ECCLESIASTICAL HINGHAM
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Should you walk along the highway from Quincy to Hingham on a Sunday
morning you would be passed by many automobiles, for the Old Coast Road
is now one of the great pleasure highways of New England. Many of the
cars are moderately priced affairs, the tonneau well filled with
children of miscellaneous ages, and enlivened by a family dog or
two--for this is the way that the average American household spends its
modern Sabbath holiday. Now and then a limousine, exquisite in
workmanship within and without, driven by a chauffeur in livery and
tenanted by a single languid occupant, rolls noiselessly past. A
strange procession, indeed, for a road originally marked by the
moccasined feet of Indians, and widened gradually by the toilsome
journeyings of rough Colonial carts and coaches.
It is difficult to say which feature of the steadily moving travel would
most forcibly strike the original Puritan settlers of the town: the fact
that even the common man--the poor man--could own such a vehicle of
speed and ease, or the fact that America--such a short time ago a
wilderness--could produce, not as the finest flower on its tree of
evolution, but certainly as its most exotic, the plutocrat who lives in
a palace with fifty servants to do his bidding, and the fine lady whose
sole exercise of her mental and physical functions consists in allowing
her maid to dress her. Yes, New England has changed amazingly in the
revolutions of three centuries, and here, under the shadow of this
square plain building--Hingham's Old Ship Church--while we pause to
watch the Sunday pageant of 1920, we can most easily call back the
Sabbath rites, and the ideals which created those rites, three centuries
ago.
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It is the year of 1681. This wooden meeting-house, with the truncated
pyramidal roof and belfry (to serve as a lookout station), has just been
built. A stage ahead, architecturally, of the log meeting-house with
clay-filled chinks, thatched roof, oiled-paper windows, earthen floor,
and a stage behind the charming steeple style made popular by Sir
Christopher Wren, and now multiplied in countless graceful examples all
over New England, the Old Ship is entirely unconscious of the
distinction which is awaiting it--the distinction of being the oldest
house for public worship in the United States which still stands on its
original site, and which is still used for its original purpose. In the
year 1681 it is merely the new meeting-house of the little hamlet of
Hingham. The people are very proud of their new building. The timbers
have been hewn with the broad-axe out of solid white pine (the marks are
still visible, particularly in those rafters of the roof open to the
attic). The belfry is precisely in the center of the four-sided pitched
roof. To be sure this necessitates ringing the bell from one of the
pews, but a little later the bellringer will stand above, and through a
pane of glass let into the ceiling he will be able to see when the
minister enters the pulpit. The original backless benches were replaced
by box pews with narrow seats like shelves, hung on hinges around three
sides, but part of the original pulpit remains and a few of the box
pews. In 1681 the interior, like the exterior, is sternly bare. No
paint, no decorations, no colored windows, no organ, or anything which
could even remotely suggest the color, the beauty, the formalism of the
churches of England. The unceiled roof shows the rafters whose arched
timbers remind one that ships' carpenters have built this house of God.
This, then, is the meeting-house of 1681. What of the services conducted
there?
In the first place, they are well attended. And why not, since in 1635
the General Court decreed that no dwelling should be placed more than
half a mile away from the meeting-house of any new "plantation"--thus
eliminating the excuse of too great distance? Every one is expected,
nay, commanded, to come to church. In fact, after the tolling of the
last bell, the houses may all be searched--each ten families is under an
inspector--if there is any question of delinquents hiding in them. And
so in twos and threes, often the man trudging ahead with his gun and the
woman carrying her baby while the smaller children cling to her skirts,
sometimes man and woman and a child or two on horseback, no matter how
wild the storm, how swollen the streams, how deep the whirling
snow--they all come to church: old folk and infants as well as adults
and children. The congregation either waits for the minister and his
wife outside the door, or stands until he has entered the pulpit. Once
inside they are seated with the most meticulous exactness, according to
rank, age, sex, and wealth. The small boys are separated from their
families and kept in order by tithing-men who allow no wandering eyes or
whispered words. The deacons are in the "fore" seats; the elderly
people are sometimes given chairs at the end of the "pues"; and the
slaves and Indians are in the rear. To seat one's self in the wrong
"pue" is an offense punishable by a fine.
"Here is the church, and here are the people," as the old rhyme has it.
What then of the services? That they are interminable we know. The
tithing-man or clerk may turn the brass-bound hourglass by the side of
the pulpit two and three times during the sermon, and once or twice
during the prayer. Interminable, and, also, to the modern Sunday
observer, unendurable. How many of us of this softer age can contemplate
without a shiver the vision of people sitting hour after hour in an
absolutely unheated building? (The Old Ship was not heated until 1822.)
The only relief from the chill and stiffness comes during the prayer
when the congregation stands: kneeling, of course, would savor too
strongly of idolatry and the Church of Rome. They stand, too, while the
psalms and hymns are lined out, and as they sing them, very uncertainly
and very incorrectly. This performance alone sometimes takes an hour, as
there is no organ, nor notes, and only a few copies of the Bay Psalm
Book, of which, by the way, a copy now would be worth many times its
weight in gold.
After the morning service there is a noon intermission, in which the
half-frozen congregation stirs around, eats cold luncheons brought in
baskets, and then returns to the next session. One must not for an
instant, however, consider these noon hours as recreational. There is no
idle talk or play. The sermon is discussed and the children forbidden to
romp or laugh. One sometimes wonders how the little things had any
impulse to laugh in such an abysmal atmosphere, but apparently the
Puritan boys and girls were entirely normal and even wholesomely
mischievous--as proved by the constantly required services of the
tithing-man.
These external trappings of the service sound depressing enough, but if
the message received within these chilly walls is cheering, maybe we
can forget or ignore the physical discomforts. But is the message
cheering? Hell, damnation, eternal tortures, painful theological
hair-splittings, harrowing self-examinations, and humiliating public
confessions--this is what they gather on the narrow wooden benches to
listen to hour after hour, searching their souls for sin with an almost
frenzied eagerness. And yet, forlorn and tedious as the bleak service
appears to us, there is no doubt that these stern-faced men and women
wrenched an almost mystical inspiration from it; that a weird
fascination emanated from this morbid dwelling on sin and punishment,
appealing to the emotions quite as vividly--although through a different
channel--as the most elaborate ceremonial. When the soul is wrought to a
certain pitch each hardship is merely an added opportunity to prove its
faith. It was this high pitch, attained and sustained by our Puritan
fathers, which produced a dramatic and sometimes terrible blend of
personality.
It has become the modern fashion somewhat to belittle Puritanism. It is
easy to emphasize its absurdities, to ridicule the almost fanatical
fervor which goaded men to harshness and inconsistency. The fact remains
that a tremendous selective force was needed to tear the Puritans away
from the mother church and the mother country and fortify them in their
struggle in a new land. It was religious zeal which furnished this
motive power. Different implements and differently directed force are
needed to extract the diamond from the earth, from the implements and
force needed to polish and cut the same diamond. So different phases of
religious development are called forth by progressive phases of
development. It has been said about the New England conscience: "It
fostered a condition of life and type of character doubtless never again
possible in the world's history. Having done its work, having founded
soundly and peopled strongly an exceptional region, the New England
conscience had no further necessity for being. Those whom it now
tortures with its hot pincers of doubt and self-reproach are sacrificed
to a cause long since won."
The Puritans themselves grew away from many of their excessive
severities. But as they gained bodily strength from their conflict with
the elements, so they gained a certain moral stamina by their
self-imposed religious observance. And this moral stamina has marked New
England ever since, and marked her to her glory.
One cannot speak of Hingham churches--indeed, one cannot speak of
Hingham--without admiring mention of the New North Church. This
building, of exquisite proportions and finish, within and without, built
by Bulfinch in 1806, is one of the most flawless examples of its type on
the South Shore. You will appreciate the cream-colored paint, the buff
walls, the quaint box pews of oiled wood, with handrails gleaming from
the touch of many generations, with wooden buttons and protruding hinges
proclaiming an ancient fashion; but the unique feature of the New North
Church is its slave galleries. These two small galleries, between the
roof and the choir loft, held for thirty years, in diminishing numbers,
negroes and Indians. The last occupant was a black Lucretia, who, after
being freed, was invited to sit downstairs with her master and mistress,
which she did, and which she continued to do until her death, not so
very long ago.
Hingham, its Main Street--alas for the original name of "Bachelors
Rowe"--arched by a double row of superb elms on either side, is
incalculably rich in old houses, old traditions, old families. Even
motoring through, too quickly as motorists must, one cannot help being
struck by the substantial dignity of the place, by the well-kept
prosperity of the houses, large and small, which fringe the fine old
highway. Ever since the days when the three Misses Barker kept loyal to
George IV, claiming the King as their liege lord fifty years after the
Declaration of Independence, the town has preserved a Cranford-like
charm. And why not, when the very house is still handsomely preserved,
where the nameless nobleman, Francis Le Baron, was concealed between the
floors, and, as we are told in Mrs. Austen's novel, very properly
capped the climax by marrying his brave little protector, Molly Wilder?
Why not, when the Lincoln family, ancestors of Abraham, has been
identified with the town since its settlement? The house of
Major-General Benjamin Lincoln, who received the sword of Cornwallis at
Yorktown, is still occupied by his descendants, its neat fence, many
windows, two chimneys, and its two stories and a half proclaiming it a
dwelling of repute. Near by, descendants of Samuel Lincoln, the ancestor
of Abraham, occupy part of another roomy ancient homestead. The
Wampatuck Club, named after the Indian chief who granted the original
deeds of the town, has found quarters in an extremely interesting house
dating from 1680. In the spacious living-room are seventeen panels, on
the walls and in the doors, painted with charming old-fashioned skill by
John Hazlitt, the brother of the English essayist. The Reverend Daniel
Shute house, built in 1746, is practically intact with its paneled rooms
and wall-paper a hundred years old. Hingham's famous elms shade the
house where Parson Ebenezer Gay lived out his long pastorate of
sixty-nine years and nine months, and the Garrison house, built before
1640, sheltered, in its prime, nine generations of the same family. The
Rainbow Roof house, so called from the delicious curve in its roof, is
one of Hingham's prettiest two-hundred-year-old cottages, and Miss Susan
B. Willard's cottage is one of the oldest in the United States. Derby
Academy, founded almost two centuries and a half ago by Madam Derby,
still maintains its social and scholarly prestige through all the
educational turmoil of the twentieth century. One likes to associate
Hingham with Massachusetts's stanch and sturdy "war governor," for it
was here that John Albion Andrew, who proved himself so truly one of our
great men during the Civil War, courted Eliza Jones Hersey, and here
that the happy years of their early married life were spent. Later,
another governor, John D. Long, was for many years a mighty figure in
the town.
With its ancient churches and institutions, its pensive graveyards and
lovely elms, its ancestral houses and hidden gardens, Hingham typifies
what is quaintest and best in New England towns. Possibly the dappling
of the elms, possibly the shadow of the Old Ship Church, is a bit deeper
here than in the other South Shore towns. However it may seem to its
inhabitants, to the stranger everything in Hingham is tinctured by the
remembrance of the stern old ecclesiasticism. Even the number of
historic forts seems a proper part of those righteous days, for when did
religion and warfare not go hand in hand? During the trouble with King
Philip the town had three forts, one at Fort Hill, one at the Cemetery,
and one "on the plain about a mile from the harbor"; and the sites may
still be identified.
Not that Hingham history is exclusively religious or martial. Her little
harbor once held seventy sail of fishing vessels, and between 1815 and
1826, 165,000 barrels of mackerel were landed on their salty decks. For
fifty years (between 1811 and 1860) the Rapid sailed as a packet between
this town and Boston, making the trip on one memorable occasion in
sixty-seven minutes. We read that in the War of 1812 she was carried up
the Weymouth River and covered, masts and hull, with green bushes so
that the marauding British cruisers might not find her, and as we read
we find ourselves remembering that _camouflage_ is new only in name.
How entirely fitting it seems that a town of such venerable houses and
venerable legends should be presided over by a church which is the
oldest of its kind in the country!
Hingham changes. There is a Roman Catholic Church in the very heart of
that one-time Puritan stronghold: the New North is Unitarian, and
Episcopalians, Baptists, and Second Adventists have settled down
comfortably where once they would have been run out of town. Poor old
Puritans, how grieved and scandalized they would be to stand, as we are
standing now, and watch the procession of passing automobilists! Would
it seem all lost to them, we wonder, the religious ideal for which they
struggled, or would they realize that their sowing had brought forth
richer fruit than they could guess? It has all changed, since Puritan
days, and yet, perhaps, in no other place in New England does the hand
of the past lie so visibly upon the community. You cannot lift your eyes
but they rest upon some building raised two centuries and more ago; the
shade which ripples under your feet is cast by elms planted by that very
hand of the past. Even your voice repeats the words which those old
patriarchs, well versed in Biblical lore, chose for their neighborhood
names. Accord Pond and Glad Tidings Plain might have been lifted from
some Pilgrim's Progress, while the near-by Sea of Galilee and Jerusalem
Road are from the Good Book itself.
"Which way to Egypt?" Is this an echo from that time when the Bible was
the corner-stone of Church and State, of home and school?
"What's the best road to Jericho Beach?" Surely it is some grave-faced
shade who calls: or is it a peal from the chimes in the Memorial Bell
Tower--chimes reminiscent of old Hingham, in England? No, it is only the
shouted question of the motorist, gay and prosperous, flying on his
Sunday holiday through ancient Hingham town.
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