Shawmut Church, in Boston, stands
at the corner of Tremont and Brookline Streets.
Its history is one of unique interest. Its very
name connects the old and new world together.
A Saxon monk, named Botolph, after completing his
Christian studies in Germany, founded, A. D. 654,
a monastery in Lincolnshire, on the Witham, near the
sea, and made it a centre of holy light and knowledge.
He was the friend of sailors and boat-folk. The
houses which grew up around the monastery became Botolph’s
Town, or Boston. “Botolph” is itself
but another form of boat-help, and the famous tower
of this English parish church, finer than many cathedrals,
is crowned by an octagon lantern, nearly three hundred
feet above the ground. It serves as a beacon-light,
being visible forty miles distant, and, as of old,
is the boat-help of Saint Botolph’s Town.
This ecclesiastical lighthouse is familiarly called
“Boston Stump,” and overlooks Lincolnshire,
the cradle of Massachusetts history. At Scrooby,
a few miles to the west, lived and worshipped the
Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers. From this shire,
also, came the English people who settled at Shawmut
on the 17th of September, 1630.
The Indian name, Shawmut, was that
of the “place near the neck," probably the
present Haymarket Square. The three-hilled peninsula
called Tremont, or Boston, by the white settlers, was
connected with the main land at Roxbury by a long,
narrow neck or causeway. The future “South
End” was then under the waves. After about
two centuries of use as a wagon road, this narrow
strip between Boston and Roxbury so narrow
that, at high tide, boys were able to leap from the
foam of the South Bay to the spray of the waters of
the Charles River was widened. Suffolk
Street, which was one of the first highways west of
Washington Street to be made into hard ground, was
named Shawmut Avenue. About the middle of the
nineteenth century, much land was reclaimed from the
salt mud and marshes and made ready for the pile-driver,
mason, and builder. Two splendid districts, the
first called the “South End,” and the second
the “Back Bay,” were created. Where,
in the Revolutionary War, British frigates lay at
anchor, are now Beacon Street and Commonwealth and
Massachusetts Avenues. Where the redcoats stepped
into their boats for disembarkation at the foot of
Bunker Hill, stretch the lovely Public Gardens.
The streets running east and west in the new districts,
beginning with Dover and ending with Lenox, are named
after towns in the Bay State. About midway among
these, as to order and distance, are Brookline and
Canton Streets.
On a chance space of hard soil around
Canton and Dedham Streets, in this marshy region,
a suburban village of frame houses had gathered, and
here a Sunday school was started as early as 1836.
In January, 1842, a weekly prayer-meeting began at
the house of Mr. Samuel C. Wilkins. On November
20, 1845, a church was formed, with fifty members.
In the newly filled up land, the pile-driver was already
busy in planting forests of full-grown trees head downward.
All around were rising blocks of elegant houses, with
promise of imposing civic and ecclesiastical edifices
of various kinds. In the wider streets were gardens,
parks, or ample strips of flower-beds. This was
the land of promise, and into it pressed married couples
by the hundreds, creating lovely homes, rearing families,
and making this the choicest part of the young city.
For, though “Boston town” is as old as
Mother Goose’s rhymes, the municipality of Boston
was, in 1852, but thirty years old. The congregation
of Christian people which, on April 14, 1849, took
the name, as parish, of The Shawmut Congregational
Society, and, as a church, one month later, the name
of the Shawmut Congregational Church, occupied as
a meeting-house first a hall, then a frame building,
and finally a handsome edifice of brick, which was
dedicated on the 18th of November, 1852. This
building is now occupied by the Every Day Church,
of the Universalist denomination. The tide of
prosperity kept steadily rising. The throng of
worshippers increased, until, in the very midst of
the great Civil War, it was necessary to have more
room. The present grand edifice on Tremont Street
was erected and dedicated February 11, 1864; the Rev.
Edwin Bonaparte Webb, who had been called from Augusta,
Maine, being the popular and successful pastor.
Boston was not then noted, as she
certainly is now, for grandeur or loveliness in church
edifices. Neither excellence nor taste in ecclesiastical
architecture was, before the war, a striking trait
of the city or the people. To-day her church
spires and towers are not only numerous, but are famed
for their variety and beauty.
Fortunately for the future of Boston,
the people of Shawmut Church found a good architect,
who led the van of improvement in church architecture.
The new edifice was the first one in the city on the
early Lombardy style of architecture, and did much
to educate the taste of the people of the newer and
the older town, and especially those in the fraternity
of churches called Congregational.
Both its architecture and decoration
have been imitated and improved upon in the city wherein
it was a pioneer of beauty and the herald of a new
order of church architecture. It is a noble vehicle
of the faith and feelings of devout worshippers.
The equipment of Shawmut Church edifice
made it a very homelike place of worship, and here,
for a generation or more of Carleton’s life,
a noble company of Christians worshipped. The
Shawmut people were noted for their enterprise, sociability,
generosity, and unity of purpose. In this “South
End” of Boston was reared a large proportion
of the generation which to-day furnishes the brain
and social and religious force of the city and suburbs.
In Shawmut Church, gathered, week by week, hundreds
of those who, in the glow of prosperity, held common
ambitions, interests, and hopes. They were proud
of their city, their neighborhood, and their church,
yet were ever ready to extend their well-laden hands
in gifts to the needy at home, and to send to those
far off, within our own borders, and in lands beyond
sea.
The great fire in Boston, of which
Carleton wrote so brilliant a description, which,
beginning November 9, 1872, within a few hours burned
over sixty-five acres and reduced seventy-five millions
of property to smoke and ashes, gave the first great
blow to the material prosperity of Shawmut Church.
Later came the filling up, the reclamation, and building
of the Back Bay district. About 1878, the tide
of movement set to the westward, progressing so rapidly
and steadily as to almost entirely change, within
a decade, the character of the South End, from a region
of homes to one largely of business and boarding houses.
Still later, about 1890, with the marvellous development
of the electric motor and trolley cars, making horse
traction by rail obsolete, the suburbs of Boston became
one great garden and a semicircle of homes. Then
Brookline, Newton, and Dorchester churches flourished
at the expense of the city congregations. Shawmut
Church, having graduated hundreds of families, had,
in 1893, to be reorganized.
Of this church Charles Carleton Coffin,
though not one of the founders, was certainly one
of the makers. As a member, a hearer, a worshipper,
a teacher, an officer, a counsellor, a giver of money,
power, and influence, his name is inseparably associated
with the life of Shawmut Church.
When Carleton’s seat was vacant,
the chief servant of the church knew that his faithful
ally was serving his Master elsewhere. After one
of his trips to Europe, out West, or down South over
the old battle-fields, to refresh his memory, or to
make notes and photographs for his books, the welcome
given to him, on his return, was always warm and lively.
First of all, Mr. Coffin was a good
listener. This man, so fluent in speech, so ready
with his pen, so richly furnished by long and wide
reading, and by habitual meditation and deep thinking,
by unique experience of times that tried men’s
souls, knew also the moments when silence, that is
golden, was better than speech, even though silvern.
These were not as the “brilliant flashes of silence,”
such as Sidney Smith noted as delightful improvements
in his friend “Tom” Macaulay; for Carleton
was never a monopolist in conversation. Rather,
with the prompting of a generous nature, and as studied
courtesy made into fine art, he could listen even
to a child. If Carleton was present, the preacher
had an audience. His face, while beaming with
encouragement, was one of singular responsiveness.
His patience, the patience of one to whom concealment
of feeling was as difficult as for a crystal to shut
out light, rarely failed.
In Japan there are temples, built
in memoriam to heroes fallen in war. These
are named Shrines for the Welcome of Spirits.
They are lighted at sunset. Like one of these
that I remember, called the Soul-beckoning Rest, was
this listener, Carleton, who begat eloquence by his
kindly gaze. Nor was this power to lift up and
cheer this winged help of a great soul,
like that of a mother bird under her fledgling making
first trial of the air given only to the
professional speaker in the pulpit. This ten-talent
layman was ever kindly helpful, with ear and tongue,
to his fellow holder-in-trust of the one, or of the
five, talents; yes, even to the little children in
Christ’s kingdom.
The young people loved Carleton because
he heard and loved them. To have his great, kindly
eyes fixed on some poor soldier, or neighbor in distress,
was in itself a lightening of the load of trouble.
Unlike those professional or volunteer comforters,
who overwhelm by dumping a whole cart-load of condolence
upon the sufferer, who is unable to resist or reply,
Carleton was often great in his power of encouraging
silence, and of gentle sympathy.
Bacon, as no other Englishman, has
compressed in very few words a recipe for making a
“full,” a “ready,” and an “exact”
man. Carleton was all these in one. He was
ever full. In the Shawmut prayer-meeting, his
deep, rich voice was the admirable vehicle of his strong
and helpful thoughts. Being a man of intense
conviction, there was earnestness in every tone.
A stalwart in faith, he was necessarily optimistic.
A prophet, he was always sure that out of present darkness
was to break forth grander light than former days knew.
This world is governed by our Father, and God makes
no mistakes.
That rhetorical instrument, the historical
present, which makes the pages of his books tell such
vivid stories, he often used with admirable effect
in the prayer-room, impressing and thrilling all hearts.
No little one ever believed more confidently the promises
of its parent than did this little child in humility
who was yet a man in understanding. Yet his was
not blind credulity. He always faced the facts.
He was willing to get to the bottom of reality, even
though it might cause much drilling of the strata,
with revelation of things at first unpleasant to know.
I never knew a man whose piety rested less on traditions,
institutions, persons, things, or reputations taken
for granted. To keen intuitions, he was able
to add the riches of experience, and his experience
ever wrought hope. Hence the tonic of his thought
and words. He dwelt on the mountain-top of vision,
and yet he had that combination, so rare, yet so indispensable
in the prophet, vision and patience, even
the patience of service.
Naturally his themes and his illustrations,
so pertinent and illuminating, were taken largely
from history. It is because he saw so far and
so clearly down the perspective of the past, that he
read the future so surely. “That which
hath been, is that which shall be,” but
more. “God fulfils himself in many ways.”
To our friend, history, of which the cross of Christ
was the centre, was the Heavenly Father’s fullest
revelation. Many are the ways of theophany, “at
sundry times, and in divers manners,” to
one the burning bush, to another the Urim and Thummin,
to another the dew on the fleece, to one this, to another
that. To our man of the Spirit, as to the sage
of Patmos, human history, because moved from above,
was the visible presence of God.
The war, which dissolved the old world
of slavery, sectional bigotry, and narrow ideals,
and out of the mother liquid of a new chaos shot forth
fresh axes of moral reconstruction, furnished this
soldier of righteousness with endless themes, incidents,
illustrations, and suggestions. Yet the emphasis,
both as to light and shading, was put upon things
Christian and Godlike, the phenomena of spiritual courage
and enterprise, rather than upon details of blood or
slaughter. Neither years nor distance seemed
to dim our fellow patriot’s gratitude to the
brave men who sacrificed limb and life for their country.
The soldierly virtues, so vital to the Christian, were
brought home to heart and conscience. He showed
the incarnation of truth and life to be possible even
in the camp and field.
Having been a skilled traveller in
the Holy Land, Carleton frequently opened this “Fifth
Gospel” to delighted listeners. There hung
on the wall of the “vestry,” or social
prayer-room, above the leader’s chair, a steel-plate
picture of modern Jerusalem, showing especially the
walls, gates, and roadways leading out from the city.
Carleton often declared that this print was “an
inspiration” to him. It recalled not only
personal experiences of his own journeys, but also
the stirring incidents in Scripture, especially of
the life of Christ. Having studied on the soil
of Syria, the background of the parables, and possessing
a genius for topography, he was able to unshackle our
minds from too close bondage to the English phrase
or letter, from childhood’s imperfect imaginations,
and from our crude Occidental fancies. Many a
passage of Scripture, long held in our minds as the
hand holds an unlighted lantern, was often turned into
an immediately helpful lamp to our path by one touch
of his light-giving torch.
For many years, Carleton was a Bible-class
teacher, excelling in understanding, insight, explanation,
and application of the divine Word. Many to-day
remember his teaching powers and their enjoyment at
Malden; but it was in Boston, at Shawmut Church, that
Mr. Coffin gave to this work the fullness of his strength
and the ripeness of his powers.
Counting it one of the noblest ambitions
of a man’s life to be a good teacher, I used
to admire Carleton’s way of getting at the heart
of the lesson. His talent lay in first drawing
out the various views of the readers, and then of
harmonizing them, even as the lens draws
all rays to a burning-point, making fire where before
was only scattered heat. Carleton was one of
those superb teachers who believe that education is
not only putting in, but also drawing out. In
his class were lawyers, physicians, doctors of divinity,
principals of schools, heads of families, besides
various specimens of average humanity. Somehow,
he contrived, within the scant hour afforded him, often
within a half hour, to bestow not only his own thought,
but, by powerful spiritual induction, to kindle in
others a transforming force. After the teaching
had well begun, there set in an alternating current
of intensity that wrought mightily for the destruction
of dead prejudices, and the building up of character.
In his use of helps and commentaries
he had a profound contempt of those peddlers of pedantry
who try to make the words of eternal truth become
merely the lingo of things local and temporary.
He was fond of utilizing all that the spade has cast
up and out from the earth, as well as of consulting
what the pen of genius has made so plain. He
believed heartily in that interpretive, or higher criticism,
which has done so much in our days to open the riches
of holy Scripture. From the very first, instead
of fearing that truth might be injured by an examination
of the dress in which it was clothed, or the packages
in which it was wrapped, Carleton was in hearty sympathy
with those scholars and investigators who, by the
application of literary canons to the Hebrew and Greek
writings, have put illuminating difference between
traditions and the original message. He believed
that, in the popular understanding of many portions
of the Bible, there was much confusion, owing to the
webs which have been spun over the text by men who
lived centuries and ages after the original writers
of the inspired word. Though he never called
himself a scholar, he knew only too well that Flavius
Josephus and John Milton were the makers of much popular
tradition which ascribed to the Bible a good deal which
it does not contain, and that there was often difficulty
among the plain people in distinguishing between the
ancient treasure and the wrapping and strings within
which it is now enclosed. Hence his diligent
use of some of the strong books in his pastor’s
and other libraries.
Above all, however, was his own clear,
penetrating, spiritual insight, which, joined with
his rich experience, his literary instincts, and his
own gift of expression, made him such a master in the
art of communication. While his first use of
the Bible was for spiritual benefit to himself and
others, he held that its study as literature would
scatter to the wind the serious objections of sceptics
and unbelievers.