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1883

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AN
PREACH ED IN FIRST CHURCH, BOST ON,
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By RUFUS ELLIS,
MINISTER OF THE CONGREGATION,
SUNDAY, MAY 6, 1883.
A ruzw arez, Ar REQUEST OF THz. Society.
BOSTON :
PRESS OF GEO. H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET,
1883.

&thirty hearg in first 4thurch :
AN
ANNIVERSARY SERMON,
PREACHED IN FIRST CHURCH, B O STON,
*
*
** *
. By RUFUS ELLIS,
e 24- 6 *
MINESTER QF THE CQNGREGATION,.
w e •. • * ... " & sº & * * .
SUNDAY, MAY 6, 1883.
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PRINTED BY REQUEST OF THE SOCIETY.
BOSTON :
PRESS OF GEO. H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET,
1883.
ANNIVERSARY SERMON.
“I AM NOT COME TO DESTROY, BUT TO FULFIL.”— Matt. v., 17.
ON the fourth day of the month of May, in the
year 1853, I was installed pastor of this church;
and I have completed the thirtieth year of my
ministry. At several stages of this ministry, I
have recited the story of the life which we have
lived together: first, in that street of quiet house-
holds, now given up to noisy traffic, but still called
by the name of one of our chief pastors; and then
in this new, but not yet dearer Boston, where, as
in the old town, the houses of God rise in fair and
stately proportions amidst the pleasant dwelling.
places of men, even as
“The life of heaven above
Springs from the life below.”
I do not propose to detain you to-day with a
twice-told tale. . I will not even recall the experi-
ences of our Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anni-
versary, delightful as they were to so many of our
own and of other religious households. That
Anniversary has passed into our history, and will
4
live as a dear memory and will help to create its
own future. But a story which it would be tedious
and unprofitable to rehearse may yield to us, in a
study of its aims, its methods, and possibly its
results, some guidance and encouragement for new
days and new endeavors, the unceasing effort to
make the thing which shall be better than the
thing which hath been.
I need not remind you that these thirty years
have been years of intense religious, moral, social,
political activity, not without battles of creeds,
conflicts of duty, antagonisms of classes, and, be-
yond all else, in proud but painful significance,
a great Civil War, years worth living, though
often the life has been very costly. No church
of the living God could be a church of mere
routines and respectable platitudes in such years.
In our Unitarian denomination, at the beginning
of that time, it was Theodore Parker on the one
side and the whole body of our churches, with
scarcely an exception, on the other side. To-day,
the fugitive slave sent from Boston jail his request
for the prayers of the congregations; and, pres-
ently, the streets were thronged with soldiers and
an excited crowd of citizens, as the national law
for the return of the runaway bondsman was en-
forced, while the question was eagerly asked,
What will our minister say and do about it?
5
Then came, as was inevitable, our war of civiliza-
tions and moralities, old and new, we may almost
say of the Old Testament and the New Testa-
ment, —freedom on the one hand and slavery on
the other hand,- the soldiers gathering for a
blessing in our houses of worship, passing to the
front, and sending back their dead to the same
places of prayer for the last tender offices; our
sewing circles and employment societies almost
exclusively occupied in providing for the sick and,
wounded; our Fast Days and Days of Thanks-
giving no longer mere traditions, but plainly made
for us, not we for them; our every-day world lifted
by the terrible strain and struggle into a realm of
ideals, of heroic sacrifices and victories, of faith
and love; our God, like the God of the Hebrews,
again a Man of War, and teaching our fingers to
fight; and, when the strife was over, the large
educational charities and corresponding church
work following as the results of the struggle. I
may add that, thirty years ago, our system of a
ministry-at-large, with its free chapels, had become
thoroughly stereotyped as our method of providing
for church absenteeism, and the hope of recalling
to our pews those who had left them from inability
or unwillingness to pay church taxes had been
practically abandoned, while the signs of decay
and disintegration were becoming but too plain
6
in several of our older and most famous churches.
It seemed to have been accepted, as a necessity
of our times, that the rich and the poor could
no longer meet together, and that we must, hence-
forth, have class churches.
It is not easy to recall even a single generation
with perfect accuracy, so swift is the movement
of our modern life; but I believe that I have a
fairly distinct thought of the one thing which,
from the beginning of my ministry in this church,
I have been trying to do, and have been in so
many ways helped and encouraged to do by hon-
orable men and women not a few, who have passed
into a higher service or still stand in their lot.
My brother,” in his installation sermon, pressed
the need of a religious religion; for there are
religions and religions, and some of them have very
little religion in them. The whole drift of the
services was to that point. I was reminded, and
I felt, that I had come into the charge of a church,
and a church of Christ; and, from that day to this,
I have sought, as your minister, and with your
co-operation, to make it more and more a church
of Christ, living and growing, and yet maintaining
its sacred identity, and more and more fitted to
do its characteristic work for the individual soul,
for households and neighborhoods, for the city,
* The Rev. Dr. Geo. E. Ellis, then of Harvard Church, Charlestown.
7
the Commonwealth, the nation. I was not called
to preside over a theologico-debating or inquiry
Society, an ethical club or a social club or a polit-
ical party. My inheritance was in that gospel
which our fathers brought across the seas, an
unbound gospel, but still a gospel, given to us not
to be criticised, not to be destroyed, but to be
fulfilled,— absolute in its trusts, its aims, its spirit,
but as seed to be constantly sowed in new ground
and treated with a new husbandry, truth to be
unfolded and to be applied in its endless capaci-
ties and its words which will never pass away,+
a religion for us men and for our salvation here
on this earth. With an extreme constitutional
tendency to questioning and even denial, and
sharing largely in the spirit of the age, more
largely than most of you would think, I have
nevertheless aimed to be affirmative and con-
structive, to speak, so far as I could, from faith to
faith or else be silent. If I were looking for a
minister, I should seek for one who believed more
than I: I do not mean as to books and dates and
propositions, the accidents of faith, but as to the
realities of Christian experience. So looking for-
ward, as any one with open eyes could not choose
but do, to the inevitable ravages of modern criti-
cism; and while recognizing the obligation to
prove all things and hold fast only that which is
8
true and maintain at all costs an intellectual in-
tegrity, I have never felt it a necessity to sur-
render even what might prove to be only outworks
at the first summons, and before so much as a
gun had been fired, but have rather sought to
strengthen the things which remain, to make the
best of my Book, and, beyond all and through all,
to keep alive and deepen that Life in God of
which the Bible, Old and New, is but the record,
however priceless, and the Church only the em-
bodiment, however providential, and of the divine
ordering. I was sure that our religion would
abide, and, if only we could be religious in heart
and life, would be its own best and sufficient evi.
dence; and I have been rejoiced to find how inde-
pendent it has proved to be of much upon which
it was supposed altogether to lean.
“The new lights of historical criticism,” writes
Mr. Martineau (would he were still a young man!),
“certainly change in no slight degree our picture
of the origin and growth of the Christian religion;
but every larger comprehension of the universe
only invests the principles of that religion with
sublimer truth, unaffected by the real discoveries
and prejudiced only by the philosophical fictions
of the last five and twenty years.” If prophecies
must fail and tongues cease and knowledge vanish
away,+ and why not in our time as well as in
9
Paul's time — how needful that we should be
deep in the faith, hope, and love which were so
abundantly in Jesus, and in all those who shared
his life and gave it abundantly to their world,
before a line of this much criticised New Testa-
ment was written, and while the Spirit, and the
Spirit alone, was leading men into all truth, bring-
ing all things to their remembrance, and glorifying
their Lord! Let us see if we cannot so believe
in Jesus that he will still be our Master, though
we should come to hold a suspended judgment as
to much which has been told about him. I have
always felt it to be my duty to make myself as
familiar as possible with the modern learning about
the Bible. I have never sought to throw dust into
the eyes of any honest inquirer; but I have been
more eager in my preaching to enter into and
express the mind of Christ than to lay before the
average worshipper the details of a destructive
criticism. We must live in our house while we
are rebuilding it, and, as my predecessor once said,
— and I wish some one had recorded his every-day
talk, “Those who propose to break the church
windows should go outside, and not throw stones
at them from the pulpit,” and “Much as I love a
large house, I do not care to live in all-out-of-
doors.” By these constructive methods, we come
at last not to be so much unclothed as clothed
IO
upon when the raiment and even the body of the
truth fall away.
And how helpless we are without the old sacred
Books, the old religious speech so enriched by the
use of Christian centuries, the old symbols, the old
sacraments, the old benedictions. It is an offence
which I cannot easily overlook, when the preacher
brings out anything in this way, new and, as they
say, original and advanced. I cannot tell you how
I dislike it. I would sooner have him write the
church hymns afresh for each Sunday. It is no
accompaniment of age. On the contrary, from my
youth up, I have clung to the old forms, waiting
until the Spirit shall have fashioned in a way that
we know not, and cannot anticipate, Some new
ritual. The Church of the future will come in due
time; but we want a church of the present, and
out of this Church of the present the Church of
the future must grow. It cannot be made anew
to order, as some seem to suppose, when the
autumn season opens, and the reporters gather
to hear and tell of the last religious novelty.
It is not a popular position. It is much more
exhilarating to be a liberal among conservatives,
commended for breadth and boldness, than a con-
servative among liberals, suspected of reactionary
tendencies and of coldness toward your sect, which,
however dear it may be, can never be to you the
I I
whole Church of Christ. Better, so men will say,
drop back into some form of new orthodoxy or
go forward into the advanced liberalism of the
day, go where you belong, and be one thing or
the other. But, if you can honestly be neither one
thing nor the other, what remains but to stay
where you are with the few, and make the best of
it? So much better does it seem to me to put
this special emphasis upon fulfilment as contrasted
with destruction, and to keep the old and the new
together, that, had I been minister of one of the
historic congregational churches of New England,
in which parish and town were conterminous, I
should at least have tried, by my persistent and
almost exclusive affirmation of what is absolute
and essential in Christianity, to have kept the
parish one and undivided to the practical exclusion
of all conventicles, and to have retained as parish-
ioners the most enthusiastic pietists and the most
moderate moralists, and, if you will, rationalists.
We are exhorted to add knowledge to faith, for
we can never add faith to knowledge. We must
have faith to start from. We are exhorted to
apply Christianity, but we must have some Chris-
tianity to apply. What we ought most to desire
is such a broadening and deepening of the mind
of the old Church that we can honestly work in
it; for there is and will be the hiding place of
I 2
Christian power. It is our misfortune that we
have been and are excluded from it. “That we
are thus at a disadvantage may not be our fault.
It may be our misfortune. But, at any rate, it is
not, what we too often consider it, our boast.””
It is one of my fondest hopes that the day will
dawn — though it can hardly be my day — when
the Old Covenant of this Puritan Church will be
proclaimed a sufficient bond of union for all the
churches of this Commonwealth; and I would not
by any needless antagonisms put this congregation
beyond such a recall, in the region of a barren
intellectualism, and maintaining a creed at once
perfectly simple and utterly uninteresting and
powerless.
Because of this love for the Christian growths
and affirmations of Christian centuries, I asked
you, some fifteen years ago, to use the revised
Book of Common Prayer in our public worship,
not to the neglect of free prayer, but in combina-
tion with it. I am satisfied that for the years
to come a simple but rich ritual, in which the
congregation will largely share, with a profoundly
spiritual and therefore very broad and free gos-
pel, will constitute the prevailing service in our
churches. All signs point that way. Our move-
ment in this direction was not, as some said,
*John Henry Newman.
I 3
reactionary: it was a movement forward. It will
be wisdom to encourage it, to put prayer-books
and hymn-books into the hands of the children
as soon as they can read, to worship God in the
sanctuary yourselves and train the young to
worship with you in speech and song and outward
act, even though you should give to the youngest
a book to read or pictures to look at during
sermon time, or send them home when the worship
is over and the preaching is to begin. We want
Sunday-schools for the young, but we want church
attendance with their elders more. And here
there is room to say that, if the young are to
grow up in this way, they must be guided and
ruled by you, as God and nature command, not
you by them. How many of your boys and girls
would attend the week-day school regularly, if it
were left to their childishness and waywardness
to determine that matter?
Again, I came into a Christian church, and I
have tried to make it more truly a Christian
church, because less and less a congregation for
a class, and that a privileged class, and more and
more a source of strength and blessing to the
world around, like the communities which the
first evangelists gathered in heathen cities for
the better keeping of the new commandment that
we should love one another. Our Sunday-school,
the growth and specialty of these thirty years, has
carried us far beyond our immediate borders in
works of love which are not merely sentimental,
but are healthy and helpful, and have made this
church a recognized force among the best charities
of our city. And, besides, through this school,
we are trying to handle the modern problem how
to secure a multitudinous and promiscuous church
attendance,—a problem which, in connection with
others, we are studying in the free chapels of our
ministry-at-large, or as interested lookers-on in
the unpewed and untaxed churches of a portion
of the Episcopal body. Our morning school,
thanks to so many devoted workers and liberal
givers, is an unquestioned success as a school, and
requires only to be supplemented by yet another
Sunday gathering, should the children's half-hour
prove to be insufficient to meet the wants of those
who cannot be gathered in the morning. The
inward and outward burdens which our Sunday-
school has lifted, the light and comfort which it
has shed abroad in many homes, the young men
and women who owe to it their best training,
cannot be told, lest we should seem to be sound-
ing a trumpet before us, as happily there is no
need. s
Again, we have tried in these years to make
our church more truly a church and Christian,
I5
because more truly a fellowship in Christian aims
and works. So many of us as are engaged in
our common enterprises of charity are at one in
mutual knowledge and confidence; and if you
desire, as you sometimes say, to come together
in larger numbers and more frequently and more
cordially, you only need to multiply your Christian
aims and works. I think they might take a wider
sweep and bring us together for conference, for
report, for speaking, for hearing upon great Social
themes, as we have only too rarely gathered in
times past. There are social enterprises in which
the church as a church should make itself heard
and felt; and for such purposes, as well as for wor-
ship and for the hearing.of sermons, there should
be frequent church meetings. The Sunday gather-
ing and the communion assembly are not all or
enough. Christianity would never have been car-
ried over the world by those who came together
simply to eat the sacred bread and to receive the
sacred wine. And our religious meetings would
be, as I think, improperly supplemented by soirées
and dancing-parties, which, agreeable and innocent
as they are in themselves, are not appropriate to
the serious work of a church, and are abundantly
provided for in other directions. The congregation
of Christian men and women ought to be a power
in modern Society to promote Christian principles,
I6
to moderate and rebuke partisanship, to advance
righteousness in the State, to study and apply
social laws, to hasten the coming of that far-off
day when the Church and the Nation shall be one
in spirit and tendency. To come together as such
a congregation would seem to be in the direct line
of a true Puritanism, and some approach toward
a fulfilment of those Hebrew prophecies and
Christian hopes which tell of a heavenly kingdom
among men and not only, nay, not much of man-
sions in the skies.
I said that I should not recount to-day any twice-
told tales, or recall, as I have already done so often,
the excellent of this congregation who rest from
labors which to them were privileges, and whose
love and faithfulness are our best church inheri-
tance. But it would be sheer ingratitude in you
and in me not to recognize how much has come to
us with the swift years, which we ought to acknowl-
edge among the good and perfect gifts that are
from above; and it would be sheer thoughtlessness
not to press very seriously the question whether
there has been any Christian growth, any enlarge-
ment and uplifting of hearts, any increase of faith,
hope, and love, any expectation for our church
answering to the promise of its birthday and its
large outward opportunity. “Let no man think
me foolish,” wrote Paul; “but, if ye do, yet as fool-
17
ish receive me, that I also may glory a little: and,
seeing that many glory after the flesh, I will glory
also.” If not I, you are entitled to follow Paul in
this. As compared with other Unitarian churches,
your outward growth in these thirty years has been
to lookers-on, if not to yourselves, even surprising.
I do not care to go over the figures, to remind you
of what seemed to be the day of small things, and
yet was soon to be recognized as a day of latent
strength. I will not recall the earnest purpose and
the free giving to which you owe this beautiful
house of prayer, the steady increase both of
receipts and expenditures for your own mainte-
nance and for your large charities. I need not
repeat to you that, from living very frugally and
yet to a great extent upon the avails of a parish
endowment, you have come to live somewhat lav-
ishly, and yet altogether at your own charges.
And, if you have not grown in numbers as you
should have done, I shall be none the less thankful
that, after anxieties as to such a growth more than
I care to tell you of and spread over all these years,
we are where we are to-day, with abundant mate-
rial for whatsoever new departure the new times
may demand.
I wish I could speak with as much confidence
of spiritual and moral conditions and prospects;
but of these one ought always to express himself
I8
with much reserve, and remembering Him who
looks not so much upon the work as upon the
worker, not so much upon the outward appearance
as upon the heart. If the question be as to that
religion which is to visit the fatherless and the
widows in their affliction and to keep one's self
unspotted from the world, I am sure that it has
been greatly promoted in this congregation during
these thirty years, and that your record will bear
comparison with that of any of your contempo-
raries. There are works of humanity in which you
have been leaders and are now second to none.
The first newsboys' school and the first summer
vacation school in this city were kept in the
vestry of Chauncy Place Church There have
been, there are, many in this congregation, of whom .
it has been, of whom it will be said that they were
eyes to the blind and feet to the lame and com-
panionship to the sad and lonely; that, when the
eye saw them, then it blessed them; that, when the
ear heard them, it bore witness to them for their
unwearied care and love. And, of this pure and
singular humanity, it has been continually and
characteristically true that it was fed from a Divine
Source, the abundance of that Love in the heart
which is God in us. So far, we may seem to
abound. But have we not still to ask, What of
that piety which burns in the heart, and out of the
I 9
heart's abundance goes up to God as well as out
to man, utters itself in prayer and song, sits at the.
feet and seeks to enter into the mind of Jesus,
loves the consecrated place and the hour of wor-
ship, and the records of man's faith and God's
revelations, is more eager to impart this abun-
dance and transmit this inheritance to the new
generation than to secure worldly position and
leave worldly goods to the young, the piety which
would appear in the gathering of young and old
of both sexes about the communion table, and
would write our old church confession upon our
hearts as well as upon our windows and in
our hymn-book, and make it a true utterance of
our church life? If this be the question, I must
candidly admit that I see no signs of any such
abundance, certainly not in your minister. Do
not say that I am growing old and am gloomy and
morbid and expect too much, and that this must
be our love of God that we keep his command-
ments. On the contrary, I am very hopeful as to
this matter, perfectly sure that the present condi-
tion of things will not last, and is only incident to
our day of intellectual questioning and exceeding
materialism, and more or less true of all churches,
certainly of all Protestant churches; but it is a fact
none the less, and Occasion for grave anxieties,
and a thing to be confessed and considered and,
. Cº. 20
if that were possible, provided for. Whatever else
we and all Protestants need, we need more than
anything else a religion, not a philosophy of
religion, we have had philosophies enough, but
a religion. What we call our religion, and are
trying to make the most of, is scarcely worthy the
name, while we are reasoning about it and weigh-
ing its evidence and, as we say, upholding it.
Upholding it! Why, it ought to uphold us: that's
what it was given for. It ceases to be a religion
when it no longer sets our hearts on fire, stirs
missions, opens the heavens above us, blazes as a
torch in our dark world, melts us in contrition,
will not suffer us to be silent, gathers us in houses
of prayer—not in the mood in which we come into
lecture-rooms and concert-rooms and theatres, but
that we may be still before God, swift to hear and
slow to speak. There is reason to hope that
Christendom has come to its darkest days in this,
and that there is a prospect of something better
than a dreary rationalism on the one hand and a
dreary superstition on the other hand. I Suppose
we must admit that the religious sentiment, prop-
erly so called, is less active in the Protestant than
in the Roman Catholic world, and least active
among the Unitarians as the most Protestant of
Protestants; but I cannot believe that what we
may properly call vital piety was launched upon
2 I
an inclined plane at the Protestant Reformation,
and that, in our moderatism and intellectualism,
we are reaching the foot of that plane.
We will indulge no such fears. Let it be our
Christian privilege to be anxious for nothing—
anxiety is always unfruitful and worse; we will
rather convert every seeming failure into an argu-
ment for hope. In these swift years, we waste
our time in any endeavor to forecast the future.
Let the living present be enough, with the per-
suasion that what is in part is done away only
because we are drawing nearer to what is perfect,
— the completeness which is promised for this
world as for the world to come, and for this world
first. For myself, I shall accept the new possi-
bilities of our church work and life which you hold
out to me as persuasives to that brave and cheerful
and confident mind which you have a right to
look for in one whose years in this Christian min-
istry have been crowned with kindness, and can
only issue in thankfulness and peace. And, in
response to so many kindly greetings and con-
gratulations and gifts of a love which has never
failed, let my heart go out to you in all gracious
benedictions, that the Lord may indeed bless you
and keep you, and make his face shine upon you
and give you peace,
Iliſill
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