held at the Harpswell church. At these services Professor Henry L.
Chapman officiated, and spoke to the Harpswell people of the work
and character of their beloved pastor. A choir of Bowdoin College
students, members of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, sang appropriate
hymns. On the next day services were held in the Second Parish church
of Portland at which Rev. Abiel H. Wright, pastor of the St. Lawrence
Street church and an intimate friend of Mr. Kellogg, delivered the
following tribute, and Rev. Dr. George Lewis of South Berwick offered
prayer. The burial was in the Western Cemetery, Portland, where are
buried Mr. Kellogg’s wife and father and mother.]
In one of the pastoral psalms God’s thought and feeling concerning the
death of his consecrated servants find this expression, “Precious in
the sight of the Lord is the death of His Saints.” When the aged saint
comes home from the toil and trouble of his earth-time services, there
is joy in the heart of the Eternal Father. Angels rejoice when one
sinner repenteth and the life of faith is begun on earth, but when the
sinner becomes a saint and the long weary trial-way is trodden through
to its end, when, as the Lord sees, His servant’s work is done, and he
is received on high into the saints’ everlasting rest, then indeed the
death of His saint is precious in His sight.
Fifty-seven years ago Elijah Kellogg began his life ministry as a
preacher of the Gospel in the humble village of Harpswell Centre, where
a few days past it was ended. What minister of Maine has ever been more
widely known and loved by its people than was this saintly and revered
preacher? As a young man of thirty years but recently from Andover
Theological Seminary, he began his ministry among the Harpswell people;
as an aged saint of God, nearly eighty-eight years old, known and loved
far and wide in our land, he closed that ministry in his death, among
the people he had seen grow up from childhood to declining age. He had
baptized the children of those who were his first parishioners. He had
buried the parents and in many instances the grandparents of those
who loved, revered, and supported him during the last years of his
laborious ministry.
If we ask why he remained among them, when called to other and more
inviting fields of labor; why, when this honored Second Parish invited
him to its pastorate in the time of its strength and prime, he
declined to leave the little country church of forty or fifty members,
the answer is, because he loved the Harpswell people. They were his
first love, and they were his last love. Highly privileged people!
God-blessed church! To have had this holy man of God living among them,
passing by them continually, speaking God’s truth to them, serving
them in their homes, their fields, their boats, their sanctuary, in
the Christ-spirit of devotion, and living out his rich, fruitful life
of faith among them to its end, content and satisfied to have their
love and gratitude, and with his dying breath speaking his last loving
benediction upon them every one. It has been a beautiful life of
service,--a noble ministry for God and humanity.
We have often wondered what Elijah Kellogg would have been had he
chosen to take his father’s pulpit, and the position and the prominence
which it would have given him in our city and throughout our state. It
might possibly have made of him a grander preacher than he was--and
few are the preachers that ever came to Portland pulpits who drew
larger or more satisfied congregations than did he; it might have made
of him a more influential clergyman in our state than he was. But who
will say he could have developed a grander character or won a fairer
fame than now belong to him?
Elijah Kellogg was a man of deep and fervid piety--a man of prayer.
There are guest chambers in our city where his voice has been heard in
prayer for hours at a time, the memory of which is a benediction. There
is a chamber on Munjoy Hill, in which I have often slept, which Elijah
Kellogg frequently occupied as the guest of one of his former Harpswell
families. In that chamber he wrote parts of many of his surpassing
juvenile stories, and there he prayed often and long.
Being a man of prayer, it was his wish and will to abide where God
would have him. It was God’s will that of the fifty-eight years of
his ministry, the Harpswell people should have his service nearly all
of the time for forty-three years, and part of the time each of the
remaining fifteen years. During the ten years he was minister of the
Seaman’s Bethel in Boston, as chaplain of the Seaman’s Friend society,
he spent his summer in his Harpswell home, preaching and ministering
to the people. Counting out the five years of his Topsham pastorate,
we may say that his connection with the church of Harpswell Centre was
practically unbroken for fifty-three years, and during his pastorate in
Topsham he continued to dwell in his Harpswell home.
His work in Boston brought out one prominent characteristic of his
ministry: his interest in and love of young men. Elijah Kellogg was
every man’s friend, but he was preëminently the friend and helper of
young men. As he delighted to write books for boys, which helped them
to become right-minded and true-hearted young men, so he aimed in
preaching and by personal effort to reach and save young men. He did
so conspicuously in Boston. At the time when Dr. Stone was pastor of
Park Street Congregational church, Mr. Kellogg was preaching in the
Mariners’ church of that city. At that time Dr. Charles G. Finney was
at work as a revivalist with Dr. Stone. Rev. Mr. Kellogg had been, and
was then and subsequently, in the habit of meeting a class of young men
in Dr. Stone’s chapel. From among those young men he trained Christian
workers and led them down into the slums of the North End to help him
in his work of holding meetings on the wharves.
One of those young men I knew years afterward, who devoted much of
his spare time aiding Elijah Kellogg in his good work among the
tempted classes of the North End. Two years later that young man came
to Portland to live. He became a worker, then a member, of the St.
Lawrence Street church. When Mr. Kellogg was back again in Harpswell,
this young man was a prominent merchant and politician, and a
well-known Christian worker in this city.
At the dedication of the new St. Lawrence Congregational church in
1897, Mr. Kellogg made two memorable addresses, in one of which he
alluded to the lamented Henry H. Burgess, who had died in 1893, in
these words: “When I was preaching in Boston, Henry H. Burgess was the
bookkeeper for a paint and oil firm in that city, and a member of the
Park Street Sunday-school. I was preaching at that church, and saw that
the people were sending out old men to gather the young men into the
Sunday-school. I told them they would never do any good in that way,
and asked them why they did not send out young men to do this work.
They said they did not have any young men to do it, and I said I would
get some of them for the purpose. I preached one sermon, and the first
Sunday after that I walked fifteen young men into that Sunday-school,
with Henry Burgess at their head, and the next Sunday in came twenty
more, and so on, until finally the building was crowded to its utmost
capacity, and we had young men to work for us.
“When Henry Burgess came to Portland from Boston, I gave him a letter
of introduction to Dr. Carruthers. He is no longer here,” continued the
aged speaker, while tears of emotion coursed down his bronzed cheeks,
“but though absent in the body, he is rejoicing here with us in the
spirit.”
They loved each other, this aged minister and that strong young man,
and they were helpful to each other. They have changed eyes and clasped
hands, now, I believe, in the eternal home of the saints.
It was during Mr. Kellogg’s life in Boston, in his home on Pinckney
Street, that he wrote his marvellous books for young people. Is there
here man or woman, young man or maiden, who has not read them and
received from them moral tone and stamina? Perhaps it is true to say,
and no discredit to Mr. Kellogg to say, that he was more widely known
as author than as preacher, and that he has probably done more for the
moral health of American youth by his breezy, fascinating books than by
his work as preacher and pastor. Yea, he has been a mighty preacher to
young Americans by the eloquence of his industrious pen.
It would, I believe, be difficult to find an author who wrote with
a more definite and practical aim to Christianize young people than
did Elijah Kellogg, or one who had better success in the attainment
of his high and noble purpose. Mr. Kellogg possessed a genius for
that kind of literary work. That he had, in early years, the latent
art of an accomplished rhetorician was proved in his student days,
when he wrote and declaimed “Spartacus to the Gladiators,” while in
Andover Theological Seminary. It is well, doubtless, that Mr. Kellogg’s
literary genius was directed to the humbler, yet more practical and
serviceable, art of writing books for the moral and religious culture
of the young.
As a preacher Mr. Kellogg was great, both in the art of making and
in the forceful presentation of the sermon. Rhetorical finish and
enlivening humor were alike natural and easy to him. I never have heard
a preacher who seemed more thoroughly to enjoy the effort of preaching,
and few preachers excelled him in the ability to make his audience
enjoy the sermon. How quickly could he change the amused interest of
the congregation in the play of his humor into serious and solemn
emotion by the power and pathos of his forceful appeals, applying the
teaching of his sermon to the conscience and the heart.
He was a man of quick and responsive sympathies. His whole life was
characterized by the spirit of Christian benevolence. He not only gave
himself to his people to be ever and always their servant in things
spiritual, but as truly in things temporal. He was their counsellor and
helper in all their heavenly and earthly concerns. It was the habit of
his life to keep a purse for the Lord, into which went one-tenth of all
moneys received by him. Thus he furnished himself, systematically,
with the means to extend aid to those whose sufferings appealed to
his sympathies. It is said that he gave beyond his means, and often
to his own embarrassment. His services as a preacher were in constant
demand, from churches far and near, and he responded when he could.
Not a few churches have been blessed by his labors, at different
intervals, during his Harpswell pastorate. Here in Portland he was
greatly beloved. For nearly one year he was the continual supply of the
St. Lawrence Street church, and in the thought of its older members he
is regarded as one of its pastors. Portland claimed him as her own. He
preached at Cumberland Mills, at Wellesley, Rockport, and New Bedford,
Massachusetts, and in other places he has served the church of God. The
Congregational church in New Bedford extended to him a call, as did
this Second Parish. But he refused all such calls, being unwilling to
make any final severance from his beloved Harpswell people.
In 1889, after the close of his Topsham pastorate, he resumed full
pastoral care of the Harpswell church, which had been served by others
during his work elsewhere, and there he remained until God called
him home. It was a wonder to us all how this venerable man, with the
infirmities of extreme old age creeping upon him, could still keep
on preaching in his eighty-eighth year, two sermons each Sunday, and
ministering as a pastor to his flock.
His last visit to Portland was during “the Old Home week” in August,
1900. He opened the festivities of that notable week by preaching
Sunday morning in this Second Parish church, upon invitation of its
pastor, and preaching again in the evening of that day at Yarmouth;
returning Monday morning to the residence of his niece in the old
homestead of his honored father, the first pastor of this Second Parish
church, who died in that historic house on Cumberland Street in 1842,
aged eighty years.
Elijah Kellogg married, after the age of forty, Hannah Pomeroy, the
daughter of the Rev. Thaddeus Pomeroy, pastor at Gorham, Maine, from
1832 to 1839. Two children survive this union, both residing in Melrose
Highlands, Massachusetts, Frank Gilman Kellogg and Mary Catherine, the
wife of Mr. Harry Batchelder. I was called to officiate at the funeral
service of their mother in the Cumberland home referred to, and rode
to the grave with her sorrowing husband. Returning from the cemetery,
the aged, grief-stricken man, said, “Now I will return to my home to be
alone with my God.” His words have been living in my memory ever since.
They implied that he was sure of finding the God of all comfort in
that secluded and desolated home on Harpswell’s shore. Who doubts but
the God we love dwelt there with his aged servant, strengthening and
supporting him in his loneliness and sorrow?
His children desired greatly to have their father with them in their
pleasant homes, but he chose to dwell among the people whom God gave
him to serve unto the end. “I will die in the harness,” he would say,
in answer to their appeals. I have from the lips of his son the words
of the last prayer he was heard to offer some days before his death.
“I thank God for a Christian mother, who consecrated me to Christ and
the Christian ministry,”--the prayer was followed by his repeating of
the twenty-third Psalm.... Just before Elijah Kellogg passed away from
earth, he delivered this touching message for his Harpswell flock, “I
want to send my love to all these people.” Having loved his own, like
his dear Lord, he loved them unto the end. Yesterday the message was
delivered to them by Professor Chapman in his funeral discourse. The
very last words of this venerable man of God, this faithful shepherd of
God’s people, were, “I am so thankful.”
Let us not attempt to interpret the words; they teach us that his
Christian heart was overflowing with gratitude to God. He was dying
in a good old age, his children around him, his people near him. He
was gathered to his fathers after a long, faithful, heroic, and noble
life. He leaves with us a most precious and a most blessed memory.
Our hearts, too, are full of gratitude to God for the life of Elijah
Kellogg on earth.
[Illustration: FRANK GILMAN KELLOGG.
Son of Elijah Kellogg.]
[Illustration: MRS. MARY KELLOGG BATCHELDER AND BABY ELEANOR BATCHELDER.
Daughter and granddaughter of Elijah Kellogg.]
DECLAMATIONS
SPARTACUS TO THE GLADIATORS
It had been a day of triumph in Capua. Lentulus, returning with
victorious eagles, had amused the populace with the sports of the
amphitheatre to an extent hitherto unknown even in that luxurious city.
The shouts of revelry had died away; the roar of the lion had ceased;
the last loiterer had retired from the banquet; and the lights in the
palace of the victor were extinguished. The moon, piercing the tissue
of fleecy clouds, silvered the dewdrop on the corselet of the Roman
sentinel, and tipped the dark waters of Volturnus with wavy, tremulous
light. It was a night of holy calm, when the zephyr sways the young
spring leaves, and whispers among the hollow reeds its dreamy music.
No sound was heard but the last sob of some weary wave, telling its
story to the smooth pebbles of the beach, and then all was still as the
breast when the spirit has departed.
In the deep recesses of the amphitheatre a band of gladiators were
crowded together,--their muscles still knotted with the agony of
conflict, the foam upon their lips, and the scowl of battle yet
lingering upon their brows,--when Spartacus, rising in the midst of
that grim assemblage, thus addressed them:--
“Ye call me chief, and ye do well to call him chief who, for twelve
long years, has met upon the arena every shape of man or beast that the
broad Empire of Rome could furnish, and has never yet lowered his arm.
And if there be one among you who can say that, ever, in public fight
or private brawl, my actions did belie my tongue, let him step forth
and say it. If there be three in all your throng dare face me on the
bloody sand, let them come on!
“Yet I was not always thus, a hired butcher, a savage chief of still
more savage men. My father was a reverent man, who feared great
Jupiter, and brought to the rural deities his offerings of fruits and
flowers. He dwelt among the vineclad rocks and olive groves at the foot
of Helicon. My early life ran quiet as the brook by which I sported.
I was taught to prune the vine, to tend the flock; and, at noon, I
gathered my sheep beneath the shade, and played upon the shepherd’s
flute. I had a friend, the son of our neighbor; we led our flocks to
the same pasture, and shared together our rustic meal. “One evening,
after the sheep were folded, and we were all seated beneath the myrtle
that shaded our cottage, my grandsire, an old man, was telling of
Marathon and Leuctra, and how, in ancient times, a little band of
Spartans, in a defile of the mountains, withstood a whole army. I did
not then know what war meant; but my cheeks burned, I knew not why;
and I clasped the knees of that venerable man, till my mother, parting
the hair from off my brow, kissed my throbbing temples, and bade me
go to rest and think no more of those old tales and savage wars. And,
methinks, if I could look on something other than warrior’s harness and
the blinding glare of burnished steel, and hear some other sound than
death groans and armor clangs, could I but lay these throbbing temples
upon the soft green turf beside my native brook, and let my hand hang
over the bank into its blessed current, and feel the broad sweep of its
waters, while the leaves danced over me, methinks that I could heave
this cursed crust from off my heart and be again a child. Yes, a child,
a child! But what have I to do with thoughts like these? I do forget my
story.
“That very night the Romans landed on our shore, and the clash of steel
was heard within our quiet vale. I saw the breast that had nourished
me trampled by the iron hoof of the war-horse; the bleeding body of my
father flung amid the blazing rafters of our dwelling. To-day I killed
a man in the arena, and when I broke his helmet-clasps, behold! he
was my friend! He knew me,--smiled faintly,--gasped,--and died; the
same sweet smile that I had marked upon his face when, in adventurous
boyhood, we scaled some lofty cliff to pluck the first ripe grapes, and
bear them home in childish triumph. I told the prætor he was my friend,
noble and brave, and I begged his body, that I might burn it upon the
funeral-pile, and mourn over his ashes. Ay, on my knees, amid the dust
and blood of the arena, I begged that boon, while all the Roman maids
and matrons, and those holy virgins they call vestal, and the rabble,
shouted in mockery, deeming it rare sport, forsooth, to see Rome’s
fiercest gladiator turn pale, and tremble like a very child before
that piece of bleeding clay; but the prætor drew back as if I were
pollution, and sternly said: ’Let the carrion rot! There are no noble
men but Romans!’ And he, deprived of funeral rites, must wander, a
hapless ghost, beside the waters of that sluggish river, and look--and
look--and look in vain to the bright Elysian Fields where dwell his
ancestors and noble kindred. And so must you, and so must I, die like
dogs!
“O Rome! Rome! thou hast been a tender nurse to me! Ay, thou hast given
to that poor, gentle, timid shepherd-lad, who never knew a harsher
sound than a flute-note, muscles of iron and a heart of flint; taught
him to drive the sword through rugged brass and plaited mail, and warm
it in the marrow of his foe! to gaze into the glaring eyeballs of the
fierce Numidian lion, even as a smooth-cheeked boy upon a laughing
girl. And he shall pay thee back till thy yellow Tiber is red as
frothing wine, and in its deepest ooze thy lifeblood lies curdled!
“Ye stand here now like giants, as ye are! The strength of brass as
in your toughened sinews; but to-morrow some Roman Adonis, breathing
sweet odors from his curly locks, shall come, and with his lily fingers
pat your brawny shoulders, and bet his sesterces upon your blood! Hark!
Hear ye yon lion roaring in his den? ’Tis three days since he tasted
meat; but to-morrow he shall break his fast upon your flesh; and ye
shall be a dainty meal for him.
“If ye are brutes, then stand here like fat oxen waiting for the
butcher’s knife; if ye are men, follow me! strike down yon sentinel,
and gain the mountain-passes, and there do bloody work as did your
sires at old Thermopylæ! Is Sparta dead? Is the old Grecian spirit
frozen in your veins, that ye do crouch and cower like base-born slaves
beneath your master’s lash? O comrades! warriors! Thracians! if we
must fight, let us fight for ourselves; if we must slaughter, let us
slaughter our oppressors; if we must die, let us die under the open
sky, by the bright waters, in noble, honorable battle.”
REGULUS TO THE CARTHAGINIANS
The beams of the rising sun had gilded the lofty domes of Carthage,
and given, with its rich and mellow light, a tinge of beauty even to
the frowning ramparts of the outer harbor. Sheltered by the verdant
shores, an hundred triremes were riding proudly at their anchors, their
brazen beaks glittering in the sun, their streamers dancing in the
morning breeze, while many a shattered plank and timber gave evidence
of desperate conflict with the fleets of Rome.
No murmur of business or of revelry arose from the city. The artisan
had forsaken his shop, the judge his tribunal, the priest the
sanctuary, and even the stern stoic had come forth from his retirement
to mingle with the crowd that, anxious and agitated, were rushing
toward the senate house, startled by the report that Regulus had
returned to Carthage.
Onward, still onward, trampling each other under foot, they rushed,
furious with anger and eager for revenge. Fathers were there whose sons
were groaning in Roman fetters; maidens whose lovers, weak and wounded,
were dying in the distant dungeons of Rome; and gray-haired men and
matrons whom Roman steel had left childless.
But when the stern features of Regulus were seen, and his colossal form
towering above the ambassadors who had returned with him from Rome;
when the news passed from lip to lip that the dreaded warrior, so far
from advising the Roman senate to consent to an exchange of prisoners,
had urged them to pursue, with exterminating vengeance, Carthage and
the Carthaginians,--the multitude swayed to and fro like a forest
beneath a tempest, and the rage and hate of that tumultuous throng
vented itself in groans, and curses, and yells of vengeance. But calm,
cold, and immovable as the marble walls around him, stood Regulus the
Roman; and he stretched out his hand over that frenzied crowd, with
gesture as proudly commanding as though he still stood at the head of
the gleaming cohorts of Rome.
The tumult ceased; the curse, half muttered, died upon the lip; and so
intense was the silence that the clanking of the brazen manacles upon
the wrists of the captive fell sharp and full upon every ear in that
vast assembly, as he thus addressed them:--
“Ye doubtless thought--for ye judge of Roman virtue by your own--that
I would break my plighted oath, rather than, returning, brook your
vengeance. I might give reasons for this, in Punic comprehension, most
foolish act of mine. I might speak of those eternal principles which
make death for one’s country a pleasure, not a pain. But, by great
Jupiter! methinks I should debase myself to talk of such high things
to you; to you, expert in womanly inventions; to you, well skilled to
drive a treacherous trade with simple Africans for ivory and gold! If
the bright blood that fills my veins, transmitted free from godlike
ancestry, were like that slimy ooze which stagnates in your arteries, I
had remained at home and broken my plighted oath to save my life.