On the Highways
Arrested for preaching on Boston Common—The New England Evangelization Society— How to reach the unchurched— Address at Plymouth, "Forefathers' Day "
IN the June of 1885 an incident occurred which illustrates
how willingly this most unobtrusive and modest of men stood when necessary, even at the expense of much personal humiliation, for the common rights of American citizenship. " For the simplest, devoutest, and most peaceful preaching of the word of the Son of man " on Boston Common Dr. Gordon was summoned to court and fined by the same city government which, as if to emphasize the deep gulf fixed between the instincts and purposes of the Irish Catholic and American Protestant elements in the community, was honoring almost at the same time a vulgar and brutal pugilist with a public meeting in Music Hall and with a public presentation by the mayor * of a diamond-studded belt. It is interesting to note further, as suggestive of the amiable tendencies of Romanism and as disclosing the real hand back of the puppets of the city council, that five years after this, when for the first time the Irish canaille controlled the entire city government of Boston, a Romanist t who had been made chief of police in Calcutta signahzed his regime by forbidding open-air preaching in that city and by arresting the venerable Caius McDonald for a violation of the ordinance. Semper et tibique!
* Hon. Hugh O'Brien. t Sir Henry L. Harrison.
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Gordon's arrest was only one in a series. Mr. H. L. Hastings had been put in jail for reading on Flagstaff Hill without note or comment passages from three chapters of the Bible. Rev. W. L. Davis, for similar breaches of the public peace, was imprisoned for more than a year in close confinement in Murderers' Row, Charlestown Prison, allowed no exercise, insulted by turnkeys, and given insufficient food until scurvy set in. Tract-distribution was stopped by the police. A worthy and devout lady was arrested and taken to a police station merely because she had sung a portion of a hymn to a poor unfortunate on the street. Petty persecutions of others engaged in outdoor religious work followed. The legal justification for these outrages was deduced from an ordinance passed during the Civil War forbidding meetings on public grounds unless permission had been previously granted. From 1862 to 1882 such permits were easily procured. In 1882 the Y. M. C. A., which for fifteen years had conducted open-air services, applied for them as usual. They were refused. In 1883 they applied again and were refused. In 1884 their application to the chairman of the Common Council was not even answered. The following year they organized a meeting on the Common to test the action of the municipal authorities. It was for addressing this meeting that Dr. Gordon was arrested and fined. In court Judge Adams declared that the by-law precluded objectionable persons alone from speaking, and that any responsible people could obtain permits. This decision made it clear that the committee on the Common had administered the statute in question arbitrarily. Appeal was immediately made for permission to use the Common during the remainder of the season. This was denied until legal measures were taken to obtain it.
That such scandalous crimes against free speech should be committed, of all places, on Boston Common, where one hundred and forty-five years before Whitefield had addressed
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thirty thousand people in the open air and where every foot of ground was consecrated to freedom by the memories of the Revolution, was sufficiently humiliating. That they should be perpetrated upon men whose traditions of personal liberty ran back to the folkmotes of the German forests, traditions enunciated once for all and in classic form by John Milton and Jeremy Taylor two hundred years before, was a further aggravation. But that the perpetrators should be irredeemable aliens, whose fathers were savage kerns in the peat-bogs long after Naseby and Lexington, was perhaps the most odious feature in the whole proceeding. Public indignation was aroused. Professor Austin Phelps wrote: " Freedom of speech is too sacred a right to be subjected to the petty tyrannies of the O's and Mac's so significantly numerous in the nomenclature of our city government. Restriction of free speech on Boston Common is as much out of place there as a whipping-post." Dr. Brooks and Dr. A. P. Peabody wrote in a similar vein. Petitions for the repeal of the ordinance, numerously signed by representative men, were sent in. The city government, under the pressure, granted four evenings for hearings on the subject of street-preaching. These meetings, which packed City Hall to the roof, were a memorable protest against an obnoxious municipal regulation. Speeches in behalf of repeal were made by Dr. A. H. Plumb, Dr. Brooke Herford, Joseph Cook, and A. J. Gordon. The gag-law was not rescinded, however, and still stands a menace to liberty of speech. But thanks to this vigorous agitation against it, it has practically fallen into disuse.
Open-air preaching was not, then, to be suppressed by an Hibernicized city government. The New England Evangelistic Association, founded within eighteen months, made it an especial feature of its work. Dr. Gordon frequently spoke under its auspices, now in Roxbury from the tail of a cart, now by the arching surf at Crescent Beach, now on the Common itself. For many years he served as chairman of the examining committee, taking great interest in the selection and guidance of young men and women in these outdoor and house-to-house enterprises. He always cherished a deep interest in efforts to reach the unevangeHzed, and lamented the drift of churches, so general in American cities, from needy into prosperous localities. Writing of the situation in Boston, he said
"... The usage has been for the churches to retreat before the incoming tide of poverty and illiteracy as it has swept over the older part of the city, and to cover their retreat by throwing out a picket-line of mission stations. Only two original churches remain on the ground first occupied by the gospel in Boston. The sepulchers of Increase and Cotton Mather are with us to this day; they sleep hard by the scene of their useful labors. But the churches to which they ministered have moved on with all their neighbors, except old Christ Church and the later Baptist Bethel. Nothing so tends to disaffect the common people with the gospel as to move the church away from them, on the ground that it must follow wealth and fashion. I cannot tell how many non-church-goers I have met whose sore .spot I have found, by probing, to be just this: ' The church left me, and so I left the church; they cared nothing for me, and I care nothing for them.' It is a natural retaliation for the violation of that divine law, ' The rich and poor meet together: the Lord is the maker of them all.' Dr. Chalmers used to say, 'A housegoing minister makes a church-going people.' Of course. Let the people see that the church cares enough for them to follow them into their homes with its ministry of help and blessing, and to stay by those homes for their spirituj^^ protection, and they will not desert it. The law is just as inevitable that a house-leaving church will make a church-leaving people. Most of the churches that were born at the north
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end of the city are now huddled together at the south end and on the Back Bay— the newest portions of the town— so close that they can almost catch each other's eavesdroppings. Some of them ought to have moved; but some ought to have remained, or at least to have left their sanctuaries with a sufficient body to maintain worship. Now we are planting missions among this large unchurched population. But the original hold can never be recovered in this way. Move out your palace-cars from the assembled passengers, and then back in a cheaper train with a more economical service, and you need not be siurprised to hear them say, ' No, thank you, we do not ride second-class.' So we do not doubt that a considerable number among the honest and decent middle class have been estranged from the sanctuary by this careless habit of church-moving, the tabernacle following those whom it most needs instead of. staying with those who most need it."
After describing some from his church who preach out of doors, he goes on to say: " These have led the way which I verily believe the ministry ought to follow. I have watched them going upon the Common, where thousands gather on a summer day, or upon the circus ground, thronged with an expectant crowd waiting for a show; and as they have lifted up their voices hundreds have gathered about and listened with utmost attention to their words. Here is a lesson. These people could not be drawn to church, but they listen when the church is brought to them; and when the crowd disperses there is generally left a residuum of those who would like to hear further, and who, upon conversation, promise to meet the speaker at the church next Sabbath morning. What now if the great body of ordained preachers would go out each Sunday afternoon upon the commons and squares and public gardens and parks and tell the simple story of the gospel? I know of no solution of the problem. How shall our churches reach the masses? at once so simple and so practicable as this. And I would have each minister go as the pastor of his church. Let the people know that the church cares enough for them to send its ministers after them.
"... We talk about the dangerous classes. The danger lies in the separation of the classes— those who are the salt of the earth keeping by themselves instead of coming into contact with that which tends to corruption. If the great mass of Christians would come into heart-to-heart relation with the so-called dangerous class much might be done to change its character. But here is where we fail. We have too many family churches and too few missionary churches. Custom is inexorable in its demands, and it is exceedingly difficult for us to admit the propriety or utility of side-tracks running off from the main lines of our ministry to reach the unprivileged.
We praise God indeed that our Redeemer is one who can
have compassion on the ignorant and on them that are out of the way; but how far we should go out of the way is quite another question. The regular thoroughfare can command unlimited capital for its extension, and no matter how costly the rolling-stock of quartet choirs, Gothic arches, memorial windows, and all that, the funds can generally be raised for it. But for an unsurveyed and unchartered extension into the highways and hedges it is always very difficult to get stockholders. The reason is that we shrink from the unusual and the extraordinary. Fashion controls our religion very much as it controls the cut of our garments. The most grotesque styles are worn upon our backs if custom so order, and the most absurd contrivances of medieval art are sanctioned in our churches if they are laid down on the fashion-plate of ecclesiastical architecture. Custom is a pope whose bulls few have the courage to resist."
On the 19th of December of this year Dr. Gordon spoke at the annual Forefathers' celebration in old Plymouth. The
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speakers were drawn from various professions and from all denominations, James Russell Lowell being the most distinguished. There was there, as usual, a large contingent of the liberal stripe— as unconscious apparently of any incongruity in their celebration of the heroic faith of Puritanism as Romans of the Lower Empire might have been in honoring the fathers of the Twelve Tables. For the dry gravelly bed may indeed continue to believe itself the stream long after the cooling waters have sought other channels. To such Gordon's address seems largely directed
" I count myself highly honored in being called to participate in the festivities of this occasion. For though I cannot trace my lineage, natural or ecclesiastical, to Plymouth Rock, in common with all New Englanders, I cherish a profound interest in its history and principles. You remember that in speaking of the rock which Moses smote in the wilderness to give water to the Israelites the Scriptures call it ' that spiritual rock which followed them.' Plymouth Rock does not remain in Plymouth alone; it has followed the sons of the Pilgrims in all their migrations, its grain and grit wrought into their constitution, and rendering them the most stalwart race that has yet appeared on this continent. And without desiring that this noble rock should grow less, I do wish that a strong solution, a powerful tincture of it might be prepared and administered far and wide to those politicians without principle, to those civilians without conscience, and to those clergymen without creed, in which this generation so abounds. Then, perchance, observ^ers like Ralph Waldo Emerson might not have to lament the ' dapper liberalities,' as he names them, which have rendered our generation so ' frivolous and ungirt as compared with the former and Puritan age.'
" Mr. President, it was my fortune to be hatched ecclesiastically on Roger Williams's rock, situated in Narragansett Bay. I would not say to the sons of the Puritans, ' Our rock
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is not as your rock.' It is as your rock, the same geological and theological formation. And while the adherents of the ' standing order ' are complaining that Plymouth Rock is disintegrating and crumbling in the atmosphere of modem doubt and liberal thought, I am glad to say that our rock is as firm and compact as ever, so that we could undertake to furnish underpinning for any number of new chvuches and new States, provided the demand is for ' a church without a bishop and a state without a king.' And this suggests a theory of ecclesiastical evolution which I have formulated, but have never before ventured to make public. The followers of Roger Williams, after two hundred and fifty years, have grown to two millions, and the principles of Roger Williams— soulliberty and religious toleration—have been gradually appropriated by all churches and governments till they have become almost universally accepted. This is certainly a remarkable triumph. How shall we account for it? Well, you remember that quaint old Thomas Fuller explains figuratively the wide-spread diffusion of the doctrines of Wickliffe, and that Wordsworth puts the same into verse, telling us how the reformer's body was dug up and burned by his enemies, and how, his ashes being cast into the little brook, it bore them
" ' Into the Avon; Avon to the tide
Of Severn; Severn to the narrow seas
Into main ocean they....
Thus the bold teacher's doctrine, sanctified
By truth, shall spread throughout the world dispersed.'
" It was even so with Roger Williams. He was buried on one of the slopes of Providence Hill. An apple-tree grew above his grave, spreading its branches widely and striking its roots deeply, and bearing year by year a heavy burden of fruit. How widely that fruit was scattered and eaten, how its seeds were diffused and reproduced here and there, I need
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not conjecture. Suffice it to say that while a college student in that goodly city I saw the bones of Roger Williams disinterred, and, strange to relate, it was discovered that the taproot of that apple-tree had struck down and followed the whole length of the stubborn Baptist's spinal column, appropriating and absorbing its substance till not a vestige of the vertebrae remained. And thus that invincible backbone of Roger Williams, whom a critical Massachusetts statesman stigmatized as ' contentiously conscientious,' was ' spread throughout the world dispersed,' and reproduced in generations of his adherents. Blessed are they who are so fortunate as to have their theology enriched by such strong phosphites.
" But, Mr. President, I must not obtrude family issues into this most catholic celebration. More can truthfully be said to the praise of the worthies whose names we honor to-day than any of us shall have time to express. In the first place, of whom could it ever more truly be said that ' they builded better than they knew '? Who supposes they ever dreamed of the noble republic whose germ and principles they bore in the hold of the ' Mayflower'? They were simply dutiful servants of the Most High, not architects of their own fortunes; and, like Abraham, they obeyed the voice of God and went out, not knowing whither they went, that they might inherit a land which he should afterward give them. Had they been mindful of that country whence they came out they might have had opportunity to return, but now they sought a better country, and God gave them one which far surpassed their thoughts. I remember to have read that, years after its com-
pletion, General Jackson's campaign at New Orleans was
sharply criticized in Congress, and Judge Douglass, in a masterly speech, vindicated it. Afterward meeting the judge, the general cordially thanked him, and said, ' I always knew that I was right in what I did at New Orleans, but I never knew why I was right until I read your speech.' The remark may awaken a smile, but there is something deeply philosophical in it. The thinker must come after the actor to interpret his conduct for him. As the great master takes up some rude melody of the troubadour and sets it to music, so thinkers have to set to logic the deeds of the world's great actors. Instinct is greater than reason, because it reads the mind of God, yet knows it not. It was a divine instinct which guided the helm of the ' Mayflower,' and it was a divine instinct which guided the footsteps of the Pilgrims to this spot; and it is for us to-day to exult in the clear reasonableness of what they did.
" In another sense, these forefathers were great thinkers, for they thought God's thoughts after him, careless of the contradiction which those thoughts might bring to our human logic. This was their intellectual heroism, that they believed God though they thereby made every man a liar. It is the fashion nowadays to admire the Puritan and decry Puritanism. But it was the doctrine that made the man, and not the man the doctrine. Iron in the thinker's brain is just as needful, if he is to grasp and master the dark problems of the universe, as iron in the blacksmith's blood is needful if he is to weld and mould the iron bar which he holds in his hand. And our Puritan fathers had the iron from the hills of eternal truth so wrought into their blood that they have sent down a current of stalwart convictions which a score of generations have not outgrown. May this be the lesson which we gain from our visit to this New England shrine to-day— that fidelity to God is the surest way of fidelity to man. The truest humanity is that which is born of the truest divinity. And therefore, if we would realize the prayer of George Fox, the Quaker— of being 'baptized into a sense of all conditions'— let us know that we must be baptized into God's truth as well as into God's love. This, then, shall be my closing sentiment: as the
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Pilgrim fathers are marching on year by year in the culture and wealth and greatness which their sons have wrought out after them, may the Pilgrim sons fall back year by year upon the piety and virtue and conscience which their fathers wrought out before them."