At the Centennial Celebration of the First Congregational Church at Ellsworth, Maine, September 12, 1912. Sprague Journal of Maine History Vol. I APRIL, 1913 No. I An Address Delivered by the Honorable Clarence Hale (a) at the Centennial Celebration of the First Congregational Church at Ellsworth, Maine, September 12, 1912. MR. CHAIRMAN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN OF ELLSWORTH: It is a great honor, and it is certainly a very great pleasure, to be with my friends in Ellsworth, and in this church, with my old friends, my life-long friends, to help celebrate its one hundredth birthday. At this celebration your pastor has asked me to speak of the influence of Congregationalism in its development in New England. It was a thoughtful German student who began his book upon Travels in the East by saying that he bad never been there. I fear I have not much better fitting to speak on this great subject, so fitly suggested on this occasion. It would be much more ad- equately presented by Mr. Mathews, your pastor, who is well known throughout the State as a thorough student of church his- tory, or by some other clergyman whose life has been spent in church studies. I am glad however to present such aspects of the subject as seem clear and perhaps almost obvious to the mind of the layman. I am going to approach the subject along the road which leads by this church and through the city of Ellsworth, a city I have loved all my life. Let us take a passing look at the picture of the founding of this church a hundred years ago, and at the setting of the picture in Ellsworth, and in the State. Ells worth bad been an incorporated town only twelve years. The first settlers came here in 1763, when Governor Sullivan, in his his- tory, says there were only about ten thousand people in the Maine district. They came from Richmond's Island, Biddeford, Scarboro and Falmouth, and made their homes upon Union River. Melatiah Jordan, one of the founders of this church, came at that time. Theodore Jones came then and settled upon the Milliken lot, where this church now stands, and where the whole of the village was (a) Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Maine. 4 SPRAGUE'S JOURNAL OF MAINE HISTORY afterwards built. I have seen the plan made by Mr. Deane in 1810, which shows the houses and lots. During the same year there was tried at Castine, the shire of the county, the case of Jarvis Vs. Jones, involving the title of what was afterwards the village of Ellsworth. Ellsworth did not become the shire town of the county until 1838. Castine had represented the civilization of this part of the country; she was held by the British two years later when this church was established, and from September, 1814, to April, 1815. The British had held it before from 1779 to 1783, during the Rev- olution. Previous to that time Castine-and in fact the whole civilization of this vicinity-had been a French civilization ; broken only by a Puritan settlement at Castine from 1629 to 1635. The only county road when this church was formed had been laid out but a few years before from Surrey to Ellsworth, and on to Sullivan. The county was new, Hancock and Washington Counties were taken from Lincoln County in 1789. Cumberland and Lincoln having been formed in 1760, and taken from York County, which embraced the whole Gorges domain, by the Massa- chusetts Bay Charter. In 1691 York extended over what is now the whole of the State. And these five counties made up Maine. This was the State that appears upon the map in Governor Sulli- van's history of Maine, published in 1795. In the very year when Ellsworth was settled, the treaty of Paris had been made, which closed the door of French contention and settled forever the fear of Indian depredations in the Maine towns. Let us look at what was happening in this year of 1812; Caleb Strong was governor. This town sent Moses Adams as its representative to the general court. It had sent but one repre- sentative before, and that was John Peters, Jr. Only four more followed before Maine became a State; George Herbert, John G. Deane, Jesse Dutton and Charles Jarvis. Maine was a wilderness with here and there a settlement. There were no cities, Portland was a village, set off from Falmouth in 1786, and was not made a city until 1832. The whole country was in a state of melancholy, and almost of collapse. The shadow of the old embargo was upon it. The as what Woodrow Wilson, in his history, called "an un- locke for disorder of parties and a bewildering reversal of every AN ADDRESS BY HON. CLARENCE HALE 5 matter of policy." He calls the war against Great Britain, which had just been declared in June, "a clumsy, foolhardy and haphazard war;" although providentially it proved to be a supplementary war of independence, establishing the union of the states and their com- plete freedom from Great Britain. I wish I had time to tell the story of the men of Ellsworth of that day. I can speak of only two or three: Melatiah Jordan of this church was the great-great- grandson of Rev. Robert Jordan, the first Jordan in this country the second clergyman of the church of England, who came to Maine under Gorges. Richard Gibson was the first, but he remained only two or three years, so that Robert Jordan is the first clergyman who made a distinct career in Maine. His ancestors were men of prominence in England. He himself was graduated from Balliol College, Oxford; ordained at Exeter, and settled in Spurwink in 1640. He became one of the governing magistrates of Maine un- der Gorges. His son Dominicus was one of the trustees to whom the town of Falmouth was deeded in 1684. He was a great Indian fighter, and was killed by the Indians in 1708. Melatiah's father, Samuel, lived in Biddeford; graduated from Harvard College in 1750; was selectmen of the town and representative to the general court. After Melatiah went to the Union River, he served in the militia in the Revolutionary War. In 1789 lie became the first col- lector of customs in Frenchman's Bay district, and held the office until his death in December, 1818. A Maine historian says lie was a magistrate, lieutenant colonel of militia, and for years the most prominent man in his community. He was a man of un- questioned integrity, and a born leader of men. He married Elizabeth Jellerson of Ellsworth, in 1776; Sally, his seventh child, married Andrew Peters. From Melatiah Jordan came aline of good men and women who have helped to make the history of Maine, and to make Ellsworth memorable. The list includes two chief justices of Maine. I am indebted to Fritz H. Jordan, a descendant of Robert Jordan, and a member of the Historical Society, for many historical details, touching Melatiah Jordan. John G. Deane was a descendant of the Pilgrims; he was a graduate of Brown University of the class of 1806; be came to this town in 1810 to practice law; he was the chairman of the selectmen the year after this church was formed. His son, Llewellyn Deane, gives a glowing 6 SPRAGUE'S JOURNAL OF MAINE HISTORY picture of his father, and one of some of the Ellsworth people of that day. John G. Deane was a most useful citizen, a good lawyer, an unusually able man. He had the most knowledge on the sub- ject of the northeastern boundary of any man of his time. Letters from Governor Washburn and others show their appreciation of his labors in settling this great question, which was of vital interest to Maine. Mr. Deane has also a very interesting note from Colonel John Black. He says: "Sometime prior to my father's settle- ment in Ellsworth, John Black, a young Englishman, settled there as a deputy agent of the Bingham heirs, who owned very extensive tracts of land in Hancock and Washington Counties, called in com- mon phrase 'The Bingham Purchase.' The acquaintance between these two young men ripened into a strong and enduring friendship, which lasted, uninterrupted, till my' father's death. 'Colonel' Black was the name by which he was familiarly known. He was not only one of the best business men ever known in Maine, but be was finely educated and accomplished in the elegant attainments peculiar to the higher classes in the land of his birth. He was a good drafts- man and an amateur painter of no mean skill. Though not large in stature he was very noticeable in appearance and in his personal address he was graceful and polite and possessed of most courtly manners. noble man and a most excellent "In all respects he was a noble man and a most excellent gentleman. "His management of the great trust of the Bingham estate was characterized by the strictest diligence and fidelity, as well as the most scrupulous honesty." This town and this church have always held Colonel Black and his descendants in honor and affection. An interesting account of him is found in the Maine Historical Society archives in a volume .of the Maine Historical Magazine. The magazine contains also a fine picture illustrating his commanding presence and striking face. I should like to speak in much greater detail, and with more personal mention, of the men who founded Ellsworth; the ancestors ,of so many now in this presence. At the end of a century, they -stand out more clearly and sharply than ever in our imagination and in our hearts. I hope they all know that their works have lived after them. I hope Melatiah Jordan and John Black, and AN ADDRESS BY HON. CLARENCE HALE 7 the other noble men whom we commemorate, can look down over the great battlements and see the goodly line of their sons and daughters, to the third and fourth and fifth generations, as they pass across the little span of one hundred years. More than pass- ing word ought to be said about the individuality and sterling qualities of these early settlers and their sons. They had that rarest kind of wisdom which Dr. Hyde described as that which appreciates the point of view of the people with whom it comes in contact; which instinctively takes into account the subtle condi- tions making up any social situation. This people have always had this practical wisdom, this abiding common sense. These men have never been described more fittingly than by an honored son of Ellsworth, and of this church, Mr. Henry Crosby Emery. He says: "This people treasured their own ideas and methods of life, not always knowing how they differed from those of the great world, and in no case caring much. Whether their standards were better or worse they were independently arrived at, and they were applied to all men; to themselves and the stranger within their gate. Whether rich or poor, learned or ignorant, famous or obscure, the visitor is welcomed on terms of equality if he measures up to the local standard and left with serene indifference if he does not. And so it is among themselves. There are no sharp distinctions of wealth, no large cities, no gulfs between neighbors. Their chief sources of wealth are the forest and the sea, those two grim de- stroyers of all artificial distinctions. Added to these characteris- tics is a rough charity which while Dot always avoiding a rather brutal condemnation of what offends, still grants ungrudging credit to what is worthy, and judges a man by the best that he can show and not the worst. "The men of the coast, furthermore, possess that strange serenity of temper which comes from wrestling with the sea. They learn early the lesson that impatience and fretfulness are of no avail. The wind bloweth where it listeth and when it listeth, it brings the fog or drives it away, regardless of man's purposes. And so they learn to face all vicissitudes of life with a serene fortitude born of hard experience." There was abundant reason why the men of this section should 8 SPRAGUE'S JOURNAL OF MAINE HISTORY be the kind of men Mr. Emery has pictured; they were born to be remembered. I have already told you whence they came. They were the products of two great civilizations. They were the descendants of the British Royalists who, under Gorges, came to Richmond's Island in the last days of the Stuarts, they were the sons, too, of the Puritans who a few years later came from Massachusetts Bay to Maine; and so they were of the blood of the men, who with Cromwell, and in the Revolution, laid the foundation of England's representative government. These two elements met and mingled in Maine; their type shows markedly in the men who came to the Union River. I shall speak a little more in detail of this mingling of blood in Maine. But I must now hold to my Ellsworth store, of one hundred years ago. This church was formed at the transition stage in church history. The Unitarian element was just going off from the Congregational church; Parson Smith, the great Portland minister of his time, had just died in 1795, after a ministry of sixty-eight years. I speak of him with some detail, because he is the type of the minister of his time. Rev. Dr. John Carroll Perkins has given an nteresting analysis of his character. He describes him as not re- markable for 1earning, nor of unusual intellectual powers, nor of very fine spiritual insight; but a natural leader. In the midst of his work in the church, he found time to attend to business, and to acquire an estate; so that when Mowatt destroyed the town, Parson Smith preached for years without salary. He kept up his association with Boston, and with Harvard, going back and forth by sloop or on horseback several times a year. Let us look for a moment into his meeting house. No clergy- man then read the scriptures in the meeting house except for exegesis. The clergyman could read passages of the scripture and comment upon them; but he could not read them as a part of the service. Such reading was regarded as a part of the liturgy, and as savoring of Episcopacy. The Congregational service consisting AN ADDRESS BY HON. CLARENCE HALE 9 principally of the prayer and the sermon was not thereby unduly cut short. Often in Parson Smith's diary we End this comment after morning service: "A very full meeting, I was much enlarged and had most extraordinary assistance; was an hour and a half in " prayer. The beginning of Parson Smith's ministry takes us far back into Colonial times, and to the ministry of Increase Mather of Boston, who, says Rev. Dr. Perkins, was the supreme example of the pastor of the age before Parson Smith. He guided the relig- ious administration of New England. He was president of Harvard College for fifteen years after 1685. These two great ministries, that of Increase Mather and that of Parson Smith, bring us down to the transition age at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Edward Payson was settled over the Second Parish church in Portland in 1807; Unitarianism was just arriving in Maine. In 1808, Rev. John Codman was called to Boston to preach as an as- sociate pastor to Dr. Deane at the First Parish; but Dr. Codman proved to be of the Calvinistic school, as Dr. Payson was. By this time the Congregational church in Portland had become ripe for division. Although called by the church Dr. Codman was, voted down by the parish; and Mr. Nichols was called. In speaking of this era of Unitarianism, John A. Goodwin, a student of church history, has said: "Near the close of the eighteenth century, the intense Cal- vinism of the standing order of churches was repulsive to many Massachusetts people including not a few of the clergy. Had the Congregationalism of today ruled at that time, no great division would then have taken place; and so two centuries earlier, if the Church of England had been what she now is, the great Puritan uprising would not have occurred. " But the obvious suggestion is that this is trying to write his- tory over again, what no man has been able to do. The going off of the Unitarians was followed by a reaction. There was what was called a "great re-awakening" under Dr. Payson. The times of Whitefield were revived. While Parson Smith 10 SPRAGUE'S JOURNAL OF MAINE HISTORY had been a conservative Trinitarian, mild in his religious notions, Edward Pavson was the religious progressive of his time. Willis says of him: "He at once showed the elements of a powerful and persuasive minister. His society and church became by far the largest in the State, and himself the most popular preacher of his time. " The memory of his sermons still remain in Portland as a his- tory and a tradition. His pictures of the doom of the sinner were such that whole congregations went weeping from the church. When you read his sermons today you can see his great power; but the sermons were not of the kind that are now preached in Congregational churches. In the volume of his published sermons, some of the leading titles are:-"The Terrible Doom of the Sin- ner," "The Extreme Difficulty of Escaping the Damnation of Hell. " At the beginning of his ministry, he was an assistant to Dr. Elijah Kellogg of the second Parish. In his history of Port- land, Willis records the fact that Dr. Kellogg preached in the morning, and Dr. Payson preached in the afternoon; and Willis makes this foot note. "One of the converts, a man of some dis- tinction, observed: 'Dr. Kellogg gets the sinner down in the morning, and in the afternoon Dr. Payson comes and jumps on him. , " Dr. Payson was the great preacher of Maine when this Ells- worth church was formed. He continued to preach until his death in 1827. 1 do not know where there can be found a better type of the minister of this generation which succeeded Dr. Payson, than in the life of the Rev. Dr. Tenney, for so long a time the beloved pastor of this church. His forty years with this people is enough to dignify and almost glorify the church at Ellsworth. He was a fitting successor of the Pilgrim and of the Puritan. He was the living type of what the Congregationalist minister should be. He had the best qualities that characterized Parson Smith. He had all the kindliness and helpfulness that made for righteousness, for the good of his people. Few clergymen had so long a career as Dr. Tenney; very few could do the good he did. But the Congregational churches of that generation were fortunate in having some of that type; men who projected the Congregationalism of Massa- _ AN ADDRESS BY HON. CLARENCE HALE 11 chusetts Bay into Maine, and down to the present time; men who followed the growth and the needs of the people of their day and generation. We have taken a passing glance at four great Congre- gational ministers: Dr. Tenney, Dr. Payson, Parson Smith and Increase Mather. They may be taken each as the type of his time. Their service in the Congregational church as I have just stated it reversely in the order of time, brings us back to the earliest Colon- ial times when New England life began, and I do not know how I can better illustrate the Congregationalism of three hundred years ago than by these four great lives. History cannot arbitrarily divide itself. John Fisk has made this most interesting comment upon our history: "That while New England is sometimes spoken of as a new country; its history, is in fact, the story of an old country. Our towns have a history that takes us back to the time of James L" As I have just now suggested, the first picture of Maine life is not the Puritan picture; it presents the history of men of the world. Royalists; members of the English Church; men who hated the Mayflower Pilgrims, and repudiated the Puritan exodus ten years later to Massachusetts Bay. The founder of Maine, Ferdi, nando Gorges, was an English churchman. The grant to him of the lands of Maine was intended as a protest against Puritanism. The King enjoined upon him little else than the establishment of an Episcopal religion within his province. Men whom Gorges sent in 1639 to Richmond's Island, and to the remote wilderness "bounded on the westward by Piscataway Harbor" formed the first government of Maine. We have already seen that one hundred and twenty-five years later the descendants of these men came to the Union River; but long before Melatiah Jordan and the others came here, the Stuart regime in Maine had given way to a Puritan civilization. About the time the protectorate of Cromwell ceased the Massachusetts Bay colony bought out the Gorges interest from his heirs, paying 11250, and in 1692 the Province Charter fixed the status of Massachusetts in its control of the District of Maine. Immediately after this, there came from Massachusetts an in- fusion of Puritans and Congregationalists. They were of the best people of England. They had come over from Dorset, Lincoln- 12 SPRAGUE'S JOURNAL OF MAINE HISTORY shire and Devon between 1630 and 1650. They had left their homes at a time when Puritanism had become powerful. They never suffered persecution; they belonged to the higher classes of society. The men who came to Maine from Massachusetts Bay were of the best people of England. They were men 'who repre- sented English Congregationalism. These two strains of blood, then, entered into Maine life; the blood of the Royalists under Gorges, the best element of the English church, and the infusion from Massachusetts Bay, the best type of Puritan life. As I have shown, these two elements came to Ellsworth and to this church. The Puritans and Congregationalists of the Massachusetts Bay colony were men who had separated from the English church because they insisted on the right of individual choice in the matter of religion. They did not believe in the church dictating the kind of religion that the individual should have. In Scotland, too, the Puritan had separated from the Presbyterian organization because the Presbvtery had prescribed for him the ceremonies and discipline which he should have as an individual. In the reign of Elizabeth, the Separatists were few, and were easily driven out by the State; but under the Stuarts they multiplied. We must remember that then religion was politics, and politics was religion. The leading difference in results between the two rival religious systems was that the Catholics had burned heretics, while Elizabeth hung the pro- gressives who progressed beyond the well established Protestant pale. The world then knew of conversions to Christianity only as political conversion. Henry VIII converted his people to Prot- estantism en masse; just as Henry IV had coverted his people to Catholicism in France; and just as every Christian monarch had done before thein. The whole theory of religion in the world up to that time was religion as a part of the State; it was from this that the Separatists separated. It was on the idea of individual independ- ence. This was the teaching of the Puritan. This was the teach- ing of the English Congregationalist; his work of religious inde- pendence proceeded in equal lines in America under the Puritans, and under Cromwell in England. They were the brethren of Cromwell who fled to Holland for freedom and crossed the sea to lay the foundation of American civilization. 13 It was the same work of English speaking people in two lands. The Colonists who came to Cape Cod held themselves not to be sin- gle fugitives, but a body politic; and they brought out this idea clearly in the instrument subscribed at Cape Cod in 1620. They regarded the State as an ordinance of God; the State was to unfold itself within the church. And so afterwards it was resolved in the general court at Boston by the Massachusetts Bay colony that for the future "No one shall be admitted to the freedom of its body politic, unless he be a member of the same church within the limits of the same." The recent compendium of religion quotes from a church his- tory of almost two hundred years ago. I cite the whole passage because it illustrates that when I am talking about the Puritans, I am talking about Congregationalists; and that when I am talking about what Puritanism has done, I am speaking certainly in the broad sense of what Congregationalism has done. And so, as I have said, the Puritan church was a Congrega- tional church. It was the State church. It took generations to dissolve it from the State; and to separate the two notions. Enjoy David C. 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