The Ordination (1812)

C H A P T E R X I I I

The Ordination

[ 1812 ]

F he stopped off at Andover at all on the way back from Worcester, Adoniram may have spent no more than a few hours there before hurrying on to Bradford and Nancy with the news that they would be sailing soon. He probably spent the week end at the Hasseltine house, for on Sunday the twenty-second he preached at the church in Rowley, some five or six miles southeast of Bradford near the seacoast. Perhaps Nancy rode with him—it would have been a pleasant early morning ride—and listened with pride to his sermon. Most of the theological students had preached in the Rowley church at one time or another for the past year—Nott, Newell, Hall and Rice as well as Adoniram. Deacon Joshua Jewett was always one of their auditors, and although they did not know it, he faithfully noted in his journal who preached and the text. This day he thought Adoniram “preached well,” as he had done the previous Sunday and the Sunday before that.

Meanwhile 1811 was flaming into autumn, and Adoniram and Nancy were increasingly conscious that they might beseeing the change of New England’s seasons for the last time. They fretted to go, but they felt, too, the sadness of looking at faces and scenes they would never see again. It was a kind of dying. They looked forward to a glorious immortality but they regretted leaving all the dear familiar things they had always known.

But time ran on and no ship to India could be found. New York was already under British blockade. John Treadwell to the contrary, it was obvious to everyone else that war with England was close at hand. As the shriveled leaves fell and the land dissolved in the rains preceding the first snowstorms, a sense of urgency grew in the missionaries. A ship must be sailing, and it must be found.

December came, its first day a Sunday, and Adoniram preached once more in Rowley—“well,” according to Deacon Jewett. The year 1812 Opened and still nothing had been learned about a ship. By now a third of the four missionaries was engaged to marry—Samuel Nott. His wife was to be Roxana Peck, whom he had known since childhood. Roxana had written to Harriet Atwood, suggesting that they study “some new language in order to acquire an eastern language with greater facility.” Harriet replied in January with a lengthy letter welcoming Roxana to “those ‘dear selected few’ who will be my only associates, through the little remnant of my life.” But as to the languages, she and Newell had come to the conclusion that it was impracticable because they might be sailing in as soon as three months.

It was to be much less than that. Late in January, 1812, Hall and Newell appeared unexpectedly in Andover. They had dropped their medical studies and hurried up from Philadelphia with word that the ship Harmony, Captain Brown, was to sail from that port for Calcutta in about two weeks, by special permission of the federal government, and would take the missionaries.

The news was electrifying. All at once everyone realized that everything remained to be done with no time in which to do it. The Prudential Committee, meeting in Newburyport on the twentyseventh of January, was suddenly faced with the matter of money. The only funds in hand amounted to five hundred dollars, although another twelve hundred were in sight. It would cost at least four times that much to outfit and send the missionaries out for a year, even on a dangerously modest budget. Opportunities for communication with the East would be few after war broke out. The missionaries might easily be stranded overseas unless they had at least a year’s supply of money with them when they sailed.

But so far as the committee could see, it would be impossible to send the missionaries out with a full year’s salary in advance. It finally recommended that they go without their wives; or, if they would not do that, that they accept half a year’s salary, trusting that the other half could be forwarded later to India. If this could not be done, two of them should look to the London Missionary Society for support, to work under its auspices.

These decisions probably reflected the feelings of Mr. Bartlet of the Prudential Committee. But Dr. Worcester, who together with Samuel Spring made up the remainder of the committee, had a more daring heart. It was his Tabernacle Church in Salem which had been chosen as the place to hold the ordination ceremonies, which were to be on the sixth of February, the last day which would permit the missionaries to reach Philadelphia in time for the Harmony’s sailing. Dr. Worcester never stOpped preparations for a moment. He coolly borrowed money right and left in the name of the Prudential Committee. He even frightened bold Dr. Spring, who demurred one day, “Brother Worcester, I fear you are going too fast. I doubt if we shall have the means to pay the sum which we must borrow.”

“There is money enough in the churches,” asserted Worcester. “1 know that very well,” replied Spring. “But how can you get at it?”

“The Lord has the key,” Worcester affirmed calmly, and went on with a fine disregard for obstacles.

All at once a fifth candidate for the mission expedition presented himself and applied to the Prudential Committee for appointment. He was Luther Rice, a big man of boundless energy, a fine public speaker, quick with a jest, and an accomplished musician.

Rice would have applied long before, but the girl to whom he was engaged had been unwilling to share a missionary life with him. He had waited patiently, hoping she would change her mind. When he saw that she would not, he felt free to apply to go alone. But the Prudential Committee was having trouble enough. The most it could do was agree to appoint him if he could raise his own passage money. He had six days in which to do it. Caution and timidity -— or, as some said, discretion — were not among Rice’s characteristics. He promptly set 'off on a whirlwind horseback tour through New England to get the money wherever he could.

During that same hectic week, news came of another sailing for Calcutta, this one from Salem. It was learned that Pickering Dodge, owner of the brig Caravan, had just received permission from the government to let her go. She could carry three or four passengers, and her sailing date was tentatively set for February 10, four days after the ordination.

The Prudential Committee immediately decided to have half of the missionaries go on the Caravan, to lessen the “general risk,” of which there was no question, what with the danger of capture added to the normal hazards of a voyage halfway around the world.

As news of the missionaries’ imminent departure spread, public interest quickened. Long ocean voyages were an old story to Salem, but always with home and a fat profit to be anticipated at the end of a year or two. The missionaries, however, were making a oneway trip. They planned never to return. They had martyrdom to anticipate, with the only possible profits the glory of their souls and the salvation of a few heathen. They included women, too—and so young! One of them was only seventeen! What selflessness.’ said some. What folly! said others.

Meanwhile the indefatigable Dr. Worcester fanned the interest in every way he could, including announcements in the Salem Gazette and the Essex Register:

MISSIONARY ORDINA’I‘ION

Next Thursday, February 6, by appointment of the Prudential Committee of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Messrs. A doniram I udson, Samuel N ewell, Samuel Nott, and Gordon Hall, are to be set apart by a solemn ordination as Christian Missionaries to carry the Gospel of Salvation to the Heathen. The public exercises are to be holden at the Tabernacle in this town, and to commence at eleven o’clock A.M. A Collection will be made on the occasion in aid of the Missionaries, which, to embrace a very unexpected opportunity for conveyance to India, is now fitting out with all possible dispatch.

SAMUEL WORCESTER Clerk of tbe Prudential Committee Dr. William Bentley of the East Church in Salem saw the announcement. It was he who had rejoiced in his private journal when Adoniram’s father had left Malden and Wenham. A good man, a liberal man, and that rarity in respectable circles in Salem, a Jeffersonian, he hated the conservative theology with all his heart. Now he noted: “The Hopkinsians give notice that they have four candidates for their Missions to be ordained in the Tabernacle this week, who are to go immediately to India.... We learn nothing favorable to their talents or experience. It is said that Pickering Dodge, Mer—chant of Salem, gives them a passage to India at 3 hundred dollars each and some of them carry their wives.”

Thus Dr. Bentley. But a great many felt differently. The daring of the project caught their imagination and their sympathies. From all directions contributions began to come in—a trickle at first, then a torrent, and at the end a very flood.

While all this activity went on, Nancy Hasseltine in Bradford and Harriet Atwood in Haverhill were busily preparing for their weddings and the voyage. Adoniram went to Plymouth to say good—by to his father and mother, his sister and brother.

It is not hard to imagine the lamentations with which Mrs. Judson and Abigail contemplated farewell, nor the heavy heart with which Reverend Mr. Judson contemplated his son’s departure. With Adoniram would go all his hopes, all his ambitions, for his favorite son, the one in whom he had meant to witness the triumph he had forsworn for himself.

And, bitterest of ironies, the boy was throwing himself away for the very cause the father himself preached. By his own creed his mouth was stopped. He could say not a word in opposition. The two Adonirams were more alike than they knew. When it came to belief, neither counted the cost. Neither could compromise.

Adoniram left Plymouth early in the morning of February 3, a Monday. He had a peculiar horror of farewells—perhaps because of the unhappy emotions associated with his previous departures—so he slipped away while the family still slept.

Only his brother Elnathan, now eighteen, rode with him to Boston. Adoniram knew that Elnathan had never professed religion. At some point along the way, the two dismounted from their horses and knelt on the snow—covered ground beside the road. Here Adoniram prayed fervently for the soul of his younger brother. In Boston they shook hands and parted, to see each other only once again.

Adoniram probably stayed in Boston overnight and went on alone to Bradford the next morning. There had been a heavy rain in the night; but during the day, as his horse plodded northward, fresh-falling snow blanketed the muddy roads.

On Wednesday, February 5, 1812, a dull warm day, Adoniram and Nancy were married by Parson Allen in the west room of Deacon Hasseltine’s house—the very room where they had first met.

The same day, the two attended a great meeting in the church in Haverhill. The church was jammed to the rafters with onlookers. Some were merely curious to see the first American foreign missionaries in person. But to most, the occasion was a heart-wrenching farewell to two girls they had seen grow up almost as members of their own families.

Parson Allen delivered the sermon. The good old minister had known the two since their infancy. Many times, visiting the Hasseltine “dance hall,” he had seen them whirling about, flushed and happy, enjoying themselves without a thought of what life would bring. He spoke to them, therefore, before the packed throng as if he were a loving father.

“My dear children,” he told them, “you are now engaged in the best of causes. It is that cause for which Jesus the Son of God came into the world and suffered and died. You literally forsake father and mother, brothers and sisters, for the sake of Christ and the promotion of His Kingdom.”

He had some special advice to them, as women and wives, concerning their duty to heathen women. To convert these women “will be your business, my dear children, to whom your husbands can have but little, or no access. Go then, and do all in your power to enlighten their minds, and bring them to the knowledge of the truth.... Teach them to realize that they are not an inferior race of creatures, but stand upon a par with men. Teach them that they have immortal souls; and are no longer to burn themselves in the same fire, with the bodies of their departed husbands.”

He had words for the girls’ parents, too, and for the congregation. But at the end of his discourse he turned again to Nancy and Harriet and concluded in a voice nearly breaking: “To the care of the great Head of the church I now commit them. To His grave I also resign you all. May He gather you together in one. And may you all return and come to Zion with a song, and with shouts of everlasting glory.”

This was the end of the service except for the hymn before the benediction, which Parson Allen had composed especially for the occasion. PeOple wept unashamedly as they sang:

Go, ye heralds of salvation;

Go, and preach in heathen lands;

Publish loud to every nation,

What the Lord of life commands.

Go, ye sisters, their companions,

Soothe their cares, and wipe their tears,

Angels shall in bright battalions

Guard your steps and guard your fears.

Landed safe in distant regions,

Tell the Burmans JESUS died;

Tell them Satan and his legions,

Bow to him they crucified.

Far beyond the mighty Ganges,

When vast floods beyond us roll,

Think how widely Jesus ranges

Nations wide from pole to pole.

While from heathen nations blended
Light and peace within shall rise;
When your days on earth are ended,

Christ receive you to the skies.

To his grace we now resign you,

To him only you belong;

You with every christian Hindoo,

Join at last th’ angelic throng.

But this meeting at Haverhill was only a preliminary neighborhood gathering compared to the much greater one held in Salem the next day at which the missionaries were ordained. The night of the fifth a heavy snow had fallen. The morning of the sixth dawned clear and cold—one of the coldest days of the year—so that as people walked to the huge white Tabernacle Church their feet creaked on the fresh crisp snow. They had come from many places —-from Boston, Bradford, Rowley, Andover, Wenham, Beverly, Gloucester, Manchester, Haverhill, and Newburyport. They had come in sleighs, on horseback, and afoot. Some brought their children, so that they might be able to boast the rest of their lives that they had seen the ordination of the first American foreign missionaries. A delegation of boys from Phillips Academy at Andover and another of students from the Theological Seminary had started long before dawn, in order to be able to trudge the full sixteen miles to Salem over the drifted roads and still get to the Tabernacle Church before ceremonies opened at eleven in the morning.

The huge Tabernacle, a barnlike structure with a tent-shaped roof, could hardly contain all the people. Some thought they numbered as many as two thousand — fifteen hundred at the very least. The auditorium was so packed that “the aisles could be traced only by the ridges or seams made by the people standing.” The platform around the high white pulpit was completely filled by members of the ecclesiastical council and various dignitaries, both clerical and lay.

In the very front of this immense gathering, facing the high pulpit, sat the five candidates on a hard wooden settee—Nancy, resplendent in a new scoop bonnet, just behind them in the aisle seat of the foremost box pew.

Her thoughts might not have all been on the ordination. That morning her husband had given her proof of his aversion to formal partings. He had hurried her away from Bradford before dawn without allowing her to take leave of anyone. This time, however, his stratagem had been discovered, and the newlyweds had been called back after they had already gone a short distance and made to shake hands all round. Adoniram’s action had created a peculiar impression, not entirely favorable. From time to time during the service Nancy may have wondered why her husband was sometimes so regardless of the feelings of others, and how she could change him. But these thoughts must have been lost in the rising tension of the ceremonies.

No foreign missionaries had ever been ordained in America, and, lacking any traditional procedure, the general form used in the ordination of any Congregational minister was followed.

Onlookers are always stirred in some degree by an ordination, for it is the rite which dedicates the minister to the service of God, sets him aside from his fellow men, and admits him into the consecrated brotherhood of the ministry. But this ordination in the Tabernacle was charged with unusual, almost unbearable emotion. It was noticeable even during the routine of the missionaries’ examination by the ecclesiastical council in respect to “their Christian knowledge and piety, and their motives in offering themselves as missionaries to the heathen.” It was even more noticeable when — probably after some of the “apprOpriate music,” which next day’s Salem Gazette reported “was performed at proper intervals” on a “bass viol”—Dr. Griffin began the introductory prayer.

To Adoniram, there must have been a special poignancy in seeing Dr. Griffin as one of the ordaining ministers. He had been Adoniram’s mentor at the theological seminary. Now he was pastor of Boston’s Park Street Church—where Adoniram could have been assiStant pastor at this very moment if he had wished. But all five of the presiding ministers were closely associated with the missionary movement in one way or another. There was Dr. Woods, who had taught Adoniram as Abbot Professor of Christian Theology. If Dr. Griffin represented Adoniram’s rejected opportunities, Dr. Woods might have represented Adoniram’s conversion from infidelity. And there was Jedediah Morse, pastor of the First Church in Charlestown. He represented both Andover Theological Seminary and the American Board, as trustee of one and member of the other. As for the remaining two, Samuel Spring and Samuel Worcester, they might be said to represent the mission itself, for those two had literally invented the American Board and had done more than anyone else to bring a mission under American auSpices actually into being.

To the audience, however, another feeling began to well up as soon as Dr. Griffin began the prayer. The auditorium fell into a hush “as still as death,” as one eyewitness remembered it; for by accident or design, everything said and done from then on conveyed the spirit of farewell. The audience realized it was seeing the five men being bid a farewell that in some reSpects approached that bade at the edge of a grave in the prOSpect of an eventual resur—rection.

Dr. Woods made this increasingly clear during the sermon following the introductory prayer, when, speaking directly to the five, he said: “Dear young men, I will not break your hearts and my own, by dwelling on the affecting circumStances of this parting scene.” Later, he spoke of seeing them again “at the glorious appear- 112 T H E ing of the Son of God, and those whom their labors may rescue from pagan darkness, at his right hand.” And he closed: “With this joyful anticipation, I do, my dear friends, cheerfully and most affectionately, bid you, farewell!”

The mOSt impressive part of an ordination—and, in a way, its soul—is the “laying on of hands” as a prayer of consecration is said. When the time for it came, the five missionaries and the audience knelt. Nancy, if the traditional representations are correct, slipped out into the aisle and knelt there by the front corner of the pew, almost beside the missionaries. Each of the ordaining ministers stood before one of the five and placed bOth hands on his head as Dr. Morse gave the consecrating prayer.

The moment was too much for the audience. “An irresistible sighing and weeping” broke out. It had been heard before, but from now on “The entire wrapt congregation seemed moved as the trees of the wood are moved by a mighty wind. Pent-up emotion could no longer be restrained.”

Dr. Spring gave the charge to the newly ordained missionaries. He pointed out that “no enterprise comparable to this has been embraced by the American Church. All others retire before it, like stars before the rising sun.” But in nearly everything he said, though it was nominally the statement to the five of their duties and responsibilities, sounded that same haunting note of farewell.

Even Samuel Worcester, receiving them into the brotherhood of the ministry by giving them “the right hand of fellowship,” returned to the same theme: “By the solemnities of this day, you, Messrs. Judson, Nott, Newell, Hall, and Rice, are publicly set aside for the service of God in the Gospel of his Son, among the Heathen. With reference, therefore, to this momentous service, we, who are still to labor in the same Gospel here at home, in the presence of God, angels and men, now give to you, dear Brethren, the right hand of fellowship.... Go, carry to the poor Heathen the good news of pardon, peace and eternal life. Tell them of the God whom we adore; of the Saviour in whom we trust; of the glorious immortality for which we hope.... We are not insensible to the sacrifices which you make, or to the dangers and sufferings to which you are devoted. You stand this day ‘a spectacle to God, to angels, and to man.’ You are in the act of leaving parents, and friends, and country.... But, dear°Brethren, we shall have you in the tenderest remembrance, and shall not cease to make mention of you in our prayers.”

There was more. Ministers and orators never feared to take sufficient time to make their points, in those days. But Dr. Worcester’s conclusion expressed the general feeling:

“You are but the precursors of many, who shall follow you in this arduous, glorious exercise; for the Gospel shall be preached to all nations, and all people shall see the Salvation of God.

“Beloved Brethren, be of good courage; go in peace; and may the Lord God of the holy apostles and prophets go with you. We commend you to him, and to the word of his grace; and devoutly pray, that in the day of the Lord Jesus, we may have the happiness to see you present many of the Heathen before the throne of his glory with exceeding joy. Amen.”

It was early in the afternoon, when, after a concluding prayer by Dr. Spring, the services ended. Most of the onlookers were so moved that they would describe the events they had witnessed to their dying day. Meanwhile, they had to make their way home through the bitter cold. One of them, Ephraim Newton, 3 theological Student who had to walk all the way back to Andover, wrote two days later that he was still badly way-worn. Another, William Goodell, a student at the Academy who later went himself as a missionary to Turkey, became so exhausted and chilled that, at nightfall, still some distance from Andover, he fell and would have frozen to death had not a group of returning theological students found him. By taking turns carrying him, they managed to get him to a house on the outskirts of Andover, where a mattress and blankets could be spread for him in front of a roaring fire.

While these hundreds were streaming home over the drifted streets and roads, Adoniram and Nancy went to Beverly to Stay with her sister Rebecca and her husband in the parsonage of the Dane Street Church until the Caravan should sail—in about four days, it was hoped. Abigail, another of Nancy’s sisters, came down from Bradford to help out and be company. The Reverend Joseph Emerson was seldom home, however. He was out —— everywhere—feverishly trying to collect money for the missionaries.

For that matter, everyone was feverishly active. The morning after the ordination, Adoniram made a brief trip to Boston to say a final good-by to his sister Abby and his brother—the last time the brothers ever saw each other. The next day, the eighth, Samuel Nott and Roxana Peck were married and left for Philadelphia with Hall and Rice, for the sailing of the Harmony. Sunday evening, the ninth, there was another huge meeting in the Tabernacle, nominally the ordinary Sunday evening service, but in fact a second farewell service. But so many were the meetings these days that this one was scarcely remembered afterward.

Somewhere in these crowded days Samuel Newell and Harriett Atwood found time to be married in the big white Atwood house in Haverhill. An old, gnarled apple tree grew in the yard beside the house. Harriet had seen it bloom that Spring, but now its branches were bare. As she looked at it, she may have reflected sadly that she would never see an apple tree bloom again.

But there was little time for reflections like these. There was too much to do in the few days remaining until the Caravan should sail.