinctly
declaring that he meant to put no slight upon his
orders in the Church of England. The little con
gregation had no need to fashion any ritual. They
found it only too delicious to pray as the Spirit
gave them utterance. They will not have even the
Bible read in the course of their worship, unless it
is expounded, and the truths brought into the
light by the divine blessing upon a living ministry.
They will have none of what they called "dumb
reading." What were styled " conceived," or, as we say, ex
tempore, prayers had been allowed them in their
old church only grudgingly and in very stinted
measure. Here there shall be no other prayers, not
though it were the Lord's Prayer, which had been
so misused as a pater noster and by vain repetitions.
They would share no white surplice with Romish
priests, but would minister in the scholar's black
gown of Geneva. It seemed to them a mere formal
ity, and too much like the genuflections of the old
superstition, to bow the head at the name of Jesus,
though none could exceed them in their reverence

HISTORICAL SERMONS. 15
for that Holy One. Like the early disciples, they
would gather about the sacramental table rather than
kneel about the altar, lest haply men should say,
" they worship the bread and the wine." They will
have no funeral prayers, but will bear their dead to
the last resting-place and lay them away in touching
silence, lest they should be thought to pray for the
departed spirit, and say masses in the ancient man
ner. They will not only lay aside the marriage ring
as heathenish, but, by a strange revulsion, they will
have marriage a civil service to be performed, not
by the minister, but by a magistrate. They cannot
quite refuse to sing; but there shall be no instru
ment save the human voice, and such rough psal
mody as was supplied to the Puritans of Amsterdam
by Henry Ainsworth ; their tunes, some ten in num
ber, oftenest York, Hackney, Windsor, St. Mary, and
St. Martyn's.
Thus organized, the congregation entered upon
an autumn of fair, open weather, with gentle frosts,
followed by an early and very severe, but not pro
tracted winter. From the first the settlers steadily
gravitate to our peninsula, invited and welcomed by
the hospitable Blaxton, who, though clerical himself,
soon found the ecclesiastical element among his
guests excessive, and struck out anew into the wil
derness, where he could be quit of ministers as well
as of bishops. There was as yet no house of wor
ship. The great house at Charlestown, in fine
weather a widely spreading tree, and sometimes one

1 6 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
of the few dwellings, served for a meeting-place.
Modest shelters — cabins, I suppose, we should call
them — were gradually springing up within the com
pass of some two miles of dry land, what seemed at
high water two islands ; but it was a time of sick
ness, struggle, suffering from extreme scarcity of
food, and much depression. Shell-fish had to serve
for meat, ground-nuts and acorns for bread. Deacon
Gager's term of service had been of the briefest.
He died on the ist of September, — "a godly man,"
they said, " and a skillful chirurgeon." On the last
day of the same month, Isaac Johnson followed the
same way. The Lady Arbella had died a month be
fore at Salem. Her burial-place was said to be near
Bridge Street, Salem, as you go to Beverly. The
earthly remains of her husband were laid in what is
now King's Chapel Burial-ground. The teacher
remained with the congregation until the end of the
first month of spring, when, with several of the emi
grants, he went to England, — some, like himself, to
bring their families, others in discouragement, not
proposing to return. Winthrop records that, on the
29th of March, about ten of the clock, Mr. Codding-
ton and Mr. Wilson, and divers of the congregation,
met at the governor's; and there Mr. Wilson, pray
ing and exhorting the congregation to love, com
mended to them the exercise of prophecy in his
absence, and designed those whom he thought
most fit for it, — the governor, Mr. Dudley, and El
der Nowell. Then he desired the governor to com-

HISTORICAL SERMONS.

17

mend himself and the rest to God by prayer, which,
being done, they accompanied him to the boat on his
way to the ship, which sailed with him from Salem
to England, on the ist of April, for more than a
year's absence, that is, until the 26th of May, 1632.
The church, however, was not during so much time
without pastor or teacher. By the 2d of November
the charge passed, for the time, into the able hands
of famous John Eliot, who will ever be gratefully
remembered as the Apostle to the Indians. The
church would gladly have associated him with Wil
son, giving him, in the joint offices which their cus
tom provided, the place of teacher, for which Wilson,
in their judgment, was less fitted than for the work
of pastor, though sermons were expected from both
clergymen in the course of the Sunday ministrations.
Indeed, there was no lack of ministers. Roger Wil
liams, of whom the world has heard so much, had
arrived in Boston on the 5th of February, 163 1, that
is, before the departure of Wilson. In a letter, writ
ten to Cotton, of Plymouth, forty years later, Williams
claims to have been unanimously chosen teacher of
our church, and adds that he declined the office, be
cause of their tacit, if not open, communion with the
Church of England, which, in his judgment, was no
true Christian church, and not fit to have communion
with. The record has no word upon the subject ;
but our record is very meagre, as is often the case
where men are making history, and have no time to
-write it down. We only know, as I have said, that

l8 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
Eliot, who is remembered for his deeds as Williams
for his theories, took the temporary charge, while the
future founder of Rhode Island went on his way for
aseason to Salem.
It is characteristic of the spiritual ferment of the
times that, in the interval during which the con
gregation was only in the care of laymen, there
came from the church of Watertown the startling
intelligence that Elder Richard Brown maintained
that the Church of Rome, as well, I suppose, as the
churches in Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, and his
own, is a true church of Christ. It would be sad,
indeed, to think otherwise, when we recall the proph
ets, apostles, martyrs, saints, of that ancient com
munion, of whom the world was not worthy; but it
was a heresy, then and there, to think so ; and good
John Winthrop, the governor, and Thomas Dudley,
the deputy-governor of the little commonwealth, and
the elder of our church, must go to Watertown, and
confute a doctrine so strange and dangerous. Of
course they could consistently claim no authority
over a sister church in every way their peer, and they
must be content to offer counsel. Richard Brown
seems to have been quick-tempered and passionate
of speech ; but, though plainly in this, as in some
other opinions, of a larger and better mind than his
brother Puritans, he allowed himself to be persuaded
by them, as is so often the case in theological mat
ters, and their anxieties were quieted.
We see in another instance how much congreo-a-

HISTORICAL SERMONS. 19
tionalism and independency were still an experiment,
a theory, and an ideal. In the course of this very
year we find the Court protesting against the settle
ment of Roger Williams over the Salem church, on
the ground that he had declined communion with
the Boston church, because the members of this
church had not formally separated themselves from
and disowned the Church of England, and had him
self taught the very sensible, though, for that day,
very advanced doctrine, that the civil magistrate
might not punish the breach of the Sabbath, or any
other disobedience to a distinctively religious com
mand. It is pleasant to observe that in this case
Congregationalism and independency had their way,
and that Mr. Williams was established in Salem
spite of the protest, — established, I mean, so far as
it was possible to bind to one place and duty a per
son so restless and erratic ; for we hear of him in
Plymouth by the 25th of October, 1632, and again
in Salem in 1633. The magistrates of the little col
ony did not confine themselves to protest in things
spiritual and moral. Henry Lynne was whipped
once and again for slandering the government and
the churches ; and early in this very year a much
severer sentence for a similar offence was passed and
executed upon Philip Ratcliffe.
But we must remember that this was only the
earlier half of the seventeenth century, and that as
late as 16 10, about the time when John Cotton
took the charge of St. Botolph's in Old Boston, an

20 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
Arian or Unitarian was burned for his heresy at
Smithfield. King James I., who prided himself
upon his theology, tried, in one of his sober hours,
to convince him of his error; but, having learned
from the heretic's own lips that for many years he
had thought it unscriptural to pray to Jesus, he
spurned him with his foot as unfit to be in his royal
presence, and consigned him to the executioners.
The little company in Charlestown and Boston
were much heartened by the return of Mr. Wilson ;
and, although the worshippers from Charlestown
were soon to have a distinct organization of their own,
they joined the larger company in building a house
of worship and a dwelling for the teacher. The
contribution for this purpose amounted to ,£120.
The church was, of course, a very humble structure,
of which there is only a traditional likeness. Built
of wood and clay, it stood at the easterly corner
which State Street makes with Devonshire Street.
I may add that the name " meeting-house " had not
yet displaced the word " church." It was a neces
sity of the earlier days that the Sunday gathering-
place should be also the place for week-day meetings,
and should come to be the meeting-house, as was
the case indeed with the great cathedrals in the
days of their greatest usefulness and glory, and as
it was indeed until within a very few years with
old St. Botolph's Church, used, so they told me,
as a voting-place, what they call in England " the
hustings.''

HISTORICAL SERMONS. 21
The unavoidable withdrawal of the members from
Charlestown — nineteen men and sixteen women —
left Wilson with a small company ; and, as it seems
to have been their settled conviction that they must
have a more commanding teacher, he was formally
installed as pastor of the church on the 22d of No
vember, 1632, and filled the office with exceeding
fidelity to a good old age, — an illustration of the
Scripture that, when a man's ways please the Lord,
He makes even his enemies to be at peace with him ;
for there were divisions and alienations, and bitter
ness even in those fervid days. Meanwhile, in the
Old England, Archbishop Laud, one of the most
insane of ecclesiastical reactionists, was preparing a
teacher after their own heart for this New England
congregation. John Cotton had been for some
twenty years rector of the fine and almost cathedral
Church of St. Botolph, Boston. He had carried
to that parish from the University of Cambridge an
excellent reputation as a scholar, especially in the
Greek and Latin tongues. Of the Greek, he is re
ported to have had a critic's knowledge, and his
Latin is said to have been even elegant. His first
university sermon, we are told, was enthusiastically
received by the dignitaries of the colleges, and great
things were predicted of the young preacher. But
his hearers were not long of this mind. Pricked
to the heart by the words of an earnest Puritan
preacher, he pressed upon the congregation repent
ance toward God, and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ ;

22 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
but what they heard with their ears only served to
harden their hearts and darken their faces. It befell
him quite contrary to the experience of Dr. Chalmers,
the famous Scotch preacher. So long as Chalmers
was what is or was known in Scotland as " a moder
ate," no one cared much to hear him, while the lar
gest church would scarcely hold his congregation
when he became earnest and evangelical, and had
a point to carry in his preaching. But Cotton's
fame as a preacher must have depended largely, first
and last, upon voice and manner. His style is
didactic, expository, and extremely dry ; and one
wonders what can have become of the eloquence
which so charmed the dons of the University, or
why that might not have been retained for the
Masters service, as Wesley claimed the world's
tunes for sacred uses. Nevertheless, we must not
go behind the record; and it is beyond question that
to hear John Cotton preach, and look up to him as
teacher and guide, spiritual and even temporal, was
to our fathers the end of all perfection. He was
greatly prized and loved in Old Boston. Williams,
his English diocesan, not only Bishop of Lincoln,
but Dean of Westminster and Keeper of the Great
Seal, a busy, bustling, but most kindly man, ex
tended to him every indulgence ; and yet a church
with a settled ritual and order could hardly tolerate
such freedoms as even Cotton, unwilling Dissenter as
he was, felt compelled to insist upon ; and to Arch
bishop Laud his irregularities were intolerable. It

HISTORICAL SERMONS.

23

was plain that his ministry at Boston must soon
come to an end, and it seemed likely that he would
pass from his rectory to prison. Indeed, had he not
remained in close retirement in London, that would
undoubtedly have been his fate. So he recalled
the Scripture, " If they persecute you in one city,
flee to another ; " and, in company with Thomas
Hooker and Samuel Stone, reached Boston in the
" Griffin," the 4th of September, having foiled the
attempts of the government to detain him and his
companions. When we find how utterly and absolutely congre
gational Cotton had become, we can hardly wonder
that the Primate of England was not content with
him. He refused to baptize his child born upon the
passage, not, as he said, with his exasperating mi
nuteness, because he had scruples as to the use of
salt water, but because, being no longer the minister
of a congregation, he did not hold himself em
powered to administer the sacraments ; and so the
boy got the name " Seaborn " only after his father
had been installed teacher of our church, and so had
gained the right to baptize him. It might suffice to
say that Cotton was welcomed to New England with
open arms, and sought by one and another congre
gation, and that it was even proposed that a State
maintenance should be provided for him. This last
proposition was happily discountenanced ; and he be
came at once the teacher of our church, as Wilson
was already the pastor.

24 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
The simple ceremonial is briefly set down in
Winthrop's journal, with the story of the admission
to the fellowship of the church of the minister and
his wife ; and we are glad to learn that the baptism
of the little Seaborn was no longer delayed. It was
a day of promise and hope. The colonists had
been assured that the ceremonies of the English
Church would not be pressed upon them, and that
their enemies, Gardner, Morton, and Ratcliffe,
would not be allowed to prejudice them with the
authorities in the fatherland; and though Dudley,
in his severe Puritan temper, would not be as com
pliant as the rest in kindly feeling toward bishop and.
king, the commonwealth and the Church may well
be accounted happy in their prospects and fairly
equipped for their work in the wilderness.
In such wise and out of such living stones were
the foundations laid. They were worthy to uphold
any superstructures which in the coming ages should
be reared upon them. No faith could have been
stronger, no consciences more sincere, no desire to
live near to God and to his children deeper than
theirs who brought their all to these shores, and
labored, in the best light they could gain, to bring
order into our imperfect and, as they believed, fallen
world. They were altogether single and, as men
account, narrow. They sought the kingdom of God
almost as those might who cared little whether or
no anything else should be added to it.
Experimental religion ; obedience to the divine

HISTORICAL SERMONS. 25
law as taught by Moses, as fulfilled by Jesus ; mutual
oversight and co-operation for the ends of practical
righteousness ; the commonwealth a reign of law,
with so much love of thrift as is inseparable from
the life of an Englishman, — these were all they
prized and cherished. There was scarce anything,
Sundays or week-days, to remind one that they had
come from the land of Chaucer, Spenser, Bacon,
Shakspeare, Raleigh ; that they could exercise their
imaginations upon any subjects save the joys of the
redeemed and the sufferings of the damned; and
there seemed to be no pause in the intensity of
their pursuit of the one thing needful. A college
was for them a school for the training of ministers.
A knowledge of Hebrew was precious, because He
brew was the language in which God had spoken
to Moses ; and a knowledge of Greek was precious,
because Greek was the language in which God had
caused his last word to his rebellious children to be
written. The heavens were watched chiefly for the.
signs and wonders which proclaimed divine warn
ings. Were men drowned in the rough sea, it was
" a breach of God upon them ; " for the religious and
moral nature pervaded and occupied and awed their
whole being.
In this faith they lived and endured hardness, and
encountered, in their endeavor to translate their truth
into life, endless perplexities, and have been stigma
tized as inconsistent because they could not attain
in the seventeenth century to what we call the liber-

26 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
ality, and what they perhaps would call, were they
here, the indifference and laxity, of the nineteenth
century. In this faith they died, some of them, as
earnest men are very likely to do, rather lamenting
their failures than celebrating their successes. We
may, if we can, add to their faith knowledge ; we
may claim for earth and earthly things, for art and
human culture, the rights which they seemed to
forget ; but, if we try to centre our life and work
other than they centred it, we seek to build a city
without foundations, and shall learn sooner or
later that, " except the Lord build the house, they
labor in vain who build it."
There are deeds and sights in our modern New
England upon which we should be ashamed to have
the fathers of New England look, not because of
their Puritan scruples, but because they were Chris
tians, — men of clean hands and pure eyes. We
must be baptized again into their spirit of non
conformity, of intellectual and moral honesty, the
courage of our convictions, the spirit which does
not suffer men to go with the crowd when reason
and conscience and the living Christ bid them go
alone. We must honor their new departures by our
own forward movements. We must be content with
them to break rank and go alone, or be the faint
and few that make up the advanced army, and live
and die in that faith which is now, as ever, the sub
stance of things hoped for, and the evidence of
things not seen.

HISTORICAL SERMONS. 27
The Frenchman Renan, in the third of his Eng
lish Lectures of the present year, affirms that " the
nation which is much occupied with social and re
ligious problems is almost always politically weak.
The country that dreams of a kingdom of God, that
lives for general ideas, and is engaged in enterprises
of universal interest, sacrifices, in so doing, its proper
individual destiny, weakens and destroys itself as an
earthly country. We never with impunity bear the
fire in our own bosoms." Let us see to it that New
England in the future as in the past is a living refu
tation of this dreary and unchristian philosophy, and
was planted to show that the precise opposite is the
truth of our life on earth.

II.
" For it hath been declared unto me of you, my brethren,
BY THEM WHICH ARE OF THE HOUSE OF CHLOE, THAT THERE
ARE CONTENTIONS AMONG YOU. Is CHRIST DIVIDED ? " — I Cor.
i. n, 13-
IN a former sermon I have traced the history of
our church until the day of the installation of
John Cotton as teacher. I propose now to follow
its fortunes during those years when it was the one
and only church in Boston, the embodiment of the
religious life of the little town, and, so close was
the connection between things secular and things
sacred, as truly the town as it was the church. With
Cotton for teacher and Wilson for pastor, a congre
gation so rich in faithful men and women may well
be regarded as established on this peninsula, and
fully equipped for its serious and difficult work. In
English history — and Old England and New Eng
land were very closely bound together — the years
from 1633-4 to 1650 were crowded with events of
the deepest interest. We begin with Charles I. and
Archbishop Laud taking their first steps toward
their scaffolds ; and we end with Cromwell, who has
beheaded his king and has entered Scotland to fight
the battle of Dunbar. In some sort still a part of

HISTORICAL SERMONS. 29
the English nation, and filled to overflowing with
its new life, this congregation, in common with
many other congregations already formed or form
ing around them, is embarked in what proves to
be a very exacting and altogether new enterprise.
Partly aforethought and partly through the force of
circumstances they are beginning the world anew.
They have gone back to a few great elemental prin
ciples. They are, indeed, the subjects of England,
and I have no doubt thought themselves quite sin
cere in saying with Dudley that " in this they had
not altered." They were not, as he declares, " like
those who have dispensations to lie ; but as we were
free enough in England to turn our insides out
wards, sometimes- to our disadvantage, very unlike
is it that now, being procul a fulmine, we should
be so unlike ourselves." Nevertheless, they are far
from England, and at liberty to fashion Church and
State according to new patterns ; and we find that,
however they may be sincerely conservative and
may profess loyalty, whenever some special act of
obedience is asked of them, they take the matter into
consideration until the home rulers have forgotten
about it, and then choose their own way. Teeming
with the spirit of the new creation, their opportuni
ties are rarely lost upon them.
But with opportunity comes trial. We of the
congregation have for our law and guidance infalli
ble sacred books, especially Moses, his judicials, pat
terns for our lives, political and social ; but we of

30 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
the congregation, ministers and people, are fallible
and not altogether agreed, indeed with an im
mense tendency to individualism, and as there are
many towns already in Massachusetts beside Bos
ton, each with its congregation, and as every congre
gation is theoretically independent of every other
and of all the rest, how will it be possible for all
these to be one society and to hold the faith in the
unity of the spirit and the bond of peace ? Where
religion is such an all-absorbing interest, how can
those who are not agreed about it live together?
Moreover, the religions of the Old England and of
the New England are rapidly diverging. What if
the claims of king and bishop over governor and
minister should be asserted and enforced ? Then, it is
a new country, and they are new-comers into it, with
scarcely any title except that they are there. Why
may not others come who are not and will not be
of the congregation, and yet wish to share its privi
leges, or at least to sit down unpleasantly near ? The
congregation has already had a little experience of
some of these practical difficulties, but as yet their
trials had only begun ; and, at the time of which I
am speaking, they were full of courage and hope.
The church makes a good beginning in their
devoted ministry to the Indians, who are suffering
under a visitation of small-pox. The care and love
of the white man, as we are told, " wrought much
with them." The Englishman's God, they said, is
a good God. These settlers, unlike their fellow-

HISTORICAL SERMONS.

31

Indians, did not leave them to die uncared for, and,
though greatly exposed, did not fall victims to the
disease. It is well worth recording, as indicating
the composition of the community even at that day,
that this work of charity was not confined to those
who were in immediate communion with the church.
Maverick of Winesemett, for example, though a non-
communicant, who must have lost his vote by the
legislation of 1631, was foremost in kind offices.
Himself, his wife and servants, went daily to them,
ministered to their necessities, buried their dead,
and took home many of their children. Along with
this wholesome charity, the work of the church in
the nurture and revival and conversion of souls goes
prosperously forward. Beside the care and watch
of those who have already been gathered in, there is
a considerable increase of the communicant body.
The coming of immigrants steadily enlarges the field
for the friends of independency as well as for the
gospel laborers. Some of the new townsmen are
still strongly attached to the forms of the English
Church and not attracted by Puritan simplicity, not
to say uncouthness. Others are scarcely prepared
for any form of Christian communion.
The lapses from Christian purity and integrity, to
which our early church records bear sad though not
very frequent witness, may perhaps awaken the sus
picion that the outward advantages of church mem
bership were a temptation to some to profess a
Christianity of which they had no sufficient experi-

32 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
ence. Yet there can be no doubt that it was an
increasing congregation of sincere men and women.
The records show some thirty-seven additions in the
first three months of Mr. Cotton's ministry.
But the church could not long be allowed to con
fine its energies to works of piety and love, the nurs
ing of the sick, and the care of souls. There was
not only the Lord's Day with its double services,
there was also Thursday with its famous lecture and
its consequent half-time school. This lecture had
ceased to be preached before my coming to the
church, and I made a vain effort to reinstate it as a
union service for all Protestants. It lingered in that
way a little longer as a shadow of the past, and then
vanished, unless the Monday Lectureship, so called,
of our day be its reappearing. It is first named
soon after Mr. Cotton's coming, and may have been
a continuation of a similar meeting in Old Boston.
It seems to have been about equally devoted to the
things of Caesar and the things of God. But, whether
on Thursdays or on the Lord's Day, the new teacher,
who was a famous expositor, drawing his answers
from the Scriptures in reply to the inquiries of the
magistrates, or prompted by what seemed to him the
necessities of the hour, sets in order the new house,
civil and religious. The ministry, he teaches, must be
maintained by weekly contributions. To live upon
the income of Church funds or from State bounties
is the beginning of death. Each church must be
independent of the rest, and must demand a fresh

HISTORICAL SERMONS. 33
profession of faith, even of those who come from a
sister church. A magistrate must not be deprived
of his office without just cause, and for no cause
must be arraigned as a public criminal. You may
vote, he taught, but be sure that you vote only for
certain men, — men fit to be voted for; and when,
on one occasion, the election which followed a
Thursday lecture did not content him, he caused it
to be reversed on the subsequent Thursday, and, by
putting in the right men, saved, so it is claimed, our
Boston Common, as we trust for all generations.
The apostle Eliot finds fault with the magistrates
for alleged unfair treatment of the Indians ; and Mr.
Cotton is engaged by them to " reduce him," as their
phrase was, and he was persuaded to retract charges
which we may hope were unfounded. One is not
sorry to learn that Mr. Cotton's advice, which was
sometimes uncalled for, was not always followed, as
once in their choice of a new governor, in spite of
his urging that the old incumbent should be con
tinued in office. That incumbent was indeed de
serving of all confidence. But the republican spirit
must have its expression ; and why should Mr. Cot
ton, who was not a very earnest republican, and who
had only then been made a freeman, assume so
much ? They will choose the old governor again
by and by, but not that year. They appoint a fast
in any time of anxiety and peril, as in 1634-5,
when Wilson is visiting the English Puritans, and
there are fears that he, with some new immigrants,
3

34 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
may be detained and imprisoned. From time to
time all the ministers are called to meet with the
Boston church as a sort of council of State, as once
when two questions were proposed to them : First,
If a general governor is sent over from England,
what shall we do ? Second, Is it lawful to carry the
cross in our banners ? The ministers replied : " As
to the cross in the banner, we are not ready to say.
That may be an idolatrous symbol or not. But as
to the governor, we are quite clear that we should
not accept him, not though we should be com
pelled to fight." In a lull of more weighty matters,
Mr. Cotton shows from Scripture that women may
lay aside their veils in church, where they are not, by
custom of the place, the token of subjection. Mr.
Endecott feels compelled to take the other side ; and
the governor must interpose and end the discussion,
which waxes hot.
But the weighty matters soon came to the front.
You have already heard of Roger Williams and his
refusal to become the teacher of our congregation,
on the ground that its members had not sufficiently
separated themselves from the fellowship of the
English Church. Almost immediately after Mr.
Cotton's installation, Mr. Williams gives great of
fence to the governor and assistants of Massachu
setts by reiterating what he had formerly written to
the governor and council of Plymouth, touching
the invalidity of their title by King James's grant
and the need of compounding with the Indians.

HISTORICAL SERMONS.

35

Three passages in this paper were especially annoy
ing to the magistrates.
King James is charged with having told a solemn
public lie because he blessed God that he was the
first Christian prince who had discovered this land,
and again with blasphemy for calling Europe Chris
tendom, and then Mr. Williams had applied portions
of the Book of the Revelations to King Charles in no
flattering manner. What he had written was prob
ably only too true ; but, the governor having taken
advice from judicious ministers, Mr. Williams is
induced to submit and retract, but ft was for the
last time. He was soon to get a surer footing upon
even more advanced and firmer ground. He was
doubtless then on his way to his doctrines of soul
liberty and an extreme individualism, so extreme
that, for lack of what he deemed fit companionship,
the Lord's Supper could be no communion for him
save as he could observe it with his wife.
In the year 1635 the authorities of the colony
were much disturbed by what seemed to them the
erroneous and dangerous views of Mr. Williams
upon the functions of the magistrate as the defender
of the faith and the guardian of religious truth.
He must not, said Mr. Williams, punish a breach of
the first table ; that is, he must not enforce the first
half of the ten commandments which enjoins the
pure worship of God. His business is with the
public morals and with offences against order, safety,
and decency, not with the soul's relations to God.

36 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
He must not put an unregenerate man to his oath;
for what communion has light with darkness ? If
these things are to be allowed, the magistrates
asked, appealing to the ministers and to our teacher
among the rest, how are we to protect ourselves
against heresy, apostasy, or tyranny? Once and
again, in May and in October, Mr. Williams was con-
vented and called to account by the civil and relig
ious authorities, but they were utterly unable to
" reduce him." This being the case, it was the
almost universal judgment, one minister only dis
senting, that the continuance of such a heretic any
longer within the limits of the colony would be
fraught with extreme peril to the Church of Christ.
Six weeks were allowed him in which to depart
beyond the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. I cannot
understand why any should be surprised at such a
sentence. We may admire Roger Williams; but
why should we be scandalized because our fore
fathers had not learned, any more than the rest of
the religious world, that the Church does not need
the defence of the civil arm, and that whether, as
now in France, it be Jesuit or atheist, the safe way
is to leave every man's cause to its own merits ?
The Puritans believed that in a fallen world the
State must control the utterance of human thought
as well as restrain human action. They left Eng
land, not because they had learned that the utmost
freedom should be allowed in religious matters, but
because they believed that the particular restraints

HISTORICAL SERMONS.

37

which king and bishops imposed upon them were
not sanctioned by Scripture. They had not thought
for a moment that a man might choose his own
church or choose to be of no church, or walk about
the roads and through the fields on Sunday, or re
vert at his pleasure to Romanism. There must be
order in these to them altogether vital matters.
The people who could not conform in England
should leave England, and be suffered to go in
peace ; and the people who could not conform in
Massachusetts must go back to England or do what
they had done, make a new home for themselves in
the wilderness. And perhaps they thought, not un
reasonably, that Narragansett Bay was as good a
place to live in as Massachusetts Bay.
At all events, spite of all that our fathers had
suffered from the old order in the State, there was
a strong clinging to order of a very rigid sort, with
very little disposition to commit themselves to the
largest freedom. In answer to the propositions of
certain English peers made in 1634 to join the Mas
sachusetts Colony, Cotton writes : " Democracy I do
not conceive that God ever did ordain as a fit gov
ernment, either for church or commonwealth. If
the people be governors, who shall be governed ?
As for monarchy and aristocracy, they are both of
them clearly approved and directed in Scripture, yet
so as God referreth the sovereignty to himself, and
setteth up theocracy in both."
Moving in this direction, a certain portion of the

38 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
government were chosen for life in 1636; but this
arrangement soon came to an end, with the increase
of the troubles in England and the lessening pros
pect of noble immigrants. A large religious free
dom was rather the result of the emigration of
Englishmen to America than a part of its purpose;
and our fathers are to be admired rather for enduring
hardness themselves than for making the world easy
for others. They were probably quite right in the
opinion that Massachusetts was not large enough to
contain in that day the friends and the opponents
of Williams. It is worth noting that personally
they seem to have been on very friendly terms with
the daring innovator, and that, in its indirect results,
this controversy with Mr. Williams advanced the
interests of freedom; for it was decided in First
Church that communicating with the Church of
England should be no disqualification for our own
religious fellowship. Some, who are in the habit of
complaining that Williams was banished, seem
hardly to have understood how little there was in
the constitution of the new community to have
made any other course likely. The church leaned
almost absolutely upon the commonwealth, which it
inspired and guided. Except in Boston, all persons
subject to taxation were compelled to contribute to
the support of the ministers. All who were able
must attend the authorized public worship. The
results of synods were embodied in-laws which must
be obeyed. Persons and churches in excommunica-

HISTORICAL SERMONS. 39
tion were without civil privileges. It was not the
day of moral suasion, and in all Christendom there
was no nation without an established church. It is
not too much to say that the Rhode Island settle
ments in their endeavors to maintain order were
not quite independent of more conservative Massa
chusetts. In the month of March, 1636, Rev. Hugh Peters,
or Peter, as he writes his name, preaching to
First Church, proposes, among other things not so
useful, that they should take order for employment
of people, especially women and children, in the
winter time ; for he feared that idleness would be
the ruin both of church and commonwealth. Per
haps this may be taken as the first trace of an em
ployment society in our congregation.
But this year had not closed before our church
became the centre of a most painful religious agita
tion, which in that day must needs involve the
State as well. The story, one may hope, belongs to
the past. The very phrases in which it was first
told are strange to modern ears, and need to be
translated into the language of our day. And yet
it is still profoundly interesting, as a chapter in the
history of man's deepest experience ; and it is singu
larly characteristic of the earliest New England life.
It may be possible, even at this day, to reach what
was vital and of abiding significance in this other
wise painful story. What I am to relate would have
been impossible in any but a profoundly religious

4°

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

community, and to men and women whose thoughts
were much turned in upon their own minds and
hearts. It is an old and sacred saying that he must
die who hath looked upon God. There is a vision
of the Eternal and a persuasion of the Divine In
dwelling which threaten our personal and individual
being. God becomes so truly all in all that we have
no work and ways and conduct and character that
we can call our own. It is a condition which, if it
is not the most perfect sanity, may become the
wildest insanity. God works in us to will and to
do; and this is interpreted to mean that God does
all, and that what is done is all right, not because
conscience says so, not because good men say so,
not because the law says so, but because God, who
dwells in us and we in him, does it. It is he who
makes us, and not we ourselves. We are his chil
dren. We know it, we feel it. On such a day, in
such a place, in such a moment of exalted religious
feeling, we had the earnest of the Spirit in our
hearts. Not by any works, better or worse, poor at
the best, are we justified, — there can be no rest for
us in any such justification, — it is God that justi-
fieth ; who is he that condemneth ? God knoweth
who are his, and he has revealed to us that we are
of that number; and though character and conduct
may change, God does not change. Man looks at
the works, God looks at the worker.
Such was the outcome of the deep religious life
of the First Church, as the year 1636 was drawing

HISTORICAL SERMONS.

41

toward its close. Men called it " antinomianism,"
because it seemed to set itself against law, and was a
magnifying of God's grace and presence in the soul
that misled the believer into speaking lightly of self-
control, and in unbalanced or undisciplined or pas
sionate natures into the neglect of self-control. As
might have been expected, it was the infirmity of
noble and religious souls. In our religious history
the story of the antinomianism of First Church is
largely the tragic story of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson,
and of the consequent civil strife stirred by her
brother-in-law, the Rev. John Wheel wright. Mrs.
Hutchinson came to Boston from England, in Sep
tember, 1634; Mr. Wheelwright, not far from June 12,
1636. This lady had been an earnest and thor
oughly sympathetic attendant upon Mr. Cotton's
preaching in Old Boston. She is described by Mr.
Winthrop as a woman with a ready wit and a bold
spirit, who brought over with her two dangerous
errors : first, that the person of the Holy Ghost
dwells in a justified person ; second, that no sanc
tification can help to evidence to us our justification.
Mrs. Hutchinson was not a woman who could hide
in her heart what she believed to be the divine
counsel. By herself, and in concert with her
brother-in-law, she strove to make converts, always
claiming that in her chief points of doctrine, if not
in all that seemed to proceed inevitably from her
principles, Mr. Cotton was of her mind. And un
doubtedly she could easily have supported her asser-

42

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

tion by quoting his words, as she might have done
many unqualified and unwise sayings of Martin
Luther to the same effect. She gave great offence
by holding and preaching to what we should call in
this day parlor-meetings, — gatherings of women,
numbering even in that small town some sixty
hearers. Mr. Wilson's ministrations seemed to her
so below the mark, so legal, or, as we should say,
ethical, that she was known to go out from them
and leave the church, — a great scandal in that day.
And her friends even proposed — and most likely,
save for Mr. Winthrop's opposition, would have pre
vailed — to establish Wheelwright as the third minis
ter and assistant teacher over the little church.
It came about at last that, with the exception of
Wilson and Winthrop, and one or two more, the
church in Boston were carried away by Mrs. Hutch
inson's teachings. Well, you ask, what then ? What
harm could that do ? Was she not, as her own hus
band, who should know, well said, a dear saint and
servant of God ; and were any the worse for sharing
her mysticism and refinements, and is it not the
commonest thing for those who have the time to
amuse themselves with theological ingenuities? Yes;
but remember that the Massachusetts of that day,
though not unthrifty or quite blind to this world,
was dead in earnest, exceedingly devoted to religious
things and persuaded of the harmf ulness of false
and unscriptural teachings, and that an earnest re
ligionist was not merely a celebrity, to be thronged

HISTORICAL SERMONS.

43

and feasted and flattered and cast aside. Christen
dom, too, had not been without sad experience of a
fanaticism which issues in frightful immoralities, and
pretends to serve God by destruction instead of ful
filment. The prudent did not like this talk about
the filthy rags of our own righteousness and the
worthlessness of honesty and purity. It might be
according to the letter, but it was not according to
the spirit, and the examples of the Bible ; and they
had heard it, not only from heated preachers and
enthusiasts, but from the lips of the vile hypocrite,
Captain UnderhiU, in his seasons of real or pre
tended penitence, when he went before the church
voluntarily or of necessity, and, as Mr. Winthrop
records, could scarcely be heard for his blubbering.
Our fathers were always anxious about men and
women who claimed to be perfect and believed
themselves to be absolutely under divine guidance.
So, as time went on, the State as well as the Church
was thrown into confusion and peril. The Boston
soldiers refused to march with Wilson for their
chaplain against the Pequots, because he was what
they called — and it was in that day very opprobrious
language — a legal preacher.
Things went on from bad to worse, until Wheel
wright's preaching on one occasion awakened a not
unfounded apprehension of civil tumult, and led to
the disarming of many Boston citizens, his sup
porters and petitioners in his behalf, and finally to
his own banishment, a punishment which in his

44 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
cooler years he confessed to have been necessary.
The election of the governor turned absolutely upon
the theological question ; and Mr. Winthrop owed
his success at the polls to Rev. John Wilson, who
climbed a tree and made a speech in his behalf. Mr.
Cotton was almost swept away by the antinomian
tide, and, as it seems to me, would have lost his
head utterly, if he had not been steadied by the
sound sense of modest John Winthrop. The words
of the governor at the opening of the strife ought
to have put an end to it, and are greatly in advance
of much modern theology. " Withal he made this
request to the brother (which he said he did seri
ously and affectionately), that, seeing these variances
grew and some estrangement withal from some
words and phrases which were of human invention
and tended to doubtful disputation rather than to
edification, and had no footing in Scripture, nor had
been in use in the purest churches for three hundred
years after Christ, that for the peace of the church
they might be forborne, — he meant person of the
Holy Ghost and real union, — and concluded that
he did not intend to dispute the matter."
It does not appear that Mr. Winthrop was any
less earnest than Mr. Cotton in his persuasion of
the Divine Indwelling, but he was certainly wiser
than Mr. Cotton in his understanding and use of
this vital persuasion. Happily, there were other
churches in Massachusetts besides the church in
Boston, or independency had been a sad failure.

HISTORICAL SERMONS. ac
The other churches had no right to command ; but
they were allowed, if not entitled, to advise. There
was but one Mrs. Hutchinson ; and, host as she was
and singularly persuasive, she was drifting into specu
lative novelties, and in due time the reaction came,
alas ! in a tide which swept her, as it seems to me,
not without cruelty and injustice, out of the church
and the commonwealth. She was brought first
before the General Court. They sentenced her to
banishment, and yet deferred the execution of the
sentence until the winter should have passed ; but,
proving incorrigible, she was brought to the Thurs
day lecture in the little Boston house of worship,
first on the 1 5th of March. Her errors were enumer
ated and condemned, and herself admonished, the
governor and treasurer of the commonwealth, being
members of our church, coming from the General
Court in Cambridge to join in the sentence. But
this proved insufficient, and she was summoned
again on the 22d of the same month; and, all hope
of her repentance having ceased, Mr. Wilson was
told to pronounce this judgment: " Anne, the wife
of our brother William Hutchinson, having on the
15th of the third month been openly in publique
congregation admonished of sundry errours held by
her, was on the 2 2d day cast out of the church for
impenitently persisting in a manifest lye then ex
pressed by her in open congregation, the 15th of the
same month, 1638."
Our church does not, as it seems to me, make a

46 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
good figure in this business. It was unquestionably
a necessity in those times to fine, disarm, and even
banish leading antinomians. So young a common
wealth could not bear such internal conflicts, as
Puritan experience in Holland had already shown.
A few more months of such strife would have satis
fied waiting and sympathizing friends in England
that Massachusetts could be no home for them, and
needed for its better government a strong arm of
some sort, if not that of Charles or of Laud. Un
questionably, it was as necessary that Mrs. Hutchin
son should go away as it is needful to separate one
who has been overwrought from the old neighbor
hood and household. But it seems to me that John
Cotton, considering that he himself, spite of his nice
theological distinctions, was much implicated with
his parishioner, and that the congregation almost
without exception had been of her mind, and
that he had been much annoyed by Mr. Wilson's
reasonableness and moderation, might have recog
nized in this sincere woman a spiritual and mental
exaltation which left her scarcely, accountable. He
was always much too facile a man, and should never
have allowed the name of his friend to go down on
the church record with the brand of falsehood. Mr.
Winthrop was wiser in his first than in his final
dealing with the matter, and perhaps had this in
mind when late in life he declined to have part in a
similar severity, saying he had done too much of
that work already.

HISTORICAL SERMONS.

47

It was no way a necessary result of her banish
ment ; but it is sad to remember that in 1643 an
inroad of Indians into the Dutch country brought
death to Mrs. Hutchinson and to all her household,
with the exception of a daughter eight years of age.
This child was afterward restored through the
agency of the General Court of Massachusetts, and
placed with friends in Boston. The punishment
inflicted upon Mrs. Hutchinson had its natural effect
in exaggerating her eccentricities of thought and
speech ; and we do not find that she ever made any
concessions. One does not like to think how this
most blessed life, which so abounded in the hearts
of these New England men and women, failed of its
proper issues for lack of wise guidance. It was gain
unspeakable to have attained such a deep sense of
God; and it would have been the part of a wise
piety not to put so mysterious an experience into
propositions, and then draw inferences from them
and quote texts in support of them. It had been
wiser so to receive and so to give the holy and sweet
light that all men would rejoice in it, and be the
better for it. It is not success to owe our escape
from fanaticism to a dulness of the religious sense.
Cotton and Mrs. Hutchinson and Henry Vane and
Wheelwright spake truly, when they said that none
other and no less than God dwells in us, if we will
suffer him, and that all our deep springs are in him,
and that the life which he would have us live is pos
sible only because he lives in us. But they should

48 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
not have failed to add that whom God calls he calls
to righteousness, and that a loving heart is the only
absolutely sure token that he who is Love dwells
in us.
Must the religious world always oscillate between
a fervid fanaticism and a tradition of piety, which is
only a saying of prayers, an assenting to creeds, and
an endeavor to live a decent life ? The church of
Boston did well to be profoundly moved by Mrs.
Hutchinson's living words, when she urged that the
gospel means not some addition to our theology,
nor yet some small repairs of character, but God in
us, fashioning thought and act into his perfect like
ness. Minister and people, teacher and pastor alike,
should have labored together to add manhood,
knowledge, self-control, and all the fruits of the
Spirit to this great faith. The dry, dogmatic, literal,
formal church of Boston needed Mrs. Hutchinson's
mystic piety and her freer dealing with the old
affirmations. But they were left to exorcise as evil
a spirit which rather needed to be guided and oc
cupied. In the highest view of the matter, it was a
failure, and yet one of those failures of the sincere
and devoted upon which we build arguments of
hope, and press onward to the things which are
before.

III.

"These all, having obtained a good report through faith,
received not the promise : god having provided some
better thing for us, that they without us should not be
MADE PERFECT.'' — Heb. XI. 39, 40.
\^/E have traced the story of our church to the
time when they could bear Mrs. Hutchinson
no longer. She has been defeated, and is gone into
the wilderness. It is one of the lessons of civil
history, that a defeated rebellion strengthens the
victorious government; but the reign is rather a
supremacy of law than a reign. of love, and instead
of peace and mutual confidence, we have a con
strained and superficial quietness. Moreover, the
Church of Boston had sympathized too deeply and
widely with Mrs. Hutchinson to be soon at ease
after the whirlwind in which she had been separated
from them had passed over. The extravagances of
the Hutchinsonians increased, and seemed to justify
the sentence of expulsion ; and yet those who passed
this sentence may have reflected that oppression
makes even wise men mad. Mr. Cotton felt called
upon to deplore " his own and the church's indo
lence and credulity," which had allowed such grave
errors to gain such a hold upon the community, and
4

50

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

explained how he himself had been deceived. In a
sermon preached on a day of fasting and prayer on
account of the prevalence of the small-pox, he la
ments the want of zeal in the professors of religion
and the general decay of piety. The life that should
have become godliness had been consumed in envy-
ings and strife. It was a time of repressions and
excommunications in all the neighborhoods and
churches. Moreover, the great enemy of man
seemed, so thought our fathers, to be especially
intent to work mischief amongst them, tempting to
crime. It must have been a very sad day in Boston
when Dorothy Talbye, driven to insanity by almost
insane religious teachings, was hung for murdering
her little daughter, in the hope, as she said, that she
might free her from future misery. She manifested
no penitence. She acted, she said, from a revela
tion ; she only vainly begged to be beheaded, as less
painful and less shameful than hanging, whilst the
Rev. Hugh Peter, from Salem, exhorted the people
to take heed against being deceived by revelations,
and not to despise, as she had done, the ordinance
of excommunication. But aside from such deplor
able confounding of madness with criminality, there
was at this time scarcely a shadow of freedom in
Massachusetts. For a few months in the year 1638
a law was in force by which excommunication for
six months carried with it a liability to fines and im
prisonments. The churches were independent only
in name. One minister and some individual Chris-

HISTORICAL SERMONS.

51

tians ventured to maintain that baptized persons
shall be admitted to the communion without a par
ticular examination of their faith, and were com
pelled to retract. A Mr. Britton undertook to
criticise the churches as over-dogmatic and exclusive,
and, because he had no money to pay a fine withal,
was openly whipped for his offence.
But though the Church of Boston meets with small
success in any endeavor which may have been made
to harmonize orthodoxy and toleration, and one
must keep a watch over the lips, and be careful not
to think aloud, the moral condition of the town is
carefully looked after in the administration of church
exhortations and discipline. The ministers, prompt
ed by the General Court, protest in their sermons
against a growing extravagance in dress ; but very
little comes of it, because, as we are told, their own
wives are so deeply implicated in the prevailing
degeneracy. Nevertheless, morals are coming to
the front, and the clergy are acting upon the per
mission of the synod of 1637, and presenting the
grace of the gospel under a covenant of works.
With the theological scrupulosity of the day, they
were told that this might be done " under," but not
" in and by," such a covenant of works. There is a
distinction here, even though you may not all be able
to see it. The church turns its attention, as the
record shows, to the traders, and tries to expound
the right and wrong of buying and selling ; not, of
course, exhausting so large a matter, but making a

52 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
good, earnest beginning. Robert Keaine, brother-
in-law of Rev. John Wilson, founder of the Artillery
Company, was received in Boston Church, March
20, 1635, and had already been chosen four times
from Boston to the General Court. A shopkeeper
in our town, he had asked what seems to have been
the worth in money, and yet a very large price for
his goods, and had found purchasers willing to pay
what he asked ; but first the Court and then the
church adjudge him exorbitant. Excommunication
was proposed and preached about by Mr. Cotton,
with a somewhat full discussion of the laws of buy
ing and selling. Mr. Keaine was brought before
the assembly of Christians, and bewailed his cov
etous and corrupt heart, not, however, without ex
cusing himself in some particulars. An admonition
was finally accepted as sufficient, so far as the
church was concerned in the matter; but the de
linquent was sentenced by the Court to pay a fine
of .£100. He soon recovered his character and was
restored to favor, as one whose judgment, not his
heart, was at fault. About this time Edward Palmer,
for his extortion in taking £1 \t,s. yd. for the plank
and wood-work of Boston stocks, is fined five
pounds, and censured to be set an hour in the
stocks, The fine was remitted to ten shillings;
but the remainder of the sentence was executed, so
far as appears, the Ipswich chronicler telling us
that "he had the honor to sit in them an hour him
self, to warn others not. to offend in the like kind."

HISTORICAL SERMONS. 53
The church is scarcely ten years old, and must
begin its series of removals from one house of wor
ship to another; but what would we not give to
day for so much as a fragment of the first building ?
No wonder it was worn out with such continuous
use ! They told me in the English Groton that the
rector's house in the Winthrop Parish was more
than three hundred years old ; but here, in two
hundred and fifty years, the first things have all
vanished, and amongst them the rude structure
within whose rough walls and under whose humble
roof men and women had thought and felt and
preached and prayed and debated with such in
tensity of life, as when, to take a sadly memorable
instance, on two successive Thursday Lecture days,
Mrs. Hutchinson and the theologians vainly try to
meet in those labyrinths of divinity, from ten in the
morning quite into the evening hours, and the longer
they debate the farther are they apart. In this first
building the Artillery Election sermon was preached
in 1638 by John Wilson, for the first and only time
during the period with which my sermons have been
occupied. But the house could not well have been
made to last, and it is outgrown and outworn, and
even then was rapidly falling into decay. So after
the usual, and, I believe, always inevitable discus
sion as to the proper site, and the familiar inter
position of Mr. Cotton, without, whom nothing
could be done, it was decided to place the new
building nearly opposite the head of what is now

54

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

State Street. The church cost about ,£1,000, the
old house meeting about three-fifths of the amount,
and the remainder being supplied by voluntary and
ready contributions. It was the home of the con
gregation until it was destroyed by fire in 171 1.
The record in our hymn-book and under our church
tower is not quite correct, for the second house of
worship was not finished until 1640. In the next
year, under the order of the General Court, the
ministers agree upon a form of catechism to be
printed for general use, and there are evidences of
great care in moral as well as theological discipline.
It is pleasant to find it recorded that on a training
day at this time twelve hundred men were under
arms, and not one of them intoxicated or heard to
use profane speech. The utmost pastoral fidelity
characterized the Boston ministers, Mr. Cotton es
pecially teaching that if old and faithful officers
had grown poor in the public service, they should
be maintained at the public cost, and not dropped,
as one Mr. Hathorne had proposed in the public
caucus. The story which I have been telling you has thus
far been quite provincial in its character, — a village
tale, as you may be almost ready to say ; but it is
none the less the story of not a few who are soon to
share largely in the new career which in those days
was opening wide for Englishmen. It was a time
when the temptation to go back to England was
very great, — too strong, indeed, to be resisted, if

HISTORICAL SERMONS. 55
duty as well as the desire for the old home seemed
to plead for a return. The tidings from the mother
country are as startling as they are encouraoino-.
There are enterprises in Church and State which
demand just such men as these New England
colonists. For ministers and laymen there is good
work to be done in the Old World, about which
they had been ready to despair. A revolution is
impending. The news comes fast. The Earl of
Strafford died upon the scaffold in 1641 ; Arch
bishop Laud was at that time confined in the
Tower under an impeachment for high treason, and
after three years' imprisonment came out only to
be tried and executed. In 1642 the Royalists with
draw from Parliament, and Charles raises his stand
ard at Nottingham; whilst in 1643 the assembly
of divines gathers in Westminster, and Cotton,
Davenport, and Hooker receive an invitation to
visit England and sit in that synod, — three Inde
pendents amongst a crowd of Presbyterians as
bigoted as any of the old churchmen. Fortunately
Hooker dissuaded Davenport and Cotton, who were
inclined to go. The errand would have issued in
disappointment, and landed them in the midst of a
civil war which brought to the scaffold, at the time
of the Restoration, the famous Hugh Peter, who,
after having been for seven years a New England
minister, had become a great promoter of the Com
monwealth. Sir Henry Vane, too, a member of
First Church, was sacrificed at a later day to the

56 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
same terrible necessity; but he parted from our
communion and town as early as 1637, in the midst
ofthe conflict with Mrs. Hutchinson, who had found
in him a most hearty sympathizer. Though he
had not felt justified as a thorough-going republican
in supporting Cromwell, the restoration of Charles
II. brought disgrace and death to one who- was a
sincere and deeply religious man, and a great
helper of New England.
Meanwhile there was Work enough for those who
remained in the new home. Virginia asks for
missionaries, — not being content with such minis
trations as she had, — and with reason, unless Mr.
Winthrop had been misinformed as to the character
of the clergy of that colony. At Thursday Lec
ture three are designated for this business, one of
whom, Mr. Thompson, undertakes the errand. He is
described as " a very melancholic man and of a crazy
body," but his spirits and his outward frame were
greatly helped by a very encouraging ministry in that
Old Dominion. The conflict in England increases
in bitterness, and First Church leads the way in
keeping a day of fasting in regard of the war between
king and Parliament, and the example is widely
followed by sister churches. The scrupulous must
have been somewhat relieved when they learned that
the Red Cross of England, which had been suspected
as an idol, and had given occasion to so much dis
cussion, was borne aloft alike by Royalists and Round
heads. All this stir in England was unfavorable to

HISTORICAL SERMONS. 57
Massachusetts. It secured for her freedom of devel
opment, but drained away her life ; for you will under
stand that the tide of emigration to New England
had not only ceased, but had begun to flow the other
way. The expatriation of patriotic Englishmen
ended from the day of the summoning of Charles's
fifth Parliament. Time would fail me to recite the
names of famous New Englanders who filled the
highest places in the army and navy under the Par
liament or under Cromwell, and were raised to the
highest posts in the civil service, or reinforced the
rank and file in that day of earnest struggle. For
tunately there was a deep reservoir to be drained.
At the end of ten years after Winthrop's landing,
nearly twenty-one thousand Englishmen had crossed
in three hundred vessels, at a cost of two hundred
thousand pounds sterling ; and as there were many
who must needs go back and do the work of the day
in England, so there were those who must needs
remain. And in their twofold capacity of statesmen
and of churchmen, and as custodians of ecclesiastical
and of practical Christianity, the people of Boston
were abundantly occupied. Their new house of wor
ship from 1640 to 1650 was the scene of many ani
mated and heated debates on week-days, as well as
a place of prayer and religious instruction on the
Lord's Day.
It seems to have been a great point with our
fathers in this church to secure the attendance, at
their worship and preaching, of persons whom they

58 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
deemed heretical and who did not wish to go. The
son and son-in-law of Mrs. Hutchinson were so un
wise as to make their appearance in Boston in 1641,
and were presently called to account for reviling
the churches. The fines which were imposed upon
them could not be collected, because they had noth
ing to pay withal ; but, besides being imprisoned for
a while, they were compelled to make a part of First
Church congregation during their enforced stay in
Boston. " They refused to come to the religious
assemblies except they were led, and so they came
duly." Somewhat later, in 1642, La Tour, from Aca
dia, and his men, though "papists," as our fathers
were at pains to call them, came of their own accord
to our church meetings, perhaps from policy. Nev
ertheless, this did not ward off a very warm debate
in the congregation in 1643 upon the propriety and
scripturalness of having any league and fellowship
with idolaters, — a discussion in which Jehoshaphat,
Ahaziah, Josiah, Pharaoh Necho, Amaziah, Solomon,
Abraham, and Lot fill a very large place. This same
year we find unwilling worshippers at First Church
in the persons of Samuel Gorton and some of his
adherents. Gorton was originally a London cloth
ier, but became afterwards a Bostonian and an an-
tinomian, then a mystic theologian and leader of a
colony, besides being — whether with or without
sufficient provocation — a disturber of the peace.
Planted on a kind of debatable ground between two
settlements, he had already suffered a severe punish-

HISTORICAL SERMONS.

59

ment at the hands of the authorities of Rhode Island,
and had made himself troublesome even to so indul
gent a ruler as Roger Williams. He was, however,
finally taken prisoner and brought by our governor
to Boston. He, too, must go to the church, and he
is willing to hear Mr. Cotton preach if he may be
permitted to answer him. "So in the afternoon they
came, and were placed in the fourth seat, right before
the elders. Mr. Cotton in his ordinary text taught
out of Acts xix. of Demetrius pleading for Diana's
silver shrines or temples. After sermon Gorton
desired leave to speak, which, being granted, he re
peated the points of Mr. Cotton's sermon, and, coming
to that of the silver shrines, he said that in the church
there was nothing now but Christ, so that all our
orders, ministers, sacraments were but men's inven
tions for show and pomp, and no other than those
silver shrines of Diana," with much else which rather
piques than satisfies our curiosity, and leads us to
think that, however troublesome he may have been
as a ruler of men, he might have been put to good
use as a professor of theology. After the man
ner of the times it was deemed necessary to punish
him and his associates with great severity, though
happily for the reputation of Massachusetts they
escaped the sentence of death, which some proposed.
Another French delegation appears in the persons
of Marie and others, who come for D'Aulney, the
rival of La Tour. They are not inclined to public
worship, and are acquainted by the governor with

6o FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
" our manner that all men either come to our public
meetings or keep themselves quiet in their houses ; "
so he invited them home to his own house, where
they remained until sunset, reading books in Latin
and French and walking in his garden. It is added
that " they gave no offence."
The church mind was much engaged in the last
half of this decade of years with so modifying and
qualifying independency that the different congre
gations might have at once the privileges of freedom
and the advantages of some mild and moral control.
There must be a confederation at once of the colo
nies and of the congregations. Independency was
threatened by Presbyterianism on the one hand and
by chaos and anarchy on the other. The issue of
the Cambridge Synod of 1646-8 was the acceptance
of the Westminster confession of faith and the set
ting forth of New England Congregationalism as
the order of the churches. In this way the congre
gations provided for something like united effort, and
put themselves into what might be regarded as the
best condition to meet the assaults which had already
been begun upon them, not only by Presbyterians,
but by the great company of the unchurched and the
unfranchised, — by this time the large majority of
the colonists. Only the church-member could vote ;
and the way into the church was barred. But there
were many engaged to open it, — Episcopalians and
moderate Calvinists, and men whose experience was
rather moral than spiritual, or who were unwilling to

HISTORICAL SERMONS. 6l
be questioned as to their religious exercises. Peti
tions upon this subject were multiplied ; appeals
were carried to England, and sermons were preached
in First Church in which the bearer of the petition
for enlargement, on his way to the mother country,
was likened to Jonas. These words of the Patriarch
Cotton, as our church historian, Emerson, tells us,
were considered oracular. It so happened that a
violent storm arose on the passage, and one of the
female passengers, distracted with fear, went to Mr.
Fowle, the bearer of the document, and by her cries
and entreaties prevailed on him to give up the obnox
ious petition, which she instantly cast into the sea.
Mr. Fowle had, however, taken care to preserve the
original papers, which he published on his arrival
under the title of " New England's Jonas cast up in
London." By the help of fines and imprisonments,
and the preoccupation of Parliament with things
more pressing, the movement was stayed for the time.
But it was the first muttering of the tempest, and the
first premonition of the change which, step by step,
was to pass over New England, until in our day the
exemption of houses of worship is almost the last solid
vestige of the ancient order of the religious world.
Ecclesiasticism in that day was universal; but no
where, perhaps, was it put to so severe a strain as
in New England. You might receive the privileges
dependent upon church-membership at very little
cost in the sacramental communions of the Old
World, but on this side of the sea it was a serious

62 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
business for man or woman to gain admission to a
church, and to retain the place which, after the most
careful consideration, had been accorded. Disci
pline in those days was a reality. Any person who
stood excommunicated six months was liable, by a
law of 1638, to fine, imprisonment, or banishment.
This law lasted, indeed, only a year, but this was long
enough to show the mind of the community.
I ought not to pass over without some mention
the missionary work amongst the Indians in which,
with other churches, First Church was at this time
engaged. Wilson was earnest and successful in this
most difficult, but by no means unblessed enterprise.
Sagamore John, near Watertown, " began to hearken
after God and his ways." He was " kept down by
fear of the scoffs of the Indians," but on his death
bed " sent for Mr. Wilson to come to him, and com
mitted his only child to his care." Our pastor
shared largely with the apostle Eliot in the attempt
to Christianize and civilize the tribes around. We
read of an Indian lecture which was much frequented
by the natives, and the missionaries were greatly en
couraged by the belief that they were bringing back
to the fold the remains of the ten tribes of Israel
scattered by the Assyrian conquest. Wilson was
probably the author of a book upon the Indian mis
sion, published in London in 1647, and entitled
" The Day-Breaking if not the Sun-Rising of the
Gospel with the Indians of New England." Out of
this book grew, in 1649, an English society for pro-

HISTORICAL SERMONS.

63

moting and propagating the gospel in the United
Colonies of New England ; but already, Nov. 4, 1646,
by ordering that two ministers should be sent and
paid for going amongst the Indians every year, the
General Court of Massachusetts became the first
missionary society in Protestant Christendom. A
little earlier than this, that is, in 1645, Boston voted
to allow forever to the master fifty pounds and a
house, and thirty pounds to an usher of a free school
open to Indians as well as to whites. Free schools
there were in our town from the beginning, by vol
untary contributions at first, as appears from a long
list of donations in 1636. These voluntary contri
butions were succeeded by the enforced tax which
has continued to the present day.
Monday, the 26th of March, 1649, about noon, was
a sad time in the Church of Boston. It was John
Winthrop's last hour on earth. The townsmen
gathered in their silent way for his simple, solemn
funeral, Tuesday, April 3. But a little more than
sixty-one years of age, he was a very young old
man, and they needed his precious life. There
were many things in progress which he would
gladly have seen to the end. King Charles was
beheaded Jan. 30, 1649, but Winthrop had not
heard the tidings. We cannot resist the thought
that his spirit, wiser and gentler in age than even
in youth, would have brought in gentle counsels,
and have devised some milder way than the death-
penalty for the protection of the commonwealth

64

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

against the insanity of the Quakers, and so have
saved the names of Norton and Wilson from the
reproach which their share in the sad business has
brought upon them ; but that story belongs to the
next decade, when First Church will not stand
alone. The increasing needs of the town could no
longer be met by a single religious society. Out
of this necessity and not out of a bitter and pro
tracted theological controversy, as in the case of the
Third Church, sprang the Second Church, which was
destined soon to become a power in the community.
From the 5th of June, 1650. Cotton and Wilson are
no longer the only Boston ministers. Cotton's time
is short, only about a year and a half; but Wilson
has still a long service before him, and we leave our
church in their charge. Emerson tells us in his
history that in 1650 there were about forty churches
in New England, and seven thousand seven hundred
and fifty communicants. One thousand and thirty-
four children were baptized in Boston during Cot
ton's ministry. Three hundred and six men and
three hundred and four women had been admitted
to the communion by the end of 1652, whilst seven
teen persons had been publicly admonished, and five
excommunicated for irreclaimable errors.
I have brought down my story to a time when the
sufficiency of the Puritan method in gathering and
perpetuating a church began to be seriously ques
tioned, if it could not be freely debated. This ques-

HISTORICAL SERMONS. 65
tioning was doubtless stimulated by the intimate
connection between the Church and the State, and
the fact that to be a church-member was to be a
voter, if one desired to be. But this was not all. We
have here much more and deeper than the natural
wish of the majority to have some share in the gov
ernment. In the Church of Puritanism there was
no place save for a very pronounced Christian expe
rience, — no place for the child growing in wisdom
and stature, and yet with no deep sense of sinful
ness ; no place for those whose religion is rather
moral than spiritual, and even that mostly of the
silent sort, not loving to give an account of itself.
The Puritans would have for their fellowship the
highest and purest and most mature, or nothing.
Roger Williams reduced this rule to its severest and
most absurd terms when he refused to hold com
munion as a Christian with any one save his own
wife. The Puritan Church was not a place for the
nurture and maturing of Christians. What they
sought was quality, not quantity, — a few witnesses, a
few shining lights, not a multitude of the baptized and
the confirmed and the church-going and the prayer-
reading, with just the least tinge of Christianity. Now
precisely at this point, where this problem of church-
fellowship begins to be discussed under the breath, our
ancient congregation comes into contact with our
modern church life. It is a living question to-day how
to enlarge the Christian company without so depre
ciating and diluting its membership that it will be
s

66 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
little better than a baptized heathenism. That is
what we have been trying to learn. That is what
others have in mind, I suppose, when they speak of
" the godly discipline of the laity." Half-way cove
nants, the relaxation of the demand for a statement
of religious experience by the proposed communi
cant, the opening of the church to any who choose
to come without any questions or conditions, have
all been congregational experiments in this direction,
and they have not been successful ; on the contrary,
the wider the doors are open the fewer care to enter,
as if they felt that there is no treasure within. Slen
der as the company of communicants may be in
what are called the orthodox churches, it tends to
grow smaller, even to a vanishing point, in what are
called the liberal churches. Upon this matter for
years now my own ministerial mind has been much
exercised, and I can state almost in a word the con
clusion which I seem to have reached. We want a
church so simply, naturally Christian, that the young
may belong to it, the young in the years of opening
manhood and womanhood, and we want to see that
they belong to it and are placed in it with due and
fitting outward observance, their own confirmation
of their baptism. There is a tide in the religious
life for whose rising we are to watch. Make your
church not merely a choice collection of eminent
saints, but a school of Christian disciples, and re
member, in holding your examinations for admission,
that the point is to see not how many can be kept

HISTORICAL SERMONS. 67
out, but how many may be regarded as fitted to get
good from its loving discipline. My chief injunction
to a successor in this ministerial office would be :
Stand in the ways with the simplest of church cove
nants, like this of ours, in your hands, and invite the
young to come into the Christian congregation as
into a home whose light and love and memories and
examples shall make their every-day lives purer and
happier by an inward and divine necessity, and be
cause they are enriched and enlarged, even as by the
spirit of Christ. No outward crowd any longer
clamors and petitions for church-membership as a
baptismal right ; but there are hundreds and thou
sands who need to have the meaning of their bap
tism interpreted to them, and to be taught the blessed
truth that they are indeed, as they have been sol
emnly declared to be, God's children in a world
which is his as much as any other world created or
to be created. We need the old, earnest, serious
understanding of church-membership, and yet we
must cherish the thought that Christianity was made
for man, and is never rightly understood or preached
when it fails to get a response from the youthful and
glad as well as from the aged and stricken, from
those who are seeking what is best and most pre
cious as well as from those who are burdened with
sin and sorrow.
In Salem, in the year 1638, "one Oliver his wife,"
so we read, " was imprisoned for holding amongst
other opinions which were considered very danger-

68 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
ous, that all who dwell in the same town and will
profess their faith in Christ Jesus ought to be re
ceived to the sacraments there, and that she was
persuaded that, if Paul were at Salem, he would
call all the inhabitants there saints." Some five
years after the poor woman was whipped, and had
a cleft stick put on her tongue for half an hour,
for reproaching the elders ; but did she not tell the
truth about the Church which ought to be and shall
be, — the church, not of human selection, but of
divine election, — the sons and daughters of God, of
whom saith the Prophet, " And thy children shall all
be taught of God, and great shall be the peace of
thy children " ?

FOURTH HOUSE OF WORSHIP.
CHAUNCY PLACE.
1808.

SERMON

PREACHED TO

THE FIRST CHURCH,
ON THE
Close of irjetr SeconK Centura,
29 AUGUST, 1830.

BY N. L. FROTHINGHAM.

SERMON.

" Remember the days of old, consider the years of many
generations." — Deict. xxxii. 7.
"I HAVE CONSIDERED THE DAYS OF OLD, THE YEARS OF ANCIENT
TIMES." — Ps. lxxvii. 5.
' I ^HE life of man is measured by years. The
more lengthened existence of communities
and states is counted in generations. Is it fanciful
to think that in estimating the comparative dura
tion of each, a twelvemonth in one corresponds to
an age in the other? Threescore and ten revolu
tions of the sun fix the limits that leave to the
individual " no portion," or but a feeble one, " in
anything that is done under" its beams. And
threescore and ten of those periods, which are
ordinarily computed to mark the successions of
human life, are old age for a nation. None of the
kingdoms of Europe yet approach that longevity
of two thousand years, and most of them are youth
ful in comparison with it. If it has ever been
surpassed by any of the ancient nations of Asia
or Egypt, it was only to see their institutions over
thrown, their memory a ruin, their very speech

SERMON.

71

changed, and the stranger and conqueror pressing
upon the remnants of their faculties and the decrepi
tude of their strength. Thus it is that governments
and states and tribes flourish and pass away, as well
as the mortal man who mixes for a while his tran
sient interests with them. The very land that we
till seems to demand occasional respites of desola
tion. The great globe itself, if we may credit the
testimonies of history and the analogies of reason,
must have its alternations of ruin. For everything
there is a longer or shorter period, which we may
grow wiser by contemplating. What is gone is
always full of instruction for those who are them
selves hastening away. Moses, who lived in the
early twilight of the world, commanded his tribes to
" remember the years of many generations ; " and
David, with whom the fame of his nation began, em
ployed himself in considering the " days of ancient
times." When we think of the broad circles of empire that
have spread themselves and faded over the earth, we
may be ready to look on the space which the annals
of our own community include as a span. But in
truth the two hundred years that it has already stood
are by no means to be accounted an inconsiderable
time. Especially when we reflect that it did not
grow up, like most others, from obscure and slow
beginnings, but started at once into active, indepen
dent, intelligent life, — feeble, indeed, at first, through
the smallness of its numbers, but with nothing about

72 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
it of the ignorance of childhood or the rashness of
youth. It was commenced on this side of the sea,
with all the improvement that ages had been working
out on the other. Without anything of the thought
lessness of young and wild adventure, it was com
posed of as sober and resolute men as ever staked
their all on a holy enterprise. Without anything of
fiction wrapt about its origin, its first words were
those of a noble history, and the eyes of the most
cultivated portions of Europe watched its growth
here in the wilderness. One is impatient of those
celebrators of the national independence who speak
as if our civil existence were scarcely to be dated
earlier than the declaration of that event. It is as if
one should date the deep foundation of England
herself from her last revolution, which would make
her half a century younger than we. The freest
spirits of the freest nation then known founded the
colony ; and not a man of them but stood as erect
on his rights at his first landing as any of his
descendants have done since. Those rights were
never relinquished for a moment. The fact is de
serving of more attention than it has received, that
in 1630 the full privileges of as free a charter as
could then be framed by those who gave up all for
that freedom were publicly transferred from the soil
of Great Britain to these poor shores in the West.
The liberty that was not permitted there was by
some strange concurrence, which we hardly know
how to explain, solemnly guaranteed here. And

SERMON.

73

here it came to dwell. And from that day to this,
in all the ways of prudence and bravery, it has been
steadily maintained.
Two hundred years of such maturity are not to be
spoken of lightly. It is a space bearing a good pro
portion to that which gave the most refined people
of antiquity all their glories of letters and art, and to
that which meted out to the mightiest people that
have yet risen on earth the most valuable portions of
their dominion. With us every year has been a
narrative of plain but vigorous life ; while a great
part of the history of nations is usually the fable
of their beginnings or the tedious tragedy of their
decline. I am dwelling, perhaps, too long on a train of re
flections which every one who feels his New England
parentage, having once begun it, must find it hard
to quit. As a child, however, of that honorable and
pious descent, I must yet add one thought more to
so long a preface, and bless God that our land was
marked out as by a special Providence for the resi
dence of just such men as came to look over the
waters after its rugged but safe asylum. Before they
established themselves in it, it was sought by the
ambitious, that here they might set up their arbitrary
establishments ; but these soon went back to climates
more congenial to the growth of temporal dominion
and ecclesiastical pride. It was sought by the ad
venturous and licentious ; but it repelled those with
the rough touch of its deprivations and dangers.

74

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

The counsels of princes, the plans of the worldly-
wise, the efforts of the daring, all came to nothing
as they turned towards it. It was reserved in the
decrees of the Almighty for those only who were sus
tained by an inflexible faith, and thus fitted for the
great work which they were commissioned to ac
complish. We may dissent from some of the points
of that faith. We may wonder at some of them.
But it gave those who held it a strength that no
earthly principle could inspire. It gave them the
success for which every earthly motive was found
vain. It helped them sow the land, when it was but
just cleared of its forests, with those pregnant hopes
of learning and religion, which no zeal short of their
own could have made to grow. We are sitting un
der the blessed shade, into which those germs have
spread ; and it would ill become us to find fault with
imperfections, without which the great work itself
might possibly have been left imperfect. A severe
education is often seen to be favorable to the indi
vidual man, leaving on his mind an abiding and
salutary impression, a strong bent towards the
right, while it permits him to forget something
of the rudiments of its first instructions. The
case is not otherwise with states. Who can doubt
that New England owes the elements of her pres
ent character, and the institutions that make her
peculiarly what she is, to the discipline of her Pu
ritan ancestry, — though it may sometimes have
seemed stern like her coasts, and gloomy as her

SERMON. 75
early fortunes ? Who can endure to think that,
instead of the deep principles of those thoughtful
men, we might have had laid as the foundations
of the country the rotten theories of irreligion and
misrule, or any of the shallow devices of modern
innovators ?
Two centuries have passed since this church was
gathered, — the first of the long line of churches in
this populous town. Its records are older than those
of the town itself, since it was formed before this
peninsula was settled, or even the name now given
to it was thought of. It was gathered under cir
cumstances of peculiar affliction, when disease was
thinning the little company, that had scarcely yet re
covered themselves from the weariness of the sea
and the desolateness of their new condition. In the
spirit of a considerate and courageous sorrow, its
first preparations were devoutly arranged. With
solemn but humble forms were those preparations
completed. Its first members belonged to a class
of people whom a high foreign authority has called
" the most remarkable body of men which the world
has ever produced." * The first name on its list is
that of one who, in any age, might be held up as
a model of a magistrate and a Christian man. Its
first covenant is distinguished only by its superior
dignity and simplicity from those which are most
commended at the present day. Its first assembly
was under the shade of a tree on the other side of
1 Edinburgh Review, xiii. 337, Art. Milton.

76 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
Charles River. Its first house of worship was on this
side of the stream, and was built with mud walls and
a roof of straw. These were lowly accommodations.
Yet they corresponded well enough, not only with
their situation at the time, but with their sober de
votions at any time. For they had so long felt their
minds constrained under high ceilings of chiselled
stone, that they were glad of the poorest building
which they could raise for themselves, and content
with the freedom even of the tall forests which
" were God's first temples." They had learned, too,
from their own excited minds an independence of
all outward state in religion. They needed none of
it in their intense communion with Heaven. Their
feeling of God's presence was too strong upon them
to admit of being aided by any magnificence that
belonged to this world.
Such were the beginnings of this church. They
might seem melancholy to us if they were not so
noble. They were like the beginning of the gospel
itself, — a voice in the wilderness, — a cry to repent,
but at the same time a promise of a kingdom of God
at hand. If the history of the church had not been
written already by one of its ministers,1 this would
not be the place to enter into any minute details
concerning its progress. They might have been
looked for a hundred years ago, when the first cen
tury sermon was preached by Mr. Foxcroft, whom
several of my respected hearers can well remember,
1 The Rev. William Emerson.

SERMON. yy
— so fast do our generations crowd on one another.
They were not entered into then, and they could
now be made neither interesting nor manageable.
In the place of them, I will ask your attention to a
few general results, drawn from a comparison be
tween the elder days of the church and the present ;
with the view of showing that while we should
honor what was well done then, we should be grate-
ful for our own superior privileges. It is natural
to celebrate the past. I bless God that we find so
much there to applaud and be grateful for. I would
that the praise were tenfold louder and more sincere
among us than it is, so far as filial respect, and the
most sacred remembrances, and the love of liberty
and truth demand it. But let the admiration be dis
criminating. I would distinguish between the times
themselves and the men who lived in those times.
It is a distinction that is of the utmost consequence,
though perpetually overlooked by panegyrists on one
hand and cavillers on the other. We have to learn
more reverence perhaps than we yet feel for our
fathers and their compeers, — men whose most elo
quent praises have after all been spoken on the other
side of the Atlantic. But it is quite another thing
to applaud the state of opinions and manners at that
period, — and a further extravagance still to depreci
ate our own as contrary to them. The cry of degen
eracy and defection has become too old to be worth
attending to. It was uttered from the beginning
in various tones of lamentation. " Either I am in

78 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
an apoplexy," writes one,1 within seventeen years of
Governor Winthrop's landing, " or that man is in a
lethargy who doth not now sensibly feel the heavens
trembling over his head and the earth under his feet ;
so that little light of comfort or counsel is left to the
sons of men." Mr. Foxcroft in his century sermon
bewails " the shaking times," as he calls them, in
which he was born, and expresses his fears lest
" Boston should have the reproachful name of Lost
Town bestowed on it." Disregarding all these com
plaints and evil prophecies, whether of ancient or re
cent date, and in open dissent from those who would
bring us back to the religious opinions and usages
which we have forsaken, I will lay my finger on a
few points, which will prove to us that some advance
ment has been made in the course of two hundred
years. " Remember," say some, " the days of old,
consider the years of many generations," — as if our
only safety was in the imitation of them. We reply,
" I have considered the days of old, the years of an
cient times," and let us see to what purpose.
I. Two hundred years ago there prevailed a set of
scriptural impressions and interpretations, which our
better light has exposed, but which gave a strong
shade to opinions on government aswell as faith, and
threw a sort of spectral influence on the ordinary
affairs of life. Rational and philosophical views of
the Bible were unknown in the land ; and yet the
Bible was compelled to speak in all natural and un-
1 Ward's " Simple Cobbler of Aggawam."

SERMON.

79

natural ways on every subject of concern. The code
of Moses was thought to be a fit pattern for modern
legislation ; and the project of a theocracy, which is,
in plainer language, an administration of priests, was
seriously contemplated. The tribes of Judah and
Israel were supposed to offer suitable examples for
those who had crossed into a new world. The
oracles of the prophets were believed to be predic
tions of what the passing and the coming days were
to fulfil. Questions of sudden emergency, and dif
ficulties that belonged to their peculiar situation, were
settled by a reference to the Book of Kings or the
Song of Solomon. I find the famous Mr. Cotton1
tasking his acute mind to prove that a liturgy is a
breach of the second commandment, which forbids
the making of any graven image. Happy would it
have been if such ideas of the Scriptures had been
confined to verbal disputes, and outward usages, and
designs that were never executed. But they had not
always so innocent an ending. It was unluckily
written in the Pentateuch, " Thou shalt not suffer a
witch to live." This law was enforced only fifteen
years after the founding of the colony ; and in the
same century broke out that fatal infatuation, which
we are unable to think of without horror and grief.
Nothing would be more unjust than to charge this
foolish cruelty upon our ancestors, as if the delusion
was peculiarly theirs. I charge it against the super-
stitiousness of the age. The executions in England
1 Way of the Churches of Christ in New England, 71.

80 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
for that imaginary crime were very far more numer
ous than here ; and it was punished with death by
the authority of the most enlightened tribunals
in Europe. It is not a hundred years since the
presbytery at Edinburgh denounced the repeal of
the penal laws against witchcraft as a national sin.
And even this tenacity of error does not seem to me
more strange than the words of a Scottish historian1
published but the other day, who suggests that there
might have been " an actual appropriation of that
mysterious agency, which Scripture assures us did
once exist, and which no equal authority has ever
proved to be extinguished." It was not so slowly
that the men of New England learned wTisdom.
II. Two hundred years ago the civil and religious
interests of men were entangled together. The
church stretched out its hand to the sword of the
magistracy, and the magistracy girt its brows with
the terrors of the church. This was no invention of
our fathers. It was what they had received from
theirs. They only did not wholly disclaim it. It was
an impurity and an abuse, which their spirit of liberty,
as it refined itself, was gradually to throw off. But
there it was, — the occasion of perpetual disorders
in their infant community. Theological disputes were
accounted matters for civil jurisdiction. The gov
ernor and the pastor were seen either to withstand one
another, or to join in the exercise of a common sway.
1 Grahame's History of the Rise and Progress of the United States of
North America, vol. i. 465.

SERMON. 8l
The church, while it excluded from its communion
all but the regenerate, — an exclusion which is still
considered by some to have been a very scriptural
and praiseworthy practice, — excluded also all but
its members from the freedom of the political body.
The rest had not the common rights of citizenship.
This tyranny was indeed early resisted, and one
synod after another decided in favor of their dis
franchised brethren. I wish I could add that the
First Church was found true on that occasion to
the true cause. I wish there did not lie upon her
the reproach of bitter dealings with her more liberal
sister, the Old South, who nobly went off from her
at that time for liberty's sake.
III. Two hundred years ago there was no such
thing as toleration. In practice it was unknown,
save of a few mild spirits ; and even in open theory
it was condemned and derided. " He that is will
ing," says a writer whom I have already quoted,1
" to tolerate any religion or discrepant way of re
ligion, besides his own, either doubts of his own, or
is not sincere in it. There is no truth but one, and
of the persecution of true religion and toleration of
false, the last is far the worst. It is said that men
ought to have liberty of conscience, and that it is
persecution to debar them of it. I can rather stand
amazed than reply to this. It is an astonishment
that the brains of men should be parboiled in such
impious ignorance." Another thus expresses him-
i Ward. 6

82 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
self :* " The outcry of some is for liberty of con
science. This is the great Diana of the libertines
of this age. I look upon toleration as the first-born
of all iniquities. If it should be brought forth
among us, you may call it Gad, a troop cometh, a
troop of all manner of abominations." Most of the
Puritans of this period thought it impossible that dif
ferent sects should exist peaceably together in the
same community ; and even when oppressed them
selves they exclaimed against universal toleration.
But in this they only took part in a general senti
ment. Even the philosophic Lord Bacon thought
that uniformity in religious sentiment and worship
was essential to the support of government. Who
had taught them any better ? Where were they to
find any worthier example ? Was not the whole
world in arms against those principles, which they
had come into a desert to enjoy ? And was nothing
to be allowed for men who had made such dreary
sacrifices ? They had fled to the ends of the world,
that they might have a way of their own. They
invited none to share their " poor cottages in the
wilderness," where they were " overshadowed," as
their own beautiful language ran, " with the spirit of
supplication." They warned all who were not par
takers of their own faith and feeling, to spare their
tranquillity and leave them to their retreat. We can
not surely confound such men with vulgar persecu-
1 President Oakes's Century Sermon, 1673. Similar opinions might be
quoted from Higginson's Election Sermon, 1663 ; Shepard's Election Sermon,
1672 ; Cotton's " Bloody Tenent Washed," etc.

SERMON.

83

tors. This would be injustice in any. It would be
irreverence and ingratitude in us. Look at Europe
as it was at that moment, instead of inveighing
against them. To say nothing of the circumstances
that banished them from the land which they never
ceased to love, James the First had, but a little while
before, burnt at the stake two of his subjects for
Arianism ; and it was a considerable time afterwards
that the great national edict of toleration in France
was revoked by a bigoted and profligate king. Do
not make it too hard against them, that they were
not further in advance of the rest of mankind, — that
they had not yet attained where none were perfect, —
that they sometimes exercised, out of a deep love for
what they deemed to be God's truth and their own
right, a small measure of that power which was em
ployed elsewhere in the full insolence of despotism,
by the cunning, the conceited, the ambitious, and
the dissolute.
We have gone back two hundred years. Change
now the point of view. Come forward a short
space. Suppose the last of those self-denying men
who planted this colony to have rested from their
labors. See what was accomplished in the course of
that single generation, and you will need nothing
beside for their defence or their eulogy. They had
begun to build their own ships for their increasing-
commerce. They had stamped coin, which has
always been classed among the exercises of sove
reignty. They had founded a university. They had

84 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
seen many of the most illustrious names in the
mother land, even those of prelates and noblemen,
associated with their spreading improvements. They
left all the interests of the country flourishing. Bos
ton alone contained fifteen hundred families ; and in
telligent strangers who visited the provinces of New
England went back to tell of a state of order and
enterprise, of refinement and hospitality, equal to
their own, beyond the western waters. When was
ever a generation that did so much ? They have
left their monuments in the effects which they
wrought, in the institutions which they bequeathed,
in the prosperity which they established, in the
characters which they bore, in the examples which
they have made immortal.
I cannot conclude this discourse, already perhaps
too long, without calling up the memories of those
who have been ministering servants to our church in
the days that are gone. There will be time for little
more than to speak out their names, as their solemn
train passes before us. The first is Wilson. Asso
ciated with nobles in the English realm, he came
here for religion's sake, to be installed teacher of a
church in the open air, just two hundred years ago.
Blessings on his meek head ! His zeal had no mix
ture of sternness with it. He was a pattern of wis
dom and gentleness, in an age that had great need
of it all. The next is John Cotton. His fame was
great in the colleges and congregations of his own
country, before he crossed over to this. Boston re-

SERMON. 85
ceived its name from the English town in Lincoln
shire where he formerly ministered, and our institu
tions may almost be said to have been moulded by
his extraordinary influence. Honor to so learned
and commanding a man ! though the venerable
sweetness of his older colleague has more charms
for me than either his learning or command. Some
of his posterity are still worshippers with us, and the
children of his present successor are his direct de
scendants in the seventh generation. Norton. He
had neither the soft, healing dispositions of the first,
nor the bright gifts of the second. But his attain
ments entitled him to a better fate than to be thrown
into the whirl of political intrigues and disappoint
ments, and to die of a broken heart. Davenport,
the patriarch of New Haven, and of such celebrity as
to be invited, together with Cotton, to the great as
sembly of divines at Westminster. He gave to this
place but the feeble residue of his old age, and that
little was tormented with disputes, which his best
days would probably have done nothing to reconcile.
Let him pass in peace. Allen. His protracted
ministry seems to have been rather occupied with
silent usefulness than adorned with any renown.
Oxenbridge, on the contrary, was honored during a
short career. He was struck with death in the very
act of conducting the services of the Lord's house.
Moodey was the first child of New England who
officiated in this church. His benevolent and in
trepid mind should now be commemorated the

86 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
rather because the sour prejudices of his own times
did him wrong. Bailey and Wadsworth and
Bridge were men of a faithful heart, whom no
body of Christian believers on earth need have been
ashamed to acknowledge. The labors of the dili
gent Foxcroft offer much to be commended ;
though we may well account it a serious exception
to the praise, that he admired the fanaticism of
Whitefield and censured the liberality of Tillotson.
With Chauncy a new era commenced. He viewed
religion with naked human eyes, and not in unreal
visions, or through the discolored and distorting
medium of technical systems. He looked upon the
world, and was not afraid to bind up his hopes in
the common hopes of mankind. He looked up to
Heaven, and its throne was to him filled with the un
clouded radiancy of love. He beheld the churches
agitated with a storm of religious excitement, and
he rebuked both the winds and the sea. None of
you need to be reminded of the excellent graces of
Clarke. The regrets for him are still warm, though
his amiable features have long been dust. He had
the virtues of Wilson with a better creed, and like
Oxenbridge, he was smitten, as he stood in the pul
pit, by the angel of death. Emerson follows next.
There are many affectionate recollections among you
of his zeal as a minister and his extraordinary social
worth. You rejoiced but for a little while in his mild
light. He was cut off in the midst of his active and
devoted course, but he has left the characters of his

sermon. 87
children to praise him in the gate. Then, like the
shadow that his early promise has become, — scarcely
seen but to depart, scarcely speaking among you but
to expire, — passes the friendly Abbott, and closes
the line.
There is one more name, however, to which I can
not refrain from giving utterance. It is that of him
who was all but yours, and who would have been
wholly so, perhaps, if one less worthy had not been
called to occupy his place, — it is McKean. I see in
your eyes how well you remember that ardent and
noble spirit. He was the friend of us all ; and I am
sure there is no one here who, if called by any cir
cumstances to the island where he died, would not
inquire for the place where he rests, and piously re
move from his green grave any coarse growths that
might make it unsightly.
Brethren, I have endeavored to fulfil a duty which,
at the return of a new century, seems to be demanded
by the living and the dead. I have " considered the
days of old, the years of ancient times." But who
can confine his imagination to the past ? A hun
dred years more ! What have they in reserve to
show after their revolution is ended ? Nothing for
us. They will scarcely find the children of our chil
dren alive. But may they have blessings to shower
down on the Church of God, whose date is not meas
ured by centuries, and on the immortal cause of
human good!

THIRD HOUSE OF WORSHIP; "THE OLD BRICK.'
Site of Joy's Building, Washington Street.
J7r3-

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES
BY THE
FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON,
UPON THE
^Completion of 2Etoo J^unorea anti jFiftg gears,
THURSDAY, NOV. 18, 1880.

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES.

THE beautiful house of worship of the First Church
was decorated for the Festival with simple, but striking
and appropriate ornaments. Upon the front of the spire
on Berkeley Street, before it reached the height of the
roof, was a large draped surface, covered with American
and British flags arranged in glories, in a bordering of blue
bunting festooned with red and white rosettes. Across the
centre was the inscription " 1 630 to 1880," and beneath
hung the old Pine Tree flag of Massachusetts. In the
interior of the church were two lofty banners, one on each
side of the chancel. The one on the left bore, in red Gothic
letters on a gold-colored ground, the names of the minis
ters of the church, as follows: —
John Wilson  1630 to 1667
John Cotton  1633 to 1652
John Norton  1656 to 1663
John Davenport  1668 to 1670
James Allen  1668 to 1710
John Oxenbridge  1670 to 1674
Joshua Moody  1684 to 1697
John Bailey  1693 to 1697
Benjamin Wadsworth  1696 to 1737
Thomas Bridge  1705 to 1715
Thomas Foxcroft  1717101769
Charles Chauncy, D.D  1727101787
John Clark, D.D  1778101798
William Emerson  1799 to 181 1
John L. Abbot  1813 to 1814
N. L. Frothingham, D.D  1815 to 1850
Rufus Ellis, D.D  1853

92

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

The other, on the right, bore in similar colors the following
legend : — From Winthrop's " History of New England."
"July 5, 1632. The pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sin
cere, holy man, . . . told the Governor that, before he was re
solved to come into this country, he dreamed he was here, and
that he saw a church arise out of the earth, which grew up and
became a marvellous, goodly church."
The front of the pulpit and choir was adorned with
wreaths of glossy green leaves and scarlet passion-flowers.
About the chancel was a profusion of tropical and flower
ing plants in pots, making a little forest of bright colors
around the desk of the speakers. At the right of the
pulpit the communion-table was spread with the old his
torical pieces of church silver, all of it given by former
ministers, deacons, and church-members, with the tall, em
bossed cup, the gift of Governor John Winthrop, conspicu
ous in the centre.
In the evening the figures " 1630-1880" were shown in
gas jets above the main entrance. The chapel was deco
rated with wreaths of green leaves and with flowers, and
on its walls were hung the portraits of many of the former
ministers, as follows :

John Wilson . .
John Cotton . .
John Davenport .
Benjamin Wadsworth
John Clark, D.D. .
William Emerson .

belonging to the Mass. Historical Society.
„ „ Hon. R. C. Winthrop.
„ „ Yale College.
,, „ Harvard University.
„ „ Miss Esther C. Mack, Salem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.

N. L. Frothingham, D.D. „ „ Mrs. N. D. Hubbard.
And a fine marble bust of Dr. RUFUS ELLIS, belonging to
the society, occupied an appropriate place on its pedestal.
There were also hung on the walls other portraits, as fol
lows : —
Gov. John Winthrop . . . belonging to Hon. R. C. Winthrop.
Gov. Thomas Dudley ... „ „ Hon. R. C. Winthrop.

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 93
The other pictures exhibited were —
A view of the head of State Street, belonging to the Massachusetts
Historical Society, painted by James B. Marston, April 19, 1801,
showing the First " Old Brick " Church (the third building of
the society).
A recent ideal picture belonging to Williams and Everett, painted
by W. F. Halsall, representing the arrival of Winthrop's fleet in
Boston Harbor.
An engraving of the Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770, showing the
Old State House and the First Church. [The frame of this
engraving formerly belonged to Francis Rotch, Esq., owner of
the tea-ships, December, 1773J
A small painting of the " Old Brick" Church that stood in Corn
hill, now Washington Street.
A photograph of the church in Chauncy Place.
An engraving of the great Church of St. Botolph's, in Boston,
England.
A photograph of the Unitarian Chapel in Boston, England.
A photograph of the tower of St. Botolph's Church, in Boston,
England.There were executed for this occasion four large draw
ings of the several churches of the society, from the first
rude structure with mud walls and a thatched roof to the
present beautiful edifice; and a drawing of the Church of
St. Botolph in Boston, England, all of which were also
hung upon the walls. The pictures not belonging to the
society were kindly loaned by their owners.
The massive ancient communion plate was appropri
ately displayed in a large glass case.
The committee were much assisted in their preparations
for the celebration by Messrs. Ware and Van Brunt, the
architects of the church.
Thursday had been selected amongst the week-days for
these services, in remembrance of the Thursday Lecture,
which had been brought over from the English Boston,
and had been preached in First Church even to the

94 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
present generation, though its course is run and it is no
longer amongst the living. It was the eighteenth day of
November, not without clouds and rain, followed, however,
by a clear cold evening sky. Two of the clock was the
hour assigned for the afternoon exercises, and by that time
a large company gathered, and the church was filled with
the congregation and their guests. The chancel had been
expanded into a platform, which was occupied by the
speakers and by Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a son of a
former pastor, with Mr. Justin Winsor and Mr. Marshall
P. Wilder, the Rev. Drs. A. P. Peabody, Frederic H.
Hedge, and Edward Everett Hale. The services were
somewhat longer than had been provided for, but were
followed with deep interest by the audience to their
close, a little before six o'clock. A large number of our
guests remained with us through the evening, and took part
with the society in the further observance of the day in the
church and in the chapel, with music and a social reunion.
The services opened with an Organ Voluntary.
The Address of Welcome was then pronounced by
Hon. Nathaniel Silsbee, as follows : —
Ladies and Gentlemen, — We are met together
to-day to commemorate the two hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of the establishment of this the " First
Church of Christ in Boston," by men few in num
ber, who came from across the ocean to found both
civil and religious liberty. I have been requested
to say to you the introductory words of welcome, in
the place of the president of your Festival Com
mittee, Mr. Nathaniel Thayer, to whose liberality
in connection with this church we are so much in
debted, and whose absence we all regret. I now,
therefore, in the name of the committee, of your

7 COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 95
minister, and of the parish, bid you each and all a
cordial welcome. The exercises will be conducted
by your minister, and, in addition to the religious
services, you will be addressed by eloquent men
familiar with the history of our Puritan fathers>
and of those who have endeavored to walk in their
footsteps. May we not hope that the large number
of this congregation who have gone before us, and
whom we believe to be now in the spirit land, will
join in communion with us at this time ? I ask
your attention to your minister, the Rev. Dr. Rufus
Ellis. The minister of the church then offered the following
prayer : —
God over all, forever blessed ! we thank thee for
this day and hour; help us to bring unto thee
hearts of gratitude, and to pray unto thee a faithful
prayer. In the midst of years which have been
crowned with thy goodness we praise thy mercy
and thy truth. We consider the generations of
old, and our hearts say unto us, Did ever any trust
in thee and were confounded? We thank thee
for good examples and brave testimonies, for the
faith which wrought righteousness and obtained
promises, for those who, being dead, yet speak.
Fathers and children, and children's children, in the
wilderness and in the place of habitations, in the
body and out of the body, thou hast made us to
be one family in thee, and thy care and love for

96 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
thy household cannot be told. In this hour of
gratitude and solemn joy may the meditation of our
hearts and the answer of our lips be from the Al
mighty and the All-merciful. Gathered into thy
presence and taught by thy Spirit, may our hearts
burn with a deeper love and a new desire to see the
coming of thy kingdom. Make this church a
glorious church ; may our eyes see the King in his
beauty and follow him in his faithfulness. Show
unto us more clearly the way of his divine life, and
guide and uphold us in his blessed footsteps. We
pray for all that love thee ; we pray that all may
learn to love thee, and that, loving thee, they may
love one another even as Christ loved us. O God
and Father of our Lord Jesus ! fashion our whole
being into his dear likeness, and help us with one
heart and one voice to pray as he hath taught us :
Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy
name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in
earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily
bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive
those that trespass against us. And lead us not
into temptation ; but deliver us from evil. For
thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.
Rev. Joseph T. Duryea, D.D., minister of the Central
Church, then read the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle
to the Corinthians : —
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have
not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 97
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all
mysteries, and all knowledge ; and though I have all faith, so that
I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though
I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth
me nothing.
Charity suffereth long, and is kind ; charity envieth not ; charity
vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not
easily provoked, thinketh no evil ;
Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth ;
Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, en-
dureth all things.
Charity never faileth : but whether there be prophecies, they
shall fail ; whether there be tongues, they shall cease ; whether
there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in
part shall be done away.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child,
I thought as a child : but when I became a man, I put away child
ish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly ; but then face to face :
now I know in part ; but then shall I know even as also I am
known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three ; but the great
est of these is charity.
The reading was followed by the singing of the Te Deum
in G by the choir of the church.
The minister then spoke as follows : —
" In this month of November, two hundred and fifty years
ago, the fathers and mothers of this congregation were
looking forward not without a reasonable anxiety, and yet
with a deep trust, to their first winter in their new and
almost wilderness home. To eyes that look upon the out
ward appearance, it was the day of small things ; to Him
who looks not upon the outward appearance, it was the day
7

98 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
of great things, great faith, great hope, great love. We,
who in the good providence of God have come into their
places and entered into their labors, are not willing that
their confidence should be disappointed, and we have called
together our kindred and our neighbors to rejoice with us
and by seasonable speech to build us up to the measure
and stature of our high trust. They have kindly answered
our call, and it is my pleasant duty not to detain you with
any words of my own or to repeat what I have already
said to the congregation ; but to pronounce the names of
some who are dear and familiar to you all, and with you to
wait upon their words.
" Happily I can call upon one who is in every sense my
brother, to tell you the story of this church. I have heard
of a very idle son of a very industrious father who was in
the habit of saying to his neighbors, ' You shall hardly
find two men who have done as much work as my father
and myself; ' and I am sure that you will agree with me
that it would be impossible to find two men in the Com
monwealth who know as much about the history of our
church and State as my brother and myself. Let me ask
the Rev. Dr. GEORGE E. Ellis to address you."

ADDRESS OF DR. GEORGE E. ELLIS.
We are commemorating the two hundred and
fiftieth year of the gathering and planting, by
exiles from England, of the First Church of
Christ on the virgin soil of Boston. The First
Church, — a simple and august title, as distinctive
of primacy and of a fruitful parentage. Most
fitting it is that those " men and women " who
compose the special present membership of this
church should on this occasion be merged in this

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 99
larger company, comprehensive and representative
as it is of the offshoots and outgoings, in manifold
variety, of the original plant, in scion or graft, with
life from the vital sap. The old church welcomes
us all to-day, as to a home without walls. Still the
invitation which summons us is that of the First
Church, meeting in the fifth of its successive houses
of worship, — one for each of its half-centuries. A
question, leading deeper than we can now follow
it, naturally comes to us with this occasion and
observance. What is the bond of succession and
continuity, not to use the strong word identity,
which connects this existing religious fellowship, in
covenant, pastorate, and membership, in symbol, in
purpose, and in fact, with that ancient wilderness
church ? There are heirlooms, objects of outward
sense, not Avithout real significance of a rightful in
heritance. The original records of covenant and
membership are still here, unbroken, continuous, in
the distinctive qualities of church registers. These
sacramental vessels, beginning with the cup of com
munion, the gift of the ever-honored and revered
first Governor and first signer of the covenant, and
gathering their additions, as votive offerings in life
or death from members in their generations, have
passed from hand to hand and lip to lip during the
months of all these years. The transfers and title-
deeds of sites of land sold or purchased for suc
cessive edifices, legally recorded, assure the rights
of the present proprietors in the property of their

IOO FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
predecessors. These, however, are relics and tokens
of things of sense, temporal and material. Through
eight generations of our fleeting race on earth has
been transmitted an inheritance in interests, ex
periences, and hopes, which we trust still has its
witness here, concerned with what is spiritual, pass
ing within the veil. The covenant stained into that
illuminated window, so calmly and sweetly worded
in our dear old English tongue, reminds us of a
more serious trust which has passed down through
this church of Christ. Are those whose inheritance
it is, bound by any living tie of sympathy, fidelity,
purpose of heart, consecrating aim in life, to those
who entered into that covenant ?
While so many are to speak to you, I must re
strict myself to a single theme from a most fruitful
subject for retrospect and thought. Yet, when we
ask how this church of to-day assures its relation
of succession to that original First Church, we are
reminded that all that is of real import in the
question carries us back into a matter of larger
interest. Those who first entered into church cov
enant here were not waifs, orphans from any pre
vious Christian heritage. They called themselves
members of the Church of England, and claimed
that they were transplanting a root of it in the
wilderness. None the less they originated and in
troduced here a method in church organization, a
mode and order of worship, and an administration
of discipline divergent from those of the Church

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. IOI
of England at the date of their coming. Their
system, soon -called Congregationalism, is substan
tially that adopted and approved by all Christian
fellowships in this country, save the prelatical ones,
Roman and Anglican. Why this change, this
novelty, this breach or schism, which, it is asserted
by many, put our fathers and ourselves outside the
true fold of Christ? The question is made to be a
grave one, as it concerns their rectitude of avowal
and conduct. The pastors and chief members of
the church had been, till their coming hither, in
communion, by a qualified conformity, with the
Church of England ; and they afterwards, on
marked occasions, refused to regret or renounce
that communion. They insisted, in life and death,
that they were children and nurslings of that fold.
As the ocean-shores of their beloved home were
fadinp- on their view from the deck of their
vessel, with aching hearts and tearful eyes they
tenderly apostrophized their "dear Mother Church,"
tracing to it their gospel nurture, and asking that
the prayers of its assemblies might span the seas
for a benediction on their "poor cottages in the
wilderness." Yet, seemingly as if rejoicing to be
rid of some of its accustomed ways and usages,
they here turned their faces from it, and, as if by
silent accord, spontaneously, without debate, ex
planation, or vindication, they dropped the surplice
and the service-book, the altar-rail and ritual, the
chant and the responses, and adopted other ways of

102 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
their own in their Sunday assembly. The Common
Prayer Book, litanies and ceremonies, vestry-men
and wardens, were disused. Not a line or word
of explanation, if ever such was written, remains to
us, accounting for this spontaneous, unchallenged
abandonment of a wonted method, and the adop
tion of a new one. Why was this ?
Let me note here a fact curious and significant.
The very rarest volume — so rare that I know not
of a single copy — in all our treasured repositories,
shelves, and cabinets of relics, books, and papers,
gathered from the homes of our first generation
here, is the Book of Common Prayer, of previous
or contemporary editions. We do not find it in
the very minute inventories of the estates of the
earliest comers here ; when probated, these inven
tories often containing lists of books by titles.
Neither the Library of the Historical Society nor
the Prince Library, amid the mass of tracts and
volumes of the first exiles, has in keeping a copy
of the Prayer-book. What is especially noteworthy,
we have the inventory, and a list of the books —
nearly two hundred — left by William Blackstone,
probated in the year of his death, one year before
his house and its contents were burned by the
Indians. He was the first Eno-lish resident on
this peninsula, and also in orders as a minister of
the Church of England. Many of his books are
classed by size, without titles, and the Prayer-book
may have been among them ; but it is not men-

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 103
tioned, though we note on the list " 3 Bibles."
Governor Winthrop gave a copy of the book to
the infant college, lost when the precious old li
brary was burned, Jan. 24, 1764. The governor,
however, mentions a copy of the book belonging
to his son, which came to a humiliating fate. It
seems not to have been lying, as we should say, on
the centre-table of a home, nor on a shelf with
the Bible, nor kept at hand in a bed-chamber, but
in a place " where was corn of divers sorts." " The
Greek Testament, the Psalms, and the Common
Prayer were bound together." The son " found the
Common Prayer eaten with mice, every leaf of it,
and not any of the two other touched." The hon
ored governor notes this phenomenon as " a thing
worthy of observation," without any dismay or re
gret, rather as if impressed by it as a special rebuk
ing Providence. The editor of Winthrop suggests
as an explanation of the prodigy, that " the mice,
not liking psalmody, and not understanding Greek,
took their food from another part of the volume."
But a kindlier solution offers: The well-thumbed
pages of the liturgy, long and devoutly used by
somebody, had given a savory flavor to its leaves,
which the mice appreciated.1
But what became of all the copies of the Book of
1 It is not literally the fact that " every leaf " of the Prayer-book was thus
nibbled, as the governor says ; for the mice stopped their ravages at the
" Order for the Visitation of the Sick." The Hon. Robert C. Winthrop has
in his possession the identical volume, as also another copy of the Common
Prayer, bound in with the Bible of Adam Winthrop, the father of the
governor.

104 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
Common Prayer once in the possession and in the
use of these exile members of the Church of Eng
land ? The book seems to have been as rare here
as the holly and the mistletoe. Had they no room
for it in their sea-chests, no place for it in their
hearts ? Did they leave it in their old pews for
those who were to worship in the calm and beauty
of the dear home shrines ? Another striking fact
of like significance presents itself to notice. In
all that are left to us of the letters, the diaries,
the sermons, and other writings of those first com
ers, we should look in vain for a single quotation
of sentence or phrase from the felicitous and beauti
ful devotional terms and expressions in prayer and
exhortation and collect in the liturgy, — a usage so
familiar with those who now worship with its pre
cious help.
How are we to account for this spontaneous con
sent to lay aside, this instant disuse of, the Church
manual ? The explanation is at hand for one versed
in the history of those exiles at home and on their
coming here. The first and leading members gath
ered in this church had in their old homes been in
most intimate, tender, and heart-knitting relations
before their exile, held together by a fervent re
ligious communion. Thus they laid their plans,
strengthened their purposes, toned their spirits in
sympathy and resolve for their stern enterprise. In
these confidential meetings and conferences, a book-
service would have been cold, constrained, and for-

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 105
mal to them, as in like circumstances it always
will be. Spontaneous, heart-prompted, heart-worded
prayers, with exhortations, were the natural method of
their piety. Thus, in free, fervent breathings-forth,
to which the Spirit gave tone and language, they
were knit in fellowship for trial and sacrifice. They
reverted to the simple, primitive, apostolic method and
usage of the first companies of Christians, of which
they read in the Acts and Epistles of the Apostles,
before form, ceremonial, or ritual had come in as in
after times. Thus, free prayer became endeared to
them for its range and pitch and compass and fer
vor, and adaptation to moods and circumstances.
When they left their homes and shrines, nature and
use — the experience of its blessing and strength for
them — made it their joy and solace. It is to be re
membered that when they left their parish churches,
some of them having already disused form and cere
monial, the Service-book had not become to them the
fond and almost idolized object, bedewed and con
secrated by tender associations for those devoutly
educated by it in the last two and a half centuries.
Those of us not wonted to its use and esteem can
not at times but stand amazed at the intensity of
regard now lavished upon the book, the dread and
jealousy of any tentative dealing with it, felt by its
fondest votaries. We have seen more than once a
large convention of bishops, ministers, and lay dele
gates of our Episcopal denomination debating a
proposed change in it of a word or a phrase, and

106 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
then rejecting it as if it concerned a displacement
of the stars of heaven.
Our exiles had not so bedewed that book with
heart affections. It was to them, under the chang
ing forms of much modification and construction, a
comparatively recent fabric of man's ingenuity, pref
erence, and judgment, translated, selected, and dis
posed from various materials of devotion. In their
view, the best portions of the book were its lessons
from the Scriptures, harmed rather than helped for
them by a forced and arbitrary arrangement by an
ecclesiastical year of festivals, fasts, and saints' days.
They preferred to select their Scripture readings for
themselves. They felt rather the restraints and stiff
formalities of the Service-book than its helps. It is
wholly unlikely that on their passage hither they
once had recourse to it on deck or in the cabin, in
their daily worship or their Lord's Day exercises.
So, without the Service-book, free of it, not caring
for it, they instituted here their social religious as
sembling. The truth, simple and without just of
fence to any one, may be spoken. Besides their
scruples against conformity with a ceremonial for
which they found no warrant in the Christian Scrip
tures, the Prayer-book, rich as it was in chant and
collect, did not contain what they wanted. They
could not find within it so readily as they found
within their own burdened and longing: hearts the
matter of devotion and petition which answered to
their condition, their straits and perils, their fervors

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 107
and dreads and ecstasies of experience in dismay or
trust. The Service-book, a copy in the hand of each
worshipper, trained, as the phrase is, "in finding the
place," and knowing when to stand, sit, or kneel, so
aptly suited to the calm and decorum and routine
uniformity of peaceful Sabbaths and well-furnished
churches, with chant and organ, surplice and chan
cel and choir, did not meet the exigencies of wilder
ness worship. The fact is a significant one, and
need not, in the recognition of it, involve any invid
ious debating of the merits and uses of liturgies.
Renewals of the same experience are confessedly
met by Episcopal missionaries held to the use of
the book on our own frontiers, in sparse settlements,
and to groups of chance attendants summoned for
social worship. Within this very month we have
found the foremost minister of that communion in
its full convention pleading earnestly for liberty, —
on some occasions for free prayer and a more flexi
ble service. Overwhelmingly was the petition re
jected, the decision being that in every public service
of the church its ministers may offer no prayer other
than in the words of the book.
When, therefore, our exiles here, in disusing the
book and all the forms of ritual and prelacy, claimed
lovingly still to be in the lineage and membership of
their mother church, the explanation is obvious. The
Church of England was dear to them, as it stood
for the Church of Christ. Other than that it was
to them of no account. They had in thought the

108 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
divine pattern, deposit, and endowment, not the hu
man mechanism and administration of that Church.
Through it the verities and sanctities ofthe Christian
faith, with all its spiritual vitality, had come to them,
baptizing their infancy and imparting to them its
sacramental blessing. From the doctrine of the
church, in believing and holy living, they in no
whit departed. They had labored and suffered
while at home to advance the reformation of the
nation's church, which, having been in progress for
nearly a century, had been arbitrarily arrested in its
working back to its scriptural pattern by State pol
icy and priestly devices. They did not imagine that
their heritage in their mother church was perilled by
their rejection of some of the human inventions still
retained in its ceremonial and discipline, any more
than it was by the common repudiation of distinc
tive Roman errors. Such graces and gifts as might
come from a special method of ordination to the
ministry the first pastors and teachers of the exiles
had received in England, and it was not thought of
sufficient importance that their successors should
cross the ocean to obtain them. At any rate, the
plea of the exiles that their disuse of form and cere
mony did not sever their tie to their mother church
could be answered only by what would be from their
descendants but a harsh and ill judgment of the
Church of England. In effect it would be that the
signal quality, warrant, and glory of that church
rested in the mechanism of its service and ceremo-

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 109
nial, disposed by clerical, parliamentary, and royal
devices, rather than in its divine deposit of the sim
ple gospel. It was with the Christian vine, and not
with its trellises, that our exiles knit in their trust and
life. That vine had kept its sap and vigor through
centuries of Roman domination and corruption, and
they believed that with a further purging it would
bring forth more fruit.
The Puritan mode of worship and service, severely
naked and unwinning as it was, met the occasion
and the time in its strain upon the austere and in
tense fervors of spirit in those exiles. But with
softening and enriching experiences, it proved blank
and drear. It was suited to men stern and earnest
in their- pitch and style of piety, — hardly nutritive,
winning, or wreathed enough for women, and inef
fective, juiceless, and repulsive for children. The
" Milk for Babes," provided by the first teacher,
John Cotton, was highly concentrated, and not easily
assimilated for nutriment.
More upbuilding to those exiles than the reading
of the Service-book was an exercise which their
mother church had not provided for them, but
which, with the sermon, and more than the sermon,
was their nutriment in their solemnities. This was
" the opening," or the exposition, with comment, of
a passage of Scripture, still after the New Testament
pattern. Hundreds there were of the easy-going
vicars and curates of EngHsh parishes who would
have been utterly incapable of meeting the high

HO FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
demands and standard of our exiles for that ser
vice. On the title-page of the English Bible is in
scribed, "Appointed to be read in Churches." This
required the reading of a " Proper Lesson " from the
desk. To the Puritan this was like offering some
rich fruit to the eye or hand without indulging the
palate with its juice or flavor. "Dumb reading,"
that was called. The Puritan wished the condiment
squeezed and pressed, for a lengthened, lingering
repast. Verse by verse, with light from the Hebrew
and Greek originals, with comparison and illustra
tion by other texts, with exposition and improve
ment, would the teacher penetrate to and open the
mines of wealth in the holy pages. Men and women
listened intently, with each thumb and finger in
serted between the leaves, to follow the illuminating
way. John Cotton was midway on a second ex
position of the whole Bible when his life closed.
So the instincts and cravings of their own hearts,
their circumstances and conditions, guided them to
the use of methods best suited to the quality of
their piety, while there was always a scrupulous care
to follow the way of Scripture. If we could enter
thoroughly into their confidence, we should find that
things which they disused had been abused, like the
Lord's Prayer as the reiterated Pater-noster, and
that what to us looks like self-will was to them the
constraint of conscience. So far from supposing
that they were alienating themselves from their
: Christian heritage, they devoutly believed that they

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. m
were following the pattern of the primitive Apos
tolic Church, after the simplicity of Christ.
I may not open the manifold leadings of the ques
tion as to the rightful passing of the title and quality,
the honor and dignity, of that wilderness fellowship
to those who now constitute this First Church. Yet,
where so much has changed, the substance abides ;
the Scriptures, the Christian doctrine and rule of
life, still guide its services. A digest of the hun
dreds of thousands of sermons preached by the
succession of its ministers, and the action of the
members on the religious movements and measures
of two and a half centuries here, would present, in
fair exhibition and review, the developments and en
largements of our general religious history. Happily
the church long since relaxed the inquisitorial sever
ity of its early discipline, by which it held rigidly
to account each of its covenanted or baptized mem
bers. Otherwise it would have to deal to-day with
a notable company among the living constructively
accountable to it. If words were used by their
signification, Catholic would be the fitting epithet
for this church now. It stands free of all sectarian
and denominational bonds, being closest in its rela
tions with that unfenced brotherhood which claims
all the liberty wherewith Christ has made his dis
ciples free, provided only that they are his disciples ;
for Christ is now, as always, its Head. No ecclesi
astical process or tribunal can stand between its
minister and his flock, to question his teaching or

112 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
the tenure of his office. Acting with the freedom
and the desire of adjustment to admitted tastes
and needs, and the desire to get all good from all
things, a modified Service-book has come into use
here, not, however, with any enforcement. Those
who worship here, in the course of a single year,
find that, according to the preferences of the offici
ating minister, they engage in the original Puritan
method of devotion, or in parts or the whole of
the book. The question is asked, What would
your founders say about the grandeur and artistic
beauty of this edifice, its storied windows, its organ
and choir, the green boughs of its Christmas service,
the flowers of its Easter service, its furnaces, and
its cushioned pews ? If we care to answer, we
should say that the Puritans built the best meeting
house which they could ; that each renewed edifice
improved upon the preceding one. We should point
to the fair palaces and beautiful homes, with all their
furnishings, and to the marts of mammon, where
was once a wilderness ; and we should plead that
the sanctuary may be holy, even if glorious and
lovely. Never in all its years of life and change was this
ancient church more vigorous and earnest and effec
tive in all the offices and purposes of a Christian
church than it is to-day. Its debts are all due to
God; none of them to man, except for high and
sacred service. Its peaceful relations with all other
churches, its devout and dignified ministrations, the

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES.

lI3

fidelity and tenderness of its pastoral work, the un-
obtrusiveness of its presence in any other than its
appropriate sphere, the largeness and earnestness
and compass of its benevolent agencies, — these
make the present First Church the most fitting
memorial of the fathers in the fair city once their
wilderness home. May its Divine Guardian lead it
on for the centuries to come, still standing as it was
planted, — " built upon the foundation of the apos
tles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the
chief corner-stone " !
The minister then said : " Of the first signer of our church
covenant and the first governor of this Commonwealth, John
Winthrop, a name always to be spoken gratefully and re-
veringly, it is recorded, April 3, 1634: 'The Governour
went on foot to Agawam, and because the people there
wanted a minister, spent the Sabbath with them and exer
cised byway of prophecy.' I cannot say that there is here
any lack of ministers, but we have a liking in this church
for lay preaching when we know of what sort it will be ;
and I am sure you will say that there is something in the
doctrine of heredity when you are listening, as I need not
ask you to do, to the Hon. ROBERT C. WINTHROP."
ADDRESS OF THE HON. ROBERT C. WINTHROP.
It is no little relief to me, ladies and gentlemen,
to remember that, in promising to be with you here
on this occasion, it was expressly stipulated that I
should be held responsible for only a brief address.
There are those around me to whom this Church
must be peculiarly and justly precious, as being

114 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
their own church, and the church of their fathers
and mothers, and of all who are most dear to them.
But I can speak under the inspiration of no such
associations, as I look back on my own long and
unintermitted relations to Old Trinity, and to New
Trinity, from infancy to old age, — relations never
more valued than at this hour. Nor can I forget
how recently I have returned from a protracted
session of the triennial convention of the g-eneral
Church to which I belong, — where I was freshly
impressed with the value of its organization, the
charms of its liturgy, the safe anchorage of its
creeds, and the broad range of its views and efforts.
And yet, my friends, in face of all these associa
tions, and in full remembrance of all my religious
professions and ties, I can honestly say that there
is no connection in which I am more glad, or more
proud, to recognize my family name distinctly in
scribed, than on yonder beautiful window of this
First Boston Church. That old covenant of 1630,
of which John Winthrop was the first signer, is one
under which any man might well be willing to live
and to die. For myself, certainly, I could desire to
have lived and died under no better and no other
covenant. And as to the old Governor himself, I
venture to say for him, in this sixth generation, that
he would have preferred that his name should be
perpetuated there, rather than on a dozen statues in
the city, or the State, or the national Capitol. Let
my name, he would have said, be remembered, if at

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 115
all, not so much for founding towns or common
wealths or confederations, as for bringing the gospel
into the wilderness, and helping to advance the
kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. All else, with
him, was subordinate to that.
And certainly nothing could have been more sim
ple, more solemn, or more comprehensive than this
covenant, for those who wished to associate them
selves together in a Christian church. A recital of
all the thirty-nine articles would have added nothing
to its force or its felicity. I might have said thirty-
eight articles, as our American church omitted one
of the articles, at the same time that it so wisely
struck out from the Prayer-book the Commination
service and the Athanasian creed. If such a cove
nant were drawn up, and subscribed and entered
into heartily here, to-day, for the first time, or in any
part of the world, at any time, by a company of sin
cere and earnest believers, it could not and would
not fail to commend itself to the respect and confi
dence and sympathy of all good people, let them
belong to whatever denominational church they
might. But, let me hasten to say, there were peculiar
circumstances under which this little covenant was
adopted two centuries and a half ago, which give
it a significance, an impressiveness, and even a
pathos, which can hardly be exaggerated, and which
must never be forgotten, — least of all here on this
occasion.

Il6 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
Let me recall for an instant the historical facts, —
even at the risk of repeating what has been said, or
of anticipating what may be said, by others. Most
happily the account of the signing of this covenant,
in 1630, is preserved in all its details, as fully and
clearly as the signing of the Declaration of Inde
pendence in 1776, or of the credentials of the latest
missionary bishop at New York last month. Those
two original letters of Edward Winslow and Samuel
Fuller to Governor Bradford, contained in Bradford's
" Letter Book," — providentially rescued, eighty years
ago, from a grocery shop in Halifax, — as well as in
his " History of the Pilgrims," not less providentially
discovered, twenty-five years ago, in the Bishop of
London's library, — tell the whole story.
The men who signed this covenant on the 30th
of July, 1630, — after a long and perilous voyage
across the Atlantic, — had reached the shores of
New England about six weeks before. They had
left homes and altars, friends and, many of them,
their families, behind them, and had come to seek
that civil and religious freedom which had been
denied them in Old England. Meantime affliction
and suffering had already befallen them. They
were not, indeed, like the Pilgrims at Plymouth,
involved, at the outset, in all the rigors of a bleak
New England winter. The Pilgrims landed in De
cember, on the shortest day of the year. The
Massachusetts colony, by a striking contrast, landed
in June, on the very longest. But they were still

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES.

117

without fixed habitations, — many of them encamped
at Charlestown in tents and booths. It was too late
to begin planting with any confidence of a crop on
an untried soil, and they were still without sufficient
supplies of food to secure them from famine in the
winter. Fears and sorrows were, indeed, so multi
plying upon them and around them, that they began
to feel as if the Lord's hand was against them.
Many were sick, many were dead. Governor Win
throp's son Henry had been drowned soon after his
arrival. The Lady Arbella was pining at Salem
from the results of fatigue and exposure, under which
she was soon to sink into an unmarked grave, — to
be followed, alas, within a single month of her own
death, by her noble husband, Isaac Johnson, who
" tried to live without her, liked it not, and died."
But he was with her at Salem on the 25th of July,
1630, and there he had received from Governor
Winthrop, who was at Charlestown with the as
sistants and the Massachusetts company, a letter
recounting their anxieties and afflictions, and de
siring that all at Salem and Charlestown, and every
where else in the colony, might hasten to humble
themselves before God, seeking him in his ordi
nances, and beseeching him to withdraw his hand
of correction from them, and to direct and establish
them in His ways.
Out of this letter of the governor's to Isaac John
son, read publicly after their Sabbath evening ex
ercise at Salem, and made the subject of loving

Il8 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
consultation by Winslow and Fuller of the Pilgrim
Fathers, as well as by the Salem church, which they
were visiting, came the appointment of the following
Friday (July 30) as a day of humiliation and prayer,
and for the entering into this covenant with the
Lord, to walk in all their ways according to the
rules of the gospel.
There was no Boston yet. But the day was
to be solemnized at Salem and at Plymouth, at
Dorchester and at Watertown, as well as by the
Massachusetts company at Charlestown. It was
a most memorable day in our history. All that
there was of Massachusetts, all that there was of
New England, was down on its knees on that
thirtieth of July before God. Church and State,
ministers and governors, — the whole colony, was
assembled before the Lord, acknowledging him as
their only refuge in tribulation, and dedicating them
selves to his service. We can almost hear them, in
their little log meeting-houses, or in the larger hall
at Charlestown, or under the branches of the great
trees around them, rehearsing or singing some of
the verses of that marvellous 107th Psalm, which
seemed composed for them as much as for the chil
dren of Israel : " They went astray in the wilderness
and found no city to dwell in : hungry and thirsty
their soul fainted in them : so they cried unto the
Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from
their distress : He led them forth by the right way,
that they might go to a city of habitation." That

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 119
was the day, my friends, and those the circumstances,
on which and under which yonder little covenant
was proposed, prepared, and signed by the four
representative men whose names you have embla
zoned on your window.
I have but little doubt that Governor Winthrop
framed that covenant. It is entirely in keeping
with the discourse which he wrote and delivered on
board the Arbella during his long voyage. Nor is
it, let me add, in any degree out of keeping with his
farewell letter to his brethren of the Church of Eng
land. There is not a word in it of alienation, or
separation, or non-conformity, or of what some good
people call schism. I do not altogether believe that
on that thirtieth day of July the governor had any
very distinct idea, in his own mind, to what it was
all to lead, or what was to be the permanent organi
zation of religious worship in the colony he was
founding. There was too much trouble, too much
affliction, too much distress of all sorts, for any de
liberate decision on such a point. It might have
quickened him to such a decision if he had learned,
as possibly he may have learned, that the latest
letters from London at that moment brought tidings
that Laud — the great foe of Puritanism — was in
high favor at Court, wielding all the authority of
Primate, and that five ministers of the English
Church had just been summoned before the High
Commission, of whom his friend John Cotton was
one. But it was enough for him, and for those with

120 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
him, that they needed, and must have, the comforts
and consolations of religious association and relig
ious worship, and that the covenanted mercies of
God must be invoked by humiliation and prayer.
Meantime, beyond all doubt, whatever they may
have intended or designed, that day, that service,
that covenant, settled the question that Congre
gationalism was to be the prevailing order, and for
a long time the only order, in early New England.
Nor, let me add, have I ever doubted for a moment
that Congregationalism was the best and the only
mode of planting and propagating Christianity, in
this part of the country, in those old Puritan times.
But I said enough about that at Plymouth Rock, ten
years ago, and I have nothing to add or to alter.
Governor Winthrop was unquestionably a man
who cared more for faith than for forms, more for
religion than for ritual, more for prayer than for
prayer-books, and who held Christianity to be above
all churches. And, in that regard, there is at least
one of his descendants who does not reverence his
memory the less, and who humbly strives to culti
vate his spirit. While I can make no pretension to
the lofty title of a Puritan myself, I may at least be
permitted — when so many disparagements are cast
upon that title in other quarters — to avow my
earnest admiration for the many grand qualities
which the Puritans displayed, here and elsewhere,
in spite of all their faults ; and for the glorious re
sults they achieved for civil and religious freedom,

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 121
both in New England and in Old England. " It
was to this sect," says the historian Hume, "that
the English owe the whole freedom of their consti
tution." " The Puritans," writes Hallam, " were the
depositaries of the sacred fire of liberty." " The
genius of Puritan England," says his latest and best
biographer, " was John Milton." That is glory
enough for them in Old England.
And if we desire to understand what Puritanism
has accomplished for New England, we have only
to look for ourselves, and see what New England
is. Not to any single, massive, material structure,
with its hallowed crypt and splendid choir, its vaulted
arches and long-drawn aisles and magnificent dome,
but to countless institutions everywhere, for relig
ion, education, and charity, and to an intelligent,
industrious, and free people, living and multiplying
in the enjoyment of them all, we point proudly to
day, in presence of this old First Church Covenant,
and in loving remembrance of those who signed it,
and say, " If you seek a monument of the Puritans,
look around you ! "
The minister then said : " I gather from the story of our
church that Governor Winthrop once owed his election to
the earnest efforts of the Rev. John Wilson, who climbed a
tree that he might be the better heard by the crowd. I can
not claim to have rendered any such service to our honored
chief magistrate ; but I trust that he will none the less put
us in his debt, as the first governor was continually wont to
do. May I ask a word from His Excellency the Governor
of Massachusetts?"

122 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

ADDRESS OF GOVERNOR LONG.
I rise only to bring to this delightful occasion the
greeting and kind wishes of the Commonwealth
which shares with you the honor of the name of
John Winthrop — at once the first governor of the
Massachusetts Colony and chief of the founders of
the First Church of Boston. If he were here in my
place, what eloquent expression might he not give
to the emotions that would stir in his heart at wit
nessing the changes and the progress of two centu
ries and a half, alike in the church he aided to found
and in the Commonwealth that still reveres his
memory and bears his impress ! Much as he would
find the present minister a man after his own heart,
he would hardly guarantee, I fear, the salary of
Dr. Ellis as he did that of John Wilson, the
first pastor. He might for a moment question the
architectural elaboration and tasteful magnificence
of this edifice, as compared with the fretwork of
leaves and sunshine, or later the mud walls and
thatched roof, under which he worshipped. But
(perhaps conciliated as soon as he saw the worthy
descendant of his own loins — who honors the ven
erable and illustrious name he bears more even than
it honors him — giving the sanction of his voice
and presence here) anon his own great nature would
take in and expand to the grandeur of all this growth,
the seed of which he helped to plant. It would not

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 123
pain him, I am sure, that Church and State, over both
which his influence was once so great, have severed
connection and are independent of each other. He
would not think Mr. Peters, a minister of Salem,
was far out of the way, who, in 1636, "rebuked the
governour and plainly insinuated that if governours
would concern themselves only with the things of
Caesar, the things of God would be more quiet and
prosperous." He would certainly admit that the
Church is better employed than when it was rent
with schisms over technical points of doctrine, or
when it wrangled over mere theological terms that
have long since been as lifeless as the dead leaves
at which you may look as a student, but which fall
to dust if you touch them, and are only good for
fertilizing new crops.
The fact is, these anniversary celebrations —
which are now so frequent that our wittiest poet
has said that if we had a patron saint, it would be
St. Anniversary — are valuable, not so much because
we reproduce the past, which in its grim reality is
not always attractive, but because we idealize the
past, and so inspire the present and the future.
Remembering that first solemn covenant of this
church, which had but this one requirement, " To
walk in all our ways according to the rule of the
gospel, and in all sincere conformity to his holy
ordinances, and in mutual love and respect to each
other so near as God shall give us grace," Governor
Winthrop would find assurance that his church to-

124

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

day is all that was best in it two hundred and fifty
years ago. And if, passing from these portals, he
should walk the streets of Boston, or go over the
Commonwealth, it would rejoice him to find a better
Massachusetts than his own, the wilderness blossom
ing like the rose, thrift, education, and plenty every
where, and these shores an asylum not alone for a
Puritan congregation in search of freer range, but
for all the children of men who seek larger liberty
and a better hope. What is true of the Church is
true also of the Commonwealth. The best thing
in each is its own growth. The Commonwealth is
to-day all that was best in the Massachusetts Colony
of two hundred and fifty years ago, expanded from
that day of small things to a grander growth, but
its veins still quick with the same blood, and its
advance inspired by the same high ideals of Chris
tian virtue, education, and liberty, which have char
acterized it more and more from the beginning on,
but which have no more striking illustration than
in the history and in the men — the Winthrops, the
Cottons, the Chauncys, the Emersons — of the First
Church of Boston. To that church, in grateful
recognition of its contribution to the causes of re
ligion, of good morals, of public virtue, of education
and patriotism, on this its two hundred and fiftieth
birthday, hoping that it is in the beginning of its
usefulness, and that two hundred and fifty years
hence as good words may be said of us as we can
now say of our fathers, I bring the acknowledgments
of the Commonwealth.

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES.

!25

The minister then said : " After the excellent service
rendered by him to the city of Boston on the 17th of
September, his Honor the Mayor may well claim exemp
tion from added duty in that way ; but the church as well
as the city asks his presence when she celebrates her
anniversary, and it is not his habit to decline any reason
able call. I ask a word from his Honor the Mayor of
Boston." ADDRESS OF MAYOR PRINCE.
The Committee of the First Church of Boston,
charged with the arrangements of the commemora
tive services in honor of its completion of two hun
dred and fifty years of life, have kindly asked me to
be present and participate in these services because
of my official position as mayor of the city. It gives
me great pleasure to do so. No citizen of Boston
can fail to be deeply interested in this occasion.
No one who feels as he should in respect to our
civic history can fail of gratulation and sympathy
for the cause of this ancient society. Its origin and
its whole history are closely interwoven with the
origin and history of Boston. The annals could
not be written without giving the story of the First
Church. When we look back and recall the cir
cumstances under which this society was organized,
when we summon before our mental gaze its heroic
founders, — Winthrop and Dudley and Johnson and
Wilson and Bradstreet, — and all those grand old
Puritans who left country and home and friends,
the endearing; scenes of childhood, the sacred graves

126 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
of their fathers, the charms and attractions of civil
ized life, for a barren wilderness, inhabited only by
savage beasts and men more savage, that they might
worship God in peace and according to the dictates
of conscience ; when we remember the hardships,
dangers, and suffering of the long voyage across the
stormy Atlantic ; when we recall their sublime for
titude, their serene patience, their indomitable perse
verance, their sincerity, piety, and faith, — we cannot
but feel for them admiration mingled with awe, and
a reverence which approaches veneration. It will
be noted that the first act of the Pilgrims as a body,
upon landing here, was to found a church. Before
they made homes for themselves, before they erected
dwellings, they organized and arranged to carry out
the leading object of their emigration, the free wor
ship of God, and this society was gathered. At
first the congregation assembled and held religious
exercises beneath the spreading branches of an oak-
tree. The quiet and peace of the then untenanted
land, the solemn calm of undisturbed nature in those
first days of colonial life, would seem to have been
in full harmony with the grave Puritan character,
and such place of worship, such a temple, well fitted
to the exalted nature of Puritan devotion.
The first meeting-house was of the simplest form
and rudest construction. It had no vaulted roof, no
groined arches, no lofty spires, no cathedral mag
nificence, none of the pomp and glory of ancient or
modern church architecture. Its walls were built

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 127
of mud, as the Governor has just said, its roof was
merely thatched, but the prayers which ascended
therefrom were as sincere and devout as any that
the costliest minster or cathedral ever sent forth,
and doubtless were as acceptable. That first gath
ering did more than establish a Church, — it estab
lished a State. It arranged all the civil as well as
the ecclesiastical concerns of the infant colony. It
regulated all the domestic matters of the society, or
" congregation," as the covenanters styled them
selves. No one had voice or vote in the early days
touching public affairs, or in whatever affected pub
lic interests ; no one could make the law, adjudi
cate it, or execute it, who was not a church-member,
and none could be a church-member whose daily
life was nbt clean, decent, and holy. The order
admitting none to the freedom of the body politic
but such as were church-members was adopted in
1 63 1, and continued in force until the dissolution of
the government in 1684, although probably the
order was not rigidly enforced for some years pre
vious to that date. It has been charged that this
exercise of power was oppressive, and that the Pil
grims showed in their conduct here the same intol
erance which drove themselves from the mother
country. This may perhaps be true in some re
spects, but I think it may be demonstrated that the
action of the -fathers under the circumstances was
justifiable because necessary for the maintenance of
their cause. They had made great sacrifices for

128 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
religious liberty, and they were determined that it
should not be jeoparded, but protected by every
means against every possible danger. Religious
toleration was to be delayed to a more convenient
season, when Puritan principles would become so
firmly rooted as to defy the assault of all enemies.
Although the occasion does not allow the discussion
of the question, I have no doubt that Congregation
alism was the only church form which could have
maintained the cause of the colonists, subdued the
wilderness, the savages and all the opponents of
Puritanism, ecclesiastical and lay, and laid the foun
dations upon which was subsequently erected con
stitutional liberty, civil and religious. If the English
Church just as it existed in England had been planted
here by the emigrants, and it had been firmly estab
lished, the political and social condition of this
Commonwealth and the whole country might have,
and probably would have been, wholly different from
what it is now. Congregationalism means civil as
well as religious liberty : it is of the very essence of
freedom and independence. When we remember
that there was no religious liberty either in England
or in any other country when Puritanism arose, that
after the Reformation the power exercised by the
Pope was transferred to the temporal monarch, who
was the absolute ruler over the consciences of the
people, so that they must believe whatever he should
direct in respect to religion (which control, King
Henry said, in his letter touching the provisions of

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 129
the Act of Supremacy, " was no more than what all
Christian princes in former times assumed to them
selves in their own dominions "), we can understand
how little religious liberty there was when the Puri
tans emigrated, and we can also understand what
an important step was taken when they broke loose
from the powers controlling the church and asserted
the principles of Congregationalism. The assertion
of these principles must have created as much as
tonishment in the mother country as, years after
wards, the denial by the Puritan descendants of the
right of taxation without representation. Fortu
nately, however, the colonists were too few in num
bers, and the government of England too much
occupied with domestic matters, to pay much atten
tion to any declaration of church rights in places so
far off, by parties so insignificant every way as these
non-conformists. The Puritans were for religious
liberty, and on this account they were the advocates
of civil liberty, since civil liberty must first exist as
the basis of religious liberty.
All honor to the Pilgrim Founders of the First
Church ! We prove the solidity and completeness
of their work by its durability. It has survived
perils and schisms and enemies of every character.
Its influence can never be wholly set forth or shown.
We trace its effect everywhere in the religious, social,
and political opinions and institutions of the country.
We owe to the declaration so briefly sketched in the
simple covenant under which this church was gath-
9

130 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
ered much of that catholicity of spirit which now
pervades all religious sects, and that general recog
nition of our common humanity which makes us, in
the words of the covenant, " entertain mutual love
and respect to each other," and moves us to be in
terested in whatever concerns our race. We owe to
it that steadiness of faith with which New England
has ever resisted the materialism which would de
stroy the spiritual nature of the soul, and that severe
strength of intellect which rejects the rationalism
which would deny to us inspiration. We owe to it
the fuller development of those great qualities which
have distinguished the Puritan character, and fitted
our fathers and their descendants for the great work,
political and social, they were called to perform.
Wisely the Pilgrims came here to establish the prin
ciples set forth in the covenant. They could never
have found a fitting field for such purpose in the old
country. There not only the hostility of govern
ment, but the opinions, prejudices, habits, and tra
ditions of the people would have walled them in so
completely that no expansion or growth would have
been possible. A new and unpeopled country, where
all was free and unfettered as Nature made it, was
necessary for the planting and the harvesting. Puri
tanism first developed in its full proportions here
in Boston, and to-day still affects the character and
habits of our people, influences their thought and
controls their action to an extent not entirely recog
nized despite the great changes of time and circum-

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES.

131

stances. It was recently observed by one of the
New York papers, that Boston cannot long expect
to maintain its prominent position among the cities
of the country ; that she cannot hope to have the
same influence in the future which she has had in
the past ; that she must henceforth yield the lead to
communities actuated by other and broader ideas :
but I think we may dismiss all fears in this respect
while the spirit of Puritanism yet lingers with us,
to animate, invigorate, and guide our citizens, to
stimulate habits of industry and perseverance, to
foster the love of work, to maintain the desire
to reform, improve, and elevate. The Puritan has
been reproached for wanting those qualities which
are the grace of private life, and attach men to each
other. He is charged with that austerity which
hates even respectable amusements and pleasures,
with being " sour-visaged." There may be more or
less of truth in all this ; but acidity is not without its
value, for the sour leaven ferments the wheat, and
thus makes the wholesome bread, which is the staff
of life. May we long retain the leaven of Puri
tanism !
I congratulate the society on possessing this
beautiful house of worship. During its long life
of two hundred and fifty years it has occupied four
different locations and five different edifices, each
one more costly than the last, its fortunes advancing
with those of the city. All its history has been illus
trious by devotion to the purposes for which it was

132

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

organized, and by zealous advocacy of the cause to
which it was consecrated. Its work has been and
is now being successfully performed. Its long roll
of ministers has no name not honored and revered
for fidelity to duty, for piety and the practice as well
as the preaching of the Christian virtues. Let us
hope that it will continue to prosper in the centuries
which are to come as in the centuries that have
passed. After the singing of the Jubilate in B, the minister said :
" The old Church of St. Botolph in Boston, England, owes
to our late parishioner, Edward Everett, more, than to any
other man, the restoration of its chapel. To a son of Ed
ward Everett we owe the earnest proposal out of which
sprang this fifth house of worship, our St. Botolph's, — the
realization, is it not, of John Wilson's beautiful vision, of
which the banner on my left reminds us. It was eminently
fit that descendants of John Cotton should be foremost in
both these enterprises. And you will be glad to know
that the son of Mr. Edward Everett, who is at once child
of the congregation, member of the church, teacher and
minister, has brought to us a Poem with which to grace
our anniversary. I ask your attention to Dr. WILLIAM
Everett." COTTON IN THE PULPIT AT ST. MARY'S.
"Mather's Magnalia," Book III. p. 16.
Where the chalky heights of England melt into her dreary fen, .
Springs an ancient fount of learning, Cambridge, nurse of mighty
men :
Clustering spires and vaulted portals, velvet lawns to catch the sun,
Plashing conduits, cloistered arches, courts revealing, one by one,

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 133
Halls on halls and cells uncounted, where for many a rolling year,
All the noisy world excluded, Granta spreads her goodly cheer ;
Gathering idle monks by thousands, sunk in learned sloth and ease,
Heedless while outside their brothers faint with strife on earth and
seas.
Hush, vain babbler ! when did England battle with ancestral
wrong
And from Cambridge came no champion, bold and gentle, wise and
strong ?
When the roses' thorns were tearing through the darkness right and
left,
And the nation's crested leaders one by one in gore were reft,
Pure and clear her beacon streaming lit the path to new renown,
When the scholar's cap should lord it o'er the prince's bloodstained
crown.
When the friars of Rome gave order " Bind in chains the Word of
God,"
Cambridge pealed her trump, and straightway snapped the foul
enchanter's rod !
When o'er truth's new sun an instant bigots drew again the cloud,
Oxford fires saw Cambridge martyrs tread the way like monarchs
proud ;
And returning glory found her wing her eaglets for their flight,
Sing in Spenser's lute of wonder, gaze with Bacon's prophet sight.
Listen, ye who love our Boston, how in Cambridge spake of yore,
He who brought that name of beauty to the Massachusetts shore.
Sunday morning ! Tower and steeple, chime confusing sweet
with chime,
Call all Cambridge out to worship, in the hot-souled Stuart time.
Through St. Mary's dark-browed portal see the motley gownsmen
press,
Blue and sable, white and scarlet, passions varied as their dress.
Now the pulpit rules the nation ; Roman rostra never saw
Crowds so bent to catch each echo, fired with frenzy, dumb with awe,
As the Stuarts' England gathered, week by week, intent to hear
Puritan or prelate searching all their souls with sacred fear.
Nor since Ridley freed his spirit was St. Mary's thronged as now,
Ne'er was expectation seated keener on each scholar's brow.

134

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

Boston sends again her vicar, Cotton ; still our hearts retain
Memory of his rich oration, sweeter than an organ's strain ;
Golden from the vaults of learning, lustrous with the gems of wit,
Quaint conceits, and glowing pictures, richly woven, closely knit.
Many a time and oft we hummed him, till St. Mary's hummed
again
Like the Granta's roar in springtime, swirling o'er the affrighted fen.
When such preaching charms us, vainly London's playhouse calls
to see
Massinger's grim dens of horror, Fletcher's rosy halls of glee.
Scarcely from the white-robed trebles dies the psalm upon the air,
When o'er all the preacher rises for the ancient bidding prayer ;
Bids them pray for all in honor, king and noble, knight and priest,
That the strength and hope of England may be hallowed and in
creased ;
Bids them pray for all in Cambridge, blood and bone of Church
and State,
Every teacher, every pupil, every college, small and great ;
" And as bound in private duty I request your prayers as well
For our Protestant foundation, College of Emmanuel."
Then, as with the Pater-noster all the prayers in one are said,
Raised is every cap, and buried in its square each gownsman's
head.
Now they settle on their cushions waiting for the rich repast
That shall wake applause for Cotton loud as when they hummed
him last.
Then, as though the sultry noontide felt its clouds by lightning rent,
Leaps the text, the Baptist's warning, one short, dreadful word,
" Repent ! "
Aye, " Repent ! " no gorgeous fabric, quaint conceit or wit is there,
Classic tale or strain poetic, sweetly floating on the air ;
But Jehovah's barbed arrow, flashing from his servant's string,
Piercing every sluggish conscience with its unrelenting sting !
All the wrong that England suffers, cankered church and court
corrupt,
Finds its tawdry mantle shrivelled by that preacher's word abrupt.
All the sin that reigns unfettered, all the blood to heaven that cries,
That stern prophet's fixed index points to their unwilling eyes.

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 135
" Think not, ye that sit so careless, God hath left his house alone !
Think not, ye that soil the sceptre, blood for blood shall not atone.
Vain the trump that felled the Popish fortress, vain the martyr's
doom,
If the Lambeth finger bind us heavier than the hand of Rome.
Aye, repent ! or if in England Pharaoh harden yet his heart,
God shall bid his outraged Israel from the faithless land depart ;
O'er a wilder sea than Edom's lovelier Jordans roll their streams ;
On a fairer Zion's summit, lo, a statelier temple gleams !
First to you the word was spoken ; but since ye refuse to learn,
England brands herself unworthy, to the Gentiles, lo, we turn."
O'er the crowd the preacher gazes rapt, as when on Mars's height
Saul of Tarsus looked unflinching up to Pallas' temple white :
From the black and scarlet gownsmen comes no loud approving
hum ;
Stern resentment knits their forehead, sharp contrition holds them
dumb.
Go thy ways, thou daring Cotton ; Cambridge asks no word of
thine •
Sunk in learned ease compliant, well content with Rimmon's shrine ;
Leave thy Gothic halls by Granta, leave St. Botolph's lofty tower ;
Set those names across the ocean, here where Laud hath lost his
power ;
And thy faithful word forever finds at length its due applause
In the hum of freeborn millions, ruled by Boston's gentle laws.
The minister said : "The churches of Massachusetts in
the former days recognized, in what they called the Cor
poration, — that is, the Corporation of Harvard College, —
a right of eminent domain, and that it was their duty,
in case a minister was needed for the presidency, to sur
render him upon the instant for the office, as befell this
church in the selection of Mr. Wadsworth. The Corpora
tion comes no longer upon that errand. Indeed, I am almost
persuaded that to be a Congregational minister would be
a disqualification for the highest office in their gift. But
the President of the College does sometimes honor us with
his presence ; only when he comes he asks not us, but ours.

136 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
But he is welcome upon any errand ; and should he ask
you now, as he will be very likely to do, to found a John
Cotton Professorship of Christian Theology, I trust that
you will at once subscribe the needful amount. Let me
introduce to you the President of Harvard University."

ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT CHARLES W. ELIOT.
Looking back with grave satisfaction over the
long, continuous life of this church, and of its kin
dred churches, do we not survey the very springs
and sources of the peculiar character of the New
England people ? Do we not clearly see whence
this people has come ? Only the more instant be
comes that question which of late years has been
much in all our hearts, — whither is this people
going? There cannot be many persons in this
company who have not already said to themselves
at this two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, Will
the First Church of Boston have a five hundredth
anniversary? or a four hundredth? I invite your
attention very briefly to three reasons for indulging
the confident expectation that it will.
I remark, first, that the instinct of worship is a
universal instinct of the race, — an instinct which
civilization refines and exalts, but has no tendency
to extinguish. The religious sentiment has always
been, and still is, the strongest power in the world,
— making war and peace, resisting vice, establishing
and overthrowing governments, fostering democracy,
destroying slavery, preserving learning, building ca-

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES.

*37

thedrals, creating literature, and inspiring oratory,
music, and art. Unless we can count on the per
manence of this religious quality or faculty in man,
we cannot count upon the permanence of any of his
attributes. Yet modern science teaches that race-
qualities change so slowly that the ordinary divi
sions of time into years and centuries are not fitted
to express the rate of change*
It is hardly necessary to say that rapid change of
theological opinion may, and often does, go on from
generation to generation without producing any
effect upon the sentiments of religion, or upon the
real functions of a religious organization. The doc
trines or dogmas taught now in this church bear but
a faint resemblance to those of the seventeenth cen
tury ; but the main objects of the church are, and
will ever be, the same that they were in 1630, —
namely, to worship God with prayer and praise, to
teach men their duty and urge them to do it, and to
carry their thoughts out of the monotonous round
of their daily lives, beyond the sea, above the sky,
to the dwelling-place of the Most High. Benjamin
Wadsworth, who left the pastorate of this church to
encounter many hardships and trials as President of
Harvard College, held some theological opinions
which are not current in these days. Thus, in a
sermon preached just after the First Church was
burnt, in 171 1, he says very simply: "Tis of the
mere undeserved mercy of God that we have not all
of us been roaring m the unquenchable flames of

I38 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
hell long ago, for 't is no more than our sins have
justly deserved." And again, in a sermon entitled
" The Gospel not opposed but by the Devil and
Men's Lusts," he gravely remarks that " Nothing is
more grating, cutting, and enraging to the Devil
than to have the gospel faithfully preached to men."
Doubtless this hearty belief in the unpleasantness
of the sensations which faithful preaching inflicted
upon the enemy of mankind was an effective in
centive to many a worthy minister. But when Dr.
Wadsworth, holding these now obsolete notions,
came to the practical matter of advising parents
how to bring up their children, as he did in his
sermon entitled " The Saint's Prayer to Escape
Temptations," he gave advice good for all time,
which the latest President of Harvard College will
gladly adopt as his own : as, for example, — teach
them the Scriptures; charge them to live soberly,
righteously, and godliiy; endeavor the preventing
of idleness, pride, envy, malice, or any vice what
soever ; teach them good manners (a civil, kind,
handsome, and courteous behavior) ; render them
truly serviceable in this world, and so dispose of
them in trade or business, and in marriage, as
that they may be least liable to temptations, and
may probably be most furthered in virtue and
piety. Let us then settle down upon an abiding faith
that the instinct of worship is an indestructible
element in man's nature, and that the religious

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES.

139

and ethical sentiments of mankind, which have
survived all the physiological, psychological, social,
and political changes to which the race has been
subjected, will exhibit no less vitality in the future
than they have in the past.
In the second place, I wish to point out that the
principle of associated action for the promotion
of a common object has been wonderfully de
veloped in this country and in England during
the present century. Manufactures are carried on,
goods and passengers are transported, money is
lent, colonies are founded, hospitals, schools, and
libraries are maintained, by associations of men
who combine for one defined object, and employ
paid servants to do the common work. There is
hardly a conceivable philanthropic enterprise which
is not already the field of some benevolent society.
This facility of association being one of the chief
characteristics of our time, and a church having
become under the laws only an association of like-
minded men and women for the satisfaction of
their religious needs and the furtherance of good
works, it is inconceivably that the principle of as
sociation, which is proving so valuable in every
other field of human activity, should fail to work
well when applied, as it is in every American
Protestant church, to the promotion of worship,
charity, and piety. To our faith in the perma
nence of the religious needs and aspirations let us
then add the conviction that never in the history

140

FIRST CHURCH .IN BOSTON.

of the world has it been so natural and easy as it
is now to satisfy those cravings by the fruitful
method of voluntary association.
Thirdly, let us gain confidence in the future of
the New England churches by contemplating the
prodigious changes of legal condition and external
circumstance through which they have already
passed in safety. To appreciate the magnitude of
these changes, we must recall the facts that suf
frage in Massachusetts was long conditioned upon
church-membership, that towns could be fined for
neglecting to support the gospel, that for two cen
turies attendance at meeting on the Sabbath could
be enforced by fine, that all corporations holding
lands within a parish were taxable down to 183 1
for the support of public worship, and that down
to 1835 the property of individual parishioners was
held liable for the debts of the parish. Never was
there a firmer or closer union of Church with State
than that which existed in Massachusetts in 1630,
and never has there been more complete separa
tion of Church from State than that which exists
in Massachusetts to-day. Churches and ministers
have gradually been stripped of every peculiar
privilege and every adventitious support, until they
now stand upon this firm ground, — that they partly
satisfy an imperious need and an ineffable longing
of the human soul. It would have been happier
for the cause of religion if the disestablishment
of churches had proceeded as rapidly in Europe

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 141
as it has in Massachusetts. History then might
not have had to record that millions of educated
and liberal-minded men have been alienated from
religion by the habitual political attitude of the
established churches. Time to come can hardly
have in store for the New England churches changes
comparable in gravity with those which they have
already experienced. Their present legal condi
tion is healthier, freer, more natural, and more
likely to be stable than any previous condition.
The minister is judged, like other men, by his
gifts, attainments, and character; and the church
is valued for the services which it renders to its
members and the community.
Two hundred and fifty years is a long life for
anything of human creation. There is not a writ
ten political constitution in the world which has
even half of that age. Empires and republics
have come and gone, old dynasties have disap
peared and new ones risen to power, within that
period. In our own little Commonwealth, not only
the external form of government has changed, but
the whole theory or essence of the political con
stitution as well. There is not a single industry,
manufacture, or human occupation which has not
undergone fundamental changes in its processes
and its results within that time. But all these
years this venerable church has maintained its
original organization, and held stoutly on its way
through gladness and gloom, through sunshine

I42 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
and storm. Solemnly, resolutely, and hopefully
may it move on for centuries to come.
Does any one ask why universities, which must
inevitably be occupied chiefly with secular knowl
edge, should feel any great concern for the per
manence of religious institutions ? I answer that
universities exist to advance science, to keep alive
philosophy and poetry, and to draw out and culti
vate the highest powers of the human mind. Now
science is always face to face with God, philosophy
brings all its issues into the one word "duty,"
poetry has its culmination in a hymn of praise,
and a prayer is the transcendent effort of man's
intelligence. The minister said : " Massachusetts once took it very
hard that John Cotton, in some mood of discouragement,
thought of departing to New Haven; and New Haven took
it very hard when the Rev. John Davenport was called to be
minister of First Church. Let it be our assurance that we
bear no ill-will, but, on the contrary, cherish only honor and
affection for that confederated colony and its noble Uni
versity, that we earnestly desire to-day a word from Presi
dent Porter, who, I am happy to say, does not need to be
introduced to our congregation."
ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT NOAH PORTER.
I have been speculating for some time as to what
feat of ingenuity the pastor of this church would
resort to in order to give any good reason for my
being here. I am sure I feel very much out of
place. The real reason, I am confident, was the

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 143
last which he gave, that I am not totally a stranger
to this congregation, nor to its pastor, in bonds of
Christian or fraternal fellowship. Some ten years
ago my reverend predecessor and myself, he then
being in office, were somehow or other impelled to
ask Dr. Ellis to come and preach for us. Some
two or three years afterwards I preached for him,
and no evil ever came of either, except that I am
now called upon to make a speech. And now I am
before you, what can I do with greater propriety
than to recognize the obligation — which has not
been adverted to — of the other New England
colonies to this First Church of Boston ? The First
Church of Boston was not, certainly, the first among
the churches in New England in point of time, but
it early held a prominence among them by reason
of the quality of the men who were in it, and by its
position in this city, and its special relations to the
other colonies and their churches, which gives it
the highest place in the reverence and affection of
all loyal New-Englanders. Here the Rev. Thomas
Hooker and his company whiled away a year or two,
taking counsel and advice of Governor Winthrop
and the leading members of this church, before he
ventured off on his long journey toward the Connec
ticut. That journey, which now takes us less than
four hours to perform, was to them a weary walk of
fourteen or sixteen days, as they proceeded toward
the west over the wooded hills, through the rough
wilderness, and along the swiftly descending valley

144 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
of the Chicopee, till, finally, they were brought out
in safety upon those fair meadows of the Connecticut
valley, to which their hearts had been turning with
a longing which could not be repressed. And here
John Davenport, after in vain trying to convert the
members of this godly Commonwealth to his pecu
liar notions of the relations of Church and State,
gave up the attempt in despair, and with the New
Haven Company took possession of the territory be
tween the Connecticut and the Hudson rivers, in
which he sought to build a new Jerusalem, after his
own fashion, that should be four-square according
to the pattern in the Apocalypse, — moved perhaps
by its contrast with the pattern of the original
streets which he saw in Boston. The same John
Davenport, moreover, after trying in vain to realize
the New Jerusalem in New Haven, at the end of
some thirty-five years of his vain endeavor, and par
ticularly after the Colony of Connecticut had ab
sorbed the Colony of New Haven, came back to
Boston to renew again his first efforts as pastor of
this church for the two or three years which preceded
his death. Here also Roger Williams, after afflicting
this church in many ways and being afflicted by it,
after protesting and being protested against, gave up
in despair and went to Rhode Island, under compul
sion and with a protest, seeking soul liberty for him
self and using it freely afterwards in being a thorn
in the side of the greater colonies. In this way it
was that this First Church of Boston became the

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES.

H5

mother, or the step-mother, of Connecticut, New
Haven, and Rhode Island.
These facts suggest the reflection that the pe
culiar influence of the settlers of the Massachusetts
Colony, represented so emphatically as they were
in the First Church of Boston, to the New England
life and the New England character, has not, in one
point, been so distinctly referred to as might be
desired. The early Bostonians and the Massachu
setts emigrants, headed by the First Church and
represented in them, did not come here simply
because they were driven from England. They did
not resort to these shores solely to find a shelter in
the wilderness. Stern necessity, it is true, gave the
first impulse to their movement ; but the movement
was also animated by the hope that they might here
establish the kingdom of God after a nobler pattern
than had hitherto been known elsewhere in this
wide world. They came, not simply to preach the
gospel with boldness, not to pray as they might, but
they also came to apply the principles of the gospel
to every kind of human institution, — to the school,
to the college, to the commonwealth, to all social
relations. It is true that out of this fair ideal many
of their errors and their failures proceeded, but it
is also true that the ideal itself should confer on
them immortal honor. The Puritans had this aim
ever in their minds. It was ever high and lifted
up before their eyes. Many of the methods which
they adopted for its realization, and in which they

IO

146 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
firmly believed, were mistaken, yet for all that the
ideal itself was grand and noble.
The covenant adopted by this church has been
often alluded to, and it could not be too often ex
tolled, nor in terms of excessive praise. It seems
almost to have been given by inspiration, — the
language is so pure, the sentiments are so simple
and yet so fervent, the acknowledgment of the
great object of the Christian's trust is so incidental
and yet so comprehensive, and the recognition of
what might be called the whole catalogue of Chris
tian duties is so wide reaching. You have asked
perhaps, some of you, why this covenant was accom
panied by no creed or confession of faith. The
answer to that question is found in the more general
explanation that this was not the way of the older
Puritans. In the oldest time no church, with rare
exceptions, was founded on a written or a spoken
creed. Each pastor composed a catechism of doc
trine for his flock, because each pastor was supposed
to teach his people with sufficient clearness and
authority, as of necessity to make them acquainted
with the great doctrines of the Christian faith. It
is not known just how or when, but the fact is
certain that after some three or four generations
this practice was gradually changed. I am not cer
tain that the older practice was not the better,
for the reason that creeds change, necessarily, with
the philosophy of the times in which they are com
posed; and it is scarcely possible that any man,

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 147
after a century had elapsed, should accept, in all its
forms of statement, the philosophical definitions
and the minutely specified relations between one
truth and another, of any creed which was held a
century before. I am not certain, even, but that if
the old Puritan fashion had been upheld with fidelity
and been applied as it might have been, the Congre
gational churches of New England might have been
saved from that schism or division by which they were
so unhappily separated. Of one thing, however, I
am certain, — that when we read these early creeds,
and find in them statements that we condemn or dis
approve or reject, or when we find in the early ser
mons passages which offend us so much and offend
us rightly, we would do well to remember that in
the times in which they were uttered, and in the
thoughts of the men who uttered them, they did
not have precisely the same significance or call for
the same assent as they would require from us. In
other words, we ought to look back upon the teach
ings of the past with something like a just and wisely
ordered historic imagination and historic sense, if we
would do justice to the good sense and sound judg
ment and Christian feeling of those teachers and di
vines who had a high place, at least, in the affection
of our fathers. Why should men not be tolerant of
the past as well as of the present ? While we do not
hesitate to criticise the theology or to call in ques
tion many of the explanations of Christian truth
which were then given, it would be narrow in us not

I48 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
to expect that from one century to another the same
truths would be defended by better arguments, and
be presented in better definitions, and possibly en
shrined in formulae of prayer and consecration supe
rior to those of earlier times. No less than this, it
seems to me, is required of us when on an occasion
like this we desire with our inmost hearts to pay
the highest and sincerest homage to men who, from
one generation to another, have been loved and
honored, and who will continue to receive the re
spect of all right-minded men.
So much for the past with its admonitory lessons.
What is before us in the future ? Shall the Chris
tian Church remain in the face of the scientific and
philosophic atheism that is now so boldly proclaimed
and so plausibly argued? Shall it stand before an
historical criticism that would persuade us that the
supernatural Christ is soon to vanish out of history,
and ought therefore to be banished from the Chris
tian's creed ? Shall it continue in the face of the
insidious and the repeated proclamation, here and
there, that those bonds of duty which hold society
together are soon to be physiologically relaxed or
psychologically demonstrated out of their authority,
and thus be robbed of their sacredness and their
binding force ? Shall we renounce Christ and the
living God, and resort to science and philosophy
for the defence of our faith ? Shall we rely largely
upon historical criticism, the study of which is con
fined to the few? Not in the least. The strong-

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 749
hold of the Christian faith is not necessarily in the
schools either of philosophy or of history, important
as these are ; it is in the heart of man, as it wakens
there those convictions which the intellect assents to
as spiritually necessary and true, and which, there
fore, we are certain must remain and prevail. If
we in our Christian lives do but rise to a more con
stant and a more vivid apprehension of the presence
of the living God ; if we shall emerge from each one
of these controversies and discussions with a con
stantly increasing sense of his personality and his
loving providence ; if we learn to read and accept
the New Testament more and more for our per
sonal guidance and our personal consolation, — we
cannot but attain a higher and a more assured faith
in Christ as the ground of our hopes and the joy
of our lives. The covenant of this church, which
has often been referred to, is too familiar for me to
recite ; let me repeat from modern literature another
covenant or another prayer which seems to match
it well, though it be phrased in a diction that
might have seemed strange to our fathers : —
" Strong Son of God, Immortal Love,
Whom we that have not seen thy face
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing when we cannot prove !

" Thou seemest human and divine, —
The highest, holiest manhood, thou ;
Our wills are ours, we know not how,
Our wills are ours to make them thine.

150 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
" Our little systems have their day,
They have their day and cease to be ;
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.
" We have but faith ; we cannot know j
For knowledge is of things we see ;
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness ; — let it grow.
" Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell,
That mind and soul, according well,
May make our music, as before."
May we not conclude that if our modern litera
ture, amid all the misgivings which it derives from
philosophy and science, can express a faith like this,
in forms that both kindle and elevate the imagina
tion, and if such worship can rise from the men of
this generation, we need never despair of the life
and growth of the Christian Church. Rather should
I say, we need never despair, in the presence of the
living Christ, that his Church will continue to shine
as the light and hope of mankind.
Then followed the singing of the 107th Psalm to the
tune of " China."
From Psalms, Hymns, & Spiritual Songs of the Old & New Testaments
faithfully translated into English Metre for the use, edification, & Comfort of
the saints in public & private, especially in New England.
From the Sth Edition. Printed by John Allen & Vavasour Paris, at the
Brick Shop near the Town House, Boston, 1695.
With thanks unto the Lord confess
because that good is he ;
Because his loving kindnesses
last to eternity.

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 151
So say the Lord's redeemed, whom bought
he hath from the enemies' hands,
And from the east & west hath brought
from south & northern lands.
In desart stray'd, in desart way,
no dwelling town they find.
They hungry were & thirsty they
their souls within them pin'd.
Then did they to Jehovah cry
when they were in distress ;
Who did them set at liberty
out of their anguishes.
In such a way as was most right
he led them forth alsoe,
That to a city which they might
inhabit, they might goe.
Oh that men praise Jehovah would
for his great goodness then,
And for his marvellous lovingness
unto the sons of men.
The minister said : " There is nothing like an anniver
sary for bringing one's treasures into the light, and had
it not been for this feast I should not have known that
the minister of a famous Massachusetts church, the First
Church in Concord, is a descendant of Rev. John Wilson ;
I have found him out, however, and shall now ask a word
from the Rev. GRINDALL REYNOLDS."

ADDRESS OF REV. GRINDALL REYNOLDS.
The strains of the old psalm which we have heard
are very familiar to me. Only a few days ago I was
reading the account of the two hundredth anniver
sary of the settlement of the town in which I live.

152

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

At that anniversary this very psalm was sung, line
by line, just as the fathers sung it. I thought then,
as I think now, that nothing so shows what a pro
digious change and growth have come in all the
elements of prosperity and social life, as the fact
that two hundred and fifty years ago people could
sing the third verse of that psalm, " In desart stray'd,"
etc., and feel that it expressed truly their own expe
rience. I suppose that I owe my connection with
this interesting occasion to two facts : first, that I
represent the oldest inland parish in Massachusetts,
the descendants of that body of people who first left
the tide-waters and pushed out into the true wilder
ness country ; and second, and especially, that a few
drops of the blood of that plain, good, honored, and
useful man, John Wilson, your first minister, flow
in my veins. I count it a high privilege that some
real ties of association connect me with this time
and event. Before coming into this place I walked
into your chapel to look at the portrait of your old
minister. I saw the dark, thin face, touched with a
little of that melancholy, so often found in the coun
tenances of the men of his generation, who suffered
so much and sacrificed so much for their faith. That
he was a stern Puritan, capable of putting down
any man or any opinion which he thought threat
ened the kingdom of God in this new world, is clear.
That he shared the weakness and superstitions of
the time, believing in dreams and omens and the
private gift of prophecy, we must admit, if we accept

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153

the statement of Cotton Mather. That he was one
who had a strong, clear conscience, who can deny,
who remembers that he relinquished the pleasant
quiet of college life and study, that he gave up the
people whom he loved and who loved him, that he
left behind father and mother, brother and sister,
and wife too, and came to the wilderness rather than
be false to his convictions ? All these qualities he
shared with his brethren. They were part of the
common stock of the Puritan character. But what
was special to him, what made the core of his per
sonal character, was that, as the same Cotton Mather
describes him, he was an apostle of zeal and love.
He was a man with an affectionate temper and
warm blood in him. It was no doubt this same
warm blood which led him, as the tradition has it,
to climb a tree and plead with the people for the
re-election of Governor Winthrop. It was this
which won Winthrop's warm, deep regard. It was
this warm blood and kindly heart which made, what
an elder of the church once said, true, that in the
whole congregation there was scarcely one man who
did not love and reverence John Wilson, and possible
for him to reply, not one whom John Wilson does
not love. There were, perhaps, greater men in the
colony intellectually than he. Probably John Cot
ton had a more powerful mind, a deeper and finer
scholarship, and so a greater place as a theologian.
But John Wilson was a pastor, not simply in name
and by election, but in fact and in all the tendencies

154

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

of his character. He was a man who took up into
his heart and sympathies all the joys, griefs, errors,
and needs of his people, — a man, as it was said, great
in discipline, who could comfort, guide, and, if need
be, admonish and exhort, — a man to build up and
' strengthen in all good elements of Christian life a
church, and to be justly remembered and honored
for so doing.
There is nothing more profitable, as I believe, than
this recalling and cherishing of a good past ; not
alone, as his Excellency the Governor had it, the
idealized past, but the real, stern, hard, conscience-
loving past, which has created good institutions and
built up great and noble life. In some countries,
no doubt, the past becomes almost an oppression.
Its memories hallow sometimes not only the good
but the bad equally, and so stand as a barrier in the
way of true progress. There is no such danger in
our State and country. Here the new triumphs.
Every eye is open to clearer light ; every mind is
expecting fresh progress in knowledge, in custom
of life, in revelations of truth, in all things. No
danger but we shall go forward ! No danger that
anything shall hamper or repress life, energy, hope,
liberty ! No danger at all ! Perhaps the rather
danger that we shall seek change for the sake of it.
The memory of the old steadies us. It gives us a
sober sense of that from which all real advance
comes ; that the good present and the hopeful future
have their roots in the noble past. It is good that

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 155
while the eyes are looking forward, and mind and
heart are expecting more light and better, our feet
should stand on the stable foundation of sound
righteous history and life.
But I must not linger. I offer you the greeting
and congratulation of the oldest inland parish to
that church which may be considered to be in some
way the spiritual mother of all old Massachusetts
parishes ; to that church which, seated by the rest
less waters of Massachusetts Bay, has seen the corn
fields and pastures of the little Trimountain peninsula
become the centre of a great material prosperity, of
a refined intellectual life, and, surely we must add,
of a lofty religious faith and character ; to that
church which, in all this wonderful advance, has
contributed its full share of moral power and influ
ence ; to that church which to-day, in this beautiful
temple which it has reared, is preparing to do its
part to make the growth which the future has in
store pure, solid, righteous, and so enduring.
The minister said : " There is one of this company who
left us in very early childhood, and without giving any rea
sons ; but we have always been ready to receive him back
to our fold, and rejoice always in his word and work. Not
only a baptized child of the church but a descendant from
the Rev. John Cotton, one of its first ministers, he kindly
recognizes our claim for a word, and I need not ask you to
give your attention to the Rev. PHILLIPS BROOKS, D.D."

156 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

ADDRESS OF REV. PHILLIPS BROOKS, D.D.
I thank you very much for allowing me to say a
few words, and I will honestly try that they shall
be very few. I should like to say something of
the impression which this celebration of John Cot
ton makes upon one of his descendants. My con
nection with my very great grandfather is so remote
that I may venture to speak of him without hesita
tion. I am so full of pleasure in life, and so full of
the sense that that pleasure is very much increased
by its being my happiness to live in Boston, that I
cannot but be grateful to him who had a great deal
to do with my living at all, and a great deal to do
with making Boston what it is for a man to live in.
I am not sure that he would accept of his repre
sentative. I am not sure that if he saw me standing
here and speaking any words in his praise, and
knew exactly where I was standing, there might not
be some words rising to his lips that would show
that neither I nor you were wholly what he could
approve. He might say prelatist, he might say
heretic. He might call me by the first name, call
both of us by the second name ; and yet that criti
cism, as we stand in the presence of his memory on
this commemoration day, would make absolutely no
difference. John Cotton, in the life into which he
has passed, now looks deeper and looks wider, and
we have a right to enter into communion with the

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES.

157

spirit of the man, and not simply with his specific
opinions or the ways in which he worshipped ; we
may claim him, at least, as one who would honor
our recognition of him, as one whom we are at
liberty to honor. It would be a terrible thing, it
would narrow our life and make it very meagre, if
we had no right to honor and to draw inspiration
from any men except those we agree with and who
would approve of us. As we look abroad through
history and around through the world, I think some
times that our noblest inspirations and our best
teachings have come from the men who, when we
compare our views with theirs, are very far from us;
of whom, when we ask for their approbation of us,
we have to beg with very hesitating lips. And so
we may at least claim the privilege of John Cotton,
that he shall give us the inspiration of paying him
our honor.
And it seems to me that a man who stands, as
this man stands, at the beginning of the history of
a nation or a town, is an everlasting benefaction to
the town or nation. It is an example that never
can be exhausted. The way in which Washington
stands at the beginning of the national history and
sends down a perpetual power, full of strength and
beauty, is the great typical American instance of
the way in which, at the beginning of the history of
every town, of every city, of every State, of every
institution, there will be these typical men. Our
Western States are gathering them now, just as our

158 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
Eastern States gathered them two hundred years
ago ; and the earnest, faithful ministers, and the
consecrated men who are dedicating themselves to
the building up of institutions in our Western land,
are going to pass into that perhaps mythical, but
perhaps for that reason all the truer and more
genuine admiration, into which they who founded
our institutions two hundred and fifty years ago
have passed now. For his standing at the begin
ning of our history and sending us his inspiration
perpetually, we thank John Cotton.
And I thank him, as a Church of England man,
as a man loving the Episcopal Church with all my
heart, I thank him for being a Puritan. I thank
him for giving me a renewed assurance of that
which all history teaches me to believe, and that
which my knowledge of God would make me believe
if no illustration of it were written in history, that
God will not permit a church to become corrupt
and degenerate and unfaithful to its duties without
sending a man who shall bear testimony against
it and stir it to the regeneration of its life. The
Church of England has no men to thank to-day
more devoutly. Not her great scholars, her great
orators, her noble teachers, her splendid mission
aries ! She has no men to whom she ought to be
more grateful to-day than to the Puritans who told
her in the seventeenth century how degraded her
life was becoming.
But when I recall the name of this church, it fills

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159

me with still other feelings of gratitude. " The
First Church of Christ ! " I think there is infinite
suggestion, infinite poetry, in the thought of the
first church of Christ in any land. If a man feels,
as the disciples of Christ do feel, that all the earth
is his ; if we believe that whatever elements of srood
the savage lands have brought forth they have
brought forth by the inspiration of his Spirit work
ing even where his name has been unknown, and
that all these lands are waiting for the touch of the
Christ they cannot recognize to be quickened into a
life they have not guessed of yet, — then what shall
we think of that church which stands perpetually
bearing the proud record in its name, that it was
the first to bring the everlasting and universal
Christ into a new section, a new district of the
world? Here for the first time, when the First
Church of Christ was started, that became possible
which had been impossible before. No church can
stand here in Boston to the very end of time that
must not humbly owe and pay its debt of gratitude
to the First Church of Christ, that set his name
upon these hills and made the winds vocal with the
new ideas of his gospel.
The seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries
belong wonderfully together. The seventeenth
century was a time of deep religious conviction ;
the nineteenth century boasts itself of large toler
ation. It is perfectly natural to find, as we look
into the history of the seventeenth century, that

160 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
to deep conviction toleration was again and again
sacrificed; and as we look into the history of the
nineteenth century, we can see we have not yet
obtained such a large and symmetrical manhood
that one is not still sacrificed to the other, and find
again and again conviction sacrificed to toleration.
It would be a poor world to live in if it could get
to the end of itself in nineteen centuries, and there
were not others before us greater and better. That
is one of the elements by which the future centuries
will be made better; we must look to the combining
together in the same character of those elements
which have existed in different centuries thus far.
When absolute religious conviction shall abide side
by side with earnest toleration ; when men shall be
lieve with all their hearts, as they believed in the
seventeenth century, and at the same time be willing
that other men shall believe differently, as they are
now in the nineteenth century; when toleration
shall not be oppressed by conviction of religious
truth, and when private thought and belief with
regard to religious truth shall make men all the
more tender and jealous of the rights of other men's
consciences, — then there will come a century which,
combining the blessings of the seventeenth and the
nineteenth, shall make a nobler world to live in
than we have seen yet, — the time that has been
prophesied, but has not yet come, when mercy and
truth shall dwell together, when righteousness and
peace shall kiss each other. That our celebration

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 161
may help the coming of that day, I am sure is the
prayer of every one who joins in any of these com
memoration services.
The minister said : " Harvard College was established
primarily that the churches of the Commonwealth might
not lack competent ministers, men in whose training for
their high service manhood and knowledge had been added
to faith ; and the bond between the College and the churches
was very strong. However it may be with the forms of
truth, we believe that in the spirit of truth College and
Church are still at one, and, feeling sure that our day would
be not without interest to the Theological Faculty of the
University, we have asked the Dean of that Faculty to favor
us with a word."

ADDRESS OF REV. PROF. C. C. EVERETT, D.D.
Ladies and Gentlemen, — An attempt has been
made by one of the speakers this afternoon, a very
impressive attempt, to make us feel how long two
hundred and fifty years have been. I think it would
be even more difficult to make us realize what two
hundred and fifty years of the life of a church mean.
Especially is this so in regard to a church which
has never been the instrument of any civil or eccle
siastical power, but has always been a church of the
people and for the people. Think how many happy
homes its beneficence has made ; think how many
wandering souls it has rescued during these long
years ; think how many spirits have been uplifted
to calmer heights by its solemn worship ; and now
it stands to-day as fresh, as young, as ever, doing its
ii

l62 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
work as well as ever, giving us the promise of suc
cessful labors in the years to come. But I think we
must fully realize, when we speak of the Church, that
in founding the Church, our fathers were also plant
ing the State. They founded the churches which
were to spring into States ; and when we think of
this, we realize, as we do not always, the fact that
we have no mythical period to our history, — the
fact that all our history is so transparent and open
to us. We have no heroic age, veiled from us by
the shadows of awe, myth, and tradition. At the
same time, I wonder, when I think of it, how little
we miss this mythical heroic age. We have an
heroic age as noble as that of any other people, and
it needs no shadowy abode of myth, no veil of, mys
tery. Our fathers were heroic as those stern heroes
of olden story. They were wise as Arthur and pure
as Galahad. We find, also, that supernatural ele
ment which gives so much of the charm to those old
heroic stories, for our fathers felt the very presence
of God with them, and every word and every act
sprang from this consciousness. They were but as
instruments in his hands.
Now, in an anniversary like this, when we celebrate
the great beginning which occupies our thoughts
to-day, we find ourselves face to face with these
heroes of the past, — our fathers. We find ourselves
face to face, also, with that great idea which was
their inspiration and which has been the life of our
nation ever since. For this transparency of our

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES.

163

history, that I spoke of, is marked in nothing more
than in this, — that the ideal element, which is so
often hidden in the lives of other peoples, which they,
perhaps, slowly come to realize themselves, — which,
perhaps, they never come to realize, — is ever present
in our history. Just as the history of the Hebrew
people is marked in this, that providential guidance
stands forth as in no other, and we read that " God
did " and " God said," so in our history this inner
providence, which is present in the history of all
peoples, makes itself manifest in every step. As we
look back, we find ourselves face to face with this
grand ideal, face to face with these heroic souls ;
and we cannot help reading the question in their
deep, earnest eyes, whether we have been true to
it and to them. If we have not, in vain is it that
we come to do them reverence. This ideal element,
as we have been told this afternoon, consists of two
parts, namely, of liberty and of religion. These
were not held by our fathers as I have named them
simply side by side. The ideal of religion was the
fundamental ideal. Liberty was for the sake of
that. It was not merely religious liberty they sought,
it was not merely liberty for religion, it was liberty
for the sake of religion.
Now, to this ideal of liberty I think we may fairly
say that we have been true. Our generation also
has shown itself heroic. When this ideal of free
dom moved like a pillar of fire through the dark
night of war, the nation followed it with bleeding

164 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
heart. But how is it in regard to religion ? I think
if we should lay before our fathers all our triumphs
of art, all our triumphs of civilization, all our dis
coveries in science, they would still look from them
all and ask for that one thing needful. They left a
civilization dear to them as ours is to us, they left
it for this ideal of which I speak, and they would
still ask, " How is it with religion ? Are you true,
also, to that ? " And would they not miss in our
busy streets what they need most, in our training
schools what they need most, in our varied associ
ations for varied business what they need most, —
something of this presence ? Certainly the religious
element does not fill the place in our common con
sciousness that it did in theirs. And here one or two
considerations may be named : one is, that our fathers
were picked men. They were drawn, as by a sort
of magnet, from their contemporaries ; they came
here as leaven to introduce a new power or life.
No sooner were they here than the leaven was cov
ered by the meal, poured in without measure as it
is being poured in now, and we need not ask our
selves whether the whole mass be like that original
type, but simply whether the leaven be still working
at its heart. And then, again, you must allow me
to make a distinction in regard to religion. There
are two forms of religion, and though I shall place
one vastly higher than the other, I would have you
understand that both, in their measure, may enter
into the true and complete religion. In the one,

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 165
men seek God for what he may do for them. They
seek to make him, if I may so speak, their instru
ment ; at least, they seek from him temporal and
eternal prosperity and happiness. In the other,
men ask what they shall do for God. They seek
to make themselves his instruments and to do his
will. Now, of the two that I have 'named, it is the
first that makes the most parade. It is this that
builds most temples, it is this that lights most altar
fires, it is this that makes the idea of religion con
stantly prominent. The other is more quiet, it
makes less parade, yet it is the higher of the two.
One we may compare to the starlight : we go out
and we see only the stars, and we say, " How beau
tiful they are ! " The other may be compared to
the sunlight : we go out into the world, not to say,
" How beautiful is the sun ! " but " How beautiful is
the world ! " So the divinity of the one form of
religion says, " Come and do reverence to me ; " the
other says, " Go, do my will." Now, as I have said,
these two elements may together, each in its meas
ure, be united in one perfect religion. Of the two,
it must be admitted that the first or lower form is
certainly much less prominent than it was in almost
any other period of the history of the world. It is
this that has been torn by criticism, that has been
attacked by so-called science ; it is this that has had
to bear the great brunt of the onslaught against the
religious experiences. But the great question for
us is whether there still remains, in its due propor-

l66 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
tion, that higher element of religion, that element
of obedience, that element that seeks the will of
God. This our fathers had. It was this that drove
them to this wilderness : they came to do God's will.
And the question for us to ask ourselves is whether
that spirit animates their children. Who shall an
swer? Who, at least, shall dare say in the face of all
the triumphs of philanthropy, in the face of all the
triumphs of Christian charity, — who shall dare to
say that it does not ? And I would add, simply,
that the work that this religious faith has to do
to-day is very like that which it had to do in the
day of our fathers. We speak often of this First
Church as " the church of the wilderness." It was
pushed far in advance of the reach of the civiliza
tion of the time into a new world ; and are not
new realms constantly opening before us now ? Not
realms of the physical world, but realms of the in
tellectual world ? Are not these great reaches of
science and civilization opening before us, and is not
the work of the Church now, what it was then, to
press on to occupy these new lands, and plant itself
in advance even, in this intellectual region, which
is, so far as religion may be concerned, a wilderness,
— to plant itself there that the wilderness may blos
som like the rose ? Long may this First Church of
Boston continue to do, as it is doing now, its blessed
work !
The anthem, " Send out thy light" (Gounod), was then
sung by the choir. And the minister said : " Salem was

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 167
John Winthrop's landing-place, and though, as it is re
corded, 'he liked it not,' he still landed there, and we
have had reason to be grateful that it has been the home
of so many noble men and women. Our own church has
been called Salem Chapel for the number of those whom
we have been glad to welcome from that City of Peace.
I am sure that you will be glad to hear one who will speak
for Winthrop's landing-place."

ADDRESS OF HON. ROBERT S. RANTOUL.
The lateness of the hour admonishes me to ad
dress myself at once and without verbiage to the
purpose I had in view in accepting your kind in
vitation to take part in this memorial. My object
was to ask a moment's attention to a few sentences
from a very remarkable letter of the period, — a
letter remarkable for its authorship, remarkable for
the times and circumstances which produced it,
and equally remarkable for the rare and admirable
spirit of tolerance which prompted it and breathes
through it.
No member of the Winthrop company — the
great Suffolk emigration of 1630 — was more justly
conspicuous than Sir Richard Saltonstall. He was
the first named of six original patentees of Massa
chusetts Bay. He was a man of learning, of influ
ence, of rank and parts. His name was often at or
near the head of lists of subscription for stock and
funds. Mather called him " that excellent knight."
Nobody of that whole company was more esteemed

1 68 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
at home or on this side the water, and although he
remained in New England but a few years, he hap
pens to have identified himself more thoroughly than
any other of the Winthrop company, through an
honorable progeny, with my own county of Essex.
I state these facts simply to show that Sir Richard
Saltonstall is as well entitled as any man of the
number to be ranked as the exponent, the spokes
man, of the best thought and sentiment of the Puri
tanism of Old and New England, and I read this
letter simply to show how far his own generous
mind, and how far the better minds of the times
on both sides of the water were impressed with a
healthy abhorrence of the extremes to which some
of our ancestors were inclined to carry their narrow
ness and intolerance. He wrote from England soon
after his return there the following letter : —
" It doth not a little grieve my spirit to hear what
sad things are reported daily of your tyranny and
persecutions in New England, as that you fine, whip,
and imprison men for their consciences. Truly,
friends, this your practice of compelling any in mat
ters of worship to do that whereof they are not fully
persuaded, is to make them sin, for so the apostle
tells us, and many are made hypocrites thereby, con
forming in their outward man, for fear of punish
ment. We pray for you and wish you prosperity
every way, and hoped the Lord would have given
you so much light and love there as not to practise
those courses in a wilderness which you went so far

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 169
to prevent. These rigid ways have laid you very
low in the hearts of the saints. I do assure you
that I have heard them pray in the public assemblies
that the Lord would give you meek and humble
spirits, hot to strive so much for uniformity as to
keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.
I hope you do not assume to yourselves infallibility
of judgment, when the most learned of the apos
tles confesseth he knew but in part and saw but
darkly." The minister said : " When they speak of New England
and the Pilgrim Fathers and the Puritans across the ocean,
it is Plymouth, not Boston, that comes first from the lips.
And so we of Boston must still look as the younger to the
older, and ask a word of encouragement from a Plymouth
minister and man."
ADDRESS OF REV. G. W. BRIGGS, D.D.
Have compassion upon me at this late hour, and
I will have compassion upon you. In his desire to
get as near to the Pilgrims as possible in point of
time, my friend has asked me, as the oldest living
minister that has been connected with the church
which they formed, to respond for it to-day. Let
me make my few words a right hand of fellowship
from that older organization. Twenty-eight years
earlier than the First Church in Boston, the Plym
outh Church was formed in the same simple way,
by the covenanting together of godly, truth-loving
men, probably in Elder Brewster's house, in Scrooby,

170 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
in England. They were mainly gathered from the
common people ; like those who heard Jesus gladly,
those from whom apostles were made. Finding in a
little while that they would "be harried out of the
kingdom," or meet heavier punishment, they went
first to Leyden, and a few years later, in 1620, came
to Plymouth. After their first severe experiences
here, I can imagine with what intense gratitude and
joy they welcomed the earlier churches organized
upon these shores. They had suffered from wasting
sickness, nearly half of the first company going to
their graves in the first four months. They had an
experience of famine, so that men were sometimes
faint from the want of proper food ; and they could
offer only a bit of fish and a draught of cold water
to those who came to visit them. They were in per
petual peril of attack from the native tribes. They
were disturbed by internal dissensions also. For
when these sons of God were gathered together,
Satan came also among them in the person of a
wily and false minister who purposed mischief. But
those true-hearted men unmasked him, and indig
nantly drove him away to his own place. After
nine years of such perils, when the Salem Church
was formed, in 1629, how earnestly Governor Brad
ford, with others not named, must have hastened to
greet it ; and, though hindered by " cross winds "
as they went over the Bay, only reaching Salem late
in the day, they were in season to give their right
hand of fellowship with deep religious joy. And

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 171
when in the next year the churches in Boston, Dor
chester, Watertown, were organized, each must have
seemed to them as a new star shining out upon the
night round about them, whose rising they hailed
with exceeding gladness as full of promise and
hope. These stars differed from one another in various
respects, but they all had one common glory. All
of these organizations were created by a religious
inspiration, and devoted to the highest ends ; and
therefore they have survived. Other settlements
were attempted with lower aims. One was made in
Weymouth, in which men tried to live "by bread
alone," and it quickly died. Basing themselves
upon the eternal things, working for them, the Pil
grim and Puritan settlements have lasted through
the succeeding centuries. What great things they
have wrought ! A twofold glory belongs to Plym
outh. In the cabin of the Mayflower the Pilgrims
created a government founded upon the eternal truth
of the divine rights of humanity, and not upon the
baseless assumption of the divine right of kings. It
has been eloquently said to-day that we need a re
ligion that shall unite the faith of the seventeenth
century with the liberality of the nineteenth. The
prophecy, we may almost say the glory, of that union
belongs to the Plymouth Fathers. The liberality of
the nineteenth century spoke in the farewell charge
of Robinson, their minister, when the Pilgrims
started from Leyden. And the faith of the seven-

172 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
teenth century inspired those who so bravely crossed
the sea, and stayed through perils to build up here
the kingdom of God.
I leave the tempting theme. In 1630 the Pilgrim
Church must have given its right hand to this in all
the joy of hope. In thankfulness for what you have
done in these two hundred and fifty years, as well
as in the glad hope for coming centuries, as the rep
resentative of that Pilgrim Church I give you its
right hand of fellowship again to-day.
The minister then said that a telegram had been re
ceived from the President of the United States, and letters
from the Secretary of State, Hon. William M. Evarts, and
the Attorney-General, Hon. Charles Devens, acknowledg
ing, but declining invitations to be present with us. Many
letters, some from Old Boston and others from friends in
our land, would have been read to the congregation had
time permitted. They will be found in the chapter of
correspondence. The services continued with the singing
of the following Hymn by Rev. CHARLES T. BROOKS : —
O God ! while generations flee
Like leaves before Thy face,
Through endless ages Thou wilt be
Thy children's dwelling-place.
Great Shepherd of the countless flock,
Where'er they rest or roam ;
Their cheering sun, their sheltering rock,
Their everlasting home !
Our sainted fathers, where are they ?
They slept, they woke in Thee,
And here in memory's light, to-day,
They walk serene and free.

COMMEMORATIVE SERVICES. 173
Roll back, O Time, thy ceaseless wave,
Bring round the day once more,
When first they trod, the free and brave,
This wild and wood-crowned shore.
In God's first temple here they stood,
His breath inspired the air ;
And through the green, o'erarching wood
Uprose their song and prayer.
When days grew dark, they sowed in trust,
In patience, and in peace,
Assured that God, the wise and just,
Would give the seed increase.
A large-armed tree, behold it now !
God's word its living root ;
To children's children each broad bough
Brings healing, shade, and fruit.
O Thou who led'st our sires of old,
Their grateful children lead ;
Thy flock in shelter safe enfold,
In sunny pastures feed !
Still guide our footsteps in the way
That climbs the morning height,
Thy law, O God ! our cloud by day,
Thy love our fire by night !
The afternoon exercises closed with a most fitting bene
diction by the Rev. John H. Morison, D.D.
After an interval of two hours, a large company gath
ered in the church, to listen to a concert from the choir;
and then passed, by invitation, into the chapel for a social
gathering and collation.
The choir, whose services added so much during the
afternoon and the evening to the interest of the occasion,
was composed as follows: Miss Annie Louise Gage,
soprano; Mrs. Jennie M. Noyes, contralto; Mr. W. H.

174 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
Fessenden, tenor; Mr. Clarence E. Hay, bass; and
Mr. ARTHUR FOOTE, piano. The rendering of the fol
lowing ancient New England Psalm was much enjoyed by
the company : —
PSALM LXX VI 1 1. Maschil of Asaph.
Old Tune, — " Rainbow."
Give list'ning ear unto my law,
Ye people that are mine ;
Unto the sayings of my mouth
Do you your ear encline.
My mouth I '11 ope in parables,
I '11 speak things hid of old,
Which we have heard and known, and which
Our fathers have us told.
Them from their children we'll not hide,
But shew the age to come
The Lord, his praise, his strength and works
Of wonder he hath done.
That th' age to come and children which
Are to be born might know
That they who should arise, the same
Might to their children shew.
That they upon the mighty God
Their confidence might set ;
God's works and his commandements
Might keep and not forget.
And might not like their fathers be
A cross, stiff race, a race
That set not right their hearts, not
Firm with God their spirit was.
The music, the gathering, and the banquet were all that
could be desired, and the guests of the church were many.

CARBON PHOTO. ALLEN & ROWELL

W

CORRESPONDENCE.

CORRESPONDENCE.

FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND
MEMBERS OF HIS CABINET.
Executive Mansion, Washington, Nov. 18, 1S80.
I regret that I cannot attend the very interesting commemo
ration services to be held to-day in honor of the two hundred
and fiftieth anniversary of the completion of the First Church
in Boston. R. B. Hayes.

Department of State, Washington, Nov. 16, 1880.
My dear Sir, — ¦ I regret extremely that it proves to be not
in my power to attend the commemorative services on the ap
proaching anniversary of the First Church in Boston.
Please convey to the committee my regrets, and, with my
thanks for the courteous attention of their invitation,
I am, with great respect,
Your obedient servant, Wm. M. Evarts.

Department of Justice, Washington, Nov. 11, 1880.
Dear Sir, — I am exceedingly obliged for the invitation to
attend the commemorative services in honor of the completion
by the First Church in Boston of two hundred and fifty years,
and regret extremely that my engagements will necessarily com
pel me to decline to be present upon so interesting an occasion.
Your obedient servant,
Chas. Devens.
12

178 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
ENGLISH LETTERS.
From the Minister of the Unitarian Chapel in Old Boston.
2 Winter's Terrace, Boston, England, Oct. 20, 1880.
Dear Dr. Ellis, — Permit me, on behalf of my congregation,
to present to you a small engraving of Boston, photographs of
our own chapel and school, Boston Church, and Dr. Cotton's
pulpit, — the latter being the best I could get, it being a very
difficult object to photograph, — and a small volume of tales.
" A Legend of Boston, by Anthony Oldbuck," was written by
the late Henry Harwood, Esq., Solicitor, and a member of my
congregation. It has been a sort of scramble to get them so far
ready for despatch. They required packing at ten minutes to
time of departure of train from Boston, so kindly excuse all de
fects and untidiness. I trust they will reach you ere you leave
the Mersey, for they ought to arrive in Liverpool to-night at seven
o'clock. It was my intention to write you at greater length, but I must
defer my epistle a few days.
All our friends here wish you and yours a very safe and pleas
ant voyage to the New World.
Your letter is being read with deep interest.
Yours in haste,
W. S. Key.

From a Parishioner of St. Botolph's.
Spilsby Road, Boston, Lincolnshire, Sept. 25, 1880.
My dear Sir, — I am unexpectedly given, through a mutual
friend, the privilege of congratulating yourself and your church
on the completion of its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary. I
have the greatest possible pleasure in doing this, because I am
a genuine native of the old town, and because it is only by the
merest accident that I am not an American, as my father and a
lot of Unitarian friends had once determined to go to Washing
ton with my uncle, Pichey Thompson, author of the " History of
Boston ; " and I know very well that if I had been born in your

CORRESPONDENCE.

179

great country I should have been attracted towards Boston, Mas
sachusetts, for my impression is, that in all which concerns the
higher civilization of mankind your city is the foremost city in the
world. Liberty without license, freedom of thought without vul
garity, and a sort of quiet " sticking to your guns " in matters of
opinion, combined with great refinement of expression (of course,
my experience of your Boston is only literary), seem to me to be
your characteristics, and I have, moreover, the vanity to believe
that some of these you derive from the old source. That the old
source has seen better days is a melancholy fact ; but that your
John Cotton should have partly sprung from it, and should have
inherited certain qualities from it, is a fact also which is the re
verse of melancholy. I will not trouble you with any reference
to the Rev. John Cotton, or the Pilgrim Fathers, or the May
flower, for I dare say you know more about them than I do ; but
I will say this, that whenever any of your citizens should wish to
pay a visit to the old town, I hope there will always be one of my
name (and we are man)') to welcome him. If yourself, for in
stance, would like at all to preach in the Unitarian Chapel here,
the pulpit would be very much at your service, and the congre
gation, which is small, might be enlarged for the occasion ; and
myself or my elder brother Charles would be most glad to see
and entertain you. Yours very truly,
Thomas Wright.
To Mr. Rufus Ellis.

REPLIES TO TELEGRAM INVITING CLERGYMEN AND LAY
MEN OF BOSTON, ENGLAND, TO THE CELEBRATION.
Boston Vicarage, Lincolnshire, England, Nov. g, 1880.
My dear Sir, — I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your
telegram of the 6th instant, inviting me, in the name of your
committee, to be present at the two hundred and fiftieth anni
versary of the First Church in your city, and I have to thank
yourself and them for their courtesy to myself individually and
to the office which I have the honor to hold.

l8o FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
By a singular coincidence, yours is the second invitation in
connection with New Boston which I have been obliged this year
to decline, — on the former occasion, through absence from home
at the arrival of the telegram ; and on this occasion, by pressure
of work at home and other reasons with which I need not trouble
you. The clergyman of your church, however, whom I had so
lately the honor of seeing at my vicarage, will tell you how much
I desire (if the providence of God shall clear the way) to visit a
city so closely connected with this town where I have lived so
long, and a slight recollection of which long life I venture to send
with this letter ; and I remain, with much esteem,
Your faithful servant,
G. B. Blenkin,
Vicar of Boston, Canon of Lincoln.

Boston, Lincolnshire, Nov. 8, 1880.
Dear Sir, — I feel extremely obliged and flattered by your
invitation to attend the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of
your church, but I am unable to accept it.
I am, dear sir,
Yours respectfully,
T. Wright.
Boston, Lincolnshire, Nov. 8, 1880.
My dear Sir, — Permit me to thank you for the kind invita
tion you have sent me through our worthy vicar to be present at
the jubilee to be held in commemoration of the two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of your church and the
renaming of your town.
Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to be with you
on that occasion, but my business engagements forbid it.
I fully participate with you in the feelings of cordiality and
esteem that connect the old Boston with the new as members of
one family, and express a hope that these will long continue.
Believe me, my dear sir,
Yours very truly,
Charles Wright.

CORRESPONDENCE. 181
2 Winter's Terrace, Homcastle Road,
Boston, Lincolnshire, Nov. y, 18S0.
Dear Dr. Ellis, — Although compelled by pressure of busi
ness to delay the writing of this letter until now, I must avail
myself of the present opportunity for discharging what I feel
is a duty, and trust my communication may reach you before
your celebration on the 18th instant. In the first place, I ought
to express the great pleasure my congregation and myself experi
enced in being honored with a visit from yourself, Mrs. and Miss
Ellis. Our pleasure would have been increased tenfold had only
the time at your disposal allowed of our giving you a much more
fitting reception than we were really able to. Most assuredly, if
you could have remained amongst us over the Monday, we would
have given you a public welcome, — though in Old Boston we
don't move very quickly, or do very great things, such as "our
kin across the sea " do in New Boston, if I except the great
amount of bribery and corruption of which we are guilty at our
elections, and for which we are at this moment being most right
eously castigated.
I would also have guaranteed you the largest congregation
my chapel is capable of holding, had you been able to preach in
my pulpit; for, in spite of our natural sluggishness, we can, on
occasion, get up a little enthusiasm, and should have done so on
such an auspicious occasion as the visit of one who occupies the
exalted position of successor to the great and good Dr. Cotton of
historic fame on both sides of the Atlantic, and the bishop (par
don the title) of a diocese very largely composed of churches and
professors of a liberal faith. However, in lieu of that reception,
I hope the small gift from my congregation may be accepted by
your own people as an earnest of the fraternal feeling we enter
tain for our American cousins, or, as I ought to say in this case,
our sons and daughters.
Having learnt that you desired to take something from St.
Botolph's town for your people to look at, to read, or to listen to,
we thought a sketch of our town as it used to be would be ap
preciated by those whose very existence as citizens of one of the
first cities in the United States is a fitting denouement of a drama
the first scene of which was acted here nearly three centuries ago.

l82 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
A view of the old bridge, as it is possible it looked in those early
days of the seventeenth century, and a glimpse of the river, on
the bosom of which first floated that ship's freight of determined
Englishmen, together with the precious souls of their wives and
children, all alike sustained with one desire to be free, and des
tined by an all-wise Providence to become the founders of the
greatest republic the world has ever known, we felt must be wel
come to those who, in their veneration for all that was noble in
the past, we regard as the most conservative of men.
As from one congregation of free Christians to another, we
deemed a photograph of our own chapel and school would not
be inappropriate. The little volume of "Tales of Boston," writ
ten by a former member of my congregation, and presented by a
present and the oldest member, Mr. Thomas Smalley Cooke,
aged eighty-six, it was thought would amuse, while the photo
graphs of our church and Dr. Cotton's pulpit, as they were seen
but a few days ago by yourself and Mrs. and Miss Ellis, would
be a small memento of your visit you would be pleased to pos
sess. Not for any intrinsic value the gift possesses do we ask
the citizens of New Boston, or those of them belonging to First
Church, to accept these things, but as a small token of the high
regard we have for them, and as an unworthy substitute for the
more substantial and unanimous mark of recognition which my
congregation think ought certainly to have been presented by
our town on the auspicious celebration of the two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary of tbe foundation of your city. Some of us
regret exceedingly that the lack of enterprise, good feeling, and a
broad sympathy here should have rendered it impossible to per
form a great duty, but so it is. It is a pleasure to know that New
Boston possesses more of these virtues, and that its citizens will
make a practical display of their generous sympathy, one towards
another, at the approaching celebration. We one and all send
you and your fellow-citizens our warmest congratulations on the
attainment of your two hundred and fiftieth year of age. We are
proud to know that the spirit of enterprise and manly endeavor
that inspired the founders of your great nation and beautiful city
was the spirit of true-born Englishmen • and while the parent
stock here and there shows signs of decay, we are conscious she

CORRESPONDENCE. 183
has given — unwittingly, we admit — some of her best life for the
foundation of other nations, the peopling of other continents, and
the advancement of civilization. Most sincerely do we pray and
hope that the next two and a half centuries of time may be as
prodigal of good results for your city and country as the last have
been ; and especially do we trust the great American people will
long continue to hold by those great principles of civil and relig
ious freedom which have been instrumental in advancing the
United States of America to the very forefront amongst the na
tions of the earth. With our united very best wishes for the suc
cess of your gathering on the 18th instant, and for the continued
welfare of your great republic, believe me to remain,
Very cordially yours, W. S. Key, Minister.
On behalf of the Unitarian congregation, Boston, Lincolnshire.
P. S. Your excellent letter to me, written at Lincoln City, af
ter being read with interest by my congregation, I handed to the
Congregational Body for perusal, with the expressed hope that
they would send you a fraternal greeting. I have not heard if
they intend doing so.
Many thanks to friends for cablegram just to hand by Vicar of
St. Botolph's.
I am requested to reply on behalf of Messrs. Wright and my
self. We should have been delighted to accept your hospitality
on the 18th instant, but are detained here by Royal Commission
and other matters.
Canon Blenkin, I guess, will reply direct. ^^

LETTERS FROM MINISTERS OF FIRST CHURCHES.
Plymouth, Mass., Nov. 8, 1880.
Dear Sir, — Your invitation for me to attend the exercises
on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding
of the First Church in Boston has been duly received, and it

184 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
will afford me great pleasure to be present at the time and place
indicated. Very sincerely yours,
E. Q. S. Osgood.

Salem, Mass., Nov. 9, 1880.
Gentlemen, — It will give me much pleasure to attend the
commemorative services in honor of the two hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of the First Church in Boston, Thursday, Nov. 18,

With many thanks for your cordial invitation, I am
Very respectfully yours,

F. Israel.

Lynn, Mass., Nov. 9, 1880.
Dear Sir, — Your very kind invitation to attend the two hun
dred and fiftieth anniversary of the First Church in Boston is
received, and in reply I would say that it will give me great pleas
ure to be present at the commemorative services to be held in
honor of the occasion, unless some special duty should arise to
detain me at home.
I believe in such occasions. It seems eminently befitting, es
pecially in this busy and fast age, to improve such an anniversary
by reviewing the lives and labors of the brave and good who have
gone before us. We have so much to do, to care for, to think,
read, and talk about in regard to what is going on in the wide and
wide-awake world around us, that there is great danger of our
forgetting the past and what is due to it from the present. May
your review of these two centuries and a half furnish to you who
are most interested, and to all who shall read the reports of the
commemorative services, many lessons for study, reflection, and
improvement in all the years to come. " Tell ye your children
of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children
another generation." Sincerely yours,
W. Barton.

CORRESPONDENCE. 185
Yarmouth, Mass., Nov. 8, 1880.
Dear Sir, — I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of
the invitation of the First Church in Boston to attend the com
memorative services in honor of its completion of two hundred
and fifty years, and shall be happy to accept it. I shall be happy
to bear, in a quiet way, the congratulations of the ancient church
I represent — the seventh in the order of establishment in the
old colony — to her elder sister of the Colony of Massachusetts
Bay. Respectfully and fraternally yours,
John W. Dodge.
Newbury, Mass., Nov. 8, 1880.
Dear Sir, — I have received the invitation of the First Church
in Boston to attend the commemorative services in honor of its
completion of two hundred and fifty years.
It would give me great pleasure to attend those services if other
engagements permitted. I am expecting to attend the National
Triennial Council of Congregational Churches in St. Louis this
week and next, and therefore shall probably be unable to accept
your kind invitation.
In behalf of the First Church in Newbury, I extend hearty
thanks for your courtesy, and regrets on my own behalf that I
shall be unable to accept your cordial invitation.
Very sincerely yours,
Omar W. Folsom.

Gloucester, Mass., Nov. ii, 1880.
Dear Sir, — I regret to say that it will not be convenient for
me to attend your commemorative services next Thursday. I
thank you very much for your kind invitation. I trust that your
venerable church will have to celebrate many, many such joyful
anniversaries ; and that, though the " First Church in Boston," it
is still very young compared with the age to which it is to live,
doing Christ's noblest work. Yours respectfully,
J. S. Thomson.

1 86 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

LETTERS FROM OTHER MINISTERS.
Medfield, Mass., Nov. 9, 1880.
Gentlemen, — I beg leave to return my grateful acknowledg
ment of the honor conferred upon me by the invitation of the
First Church in Boston to attend the services commemorative of
the organization of that church, which are to take place on Thurs
day, Nov. 18th, and to say that I shall be most happy to be pres
ent, if possible, on that occasion.
Bearing the name of one of the early ministers of that church,
the Rev. Charles Chauncy, who was the particular friend and
patron of my father, I shall feel it to be a duty as well as a privi
lege to attend these services.
With great respect, I am, gentlemen,
Yours very truly,
Chas. C. Sewall.

Hingham, Mass., Nov. 9, 1880.
Dear Sir, — I am very grateful to you and your associates
for the invitation to attend the commemorative services of the
First Church in Boston on the 18th instant. Such occasions have
a special interest to those who honor the aim and revere the char
acters of the men who planted our New England institutions.
My age and sickness in my family render it so very uncertain
whether I shall be able to leave home at the time, that propriety
requires me to decline with great reluctance your kind invita
tion. With great respect, yours, Calvin Lincoln.

Sunday, Nov. 7, 1880.
Gentlemen, — I esteem it an honor to be invited by the First
Church in Boston to the observance of its two hundred and fiftieth
anniversary. It was my privilege fifty years ago to be a worshipper in my
father's pew in Chauncy Place, and I take pleasure in recalling
the faces that were lifted towards our minister.

CORRESPONDENCE.

I87

I am not now so good a hearer as then, and on that account
must not take the place of some one whose ears will catch all
the good words of that occasion. May all things conspire to
bless your services !
With loyalty to the First Church, I am yours truly,
Wm. G. Babcock,
Pastor of Warren St. Chapel.

Boston, Nov. 6, 1880.
Honored Sir, — Your kind invitation to meet you on Thurs
day, Nov. 1 8th, at two o'clock, for the two hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of the formation of the First Church, has just been
received, and I am very much obliged to you for the same, al
though, from my limited strength, I feel obliged to decline all
outside calls of this nature.
I have especial reasons for rejoicing with you in this anniver
sary. My father and mother attended the First Church for a
great many years ; I was for a long while a member of the Sun
day-school ; in 1848 I joined the church under Rev. Dr. Froth
ingham, and I was at one time a student in theology with Rev.
Dr. Rufus Ellis : so that you see a large part of my life, that has
now reached about fifty years, has been interwoven with the his
tory of your society; and when I took my vows as a minister in
1854, Dr. Ellis was a prominent member of the Council, and
took an important part in the services of the day.
It is therefore with great regret that I feel myself forced to
stay away at the time of your rejoicing.
Very respectfully,
Caleb D. Bradlee,
Pastor ofthe Church at Harrison Square.

St. Paul, Minn., Nov. 12, 1880.
Mr. G. W. Warren.
Dear Sir, — I thank you for the invitation to attend the ser
vices of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of First Church.
I cannot come, but with a great multitude of Boston boys, now

1 88 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
Western men, shall watch the newspapers with interest to over
hear what you do and say in the mother church, so old and so
young. Yours respectfully,
W. C. Gannett.

Danvers, Mass., nth mo. 9, 1880.
Hon. Geo. W. Warren, — My thanks are due for the invita
tion to attend the commemorative services on the two hundred
and fiftieth anniversary of the First Church in Boston. I regret
that I am not able to be present on an occasion of such interest
to Boston and the Commonwealth at large.
Very truly thy friend, John G. Whittier.
St. Moritz, Upper Engadine, Switzerland, July 14, 1880.
Dear Mr. Ellis, — Your invitation to attend the two hundred
ancl fiftieth anniversary of the First Church was received last week
at Lucerne. Accept my assurance that nothing would give me
greater pleasure than to accept it and say a hearty word as a lay
man now and a child of the church into which in my youth I was
admitted to membership. My memory lingers fondly over my
father, — his long pastorate ; his devotion to his people ; his fidel
ity to the offices of his ministry ; his loyalty to the faith, as he
apprehended it ; his high aim as a teacher and servant of his
Master. I recall the day of his successor's installation, and re
member some of the words he said on that occasion. Though
for many years my associations with the ancient church have
been interrupted by outward circumstances, let me say that my
sense of the present pastor's constancy and zeal is, as it always
has been, clear and strong, and my interest in the old church
steady as ever. May its future be as honorable as its past has
been ! More than that cannot be asked.
The occasion suggests thoughts which I might speak but shall
not attempt to write. My own pulpit ministry ends at about the
same age with my father's. It pleases me to think that the spirit
of it was approved by him in his latter years.

CORRESPONDENCE.

189

Thank you for your kind wishes respecting my health. It is
indeed better, and will, I hope, allow me yet to do some work in
a new field.
With cordial wishes for the success of your anniversary, and
remembrances to my old friends who may be privileged to cele
brate it, I am Faithfully yours, O. B. Frothingham.

Clinton, Mass., Nov. ii, 1880.
Dear Sir, — Your invitation to attend the commemorative ser
vices in honor of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the
First Church in Boston came duly to hand.
I regret to write that home duties will not permit me to be
present at the services the report of which I shall read with so
much pleasure.
For a year, during my preparation for the ministry, I was
superintendent of the First Church Sunday-school, under the su
pervision of the then and now pastor. My work in the Sunday-
school, if of little value to teachers and pupils, was of much
benefit to myself in fitting me for the ministry, and I found in the
church another " lecture-room " to supplement those of the Divin
ity School.
For the church and pastor I cherish grateful memories, and
am glad to have them thus happily called fresh to mind.
Truly your friend, Charles Noyes.

Boston, Nov. 6, 1880.
My dear Sir, — I take pleasure in acknowledging your invi
tation to the coming anniversary of the First Church. I accept
it in my own behalf and that of my society with hearty congratu
lations upon the noble past record and the present flourishing
condition of this our elder sister church.
Most sincerely yours,
Edward A. Horton,
Pastor of Second Church.

190

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

Boston, Nov. 9, 1880.
My dear Sir, — Your kind letter inviting me to attend the
two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of First
Church has reached me just as I am getting ready to take the
cars for St. Louis. It is a great disappointment to me that I
shall not be able to be at the observances of so important an
occasion. Especially interesting to me would it be to be present,
owing to the relations of the First Church to the Old South in
their early-history. I think I can say, in the name of all the Old
South people, that the daughter sends affectionate greetings to
the mother. It gives me much pleasure to have this opportunity
of saying that my relations with your present minister, Rev. Rufus
Ellis, D.D., have always been most pleasant. I desire also to
acknowledge his uniform courtesy and kindness to me, and the
kindness of his parishioners whom I have had the good fortune
to meet. Necessarily in haste, very truly yours,
J. M. Manning,
Old South Parsonage.
69 Newbury St., Boston, Nov. 9, 1880.
Hon. G. W. Warren, — I thank your committee heartily for
the favor of an invitation to the anniversary exercises of the First
Church. It will afford me joy to participate in the exercises as
a listener in cordial sympathy with my brethren and nearest
neighbors in the communion of the Christian Church.
Yours fraternally,
Joseph T. Duryea,
Pastor of Central Church.
Washington, D. C, Nov. io, 1S80.
Dear Sir, — Your kind invitation to attend the two hundred
and fiftieth anniversary of the First Church in Boston was duly
received. I regret being unable to attend the interesting services which
you will have on that occasion, but am grateful for your invita
tion. My engagements here will keep me until next week, and
make it difficult for me to be present.

CORRESPONDENCE. Igl
But I assure you of my hearty sympathy with you in the com
memorative services, and of my best wishes for the future pros
perity of the grand old First Church in Boston.
Truly yours, C. A. Staples,
Pastor of First Cong. Church, Providence, R. I.

Providence, R. I., Nov. 9, 1880.
My dear Sir, — It gives me very great pleasure to accept the
invitation of the First Church to attend the commemorative ser
vices on Thursday, Nov. 18th.
I am, with great respect, J. Lewis Diman.1

Brooklyn, N. Y., Nov. 17, 1880.
My dear Sir, — It is with bitter disappointment that I am
obliged, in consequence of a slight indisposition, to say that it
will not be in my power to attend the impressive anniversary ser
vices of the First Church to-morrow afternoon. No occasion for
these many years has had such attractions for me, and, after re
ceiving and accepting your kind invitation to be present, I had
fully purposed to be with you ; but my physician orders other
wise, and I must submit. But I am sure you will permit me to
say how heartily my people and their minister rejoice with your
ancient church at such an hour as this.
«
1 Feb. 4, 1881. As this little volume is passing through the press there
comes the sad intelligence that Dr. Diman died yesterday in Providence,
R. I., after a very short illness. He was before all the Congregational minis
ters who are known as "orthodox," certainly in this neighborhood, in the
offer of an exchange of pulpits to a Unitarian clergyman. At his invitation
we took each the other's place, on Sunday, May 10, 1863, he officiating in
First Church and I in his house of worship in Brookline. Dr. Diman was a
frequent and most welcome preacher to our congregation, and the writer of
this note was just proposing to invite him to take his place for a Sunday
when the tidings came that he had been summoned hence. He is gone, but
his work remains. Somewhere, if not here, " man is immortal until his work
is done." — R. E.

I92 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
May the close of the two hundred and fifty years to come find
your successors as vigorous and earnest and happy as you all are
to-day ! Cordially yours,
A. P. Putnam.

Providence, R. I., Nov. 9, 1880.
My dear Sir, — It would give me very great pleasure to attend
the anniversary exercises of the First Church, on Thursday, Nov.
18th, if my engagements on that day should permit. I fear,
however, that I shall be debarred the privilege. The occasion
must be one of the greatest interest, not only to the parish imme
diately concerned, but to all of our New England churches, and I
shall certainly consider it a great loss to myself to be deprived of
the pleasure of engaging in the commemoration.
Thanking the gentlemen of the Committee of Invitation for
their kindness, I am
Very truly and faithfully yours,
A. Woodbury,
Pastor of Westminster Church.

Portland, Me., Nov. 9, 18S0.
My dear Sir, — I am very sorry that I shall not be able to
leave home at the time of your church anniversary to which you
so kindly invite me, for Nov. 18th, as I should enjoy the occasion
and the meeting with the friends and brethren.
Very respectfully and truly yours,
Thomas Hill.

Letter from Orville Dewey, D.D.
Sheffield, Mass., Nov. ii, 1880.
Dr. Dewey regrets that his health will not permit him to attend
the very interesting services to be held by the First Church of
Boston on the 18th of November.

CORRESPONDENCE.

193

Boston, Nov. 9, 1880.
My dear Sir, — I accept with much pleasure the invitation
of the members of the First Church of Boston to join with them
in their commemorative services on Thursday, Nov. 18th.
To me the invitation is of special interest, because, in England,
of my having had, at one point and another in my earlier life, to
meet and judge that same stream of influence to escape which
the Puritans left Old England and made for the Bay of Massa
chusetts. I was born in a town from which, even because of his excel
lence, Richard Baxter was excluded, as you certainly would think,
through the malicious operation of an act of Parliament. And it
happened to me, also, at a month old, to be baptized in that same
parish church at which once that great Christian was a minister.
In Boston, as also in Salem and Roxbury, two hundred years ago,
there was perhaps no name of a living Englishman which was
dearer than that of the Rev. Richard Baxter. Ancl that popular
ity was not without a good reason for it, apart from his having
been the great controversialist of his day, and the largest relig
ious writer of his time, and the author, in particular, of " The
Saints' Everlasting Rest."
Two hundred and fifty years ! and spent — all of them — like
a tale that is told ! Puritan and Psalmist, both alike as to that
sense of life ! However, in Boston, life has, with earnest liv
ing, turned to noble and enduring history. And the narrative
has another effect and probably a grander moral than any tale
ever had, told by an Eastern story-teller to fascinated listeners,
whether at the gate of a city or out among the tents. Magna est
Veritas et prcevalebit, and because of what truth was in them, and
because of the manner in which, with more or less clearness and
certitude, they have lived by it from the beginning, it has hap
pened to the people of Boston, under God, politically and largely
also in other ways, that at this present time " there is no speech
nor language where their voice is not heard. Their 'line is gone
out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world."
I wish you all joy in your coming commemoration ; and you
have good reason to feel it.
I am yours faithfully,
William Mountford.
13

I94 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
Florence, Italy, Dec. 13, 1880.
Dear Mr. Ellis, — Mr. Shattuck has kindly lent me his copy
of the " Register," with your sermon on your late anniversary oc
casion, and the " Advertiser," with a report of all the doings.
Let me congratulate you, not only on the success, but on the high
tone of all the exercises. It must have been a happy and a proud
time. I especially enjoyed your brother's speech and your ser
mon, with the closing paragraph of which I am heartily in sym
pathy. Both the historical and the spiritual chords were nobly
struck, and their fine music will be heard far beyond the limits of
Boston and the boundaries of Unitarianism. A better use of
the occasion could not, in my judgment, have been made. I
hope that all the proceedings will be published and widely dis
tributed. Faithfully yours,
O. B. Frothingham.

LETTER FROM HON. G. W. CURTIS.
West New Brighton, N. Y., Nov. 12, 1880.
My dear Sir, — I am very sorry that it is impossible for me
to accept the cordial invitation of the First Church in Boston to
attend the celebration of its two hundred and fiftieth birthday.
As I think of its long and illustrious history, and of the pro
found influence upon America and the world which the First
Church in Boston represents, I am glad to know that " time can
not wither her," and that her prosperity and liberality still symbol
ize the progressive Puritanism upon which America is built. Our
fathers, indeed, came from many countries, and were of various
faiths; but with all our differences of origin, and through all our
history, from the deposition of Andros to Bunker Hill, and from
the Declaration of Independence to the Proclamation of Emanci
pation, the dominant power in American civilization has been the
genius of Puritan England.
May the First Church in Boston live and prosper, and may her
five hundredth birthday find her and her cause, like Milton's

CORRESPONDENCE. Ig-
noble and puissant nation, " as an eagle mewing her mighty youth
and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam."
Very truly yours, George William Curtis.

FROM FORMER PARISHIONERS.
350 Marlborough St., Boston, Nov. 9, 1880.
Dear Sir, — I am obliged by your kind remembrance of me on
the commemorative occasion of the two hundred and fiftieth an
niversary of the founding of the First Church, and if the infirmi
ties of old age do not prevent me I shall have great pleasure in
being present with you. Very truly yours,
Edward Reynolds.
Boston, Nov. 9, 1880.
My dear Sir, — I have just received the card of invitation to
the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the First Church,
which it gives me much pleasure to accept.
As I was christened by the Rev. Mr. Emerson more than eighty
years ago, and as my interest has always been reverently cher
ished for the old church, I shall certainly be present on the 18th
instant. Very truly yours, Chas. Hickling.
Roxbury, Cedar Square, Nov. 6, 1880.
My dear Sir, — I feel highly honored in receipt of your invi
tation to attend the commemorative services in honor of the First
Church. I have a right to feel an interest in the occasion, as
my father and mother attended said church, where I was christ
ened, and also nine brothers and sisters. I am the only survivor
of the family. It will give me great pleasure to attend.
Very respectfully, your obedient serva-nt,
S. Parkman Blake.

196 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON. Boston, Nov. ii, 1880.
To the Committee of the First Church, Boston.
Gentlemen, — Your official and cordial invitation to attend
the commemorative services of the First Church, having been
received, is gratefully acknowledged, and with great pleasure
accepted. Most respectfully yours, Lewis G. Pray.

FROM A DESCENDANT OF JOHN COTTON.
9 Arlington St., Boston, Nov. 9, 1880.
My dear Sir, — I am very much obliged for the invitation to
attend the commemorative services in honor of the two hundred
and fiftieth anniversary of the First Church, and will thankfully
receive the admission ticket. As a lineal descendant of John
Cotton, the second minister of the church, and of Governors
Dudley and Bradstreet, who were among its first members, I feel
a great interest in the celebration. Yours truly,
James W. Austin.

The Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company was represented by the
commander and staff, and had time permitted would have been heard from
on the occasion. Boston, Nov. 15, 1880.
Hon. G. Washington Warren.
Dear Sir, — Permit me to thank your committee, in behalf of
my command, for the invitation extended to myself and the offi
cers of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company to be
present at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary exercises of
your society on the 18th November. It will give us great pleas
ure to accept your polite invitation.
John Adams, in his writings upon government, more than once
said that the four corner-stones of a State were " tbe town-meet
ing, the school, the church, and the militia."
Three of these corner-stones, represented by the First Church
of Boston, Harvard College, and the Ancient and Honorable

CORRESPONDENCE.

197

Artillery Company, will meet at your anniversary after an exist
ence of nearly two hundred and fifty years.
The first charter granted by the General Court of Massachu
setts was to Harvard College, in 1636. The second, and for a
very long time the only other, was to the Ancient and Honorable
Artillery Company, on the 17th of March, 1638.
Lewis, in his "History of Lynn," says : " 1638, first Monday
in June, A. and H. A. Company organized ; between three and
four p.m. there was a very great earthquake." What connection,
if any, there may have been between these two circumstances I am
unable to say. Perhaps to typify the shock of arms, or to shake
our organization together so firmly that the march of time should
bring with increasing years no sign of weakness or decay.
Our first commander, Robert Keayne, was a member of the
Honorable Artillery Company of London.
He came to this country, it is thought, in 1634, and lived where
the Old State House now stands. He was a man of very strong
will, and he left one of the longest wills upon record.
He was received into Boston Church March 20, 1635-6.
He was a brother-in-law of the first pastor of your church, John
Wilson, by whom the first sermon was preached to our corps.
I find, by our company's history, that nearly all the pastors that
have been settled over your church have, in their time, preached
our annual election sermon ; and until 1868, with scarcely an
exception, our services were held in your meeting-houses.
Thus the relation between two of the " corner-stones " of our
old Commonwealth — the church and the militia — is very near;
and it seems appropriate as well as very pleasant to us who will
represent the latter, still young and vigorous in its wealth of
years, to join with you in this the two hundred and fiftieth anni
versary of the former, your venerable and revered society.
It is the intention of our company to prepare a suitable box to
contain an account of our participation in the two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary of the settlement of our city and other matters
connected with the history of the corps, together with letters mis
sive from distinguished writers upon the most important interests
ofthe day, the box to be opened one hundred years hence.
Should it be the wish of your committee, we would be pleased

198 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
to deposit therein the memorial of your church history which I
understand is to be prepared.
In conclusion, let us fervently hope that the precepts taught by
the church may so permeate our beloved country that the active
services of the militia shall seldom be needed.
Yours very truly,
Chas. W. Stevens,
Commander A. and H. A. Company.

82 Water St., Room io, Boston, Nov. ii, 1880.
RUFUS Ellis, D.D., Pastor of the First Church, Boston, Mass.
Dear Sir, — My attention has been called to the proposed
celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the
founding of the First Church.
We find that the founder of our company, Robert Keayne, was,
on the 17th day of March, 1638, ordered by Governor John Win
throp to organize " The Military Company of the Massachusetts."
{Previous to 1738 the name was changed to " Honorable Artillery
Company," same as the London Company, of which Robert
Keayne was a member before he came to this country, and again
in 1738 to Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company.)
On the first Monday in June, 1638, Rev. John Wilson, brother-
in-law of Robert Keayne, preached the first election sermon before
the company, and we suppose that he preached in his own meet
ing-house. With hardly an exception, save eight years during the
Revolution, from 1638 to this time, the Artillery election sermon
has been annually preached, and, until the removal of the First
Church from Chauncy Place, was preached for the whole or a
very large part of the time in the meeting-house of the First
Church. Thinking that the historic connection of our company with the
First Church may not have attracted your attention, I have taken
the liberty of referring to it ; and it might not be inappropri
ate that our commander, officers' staff, and past commanders
should be present at your anniversary, and that your proceedings
be transmitted with our collection.
Very respectfully yours,
Edward Wyman.

CARBON PHOTO ALLEN & ROWELl

APPENDIX.

APPENDIX.

COVENANT OF FIRST CHURCH.
In the name of Our Lord jfesus Christ, and in obedience to his
holy will and divine ordinance, —
We, whose names are hereunder written, being by His most wise
and good providence brought together into this part of America, in
the Bay of Massachusetts ; and desirous to unite ourselves into one
Congregation or Church under the Lord Jesus Christ, our head, in
such sort as becometh all those whom he hath redeemed and sanc
tified to himself, — do hereby solemnly and religiously (as in his
most holy presence) promise and bind ourselves to walk in all our
ways according to the rule of the gospel, and in all sincere con
formity to his holy ordinances, and in mutual love and respect each
to other, so near as God shall give us grace.
John Winthrop, Governor.
Thomas Dudley, D. Governor.
Isaack Johnson.
John Wilson.

ROLL OF THE MINISTERS OF THE FIRST CHURCH.
John Wilson. Installed as teacher, Aug. 27, 1630; as pastor, Nov. 23,
1632. Died Aug. 7, 1667, aged 78.
John Cotton. Installed as teacher, Oct. 17, 1633. Died Dec. 23, 1652,
aged 67.
John Norton. Installed as teacher, July 23, 1656. Died April 5, 1663,
aged 57.
John Davenport. Installed as teacher, Dec. 9, 1668. Died Mar. 15, 1670,
aged 72.

202 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
James Allen. Installed as teacher, Dec. 9, 1668. Died Sept. 22, 1710,
aged 78.
John Oxenbridge. Installed as teacher, April 10, 1670. Died Dec. 28,
1674, aged 65.
Joshua Moody. Installed as assistant, May 3, 1684. Died July 4, 1697,
aged 65.
John Bailey. Installed as assistant, July 17, 1693. Died Dec. 12, 1697,
aged 53.
Benjamin Wadsworth. Ordained Sept. 8, 1696; chosen President of Har
vard College, 1725. Died Mar. 12, 1737, aged 67.
Thomas Bridge. Installed May 10, 1705. Died Sept. 26, 1715, aged 58.
Thomas Foxcroft. Ordained Nov. 20, 1717. Died June 18, 1769, aged 72.
Charles Chauncy, D.D. Ordained Oct. 25, 1727. Died Feb. 10, 1787,
aged 82.
John Clark, D.D. Ordained July 8, 1778. Died April 1, 1798, aged 42.
William Emerson. Installed Oct. 16, 1799. Died May 12, 181 1, aged 42.
John L. Abbot. Ordained July 14, 1813. Died Oct. 17, 1814, aged 31.
Nathaniel L. Frothingham, D.D. Ordained Mar. 15, 1815. Resigned
March, 1850.
Rufus Ellis, D.D. Installed May 4, 1853.

FORMER HOUSES OF WORSHIP.
The first house of worship was erected on State Street, corner of Devon
shire, site of the present Brazer's Building, A.D. 1632. Upon the land in the
rear, now known as the Prince estate, were horse-sheds used by those who
rode to church.
The second was built on the present site of Joy's Building, on Washington
Street, then called Cornhill, A.D. 1640, and was consumed by fire, Oct. 2,
1711. Rebuilt on the same spot, A.D. 1713, and for many years known as
the " Old Brick," a very imposing structure.
The fourth was erected in Chauncy Place, A.D. 1808. Services were held
in it for the last time, May 10, 1868.
The corner-stone of the present house of worship was laid April 4, 1867,
and the house was dedicated Dec. 10, 1868. The church holds it free of debt,
and it may aptly be said to realize the vision of John Wilson.

THE COMMUNION PLATE.
The following is a description prepared by the late Rev. Dr. Frothingham
of the pieces of communion plate given to the church in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Other pieces have been given during the present
century, the whole service being composed of the gifts of church-members.
The church proper, or the body of communicants, holds also charity funds
amounting in all to nearly $20,000.

APPENDIX.

203

1. A silver basin for baptisms, with a coat of arms engraved on the rim,
and " J. Hurd " stamped in the centre.
2. A flagon, with a coat of arms engraved in front, and an inscription under
neath : "The Gift of the Hon1?1.6 William Dummer Esq. to the First Church
in Boston, 1726."
3. A similar flagon, with the inscription within an ornamented oval : " The
Gift of Deacon Thomas Waite to the First Church of Christ in Boston, May
IS. I775-"
4. A tall embossed cup, with engraving and figures in relief, and this in
scription written round the rim : " The Gift of Governor Jn° Winthrop to
ye i' Church in Boston."
5. Three ornamented cups, lettered on the sides : " The Gift of Elder Joseph
Bridgham to the First Church in Boston, 170S."
6. A similar cup, with the inscription on the side : " The Gift of James
Everitt to the First Church in Boston, 1705."
8. A plain cup, with this inscription: "The Gift of a Friend R * H."
These letters, B) (C, also are faintly visible. Date, 1661, written on the
bottom. II. Three large plain cups, inscribed, "The Gift of Jn? Oxenbridge."
12. A pair of cups, engraved on one side with a coat of arms, and on the
other with this inscription in an ornamented cartouche : "The Gift of Mrs.
Lydia Hancock to the First Church of Christ in Boston, Sept. 4, 1773."
17. A pair of tankards, lettered, "The Gift of Sam!! More to the First
Church in Boston, 1717.''
18 Another tankard, a cartouche in front with the inscription : " The Gift
of Nathaniel Balston Esq. to the First Church of Christ in Boston, 1773."
On the handle are the initials, N. B- H.
19 Another tankard, with the inscription in an ornamented cartouche :
" The Gift of Madam Eliz : Welsteed to the First Church in Boston, 1752."
Initials on the handle, W. E.
20. A pair of cans, with a coat of arms engraved on the front, and under
neath the inscription : " The Gift of Deacon Jonathan Williams to the First
Church of Christ in Boston, at his decease, March 27, 1737."
21. A can, inscribed, "The Gift of John Forland to the First Church of
Christ in Boston, for the use of the Table, 1717." T
22. Two massy tumblers, enchased, with the letters, B 1 ¦ C, one of them
bearing the date 1659 under the initials.
23. A vase, figured with birds and flowers, bearing on the bottom the ini
tials, R. S- E.
26. Four dishes, with the inscription round their rims : " Given by Suviah
Thayer, in testimony of her respect for the First Church of Christ in Boston.
A.D. 1796."

204 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

USHERS ON THE DAY OF COMMEMORATION.
S. Henry Hooper. John S. Tebbetts.
E." Pelham Dodd. Henry G. French.
Henry G. Hall. Charles Pfaff.
Joseph W. Warren. Frederic B. Holder.
Charles H. Whiting. John F. Moors.
George R. R. Rivers.

ADDRESS AT THE LAYING OF THE CORNER-STONE
OF THE
FIFTH HOUSE OF WORSHIP OF THE FIRST CHURCH,
By Rev. R UFUS ELLIS, Minister of the Church,
April 4, 1867 (Fast Day).
The First Church of Christ in Boston lays to-day the corner
stone of its fifth house of worship.
In the summer of the year of our Lord 1630, the fathers of the
congregation met under the shelter of a wide-spreading tree for
their first public act of worship ; and, for the space of about two
years, the company of disciples broke bread from house to house.
Upon the return from England of their first pastor, the Rev.
John Wilson, they erected a simple building of wood and earth,
not unlike the log-cabins of our Western world, and, until 1640,
sheltered therein the ark of God. This very humble sanctuary
stood on the south side of what is now known as State Street.
The congregation then passed first to a wooden, and afterwards
to a brick, meeting-house on the spot which is now covered by
Joy's Building, where they remained until the 21st of July, 1808,
when their pastor, the Rev. William Emerson, preached the
dedication sermon of the present house of worship on Chauncy
Street, and the workmen commenced the demolition of what had
been known since 17 13, first as the Brick Meeting-house, and,
with the lapse of years, as the Old Brick Meeting-house.
It has been thought that the interests of the congregation
would be promoted by another removal. Therefore we are here
to-day, and have already asked the blessing of God upon our

APPENDIX. SOS
new and serious undertaking. It is fitting that a few words
should be spoken concerning the trust which the God of our
fathers has committed to our keeping.
I need not remind you that, however little it may have cost
us, this inheritance was bought for us at a great price. Men
and women do not cross the stormy sea and found a city in the
wilderness and amongst savages, to keep holiday. The plant
ing of this church was to our fathers a very serious business ;
the Christian congregation was to them the very heart of their
Commonwealth; and, however much we may garnish their sep
ulchres, and set up tablets to their memory, we really put them
to open shame unless we fill up what is behind of their honor
able labors and patient endurance. And, if we will enter into
their earnest spirit, we shall make haste to say that our trust
from them is twofold, that we have to keep, living and fresh and
growing in the world, two great traditions, — two and yet one,
for the two agree in one, — the tradition of Christianity and the
tradition of freedom in Christianity. Our fathers planted this
church because they were Christians, because their religion
was more to them than anything ancl everything else in the
world ; and they planted it in the wilderness, leaving their pleas
ant English homes because they were Christians, according to
that word in Christ which is not bound.
Now, as of old, in laying this corner-stone, we repeat the old
baptismal words. We say, " In the name of the Father and the
Son and the Holy Ghost," and " Other foundation can no man
lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ," in whom we have
the absolute manifestation and the ever-abiding presence and the
ever-redeeming power of that God who is love, that God who in
the life of his Son has opened his whole heart to the world, and
completed in him all the religious and moral possibilities of
our humanity, so that no man can add anything unto him, or
take anything from him. Following this Dayspring from on
high, our fathers crossed the ocean. We have this day, and
we desire to have, no other guidance. We ask for no church
save the church of Christ and of his Holy Spirit, still and ever
more proceeding. The heart of humanity still saith, as ear
nestly and affectionately as ever, nay, with ever-deepening

206 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
enthusiasm, as the burden of civilization presses more and more
heavily, " Lord, unto whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words
of eternal life."
And even because this word from heaven was so altogether
sufficient, and so altogether blessed unto them, our fathers must
needs hold it as it was in the beginning, is now, and evermore
shall be, in freedom from all human devices, prescriptions, and
imaginations. They had heard the word of the Apostle speaking
to them also in the latter days : " Stand fast therefore in the
liberty wherewith Christ hath made you free, and be not entan
gled again in any yoke of bondage." He seemed to be saying
to them, in their peculiar circumstances and with their peculiar
temptations, " If you conform as of obligation to the rituals of
the outward church, Christ shall profit you nothing ; " and they
left their own houses, like the old patriarch, to walk with God
in Christ, though they knew that his way would be in the
sea, and his path through the great waters, and that their feet
would be pierced with desert thorns. We believe that as adher
ents to an unbound Christianity, a Christianity that hears none
but Christ, and is not careful to get any human indorsement of
its orthodoxy, we are the legitimate children of the fathers
of this church. We believe that we stand, if not precisely where
they stood in that day, yet substantially where they would have
stood to-day, ready to follow the well-instructed scribe, spoken
of by our Saviour, who brings forth from the treasury things
new and old, to accept with them whatever was real and vital in
what is called their orthodoxy, all the old verities of Christian
history and Christian experience ; and yet equally ready to inter
pret these verities according to that word of the Apostle which
bids us add knowledge to our faith, — in modern phrase, science to
religion, — and those greater words of Jesus, "Why even of your
own selves judge ye not what is right ? " and " Sanctify them by
thy truth."
It is with profound satisfaction that we reflect that our liberty
also is an inheritance. Let me remind you of some striking
words of Mr. Edmund Burke, and lay claim to them as fulfilled
in us. " It has been," he says, " the uniform policy of our consti
tution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance,

APPENDIX.

207

devised to us from our fathers, and to be transmitted to our pos
terity. This idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of
conservation, and a sure principle of transmission, without at all
excluding a principle of improvement. In what we improve we
are never wholly new ; in what we retain we are never wholly
obsolete. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized fore
fathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and
excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. By this means our
liberty becomes a noble freedom ; it carries an imposing and
majestic aspect ; it has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors ; it
has its bearings and ensigns armorial ; it has its gallery of por
traits, its monumental inscriptions, its records, evidences, and
titles." We rebuild our church, if not our house of worship, on the old
foundations. Our church covenant is the fathers' covenant. We
have no desire, no purpose, to change a word or so much as a
letter of it ; but we do hope to gain a deeper interpretation, and
to come into a larger and better use of the truth which it seeks
to express. We hope to rear a building that shall shelter many
generations of Christian disciples, worshippers, believers, work
ers ; a multitude ready to receive the truth as from time to time
it shall break forth, beautiful as the morning light, from the word
of God, ready to carry forward the special work of Christ as it
shall be discovered from time to time in this city of our affec
tions, ready to meet Him in whom mercy rejoiceth against judg
ment, and whose word can be believed, and whose law is fulfilled
only in love.
It is a custom of great antiquity to lay the corner-stone of
every public structure with religious observances. The historian
Tacitus tells us that silver and gold ancl the less precious metals,
all unwrought but in great profusion, were laid under the corner
stone of the old Roman Capitol an offering to the gods of the
nations. Following the same spirit, but guided by a higher wis
dom, and looking for a nobler habitation, we have begun our
work with prayer to God, and with these commemorative words ;
depositing also for the eyes of those who shall come after us, in
what we trust will be a very distant age, a few memorials of the
swiftly passing hour.

208 FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
We believe that our work has been well begun, and that it is
in the hands of men whom the Lord hath made wise-hearted to
devise and to execute, even as when the Hebrews fashioned the
tabernacle in the wilderness. May it go forward until we shall
raise the headstone thereof with shoutings, crying, " Grace,
grace unto it ! " May it go forward in all integrity and in all
charity, and in remembrance of the good word of old, " Except
the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it ; " and
to that Lord, the " King eternal, immortal, and invisible, the only
wise God, be honor and glory, through Jesus Christ, forever
and ever. Amen."

DESCRIPTION OF CHURCH AND CHAPEL WINDOWS.
The windows in the church, although exhibiting a variety in
treatment and handling, which greatly enhances their interest, are
all constructed upon the same principle, being of what is called
mosaic glass-work as distinguished from enamel painting. They
are elevated high above the eye, to avoid disagreeable cross-
lights. They are all filled with English glass, executed in Lon
don, in accordance with the architects' sketches. Seven in the
church and two in the chapel are the gifts of members of the
society. The church windows, though the work of different
makers, all follow the same general design. A broad border sur
rounds a central field of ornamental work, the upper part of
which is occupied by the half figure of an angel in a circle.
Near the bottom of each window is a figure, subject, or picture
extending across both the ornament and the borders. The
subjects of those in the body of the church are " St. John at the
Last Supper," by Messrs. Lyon & Co. ; "The Syro-Phcenician
Woman," by Messrs. Saunders & Co. ; and "The Good Samar
itan," executed by Messrs. Heaton, Butler, and Bayne. This
window is erected "In memory of John Eliot Thayer." The
window opposite this represents the Transfiguration* with the
three disciples in the foreground and above the figure of Christ,
in a glory of the form of a vesica piscis, with Moses and Elias.
This window was the gift of the late Mr. Turner Sargent. At

APPENDIX. 20g
either end of the transepts are similar windows, but of much
greater size, being nearly twenty feet high. Those in the north
transept contain full length figures, about the size of life, of St.
John and St. Paul. The subjects beneath are " The Women and
the Angel at the Sepulchre " and the " Departure of Paul from
Ephesus." The St. John window is erected " In memory of
Peter Chardon Brooks." The St. Paul window is erected " In
memory of Thomas Beale Wales." The south transept is occu
pied by windows of similar size, containing, in the place of the
Apostles opposite, inscriptions relating to the history of the
church. On one is the ancient covenant under which the church
was gathered in 1630, signed by Governor Winthrop, Governor
Dudley, "and ninety others, men and women." Beneath is the
"Vision of the Man of Macedonia," — the carrying of the gospel
into Europe having been considered by the founders of this
church as the prototype of its introduction into America, the
text " Come over and help us " occurring in the original seal of
the Colony. The other window contains a list of the ministers
of the church during the two hundred and fifty years since its
foundation. Beneath are figures of the four Evangelists. These
four windows are by Messrs. Lavers, Barraud, and Westlake.
The other windows were furnished out of the funds of the so
ciety, and consist for the most part merely of decorative work.
The great Rose, however, at the end of the church, over the
entrance, contains in the centre a figure of the Lamb, and about
it a choir of angels singing and playing upon various instru
ments. In the north transept is also a small window, nearly on
a level with the eye, containing, in four compartments, the story
of the Prodigal Son. All these windows are the work of Messrs.
Clayton & Bell, also of London.
The two stained windows in the chapel are products of Amer
ica, and have been given since the completion of the church.
Unfortunately the conditions of the light are not favorable to
the fullest development of their color. They are interesting
specimens of the ultra-mosaic system. It would be difficult to
"find pictorial windows of a like importance, in which the brush
had been less sparingly used. The central composition of the
right-hand window, " In memory of Fanny Cabot Paine," repre-
14

2IO FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.
sents St. Christopher fording the stream with the infant Christ
on his shoulder. The effect is that of pale starlight. In the
execution of this window, the so-called " rolled " glass has been
almost exclusively employed. In both figures and ornament the
line alone has been employed to indicate form. This window
was set up in 1879.
The left-hand window, " In memory of Gurdon Saltonstall,"
set up in 1880, is devoted to incidents in the life of David; the
central composition depicting him as he descends into the valley
to meet the Philistine giant and calling on the Lord for help.
This figure is carefully modelled by the "stippling" process.
The other figures and accessories are less elaborately treated.
The " antique " glass has been employed throughout, and is
of the richest description. The leadings are delicate and fre
quent. Both windows were designed and supervised by Fred
eric Crowninshield, and were executed by Donald McDonald.

INDEX.

INDEX.

Abbott, Rev. John L., tribute to, 87.
Adams, John, 196.
Ainsworth, Henry, 15.
Allen, Rev. James, tribute to, 85.
Ancient and Honorable Artillery
Company, 196-198.
Antinomianism, account of, 39-48.
Aspinwall,  , chosen deacon at the
organization of the First Church,
14.
Austin, James W., letter from, 196.
Babcock, Rev. William G., letters
from, 186.
Bacon, Francis ; Lord Veridam, 82.
Bailey, Rev. John, tribute to, 86.
Barton, Rev. W., letter from, 184.
Baxter, Rev. Richard, 193.
Blackstone, Rev. William, 102.
Blake, S. Parkman, letter from, 195.
Blaxton,  , 15.
Blenkin. Rev. G. B., of Boston, Eng.,
letter from, 179.
Boston, from whence it derived its
name, 84, 85.
Bradford, Gov. William, 116, 170.
Bradlee, Rev. Caleb D , letter from,
187.
Bridge, Rev. Thomas, tribute to, 86.
Briggs, Geo. W., D.D., address of, at
the two hundred and fiftieth anni
versary of the First Church, 169.
Britton,  , whipped for criticising
the churches, 51.
Brooks, Rev. Charles T., hymn by,
sung at the two hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of the First Church,
172.

Brooks, Peter Chardon, window in
the First Church erected in mem
ory of, 209.
Brooks, Rev. Phillips, address of, at
the two hundred and fiftieth anni
versary of the First Church, 156.
Brown, Elder Richard, his heresy re
garding the Church of Rome, 18,
Burke, Edmund, quoted, 206.
Chalmers, Thomas, D.D., his popu
larity as a preacher, 22.
Charlestown, Indian name for, 4.
Chauncy, Charles, D.D., tribute to,
86.
Clarke, John, D.D., tribute to, 86.
Coddington,  , 16.
Common Prayer, Book of, its disuse
by the Puritans, and the reasons
therefor, 102, et seq.
Cooke, Thomas Smalley, 182.
Cotton, Rev. John, 5, 10, ti, 19, 34,
52 - 54. 59- 61, 79, 109, no, 119,
132, 142, 153; birthplace of, 12;
pastor of Church of St. Botolph in
England, 21"; accomplishments as
a scholar and preacher, 21, 22;
forced by his irregularities as a
Dissenter to fly to America, 22, 23 ;
example of his extreme Congrega
tionalism, 23 ; becomes the teacher
of the First Church, 23 ; his famous
Thursday lecture, 32, 33 ; his re
ply to the proposition of English
peers to join the Massachusetts
Colony, 37 ; his tendency towards
Antinomianism, 41, 44, 46; feels
called upon to deplore the same,

214

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

and explains how he had been de
ceived by it, 49, 50 ; invited to visit
England in 1643, 55; tributes to,
84,85,156-158.
Curtis, Hon. G. W., letter from, 194.
D'Aulney,  , 59.
Davenport, Rev. John, 142, 144; in
vited to visit England in 1643, 55 ;
tribute to, 85.
Devens, Hon. Charles, letter from,
177-
Dewey, Orville, D.D., letter from,
192.
Diman, Rev. J. Lewis, letter from,
191. See also note.
Dodge, Rev. John W., letter from,
185.
Dudley, Thomas, 16, 18, 24, 29 ; one
of the first four signers of the cove
nant of the First Church, 7 ; ac
count of, 8.
Duryea, Joseph T., D.D., reads a
chapter from the Bible at the two
hundred and fiftieth anniversary of
the First Church, 96 ; letter from,
190.
Ecclesiasticism, in early New Eng
land, 61, 62.
Eliot, Pres. Charles W., address of,
at the two hundred and fiftieth an
niversary of the First Church, 136.
Eliot, Rev. John, ^3 ; took temporary
charge of the First Church during
Wilson's absence in England, 17.
Ellis, Arthur B., xix, xx.
Ellis, George E. D.D., xviii, xx ;
address of, at the two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary of the First
Church, 98.
Ellis, Rufus, D.D., 113, 121, 125, 132,
135. '42. 143* J5l> r55i '61, 166,
167, 169, 172; historical sermons
by, preached to the First Church
on the occasion of the two hun
dred and fiftieth anniversary, 3-87 ;
bust of, 92 ; prayer by, 95 ; address
of, at the laying of the corner-stone
of the fifth house of worship of the
First Church, 204.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 94.
Emerson, Rev. William, the historian
of the First Church, 61, 76 «., 204 :
statistics concerning the New Eng
land churches up to 1652, 64; tri
bute to, 86.
Endecott, Gov. John, 34.
Evarts, Hon. William M., letter from,
177-
Everett, Prof. C. C, D.D , address
of, at the two hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of the First Church,
161.
Everett, Edward, 132.
Everett, William, poem by, read at
the two hundred and fiftieth an
niversary of the First Church,
132.
Fessenden, W. H., 174.
First Church in Boston, annual meet-
ing of the proprietors held April
15, 1879, xi ; proceedings prelimi
nary to the celebration of its two
hundred and fiftieth anniversary,
xi-xx ; report of the committee ap
pointed to consider measures for
the same, xi, xii ; the committee
of twelve appointed to make all
necessary arrangements, xiii ; re
port of this committee, xiii, xiv ;
sub-committees appointed, xiv, xv ;
account of its participation in the
celebration of the two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary of the settle
ment of Boston, xv-xix; date of its
birth and story of its formation,
3 et seq. ; its four founders, 7 ; their
purpose and hope, and the difficul
ties by which they were met, 13 ;
the date and the manner of its
formal organization, 14; its inde
pendence of the ritual, 14, 15; its
favorite tunes, 15; contribution of
a fund for the purpose of building,
20 ; location of the building erected,
20 j withdrawal of the Charles
town members, 21 ; character of
its religious faith, 24-26; impor
tant period in its history, 28-30;
its ministry among the Indians, 30,

INDEX.

215

31, 62 ; its growth and religious
work, 31, 32 ; Thursday and its
famous lecture, 32, 33 ; the council
of ministers that was called, and
the two questions proposed for dis
cussion, 34 ; the first trace of the
existence of an employment so
ciety in, 39 ; the story of the Anti
nomianism of, 39-4S ; 'the inculca
tion of morals which followed, 51,
52 ; the erection of a new church
building, 53, 54; a day of fasting
kept on account of the war between
the king and parliament, 56; its
custom of obliging the attendance
at worship of heretics and others
not desiring to come, 57-60 ; the
commemorative services held upon
its two hundred and fiftieth anni
versary, 91— 174; decorations of the
church building upon that occasion,
91-93; list of portraits and pictures
exhibited at that time, 92, 93 ; the
change from its Puritan character
to that of the present day, in, 112;
the historical facts of the signing
of its covenant, 116, et seq ; the
debt which present generations
owe to its founders, 129-131 ; the
reasons for believing in its contin
ued life in the future, 136, et seq. ;
its special relations to the other
New England colonies and their
churches, 143, et seq. ; why its cove
nant was not accompanied by a
creed or confession of faith, 146 ;
copy of its covenant, 201 ; roll of
its ministers, 201 ; its former houses
of worship, 202 ; its communion-
plate, 202, 203 ; names of the ushers
on its commemoration day, 204; de
scription of the church and chapel
windows in its present house of
worship, 208.
Folsom, Rev. Omar W., letter from,
185.
Foote, Arthur, 174.
Fowle,  , bearer of a petition to
England, 61.
Foxcroft, Rev. Thomas, the sermon
at the close of the first century of

the First Church preached "by, 76,
78 ; tribute to, 86
Frothingham, Nathaniel L., D.D., 4,
202 ; the sermon preached by, on
the close of the second century of
the First Church, 69.
Frothingham, Rev. O. B., letters from,
188, 194.
Fuller, Samuel, 116, 118.
Gage, Miss Annie Louise, 173.
Gager,  , chosen deacon at the
organization of the First Church,
14 ; his death, 16.
Gannett, Rev. W. C, letter from, 187.
Gardner,  , 24.
Gorton, Samuel, obliged to attend
the First Church, and after the ser
mon allowed to criticise it, 58, 59.
Hale, Edward Everett, D.D., 94.
Hale, Hon. Geo. S , xiii-xv.
Hallam, Henry, quoted, 121.
Harwood, Henry, 178.
Hathorne,  , 54.
Hay, Clarence E., 174.
Hayes, Pres. R. B., letter from, 177.
Hedge, Frederic H., D.D., 94.
Hickling, Charles, letter from, 195.
Hill, Rev. Thomas, letter from, 192.
Hooker, Rev. Thomas, 143 ; accom
panies John Cotton in his flight to
America, 23 ; is invited to visit
England in 1643, 55-
Horton, Rev. Edward A., letter from,
189.
Hume, David, quoted, 121.
Hutchinson, Mrs. Anne, introduces
Antinomianism into the First
Church, 41 ; her banishment from
both church and commonwealth,
and the judgment pronounced upon
her, 45 ; her death, 47.
Israel, Rev. F., letter from, 184.
Johnson, Lady Arbella, 117; wife
of Isaac Johnson, 9; her death and
burial-place, 16.
Johnson, Isaac, 117 ; one of the first
four signers of the covenant of the

2l6

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

First Church, 7; account of, 9;
family of, in England at present
day, 11 ; his death and burial-place,
16.
Keaine, Robert, admonished and
fined for exorbitant charges in
trade, 52 ; founder and first com
mander of the Ancient and Hon
orable Artillery Company, 197, 198.
Key, Rev. W. S., minister of St. Bo
tolph's, letters from, 178, 181.
La Tour,  . 58.
Laud, William, Archbishop of Canter
bury, 21, 22, 28, 55, 119.
Lewis,  , his " History of Lynn "
cited, 197.
Lincoln, Rev. Calvin, letter from, 186.
Long, Gov. John D., address of, at
the two hundred and fiftieth anni
versary of the First Church, 122.
Lynne, Henry, whipped for slander
of the churches and government,
19.
Manning, Rev. J. M., letter from, 190.
Massachusetts, early religious dog
matism of, 50, 51 ; unfavorable
effect of the strife in England be
tween the king and parliament
upon, 56, 57 ; the General Court
of, was the first missionary society
in Protestant Christendom, 63 ;
early beginning of free schools in,
63 ; the union of Church with
State in 1630 .and at the present
time, 140.
Mather, Rev. Cotton, 153, 167.
Maverick of Winesemett, his services
among the Indians, 31.
McKean,  , tribute to, 87.
Milton, John, 121.
Moodey, Rev. Joshua, tribute to, 85.
Morison, Rev. John H., D.D., 173.
Morton,  , 24.
Mountford, Rev. William, letter from,
193-
New England Congregational
ism, the occasion and birth of, 60 ;

the opposition thereto, and the peti
tion sent to England, 60, 61 ; the es
sence and value of, 128, 129.
New England, to what she owes the
elements of her present character,
74-
Norton, Rev. John, 64; tribute to, 85.
Nowell, Elder  , 14, 16.
Noyes, Rev. Charles, letter from, 189.
Noyes, Mrs. Jennie M., 173.
Osgood, Rev. E. Q. S., letter from,
183.
Oxenbridge, Rev. John, tribute to, 85.
Paine, Fanny Cabot, window in the
First Church erected in memory
of, 209.
Palmer, Edward, for extortionate
charges in making Boston stocks,
is fined and obliged publicly to sit
in same, 52.
Peabody, A. P., D.D., 94.
Peters, ./?.?-£>. Hugh, 10, 39, 123; ex
horts the people against being de
ceived by revelations, 50 ; is exe
cuted in England at the time of the
Restoration, 55.
Plymouth Church, formation of, 169,
170.
Porter, Pres. Noah, D.D., address
of, at the two hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of the First Church,
142.
Pray, Lewis G., letter from, 196.
Prince, Mayor F. O., extract from
oration of, on the two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary of the settle
ment of Boston, xviii ; address of,
at the two hundred and fiftieth an
niversary of the First Church, 125.
Puritan Church, the, its character and
limitations, 64, 65.
Puritans, their opinions on matters
of Church and State, 36-39; ex
planation of their intolerance, 81,
82; peculiarity of their church ser
vice called "the opening," 109, no;
tribute to their noble qualities and
deeds, 120, 121 ; motives which in
spired their emigration to America,

INDEX.

217

145; their religious spirit, inquiry
as to whether the present genera
tion possesses it in like degree,
163-166.
Putnam, Rev. A. P., letter from, 191.
Rantoul, Hon. Robert S., address
of, at the two hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of the First Church, 167.
Ratcliffe,  , 24.
Ratcliffe, Philip, whipped for slander
of the churches and government,
19.
Renan, Joseph Ernest, quoted, 27.
Reynolds, Edward, letter from, 195.
Reynolds, Rev. Grindal], address of,
at the two hundred and fiftieth an
niversary of the First Church, 151.
Richardson, Thomas O., xiii.
Rogers, Mrs. Jacob O, xiii.
Sagamore, John, conversion of, 62.
Salem Church, formation of, 170.
Saltonstall, Gurdon, window in the
First Church erected in memoiy
of, 210
Saltonstall, Sir Richard, 167 ; his
letter written from England de
ploring the intolerance of the Pu
ritans, 168.
Sargent, Turner, 208.
Second Church in Boston, date of its
formation, 4; occasion of same, 64.
Sewall, Rev. Charles C, letter from,
186.
Silsbee, Hon. Nathaniel, delivers the
Address of Welcome at the two
hundred and fiftieth anniversary of
the First Church, 94.
St. Botolph, Church of, 6, 11, 20, 21.
Staples, Rev. C. A., letter from, 190.
Stevens, Charles W., Commander of
Ancient and Honorable Artillery
Company, letter from, 196.
Stone, Rev. Samuel, 23.
Talbye, Dorothy, hung for murder
ing her little daughter, 50.
Thayer, John Eliot, window in the
First Church erected in memory
of, 208.

Thayer, Nathaniel, xiii, xiv, 94.
Thompson,  , appointed as mis
sionary to Virginia, 56.
Thompson, Pichey, 178.
Thomson, Rev. J. S., letter from, 185.
Underhill, Captain  , 43.
Unitarian, burning of a, for heresy in
England, 20.
Van Brunt, Henry, 93.
Vane, Sir Henry, 47 ; his fate at the
time of the Restoration, 55, 56.
Virginia asks for missionaries of
Massachusetts, 56.
Wadsworth, Rev. Benjamin, tribute
to, 86; selected as President of
Harvard College, 135; his theo
logical opinions, 137, 138.
Wales, Thomas, Beale, window in
First Church erected in memory
of, 209.
Ware, William R., 93.
Warren, Hon. G. Washington, xi-
xv ; address of, at the festival in
Faneuil Hall on the occasion of
the two hundred and fiftieth anni-
versa'y of the settlement of Bos
ton, xv.
Wheelwright, Rev. John, the civil
strife stirred by, 41, 43.
Whittier, John G , letter from, 188.
Wilder, Hon. Marshall P., 94.
Williams,  , Bishop of Lincoln,
5, 22.
Williams, Roger, 144; his claim to
have been unanimously chosen
teacher of the First Church, and his
reason for declining the ofiice, 17 ;
protest of the Court against his
settlement over the Salem church,
19 ; he offends the Governor ancl
Assistants of Massachusetts, by a
paper impeaching the validity of
their land grant, 34 ; the passages
especially annoying, 35 ; the rea
sons for his banishment in 1635
from Massachusetts colony, 35, 36;
his banishment in accordance with
the chtracter of the constitution of

218

FIRST CHURCH IN BOSTON.

the colony, 38; his refusal to hold
communion as a Christian with
any one save his own wife, 65.
Wilson, Rev. John, 33, 42-44, 52, 64,
92, 121, 122, 132, 202, 204; one
of the first four signers of the cov
enant of the First Church, and its
first pastor and teacher, 7 ; account
of, 9-1 1 ; his independence of the
ritual at the organization of the
First Church, 14; his departure
for England, 16, 17; formal instal
lation as pastor of the First Church,
21 ; pronounces judgment upon
Anne Hutchinson, 45 ; preaches
the first Artillery-Election sermon
in 1638, 53, 197, 198; his. mission
ary work among the Indians, 62 ;
author of a book upon the Indian
mission, 62 ; tributes to, 84, 1 52-
154.
Winslow, Gov. Edward, 116, 118.
Winsor, Justin, 94.

Winthrop, Gov. John, xv-xvii, 11,
16, 18, 24, 41, 43, 56, 92, 103, 113,
114, 117, 121, 122, 143, 198; one of
the first four signers of the cove
nant of the First Church, 4, 7 ; ac
count of, 8 ; his attitude towards
Antinomianism, 42, 44, 46 ; his
death, 63 ; reasons for believing
that he framed the covenant of
the First Church, 119.
Winthrop, Margaret, 10.
Winthrop, Hon. Robert C, 103, n. ;
address of, at the two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary of the First
Church, 113.
Witchcraft, the persecution of, in
New England, to what due, 79, 80.
Woodbury, Rev. A., letter from, 192.
Wright, Charles, of Boston, England,
letter from, 180. '
Wright, Thomas, a parishioner of St.
Botolph's, letters from, 178, 180.
Wyman, Edward, letter from, 198.

University Press : John Wilson & Son, Cambridge.

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