Class Book FIRST CHURCH OF HARTFORD. Erected 1807. COMMEMORATIVE EXERCISES OF THE V I SC? t p Y /s .; i //// / / / t /// t ■ ■ /> ' '" ' //"/"■/ '//,/>//,'>,/, V, ',, ^ . '///, / /, -'/aw. but the General Committee on the celebration, at a meeting held the 15 th of October, deeming the event deserving of permanent record, authorized and directed a sub-committee, consisting of the following named persons, to prepare and publish a memorial of the transactions of the anniversary suited to a place in the library of those Concerned or inter- ested in it : William Thompson, Daniel R. Howe, Charles T. Welles, George Leon Walker. Robert E. Day, It is in fulfillment of this direction that the following pages have been compiled. ORDER OF EXERCISES. Thursday Morning. I. Organ Prelude. Handel. II. DOXOLOGY. III. Reading of Scripture. Psalm lxxxix : 1-18. IV. Prayer. V. Anthem. One Hundredth Psalm. Tours. VI. Address of Welcome. William R. Cone. VII. Psalm cxxxvi. Tate and Brady. Tune, Lenox. To God the mighty Lord, Your joyful Thanks repeat : To Him due Praise afford, As good as He is great. For God does prove Our constant Friend, His boundless Love Shall never end. 2. Thro' Desarts vast and wild He led the chosen Seed ; And famous Princes foil'd, And made great Monarchs bleed. For God, etc. 3. Sihon, whose potent Hand Great Ammon's Sceptre sway'd ; And Og, whose stern Command Rich Bashan's Land obey'd. For God, etc. 4. And of His wond'rous Grace Their Lands, whom He destroy'd, He gave to Isr'els Race, To be by them enjoy'd. For God, etc. II 5. He does the Food supply, On which all Creatures live : To God who reigns on high Eternal Praises give. For God will prove Our constant Friend, His boundless love Shall never end. VIII. Early Topography of Hartford. John C. Parsons. [Illustrated by a copy of Porter's Map of Hartford in 1640, prepared by Solon P. Davis.] IX. Hymn 1060. "O God, beneath Thy guiding hand." Tune, Bond. Thursday Afternoon. I. Psalm lxxviii. Tate and Brady. Tune, Archdale. Hear, O my People, to my Law, devout Attention lend ; Let the Instruction of my Mouth deep in your Hearts descend. My Tongue, by Inspiration taught, shall Parables unfold, Dark Oracles, but understood, and owned for Truths of old ; 2 Which we from sacred Registers of antient Times have known, And our Forefathers pious Care to us has handed down. We will not hide them from our Sons ; our Offspring shall be taught The Praises of the Lord, whose Strength has Works of Wonder wrought. 3 That Generations yet to come should to their unknown Heirs Religiously transmit the same, and they again to theirs. To teach them that in God alone their hope securely stands, That they should ne'er His Works forget, but keep his just Commands. II. Historical Address. Rev. George Leon Walker, D.D. III. Hymn 820. "Let saints below in concert sing." Tune, St. Anns. IV. Closing Voluntary. Bach. 12 Thursday Evening. I. Organ Voluntary. Mendelssohn. II. Gloria in Excelsis. Pease. III. Addresses by former Pastors. IV. Music. " The Lord is mindful of His Own." Mendelssohn. V. Addresses by Invited Guests. VI. Hymn 1 014. " Christ is coming ! Let creation " — Verdussen. Friday Morning. I. Organ Prelude and Chorus. St. Saens. II. Prayer. III. The Meeting-houses of the First Church. Rowland Swift. IV. Reminiscences. Rev. Aaron L. Chapin, D.D. V. Hymn 757. " O where are kings and empires now." Friday Afternoon. I. Hymn 522. " Call Jehovah thy salvation." Raff- II. Relation of the Church to the Civil Government. Pinckney W. Ellsworth. III. Social and Domestic Life in Early Times. Mrs. Lucius Curtis. IV. Hymn 824. " Blest be the tie that binds." Tune, Dennis. T HURSDAY MORNING M ADDRESS OF WELCOME. BY WILLIAM R. CONE. Throughout the German empire there is to be celebrated on the i ith of the next month, November, the anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther, a poor miner's son, born in a Saxon village four hundred years ago. The event is deemed of such importance, that the Emperor William of Germany, has issued his proclamation designating the ioth and I ith days of Novem- ber as " Luther days," to be observed throughout his king- dom of Prussia. In this proclamation the emperor says : " I pray that God may listen to the supplications in which I and all evangelical Christians unite, that this celebration be .productive of lasting benefit to our Evangelical Church." This is a prayer which we may most appropriately adopt upon this occasion. On the 4th of September, 1633, an event occurred upon this side of the Atlantic, hardly less significant and import- ant, and which in its consequence to religion and civilization has few parallels in history. On that day there landed from a vessel, the Griffin, at the port of Boston, a few miles away from the little hamlet of Newtown, now Cambridge, Mass., a company of exiled Puritan pilgrims, seeking a home in this western world. Among them were two remarkable men, Thomas Hooker, who became the first pastor of this Church, and John Haynes, who became the first governor of this State. They met upon the shore a small band of relig- ious men and women, who had preceded them, and there, by the sea, awaited their coming. Hooker had, prior to their departure from England, ministered to a considerable portion of this handful of emigrants, and as he landed, they met him with open arms and glad hearts, and welcomed him, as I do i6 you to-day, with most hearty greetings. And as he came within their welcome embrace, he assured them with equal earnestness of his Christian regard, affection, and interest, and said to his old flock, " Now I live if ye stand fast in the Lord." This meeting and Christian greeting carried with it such evidence of their trust and fidelity to their Lord, that on the nth day of the next month, October, they fully organized this first Church of Christ, and Mr. Hooker was installed as their Christian leader. This organization has never been interrupted. It is the same church which com- menced its work on the nth of October, 1633, and which in its Christian work since, and in its influence upon civilization and all that contributes to national wealth and prosperity, and the advancement and happiness of the human race, will continue to work on to the end of time. A quarter of a thousand years since the happening of this event, so appar- ently small and insignificant in itself, has passed; but it involved great trusts, the planting here of this Christian church, which contained the germs of our nation's greatness, and power ; and though the actors in this organization of the nth of October, 1633, have ceased their work, and many generations have swept over their memories and their graves, and most of them are forgotten, and even the names of many of them are no longer to be found in any part of this wide land ; yet their work will never stop. The faithful services they did here, in planting this Church and founding this State, will never die. The church is the same, though other hands have taken it up and will carry it on through all time. The results of these labors are spread over this whole continent, are felt throughout the civilized world, and this assembly is here by invitation to celebrate the 250th anniversary of this event, look upon the work, judge of the results, and trace the steps in the progress of its accomplishment. I have somewhere seen a picture, executed by a skillful master, which brought out in wonderful vividness the history and events of a life. It was the picture of a very old man, calling up to himself the record of his life. He stood, a very 17 patriarch, with flowing locks and the snow of many winters upon his head — looking off, and viewing, at a great distance in the landscape, the house in which he was born, the fields of his early sports, where he passed his youth and his school days. He held in his hand a portrait of himself, just as he was passing from boyhood, with a face radiant with hope, every lineament marked with self-reliance and high resolve. Spread out before him was a wide landscape extend- ing over land and water, the great field of his labor and his life. Upon a roll at his feet was inscribed the names of his chil- dren. Standing there, with the scenes of every stage of his life spread out before him, he was trying to discern, in the portrait of his boyhood, some resemblance of himself as reflected in a mirror. He seemed to be calling up to his memory the history of his life, its trials, its discouragements, disappointments, and vicissitudes, its successes, triumphs, and victories. The events and results of a whole lifetime were before him, as was the path he had traveled all the way from the little old home where he was born to the place where he was standing. The picture was wonderfully suggestive. Something like it we are here to witness to-day. This venerable church, represented by the descendants and successors of its early members, stands here looking down through the vista and mist of two hundred and fifty years, and sees in the dim distance the early and unpretend- ing home by the sea, in which it had its birth, and from which their way through a trackless wilderness led them, just as it was taking upon itself the strength and vigor of its early manhood, to this, then as now, fertile and beauti- ful valley of the Connecticut. And now, as the representa- tives and embodiment of this First Church of Christ, we are here, trying to discern what there is of resemblance to the portrait which you will have presented to you of its early existence — and if the picture, with its groupings and environ- ments, is well drawn and distinctly presented, as it will be, — for it is to be done by a skillful master, — the history and events of this church, its trials, vicissitudes, disappointments, 3 i8 and its successes and triumphs as well, will be seen to have impressed themselves upon the world at large, the civil community here and everywhere, as no other like event has ever done. Early in June, 1636, the party, constituting this first Church of Christ, commenced their wearisome and perilous jour- ney from the sea, through the dark and trackless forest to this, their future home of toil, privation, and suffering. Who can adequately describe the discouragements of that journey ? About the 15th of June, after two weeks of march- ing through the tangled jungles of the forest, this party of about 100 men, women, and little children, led by Hooker, stood upon the banks of this river, and through the openings made by the repeated fires, which the Indians for centuries had annually started to preserve the clearings upon which they planted their corn, and cultivated their scanty crops — saw "Centinel" hill, and the rising ground which became " Meeting-house Yard" and the elevations west and south of the city and further from the river, upon which the capitol, the asylum, and the colleges now stand. Beyond these openings, there extended back from the river on every side, the dark, impenetrable forest, of giant oak, chestnut, and other forest trees, the growth of centuries, inhabited by wild and ferocious beasts, and peopled by wild and more savage Indians, whose wigwams were seen upon the outskirts of these openings, frightful in their war paint, clothed in skins, or a coarse and filthy blanket, decked with feathers, armed with tomahawk and scalping knife, and whose war whoop and treachery had become the terror of all the white inhabit- ants of the land. Why were not these men and women disheartened at the prospect of life before them ? The object and purpose that brought them here, made them courageous and stout- hearted. Hooker and his party had an errand in this wilderness, a work to accomplish. It was the planting here of " a Church without a Bishop ; and the founding a State without a King." The principles of religion and civil < I- 2 oo 19 liberty, which they brought with them, were safe in their keeping, and soon formulated in the first written constitu- tion which ever had existence (the constitution of 1639), the work of Hooker, Haynes, and Ludlow, and in which Governor George Wyllys had some part ; a constitution which recognized the people as the sovereigns, from whom alone emanated all power; and never has Connecticut recog- nized any man as its governor whose authority was derived from the king ; a constitution which in its essential features always has been, and still is the constitution of this State. There was, in this company of plodding pilgrims, another personage, William Gibbon*, whose name is forever linked in history with the preservation of that immemorial tree in which the chartered liberties, contained in that first constitution, were hidden and preserved ; when the king sought to wrest from the people their liberties, and bring them under his authority. He too, had an errand in this wilderness. He was the steward of George Wyllys, the third governor of Connecticut, sent forward to purchase and prepare a place fit for his reception. Charter Oak hill was selected as the place. And, as he, with his men, was making the clearing and felling the trees, there came, upon one of those warm, balmy days in early summer, a deputation of Indians, to remonstrate and pro- test against the cutting down of a venerable oak which stood upon this hill. They pleaded, in behalf of this immemorial tree, that the woodman would spare it. " It has been the guide of our ancestors for centuries," said they, " as to the time of planting • our corn ; when its leaves are the size of a mouse's ear, then it is time to put the seed in the ground." At their entreaty the tree was permitted to stand, and for two hundred and twenty years continued to indicate the * William Gibbon of Hartford upon Connecticut, Yeoman, died in 1655. By his last will he devised about thirty acres of meadow and upland in Fenywise, in the town of Wethersfield, "towards the mayntenance of a lattin schoole in Hartford." This was probably the first legacy for educational purposes in Connecticut. Under a town vote passed Jan. 8, 1756, this land was let out on a long lease for a gross rent, but the fee is still in the trustees of the Hartford Grammar school. — Vide note, p. 31, Vol. iv, of the printed Colonial Records. 20 time when the earth was prepared for the seed corn. And I well remember, and others in this assembly will remember the solemn tolling, tolling, of this church bell, on the 2 1st day of August, 1856, when it was announced that this vast legendary tree, the Charter Oak, so intimately connected with the planting of this Church and founding of this State, had fallen. This was indeed the planting season, the propitious time for the seed to germinate here. Thus this church was planted, this State was founded, Hartford was peopled, and this old oak saved, that the charter of its liberties might be preserved. "God sifted a whole nation," said Stoughton, "that he might send choice grain over into this wilderness." The choicest of the seed was planted here upon Hartford soil, it took deep root, and its fruits are ripening in every State upon this continent* Though sown and nurtured by these pioneers in sorrow and tears, nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, the ripening harvest is now being reaped in joy and triumph. * DeTocqueville, the French Historian, a great friend of America, was once invited by some of our countrymen in Paris to a 4th- of July dinner. Called upon for a speech towards the close, he promptly responded, and narrated how in the course of his tour through the United States, he at length reached Washington. Congress was in session, so of course, he hastened to the Capitol and found himself, presently, eagerly listening to the various speakers in the Senate Chamber and House. One after another arose and harangued the audience, riveting his attention in several instances by their irresistible eloquence, fertility of resource, forcible argument, or sterling common sense. "Who is that last speaker?" DeTocqueville would exclaim to one who sat beside him. "Oh! that is the member from Kentucky, but he belonged originally in Connec- ticut." Again, " Who is the able man now speaking ? " " That is the member from Missouri, but he was originally from Connecticut." "And that other one to whom all listened so breathlessly ? " " He is the member from Illinois, but Connecticut was also his native State," and so on, till the vivacious Frenchman became impatient to consult his map, saying to himself, "Dis Konnecticoot must be a very fine State ! " He went home and searched the map and found that "it was only von leetle yellow spot!" He went on to relate, how afterwards he went to see for himself that same spot, and, when he inspected its schools and colleges, saw its busy trade, successful industries, and the variety of its manufac- tures, he was led to exclaim, "as I now do to you, Gentlemen," finally, " dat leetle State you call Konnecticoot is von great miracle to me " ! ! ! 21 We, of this generation, enjoying the comforts and luxuries of our day, in the use and employment of the various inven- tions in labor-saving machinery, and all .the modern appli- ances of our civilization, cannot roll back the tide of time two hundred and fifty years, and picture the scenes and events connected with this toilsome journey, and the hardships and privations of their home life here. The contrast, with our times and experience, is too great for realization. If we try, we look in vain for any external features in the portrait of its early times and young life, with this old patriarchal church. More than two centuries have passed since the youngest of the company, who met Hooker on the 4th of September, 1633, and who accompanied him here, was carried to his grave on men's shoulders. No recognizable vestige of the place, where they lived and labored for us and for posterity, now exists, except these imperishable hills, the soil upon which they trod, and the scattered fragments, to be found, here and there, of that memorable oak, the last of its kind, saved from the axe of the woodman, in that early summer time, when this church was being planted and this State was being founded, and in which its charter was hidden and preserved. The savage population are extinct, — the howl of the wolf is no longer heard,— the forest of oak, elm, hemlock, and beach have disappeared in the progress of civilization — the paths they trod and the ways they traveled, as shown upon the map, are obliterated. The houses they built and occupied have gone to decay ; the graves of many of them are removed ; their house of worship has long since disappeared, and its precise site is not certainly known. There is no feature or lineament in the portrait of the young church remaining and recognizable now, except, ah, except the principles upon which it was founded, and which its early members exempli- fied in their daily life, and left as a precious legacy to all the future inhabitants of this land. These, time has neither faded or weakened ; they live and flourish, and will live for- ever, and from them this church has never swerved, and the originators and founders should be honored, and held in per- 22 petual, grateful, and everlasting remembrance. We are here, my friends, to give expression to our veneration. What changes between that day and this ! Should these men who constituted this first church of Christ in Hart- ford, Hooker, Stone, Haynes, Wyllys, and the others, now enter the doors of this church, advance along these aisles, and give to you this address of welcome, what would be their surprise and amazement as they looked upon this beautiful, prosperous, and busy city ; and then off upon this great, opulent, and powerful country, — as they listened to the peals of this organ ; heard in the instrument's click a message from the remotest part of the globe, as it comes over the telegraph wire ; and recognized the voice of friends, sepa- rated from them by an hundred miles, as heard in the tele- phone — and realized what wonderful discoveries and inven- tions had been made, and how all the elements had been brought to contribute to the uses and happiness of their posterity. In view of all this wonderful change, would they not exclaim in the language of the first message ever sent over the telegraph wire, and sent too by a member who worshiped in this church of their founding, "What hath God wrought ? " In my fancy to-day, I see this church peopled with another congregation, a congregation of a past generation, as I saw it in 1826, nearly sixty years ago. I seem to hear from the mahogany pulpit, perched high against the wall at this end of the church, from which he delivered his message, the voice of the young pastor Joel Hawes, as he proclaimed the mes- sage, with the earnestness and fervor which characterized his early preaching, — see good Deacons Chapin and Colton as they passed up and down these aisles, in the distribution of the bread and the wine ; and as my eye passes from one square, high-backed pew, ranged along the wall sides of this church to another, and from one slip in these aisles to another, I see the venerable men who worshiped here, dressed in the costume of that day, in short clothes, white- topped boots, with powdered heads, and a queue down 23 the back, and some with a three-cornered hat ; — matronly women, with their sons and daughters, the younger members of the family, as they enter and are seated for their Sunday worship ; men and women who impressed me with their dignity, and commanded my veneration, and whose saintly lives furnished daily evidence of their fidelity to the church, and their consistency as devoted Christian men and women. These fathers and mothers, where are they ? Some of their sons and daughters are still in life, scattered here and there upon the earth — most have gone up higher, to the " house not made with hands " — some few are here to-day ; but I seem to see, and recognize them all, as now here assembled in this house in which they delighted to worship, charging you and this generation with greater fidelity to this old church which they loved, and from which many of them were buried. Standing here and speaking in their name and stead, and in the name and behalf of this First Church of Christ to this assembly, I would say, as Hooker did to his followers when he met them on the 4th of September, 1633, by the sea, and embraced them after their brief three years' separa- tion : " Now I live if ye stand fast in the Lord." Yes, this venerable church, whose teachings have come down through these two hundred and fifty years, still lives, and will con- tinue to live if you and its future members stand fast in the Lord. Thus, friends, we greet and welcome you all here to-day, and may God bless and prosper this old church in the future as He ever has done in the past. We have invited you to this festival, and we give you all a cordial and hearty welcome to-day. REMARKS ON THE EARLY TOPOGRAPHY OF HARTFORD. BY JOHN CALDWELL PARSONS. One object of this commemoration is to obtain for our- selves, if possible, and to perpetuate, some more accurate impressions of the founders of this church and town ; to realize, as exactly as we can, what manner of men and women they were ; to give due honor to their memories, and to gain some lessons from their example ; and to do this by studying, not only their main impulses and guiding principles, but also their daily and outward lives, their hard- ships, recreations, and temptations, and their physical sur- roundings. It is of these last that I am to say a few words. They will be very brief, for the material is scanty. As one good photograph of Richard Lord and his eight children, in the living room of their house, would inform us better of their domestic life than a volume of essays, based on ancient inventories and casual hints ; so a picture of Hartford, or an accurate map of the town in 1637, would instruct us more in matters of local and territorial life than a library of acute conjecture. But we have no such data. One of the early votes of the town reads : " It is ordered that whosoever borrows the town chain shall pay twopence a day for every day they keep the same, and pay for mending it, if it be broken in their use." This is the first and only record of any surveyor's instrument. Doubtless there must have soon come some large, if rude, compass, and perhaps some other apparatus for triangulation.* But of such we know * Pocket compasses must have been common with the first settlers, and maritime compasses were accessible. Reference is here made only to the sur- veyor's compass. 2 5 nothing. This poor town chain, its bent and broken links mended from time to time by the town blacksmith, according to his best judgment, served to lay out the two-acre home- steads, the quarter-acre lots of Soldiers' Field, and the half- acre house lots of the later and less important immigrants. No skillful engineering was required. The highways con- formed to the courses of the streams, and the elevations or ridges of ground ; and if there was a right angle on any lot, or at any street intersection, then, as ever since, it was by accident. Among all the ancient furniture from garrets and sheds that has lately reappeared in our parlors and halls, and which fond tradition, growing more and more positive day by clay, i ascribes to the Skinners, or Pratts, or Talcotts — among all these battered warming-pans and foot-stoves and spinning- wheels and rickety tables — I have yet to hear of a level, or compass, or other instrument of early date, intended for sur- veyor's use. But whatever implements of this sort the first settlers possessed, they preserved no results of their work in the form of maps or drawings. There is not extant, so far as I can learn, a map of the town made before the Revolu- tionary war, nor is there in existence an authentic picture or sketch of the town, or any part of it, or of any building, public or private, in the early days ; nor of word-painting or description of any kind, is there much to guide in any attempt to reproduce the actual appearance of Hartford in 1636. The site of the town, both meadow and upland, had been partially cleared and cultivated by the Indians in their rude way, and we can easily imagine the attractiveness of the spot as it was visited by the first explorers. There was much variety of soil and exposure ; abundant water supply from springs, brooks, and rivers ; forest trees of every kind, and small fruits, shrubs, and aromatic and medicinal plants ; a climate far less trying to poorly-housed settlers than that of Massachusetts Bay; a wide, navigable river of pure water, abounding in fish, its banks bordered by fertile meadows, never requiring enrichment ; and a smaller stream, not even in 4 26 those days a mountain torrent of limpid water, but swiftly flowing, sometimes through rich arable and pasture land, and again cutting through the main ridge of the future settle- ment, leaving sandstone walls thirty or forty feet high on either side. It is a matter of course that the natural surface of the town has been wholly changed. Hollows have been filled, hills have been reduced in grade, lesser elevations have almost disappeared, minor water courses and springs have ceased to exist or are hidden in sewers. " Centinel Hill," the highest elevation of Main Street, in the immediate vicin- ity of the present Fourth Church, was at least ten or fifteen feet higher than the grade of to-day. It commanded a view of the north part of the town, the north meadows, and the river, and of the whole length of Main Street. The neigh- bors supplied themselves with earth from it so freely, that, in 1660 the town, not yet prepared to relinquish this post of observation and perhaps of defence, voted " that whosoever for the future shall dig or carry earth away from Sentinel Hill shall forfeit two shillings a load, and so for any proportion, without they have the consent of Ensign Talcott and John Allyn." But this restraint was only temporary, and the whole crown of the hill has been removed. Where Asylum Street now runs, from Ann Street to the railroad crossing, lay a meadow overflowed by every moderate rise of the Little River. The heavy soil of the uplands held water easily in all its hollows ; and little ponds, like those few remaining on Asylum, Collins, and Edwards Streets, were abundant. Children have skated in this century on such a pond between Main and Prospect Streets. Large water courses are sometimes permanent boundaries, but at Hartford the rivers too have changed. When the first settlers came, the Connecticut River ran farther to the east, and a pleasing and fertile meadow extended from Front Street, easterly, well into the present channel of the river. The Riveret, as Little River was sometimes called, has not changed it course where it was hemmed in by rock ; but 27 throughout Bushnell Park its channel has varied like its char- acter. It was in early days an attractive stream. The magnates of the town, Hooker, Stone, Goodwin, Haynes, and others, chose their lots on Arch Street, facing the river road, overlooking the current, which at first ran, unvexed and unpolluted, to the Connecticut. And though a tannery was already in operation in 1640 on what is now the park, opposite the Jewell works, and a mill and dam were built west of Ford Street, there seem to have been no groans about mephitic exhaltations and disgusting smells and intolerable nuisances. Then, as now, the inhabitants along its banks highly valued their water privileges, and esteemed their loca- tion the most delightful in the town. And even when Thomas Hooker, the pride and prop of church and town, died of fever on its banks, there was not a whisper of " malaria " throughout the colony. One of the first embarrassments of the settlers — an embarrassment that has long remained to haunt their succes- sors — was the badness of the roads. Asa general rule in new settlements, the better the soil the poorer the roads. The tenacious clay that underlies the loam in Hartford is the most intractable of all material for road-building. Those who have seen, within the last thirty years, wheels sunk to the hub in the native clay of Pearl Street, within two hund- red yards of this spot, can faintly imagine what must have been the condition of all the highways of the town, not only in 1640, but for long years afterward.* And it is easy to sympathize with the ardor which, 150 years ago, fired the people of this church in fierce and long dispute about a new *In May, 1774, sundry prisoners for debt in the jail, then near the corner of Pearl and Trumbull Streets, petition the General Assembly that the jail limits may be enlarged as far east as the Court House, representing that they " labour under many Inconveniences, hardships, and disadvantages, which are uncommon to prisoners in other Gaols in this Colony. By Reason that the Gaol is in so retired and back part of the Town, so seldom frequented by any Inhabitants of the Town; all the Roads which lead to it being for a Considerable part of the Year miery and uncomfortable to walk in, by which Reason the People who would otherwise be very Charitably disposed towards the Prisoners, seldom have an opportunity of bestowing their Charities." 28 location for their meeting-house, when we remember that every additional yard of distance between house and church meant additional weary struggle with mud and mire. About the middle of the eighteenth century some attempt was made to improve the condition of Main street, but little seems to have been done then, or for fifty years afterwards, except to fill the worst holes and quagmires with stone from Rocky Hill.* There is a credible tradition that, not far from the begin- ning of this century, the late Mrs. Daniel Wadsworth, on a Thanksgiving day, was unable to cross Main street, from her home near the City Hotel to Col. Wadsworth's house on the Athenaeum lot, except on horseback. How the first set- tlers, in bad weather, ever traveled the road to Wethersfield, which has been all but impassable for wheels during the mem- ory of many here present, is a puzzle and a wonder to us. Doubtless the courage of those pioneers was high, their boots were thick, their tastes were not as fastidious and delicate as those of their descendants. Necessity drove, and they moved in some way. But speed and ease of travel over bad roads was an impossibility. All the discomforts of locomo- * A curious petition, signed by all the clergymen of the town, among others, for leave to raise ;£ 6,000 by a lottery, for the repair of the roads, dated, May 8, 1760, is to be found among the State Documents at the Capitol ; for reference to which I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. C. J. Hoadly, State Librarian. It represents " that the Streets of the Town of Hartford a great part of the year are extreamly bad, to Which ye Great Concourse of People Drawn into said Town to attend the General Assembly, Sup r and County Courts, held in the town, greatly Contributed : That your memorialists apprehend that the Costs and Expenses of Repairing the Highways and Streets in ye Town aforesaid, is (by Reason of ye badness of the ground, & greatness of Traveling in and through said Town) much greater than in any other Town in this Colony. — That your memorialists apprehend that to Leave the matter of Repairing said Streets to the Ordinary Provision made and provided in Such Cases by Law, will for- ever prove ineffectual for necessary repairs of Said Ways, as it has hitherto Done : That in the Year 1754 sundry y r Memorialists and others (finding it absolutely necessary) in Order to make said Ways feasible, were Obliged to Expend the Sum of about ^1.300 old Tenor, by Private Subscription, which was expended on the Town Street in said Town from the Bridge to the Court House, the Great benefitt of which has been Experienced by y r Hon 13 and the Whole Government." 2 9 tion, of which we hear so much in the time of the Revolu- tion, and down to the days of turnpikes, existed, magnified and intensified, when this church was established in Hartford, and for many subsequent years. I reminded you at the outset that we possess no original map of the town. Not many years ago, however, a map was com- piled by a patient and intelligent surveyor and antiquarian, chiefly from the records of land. It does not profess to be altogether accurate, but it represents substantially the orig- inal layout of the town. We have it here on a large scale, to bring the facts of the settlement as clearly as possible to your eyes. I call your attention first to the fact that it was a skillful and judicious plan. The broken surface of our territory, and the water courses which bound or divide it, forbade that rectangular and regular plan, which elsewhere, and especially in New Haven, was found to be convenient. The wisdom of the townsmen here has been justified by experience. From 1640 till after the incorporation of the city in 1784, 144 years passed, during which but a single highway was added to the original streets of the town. Again it is noticeable that the limits of the city for nearly 70 years after its incorporation and about 220 years from its settlement, did not exceed the distributed and settled portion of the town in 1640. In other words, the territory possessed and actually occupied by families in 1640, sufficed them and their descendants for over 200 years. It was not till 1853 that the population, then about 20,000, had so outgrown the original settlement that the city limits were extended. The early settlers, possibly comprising 600 souls, had laid out ample house room and highways for 20,000 inhabitants. During the last thirty years we have striven to imitate the foresight of our ancestors, and have laid out streets enough to provide for the growth of the next 200 years. The city and town are now conterminous. But it is well to bear in mind that as late as 1853 the city — and I speak of the orig- inal city and the original town plot as identical in area — 30 comprised only about one-tenth of the area of the town. It did not include the whole of the Union depot, the site of the jail, and the hospital, nor any land below the South green. None of these old streets originally bore the names they do at present* Main street was the " Road from Centinel hill to the Palisado ; Front street — " Road from Little River to North Meadows ; " Trumbull street — " Centinel hill to Seth Grant's house ; " Pearl street was the " Road from the meeting-house to the mill ; " Arch, Wells, Sheldon, and Elm streets were " Highways by the Little River." What is now State street extended only to Front street. The highway to Boston and the East led through Ferry street to the " land- ing," and a flat-boat ferry was the only means of crossing Connecticut River till the first toll bridge was completed in 1 8 1 1 .• Prospect street, though shown on the map as " Meeting House Lane," was originally only a foot-path, and was not laid out as a highway till 1787. Within mv own recollection, large, flat pieces of sandstone have been found at different spots along the street, apparently part of an ancient walk from Thomas Hooker's house to the meeting-house. One street, shown on the map, has been discontinued. It led from North Main street, westerly to the brick kiln, or Brick hill, crossing High street not far from Walnut street. A few years ago, in excavating High street, a section of this road was clearly discernible about four feet below the present surface. The central spot of the city so long known to us as State House Square was much more of a square when it was first called " Meeting-House Yard" by the settlers. It was then a rectangle, at least a third greater in area than at present. Encroachments upon it began at a very early date. The first burying-ground was located on this square — tradition says near the northeast corner, on what was afterwards the Law- *One of the first acts of the City, after its incorporation in 1784. was to name the streets. Pearl street, from Main to Trumbull, was "Prison street"; west of Trumbull, " Work House Lane "; Trumbull was " Back street"; the south- ern portion was "Maiden Lane"; Arch street was "School"; Sheldon street, " Water " ; Elm street, " Tanner's street," etc., etc. 3i rence property ; not far from this was the Jail ; and near the southeast corner, the market. A market-house stood there until about 1829; and that vicinity has only just ceased — if it has ceased — to be a market place for hay, straw, and wood. Before 1640 it was seen that the burying-ground on the square was insufficient and ill-located ; and in that year the town purchased of " Richard Olmsted, parcel of his Lot for a Burying Place," which continued to this century to be the principal burial ground of the town. This is the cem- etery in the rear of this church, and it at first extended to Main street, including the site of this house and the lecture- room, and of the buildings next north. Probably interments were made occasionally on private grounds. The monu- ment of Dr. Norman Morison, who died in 1761, and was buried in his own garden, still stands in front of St. Paul's church on Market street, with that of another of his family. The town retained for a long time the banks of Little River for mills sites and public uses, but afterwards (1780 to 1820) leased some of the land for long terms, at what we now consider a nominal rent. Most, if not all these leases, were assigned by the town in 1824 to Trinity, then Washington College, as an inducement to its location in Hartford ; and the college still collects the rents, where the leases have not been extinguished or transferred. I cannot discover that any land in the town is now in the possession of the descendants of the original owners, having been continuously in the possession of the family. Some, through female heirs, may possibly be so held. The property No. 459 Main street, has been for many generations in the Talcott family, but it does not appear to have belonged orig- inally to John Talcott. His home lot was on the opposite side of Main street, and Talcott street was laid out through it by Samuel Talcott in 1761. The adjacent land was dis- tributed to his daughter Mary, who married James Watson of N. Y. By her, Talcott street was widened in 1800, and in 1 8 14 her interest in the land was sold. A part of the old building on the south corner of Main and Talcott street, 32 is reputed to have been built by John Talcott in 1646, and to be the oldest existing building in town. With these few scraps of historical topography, I invite you to examine the map, so clearly and handsomely enlarged from Mr. Porter's diagram, by one of our number, Mr. Solon P. Davis. A picture of the Rev. Joel Hawes which hung near the desk was then unveiled, and Mr. Cone said : " This portrait of the Rev. Dr. Hawes is to be presented to this church and society by Rev. Dr. Henry J. Van Lennep, his son-in-law, whose health does not permit him to be present to-day. His son, Mr. E. J. Van Lennep, will take this opportu- nity in behalf of his father to present it." He said: It is my privilege to represent one who was for many years intimately connected with this church. By no one could the news of this anniversary have been received with greater pleasure than by Dr. Van Lennep, and it is indeed a disap- pointment to him that he is not able to be with you to-day. It was in the chapel of this church that he was received into Christian fellowship, when a lad of sixteen years, by your beloved pastor, Dr. Hawes. And as your representative he went, a few years later, to his life work in the service of foreign missions. During his thirty years of missionary life in Turkey, he always felt that the members of this church were among his warmest friends and supporters. From the Christian fellowship of this church also Mrs. Van Lennep went to the mission field, and her family, the family of the Rev. Isaac Bird, were for many years associated with you in Christian work here in Hartford. Bound to you by such strong ties and hallowed memories, they rejoice in the evidences of your continued vigor and prosperity. Although this portrait came into the possession of Dr. Van Lennep in accordance with the wish of Dr. and Mrs. Hawes, yet he has always felt that when a fitting occasion offered, it should be presented to the church in whose behalf Dr. Hawes labored so faithfully and well. 33 You are to enjoy the privilege of listening to several emi- nent men who have in times past occupied the important position of pastors of this church ; and in the course of a historical sketch the lives of their predecessors will pass before you. The portrait which I now have the honor to present, will, however, serve to give greater vividness to some of the scenes over which Dr. Hawes presided. With this devoted servant of the Center Church are associated cherished memories which the sight of these familiar fea- tures will undoubtedly recall to the minds of many here present. And when the young look upon this kindly face, may they be told of the earnest words that fell from his lips, of the warm heart that ever sympathized with youth, and led so many into the fold of Christ. Often and earnestly has this good man invoked the bless- ing of God upon his hearers, and signally have you been blessed in the past. May the same blessing rest upon and abide with you ever more. Rev. Dr. Walker in behalf of the church received the portrait, and in returning thanks for it, alluded to the fact that of the older pastors there were but two whose portraits were extant, Drs. Strong and Hawes. Thursday Afternoon. tr^cu^^u/^LJte^^ THE HISTORICAL ADDRESS. BY GEORGE LEON WALKER, PASTOR. I A historical discourse has been announced as one of the features of this celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the First Church of Christ in Hartford. But the attempt to tell the story of two and a half centuries at a single sitting of an afternoon congregation, is much like depicting the course of the Connecticut river on the page of a school-boy's atlas. The map-maker indeed undertakes the attempt, and succeeds after a manner. But it is by heroically ignoring all minor details and confining his notice only to the main features of mountain headland and long river-sweep and abrupt bend and general direction and losing necessarily thereby almost all the beauty and a chief part of the truth of the object he attempts to delineate. Still a school-chart of the Connecticut is better than no map of it at all, and a des- perately foreshortened account of this Church's experiences may be preferable to none. I am comforted, furthermore, in forecasting the deficiencies of the present discourse, by remembering that other papers, to be presented on special topics connected with our Church, will in a considerable degree supplement those deficiences, and discharge me of any present obligation to refer at length to the matters with which they are particularly to deal. Nor can it I think be inappropriate for me also to say, that fore- seeing the inevitable limitations of an anniversary discourse to tell adequately the tale which ought to be told, I have already in a state of large readiness for the press, and hope before many months to complete and to publish, a more detailed narrative of this First Church's history than any 38 such occasion as this would give hearing for. And I refer to this the more freely at this time, as affording me opportu- nity to add that some statements of the present discourse, which may be more or less unexpected or counter to state- ments heretofore made by others, I shall in those more leis- urely pages undertake to verify ; leaving them here simply as statements, invoking only a suspension of judgment till the promised evidence be produced. It is therefore but to a very compressed and birds-eye view of this story of two hundred and fifty years, that I now a little while invite you. On the nth of October, .1633, Rev. Thomas Hooker and Rev. Samuel Stone, both ministers of repute in England, who had landed in Boston from the same ship which brought Rev. John Cotton and Mr. John Haynes the 14th of Sep- tember previous, were ordained, respectively, Pastor and Teacher of a Church of Christ at Newtown, now Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Church over which they were thus set had in all probability been organized at an earlier day, and quite likely the previous autumn, as the congregation who mainly composed it had been established in a house of wor- ship "with a bell upon it" in Newtown sometime in 1632. This probable earlier period of church-gathering accounts for Winthrop's silence respecting any such important event as the gathering of the Church, in his account of the ordination of its officers, and corresponds with Johnson's designation of it as the eighth in order in New England ; a position in rela- tion to others of which there appears no adequate evidence that this Church should be deprived, and which carries its birthday some months, and perhaps a year, back of that first distinctly recorded date which we celebrate to-day. The silence of Winthrop respecting the institution of any other officers than the Pastor and Teacher, makes the suggestion reasonable that William Goodwin, who had arrived with sev- eral other prominent members of the Church on September 16th of 1632; had been inducted into his office of Ruling Elder at a previous date, and perhaps at the formation of the Church. 39 But whenever gathered, this Newtown Church doubtless proceeded substantially after the same manner as did the other early churches of Massachusetts Bay. These churches were all of them formed of men and women who had been members of the English Establishment. Few of them had been, in their own land, distinctly Separatists in principle. Many of them could have lived always in the communion of the church of their birth, if a few points of its polity could have been reformed in consonance with their convictions. They were Puritans, not Separates. Still, three thousand miles of watery distance, and the homogeneous quality of a wilderness society, were great facts which could not be with- out influence in shaping the new ecclesiastical framework of their religious life. The example, and the direct influence also of the avowedly Separatist church of Plymouth, had not been inoperative. In the gathering of the church of Salem in 1629, which in a manner set a pattern for all the others in the Bay, that agency is distinctly traceable. And in the case of this particular Newtown Church it is quite certain, furthermore, that however it may have been with the mem- bership in general, the Pastor had come from his exile in Holland, and the Teacher from his Puritan Lectureship in England, with quite definitely pronounced convictions of the competency of every congregation of Christian people to constitute themselves into a church, and to appoint the officers they supposed demanded by Scripture. The particular manner of this self-erection of a band of Christians into a church body-politic, was the solemn adop- tion of a Covenant, by which visible document of agreement and sacred confederation, the signers regarded themselves as made into a Church of Christ, having all necessary powers of admission, discipline, choice of officers, and ordination of them to their appointed work. The form of words constituting the Newtown church- covenant is unknown. It has shared the fatality which has buried the entire documentary records of this Church's first 4 o fifty-two years — the most important years to have preserved — in oblivion. What its phraseology, what the nature of its stipulations, who precisely were its signers, how many, in what order, how nearly it may have agreed with formulas which appear from time to time on the records subsequently, in substantial identity, till the adoption, within the lifetime of some of its present membership, of a formal Confession of Faith and Covenant, of modern and somewhat clumsy type, in 1822 — all these things are to a degree uncertain. The document, however, was not likely to be essentially different from several others of that period which time has spared to us, and of which the covenant of the Boston church, adopted about two years before, is an example. And the names of the signers, at least the male portion of them, can be, for the greater part, sufficiently determined from contem- poraneous and shortly subsequent civil records. The signers were a company of men and women mainly from a region a little to the north and east of London, and chiefly from the county of Essex, who with a few others joined with them had left England under the primary impulse of a desire for liberty to worship and serve God as conscience commanded them. They had to some considerable extent been acquainted with one another, and especially with the Pastor newly ordained over them ; having lived, many of them, in the near vicinage of Braintree and Chelmsford where his fame was a household word. The strengthening spirit of prelatical authority significantly represented in the person of Arch- bishop Laud, who as bishop of London had a considerable time held them under his severe diocesan sway, left them little hope that the liberties they had come to deem essential to Christ's freemen could any longer have scope in Eng- land. One after another of the ancient Papistic usages which they supposed the Reformation to have abolished was reimposed upon them by the harmoniously co-operant author- ity of the bishop and the king. One after another of their 41 accepted preachers was silenced and exiled. Some of them were imprisoned and pilloried. The prospect for themselves and their children was darkening daily. It is not strange that in this condition of affairs they turned to the New World as their only hope. Some time in 1632 a considerable number of them left their homes, and, arrived in New England, began "to sit down at Mt. Wollaston " in the township now known as Quincy. These were by " order of court," in August of that year, removed to Newtown. Governor Winthrop, in record- ing the event on the 14th of the month, calls them by the double appellation of the " Braintree Company " and " Mr. Hooker's Company." Mr. Hooker was then in Holland and did not arrive for thirteen months afterward, which of itself suggests the fact corroborated in other ways, that the people gathered in the Newtown church-fellowship were a special companionship, having, many of them, recognized relations of obligation and expectancy, long before he arrived, to the Pastor who was on the nth of October, 1633, set over them. The Pastor who at that time was " ordained " was a man who had already exercised a ministry of thirteen or more years, had received Episcopal ordination in the English Church, and had stood in practical pastoral connection with several Christian congregations. His transcendent abilities and his fatherly relationship to this Church and colony demand that even in a cursory sketch like the present, some space be given to his imposing figure. Thomas Hooker was born at the little township of Marfield, in Leicester Co., England; it is believed on July 7, 1586. The parish records of Tilton parish-church, to which Marfield ecclesiastically belongs, are non-existent previous to 1610, and do not therefore contain the entry of his baptism. They contain, however, the record of the burial of his father, mother, and eldest brother ; which last, dying childless, and leaving bequests to his brother Thomas' sons in America, causes the name henceforth to vanish from Tilton memorials. Marfield is a little hamlet of only five houses (having had 6 42 six twenty-two years before Hooker's birth) lying in a pleasant valley a mile and a half north from Tilton hill. With the exception of the one vanished dwelling, some old oak timbers of which still remain, the scene is probably not appreciably different from what it was when looked at through young Thomas' eyes. Still the sweet fields smile with luxuriant harvests around, and still the most prominent object to arrest the eye is the stately church of St. Peter's at " Tilton super moutem" whose peal of six bells rings out now as it did then from the arches of its beautiful spire. In this really noble church edifice, rising above the thatch-covered village that clusters about the crown of the hill on which it stands, and tenanted here and there by monumental effigies of great personages of the parish back to early in the twelfth century, young Hooker doubtless was baptized, in the font which can still be seen, and gained his earliest impressions of public worship. From his humble home at Marfield he went at about fourteen years of age to the newly established preparatory school of Market-Bosworth, about twenty-five miles west- ward from his birthplace. It was probably while he was at this school, and about a year before leaving it for the university, that the great and termagant Queen Elizabeth died, and the uncouth and polemic James succeeded to the monarchy. Cotton Mather says Hooker's parents " were neither unable nor unwilling to bestow upon him a liberal education," which may in part be true ; but he was matriculated " Sizar " of Queen's College, Cambridge, on March 27, 1604, the title signifying a certain inferiority at least, of pecuniary resources. He was however, soon, at some unascertainable date, trans- ferred to Emmanuel college, where he took his degree A. B., in January, 1608, and A. M. in 161 1. Here at Emmanuel, in the very focus of Puritanism in that most exciting period, he resided as undergraduate and afterward as Fellow on Sir Wolstan Dixie's foundation, from about his eighteenth to his twenty-eighth or thirtieth and 43 possibly even thirty-second year. These were great years in English history. They covered the events of the gunpowder plot, the exile of Robinson and his Scrooby church to Hol- land, the forcing of Episcopacy by the whilom Presbyterian James into Scotland, the dissolution of James' parliaments, the negotiations for the marriage of prince Charles with the Spanish Infanta, the execution of Raleigh, the outbreak of the Protestant and Catholic struggle of the Thirty-years' war, the planting of Plymouth Colony in America. But somewhere in this period came to Hooker a greater personal event than any of them, his individual spiritual con- version. This experience was preceded and accompanied in his case with the intensest perturbations of soul, which probably lent something of vigor, and it may be of somber- ness and severity, to some of his after religious views of the necessary processes of spiritual change. He appears after this transcendent event in his history, to have fulfilled certain catechetical and lecturing functions at the university ; but about 1620 he became rector of the dona- tive parish of Esher in Surrey, a little place sixteen miles west from London. Here he married his wife Susannah, a " waiting gentlewoman " of a Mr. Drake who was the donor of the parish living. From hence, after some ineffectual attempts to secure his establishment at Colchester in Essex, he went, apparently sometime in 1625 or 1626 to Chelmsford, also in Essex, as Lecturer at St. Mary's church, of which Rev. John Michael- son was rector. These Puritan lectureships were an out- growth of the religious movement of the age, and were designed to secure a more efficient preaching service than could often be had from the legal incumbent of the parish. From this beautiful church of St. Mary's, Hooker's influence radiated through all the adjacent country. Throngs flocked from all quarters to listen to his words. His personal power over those brought in conference with him was immense. These facts soon attracted the attention of Laud, then bishop of the diocese, and Mr. Hooker was forced, sometime 44 late in 1629, against the remonstrance in his behalf of a large body of Conformist ministers of Essex county, to lay down his ministry. Thus silenced, he removed from Chelms- ford to Little Baddow, four miles away, and taught a school, having John Eliot, afterwards the Apostle Eliot and who was converted in his family, as assistant. But his influence still haunted the region. Conference with him was still possible and was dreaded by the authorities. Sometime early in 1630 he was cited to appear before the High Commission court, but convinced of the bodily danger of doing so, he forfeited his bonds with the consent of his sureties, and after a narrow escape from his pursuers got off for Holland. Arrived in Holland Mr. Hooker preached temporarily at Amsterdam, then nearly two years at Delft, and afterward awhile at Rotterdam. Here he united with the celebrated Dr. Ames in the authorship of a volume, published in 1633, entitled " A Fresh Suit against Human Ceremonies in God's Worship." While thus laboring in Holland, overtures were made to him by some of his former Essex County hearers to accompany or follow them into America. Attempts were made to join him with Rev. John Cotton in the same enter- prise. These attempts failed, but overtures being success- fully made to another to become his assistant, Mr. Hooker crossed to England, narrowly escaped arrest, embarked on the Griffin, and on Sept. 4, 1633, reached Boston, whence he soon joined the waiting flock at Newtown, with the Apostolic salutation, " Now I live if ye stand fast in the Lord." The other minister who was secured as assistant to Mr. Hooker in the New England enterprise was Rev. Samuel Stone. Mr. Stone was born at Hertford (commonly pro- nounced Harford), in Hertfordshire, England, and baptized at the church of All Saints, July 30, 1602. He was probably prepared for the university at Hale's Grammar School in his native town, and was matriculated pensioner at Emmanuel College, April 19, 1620. He took his A.B. degree in 1624, and his A.M. in 1627. These university years of Stone, also, were great years in English history. They saw the 45 departure of the Pilgrims, the accession of Charles First, the marriage with Henrietta Maria, the reception of Laud as the King's chief ecclesiastical adviser, the levy of Charles' first forced loan, the degradation of Chief Justice Crewe, the disastrous issue of the siege of Rochelle. After leaving the university, Mr. Stone studied divinity awhile in the very peculiar and interesting theological school of Rev. Richard Blackerby, an eminent Puritan divine, who " not being capable of a benefice because he could not subscribe," amid a good deal of tribulation, boarded and educated divinity students for twenty-three years. From this school, at Aspen in Essex, Stone went, in 1630, as Puritan lecturer to Towcester in Northamptonshire, recommended thereto by Thomas Shepard, some years after- ward Mr. Hooker's son-in-law and pastor of the church at Newtown which was formed after the departure of this Church to Hartford. It was while successfully occupying this Tow- cester lectureship, and doubtless in view of his recognized learning and powers, that the proposals were made to Mr. Stone which brought him into connection with Mr. Hooker and with the Church to which he was to bear the relation of Teacher. A quick-witted, resourceful, able man, his adroit- ness saved Mr. Hooker from arrest just before their embarka- tion, and there is no evidence that their intimate relationship was not an occasion of satisfaction to them always. Set thus in their appointed positions as practical and doc- trinal expounders of the Gospel, and ordained probably by the laying on of the hands of William Goodwin, and some two or three lay brethren of the Church, and having chosen Andrew Warner, and possibly some one beside, Deacon, the Newtown Church was, after the Congregational way, a fully equipped organization, and was ready for the Lord's work. And when autumnal days really settled down in 1633 upon the little town, William Wood, writing this same year, was able to describe the Newtown village as " one of the neatest and best compacted towns in New England." But Newtown was not destined to be long the home of this 4 6 Christian companionship. There was, all along from very near the arrival of the Griffin's company with Mr. Hooker, Mr. Cotton, Mr. Haynes, and Mr. Stone, a certain uneasiness in respect to the Newtown location, all the causes of which are somewhat difficult to trace, but which are more or less distinctly indicated in various documentary records. It was only seven months after the induction of Mr. Hooker into the pastorate, that the people of " Newtown complained, May, 1634, of straitness for want of land, espe- cially meadow, and desired leave of the Court to look out either for enlargement or removal." Unadjusted at this time, the matter again came before the Court in September, at which time the argument for removal, and to Connecticut as the objective point, had reached this degree of definiteness in statement: " 1. Their want of accommodation for their cattle, so as they were not able to maintain their ministers, nor could receive any more of their friends to help them. . . . 2. The fruitfulness and commodiousness of Connecticut, and the danger of having it possessed by others, Dutch or English. 3. The strong bent of their spirits to remove thither." The matter was excitedly discussed. The very " reverend and godly " William Goodwin, the Ruling Elder of the congregation at Newtown," was rebuked for " unreverend speech " in open Court. A grant of enlargement, embracing the territory now known as the towns of Brookline, Brighton, Newtown, and Arlington was made. There was hoped to be an amicable adjustment. But it did not last. The " strong bent " of the Newtown people's spirits to " remove " continued. The territorial ques- tion could not have been the only question. They were perhaps a hundred and twenty families. The population on the same soil is now upwards of seventy thousand souls. Other causes than lack of ground in five townships to pas- ture the few cattle of Newtown's third summer, must have conspired to create this restlessness. What were they? The historian Hubbard, writing within fifty years of these events, and Dr. Benjamin Trumbull in his account long sub- 47 sequently of the death of Mr. Haynes, both intimate that considerations respecting the relative influence of the chief leaders of the two towns, Boston and Newtown (Winthrop and Cotton in the one, and Haynes and Hooker in the other) had something more to do with the matter than territorial ones. Some good people have been quite horrified at this. But horrifying or not this was probably the case. Nor do I see anything in it to apologize for. The New- town people were in a remarkable degree a homogeneous company, acquainted with one another and with their Pastor in the old country. The came into the pre-existing commu- nity of the Bay with something of the distinct character of a body corporate. Their views of civil policy were from the outset somewhat different from their's who preceded them. Mr. Cotton and Mr. Hooker were too positively marked characters, however friendly, always wholly to harmonize ; and there were some special provocations, if not to jealousy at least to willingness to move in less closely parallel paths, attending the tumult made in the colony about " Mr. Cotton his sitting down," who had been once applied to as Mr. Hooker's assistant or colleague in the American enterprise. Add to this, that already, in 1635, the theological differ- ences, which afterward developed into such prominence over the views of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, and in reference to which Cotton and Hooker were to a degree antagonized, began to show some of their earlier and unhappy results, and it is not strange that with the sense of competency to their own affairs within them, and the sight of the sweet meadows of the Connecticut a hundred miles away alluring them, their " strong bent " to go should at last prevail. It did prevail. Some of them came in the autumn of 1635, suffering immense hardship in the following winter of prolonged and almost unparalleled severity. But the greater part delayed their pilgrimage till spring. They sold their Newtown habitations to the congregation of Rev. Thomas Shepard, who occupied the vacated village. 4 8 And on the thirty-first of May, 1636, they set out on their journey. It is the season in our New England climate when the landscape has just burst into verdure. The streams run full with the melted snows of winter. The ground is spotted with the anemone and wild violet. The days are alive with promise, but the nights, though short, are damp and chill. The Newtown pilgrims struck out into the unpathwayed woods. Their guides were the compass and the northern star. Evening by evening they made camp and slept senti- neled by the blazing fires. One of their number, the pastor's wife, was carried on a litter because of her infirmity. The lowing of a hundred and sixty cattle sounding through the forest aisles, not to mention the bleating of goats and the squealing of swine, summoned them to each morning's advance. The day began and ended with the voice of prayer. At some point of their fortnight's journey a Sabbath intervened, when the camp rested and the people listened to the exhorta- tions of their ministers and joined in solemn psalm. Their toilsome and devious way led them near the mouth of the Chicopee, close by where now stands Springfield. Thence was a comparatively easy pathway. Meadow lands were in sight always. The wide, full river, flowing with a larger tide than now, was crossed on rafts and rude constructed boats ; and on the soil where we now stand, cheered by the sight of some pioneer attempts at settlement made by those of their num- ber who had come the season previous, the Ark of the First Church of Hartford rested, and the weary pilgrims who bore it hither stood still. Arrived upon the grounds one of the earliest transactions of the new comers was the purchase of the land from the Indians. This seems to have been done in 1636, and Rev. Samuel Stone and Elder William Goodwin were the agents in the negotiation. The territory embraced in the purchase was about coincident with the territory subsequently known as the township of Hartford. 49 The portion needed for the immediate uses of the little village was parceled out into lots covering most of the older portions of this city : those assigned to the Pastor, the Teacher, and the Ruling Elder fronted on the Little River ; Mr. Goodwin's being on the corner of what is now Arch and Main Streets ; Mr. Stone's next eastward, and Mr. Hooker's beyond Mr. Stone's. Dea. Andrew Warner's lot lay across the Little River opposite Mr. Stone's. The central point of interest in an ecclesiastical point of view was of course the Meeting-House. This was situated on Meeting-House Yard, a tract of territory covering the ground now known as State House Square, and of somewhat larger extent, especially on the northern and southern sides. Here, somewhere on the portion now covered by the build- ings of Central Row, a temporary structure first afforded a meeting place for public worship. This, within about four years, gave place to another destined to fill its purpose nearly one hundred years, situated on the east side of the square, near the corner made by the road leading down to the Con- necticut River ; a spot coinciding nearly enough with the vacant space just west of the American House or its Hall. Not far from the meeting-house, on the same public square, were those other more secular conservators of public welfare, the jail, the stocks, and whipping-post. The first burial place of the dead — for men and women would die amid all the hopes of a new colony on a fresh planted continent — lay on the northerly side of Meeting-House Yard, westward upon or above the site of the present City Building. The spot was formerly higher than now, and its leveling removed alike monuments and graves. The first rude church, however, was hardly built and the plain dwellings of the pilgrims made habitable, before it became necessary to fight for home and life. It was only May, 1637, when the expedition against the Pequots, led by Captain John Mason, took place ; a really heroic and notable enterprise, in which Mr. Stone went with the small army as chaplain, while Mr. Hooker as an encouragement declared 7 5o to the departing brothers and sons of the anxious little com- monwealth, that " the Pequots should be bread for them." The result was as the Pastor prophesied, and the Pequot's power was permanently broken. It a little revolts modern feeling, however, to find Mr. Ludlow and Mr. Pynchon and several other presumably good Christians carrying to Boston shortly after, the skins and scalps of the vanquished " Sassacus and his brother, and five other Pequot sachems, who, being fled to the Mohawks for shelter . . . were by them surprised and slain." Even in that hard age there was one man, Roger Williams, who said, " Those dead hands were no pleasing sight." But even the exigencies of war and wilderness could not divert the attention of those pioneers of the church from questions of theology. On the fifth of August following the Pequot slaughter in May, Mr. Hooker and Mr. Stone arrived in Boston, through the forests from Hartford — or Newtown, as Hartford was still called in accordance with the Massachusetts name — to attend an ecclesiastical council concerning the peculiar doc- trines promulgated by Mrs. Anne Hutchinson and her brother- in-law, Mr. Wheelwright, which had thrown the Bay Colony in general, and Boston church in particular, into ferment. Mr. Ludlow, Mr. Pynchon, and others who carried the Pequot skins and scalps along with them, went as delegates on the same business. The churches of the entire colony were turmoiled. Mr. Wilson, pastor of the Boston church, and Mr. Cotton, its teacher, had for some months been regarded as taking differ- ent sides. Public fasts had been appointed in January and July previous, in view of the dissensions in the churches. In May, some of the Massachusetts soldiers, called out in the Pequot matter, had declined to go with Mr. Wilson as chaplain, alleging that he was " under a covenant of works." The civil government had shifted hands on the issues involved, Governor Vane losing his election and returning to England. In this condition of things a Synod was called, 5i to which the representatives of the scarce-rooted Connecticut churches went. The sessions lasted twenty-two days. Rev. Peter Bulkley of Concord and Mr. Hooker of Hartford were moderators. As a result of the deliberations, eighty-two opinions more or less intimately connected with Mrs. Hutchinson's teachings were condemned as, "some, blas- phemous, others erroneous, and all unsafe." It was further resolved with special reference to Mrs. Hutchinson's Bible- reading meetings, that though females meeting " some few together" for prayer and edification might be allowed, yet that " a set assembly where sixty or more did meet every week, and one woman took on her the whole exercise " was " disorderly and without rule." The assembly broke up on the 22d of September, and so Mr. Hooker and Mr. Stone had chance to go back to Hartford after more than two months' absence, during which time, doubtless, Ruling Elder Good- win had "exercised by way of prophecy" in their place. The following year, 1638, witnessed the preliminary pro- ceedings, very imperfectly recorded, of the formulation of that body of Fundamental Law, drawn up at the direction of the Court by Roger Ludlow, which has been called by Dr. Leonard Bacon the "first written constitution in the history of nations." But our chief interest in the matter on this occasion is not a historic one, looked at from the point of civil admin- istration. The interest as connected with this Church is two-fold. It is, first, that the form of government here in distinct prescription established, was simply an extension to the domain of secular affairs of the principles already adopted in religious matters — the mutual covenant and agreement of those associated, as under God the ultimate law. And second, and more particularly, because of the agency in establishing this principle, of the wise and far-sighted Pastor of this Church. We are indebted for the discovery of defin- ite evidence of this agency, to the skill and research of our distinguished antiquarian townsman, Dr. J. H. Trumbull. The evidence lay undiscovered more than two and a quarter cen- turies in a little almost undecipherable manuscript volume, 52 written by a young man in our neighbor town of Windsor. In it is found an abstract of Mr. Hooker's lecture given on May 31, 1638. The doctrine laid down in the discourse is, "That the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God's own allowance. . . . That they who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their power, also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power and place to which they call them." The preacher declares that "the foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people ; " and the "use" which he derived from the principles laid down was an exhortation to take the liberty they had in their power. Dr. Bacon says, " That sermon by Thomas Hooker from the pulpit of the First Church of Hartford is the earliest known suggestion of a fundamental law, enacted not by royal charter, nor by concession from any previously existing government, but by the people themselves — a primary and supreme law by which the government is constituted, and which not only provides for the free choice of magistrates by the people but also ' sets the bounds and limitations of the power and place to which ' each magistrate is called." Eight months later the Fundamental Laws embodying these princi- ples were "sentenced, ordered, and decreed." It is impossi- ble not to recognize the Master-hand. It diminishes nothing of the proper honor of Roger Ludlow to say that the Pastor of the Hartford Church was Connecticut's great legislator also. In the May following the adoption of the new Constitution in January, 1639, Mr. Hooker and Mr. Haynes, the governor, were in Boston on the business of a treaty of confederation with Massachusetts ; and the same year saw the organization of the church at New Haven, where the tradition is that Mr. Hooker and Mr. Stone were present as representatives of the Hartford Church. Meanwhile events were onmoving in England. The par- liament, known as the Long Parliament, began its session in 1640. Laud, who had been the chief agent in driving out of 53 the old country a large part of the ministers in the new, was himself imprisoned in 1641. The king or the parliament was to break. The ecclesiastical constitution shared the general disorder. Presbyterianism, Episcopacy, Independency, were all eagerly contended for, though by parties having very unequal numerical strength. In this state of affairs a General Assembly was ordered by Parliament, and being contemplated the American exiles were not forgotten. Mr. Cotton of Boston, Mr. Davenport of New Haven, and Mr. Hooker of Hartford, were sent to by the Earl of Warwick, Oliver Cromwell, and some thirty-seven other Independent members of parliament, to " assist in the synod." Mr. Cotton and Mr. Davenport inclined to go. Mr. Hooker, with characteristic sagacity discerning the numerical weakness of the Independent interest in the assembly as it was actually constituted, declined. The matter fell through with all the American divines, and the event proved anew the accuracy of the Hartford Pastor's judgment. The English Assembly issued a Presbyterian platform. This fact gave new encouragement to a few eminent minis- ters in Massachusetts colony whose views favored that form of church policy. Fearful of the spread of such views to the subversion of the " congregational way," it was deemed best to hold a synod in Cambridge to emphasize Independent principles. The synod met in September, 1643, and was com- posed of "all the elders in the country," about fifty in number. Here again, as in 1637, Mr. Hooker, joined this time with Mr. Cotton, was one of the moderators. But apparently the conclusions were not conclusive. The party of Presbyterianism grew. A meeting was held at Cambridge, July 1, 1645, at which it was agreed to send over to England for publication certain books in reply to the Presbyterian arguments, which had been written by ministers here. Among these books were Davenport's answer to Paget known as the " Power of Congregational Churches," and Hooker's " Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline " in reply to Rutherford's " Due Right of Presbyteries." The 54 first copies of these books were lost in the vessel which sailed from New Haven in January, 1646, and never heard of more, save in the phantom of it which appeared two years and five months afterward, and which John Davenport declared was sent for the comfort of surviving friends of the vanished crew. The books, thus lost, were laboriously rewritten, again sent, and published ; Hooker's, however, not printed till after his death. Of Mr. Hooker's Survey of Church Discipline it can here only be said, that with far more of erudition and histori- cal learning, it divides with John Cotton's " Keyes " the place of chief authority in early Congregational literature. By May of 1646, the peril of a subversion of ecclesiastical usages seemed so great that Massachusetts summoned the synod which had passed into history as the Cambridge Synod, and the promulgator of the Platform of that name. The synod met on the 1st of September, for its first fort- night's session. Mr. Stone was present, but Mr. Hooker was not there. He wrote a letter to his son-in-law Shepherd excusing himself on account of age and infirmities. The synod adjourned until June 8th of the following year. Regathered at that date it was almost immediately adjourned again by reason of an epidemic throughout New England. The sickness was very severe in Hartford. Many of the citizens died of it. One of them Treasurer William Whit- ing. But its most shining mark was the Pastor of this Church. Governor Winthrop in his diary records : " That which made the stroke more sensible and grievous both to them [of Connecticut] and to all the country was the death of that faithful servant of the Lord, Mr. Thomas Hooker, pastor of the church in Hartford, who for piety, prudence, wisdom, zeal, learning, and what else might make him serviceable in the place and time he lived in, might be com- pared with men of greatest note ; and he shall need no other praise ; the fruits of his labors in both Englands shall pre- serve an honorable and happy remembrance of him for ever." This wise and eloquent eulogy cannot receive at this time, and needs scarcely at any time, any amplification. Some 55 twenty-three volumes, mainly of sermons and expositions, remain to us from Mr. Hooker's hand. They give us, in their vivacity, pungency, and power, a little glimpse of the majestic man. His theology was of the sternest Calvinistic type. He was a " Hopkinsian before Hopkins." But min- gled with all his sternness and strength is a beauty and felicity most unusual to his time, unexampled among his New England associates. In' extent of learning probably none of them but John Norton could compare with him. He was a man of whom it was said that " on the Lord's business he could put a king in his pocket." Mr. Hooker died July 7, 1647, at the age of sixty-one, and it is said on the anniversary of his birth. His mortal part lies mouldered back to dust just behind this church. His memory is that of one of the best and greatest of men. Upon the death of Mr. Hooker the Church does not seem to have contemplated the possibility of long continuing with- out another minister. Mr. Stone was only forty-four years old, but the theory of the dual ministry with which the New England churches had begun, was not yet worn out. So measures were at once taken to secure a successor to the late Pastor. The seed planted in the founding of Harvard College in 1636 had already begun to bear fruit. And the first man to whom the Hartford Church turned was Jonathan Mitchell, still a student there. Mr. Mitchell, however, was not destined to become pastor of the Hartford congregation, although promptly and earnestly invited. He speedily after settled in Cambridge, and died comparatively young, but leaving an illustrious name in New England history. Neither was Michael Wigglesworth so destined, nor John Davis his classmate, nor John Cotton, son of the famous Boston John, who for quite a protracted period lived at Hartford, studied divinity with Mr. Stone, and ministered to the congregation. Michael Wigglesworth's candidacy, at different times in 1653 and 1654 (for such his diary shows it to have been) 56 may, however, be mentioned as probably affording the most distinctly recognizable provoking occasion of the series of events which give to the next few years of this Church's his- tory its chief and melancholy interest. This period, from about six years after Mr. Hooker's death to about four years before the death of Mr. Stone, or from 1654 to 1659 inclu- sive, is remembered mainly for a quarrel in the Hartford Church, of such virulence, contagiousness, and publicity, that it attracted the attention of all the churches in New England, and occupies a large place in every history of early ecclesi- astical affairs in this country. Into the perplexing and prolonged details of this contro- versy it would be utterly impossible to enter on this occasion with any minuteness, though I have elsewhere endeavored to follow it out in all ascertainable accuracy. It is a controversy which Cotton Mather and Dr. Benjamin Trumbull and Dr. Leonard Bacon have all spoken of as obscure, even to the point of being almost incomprehensible. But this conclusion of these eminent historians I am convinced was owing chiefly to two causes. First, a generous unwillingness on their part to recognize the largely personal element in the controversy, arising from the contact and conflict of the two very pro- nounced individualities of Mr. Goodwin and Mr. Stone ; and second and mainly, the absence from their knowledge of the contents of certain documents only comparatively recently discovered and published, which afford help in the solution of the trouble, of the very greatest assistance. It has been customary in the attempts which have been made to explain this unhappy passage in the Church's history, to ascribe a very large agency in it to the agitation of the ques- tions concerning Baptism, and the rights of children of bap- tized persons who were not communicants, — questions which began, certainly, to be mooted before this period, and which not long after this period came to open conflict, resulting in the rupture of this Church in 1670. But it may well be questioned whether the influence of this factor in the quar- rel in Stone's day has not been very much exaggerated, if 57 indeed it can be said to have perceptibly existed at all. Not one of the twenty-one contemporaneous documents, of various object and authorship, among the newly discovered manu- scripts published by the Connecticut Historical Society in 1870, speaks of this matter of Baptism as in any way an issue in debate ; a fact utterly impossible to account for, not to say utterly impossible in itself, had the rights of church- membership based on Baptism been a recognized feature of the controversy. And even a careful reading of the historian Trumbull, who wrote in ignorance of these much-illuminating papers, will show that he conceived the agitation of the Bap- tism question to have been not of the substance of the quar- rel, but, as he says, a matter of " meanwhile," and for which certain parties " took this opportunity." Believing thus that any treatment of the quarrel which resulted in Elder Goodwin's party leaving Hartford for Had- ley, consistent with the documents in the case, must proceed substantially independent of that other discussion concerning baptismal rights which to some extent ran parallel with this, continued after it, and finally resulted in the separation of the Second Church of Hartford from the First, I shall here only indicate in the barest way what sorts of events they were which thus turmoiled the peace, not only of this Zion, but involved in it, all our New England Israel. All accounts agree that the quarrel commenced in an antagonism between Teaching Elder Stone and Ruling Elder Goodwin. There is a high degree of probability that its first recognizable point of outbreak, and perhaps its very occasion, was the refusal of Mr. Stone to allow the Church to vote on Mr. Michael Wigglesworth's " fitness for office in ye 1 church of Hartford," thus infringing, as Mr. Goodwin claimed, on the " rights of the brotherhood." As the quarrel progressed it was attended by such inci- dents as these : the indignant resignation of his office by Mr. Stone, yet his after resumption of its functions as if he had not resigned ; the practical deposition of Mr. Good- win, the Ruling Elder, from his functions by the Church's 58 choice of a "moderator" to preside in its meetings; the withdrawal of Mr. Goodwin and his sympathizers from com- munion with the majority who adhered to Mr. Stone ; the commencement of processes of discipline by the Church against the withdrawing party for so doing ; the summons of an ecclesiastical council, composed of churches of this colony and of New Haven ; and then of another of churches of Massachusetts, their messengers traveling through the far wilderness, before whom each party pleaded its case ; pub- lic days of humiliation and prayer appointed by the Massa- chusetts churches in behalf of the Hartford Church and for the success of the council ; the interposition of the General Court with repeated well-meant and blundering endeavors at reconciliation ; the aggravation rather than the healing of the strife ; the final review of the whole matter and " Deter- mination " thereupon by a council at Boston, after a ten days' session, in September and October, 1659 ; the acceptance of the "sentence" by both parties, and the removal of Elder Goodwin and most of the minority party to Hadley, — these, in the rapidest and most meager outlines, were the main features of the first great quarrel in the Hartford Church. It began, probably, so far as anything visible was a beginning, in a question of personal preference for a pulpit candidate ; it found expression in a dispute touching the official preroga- tive of the two chief officers of the Church ; it broadened out as it went into a controversy concerning the claims of the brotherhood and the rights of a minority, and of the proper methods of securing ecclesiastical redress when those rights •were infringed. It brought up many interesting questions of Congregational order, but the personal element was all along the baffling and potential quantity. Mr. Goodwin was a very able and reverend man. But we remember that before the Church left Massachusetts he had been reproved in open court for his " unreverend speech." And it may be fairly questioned whether the very vigor and pertinacity with which he exercised what he regarded as the proper functions of his ruling eldership, was not one of the 59 most persuasive arguments with the Church for never appoint- ing another. Certainly another never was appointed. Mr. Stone, too, was an exceedingly reverend and able man. But he obviously took very high views of the prerogatives of his office. His conception of ministerial authority belonged more to the period in which he had been educated in Eng- land, than to the new era into which he had come in New England. His own graphic expression, " A speaking aristo- cracy in the face of a silent democracy," is the felicitous phrase which sets forth, at once, the view he took of church government, and the source of all his woes. On the whole, respecting the controversy itself which turmoiled the Church so long, the impartial verdict of history must be that, spite of many irregularities and doubtless a good deal of ill-temper on both sides, the general weight of right and justice was with the defeated and emigrating minority. Mr. Stone survived this passage in his experience about four years. They were years of apparent harmony in the Church and comfort to himself. He was a man of popular qualities and great conversational gifts, but he was also a man of the utmost sincerity and devout piety. The estima- tion in which he was held by his fellow-townsmen is shown in the very name our city bears ; the place of Mr. Stone's birth being chosen, rather than that of any other of its founders, as the name of the new home in the wilderness. He died July 20, 1663, at the same age as his more illustrious companion, Hooker — sixty -one years. And he sleeps beside him in the old cemetery. The year after the adjustment of the long quarrel, and three years before Mr. Stone's death, an associate minister was secured for him in the charge of this Church. Rev. John Whiting was ordained colleague with Mr. Stone, probably in 1660. He was the son of Mr. William Whiting, an early settler of the colony, and its treasurer. He was born in England, in 1635, but was educated at Harvard, graduating in 1653. He preached a while at Salem, Mass., but removed to Hartford to undertake the associate work of this Church of his childhood. 6o During the three years of Mr. Stone's survival, after Mr. Whiting's coming, the new minister seems to have performed the largest part of the work ; but at Mr. Stone's death the people were still too full of the primitive idea of a dual minis- try to think of devolving the work on Mr. Whiting alone. Consequently, almost immediately upon the death of the old Teacher, Rev. Joseph Haynes was invited to an associate ministry with Rev. John Whiting. Mr. Haynes, like Mr. Whiting, was a Hartford man. He was the son of Governor John Haynes ; was born about 1641, and graduated at Harvard College in 1658. He began his joint ministry with Mr. Whiting some time in 1664. Here, then, were two young men — Whiting at his settle- ment was twenty-five, and Haynes at his settlement, four years later, was twenty-three — of common associations and mutual fellowships in town and college, united in the pastoral care of a Church which was the mother of them both. What fairer prospect could appear for a happy and prolonged asso- ciate ministry ? Nevertheless, two years after the settlement of the younger man, we find the two Pastors in open conflict, the Church divided into parties, an ecclesiastical warfare in lively progress, which in less than four years more resulted in the permanent rupture of the body known as the Church of Hartford into two separate religious organizations. A vivid picture of one scene of the drama in June, 1666, just when the sharper phase of the struggle was beginning, is preserved for us by the pen of Rev. John Davenport of New Haven. The curtain lifts on the spectacle of "yong Mr. Heynes" sending " 3 of his partie to tell Mr. Whiting that the next lecture-day he would preach about his way of baptizing, and would begin the practicing of it on that day." Lecture-day came. Mr. Haynes preached. " Water was prepared for Baptism," which Mr. Davenport says, " was never adminis- tered in a weeke day in that church before." But up stood the senior Pastor, Mr. Whiting, and, " as his place and duty required, testifyed against it and refused to consent." A 6r wordy contest began. Rev. John Warham of Windsor, now an old man, and repentant of his seven years' practice of the way of baptizing which he now repudiated, was present, probably by request of the senior Pastor, Mr. Whiting. Pre- suming on the " common concernment to all the churches " of the matter in debate, he attempted to speak, but was " rudely hindered " by the exclamation, " What hath Mr. Warham to do to speake in our church matters." The meet- ing apparently broke up in disorder, but was followed by a challenge from the younger to the older Pastor for a public "dispute about it with Mr. Whiting the next Lecture day," — an ecclesiastical contest which probably came off according to programme, as Mr. Davenport says it was " agreed upon," but of which no account remains to us. This contest between Mr. Whiting and Mr. Haynes about baptism was only an incident in a general conflict of opinion and behavior in the New England churches at large, about this period. The subject can only be treated of on this occasion in the briefest manner. The original theory upon which the churches were gathered on this side of the Atlantic was the personal regenerate character of the membership. " Visible saints only are fit Matter appointed by God to make up a visible Church of Christ," was the language of Mr. Hooker, which may be said to express the generally accepted view of the primitive New England churches. But this view of the only proper constituency of the Christian Church, taken in connection with the very vigorous tests of personal experience which were deemed necessary to mark "visible saints," left a considerable number of people of good moral character, and some of real piety, outside any church fellowship, and destitute of a voice in the selection of a minister, whom nevertheless they were legally bound to support. And it left a growing body of young people in every com- munity who, having been baptized in infancy, were accounted in a manner church-members, but lacking the criteria of conscious regeneration, were deprived not only of an 62 invitation to the Lord's Supper, but of the privilege of presenting their children for baptism. The difficulty was a two-fold one, having reference to adult people never " con- federated" into the churches of New England, yet bound to support their ministers, and to the children of " confederating parents " who came to years of maturity and parenthood without the experiences which were regarded necessary to full participation in church privileges. Quite a number of the ministers of early New England foresaw trouble on this point and were disposed to take such a view of the church, and of the relationship of baptized persons to the church, as would meet at least that part of the difficulty which was experienced by parents who, having been themselves baptized but not admitted to the Lord's Supper, desired baptism for their children. So early as 1634 the church of Boston, under the lead of John Cotton, advised the church of Dorchester that a grandfather might claim baptism for a grandchild, although the intermediate parents were not received into church covenant, — a posi- tion, however, which Mr. Hooker in his Survey distinctly repudiates. And it appears to be in evidence that the Ipswich church, in 1655, put on record a declaration that the children of adult parents " not scandalous " taking the covenant, should have their children baptized. The Dorchester church took similar action the same year. Salem, under the lead of Mr. Norris, debated and conceded the principle (though appar- ently delaying the practice) a year or two earlier still. Connecticut cannot therefore be charged with originating the new departure in enlarging the scope of baptism, although the earliest motion for an authoritative statement upon the subject did come from this colony. The matter was in the air. And the turmoiled condition of the Hartford Church, owing to the long quarrel between its officers, made this question all the more ready to arise. As Dr. Benjamin Trumbull says, " numbers of them took this opportunity to introduce into the Assembly a list of grievances on account of their being denied their just rights and privileges by the 63 ministers and churches." The ever ready General Court listened to the appeal. In February, 1656, it appointed Mr. Warham of Windsor, Mr. Stone of Hartford, Mr. Blinman of New London, and Mr. Russell of Wethersfield, delegates to a ministerial assembly called by Massachusetts at Boston to consider twenty-one questions concerning the matters in debate. The session of the ministers began June 4, 1657, and continued a fortnight. The answers they gave to Con- necticut's twenty-one questions were a substantia] endorse- ment of the claim to baptism and so to church-membership, of all children of baptized parents " not scandalous " who themselves " own the covenant." This virtually carried with it the conclusion of the right of all baptized persons to vote for the minister, and was so far an acceptance of the "parish way " of Old England against the church way of New Eng- land. The findings of the ministers were reported by Mr. Stone to the General Court in August, 1657, and by the Court commended to the consideration of the churches. Mr. Warham and the Windsor church began the practice of half- way covenant baptism the 31st of January following, but gave it up in March, 1665. Nevertheless the churches generally were slow to accept the change. The agitation however continued, and the Synod of 1662 was called in view of it. Neither Connecticut nor New Haven Colonies were represented in this Massachu- setts Synod of 1662, but it ratified by a vote of more than seven to one the principles set forth in the answer given to the tenth of the Connecticut Questions by the Ministerial Assembly of 1657 ; thus setting the endorsement of a Synod of the Churches to what is known as the Half- Way Cove- nant. Encouraged by this sanction and discouraged by the atti- tude of the Hartford Church and other churches in this Colony, an appeal to the General Court was made in October, 1664, by Mr. William Pitkin (a very able, and, there is ample evidence, a sincere and godly man) and several others, which was in effect a claim that, having been baptized members of 6 4 the English National Church, they ought to be accounted on that basis and without further qualifications members of the local New England churches where they resided. The appeal met with sympathy. The Court responded with an intima- tion of readiness to order the churches so to practice " if they doe not practice without such order." It was in effect an explicit notice to the churches that the Government was in favor of the parish way, or, as it had begun to be called, the "Presbyterian way" of a State Church, rather than the way of Robinson and Hooker. It is at about this point that John Davenport lifts the curtain on the Thursday lecture-day scene I spoke of a few minutes ago. Up to this time, as Mr. Davenport declares, "the most of the churches in this jurisdiction" were strong on the old platform of a church consisting of " visible saints " only, and of baptism administered only to children of those in full communion. But the tide was against them, or against the principle on which they stood. For years the influence from over the water at home had been adverse. Presbyte- rianism had beaten Independency in England, and had suc- ceed to about all the " largeness " of Episcopacy, till itself had been superseded by a re-established Episcopal National Church. -♦ " Yong Mr. Heynes " and his party for Synodical authority, the " parish-way" and "large baptism " were obviously in the ascendency. Yet the minority could have no ecclesiastical relief. The law of March, 1658, forbidding all separate church assemblies (enacted to defeat Elder Goodwin's with- drawing party in the old quarrel with Mr. Stone) was still in force, and held Mr. Whiting and those who adhered to the anti-sy nodical, early-congregational way, in subjection to it. The Church and the colony were in a turmoil. The ever meddlesome General Court adopted several ineffectual expe- dients of redress, wearing out in the process two or three uneasy years. In May, 1669, however, apparently at last despairing of settling doctrinal questions by "orders" and "disputes," the Court passed a resolve giving permission to 65 all persons " approved according to law and sound in the fundamental^ of the Christian religion," to " have allowance of their perswasion and profession in church waves." The immediate effect of this action, though the Court had no sympathy with their views, was to open a way of escape from their embarrassment to Mr. Whiting and his minority party in the Hartford Church. On the 226. of February, 1670, he and thirty-one members of this Church with their families withdrew, and formed themselves by the advice of council into the Second Church of Hartford. The platform of principles they adopted is a striking and vigorous statement of original Congregationalism, in opposition to the synodical or Presbyterianizing tendency of the time. It was a noble and timely utterance. But it significantly illustrates how in the process of a controversy the watchwords and the stress of battle often change, that the new church which went off from the old as the representative of old Congregationalism began, on the very day of its organization, to practice half- way covenant baptism. The original question at issue had been the relation to the church of those who, having been baptized in infancy or in England, desired a voice in church action and a part in church privileges. It came, in the six years of struggle, to be a question of, relatively, almost a theoretic interest, concerning synodical authority and self- government. The tide on the baptism question was too strong for any party to resist. Its original opponents abandoned even the attempt. Mr. Whiting continued the honored pastor of the Second Church till his death in 1689. The separation into two societies involved of course an altera- tion on the way of defraying ecclesiastical expenses, all hav- ing previously been done by town vote. Left in charge of this Church Mr. Haynes remained its sole minister. Apparently the experience of the Church had satisfied it with the trial of the dual pastorate. It did not repeat the experiment for a hundred and ninety-two years. Committed to the half-way covenant principle, inclined to favor "large Congregationalism" and synodical super- 9 ?66 vision, the old Church swung with the ^general drift of 'the tide at that day. Mr. Haynes ministered to it till, at the still early age of thirty-eight years, he died May 24, 1679, having served the Church fifteen years; four in connection with Mr. Whiting, and eleven as sole Pastor. He was buried beside his father, the honored governor of the colony, and beside Hooker and Stone, the ministers of his boyhood and youth. Mr. Haynes was succeeded in the pastorate, some time late in 1679 or ear ly m 1680, by Isaac Foster. In the historical sermon preached by Dr. Hawes on June 26, 1836, two hundred years after the arrival of the Newtown Church on its present soil, the preacher says of Isaac Foster: "The late Dr. Strong remarks of him, that 'he was eminent for piety and died young.' " Dr. Hawes adds : " This is the only record that remains of him, and places him among the just whose memory is blessed." Fortunately the developments of time enable us to ascer- tain a little more fully the facts of Mr. Foster's story; though, as his pastorate was short and uneventful, they must be shut up here into the narrowest compass. Has was born, proba- bly in 1652, son of Captain William Foster of Charlestown, Mass. He graduated at Harvard College in 167 1, and in the autumn following was captured by the Turks while on a voyage with his father to Bilboa. Ransomed from captivity in 1673, he held a fellowship for some years at Harvard Col- lege, where his eminent gifts attracted toward him the notice of several churches. Overtures were made to him in behalf of the churches of Charlestown and of Barnstable, Massachu- setts. These, for one reason or another failing, he was, in January, 1679, sounded respecting a call to the pastorate of our neighboring church of Windsor. A curious corre- spondence remains between Rev. John Whiting of the Second Church here, and Increase Mather of Boston, the object of which on Mr. Whiting's part was to find out how Mr. Foster stood on the questions which had so recently divided the Hartford Church. The correspondence cannot 6 7 be quoted here, but it plainly appears that the art of finding out how a man stands on the main theological issues of his time has not made much progress since 1679. Mr. Foster had all the wise caution of a modern candidate for a pulpit in a pretty evenly divided community, yet on the whole leaned to the "large congregational" side. The church at Windsor, however, called him after hearing him preach, and did it with enthusiasm. The matter there, nevertheless, fell through. It fell through, moreover, in curious coincidence with the vacancy in the First Hartford Church, caused just at that time by the death of Mr. Haynes. It seems probable that the leaning of the Windsor church toward the stricter Congregational party, and especially Mr. Foster's candidature in a manner under the surveillance of Mr. Whiting and others representing that party, may not have been altogether accepta- ble to the undoubtedly " pious " but obviously politic young minister; so that as a fact the call to the, just then, stricter Congregational church of Windsor was negatived, and a call to the more "Presbyterially" inclined Church of Hartford was accepted ; and Mr. Whiting had him — instead of a neigh- bor six miles off — a townsman next door. Just when he was invited here, or when he came, cannot be told, all church records up to this period having vanished. But his ministry was short. He died August 21, 1682, in one of those epidemical sicknesses with which early Hartford seems to have been so often afflicted. Mr. Bradstreet of New London, records in his journal: "He was aged about thirty, a man of good Abilyties. His death has made such a breach yt it will not easily be made up." The young Pastor lies with his predecessors. The slab above him records at once his own burial place, and that of his successor ; a successor who not only took his office but married his widow, and so he vanished from among men. The successor who thus doubly came after Mr. Foster was Rev. Timothy Woodbridge. He was the son of Rev. John Woodbridge (himself son of a clergyman of the same 68 name), who was ordained pastor at Andover, Mass., October . 24, 1645 ! DLl t returning to England became minister of Barford St. Martins in Wiltshire, where his son Timothy was baptized, January 1 3, 1656. Ejected from his parish, however, at the Episcopal restoration, he returned to America in 1663, and became an associate with his uncle, Thomas Parker, in the ministry at Newbury. Of young Timothy, who was seven years old on his father's return to America, nothing beyond his baptism is known till his graduation at Harvard College in 1675. Then follow eight years of considerable obscurity respecting him, till he appears at Hartford in 1683, supplying the pulpit "of the first church and congregation formerly under Mr. Isaac Foster's ministry." He was not, however, ordained in the ministry here till November 18, 1685. With Mr. Woodbridge the records of Church and Society first begin, all previous documents distinctly belonging to them having disappeared. The time at which Mr. Woodbridge entered on his ministry was a rather gloomy one. The demoralizing influence of the wars with the Indians where the Indians were hostile, and of intercourse with the Indians where they were friendly, was visible on every side. The operation of the half-way covenant was becoming manifest. The churches were becoming filled with people sufficiently religious to be church-members and impart church-membership to their children, but not religious enough to profess or to have any personal experiences of repentance or faith or to come to the Lord's Supper. Sins of drunkenness and licentiousness were astonishingly prevalent in a community only a few years previous marked by devoutest manners and sternest principles. It was in 1683, the first year of Mr. Woodbridge's preaching at Hartford, that Samuel Stone, the son of the honored former Teacher of this Church, and himself having been a " preacher some years with general acceptance," after a day spent " first at one and then at another taverne," fell into the Little river and was drowned. The general political disturbances which attended the death of the profligate King Charles; the accession of James II 6 9 the same year Mr. Woodbridge was installed Pastor; the arrival of Androsin Boston in 1686, and in Hartford in 1687; the excitement attending and following the hiding of the Charter; the English revolution and the accession of William and Mary, and declaration of war between England and France, were all unfavorable to the prevalence of order and piety in the town and in the colony. Meantime it is appar- ent from various sources that more than the usual severity of flood and storm and disease and scantiness of harvest, marked a protracted period of time, so that the twenty concluding years of the seventeenth century were among the darkest of New England history. In the midst of this prevalent depressed state of religion, it is in evidence that the ministers of this and other colonies made earnest efforts to stay the general tide. In response to the recommendations of the Reforming Synod of 1679, an ^ to recommendations of the General Court, and to deep convic- tions of their own, they labored, if not with fully illuminated, certainly with sincere endeavor to reform morals and increase godliness. Something we need not hesitate to call revivals of religion, however imperfect the standard of estimate, from time to time appear. Such an experience came to this Hart- ford Church in the winter and spring of 1695-6. It was at an hour of general alarm on account of Indian disturbances a little way up the river. The crops of the previous season had been cut off. The community was under unusual religious impression. The result is seen on the Church records. Between February 23, 1696, and April 5th of the same year, one hundred and ninety-four persons, an equal number of either sex, gave assent to the convenant. It is, however, a significant commentary on the imperfection, perhaps of the reviving itself, and certainly of the religious system under which it took place, that on Sunday following the last above mentioned, when those admitted to "full communion" as the fruits of this winter's awakening were received, there were but twelve. Six deacons appear to have been elected to office in Mr. 7o Woodbridge' s pastorate, three in 1691, and three in 171 2. The election of the first three was apparently a matter of much deliberation. On March n, 1686, the names of five persons were " proposed to ye church and left to their consideration." But action was not taken till April 23, 1691, when "Paul Peck, Senr., Joseph Easton, and Joseph Olm- stead were chosen Deacons." No record of formalities about the choice of John Sheldon, John Shepard, and Thomas Richards remains. As early as 1694 the people on the east side of the Con- necticut River petitioned the Court to have the " liberty of a minister " among themselves. The request, acceded to by the Court, was rather grudgingly allowed by the Old Church on» condition that "all the land on the east that belongs to any of the people on the west side shall pay to the minis- try of the west side, and that all the land of the west side shall pay to the ministry of the west side, though it belongs to the people of the east side." Some controversy and trouble ensued. But time at last adjusted differences, and March 30, 1705, saw the ordination of Rev. Samuel Wood- bridge, a nephew of Timothy of the First Church, over the church of East Hartford. The date of the church organiza- tion, as a body ecclesiastically separate from the parent Church, it seems impossible exactly to determine. Less fric- tion appears to have attended the setting off of the West Hartford church and society, which events occurred with a good degree of amicableness in 171 3. Mr. Woodbridge was a man of large frame and strong constitution, but he appears to have been absent nearly two years from Hartford as an invalid in Boston between 1701 and 1703. Several, and some of them rather pathetic endeavors " to condole with Mr. Woodbridg under the sor- rowful sircumstances," appear on the Society records. Mean- time the pulpit was supplied " att Thirty Shillings ye Sabath " by Ephraim Woodbridge, a nephew of the pastor, and by John Read and Nathaniel Hubbard, afterward distinguished lawyers in Massachusetts, who both appear to have tried preaching before settling down to law. 7i There is ample evidence that Mr. Woodbridge occupied a prominent position as a minister in the colony. Concerning the two most considerable episodes of his life which illustrate this fact there cannot, however, on the present occasion be afforded space to go into any detail. Respecting the former of these passages of his history — his agency in the founding of Yale College and his controversy respecting its location, — only this can here be said : Mr. Woodbridge was one of the " ten principal ministers of the colony" nominated as "Trustees or Undertakers . . to found, erect, and govern a college." The old story of these men meeting in Branford in the year 1700, and laying a number of books upon the table, saying, " I give these books for the founding of a College Library in the Colony," is familiar to all. But Mr. Woodbridge, in sympathy with Mr. Buckingham of the Second Church, who became Trustee in 17 1 5, and in sympathy doubtless with most of the people in this northern part of the colony, wanted the permanent abode of the college, which had maintained hitherto a rather divided and peripatetic existence at Saybrook and Killing- worth, and Milford and Wethersfield, to be fixed at the last named, neighboring place. And perhaps the most dramatic incident of Mr. Woodbridge's whole history, may be found in that passage of it, when, having in various ways voted, remonstrated, and labored against the location of the college at New Haven, he presided at a rival commencement at Wethersfield, in defiance of the plain votes of the Trustees, and of the General Assembly, fixing the college at the former place. The occurrence is too pictorial not to claim expres- sion in President Clap's own statement of it. After describ- ing the " Splendid Commencement at New Haven," on Sep- tember 18, 1718; the dignity of the personages present, and the elegance of the "Latin Oration" with which "the Hon- orable Governor Saltonstall was pleased to Grace and Crown the whole Solemnity," he goes on to say that on the same day, " Something like a Commencement was carried on at Wethersfield before a large Number of Spectators ; five 72 Scholars who were originally of the Class which now took their Degrees at New Haven performed publick exercises ; the Rev. Mr. Woodbridge acted as Moderator, and he and Mr. Buckingham, and other Ministers present signed Certifi- cates that they judged them worthy of the Degree of Batch- elor of Arts ; these Mr. Woodbridge delivered to them in a formal Manner in the Meeting-House, which was commonly taken and represented as giving them their Degrees." The town of Hartford sympathized with its ministers in their rather excited and irregular proceedings, and elected Mr. Woodbridge and Mr. Buckingham the following year, repre- sentatives to the Assembly. Mr. Woodbridge prayed at the opening of the session on the 14th of May, but on the 18th his seat was challenged on account of his alleged charging the " Honorable the Governor and Council " in the college affair "with breach of the 6th and 8th commandments." The Lower House voted at first to exclude him from his seat, but subsequently acquitted him of blame. Just how the matter eventuated in the Upper House cannot be deter- mined. Mr. Woodbridge afterward became reconciled to the location of the college at New Haven, was Rector pro tempore at the Commencement in 1723, and a Trustee while he lived. Coincident in point of time with most of Mr. Woodbridge's earlier labors for the college, was his activity in originating and maintaining the Consociational System established by the adoption of the Saybrook platform in 1708. The move- ment for this system originated, naturally enough, with the trustees of the college, who were about the only ministers of the scattered churches of the colony to be brought by any public duties statedly together; but it was the result of pre- liminary discussion in the constituent county bodies, and of the consultation of their regularly elected delegates ; so that there seems no valid ground for the suggestion which has been made, that the body convened at Saybrook in Septem- ber, 1708, was not a perfectly fair and fully representative body of the forty churches of Connecticut. 73 Among the Hartford county delegates to this Synod was Timothy Woodbridge, Pastor of the First Church, and John Haynes, one of its members, son of its former Pastor. For the purposes of the present discourse it is unnecessary to express any judgment as to the merits of the Saybrook Ecclesiastical Constitution. The system, bad or good, con- tinued the legally recognized one in the State till 1784, and remained the voluntarily accepted method of the majority of the churches much longer. In this Church, whose Pastor and delegate had some hand in its devising, it continued operative one hundred and sixty-two years ; and its operation was such as to incline another eminent Pastor to say, at the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary meeting under the Say- brook Constitution, " the First Church of Hartford is a con- sociated church, and such I trust it will ever remain." The system thus set in working, Mr. Woodbridge energet- ically supported. Of the local county Association, organized under the system, he was generally moderator till his death. That event occurred, after a period of some months of disa- blement, on April 30, 1732, at the age of seventy-six years and six months; after his having served the Church in a min- isterial capacity forty-eight years and eight months ; having being for forty-six years and three months its ordained Pastor. Three hundred and sixteen persons were admitted to full communion, and four hundred and seventy-eight owned the covenant in Mr. Woodbridge's ministry. Mr. Woodbridge left two extant specimens of his pulpit powers, an Election Sermon preached May, 1724, and a Sing- ing Lecture preached at East Hartford in June, 1727. His own funeral eulogium was spoken in an election ser- mon, eleven days after his death, by his neighbor and friend, the aged Timothy Edwards of East Windsor, son of Richard Edwards of this Church, and concludes with the declaration, which there is, perhaps, no considerable occasion to modify, " that he was one of the choicest and greatest men that has ever appeared among us in these parts of the country." Two days after the death of Woodbridge, and on the even- 74 ing of his funeral, measures were taken by the Society of this Church " to treat with Mr. Daniel Wadsworth respecting his settling in the work of the ministry." Mr. Wadsworth had already sometime preached in the later weeks of Mr. Woodbridge's incapacity, and the result of overtures to him was that on the 28th of September, 1732, he was ordained as Pastor. The procedures on the occasion he has himself inscribed on the church record as follows : " The Rev. Mr. Whitman of Farmington, began with prayer, and preached a sermon from Matt, xxiv, 45. The Rev. Mr. Edwards of East Windsor made a prayer, and gave ye charge. The Rev. Mr. Marsh of Windsor made ye next prayer. The Rev. Mr. Colton of West Hartford gave the right hand of fellowship." The new pastor thus set in place in the twenty-eighth year of his age, was born at Farmington, November 14, 1704, and graduated at Yale College in 1726, in the same class with Elnathan Whitman (son of his old pastor at Farmington who preached at his ordination) who was soon to be his associate in the Hartford ministry as pastor of the Second Church. The occasion of the new ministry seems to have been laid hold of by the Society for the revival of the already much debated question of a new meeting-house. Into the long struggle over the location of this edifice and the story of its erection, it is unnecessary for me here to enter, the division of labor on this occasion assigning the whole matter to another hand. For the present it must suffice for me to say that the affair, wrangled over for years, was at last happily ended, and a new meeting-house, standing sidewise to the street, substantially on the spot where we now are, took the place of the old edifice in Meeting-House Yard, which had been used from near the planting of the settlement. The house was dedicated December 18, 1739; the sermon preached by the Pastor on the occasion from Haggai ii, 9, The glory of this latter house shall be greater than the former, saith the Lord of Hosts, being published, and affording us our only surviving specimen of Mr. Wadsworth's pulpit powers, which seem to have been of a respectable, though certainly not of a commanding order. 75 The institution of this pastorate brought also to an issue, in the slow, conservative way which had already become characteristic of the First Church, the very live question of that day, whether to sing " by ear " or " by rule." The ser- vice of song had been now for considerable period a matter of discord in many senses. Music for more than a genera- tion past (owing to the introduction of the Bay Psalm Book, having no musical notes, in the place of Ainsworth's or Stern- hold and Hopkins', which had the musical score) had become a matter of memory, and varying tradition. Direct instruction was wanting ; instrumental accompaniments disallowed ; so that singing came to the pass of utter poverty and confusion. Tunes called by the same name were scarcely recognized in places a few miles apart. Some congregations did not attempt more than three or four. The effort to amend matters about the first quarter of the eighteenth century met with violent opposition. Many congregations almost split on the question. The innovation was denounced as an insult to the memory of the fathers, and as tending to Papacy. "If we once begin to sing by note, the next thing will be to pray by rule, and then comes Popery." The interposition of the General Court was in some instances necessary to quiet disturbances arising from the proposal to sing " by rule." In this Hartford Church the matter took a characteristic course. The old Pastor, Mr. Woodbridge, wanted the reforma- tion and preached a Singing Lecture, as has been men- tioned, by request of the Association at East Hartford in June, 1727, in its behalf. He also, as Moderator of the General Association, put his signature to a paper read to that body on May 12th of the same year, by Rev. N. Chauncey of Durham, and published by its order, entitled " Regular Singing Defended and Proved to be the Only True Way of Singing the Songs of the Lord." But the old Pastor died without the sight of the change he advocated. With the coming of Mr. Wadsworth, however, enthusiasm 7 6 enough was enkindled to induce the Society on the 20th of June, 1733, to take this cautious and tentative action: " Voted and agreed, that after the expiration of three months, singing by Rule shall be admitted to be practiced in the con- gregation of this Society, and until their Annual Meeting in December next ; & that then a Vote be Taken whether the Society will further proceed in that way or otherwise." The two leaders of the opposing methods were then designated " to take on them the care of setting the Psalm " for the periods specified ; " Mr. William Goodwin as usuall," and " Mr. Joseph Gilbert, jr., after the Expiration of the three months." Tried thus prudently for four months, the Society saw its way in December to vote " that singing by Rule be admitted and practiced in the congregation of this Society," and Mr. Gilbert was empowered " to sett the psalm." The favorable issue of the singing controversy, and especially of the meeting-house struggle, must have been very welcome to Mr. Wadsworth and the more spiritual por- tion of his people. These years of controversy were natu- rally years of barrenness. Meantime while Hartford Church was quarreling over its location only so far away as Windsor a remarkable revival had taken place under the ministry of Rev. Jonathan Marsh. The year 1735, just in the thick of the meeting-house conflict, was the year of the great revival under Jonathan Edwards at Northampton. It was, however, the year 1740, just after the entrance on the new house of worship, which is commonly taken as the commencement of that religious movement in New England known as the Great Awakening. It was this year that George White- field made his first preaching tour through New England. The religious condition of the community was eminently favorable for Mr. Whitefield's success. His youth, his elo- quence, his peculiar position as an Episcopal minister in full sympathy with the distinctive doctrines of the Puritans, attracted universal attention and good will. No such general prostration of a community before one man, and he only a young gospel preacher, was ever known before, and none 77 has been known since. He left Northampton Sunday even- ing, October 19th, accompanied by Jonathan Edwards as far as the house of Jonathan's father, Rev. Timothy, at EastWindsor, preaching at Westfield and Springfield and Sufneld on the way. On the afternoon of October 21st he preached at East Windsor, and there Jonathan Edwards gently remonstrated with him about his denouncing the ministers; his practice of "judging other persons to be unconverted ; " and the large place he accorded to "visions" and other similar results of religious excitement. Next day, Monday, October 22d, he was here at Hartford, preaching in the new meeting-house, doubtless, to an audience which he describes in his customary exaggerated way, as " many thousands." Thence by Wethersfield, Middletown, and Wallingford, he went preaching to New Haven and so to New York. Some measure of benefit seems to have accom- panied or followed Mr. Whitefield's transit through Hartford. The records of this Church show an accession of twenty-five to its "full communion" membership, and of eleven to its " Covenant " in the twelve months succeeding. The records of the Second Church at this date are lost. The church in West Hartford gained forty-five, but whether all to its "com- munion " I am unable to say. These certainly do not seem large results for the great year of the Great Awakening. And large or small, they were attended and followed by some features which made all the ministers of Hartford, and most of the Hartford local Association, unite on February 5, 1745, over their individ- ual signatures, in a public printed " Testimony against Mr. Whitefield and his conduct," and a solemn " warning and caution " to their people not to hear him on his proposed second transit through New England. This declaration was followed by another of a like character, five months later, issued by the General Association over the hand of Benjamin Cokon of West Hartford, Moderator, and Elnathan Whitman of the Second Church, Scribe. Why was this ? And why was the very awakening which 78 in its general result so blessed Connecticut, and blesses it to this day, the occasion for a sharp conflict of feeling and judgment among the ministers and the churches ? The reason is not far to seek. Dr. Leonard Bacon acutely remarked, "the Whitefield of history is not exactly the Whitefield of popular tradition." It is so. The real White- field of the pilgrimage of 1740 was a young man of twenty- five, of burning eloquence and impassioned piety, but censo- rious, denunciative, and lending all the weight of his tremendous popular influence to the encouragement of fanatic extravagances of experience and expression in his converts and followers. Whosoever hesitated at any of his measures was pronounced unconverted and carnal. In spite of the wise and loving caution of Jonathan Edwards at East Windsor he preached, three days after, at New Haven — and of all congregations to a congregation of students — on the "dreadful ill consequences of an unconverted ministry." But all of Mr. Whitefield's own extravagances of speech might have been forgotten had it not been for the actions of his followers. Many of these, ordained ministers, either having no proper charge or forsaking it, went through the colony at their own will, encouraging discontent with the settled ministry, and promulgating crude and erroneous tests of piety and the means of attaining it. A numerous crop of lay exhorters rose in the churches, professing infallible ability to discern spirits, especially the spirits of ministers, and passing sudden and damnatory judgment on all who dif- fered from them. These excesses became so great as to attract in some instances the attention of the civil authorities. One con- spicuous case of this kind, which cannot be detailed at any length, is here adverted to only because of a certain dramatic connection with the church edifice of this Society. Rev. James Davenport of Southold, L. I., was one of the most accepted favorites and followers of Whitefield, who pronounced him " nearest to God " of any man he had known. He was a man of a wild sort of eloquence, and wherever he went 79 created great excitement. Arrested on a warrant from the General Court, together with Rev. Benjamin Pomroy, on a charge of inflaming the congregations he addressed, largely of children and youth, with doctrines subversive of all law and order, he was brought before the Assembly at Hartford on June I, 1742, about eighteen months after Mr. White- field's transit through the place. His trial took place in the meeting-house of this Society, and lasted two days. The town was in a state of excitement bordering on tumult. The partisans on either side rushed together to support or to over- bar the sheriff. Again and again it seemed as if the prisoners would be rescued from his custody. The night between the two days was little short of a riot. In the morning the mili- tia were ordered out to suppress disorder. The Assembly adjudged Mr. Davenport to be "disturbed in the rational faculties of his mind," and thus less responsible than he otherwise might be, and directed that he be sent out of the colony. And so, about four o'clock in the afternoon, Mr. Davenport was marched " between two files of musketiers " from the meeting-house down to Connecticut river, and put aboard a boat for his home. All these things show the intensity of feeling connected with the Great Awakening period, and the reasons, to some extent, which made the Hartford ministers, and a large por- tion of the ministers of Connecticut generally, disfavor a second Whitefieldian pilgrimage. But for so doing they were stigmatized as Old Lights, Formalists, Arminians, indi- cators of " mere heathen morality," and careless of the souls of men. Some of Mr. Whitman's hearers deserted his con- gregation in favor of more spiritual instruction. There was really no just ground for such accusation. The charges were easy to make. They are in substance made in almost any revival period when any one dissents from the counsels of the most fervid promoters of any of its methods. They have in effect been made in very recent days. Possibly a larger share of benefit might have come to this community had this Church and its immediate neighbors 8o thrown themselves more into the line with Wheelock and Pomeroy, and Bellamy, and even somewhat more generously tolerated Davenport. Possibly also, not. Anyway this com- munity was spared the ecclesiastical scandals which separated churches and dishonored religion in some parts of the State where freer scope was given to the new measures of the new men. But right or wrong, Mr. Wadsworth's part in influencing religious affairs was soon afterward ended. He died Novem- ber 12, 1747, lacking two days of forty-three years of age; having filled a pastoral term of fifteen years and two months. He sleeps with his ministerial forerunners in the old grave yard. Ninety-nine persons were admitted to "full communion," and seventy-four to " covenant " during his ministry. Rev. Edward Dorr succeeded to the pastorate April 27, 1748, after having preached a considerable period during Mr. Wadsworth's disability. Mr. Dorr was born at Lyme, Novem- ber 2, 1722. He united with the church in Lyme, June 7, 1 741, under the ministry of Rev. Jonathan Parsons, one of the most useful and able of Connecticut's ministers in the era of the Great Awakening. He graduated at Yale Col- lege in the class of 1742, and was licensed to preach by the New Haven Association, May 29, 1744. Before coming to Hartford he preached more than two years at Kensington, in the midst of a church and society controversy, unnecessary here to relate. The elaborate and repeatedly modified mon- etary negotiations recorded on the books of our Society prior to his settlement, significantly indicate the unsettled condi- tion of financial affairs at the period, consequent largely on the colonial indebtedness in the repeated wars with the Indians and the French. Mr. Dorr followed the example of his pre- decessor by recording on the Church book the procedure at his ordination. "The Rev'd Mr. Bissell [of Wintonbury] began with prayer, ye Rev'd Mr. Whitman [of Second Church] preach'd a Sermon from 2 Cor. 4, 5. The Rev'd Mr. Col- ton [of West Hartford] made the first prayer. Mr. Whit- man of Farmington gave the Charge. Mr. Steel [of Tol- land] made the second prayer, and Mr. Whitman of Hartford gave the right hand of Fellowship. Give me grace, O God, to be a faithful, and make me a successful minister of the Gospel of Christ. E. Dorr." The period of Mr. Dorr's ministry was one of great relig- ious declension, which lasted with slight and local interrup- tions throughout New England considerably beyond the period of his pastorate. The controversies of the preceding years, growing to some extent out of the Whitefieldian movement ; the separations which took place in many Connecticut churches ; the restive- ness of some under the Saybrook platform, and the resolu- tion of others in the administration of the discipline estab- lished by that platform ; the corrupting effects of the Indian and French wars, and the absence, however accounted for, of those divine influences which seem at times to triumph over all obstacles, — all combined to make this period of the coun- try's history one of general monotony and discouragement. In the midst of this comparatively depressed state of affairs, Mr. Dorr exercised a faithful and laborious ministry. One hundred and sixty-one persons " owned the covenant," and fifty-three were admitted to full communion, during the twenty-four and a half years of his pastorate. The compari- son of these numbers with the seventy-four who owned the covenant and the ninety-nine who were admitted to full com- munion in the fifteen years of Mr. Wadsworth's ministry, is significant. Especially significant is the striking alteration of proportion between those covenanting and those commun- ing. It is plain that a larger and larger number of people were contenting themselves with such a merely formal assent to the gospel as carried with it the privileges of a qualified church-membership, but implied no spiritual change. Amid this general state of public anxiety and of religious de- pression, a few items of local interest may be gathered up. In 1755 it was thought necessary to enlarge the meeting-house, and a committee was appointed for the purpose, but the mat- 82 ter seemed to go no further. The need could not have been great. All the inhabitants in Hartford at this time, includ- ing East and West Hartford, were less than thirty-five hund- red, and there were four meeting-houses. In 1756 the Society appointed a committee to inform Mr. Dorr that " this Society are desirous that Dr. Watts' Psalms may be sung in the congregation at the time of divine worship at least half ye time." A good deal of trouble all along these days seems to have attended the always vexatious business of " seating " the people. In the year 1760 the Society took a new course, and " voted and agreed that the inhabitants of this society for the future, and until this society shall order otherwise, have liberty to accommodate themselves with seats in the meeting-house at their discretion, any measures this society hath heretofore taken for seating sd house notwithstanding." This democratic plan did not long suit, however, for four years later the Society voted to " new seat the meeting-house in the common and usual way and manner." Mr. Dorr's period of ministry witnessed also the first endeavor to plant an Episcopal church in Hartford, by the preaching of Rev. Thomas Davies in 1762. The events connected with that endeavor have recently been narrated in Mr. C. J. Hoadly's lately published and admirable sketch of the history of Christ Church. They probably attracted the attention of Rev. Mr. Dorr somewhat more warmly because the " Sam. Talcott," who seemed to be the most troublesome Sanballat of the new movement, was a " covenant " member of the First Church, and Mr. Dorr's brother-in-law. Mr. Dorr's own attitude on the question of Episcopal separatism, as well as separatism of other kinds, is quite discernible to one who can at all read, between the lines in his election sermon preached in 1765, in which he said : " I readily own that every establishment of a religious kind should be upon the most generous and catholic principles, and that no man or set of men should be excluded from it for mere specula- tive and immaterial points ; for different modes and cere- monies Suffer me to query with your Honors, whether % 33 the laws in this Colony made for the support of religion dont need some very material amendment ? And if they be suffi- cient, whether the construction put upon them in many of our executive courts hath not a direct and natural tendency to undermine and sap the foundations of our ecclesiastical con- stitution ? But if Mr. Dorr was not in advance of his time on the question of toleration of dissenters, this same election ser- mon shows him in a most amiable and admirable attitude on the question of the treatment of the Indians, which he dis- cusses in another part of it. His views on this latter sub- ject, too extended to quote here, are as well worthy of con- sideration by our national government to-day, as they were by the colonial government of 1765. Mr. Dorr's lot was cast in a dull time of our ecclesiastical history ; he was cut off from life in the prime of his strength, and without posterity ; but .the tokens that survive of him give him not only a fair but an honorable place in the ministry of this Church. He died, after many months of paralytic disability, Oct. 20, 1772, in the fiftieth year of his age. Rev. Samuel Whitman of the Second Church preached a funeral discourse, still extant. He was buried beside his prede- cessors. After the death of Mr. Dorr the Society of this Church, in December of the same year, made unsuccessful overtures to " Mr. Joseph How " ; doubtless the Joseph Howe who was just finishing his tutorship at Yale College, who became pastor of the New South Church in Boston, and who died in 1775. The next attempt was more successful, and resulted in the introduction to this Church's service of one of the most illustrious of its ministers. " Mr. Nathan Strong of Coventry," was invited by the Society to the ministry of this congregation, June 4, 1773, and was ordained to the pastorate on the 5th of January, 1774; the sermon on the occasion being preached by Rev. Nathan Strong, his father, from 2 Tim. iv, 4: "But watch 8 4 thou in all things ; endure afflictions ; do the work of an evangelist; make full proof of thy ministry" The sermon was published, and gives token that the religious influence which had been brought to bear on the boyhood and youth of the young minister, under his father's instruction, must have been of a robustly vigorous kind. The Pastor thus set in office in this Church was twenty-five years of age, having been born Oct. 16, 1748. He graduated at Yale College in the class of 1769, having among his associates Timothy Dwight, the future president of the college, and receiving at his graduation the first honor of the occasion. Mr. Strong was accustomed to refer the period of his personal spiritual renewal to his early life, but he seems not at first, after graduating, to have contemplated the ministry as a profession, but turned his attention to law. In 1772 and 1773 he was tutor in Yale College ; during which time he devoted himself to theology, and received overtures to the pastorate from several churches. President Stiles is said to have told the committee of the Hartford Church, when applied to respect- ing the tutor's fitness for the place, that " he was the most universal scholar he ever knew." The period of the institution of the hew pastorate was a trying one. The colonial relationships to Great Britain were just on the point of rupture, and the feeble confederacies on this side of the Atlantic were about entering on a protracted and exhausting war with that then recognizedly chief belligerent power in the world. Divisions of sentiment respecting, not only the details of the struggle, but the main aim and method of it, divided to some extent every com- munity, and very distinctly that of Connecticut. At the same time the condition of the churches, spiritually considered, was very low. The half-way-covenant sowing was producing its natural harvest. There were only fifteen male members in full communion in this Church when Mr. Strong was set in pastoral charge. As the public conflict progressed, a tide of infidelity set in under the sympathetic influence of French associations in the war for Independence, 85 and religion became, to an extent unknown before or since in this land, a matter for gibe and contempt. In. this condition of affairs Mr. Strong threw himself with great energy into the conflict for American liberty. He served some time as chaplain to the troops. He wrote and preached in support of the patriotic cause. Especially in the later political discussions connected with the establish- ment of the Federal constitution he published a series of about twenty articles intended to harmonize public opinion in the ratification of that instrument. It was not probably at all on account of his ardent advocacy of this cause, but it was certainly appropriately harmonious with it, that the con- vention which ratified the Constitution of the United States, on the part of Connecticut, was held in the meeting-house of this Society in 1788. Meantime the earlier period of Mr. Strong's ministry can- not be said to have been marked by tokens of spiritual vigor. Perhaps this was, in the nature of events, impossible. It may be, however, that Mr. Strong was lacking in some of those deeper convictions which distinguished and made so powerful his later ministry. It serves perhaps to corrobo- rate this impression, to know that in a considerable part of this portion of his life, Mr. Strong was engaged extensively in the distillery business, with his brother-in-law, Mr. Reuben Smith. The records of Hartford land-transfers show some twenty deeds of real estate involving thirty or forty thousand dollars worth of property, bought and sold by the partnership of "Reuben Smith & Co.," (Nathan Strong's name how- ever generally taking the priority in the deeds made to or by the partners) between 1790 and 1796, together with their vats, stills, and cooper shops, in the prosecution of this enterprise. The venture was ultimately unfortunate from a pecuniary point of view, and in October, 1798, writs of attachment were levied against the property, and, in default of that, against the bodies of Messrs. Strong and Smith, on a judgment against them. Mr. Smith prudently took himself to New York. Mr. Strong remained in the house he had 86 built (the house just south of the Athenaeum), which was attached under the sheriff's warrant. It is said that the sheriff proposed to take Mr. Strong to jail, but relented when told that he " would go with him if compelled, but if he went he would never enter the pulpit again." Whether the business distress which began to press upon Mr. Strong several years before this culminating incident of his disaster, had any causal connection with an altered tone in his ministry and a revived condition of things in his Church, it is perhaps presumptuous to assert. But certain it is that the year 1794, at which time the distillery business had broken down and the sale of effects appertaining to it had begun, witnessed the first indication of the spiritual awakening of his flock. One token of this quickened religious interest remains in a vote of the Society, Dec. 16, 1794, "to light the meeting-house for evening lectures"; this being probably the first time religious meetings were ever held in any public building belonging to this Society in the evening. This earliest period of awakening was followed in 1798 and 1799 by a prolonged and powerful revival, which wrought a great change in the religious condition of the con- gregation. During its progress Mr. -Strong published a volume of sermons of a character eminently fitted to awaken and promote a quickening of evangelic piety. This volume was followed by another in 1800, dealing with aspects of religious truth suited to confirm and strengthen those who had been brought under impression. These sermons, together with Mr. Strong's treatise on the Compatibility of Eternal Misery with Infinite Benevolence, in reply to a volume — found after his decease among his writings — of Rev. Dr. Huntington of Coventry, show great acuteness of thought, and an unusual vivacity and vigor of utterance. Unlike a great proportion of the sermons of that time, they are readable and might even be effectively preached to-day. They were perhaps the occasion of the conferring on him the degree of Doctor of Divinity by the College of New Jersey in 1801. No man more than Dr. Strong contributed to the revival 87 of earnest piety which marked so extensively the close of the last century and the beginning of the present in this State. In 1808, and again shortly before his death, from 1813 to 1 8 1 5, powerful awakenings in his congregation bore witness to the efficacy of the truth so cogently and persua- sively preached by him. Eighty-eight persons united with the Church in 1808, the year after entering on the new meeting-house ; and one hundred and twenty-eight joined as the result of the revival of 181 3-14. Jt is greatly to be regretted that the perishing, or, more probably, the non- creation of any Church records (except a few memoranda by Mr. Barzillai Hudson, long a member of the Prudential Com- mittee) during the entire period of Dr. Strong's ministry, makes it impossible to trace precisely who they were, or in what numbers, who united with the Church at any epoch of this pastorate previous to 1808. Especially to be regretted is it, that it is impossible accurately to discover the working of the revival spirit upon the half-way-covenant system in this Church which had practiced it so long. It is doubtful if that system was ever distinctly abrogated in Dr. Strong's day. The late Thomas S. Williams and wife both owned the covenant, it is believed in his time, and only made such a profession as brought them into the Church's full com- munion in 1834, in the days of his successor. In 1799 Dr. Strong published, in connection with Rev. Joseph Seward, a deacon of this Church, and Rev. Abel Flint, pastor of the Second Church, the volume known as the " Hartford Selection of Hymns," which attained a wide cir- culation among the churches, and which contained some metrical compositions of his own. These have been praised, but it can hardly have been for their poetry. Not the least of Dr. Strong's services to this Church and to the churches generally, was his labor in behalf of Mis- sions. It was largely his interest in the Connecticut Mis- sionary Society, formed in 1798 for the purpose of sending missionaries to the North and West, and of which society he was one of the original founders, that induced him to project 88 and in part to edit, and for a time largely to write, the Connecticut Evangelical Magazine. This monthly periodical was continued for fifteen years. The number of copies dur- ing the first five years averaged 3,730 annually. The net profits were paid over to the Connecticut Missionary Society, which received from this source $11,620. The year 1807, December 3d, saw the entrance of this Society into this house of worship where we are now gathered, and which was generally regarded at that day, and as such described by Dr. Dwight in his Travels, as a masterpiece of ecclesiastical architecture. Stoves were first introduced into this edifice the year before Dr. Strong died, 18 15. The pulpit, the height of which it is said was first determined by Dr. Strong, was lowered two feet in 18 16, the year he died, and has (incredible as it may seem) been lowered three times since. In 1802, moved by the renewed sense of religious things in the community, the Society raised a fund of $4,709 by subscription, to be put on interest till it amounted to $7,000, then forever afterwards to be "kept entire" for the "sup- port of the ministry in the society." The names of the sub- scribers are entered in a roll of honor on the Society records. This fund met with the not unusual fate of such funds when the donors are dead and a society gets short of money, as we shall presently have occasion to see. This Bible, presented to the Church by Mr. Rueben Smith, Dr. Strong's partner in the unfortunate distillery business, and in memory of Deacon Solomon Smith, Dr. Strong's falher-in-law, has been in use since 18 12. In 1 8 14, the Church entered on the use of its first confer- ence room, a brick edifice erected on a lot of ground, thirty by fifty feet in dimension, on Theater, now Temple street. Even this hasty sketch of Dr. Strong's ministry would be culpable did it not refer to his vast power of social influence and his unsurpassed vivacity and wit. The sharpness of his repartee often stood him in better stead than arguments. Many of his sallies and rejoinders are familiar to this day to people of this community. 8 9 Dr. Strong had his full share of trouble. Beside those of a financial kind, of which mention has been made, he was called on to bury two wives and a son (the survivor of his second wife Anna McCurdy), who, having just graduated at Yale College, was drowned at the East Hartford ferry. Dr. Strong lived a widower the last twenty-six years of his life. Negotiations for the settlement of a colleague were in har- monious progress between the Pastor and the Society when death intervened. Dr. Strong died December 25, 18 16, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, and the forty-third of his min- istry. He was the first of this Church's Pastors to be buried elsewhere than in the old ground behind the church. His mortal part lies in the North Cemetery. His face and figure still survive in the living memory of a few among us, and his name must ever be honored in the annals of this place. The names of George Burgess, Heman Humphrey, and especially Eleazer T. Fitch, bring us to what seem modern times. All preached here during the months following Dr. Strong's decease, but to none was extended a formal call. Sunday, the 28th of September, 1817, saw in the pulpit of this Church, for the first time, a tall, awkward man of a little over twenty-seven years of age, who was destined to fill the second longest term of pastoral service in the two hundred and fifty years of its history hitherto. A member of this Church, now deceased, who well knew Dr. Strong, narrated to me his vivid impressions of that Sabbath and the sharp contrast he felt between the courtly and dignified bearing of the pastor of his youth, and the ungainly, impulsive, red-bandannad occupant of his place. But he truthfully added the reproof administered to him by a pious old aunt to whom he ventured to suggest some of his feelings : " Remember my words, that is to be a very remarkable man." Joel Hawes, one of this Church's and Connecticut's most eminently useful ministers, was born at Medway, Massachu- setts, December 22, 1789. His youth was passed amid asso- ciations not very congenial to scholarly tastes or even favora- 9 o ble to mental improvement. It was at about eighteen years of age, and while engaged in serving a period in a cloth- dressing establishment that he experienced his first strong spiritual impressions, almost for the first time read the Bible, and became experimentally a Christian. He made confes- sion of his faith by uniting with the church in Medway, the first Sunday in May, 1808, being at that time also baptized. Studying a while in private, under the tuition of Rev. Dr. Crane of Northbridge, he entered Brown University in Sep- tember, 1809. He worked his way through college, teaching school in winter, but by indefatigable industry and labor graduated September 1, 18 13, second in rank in his class. He entered Andover Seminary in 18 13 ; dropped out a year to teach in Phillips Academy, and graduated September, 1 817. He had been licensed to preach by the Essex Middle Association on May 13th previous, and followed his licensure by preaching several Sabbaths for Rev. Dr. Dana of New- buryport. Measures looking to his call to the pastorate in connection with Dr. Dana were in progress when he was invited to preach at this First Church in Hartford. He came here on the Saturday following his graduation, and preached his first sermon here on the succeeding Sunday. After trial of his gifts for ten Sabbaths, a call was extended to him by the Church and Society, and on the 4th of March, 18 1 8, he was ordained Pastor, being the tenth in the minis- terial succession of the pastoral line. In the public service of the ordination Prof. Fitch of Yale College offered the Introductory Prayer; Dr. Woods preached the Sermon, which was afterwards published, from Heb. xiii, 17; Dr. Nathan Perkins of West Hartford, offered the Ordaining Prayer ; Mr. Rowland of Windsor, gave the Charge ; Dr. Abel Flint of the Second Church extended the Right Hand of Fellow- ship, and Rev. Samuel Goodrich of Berlin, made the conclud- ing prayer. With the induction of Mr. Hawes into the pastorate, a period is reached where the thronging memories of some present, and of more and more in its later portions, will out- *>&& O^u^c^/ 9i run and outnumber any utterances of the speaker. All the more needful, therefore, will it be for him to confine himself to the main facts of the Church life, with small references as possible to personal biography. Dr. Strong had certainly been a very able and in most of his ministry a very devout and useful minister; but many things in Church and Society affairs were left by him at strangely loose ends. Dr. Hawes writes in the first year of the new pastorate : " Our Jerusalem is all in ruins. . . . No church records ; no accounts to tell me who are members and who not ; what children have been baptized and what not ; . . . many irreg- ular members, some timid ones, and I fear but few who would favor a thorough reformation." The new Pastor threw himself into his work with energy and success. Records began to be kept in the Church, unkept or most imperfectly kept for forty-five years. A Prudential Committee, the first in the church's history, was appointed in 1821, to "aid the Pastor in promoting the peace and welfare of the Church, and in the maintenance of gospel discipline," which last portion of their functions there is ample evidence they entered on with vigor. The same year the new pastorate was established, marks the beginning of Sunday-school work in Hartford. The " Sunday- School Society" was organized on the 5th of May, 18 18, Rev. Abel Flint of the Second Church being President, and Mr. Hawes one of the directors. Four schools were formed with special reference to the four then existing religious societies in the place, — the First and Second Congregational, Christ Church, and the First Baptist, — but all under the patronage of the Union Society. This arrangement con- tinued, however, only about two years, when each society took the management of the Sunday-school work into its own hands. With another action, to which the Church was persuaded about this time, we may or may not perhaps as fully sympa- thize. The new Pastor had just come from Andover, where the battle lines of the Unitarian controversy were set in 9 2 sharply hostile array. And he stigmatized the covenant of the Church here as " a covenant and confession of faith con- tained in just ten Arminian lines." That covenant, which, with slight verbal change, had been in use in this Church cer- tainly more than a century and a quarter, and perhaps from the beginning, reads as follows : "You do now solemnly, in the presence of God and of these witnesses, receive God in Christ to be your God, one God in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the. Holy Ghost. You believe the Scriptures to be the word of God, and promise by divine grace to make them the rule of your life and conversation. You own yourself to be by nature a child of wrath, and declare that your only hope of mercy is through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, whom you now publicly profess to take for your Prophet, Priest, and King ; and you now give up yourself to Him to be ruled, governed, and eternally saved. You promise by divine grace regularly to attend all the ordinances of the Gospel (as God may give you light and opportunity), and to submit to the rule of the government of Christ in this church." Just where the " Arminianism " comes into this old for- mula, to which so many generations had given assent in the most solemn transaction of their lives, it is hard to tell. But the Church yielded to the Pastor's desire, and on the 29th of July, 1822, adopted a long, many-articled confession of faith, which, with slight and unimportant modifications, continues in use to this day. But revivals of religion occurred and marked the epoch of this ministry as none in the history of the Church had been marked before. One in 18 19 brought in six young men from the mechanic's workshop, four of whom shortly began to study for the ministry, one of whom, Rev. A. Gleason, still lives. One in 1820-21 pervaded the entire region, brought into the Hartford County Associated churches more than a thou- sand converts, and added to this Church one hundred and thirty-eight ; three of whom are members with us to-day. 93 Rev. Lyman Beecher of Litchfield assisted the Pastor in this revival and greatly contributed to its success. In 1826 was another time of refreshing in this region, and saw as its fruits fifty-four joined to this communion. In 183 1 was tried the experiment of a " protracted " or "four-days'" meeting, it is said for the first time in Connec- ticut, in union with the Second and North Churches. Fifty persons joined this Church as its consequence. In .1834 an important religious awakening occurred, which brought into this Church many heads of families and men of influence in the community hitherto unreached. The Pastor was aided at this period by the powerful preaching of Rev. Dr. Taylor of New Haven. Between sixty and seventy were, as a consequence, added to the fellowship. The year 1838 brought in eighty. In 1 841 was another great revival in this region. Rev. Mr. Kirk, then in the prime of his popular eloquence and evangelistic fervor, preached in many of the Hartford churches with persuasive power. One hundred and ten per- sons were added to the Church at this period. More than one hundred stood up at one time in this aisle to confess their new faith. The revival of 1852 brought in sixty-six, and that of 1858 fifty. Ten periods of distinct religious awakening occurred during this ministry, and there were added to the Church in that space of time, by confession of faith, ten hundred and seventy- nine members. It is obvious to remark, in view of a fact like this, that the ministry of this eminent Pastor was cast in a period more characterized by general revival influences than any which had gone before for a hundred years, or that, from present signs, seems very likely soon to occur again. But it is equally obvious that these extraordinary results were largely attributable to the man himself who was in this pastorate at that period. His zeal, his wisdom, his perseverance, his pro- found convictions, his unmistakable sincerity and devotion, were powerful and, it is perfectly proper to say, indispensable elements in that wonderful series of awakenings. 94 It was itself indicative of one of the features of the Pastor's character which gave him such success in revival work, that Dr. Hawes preached, in 1827, that course of Lectures to ^ Young Men which, on their delivery here and in New Haven, produced so profound an impression, and when published, both in this country and in England in repeated editions, wrought a still wider and more lasting benefit. The volume may seem trite now, but it was a venture into a comparatively fresh and untrodden field then, and aside from any higher ends attained by it, it made appropriate (cer- tainly as such things go) the Doctorate which Mr. Hawes received from the college of his youth. But if the period of this pastorate was one of large acces- sions to the church, it was also one of large colonizations from it. On the 23d of September, 1824, ninety-seven members received dismission from this Church, and were organized as the North Church. On the 10th of January, 1832, eighteen members were organized with others as the Free, now the Fourth Church. On the 14th of October, 1852, thirty-six members of this Church, and soon after eleven more, were dismissed to unite with others in forming the Pearl Street Church. On the 5th of March, 1865, forty members and shortly after eleven more, were dismissed to unite with others in forming the Asylum Hill Church. The old Church was a quarry out of which everybody was free to draw the living stones of newer temples. It gave liberally. It gave men and it gave money. It was eminently a church-planting and missionary Church. The personal interest of its Pastor in the larger aspects of missionary work, which has been evidenced among other cogent ways in his giving his only daughter to live, and as it proved, to die on foreign missionary ground, was not with- out result in training the congregation to large-minded benefi- cence both at home and abroad. Meantime, all alongside this really grand record of churchly 95 prosperity and usefulness ran the usualf line of perplexing, amusing, and drudging incidents. Some people of the good old Society loved its privileges, but didn't like to pay for them. And so every year or two, from 1823 to 4848, votes appear on the records showing difficulties about meeting expenses, and expedients to make occupants of good pews, of an economical turn of mind, contribute a due proportion of the parish costs. An Act of the Legislature in the latter year, sought and secured as a means of grace to such, allow- ing the taxation of pews like any other property, seems to have been the effectual call, where other methods failed. In 1830 the Society raised the question of the possibility of appropriating something to help the Sunday-school ; debated it, doubted its legality, appointed a committee to investigate the novel and difficult question, had a divided report on the issue, thought it best to move slowly, and in 1842 (twelve years afterward), hazarded a first appropriation of a hundred and fifty dollars. The year 1831 brought up a question of a new conference- .room, in place of the old one in Temple street ; and the year 1832 brought the conference-room itself, the one now used. But it brought, also, in doing it, the appropriation and extin- guishment of the fund so solemnly described in 1802, " to be forever kept entire as a Society Fund, the interest thereof to be appropriated and applied for the support of the ministry in the society." ^ The year 1822 saw the first organ put into this house, and the year 1835 saw the second — the one just displaced — an instrument so excellent that the Society's extended thanks to the maker of it are inscribed on its records. But, alas, nothing quite suits everybody, and 1837 saw on file the peti- . tion of Ezekiel Williams, entreating relief from the terrible " sub-bass " of the dulcet new organ. A committee was raised to harmonize the sub-bass with the petitioner's nerves, with what success does not appear. The year 1835 lowered the pulpit a second time, and brought the galleries down nearly five feet ; and 185 1 swept 9 6 out the old square pews around the walls, and the mahogany pulpit, lustrous yet, in the memory of some here, above all structures beside. Early in 1863 Dr. Hawes wrote to the Society expressing his desire for a colleague in the ministerial work. The Society voted that it did not want a " colleague," but " a new minister, Dr. Hawes still retaining his pastoral relations to us." Dr. Hawes replied in an extended communication, urging the colleagueship, and declaring that the position of pastor emeritus proposed by the Society was " a change greater than [he] could at present desire." The Society yielded to his wish, and on the 21st of October, 1862, Mr. Wolcott Calkins was installed Associate Pastor. Mr. Calkins was born at Painted Post (now Corning), New York, June 10, 1831; graduated at Yale College 1856; studied Theology at Union Seminary in 1859, anc ^ at tne University of Halle in 1860-1862. He was never " licensed" as a preacher, being ordained as well as installed at his entrance on the associate pastorate with Dr. Hawes. Mr. Calkins fulfilled the func- tions of his office about eighteen months, when, on April 29, 1864, he resigned his associate pastorship. His resigna- tion was followed on the 5th of May by that of Dr. Hawes. An ecclesiastical council met on the 17th of May to con- sider the resignation of Mr. Calkins, but during its delibera- tions the case was withdrawn. Reassembled by call, however, on the 6th of July, Mr. Calkins was dismissed, Dr. Hawes being lef t pastor emeritus of the Church. On the 14th of December, 1864, Rev. George H. Gould was installed pastor. Mr. Gould was born Feb. 20, 1827, at Oakham, Mass. Graduating at Amherst College in 1850, and Union Seminary in 1853, the early portion of his minis- try was spent in evangelistic work, chiefly in Wisconsin. He was ordained November 13, 1862, and served as acting pastor of the Olivet church, Springfield, Mass., from 1863 to 1864, when he became Pastor of this Church. Dr. Gould continued in office till the nth day of October, 1870, when he was dismissed with the concurrence of a council. During ^fc^ X ,£&&^uX733 had been realized by sale of pews and slips, some in fee simple, some for a term of thirty years — conveyances unavoidable at the time, but embarrassing and troublesome in later years. They were eventually, all but one or two, repurchased by the society and canceled, and were the prin- cipal cause of the debt carried so long, finally and happily disposed of the year before last. The pews were built at the sides of the house above and below; slips at the front of the galleries and in the middle of the floor ; one pew at the middle of each side being dignified by name as the Gover- nor's Pew, and finished with a somewhat ornamented canopy, which remained, as some present will remember, until 1831. This house, like its predecessors, was finished without arti- ficial heat ; and for the majority of those in the assemblies of the day, there was no help for the cold. Some, — many indeed, — had footstoves now and found a real amelioration of the temperature, which oftentimes during a freezing week awaited their coming to the place of worship, charged with dangerous if not fatal damps and chills. Notwithstanding we are to suppose that all who worshiped were robust, and heavily clad in frosty weather, it is a legitimate wonder that not till 181 5 were stoves placed in this house ; and that when introduced otherwheres, the comfortable innovation was so seriously and so ridiculously objected to. The luxury was recognized and protected here. The footstoves were put t Peters' Hist. Conn., p. 164. 1 63 aside, and the committee were instructed (1830) to remove to the portico any that might be found at the close of service at any time. The clock returned to its place after the completion of the steeple, remained in use until worn out and until the present one was procured in 1849. The old bell, after numerous overtures for its purchase, finally returned and continued long to do service, though regarded too small for so large an edifice. It is a matter for congratulation that it after all escaped sale and transfer. It was recast at Chicopee, Mass., in 1843-4 with largely increased weight, but after compara- tively brief use failed, and was recast again at Troy in 1849- 50. As you hear it to-day, its grand and musical voice is tuned with the metal of the old bell of 1632. The first organ in use here was the gift of individuals of this Society and congregation, "cheerfully accepted," the record says, June 22, 1822. Its successor, an exceptionally fine and grand instrument, replaced it in 1835. It was fur- nished at the expense of the society, partly, and partly by personal subscriptions, and after so long and notable service gives place to the one which you hear to-day — the munificent bestowal of one of your number, offered as a memorial of her beloved husband. The first important changes that were made in the arrange- ment of this interior, took place at the time that preparations were made for the organ in 1835, when the galleries and the pulpit were lowered. In 185 1 more extensive alterations took place. All the pews and the still lofty pulpit were removed ; the recess for the platform and desk was built ; the windows were changed ; those at the west end closed, and a new arch to the ceiling built, leaving the audience-room in shape substantially as you see it to-day. Said Dr. Strong, when this last, our fourth, edifice in Hart- ford was dedicated, "My dear youth, you behold the zeal of your fathers, who have erected this building and who daily pray that you may long live to worship the God whom they have served. . . . We who stand where the word of God is dispensed, do now in his awful presence charge you, that when the fathers sleep this place may be holy to the Lord." 164 REMINISCENCES. BY REV. AARON L. CHAPIN. These recollections touch upon the latter part of the first quarter of the present century, — when the population of Hartford was less than ten thousand, — when Main street, from the junction of the Albany and Windsor roads to the South Green, measured the length of the city ; when, north of Morgan street, west of Trumbull street, and south and west of the Little river, stretched open fields with only here and there a dwelling, — when gas was unknown and the streets were dimly lighted by oil lamps, few and far between, — when the city post-office was a single room in the dwelling- house of the postmaster, nearly opposite the First church, with a window opening on the street for the delivery of let- ters and a slit in the door for receiving them, — when the only church edifices in the city were the First church, more fre- quently called the Brick church, since all the rest were of wood, the Second or South church, an Episcopal church on the corner of Main and Church streets, opposite the present site of Christ church, a Baptist church on the corner of Temple and Market streets, a Methodist church, just erected against strong protests, on the corner of Trum- bull and Chapel streets, and a small Roman Catholic chapel on Talcott street. My thoughts center around the First church, and memory brings distinctly before me the picture of that house of worship as it then was, with its majestic Grecian portico, its stately Corinthian columns, its high gallery, its beautiful mahogany pulpit raised to the level of the gallery front, to which ascent was made by flights of winding stairs on either side, its square pews around the walls (that in the southwest corner being distinguished as the governor's pew, and hung with heavy drapery), its slips with high, straight backs filling the central space, and its grand old steeple, on the point of whose vane sat a gilded bird said to contain a copy of Dr. i6 5 Strong's dedication sermon, and from which the call to service and the faithful clock's count of passing hours rang out in the silver tones of the clear, sweet bell heard distinctly in all parts of the city. Glad am I to learn that the metal of the old bell is blended with the heavier mass of the new one, adding richness to its deep vibrations as they linger on the ear. Now let me take you to the slip in the south gallery, near the middle, intimately associated with my earliest attendance on Sabbath services in the sanctuary. I found it the other day just as it used to be, except that with the entire gallery, it has been lowered four or five feet. There before my child eyes stood the tali, gaunt form of the young pastor, Joel Hawes, singularly awkward in the blacksmith's motion of his long arms, singularly impressive as with soul-earnestness he uttered plain gospel truth, to which the emphatic forefinger seemed to give point to pierce his hearers' "hearts. At the other end of the house the singers' gallery was an object oi special interest, with its numerous choir of young men and maidens, supported in their song by the viol and flute tdl the first little organ was introduced, a notable incident There come back to me to-day, fresh and vivid, the childish fancies which busied my little brain when that organ was first brought into use — fancies of many players on instru- ments shut within the shining case — fancies of myself winged as an angel, seizing one of the golden pipes, soaring around the vaulted ceiling and making the arch ring with trumpet notes of joy. To me, another point in the old church was of special interest. It was the little end of the front slip, cut off by the first column to the left of the pulpit. That slip is now removed, and the column has a new pedestal finished to the floor, but in the earlier days, like the other slips in which the columns come, it was divided so that the shorter end made comfortable sittings for two. There, as regularly as the Sabbath returned, were always to be seen two faces familiar to the whole congregation. They were the two Aaron s, who, 1 66 as Dr. Hawes was wont to say, were to him what Aaron and Hur were to Moses — Deacon Aaron Chapin and Deacon Aaron Col ton. Deacon Chapin sat nearest the aisle, his hands resting on his staff, his head erect, his double specta- cles thrown back upon his forehead, a devout listener. Deacon Colton's place was by the column, where, with con- veniences of his own contriving, he took pen and ink notes of every sermon. Some hundreds of his outlines are still extant to indicate the character and style of the preaching from that pulpit in those days. Their wives were invalids, unable to attend church, and so they sat by themselves. These two men had come, one from the hive of Chapins in Chicopee, and the other from the hive of Coltons in Long- meadow, and settled in Hartford about the time of the close of the revolutionary war. They were plain mechanics of the same trade — cabinet-makers — and in fortune realized the prayer of Agur. 'At about the age of sixty, each had withdrawn from the stir and worry of large business, and was occupied by himself in a special industry of his own. Active, but not anxious, they lived for more than twenty years, beautiful exemplars of a cheerful, happy old age, pervaded with Christian faith and hope and love. The office of deacon seemed to come to them by a law of heredity, for the ancestry of each, for four or five generations, was a line of deacons. More- over, they were to each other, own cousins. So it happened, almost as a matter of course, that in 1813 under the pastorate of Dr. Strong, they were together elected deacons of this First church, and retained the office till their death in 1838 and 1840, respectively. Josiah Beckwith, their special friend, was elected at the same time with them. Their colleagues in office were, by earlier elections, Ezra Corning, Isaac Bull, and Joseph Steward ; by later elections, Russell Bunce, Wil- liam W. Ellsworth, William W. Turner, and Thomas S. Wil- liams — a goodly company of Christian worthies. The war of the Revolution and the independence of our na- tion was followed by a period of sad declension and skepticism quite general. But as the nineteenth century opened, there 167 came a reviving breath from the Spirit of the Lord which quickened the languishing churches to new life. The winter of 1807-8 was the time of such a refreshing to this First church. My parents and grandparents loved to tell the story of that gracious visitation. Often have I heard it from their lips and felt its impression on my child-heart. The pages of the Evangelical Magazine of that period give in simple terms a sketch of the great revival. The records of the church show how the ingathering of that precious harvest brought into its fellowship some scores of persons who for half a century were its ornaments of grace and its pillars of strength. With that revival was introduced what was the " new measure " of that day — the evening meeting for social conference and prayer. Some conservatives in the church looked upon it with distrust and suspicion. But the pastor, Dr. Strong, went into it with all his heart and was well sustained by the earnest spiritual members of his flock. At first the meetings were held in private houses in different parts of the parish, most frequently at the house of Mr. Colton, convenient from its central position. Very tender and precious were the scenes witnessed in those circles, as hearts bowed in penitence found peace in believing, to the joy of saints on earth and angels in heaven. The interest in these meetings was so great as to demand better and more fixed accommodations. But the prejudices of many forbade an attempt to induce the society to provide a place. The tact and wisdom of the pastor were equal to the emer- gency, and under his guidance a few individuals joined hands and the want was met. Mr. Colton offered a corner of his own lot for a site. Others contributed the needed means, and the little brick conference house on Temple street was built. The records of the society show that a formal transfer of the building to the society was made by deacons Chapin and Beckwith, in 18 15. I think it had been completed and used for a few years previous to that date. There the social meetings of the church continued to be held till 1832, when the present more commodious lecture-room was secured. A i68 few clays ago I found the little brick house still standing, devoted to humbler uses as a workshop for a carpenter and a painter. As I crossed the threshold the old associations returned. I remembered how Deacon Colton took upon himself the voluntary and gratuitous services of a sexton for the building, calling in occasionally the assistance of one or another of his grandsons ; how the two deacons were always present, the one with his pitchpipe to set and lead the worship of song, the other with heart always attuned lo lead in fervent prayer; how in later revivals under Dr. Hawes the little room used to be filled morning after morning for a sunrise prayer-meeting j and especially how the house was packed with people eager to hear Dr. Nettleton, as he came full of faith and the- Iloly Ghost on one of his last evan- gelistic tours, and the power of the truth uttered in quiet solemnity of manner held all, even the little boys looking clown through the door of the attic, in breathless attention. The walls of that little house are already cracked and must soon fall, but there is a record in Heaven of things done there which can never pass away — of some hundreds of redeemed souls it is written for the eternal ages, to the glory of God's love and grace, "This and that man was born there." Now there come thronging on my recollection, pictures of these two men as they met the duties of their sacred office. Let me try to bring two or three of them out from the mists of the past. It is early evening, the simple supper oi bread and milk, always the same, is finished, and Deacon Colton, with stall in one hand and lantern in the other, is starting forth on an errand of Christian love. His form is erect, his step is elastic and brisk— seventy years have passed over his head, but no sign of weakness appears yet — he makes his way rapidly as one who has a mission, to the humble home of a poor widow and thence to the bedside of a sick brother. Then on his return, he drops in to tell Deacon Chapin what he has seen and heard, and they confer about what is to be done for these needy ones of the flock. Young ears listen and 169 young minds apprehend something good and noble in such ministry to Christ's little ones. It is a dismal November afternoon. Deacon Chapin, in his little shop, cheers himself with humming a tunc as he tinkers the old watch in his band. He has just cracked a nut with his vise and passed it to the youngster in the corner. The door opens and the pastor enters with face downcast and spirit disheartened, lie receives a kindly greeting, and almost before lie can utter his complaint, .1 spark of dry humor from the deacon's lips has forced a smile upon his own, and as the talk runs on, the burden on his soul is lifted and removed, and after a few minutes, he passes out joyous and hopeful. It was good Christian talk all the way through, and yet there was hardly a solemn word in the whole con- lion. The blessed thing about the interview was the cheerful spirit of one whose religion was the tenor of a trustful, godly life. It is a Saturday afternoon, the day before the communion. On Deacon Colton devolves the charge of preparing the ele- ments for the Supper. All the manual labor must be done, as far as possible, before the Saturday's sun shall set. The bread made of flour chosen and set apart for this purpose, baked to just the perfect tint of brown, is before him. He takes the knife devoted to this peculiar use and reverently removes the crust, then skillfully divides each loaf and binds it together to keep its place and moisture, then carefully packs all with the sacred vessels and calls upon his grandson to accompany him, wheeling the precious load to be safely deposited in the church before the sun goes down. This done, he returns and devotes the quiet of the evening to the preparation of his soul to hold communion with his crucified and living Lord. In all this there was nothing like fetichism, no foolish superstition, but a cherished, hallowed association of material symbols with spiritual realities, grand and holy. To the children's taste, no bread was ever so sweet as those communion crusts, which, with sweet milk, made their Sun- day morning meal. 170 One more picture must suffice. It is in the new lecture- room in the early days of its use. Deacon Colton has his place uniformly just by the desk at the left hand of the minister. Deacon Chapin's place is marked by an iron rod which rises above the level of the pews a few seats in front of the desk. A few minutes before the conference service is to begin, a lamp is set on the top of the rod, and by it stands the good old man of eighty, to guide the little company of singers gathered before him in the practice of the tunes to be sung. He is much delighted with the new revival hymns of the Christian Lyre just published, and would mingle some of them with the older and more staid strains of the sanctuary. The clear tenor voice is not so steady as it once was, but it has lost none of its sweetness. He gives the key-note from his pitchpipe, with the beat of his cane he brings up the time when it lags, his own enthusiasm kindles a glow of praise in other souls, and when the gathered congregation all join in under his lead, the song is full of heart-melody, and is akin to the worship of heaven. He continued to serve at this post of duty till his voice began to break, and through the weaken- ing of his mental faculties he would name a new tune and start an old one, to the amusement and confusion of his class. Then he withdrew, and afterward spent many an evening in running over old familiar hymns and tunes, offering unto God the silent song-worship of a soul that never faltered in its faith and love even to the end. The simple lives of these Levites of the Lord's house were almost exempt from sickness. Each was stricken down by paralysis at last, Deacon Chapin in his 86th, Deacon Colton in his 82d year. The savor of their true-hearted piety lingers still on earth, and will ascend as sweet incense before the throne of God forever. Their mortal parts lie side by side in the North burying-ground, and not far off, with them waiting the resurrection, sleeps the body of their Loved pastor, Dr. Strong, and I think also that of their later pastor, Dr. Hawes. May this First church of Connecticut, so blest in its past history, be favored ever with a succession of no less faithful pastors and no less faithful deacons. Friday Afternoon. RELATION OF THE CHURCH TO THE CIVIL GOVERNMENT. BY PINCKNEY W. ELLSWORTH. At the request of the committee of the First Congrega- tional church of Hartford, an article is now presented by the writer, upon the relation between the Congregational order, and the State ; and especially the influence exercised upon the latter by this ancient Society, collectively or individually. As it is not my intent to preach a sermon, a text was omitted. But as the essay was proving too long for the patience of this audience, and as abbreviation was necessary by cutting off both ends, taking out much from the middle and several joints from its body elsewhere, producing a solution of con- tinuity, as we professionally describe it, I have adopted the 17th verse of the 65th chapter of Isaiah as a rallying point, should any become lost in its mazes and that of prophecy : "Behold I create new heavens and a new earth." Although undertaken with reluctance, the writer could not refuse to do the little in his power to honor the memory of the heroic men and women of 1633 ; for in his own veins flows the blood both of Separatist and Huguenot, whose names still live in the family record. The acts of the clergy will be delineated by other and abler hands. They were the life of the move- ment which took the Colonists out of the jaws of the lion, though placing temporarily many of the pious and learned of England's gentry and yeomanry in a crucible of affliction, from which, under the watchful eye of a Divine overseer, was poured forth an ingot of inestimable value. Thus was ful- filled again and on a grander scale, " Behold I have refined thee, but not with silver, I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction." In the premises I would say, Congregational- ism is the simplest and most natural form of administration 174 as regards ecclesiastical and civil affairs, and is practicable only with those having a deep sense of personal freedom, and unhampered by an aristocracy, and is the frame work or body through which the vital forces of liberty and religion manifested their presence in New England. We propose now to examine this principle which pervades all public transactions, not as an abstraction, but concrete in the lives of the settlers, and the civil and ecclesiastical government they established, showing the ennobling, invigorating, and happy effects of piety, when acting through the most natural, simple, and Scriptural polity of independency. Any other method of presenting the subject would not be suggestive to those making ecclesiastical matters a professional study, or interesting to a miscellaneous audience. The Church polity, especially as related to the civil power, was not fully settled by the colonists for a long period, though the general idea of equality was acted on. Nevertheless, educated to believe the Church should find a protector in the State, notwithstanding their bitter experience, they adopted the same error in a modified form, giving the Church the precedence. This was especially true of Massachusetts, and led of course to trouble, continuing nearly a century ; develop- ing endless disputes, schism, the half-way covenant, and a fatal decline in piety, from which the church was rescued finally by the preponderating weight of 40,000 or 50,000 con- verts, the fruit of the great awakening under Edwards in 1735 to 1743. The Puritans at first seem to have had their minds fixed on the rescue of the Church from tyranny over- the conscience, without having settled on the "modus in quo," and the State was of little account except as protector of their own personal rights and religious freedom. The gen- eral opinion as to what was correct, and which, more or less modified, lay as foundation truths, was expressed by Daven- port at New Haven in the great meeting in Newman's barn : " Ecclesiastical administrations are a divine order, appointed to believers for holy communion in holy things ; civil admin- istrations are a human order, appointed by God to men, for 175 civil fellowship of human things." " That the ecclesiastical order and the civil must have different laws, different officers, and different powers." John Wise in 1717 made a great sen- sation in laying down Congregational principles as now accepted, which expressed the views of Roger Williams, so much in advance of his time, that in ecclesiastical censures the State has no interest, and that it has no authority over conscience. The ways of God are not our ways. The very calamities, almost crushing in their character, which beset our fathers, saved New England. Sickness, cold, famine, war, death, and sorrows innumerable, protected the colonies from the rush of those whose only motives were gain, and preserved the land for those who could sacrifice all for the love of God. It was only by force the best stock of England could be wrenched from her soil and transplanted to New England ; therefore the cruelties of Archbishop Laud were made instrumental in giving at the start the noblest men of Europe to the colonies, and God protected them ; not indeed by a sea of fire as Jefferson wished, but barriers of floating ice and a storm-swept ocean, clothed with unknown terrors, to them boundless in extent, yet a sea to be removed, when its protection should be no more needed and the swift steamer and sub-marine cable should practically say, there is " no more sea." Thus the holy seed was left to germinate in peace, even under the freezing blasts of an American winter, and in a rugged soil, whose matured fruit should " shake like Lebanon." With the word of God came light,' and with light, liberty. Immediately on the entrance of these factors into the life of nations, we see the most aston- ishing results. At once upon the pressure of evils so intol- erable that exile or rebellion alone presented hope of relief, the two wings of the great eagle of the apocalypse, which had once borne the church to the valleys of Piedmont, the mountains of Switzerland, and the morasses of Holland, were outstretched for a new and mightier flight, to that far distant portion of the wilderness- prepared for her, where she 176 might be nourished in safety from that terrible power which for a thousand years had placed its foot upon the neck of every potentate, and reigned triumphant over " all kindreds and tongues and nations." It is true that papacy had parted with many of its errors in manifesting itself as the church of England, and in its new phase held in its communion many truly godly men ; but its hierarchy was still actuated by the spirit of persecution, and a pope yet lived in the person of a king, head of the church, neither by divine appointment nor the will of its members, man}' of whom still pined for the gold, the scarlet, the merchandise and pomp of Rome. The spirit of popery is tyranny over the souls of men in the name of Christ. The true meaning of anti-Christ is, in place of Christ. There simply remained the old enemy, with a new name and new ministers. It still had two horns like a lamb, and its voice was unchanged. Observe the fact, not without significance, that the eagle, as if selected by a divine heraldry, now symbolizes the nation, which by pro- phetic figure was thereby saved. Let us then when we con- template this emblem of our country, with unfeigned grati- tude remember him who said of his people found in like cir- cumstances, " As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings, so the Lord did lead him and there was no strange God with him." The early settlers of Massachu- setts were called Separatists, and were much opposed to the Puritans, who, remaining in the church of England, were looking for an internal reform. But on emigrating to America the words of John Robinson were fulfilled, and when the repressing hand of power was removed the Puritans dropped the uniform of the man of sin, and all returned to the sim- plicity which is in Christ, uniting at the table of the Lord under the name of Puritan. None of the colonies at first broke from the church of England except that of Plymouth, and the clergy were all ordained by English bishops. But as their minds became enlightened by the spirit of God, and the mists of superstition and of early education were 177 removed, they all stood forth as freemen in Christ, and adopting the now existing polity, were able to apply every energy to extend the cause and kingdom of their divine Mas- ter. We see the inestimable value of the first settlers of a nation being godly men, for as the seed such is the fruit. Every people will inevitably find themselves sooner or later under a government demanded by the moral state of the majority if that majority is large and powerful: in other words, will have as good as it deserves. It would be utterly impossible for any nation to possess a free, stable, and safe government, not founded on the princi- ples taught in the word of God. The Orsini bomb, the dag- ger, dynamite, the assassin's bullet, are not the weapons blessed by Him who said "Not by might nor by power, bat by my spirit;" nor were they the defences of the settlers of New England. It would be impossible for those seeking free institutions in Europe, especially for those possessing a state religion, to maintain self-government as it exists in the United States. Marshal Prym recognized this insuperable obstacle in the recent revolution in Spain. Even France, which has a small element of Protestantism to redeem it, is ever on a volcano. The tocsin of St. Germain, sounding the death signal of 75,000 children of God, still rings in the ears of Him who said " vengeance is mine," the scales of whose justice respond to an atom's weight ; and France humbled herself in the dust before the glittering bayonets of the martial host, descendants of the 350,000 exiled Huguenots, the moral and military strength of her realm, but who, protected by the friendly arms of Germany were in their sons an avenging sword. The steps of her Goddess of Liberty are unsteady on a land slippery with the blood of martyrs of Jesus. They were the salt which ages could not restore, which, had it remained, would have given stability, averted moral corruption, and made her the peer of England ; pre- venting the commune, the Reign of Terror and of the guillotine, the carnage of Napoleon ; Eilau, Austerlitz, Tra- falgar, Waterloo, the madness of the Second Empire, Grave- -3 1 78 lotte, Sedan ; the siege of Paris and of Metz ; that sad episode in her history of slaughter, the second commune, with the satanic orgies of the Petroleuse, legitimate daughters of her goddess, from whose torches, lighted by the flames of the bottomless pit, the battered palaces of Paris were rescued, only by the superlative horrors of " the week of blood ; " "For they have shed the blood of saints and proph- ets, and Thou hast given them blood to drink, for they are worthy." Nor can any other people stand fast in that liberty which God designed, who are not free in spirit, who know not the God of the Protestant, the Protestant Bible, and Protestant principles. The chief sorrows of Ireland spring from moral causes, the removal of which will bring prosperity. The persecution of Jews in Russia, the civil wars in Mexico, the repressive laws of Spain, show the unfitness of those nations for free institutions and national independence. Well said that noble Puritan, Milton, of the crowds who shout so fiercely for liberty and equality : They " bawl for freedom in their senseless mood, And still revolt when truth would set them free ; License they mean, when they cry liberty: For who loves that must first be-wise and good. But from that mark how far they rove we see For all this waste of wealth and loss of blood." It is known that in want of any other precedent, the Puri- tans adopted the Mosaic code, except where applicable to the Hebrews only. The circumstances were much alike. On the formation of their respective governments, their num- bers were nearly equal, and the after division into States, thirteen in number corresponded with the tribes, counting, as Moses did, the two sons of Joseph for their father, also making thirteen, a very interesting and suggestive coinci- dence, taken in connection with what is to be said. The laws were, as a general thing, adequate to their circumstances, and in humanity immeasurably in advance of those of England, especially as regards capital offences, and the apportionment and tenure of land; for the English, though a sincere and 179 noble people, seem always to have retained something of the harshness of character of their early progenitors, the Northmen. Let me say that, without claiming perfection for the fathers, we must in justice judge them according to the age in which they lived ; educated under severe and sumptuary laws, with treason and rebellion staring them in the face at every turn, they were somewhat intolerant, not because they denied the right of worshiping God according to the con- science, as did the mother country, but simply to preserve their own liberty, determined not to part with their own freedom to any power, especially that one the fundamental principle of which was persecution, and to which liberty of conscience was an unknown term. Of the measures finally adopted by the settlers for fixing a State polity, the first record appears in notes of Henry Wolcott, Jr., taken at the delivery of a discourse in the little meeting-house on the public square in Hartford, by Rev. Thomas Hooker, June 10, 1638, a polity the fruit of which is the New England of to-day. Hume says : " The precious spark of liberty had been kindled and preserved by the Puritans alone, and it was to this sect, whose principles appear so frivolous, and habits so ridiculous, that the Eng- lish owe the whole freedom of their constitution." Congregationalism is eminently democratic in the best sense of the term, elevating to a higher level, not, as many suppose, depressing all to the lowest one ; for equality in the sight of God produces equality in the sight of law, and social equality, varied only by considerations of character, official position, and the accident of wealth ; the latter of little value in estimating title to honor with those themselves virtuous and refined. The Puritans wished to found churches cleansed of all superimposed devices of man, and which, entirely distinct, were yet one in Christ as the only and all-sufficient head, and in which the spirit of Christ shadowed forth in the simplest types or ordinances was a living power. i8o There must be, owing to the constitution of man, a power which will control his passions. This may be spiritual or civil ; but in most of human history it has been a civil power dominated by a spiritual, and that, too, by one, the scriptures of truth assure us, adverse to the interests of the human race. The Puritan gave this power to God, and that too, a holy God, and thus the government approached per- fection as nearly as possible in a world not yet "become the kingdom of the Lord and of his Christ." We had theocracy as applied to the individual, and democracy as applied to the State, viz. : a theocratic democracy. As the individual owed allegiance to God, then to the State, of course all acting on such principles would make a perfect State, not by enactment of statute, but by the law of conscience, for to such, in an important sense, there is no law. For this reason the Bible, the guide of the Puritan and the charter of liberty, is under the ban of every tyrant, whether he wears the ermine or the surplice, whether he wields the sword or brandishes the keys. By this sign recognition is infallible. As types are prophecies, of which Scripture is full, and as all point to the suffering or reigning Savioiir, let us see how God by His Providence interprets the grand declaration " Behold I create new heavens and a hew earth." As the destruction of Jerusalem typified the final consummation, so Isaiah lxv, 17, we have reason to believe, foreshadows two events no less stupendous, but more glorious in contemplation. This passage is expressly connected with the exaltation of the Gentiles and the adoption of a people for himself in place of those rejected of God. Though the advent of the Messiah inspired the prophetic pen, no immediate glory would follow that amazing event, but rather a sword. The robes of the bride were for long ages to be sackcloth, and her veil the deepest black ; and it was not until the 21st of December, 1620, the Bible was given an opportunity to mould a nation according to the spirit of the gospel. Then it was, as Canning said, " Protestantism* turned to the new world, to redress the balance of the old." Then, and never i8i before, was erected a fulcrum, on which might rest a divine lever mightier than that of the dream of Archimedes, working slowly but surely through the enfranchised word, and ulti- mately to topple over the monuments of human pride and power, placing on sure foundation the stone which should fill the earth. Prior to that time, even from the days of Wick- liffe, though the morning star had begun to rise, still darkness covered the nations. How barren was literature up to the time of Luther! How feeble was invention ! How meager science ! How dead the humanities of life ! This was a golden period for prelacy, but of gloom for the human race. Then it was the entrance of the word brought light, and also a sword ; but in the moment of extremity the church, lifted to the skies, and borne on "the two wings of a great eagle" to a wilderness at the world's end, alighted on the rock of Plymouth, and its footfall, if unobserved on earth, stirred the hosts of heaven. Kossuth said : " The musketry of the farmers at Lexington and Concord was heard around the world." So was felt the advent of the feeble, suffering church in New England. Little as the event appeared, all were called upon to " sing unto the Lord a new song, and his praise from the end of the earth, ye that go down to the sea, and all that is therein, the isles and the inhabitants thereof." " Let the inhabitants of the rock sing, let them shout from the top of the mountains." Mighty changes were consequent on the planting of the standard of liberty on the snowy hills of Massachusetts on that gloomy day of December. We must not judge by appearance only, for sorrow seems the first lot of every great and useful conception. As we compare the condition of the world now with what it was in 1620, we can but exclaim : " Thou hast made all things new. Thou hast indeed made us to ride on the high places of the earth, that we might eat the increase of the fields and to suck honey out of the rock, and oil out of the flinty rock." The world took from that moment a new start. A returned missionary said, after seeing how things are done in heathen lands, it seemed to him " a man could not drive a nail right without 182 the gospel." We know Christianity invigorates the mind, elevates the character, expels low thoughts by ennobling conceptions of God, inspires energy, utilizes every faculty, arouses invention, discovers new agencies, and new and better ways of doing all things. Under this heaven-born stimulus "what hath God wrought ! " Since the Puritan consecrated the new world to God, what mortal and physical results have ensued ! The very thought fills one with amazement ; yet all have emanated from an energy before latent in His word, working its legiti- mate effects on man, when liberated and allowed full play. This is the true philosopher's stone. The application of the power of steam, infinitely more surprising and beneficent than any or all of the seven wonders of the world united, has changed every commercial relation and enlarged in an unlimited degree the control of man over the forces of nature. This agency we owe to John Fitch, born near the boundary of Hartford and South Windsor, and within the sound of the bell of this church, hastening the time when, as President Stiles translates it, " There shall be a great traveling to and fro." The locomotive has done its share in making ready for the advent, we believe. " Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain : and the Glory of the Lord shall be revealed." This sublime oriental figure, announcing the dignity of the coming Messiah, met no literal fulfillment in the mortal life of the Man of Sorrow, in whom, to human eyes, " there was no beauty that we should desire him," and having made but one triumphal progress of two miles, down the narrow, precipitous, and stony path of the declivity of Olivet, riding " meek and lowly " on an ass' colt, on his way to execution, and with eyes filled with tears at the miseries about to fall on Jerusalem. But there is a wonderful fulfill- ment as he enters the New World, where " the chariots are with shining steel in the day of his preparation." " They 183 shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings." This last prophecy of Nahum probably has a deeper signifi- cance than the overthrow of Nineveh. Have we not often fallen into the error of the Jew, who mistakes shadow for sub- stance ? The spirit of Prophecy is to testify of Jesus, and the fifteenth verse of the first chapter, referring to the same war of Nebuchadnezzar is expressly quoted as applicable to the reign of Christ. Besides, Scripture declares, all these things happened as " tupoi," figures, for us on whom the ends of the world are come. Such certainly was the under- standing of the Old Testament, by the writers of the New. God gave not this power for evil, as well as good, to Philip 2d, or a Tamerlane, but reserved it for the new era, when the humanities taught by our Lord had softened the hearts of men and wrought in them a sense of brotherhood, making them safer custodians of such mighty agencies. The world is now dependent in most of its commercial transactions upon the telegraph and telephone, New England inventions, among the latent powers of this new creation, which no doubt still contains many new forces and applications of old ones yet undiscovered. Let us briefly consider the workings of evan- gelical truth. in its physical results in New England, aside from the moral power thus created ; particularly as exempli- fied in this community by members of this church on those trained under the same energizing influences. To Horace Wells, M.D., a member of this church, the world is indebted for the introduction of the principle of anaesthesia in surgery, an event the most important, in that department, of this century and perhaps of any age. The cot- ton gin, invented by Whitney of New Haven, added hundreds of millions to the wealth of this country. The sewing-machine is a constant source of wonder, more marvelous and infinitely more useful than the pyramids. Two members of this church, Dr. Mason F. Cogswell and Rev. Thomas H. Gallau- det, opened the avenue of knowledge and religion to the large class of deaf mutes; practically making the deaf to hear and dumb to speak. A son of a member of this church revolutionized the art of war by land and sea, through the discovery of the superiority of breech-loading and revolving arms, and the submarine torpedo; out of which grew breech- loading and rifled cannon, and the Gatling gun, an invention of a member of a sister Congregational Church. Now no nation ventures on the arbitrament of battle without Connecticut arms and munitions, and relies, whether English, French, or Russian, as certainly on these as on the treasury of the Rothschilds. God's way of ending wars would seem to be in keeping with his usual plans, precisely the opposite from human expectations, viz., making it so destructive that it will not be lightly undertaken, and so costly that money rather than arms will decide the issue: and the gold he will give and has given, as we shall see, to those best fitted to use it for His glory. The very thunderbolts are harnessed to the chariot of science and used as motive power, and Morse, born in Charlestown, now to all intents united to Cambridge (which saw the natal day of this Society), was allowed to know more than the wisest of the Patriarchs, and could have replied in the affirmative to the question put to Job, " Canst thou send lightnings that they may go and say unlo thee ' Here we are ?'" for the electric fluid is man's busiest servant. Vast, also, has been the change in the heathen world under the labors of such men as Samuel J. Mills of Torrington, Conn., who originated the American Missionary Society, and was prominent among the founders of the Col- onization Society, and Dr. Judson of Massachusetts, Mission- ary to India, showing that the stone cut out without hands is fulfilling its expansion, and its weight is recognized in the extremities of the earth. They were born respectively in 1783 and 1788, near the date of the formation of the govern- ment, which was in 1787. We have spoken of a few only of the remarkable discov- eries of modern times, but they are innumerable. There have been issued from the Patent Office 250,000 patents, a vast proportion of which have been to New England, and especially Connecticut, which takes the lead relatively. In i8 5 1 88 1 there were issued to the people in this State 693 patents, or one to every 829 inhabitants, while in North Carolina there were 64, or one to every 21,871 inhabitants; South Carolina 45, or one to 22,123; Mississippi 41, or one to 27,599. No doubt the patents issued to other States would show a very large proportion of the patentees were of New England origin, especially at the West, the population of which, w T hen not immigrants from Europe, generally claims New England as its birthplace. In speaking of the influence of the Puritan faith in arousing a benevolent spirit, we should not in this connection omit men- tion of the many saintly men who once sat where you do now, and who seem to demand remembrance by you on this joyful yet solemn occasion. It would be impossible to speak of all, but I will recall to your remembrance, besides the founders of that most beneficent institution, the American Asylum, the present of the Athaeneum by that man, small of stature but large of heart, Daniel Wads worth, which was built upon a spot consecrated by so many incidents connected with the Revolution, and by the presence of the illustrious Washington, who there with Lafayette and Rochambeau devised a plan for capturing Cornwallis. The Retreat for the Insane, a mother institution of that kind, was largely built by contributions from this church. The Farm School, Widow's Home, the Hospital, mainly built through the munificence of David Watkinson, to whom also the city owes the princely gift of the library of reference ; the Warburton Chapel, the gift of John Warburton and his estimable wife ; the royal bequest of $700,000 to Yale by Henry L. Ellsworth, though failing in part, yet testified to his regard for learning. The splendid endowment of the Theological Seminary by James B. Hosmer, gave an impulse to that institution which will be felt by the latest generations. These are some of the largest benefactors, but their gifts fall below the contributions from this church which have flowed in a perennial stream to the isles of the sea, a shower which has made many a wilderness a fruitful field, and which has nerved a vast number who are instilling into the West and South 1 86 the energy and spirit of New England. We can merely hint at these devout men whose works have not only gone before them, but whose example has left an ever increasing blessing behind. But a study of the scriptures and of the Divine workings in the natural world, shows us another remarkable fulfillment of prophecy in the new earth. When this development of providence was to take place, with the latent moral, commer- cial, mechanical, scientific, agricultural, and telluric potential- ities connected therewith, one element more was wanting to render effective these mighty agencies, the power which alone could set them all in motion, viz., money, which is to commerce as steam to the engine. This was so evident that as early as 1846 it was confidently foretold, owing to the fulfillment of prophecies and the necessities engendered by enormous commercial transac- tions, arising from the use of steam and other inventions, that the 17th verse of the 60th chapter of Isaiah would soon receive fulfillment. " For brass I will bring gold, and for iron I will bring silver, and for wood brass, and for stones iron: and I will also make thy officers peace and thy exactors righteousness ;" and the very places, California and Austra- lia, were designated where God had possibly hidden his treasures. The discovery of gold at Sutter's mill in Cali- fornia, and the opening of that treasure house, which first startled the country, was within two years from that time announced to the world by the Rev. Prof. C. S. Lyman of Yale, a Congregational clergyman, born within the original limits of the town of Hartford, but then residing for his health in that region. Prof. Lyman is of Puritan descent, and the ancestral name is carved on the monument in the cemetery of this church. These discoveries have doubled the amount of the precious metals within thirty-four years. But there is another remarkable circumstance connected with, this, viz. : nearly all the vast treasures of gold, silver, brass (or copper), petroleum, iron, etc., lie in the tract which by patent or charter was confirmed to New England ; for the limits extended from the 40 to the 48 of north latitude, i8 7 with practical control from 34 to 38 , also, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean, taking in the great lakes on the north, and Maryland on the south, and containing within the boundaries most of the oil wells, agricultural and mineral wealth of the country. The limits were afterward reduced to the first figures. The foot of the Pilgrim was to transform the desert into an Eden, for thus had Isaiah sung, "The Lord shall comfort Zion, He will comfort all her waste places, He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord." It is a fact worthy of notice that God has also greatly prospered Great Britain in this respect; thus giving his especial favors to the two nations serving him with the purest faith. We have now spoken of the liberation of the word of God and the opportunity of showing its power. From that moment forces were at work which assuredly would eventuate in a new earth, and all traceable to the entrance of truth upon a new era and under happier auspices, the moral atmosphere was cleared, stars in scripture figures and hieroglyphics put for kings and often so used fell from heaven, or seat of power, old governments would be remodeled and reformed; new conditions replace the old, and all things were to be made new. The subject of education, lying as it does at the foundation of all prosperity in the State, could not be omitted in any formal treatise, but time forbids more than the briefest allusion thereto. As a republican form of government cannot exist long without intelligence and virtue, an axiom in the estimation of all parties, there is less need of enlarging upon the subject. But in passing let me throw out a suggestion, viz., that it is possible the attempt to pro- duce homogeneousness by the present school system, though theoretically practicable, may prove inadequate where most necessary, owing to the hostility of a great religious sect, nearly equaling the united members of all Evangelical churches. The same arguments are forcibly used as against the standing order, both resting upon the same basis; and the same opposition is encountered and likely at no distant day to be more influential, among the very ones most needing the vivifying influences of a New England education. If we open our eyes we cannot avoid seeing the effect of the Puritan and Congregational idea of law, liberty, and religion as developed in the body politic, and as manifested in national characteris- tics. It is seen in the intelligence and high moral tone of the people, in their rapid expansion, their unbounded energy, their inventive genius, their obedience to authority, their universal sympathy with the oppressed and suffering, whether by the tyranny of man, or providence of God ; their love of learn- ing and the arts of peace ; and above all in regard for right. We have noted a few results, since in the shades of night Brewster and Bradford, in the secret chambers of Braintree and Scrooby, devised measures to emancipate themselves and religion from the merciless tyrant Archbishop Laud and the English King. Since that time there has been a vast increase not only in Congregational churches, but in many other denominations, which, springing into life from the same impelling causes and partaking of the same spirit, have aided greatly in making this a Christian nation. Indeed, while one hundred years ago Congregationalists comprised the great body of Evangelical churches, they are at present numerically surpassed by several other denominations. But we claim for the Congregationalism of the Puritans most that is efficient in other sects, even in the Episcopal, since the example of the former was eminently contagious and what there was of spirituality in the latter was owing to the active exercise of the Puritan element, which had not utterly forsaken the Church of England on the departure of the Separatists. The number of Congregationalists in 1881 was 383,685, while of Baptists there are 2,394,472 communicants. Of the Methodist Episcopal (North) 1,680,779; (South), 828,013; of Romanists, 6,174,202 ; Presbyterians 693,347. Now there must be some great cause for the increase of Congregationalism being relatively so slow, for as Dr. Patton says, " If religion had been only brain work we should have led all the denominations." 1 89 The causes of the slow growth of Congregationalism are, ist. The half way Covenant, so called. 2cl. The unyielding position of the clergy as respects the standing order. 3d. Making no attempt at proselytism ; not objecting to its members uniting with other denominations, especially the Presbyterian. 4th. The question of slavery. 5th. The high culture demanded of the clergy and the revolt of democracy, which brooks no claim to superiority, whether mental, moral, social, or political. 6th. The discourses not best adapted to the capacities and wants of the people. From want of time we shall omit speaking upon these causes except the last. I hope my clerical friends will not think the remarks of the writer intrusive on their territory, but rather the suggestion of a patient to his learned physi- cians, of whose remedies he has had much personal experience. He with due humility applies to himself the remark made by President Stiles in this pulpit exactly one hundred years ago while addressing Gov. Jonathan Trumbull, the Legislature, and the clergy : ndvro)v rtiv dyliov eAaxiSTorepog eXaxuroTdron' . The sixth reason is, people are becoming less Calvinistic and more Arminian in their way of thinking. There seems, unwittingly, to have been a tendency to the cultivation of a legal spirit, a fear of making grace too free, a dread of the low standard of obedience held by the Church of England, whose head wrote a book of sports suited for Sunday. This terror of the law may have originated in the constant contem- plation of their model, the Hebrew commonwealth, but once fixed it became hereditary in the church. This style of dis- course, no doubt, had advantages at that day, wanting at the present time. But whatever the cause, their sermons, though scholarly and orthodox, were dry, and did not engage the hearts of their hearers, nor do they seem to me always with clearness and assurance to have proclaimed the complete- ness, and all-sufficiency of the Atonement. The clouds which overhung Sinai, also shadowed Calvary, and the expir- ing but triumphant words, "It is finished," were but faintly heard by those trembling under the trumpets of the fiery 190 mount. The attributes of God as Sovereign, were more vigorously presented than the admirable and transcendent provision for abundant pardon, as revealed in the New Testa- ment, so that the kiss of "righteousness and peace" seemed rather a matter of ceremony than affection. By the glare of Sinai's lightnings, God reveals the Judge, establishing authority, rather than illustrating mercy. Law rather than love was the motive power. The fact is, men are miniatures of the God they worship. The character of Moloch was well reflected in the Canaanite, who immolated in the monster's brazen arms the innocent babe. A deity all mercy, and with no hatred of sin, or one forgiving by priestly manipulation, with no change of heart, or reformation of life, will have a constituency regardless of sin, and unworthy of trust. The God of the Puritan was feebly photographed in the Puritan church. To that, he was holy, and could not look on sin without abhorrence ; severe to mark iniquity, just, and whose wrath was feared more than his love attracted. Thus, the Puritan reflected a similar character — shunning every legal lapse with holy fear ; severe to himself, if kind to others; just, if not always merciful; to whom duty, taking precedence of love, was the cardinal virtue; to whom a lie was not only a sin, but a crime amenable to law ; to whom the day of rest was the Sabbath of the Jew; stern in dealing with transgressors ; yet alway a man to be relied on in every business or situation ; working diligently and conscientiously in the fulfillment of every obligation to God or man; and with a morality severe, even to austerity. Now, as these ideas must have, in part at least, been derived from the clergy, their preaching undoubtedly tinged the Puritan faith. This was inevitable. Judging of the impressions on others by that made on myself by many years of pulpit instruction, I cannot but think there was obscurity in presenting the grounds of salvation. The " open door " seemed but a gate ajar, and grace the hard-earned compen- sation of good resolves, pungent sorrow, scrupulous obedi- ence ; and the yoke of Christ an additional burthen to the 191 law ; that salvation was yea and nay, not yea and amen ; that success was by no means assured to the most penitent and earnest. I do not say this doctrine was preached ; but as the natural tendency of men is to rely on personal merit, at least as supplemental, that error was not sufficiently guarded against. It was many years before it was given me to learn, from an unexpected quarter, the divine glory in a Saviour adapted to every want ; that He was a free and unspeakable gift, needing no supplemental works to render effectual His all-sufficient atonement. The theology I had before learned, was that sanctification was a necessary precedent of jus- tification. These statements are illustrated by the history of that most excellent man, John Wareham, who came to Windsor with the party of Henry Wolcott, and was their first and well beloved pastor, who, history asserts, was always so oppressed with a sense of unworthiness and his lost condition by nature and legal obstacles, that he scarcely dared partake of the communion and went sorrow- ing all his days. His staunch Calvinism still held him in the grasp of original sin. The great revival under Edwards (1740) according to his own account, presented many terrible examples of the effect of these somber, if not distorted, views of the relations of law to grace, and even leading to suicide. But we need not seek the records of antiquity for examples. I say this as no reproach to revivals ; they are a blessed provision for the exhibition of the sovereignty and mercy of God ; but there must have been something cloudy in the presentation of the best news man ever received, while the heart was longing for its reception, and yet could not understand. The crowded rink, five years ago, testified in an unmistakable manner, not so much to the learning and oratory of the men mighty in Scripture, and who three times a day for months filled the largest building in the city to overflowing, as to the longing men have to know God's way of saving the soul, and to hear the news in a manner all could comprehend. It is difficult to estimate the influence of the clergy and 192 of the Congregational principle upon the State aside from the church. It is certain, Congregationalism greatly favored patriotism. The clergy and church members were to a man strong Federalists, and went in heartily for the war of inde- pendence, while Episcopalians were as exclusively Tories. It is believed Jefferson obtained his ideas of State organiza- tion from the polity of the Baptist Church, an eminently Congregational order, and thus he was prepared to aid in the establishment of the Government of the United States, in which he was ably supported by the statesmen of New Eng- land, and eminently so of Connecticut. The story of New England love of country is told when we learn that this State furnished 32,000 men for the regular army in the revolutionary war, besides defending her own borders at her own expense, a number equal to the whole male population capable of bearing arms. At one time Connecticut troops formed one-half of the regular army. A complete history of the military service of members of this society from its organization would make a volume of very great interest, a glorious appendix to an extraordinary record, beginning with the storming of the Pequot fort defended by 600 warriors of the fiercest tribe in New England, by- 77 men, one-half of whom were from this Society, embracing one-half the military force of the three towns which at a later day formed Con- necticut, and ending with the war of the Rebellion, in which twenty-nine members of this society were engaged, of whom six fell in battle or died from diseases incident to the camp, three of whom were sons of officers of the church, two being sons of Deacon Weld, and one a son of Deacon W. W. House, and to these we may add the knightly soldier, Major Camp, educated in this church, who also fell in battle. We have now endeavored to show how the prophecies of a new earth have their fulfillment, typically, in the develop- ments of this favored age and land ; foreshadowing the more glorious state, when Christ shall assume by his own right the kingdom offered him by the prince of this world, 1800 years ago, and which the usurper has firmly held during the 193 ages past. We cannot trust to the wisdom of unregenerate men for the preservation of the institutions of our fathers, our liberties, or the continuance of our favored condition ; the majority governs, and as yet is apparently not the will- ing servant of the Almighty. All hope rests in the assured promises of the God of our fathers. The usurper has not abandoned his claim, and it does not require an ear of pecul- iar sensitiveness to detect the mutterings of coming storms, and the quarter from which they will burst ; but while " sus- tinet" follows "transtulit" on the banner of our State, and the eagle on the national standard recalls the vision of St. John, and the ever-protecting wing of the Providence of God, we may be assured his plans of beneficence will move steadily and sublimely on to accomplishment. Nor will he suffer that vine to be plucked up which his own right hand planted, blessed as it has been, by the incense of " fervent and effectual prayer," watered abundantly with the tears of exiles and of martyrs, and most richly fertilized by the blood of their sons, though the wall built around it with solicitude by the Pilgrims has crumbled in many a place, and " the wild beast of the field " (the wolves of the commune) prowl around, and " the boar from the woods " of Italy's deadly Avernus, even now, burrows under the foundations thereof. SOCIAL AND DOMESTIC LIFE IN EARLY TIMES. BY MRS. LUCIUS CURTIS. The social and domestic life of any people is, from the nature of the case, hidden from the public eye. It falls into the shadow of their religious and political life. Important as it is, and eager as we are to look into the home life of the early days of our ancestors to see their daily occupations and the interplay of family affection, much must be pictured by our imagination from the slender resources of a few 25 194 records. In respect to the Pilgrims and Puritans many affirm that they had no social life, but only religious convic- tions and the single purpose to save their souls. But we might expect, according to the promise of our Saviour, that in seeking first the kingdom of God other good things will be added to them. It may be well to take a backward glance at some of the events of the years of preparation for the founding of a new State. The tree which for a thousand years had grown on the soil of England, rooted in the Anglo- Saxon race, and cultured by Christianity, was to shed its fruits on a soil far remote from its beginning. Perhaps in a greater degree than the common mind perceives, manners and customs are affected by public events. As we turn the pages of the history of these many years, the years of war between king and nobles, of strife for supremacy between England and France, when the Church itself was seeking for the glory of the world, we get few glimpses of joyous domestic life. Anarchy and ignorance were foes to the peace of home. There had been little improvement in the condition of the rural population since the Romans left the island. Tillage of the land was poor, famine and pestilence held sway, and even the ecclesiastics lived in coarse luxury. The darkness deepened into night, in the first half of the fifteenth cen- tury. But just at this time, the dawn began to appear. The invention of printing, the discovery of America, and the mighty work of Luther, which brought light from Heaven to the humblest in condition, made a new civilization possible. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, in the last years of the reign of Elizabeth, who died in 1603, the methods of agriculture had improved, the farmers had an abundance of good food, and lived in better houses. English commerce developed rapidly. " London became a great city, where the gold and sugar of the new world were found side by side with the cotton of India, the silk of the east, and the woolen stuffs of England. The feudal castle had given way to the home with its chimney corner, its tapestried parlor, its quaintly carved chairs and cabinets, its silver plate. There 195 came at this time a mighty impulse to literature ; it was the age of Spenser and Shakespeare. The whole prose litera- ture of England had grown up, since the translation of the Scriptures by Tyndale and Coverdale." A leading writer has said, " We must not picture the early Puritan as a gloomy fanatic. The country gentleman studied theology, but he might have known something of literature. Milton's father, business man as he was, composed madrigals and sacred songs. In Milton himself (born in 1608) we see the completest type of Puritanism. There was nothing narrow or illiberal in his training. He could write of — Sweetest Shakespere, Fancy's child, Warbling his native wood notes wild. He could revel in the " dim religious light " of the great cathedral as he hears — The pealing organ blow To the full-voiced choir below In service high and anthem clear. There was nothing ascetic in his look — with his long brown hair. He could have stood for a knight in chivalrous times. When we meet Robinson and Bradford in Leyden we find them honored, wise, and accomplished men. Robinson was sought as an aid by the professors in the university ; Brewster was teaching English (as he said after the Latin manner), having learned Latin in England. When they landed at Plymouth it was with the idea of an English home in their minds that they sought to subdue the wilderness. As they looked out in the spring upon the new scene, when warm and fair weather came, and the birds sang in the woods "most pleasantly," they were reminded that it was not an English landscape that they saw. There was a glow in the sunset sky far more gorgeous than that to which they had been accustomed. Close at their feet, on the edges of the woods, the trailing arbutus gave out its fragrance. As the season advanced they could see in profusion the wild rose, seeming to choose the rocky coast for its home. The gloom of the dense woods was lighted up with the bright flush of the azalea and the laurel ; the summer died in the glory of 196 the golden rod and cardinal flower; and the autumn leaves of bush and tree were aglow with splendor. The first summer of planting was well rewarded, and they had ample supplies of fish, wild turkey, and venison ; and their first Thanksgiving was celebrated. On that occasion of hilarity, "they exercised their arms, and for three days entertained Massasoit and ninety of his people, who made a contribution of five deer to the festivity." Dark days of sickness and famine were to come, when, as they said, "the best thing we could present to the sick was a lobster or a piece of fish without any bread, or anything else but a cup of fair spring water." In the simple life of those early days, there was opportunity for "plain living and high thinking." Though there were servants to do the menial work, the governor and the elder must often have turned their hands to humble employments. The Indian corn which they had to substitute for the wheat of England, was used for money and for nutri- ment. Learning from the Indians its various uses, and its method of culture, it became to them the stay and staff of bread. Having no mill, the corn must be pounded in a mortar ; many days must have been spent in fishing, but they could know that this was the Apostles' own calling, and as they said, " God fed them out of the sea for the most part." It was not without reason, that the head of the house in later days, at the annual Thanksgiving, with his eight children around the table, remembering the Indian corn, the food in the wilderness, would say to his household : " Of all other things on the table you may eat, but of this, the Indian pudding, you must eat." It was to be a remembrance, like the pot of manna laid up in the tabernacle. The same homely dish could inspire Joel Barlow, far away from home : " Ye Alps audacious, I sing not you, A softer theme I choose, the hasty pudding. Could these mild morsels in my numbers chime, And as they roll in substance, roll in rhyme, No more thy awkward unpoetic name Should shun the muse, or prejudice thy fame, But rising grateful to the accustomed ear, All lands should catchjit, and alhrealmsjevere." 197 Five years after the planting of the colony, the chronicler relates : " It hath pleased the Lord to give this plantation peace and health, and so to bless their labors, as they had corn sufficient, and some to spare for others ; " and in the seventh year we have the report of a visitor from the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, in which he gives a glowing account of the order and comfort of the little community ; of their kind treatment of the Indians ; of the dignity of their worship. Governor Bradford himself said in a poem on New England (every one in those days wrote verses) : All sorts of grain, which our own land doth 'yield Was hither brought and sown in every field. Here grow fine flowers many, and 'mongst those The fair white lily and the fragrant rose, Pears, apples, cherries, plums, quinces, and peach, Are now no dainties ; you may have of each. We have the portrait of only one of the Mayflower com- pany ; that of Edward Winslow, taken in London in 165 1, as is supposed by Vandyke ; and of the hundreds of volumes of Brewster's library, but few can be identified. We should think in these days that the good Elder was dressed in fancy costume. In his inventory, we read of a blue cloth coat, one violet color cloth coat, and one green waistcoat. It was customary for the women of our primitive colonists to wear beaver and other hats, with a feather, and their example was long imitated by their daughters. It is said that in the second quarter of the present century, for some reason they were not in use ; women began then " to draw the line at feathers." Roger Williams at one time argued from the scripture that women should not appear in the public assembly without veils, but it was without effect, and as early as 1647, Nathaniel Ward tells us that there were " five or six women in the colony," whose hearts were drawn after the fashions; they enquire, "what dress the queen is in this week." The same spirit appeared many years after, upon one of our Connecticut hills. A young, fair woman had come to be the bride of the minister in a country parish. The good deacon, who called upon her at once, said "he 198 hoped she would not be a setter forth of the fashions." Early Monday morning the same deacon's daughter came upon her side saddle to get the pattern of the riding habit which the young wife had worn to church the day before. The clothing of the early time must have been brought from England, and would naturally be such as was in use there. We are told that Pocahontas was married in Indian muslin, with a fillet of feathers and a veil of gauze upon her head ; perhaps the gift of her father's friend, Captain John Smith. In the succeeding emigration, from 1630 and after, there came over many country gentlemen of no inconsiderable fortune. Among them were Winthrop, who had a property of six or seven hundred pounds a year; Humphrey, son-in-law of the Earl of Lincoln ; Isaac Johnson, one of the richest of the emigrants, and his lovely wife, the lady Arabella, who " came from a paradise of plenty into a wilderness of wants ; " Theophilus Eaton, an eminent London tradesman ; Edward Hopkins, the governor of the Connecticut colony, whose descent and breeding, Cotton Mather tells us, fitted him to be a "Turkey merchant," and many others. There were more than a hundred university graduates, some of whom had been classmates with Jeremy Taylor, George, Herbert, and Milton. They brought with them "deferential manners, official stateli- ness, distinguishing apparel, with stiffness and elaborate eti- quette," and they brought an isolated community on the edge of a wilderness into relations with the world.* In 1633 the poems of the saintly George Herbert (with whom President Chauncey had been a fellow at Trinity) were published, and it is supposed that his emigration, and that of Cotton and other eminent ministers suggested those well known lines : " Religion stands on tip-toe in our land, Ready to pass to the American strand." In the inventories at the death of some of the ministers, articles of luxury are noted, as in the will of Thomas Shepard, * Cotton Mather said years after, that Roger Williams " had a wind- mill in his head." Perhaps it was necessary as a means of blowing away some of the chaff of routine and custom. i 9 9 1649 : " To my son Thomas my best silver tankard, my best best black suit and cloak." To another son " one of my long silver bowls; " to a friend " my velvet cloak." In that of the Rev. N. Rogers of Ipswich, 1658, a watch, answering as a clock, and a rich " canopy bed." Winthrop could entertain guests in the large hall of his house with stately politeness, and he notes " upon consideration of the inconveniences which had grown in England by drinking one to another he restrained it at his own table, and wished others to do so, so it grew little by little into disuse." The pictures of some of these men which can be seen to-day, — Winslow with his gen- tle face, his starched ruff, Winthrop with his delicate features, and his long brown hair and full beard, and his plaited ruffles, Charles Chauncey (born in 1599,) with his long, flowing grey wig, his bands, and olive green robe, do not look like the grim Puritans we supposed them to be. They had not yet come under the oppressive severity of toil, which benumbs the power of emotion. Their high resolve which led them to abandon the ease of a settled habitation, must have given something of nobility to their aspect. On the voyage of the Arabella, we are told how the amuse- ment of the children was provided for. " Our children and others that were sick and lay groaning in our cabins we fetched out, and having stretched a rope from the steerage to the mainmast, we made them stand, some on one side, and some on the other, and swing it up and down till they were weary, and by this means they soon grew well and merry." It seems like a fish story indeed, when the same chronicle tells us that when near the Isles of Shoals, in less than two hours, with a few hooks they took sixty-seven codfish, some a yard and a half long, and a yard in compass. The moon seemed smaller to them than when in England, which was remarkable for this " great country." We have a good example of the " large stories," even of that early day. A skipper had appeared from Maine, at an English port, with cargoes in three successive years respectively, in a schooner, a brig, and finally a large ship. On being rallied about the 200 rapid increase of his vessel, as if it had grown while crossing the sea, he replied, that " they built ship-stuff in lengths and sawed sections of it off at pleasure, according to the voyage." We are glad to know what the travelers in the Arabella had to eat after their tedious voyage. On landing at Salem, " they supplied us a good venison pasty, and good beer. In the morning the rest of our people went on shore, off Cape Ann, to gather a store of strawberries." (A later traveler tells us that he saw in Boston strawberries two inches about ; cultivated ones, we suppose.) We have an account of an official visit of the authorities, civil, military, and ecclesiastic, to the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1632. Brewster and Bradford came to meet them. They were feasted every day at the several houses. On the Lord's day there was a sacrament, and in the afternoon Roger Wil- liams propounded a question — several spoke. When this was ended, the deacon, Mr. Fuller, put the congregation in mind of the duty of contribution, whereupon the governor and all the rest went down to the deacon's seat and put into the box, and then returned. The " fame of the pleasant lands " of Connecticut had early reached England. Its leading towns, New Haven and Hartford, were settled by some of the richest and best of the colonies, and as it grew steadily in numbers and wealth it soon acquired the name of the land of " steady habits." In the planting of towns, we find some notes of the quaint simplicity of the time. Of one minister, it was said, " with the youth he took great pains, and he was a tree of knowl- edge with fruit which the children could reach." An inhabi- tant of Ipswich, living at a distance, absented himself, with his wife, from public worship. The General Court empowered the selectmen to sell the farm, so that they might live nearer to the sanctuary, and be able more conveniently to attend upon its religious services. In 1670 constables were instructed to prevent young persons from being out late in the evening, especially Sabbath, lecture, and training day evenings. The boys were closely watched at church. An inhabitant of one 201 town was complained of, because he had a servant many years and had not taught him to read. The fire-places, says one, were large enough to admit a four-foot log, and the children might sit in the corners and look up at the stars. Let no one, says another, make a jest of pumpkins, for with this food the Lord was pleased to feed his people to their good content, ere corn and cattle were increased. 'Stead of pottage and puddings, and custards and pies, Our turnips and parsnips are common supplies ; We have pumpkins at morn, and pumpkins at noon, If it was not for pumpkins we should be undone. In a book published in London in 1643, New England's First Fruits, the colonists say: "We have planted fifty towns and villages, built thirty or forty churches, and more ministers' houses, a castle, a college, prisons, forts, coastways, and causeways many, no public hand reaching out any help ; having comfortable houses, gardens, orchards, grounds, fenced cornfields, etc." The ordinary dress of the time was more picturesque than in our own day. The color of the doublet universally worn by men was often red. Beneath the doublet was worn the waistcoat, which in the poorer classes was of cotton, in the richer was frequently of silk and much elabo- rated. The sleeves were slashed for the purpose of displaying the linen below. The bands of the working men and the ruffs of the gentry were starched to extreme stiffness. The outermost covering of all was the cloak. As early as 1634 there was legislation against " slashed apparel, immoderate great sleeves, long wigs, gold, silver, or thread lace, knots of ribbon, double ruffs and cuffs," reasoning that such super- fluities tended to " the nourishing of pride and exhausting men's estate, and of evil example." Such legislation was not new. In the reign of Mary, the law had regulated the size of the shoe at the toe. But it was in vain, for the peaks of the shoes had grown so large that " men could hardly kneel in the house of the Lord." The authorities were foiled in their attempts to prevent women from arranging their sleeves in the most captivating manner. In 165 1, the General Court 26 202 ordered that if a man was not worth two hundred pounds, he should not wear gold or silver lace or buttons, and because of the scarcity of leather, should not walk in great boots. These laws were soon repealed, and it is believed that they sprung not so much from unworldliness, as from a desire to check the rising independence which asserted itself in the dress of the poorer classes ; and the expense which they incurred prevented them from contributing to the public good. Winthrop's little bark, the " Blessing of the Bay," another, the " White Angel," and the "Trial" the first ship built at Bos- ton, were the precursors of the shipping of the future, which were to bring the products of the West Indies and the con- tents of the shops of London to the homes of the New World. Haste and necessity had made plain houses the rule at first, and those who had wealth were advised to abstain from all superfluous expense and to reserve their money for the public use. The New Haven people were thought to have laid out too much of their stock and estates in building fair and stately houses. Allerton, who went among them from Plymouth, built a " grand house " upon the creek. The Rev. Mr. Whitefi eld's house, built at Guilford in 1639, ls sa ^ to De the oldest house in the United States now standing as origin- ally built. At the time of Winthrop's death, 1649, a traveler was already speaking of Boston, as a city-like town, and calling attention to its large and beautiful buildings; and as rich London merchants came to reside, they built houses of great size and elegance, many of them with spacious grounds and large gardens. The Province house, built in 1679, is de- scribed as having " a palatial doorway, a spacious hall, carved balustrades, paneled and corniced parlors." It figures in Hawthorne's romance and became afterwards the residence of the royal governors. The Frankland house, described by Cooper in one of his stories, had great richness of decoration. The father of Samuel Adams was not one of the " merchant princes " of the day; he was a respectable citizen, living com- fortably and honorably; his house stood in a spacious garden, 203 looking out upon the harbor, surrounded by an observatory. We have but few elements of a Puritan city, in the descrip- tion given by a traveler in 1740 : " For their domestic amusements, the gentlemen and ladies walk the mall, and from thence adjourn to each other's houses, and spend the evening — those that are not disposed to attend the evening lecture, which they may do, if they please, six nights out of the seven, the year around. And the ladies here visit, drink tea, and indulge every little piece of gentility, and neglect the affairs of their families, with as good a grace as the finest ladies in London ! " Copley's pictures show us something of the showy dress of this period. Here is the portrait of the daughter of the Rev. Thomas Prince. She is dressed in a dark blue velvet robe, with muslin undersleeves reaching below the elbows. Four rows of pearl beads encircle the throat. In 1749 a society was established for promoting indus- try and frugality, and the fourth anniversary was publicly celebrated. In the afternoon, about 300 young spinsters appeared on the common, with their spinning wheels, draped in garments of their own weaving. An immense number of spectators were present. In 1766, in Franklin's examination at the bar of the House of Commons respecting the state of things in America, " What used to be the pride of America ? " was asked by a friendly member. " To indulge in the fash- ions and manufactures of Great Britain," was Franklin's reply. " What is now their pride ? " " To wear their old clothes over again, till they can make new ones." A fragment of a poem, by Benjamin Thompson, who graduated at Harvard in 1662, shows that women "made pies " and worked samplers in those days. The poem is on " The Fortification of Boston, begun by women." " A grand attempt some Amazonian Dames Contrive, whereby to glorify their names, A ruff from Boston Neck of mud and turf Reaching from side to side, from surf to surf, A tribe of female hands, but manly hearts, Forsake at home their pastry crust and tarts, To knead the dust, the samplers down they hurl, Their undulating silks they closely furl." 204 We have few notices of literary women. Mistress Anne Bradstreet, the daughter of Governor Thomas Dudley, wrote verses, which were published in London in 1650. One of her titles was, " An Exact Epitome of the Four Monarchies. The Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, Roman." She was a reader of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, and wrote an elegy upon it. Of Mercy Warren (born 1725), the daughter of James Otis, and wife of James Warren, a descendant of one of the settlers at Plymouth, we are told that her early education was greatly aided by the village clergyman, who lent her books and directed her tastes. She enjoyed the confidence of the great leaders of the Revolution, with many of whom she exchanged frequent letters. In one of her poems, she gives a long list of articles, imported, not of real necessity, which women could relinquish. We find that the ministers themselves held on to wigs till after the Revolution, though such good men as Judge Samuel Sewall battled all his life against them. They are certainly "becoming," as we see them in the pictures of Mr. Cotton, Samuel Willard, and Cotton Mather and many others. Great pomp and ceremony attended the departure of the dead. As Palfrey has said : " The living kept before themselves so constantly the vision of a Great Judge and of an assize, be- fore which they were to appear, that when one of their number set out for the court above they attended him, as far as they could go, with the circumstance which the event demanded." At the burial of Winthrop it was thought not too much to spend in his honor, to burn a barrel and a half of powder. Sewall records at the burial of the Rev. Thomas Shepard the names of the bearers, and adds : " It seems there were some verses, but none pinned on the herse. Scholars went before the herse." We have just been told at the burial of the poet Spenser many poets dropped verses upon the coffin. At wed- dings, at christenings, and at funerals, the parson and his wife — at funerals the bearers — also received presents of a stip- ulated kind, which were really fees and were faint traditions of earlier English customs. In 1741 the General Court en- 205 acted that no scarves or gloves except six pairs to the bearers and one pair to each member of the church or congregation where the deceased belongs, wine, rum, or rings, shall be given at any funeral upon the penalty of fifty pounds. At the funeral of a wicked man, Judge Sewall would not go, and in his diary says : " Had gloves sent me, but staid at home, and by that means lost a ring." Mr. L. M. Sargent tells us of Dr. Andrew Elliot, whose interleaved almanac discloses the fact that in thirty-two years he appears to have received 2,900 pairs of gloves at funerals, weddings, and baptisms. Of these he sold about $640 worth. " What a glove and ring market the doctor's study must have been ; it might be truly said he was hand and glove with his parishioners." A note in Sewall's diary is in regard to the day of the week which should be Fast-day: " The governor (1702) moved that it be Friday, saying, ' Let us be Englishmen.' I spoke against making any distinction in the days of the week ; desired the same day might be for fasts and thanksgivings. Boston and Ipswich lecture led us to Thursday. Our brethren at Connecticut had Wednesday, which we applauded." The " training day " was a great day of amusement and relax- ation, and we are glad to know that there was one day which , interested the dignitaries of church and State, and gave the small boy an opportunity to follow the music and play the soldier. "Election day" was signalized not only by military parade, but by pastimes and festivities, in which the family took part, making the now famous "Election Cake" in honor of the occasion. We do not need to picture the scenes of Thanksgiving, with its public religious service, its family reunions, and loaded tables. It is known to us, not merely by tradition, but in our own joyous celebration. The descendants of the Pilgrims, from far and near, then become themselves pilgrims to their early home, to exchange family greetings, and to renew the associations of childhood. Of the music of all these years there is little to be said. It is painful to think that the fathers could suppose that instru- mental music was forbidden by such a text as Amos 5, 206 xxxiii, " I will not hear the noise of thy viols ; " that they could ignore such commands as " Praise him with stringed instruments and organs." We must remember that these men were, in a measure, enthralled by the ignorance and superstition of the age. There were false interpretations of Scripture, on which were founded great wrongs as well as follies. It pleases us to record a note from Winthrop's Journal : "We received a letter at the General Court, from the magis- trates of Connecticut and New Haven, wherein they declare their dislike of such as would have the Indian rooted out as being of an accursed race, and their desire of our mutual accord." We have in our State to-day the remnants of the Mohegan Indians, and they are our friends and fellow- citizens. The noble and gentle founders of Connecticut have left to us a heritage of peace, of order, and intelligence. This State has been distinguished from early days, by its town libraries. In a neighboring parish, at the close of a fifty years pastorate, the Rev. Joab Brace said: "Reading has always been a great entertainment among this people. There have been three public libraries, containing standard works on divinity, history, philosophy, poetry, travel, enough to give any attentive reader a good education." A recently elected United States senator from this State could say that he owed the education which fitted him for public life to the library in his native town. As we look upon the portraits of our immediate ancestors, and read their letters and contemplate the works which fol- low them, we find much to honor and to imitate. The wide- spreading elms, the rich leaved maples by many a wayside and dwelling, speak of the hands that planted them so lovingly for us long ago. We have learned from them to prize home life with its family affections and domestic com- forts, and have been taught by them to look upward to the great " city of God," the household of heaven, and to make our homes on earth the symbols of its purity and peace. The letters which are given below are a few of the many received in response to the invitation of the Church to be present at its celebration. Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Sept. 17, 1883. My Dear Sir : I greatly regret that it is entirely out of my power to avail myself of the invitation which you have been good enough to communicate to me from the First Church of Christ in Hartford. You will, I trust, convey to the committee the expression of my appreciation of the honor, and the interest of my college in your proceedings. It is a matter of much pride and gratification to the present members of Emmanuel College to realize the large influence exercised by those who in the young strength of the college went out to your free and new societies ; and we value highly the interest thus given in our foundations to many in America. Since the first days the prevalent tone of relig- ious thought within our walls has doubtless gone through many changes (Puritan in Chadeton's time, becoming broad church in the flourishing time of Whitcote and his fellow, and then high church under Sancroft, to come no later down), but throughout our ecclesiastical forms have remained the same, viz. : those of our English established Church. Under those we are still mindful, I hope, of the spirit of religious liberty underlying our foundation ; and are earnest sympa- thizers with all seekers after truth in whatever associations. This sympathy has a special character, I need hardly assure you, for the work of an organization which owes its origin to two of the early graduates of Emmanuel ; and I greatly wish that I were able to give evidence of this by accepting your invitation. As my duties here make this impossible to me, I can only express my sincere acknowledgments for the 208 honor done me and my cordial interest in your approaching anniversary. I am, my dear sir, very faithfully yours, George Phear, Master of Emmanuel College. Airedale College, Bradford, Sept. 25, 1883. My Dear Sir : It would have been to me a singular pleasure, not only as Chairman of the Congregational Union of England and Wales, but as a Christian man and a Congre- gationalism to have been present at your 250th anniversary. And I am present at it ; my heart and spirit are with you. I stretch the invisible hand of brotherhood across the Atlantic, and in the name of all our churches in the mother country, I wish you joy and the blessing of the Gracious Father on you and your celebration. We owe you much. At a time when Presbyters threatened the nascent life of Independency the "Survey" of your first pastor helped to ward off the blow, and so to prevent "new Presbyter" from being " old Priest writ large." It is not too much to say that the order and discipline achieved under so trying cir- cumstances of the Congregational Churches in America showed the English Puritans that Independency was the most excellent way. And we have ever looked with pride to the manner in which your churches have served your country, contributing so many of the men, so much of the wisdom, heroism, and statesmanship to which it owes its greatness and its freedom. Allow me then, though unseen, not to be unremembered on an occasion so full of interest, of joy; but in the name of all the sister Churches here to wish you again and still again "God-speed." Ever faithfully yours, A. M. Fairbairn. Clewer House, Windsor, Eng., Sept. 22, 1883. My Dear Sir : I feel greatly honored by the invitation you have so kindly sent me, to attend the Hartford com- 209 memoration next month. It brings back to me memories of worthy men, with whom history has made me in some measure familiar ; and how pleased I should be to mingle in your congregation, your thanksgivings, and your enjoyments on the approaching occasion. But my engagements at home, to say nothing of the journey at my time of life, render it impossible for me to do what I could wish. Your Church holds a peculiar position in New England, and, as a mother, can look with joy upon her children. The wilderness and the solitary place have indeed been made glad by her, and trees of the Lord's right hand planting flourish around what, two centuries and a half ago, was but an oasis in the midst of a spiritual desert. You will have much to say of Hooker and Stone, and the shades of other holy men will pass before your deeply interested assembly. May the great Head of the Church be present to crown the gathering with His benediction; and may "the fourteenth pastor of Hartford" be long spared to carry on noble work in the transatlantic Christendom. Accept my most affec- tionate greetings, in which, I am sure, the Congregational Churches of England and Wales do fully concur. You intimate your intention to publish a history of the Hartford Church, which I look forward to with gratification. I hope I may be spared to read it. With sincere fraternal regards, I remain, my dear Mr. Walker, your sincere friend and brother in Christ. John Stoughton. New College, London. The City Temple, Holborn Viaduct, London, E. C, Sept. 19, 1883. Rev. Dr. Walker: My Dear Sir : We cannot be with you personally on Octo- ber nth and 12th, but we will not be far off sympathetically and devotionally. My own church is about the same age as yours, and has never moved out of the city of London. I 27 2IO am sure I speak for my Church when I desire your accept- ance of our warmest congratulations on the celebration of your 250th anniversary. The evangelical churches of the world belong to one another ; in doctrine they constitute one church, and in fellowship they represent one life. Though our geographical separation is so wide, yet in our spiritual nearness there is "no more sea." Accept fraternal saluta- tions, and with many a " God-bless-you," believe me, Ever cordially yours, Joseph Parker. Tilton Vicarage, Liecester, Oct. 2, 1883. Dear Sir : I have purposely delayed, in replying to your kind invitation, that my letter regretting my inability to avail njyself of it, might arrive about the time of your meet- ing on the nth inst. Although steam has bridged the vast distance between us, it is not easy for the Incumbent of a Parish to get away even for the short visit you propose. My best wishes and desires are for all, who, maintaining the grand principles of the Christian faith, are seeking to ad- vance the cause of Christ crucified, and while conveying my best thanks to the committee for the honor they have done me, assure them also that I wish God speed to both the Shepherd and the flock, believing that though not of us, yet you are not against us, that when the mists of earth are removed, the vivid comprehension then obtained may reveal a nearer and closer relationship. You are kind enough to recognize the little service I was enabled to render you on your visit to this Parish. I can assure you, you are most welcome to it, and any future help you may have occasion to require. Faithfully Yours, William Chippindale, Vicar. The Rev. G. L. Walker, Pastor First Church. 211 To the First Cfairch of Christ in Hartford, the Eliot Church in Newton, sendeth Greetings : The Eliot Church of Newton has heard with pleasure your intention to commemorate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of your church and the settle- ment of your city. We can but call to mind that the founder of your church and his whole congregation went out from us in the early summer of 1636, through a trackless wilderness, following their compass until they reached the banks of the Connecticut, and there with prayer and renewed consecration, set up a church to the living God. The record is, that the Reverend Thomas Hooker and his congregation remained within the borders of the town of Newtown, for some two years or more, when the township being too narrow for them and their Christian work, they were impelled to seek a broader field. We have always heard that the same desire for the largest and most extended Christian influence has ever continued with the church they founded. Our city has inherited the name and constitutes a portion of the original town which they left for their wilderness home. We have also with us some who are lineal descend- ants of your founders, and others who were baptized chil- dren, and some who were formerly members of your church in Hartford, and our church bears the name of John Eliot, who was converted and consecrated himself to the Christian ministry in the family of Thomas Hooker in England, and afterwards became the Apostle to the Indians where we now live. We have therefore an interest in commemorating the lives, the sacrifices, and the virtues of that devoted band and their heroic leader. In extending our congratulations for the two hundred and fifty years of your church life and church work, it is our earnest prayer that the same spirit which characterized the founders may ever continue with you, their descendants. The ties of Christian fellowship between them and those they left were not forgotten, nor can we forget that in giving to you the founder of your church, you in turn have given 212 to us a pastor who has inherited the piety, the wisdom, and the zeal of the godly Hooker. Wishing you Grace, Mercy, and Peace, we are yours in the fellowship of the Gospel. The Eliot Church, By W. O. Trowbridge, its Clerk. Eliot Church, Newton, Massachusetts, Oct. 5, 1883. At a church meeting held this evening, wherein was con- sidered the going out of the Reverend Thomas Hooker and his congregation from Newtown in 1633, and the commem- oration of that event by the First Church in Hartford, Conn., during the coming week, it was unanimously voted, that the foregoing letter be sent to the church in Hartford, and that our pastor, the Rev. Wolcott Calkins, D.D., be the bearer thereof to said church. The Eliot Church, By W. O. Trowbridge, Clerk. The First Church in Cambridge, \ Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 10, 1883. \ Rev. George L. Walker, D.D., Pastor of First Church of Christ in Hartford: Dear Sir : At the request of the officers of this church, I sent to you yesterday by mail a small volume of letters upon the history of our organization, written by Rev. Dr. McKen- zie. It was thought that the book would possess some interest for the Thomas Hooker church, and might appropriately be presented to them by the successors of the Thomas Shep- ard company at this time, when your anniversary naturally directs attention somewhat to our own early history. Asking your acceptance thereof as a token of our interest in the occasion, I remain, in behalf of the church, very respectfully and sincerely yours, T. B. Gilman, Clerk. 213 106 Marlborough St., Boston, Oct. 8, 1883. To the Rev. George Leon Walker, D.D., Minister of First Church, Hartford, Conn. : My Dear Friend : It would give me great pleasure to be with you and yours on the 250th anniversary. Wilson and Cotton (Wilson especially) are very real and very dear to me, and through them I am strongly drawn to your congregation, no longer in the wilderness, nor to be reached only by long and painful journeys. In visits which I have made to Eng- land from time to time nothing has interested me more than the endeavor to place the founders and fathers of our New England churches in their old homes, sacred and secular, as in Boston, Groton, Sudbury, and Oakham, and Eppingham in Rutland. Those men were noble specimens of a noble race, to be held in great honor for what they were willing to leave behind, and for the faith, hope, and, spite of what detractors may say, charity which they brought with them. If only their children could have remained in these north- eastern States what communities they would be to-day ! — not so populous, not so luxurious, but with far more promise of a near Kingdom of God on earth than can ever come from our huge cities and villages with so little leaven and such a vast lump to be leavened. But even the remnant which clings to New England will poorly represent a brave ancestry if we for a moment forget that our problems, hard as they may be, are not so hard as theirs. Let me send heartiest greetings for and from the old First Church of Christ in Boston to the First Church of Christ in Hartford. We sincerely prize our old name and our old covenant. We hold ourselves to be Congregationalists, pure and simple, broad if you will, and with only our Christian covenant for a creed, but still striv- ing to build upon the one Foundation which God has laid. May your gathering be altogether pleasant and helpful, and may the candle of the Lord burn and shine and brighten more and more in your Christian household. Cordially yours, Rufus Ellis, First Church. 214 Boston, Oct. 10, 1883. My Dear Dr. Walker : I have waited until the last moment to see if any unforeseen event might seem to relieve me from the duty of attending the sessions of the National Council, and so release me to the great pleasure of being with you at Hartford. But I find nothing of the sort, and so I am com- pelled most reluctantly to miss an occasion to which I had looked forward with eager expectation. I am afraid I am a little out of perfect charity with Thomas Hooker in his selec- tion of his church date, or with some more modern divine in his selection of the date for the National Council in its fifth session. I pray God to smile upon your gathering ; to give you a profound insight into the obscure facts which have so long left the early years of your noble church in shadowed obscurity; to bless your celebration to the best uses of our sacred New England history ; and to make it an occasion of newly kindling the fires of a gracious and saintly orthodoxy; besides filling it full en passant of joy and peace to you and all your co-celebrants. I shall wait with unusual eagerness for the memorial volume which shall enshrine fitly all the res gestce of the season. With much affection, faithfully, Henry M. Dexter. Dr. George Leon Walker. Andover, Mass., Oct. 9, 1883. My Dear Dr. Thompson : It would have afforded me great pleasure to attend the exercises at Hartford this week, but the privilege is denied me. From my earliest recollection I have been acquainted with representatives of the First Church, whose anniversary is to be celebrated on Thursday and Friday next. I was baptized by a pastor who had been a theological pupil of Dr. Strong, and was fond of saying that " Nathan Strong had a greater mind than any other minister in the United States." More than sixty years ago when Joel Hawes preached before the students of Brown Univer- sity, one of the students walking home from church said, in 215 my hearing, to one of the professors : " I would spend ten years at Andover, if I could become as great a preacher as Mr. Hawes." The professor replied : " It was something more than Andover which made Mr. Hawes a great preacher." The professor claimed part of the honor for Brown University, which had a special pride in so promising a young graduate. It is difficult for men of the present day to imagine the enthusiasm with which the sermons of Mr. Hawes were received by the students of Providence College between the years 1818 and 1822. His name was associated not only with Nathan Strong but also with Thomas Hooker. I am sadly disappointed in not being able to attend the exer- cises at Hartford this week, as I desire very much to learn more than I know at present in regard to Thomas Hooker and Richard Edwards, from both of whom my children have descended, and to both of whom the Hartford church is sig- nally indebted. With much regard, I remain, Dear Sir, Your friend and servant, Edwards A. Park. . LBJa'07 c y\zrt n T euK i ( W, [■88 o COMMEMORATIVE EXERCISES yirsf Q|nrr^ of Q|pisf in Ijappfopo, Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary, OCTOHKk II AND 12, 1 883. 'jr-W'- c)WO ut