CHAPTER V.

"We have not happened. Nothing in our history is the result of accident. We have come of laws as absolute as gravitation or any law of growth." Our New Departure.

BLOWS fell like hail; blood flowed like water; arrow and armor glanced and rang; swords clashed, and lances were shivered that bright May morning in the year of grace 1330, when by the dancing waters of the Salado, Alfonso of Castile joined bloody battle with the invading Moors. In the very thickest of the fight, at the head of his hundred Scottish knights, rode Lord James of Douglas, wearing around his neck, in its case of gold, the heart of the Bruce. Timely succor in dire strait, this gallant band, journeying to the Holy Land to deposit the heart of the great King Robert in ground made sacred by the Lord Christ's sorrows, had turned aside from their pilgrimage to fight for the cross and aid the Spanish king. "Never shall it be said of me," said the noble Douglas, that I and mine have turned away when the cross was in jeopardy." So, leading the van of battle, they burst, a fresh blast from the north, against the swarming hosts of the Moorish invaders. It was an hundred against forty thousand, but, nothing daunted, they dashed to the charge. The yielding ranks of the Infidels closed again around them, and so dense was the press that the horses refused to charge. Now one and now another of that gallant company fall beneath the myriad arrows of the Moor: the valiant St. Clair lies dead; Sir Simon of the Lee is down; the swarthy hosts draw closer and closer around that knightly band; defeat seems inevitable. Then rose the Lord Douglas in his stirrups, and, holding high in air the sacred relic-the heart of the Bruce -he turned to his environed comrades. Dear brethren,"

here is the cross imForward, gentlemen, all;

rang out his calm and manly voice, perilled, here is holy ground. the Bruce leads you this day as of yore." Then, with his face to the foe, he flung the sacred heart far before him into the thickest of the press; Pass first, thou dauntless heart,” he cried; "we follow thee !"

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With fresh ardor, every spear in rest, every spur in steed, the Scottish knights charged once again, following the heart of their king. The Moors wavered and quailed before the fury of the onset; King Alfonso's Spanish spears came shivering in, the Infidel invaders fled, routed and beaten, and Castile was saved to the cross. But there, above his master's heart, with dinted armor and with broken helm, lay the Douglas, stark and dead. He had passed beneath the cross; he had kept his knightly faith; he had saved King Robert's vow-for where Christ's cause was in jeopardy there was holy ground.

Born of the throbbing engine and the pulse of manufacture, the city of East Cambridge rears its myriad chimneys-a link in the continuous chain of towns that line the Charles and Mystic, secure beneath the gilded dome of the State House and the classic shades of fair Harvard. The character of its people has indeed largely changed within the last forty years, as the native-born population has given place to the foreign element who fill its factories and throng its tenements. But in many a home within its crowded limits are still contained as devout church-goers and as earnest church workers as when, in July, 1838, Elbridge Gerry Brooks, with no little hesitation as to his fitness for the post, came from his little parish by the Merrimack to take charge of the growing society in East Cambridge.

Succeeding a gifted and much-loved pastor-Henry Bacon, of blessed memory-earnest to please, and yet doubtful of his abilities, he says that the acceptance of the new

pastorate came only after much hesitation and inward consultation. Indeed, he questioned seriously whether he was not completely "written out," and wondered, after he had exhausted his stock on hand, what new subjects for sermons he could find for the instruction and contemplation of his hearers. It is a significant commentary on this youthful perplexity that when the life of this veteran minister of Christ passed the border line, his chief desire to be longer spared to earth had been that he might put into words the many and momentous subjects that thronged his teeming brain :

"And when the stream

Which overflowed the soul was passed away,

A consciousness remained that it had left

Deposited upon the silent shore

Of memory, images and precious thoughts
That shall not die, and cannot be destroyed."

The East Cambridge pastorate extended through a term of seven years—a long settlement for those shifting days— and while it was marked by no events of seemingly striking import, it was so filled with incessant labor, so crowded with efforts for a higher and more efficient usefulness, that it may be regarded as the season of that practical outreaching for a higher advancement of his faith and of the Church he served, which crystallized into the works and words of his later years.

The pages of his journal, faithfully kept up until more pressing duties rendered its continuance impossible, teem with accounts of sermons written and delivered, parish duties conscientiously followed out, lectures, speeches, social meetings, and an interested attendance upon the sessions of conventions, associations, and other gatherings of the denomination, all of which felt the influence and strengthening grasp of the fast-developing man, the earnest worker, and the consecrated minister of Christ.

The years of this East Cambridge pastorate were, however, marked by the throes of one of those incipient truth-rivings

that mark the progress of every religious movement-the dawn of a transition which, not at first fully comprehended, has gradually grown into the convictions and hearts of our people until it is now an accepted tenet of the majority of the Universalists of America.

All protests are cumulative, but they are also, to a greater or less extent, expurgative. While constantly added to in essentials, they are as surely-as time and thought clarifies and adjusts them--purged of too apparent inconsistencies. Magna Charta and the Declaration of Independence, the enthusiasm at the Elster gate of Wittenberg and the Winchester Confession, all religious reformations or political revolutions-in essence, purifications, are in effect temporary overlaps which a refined thought and a clearer judgment will in time modify and adjust.

When the strong hands of Murray and Ballou-valiant outriders in the triumphal procession of a Universal Saviour-struck from its fastenings the great bell of religious reform, the blow thus given broke forever the chains of a sacrificial theology and sent the mighty bell-its ponderous tongue loudly proclaiming God's All-Love-swaying through space. "Mainly engrossed by the errors they opposed and the glad tidings they proclaimed, regarded by those whose power was thus invaded as the enemies of God, personally maligned, misrepresented, denounced as the religious pariahs of the country," these fathers of our Church dwelt only on the Perfect Love that was to cast out fear; it is but little wonder then that the great bell of reform overswung the limits, and that some hastily considered assertions were made which time and the progress of a cultured and educating thought have practically readjusted; thus, as has been well said, the evil of overstatement is not unfrequently overruled for the permanent advance of truth."

The doctrine of no-future punishment, which may be regarded as the overswing of the Universalist protest, has, by the advancing thought of the day and the practical common

sense of the great mass of our Church, given place to that diviner and juster sense of God's love—a love which, patient, unwearied, inexorable, purifies, in time or in eternity, every soul of its sin, and asserts that no soul, whenever or wherever it passes from earthly life, can escape God's justice, God's wisdom, God's marvellous and immortal love.

This earlier phase of Universalism-the no-future punishment theory-not at first intentionally emphasized, was indeed but an incidental point of the doctrine of Father Ballou and his contemporaries. Not integral in his system, it was but the logical rebound from a doctrine that totally ignored the present and directed all thoughts to a terribly uncertain future; and time and reflection would alike have modified the extreme view first taken, even had no other influence been brought to bear upon it. It was, however, the one speck upon the clear and glorious escutcheon of Universalism, and as such was specially marked for censure and attack. As Dr. Atwood well says of this early theory : The violence it did to ethical feeling and the practical consequences that appeared to be involved in it, made it the target of hostile criticism, and before long it was the one point in everybody's mind whenever Universalism was named. In spite of the disclaimers of its friends, it came to be made more important than all the other doctrines of our theology."

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No misconceptions should be allowed in this matter. The clearer thought of our Church to-day does not seek to undervalue or impeach the work of Hosea Ballou, because of his conscientious belief in the no-future punishment theory. That work cannot be undervalued; it stands above impeachment. "Since Luther no man has stood in a position at all parallel to that occupied by Father Ballou and it is his distinction not only that he is, under God, the father of American Universalism, but that he is equally and by a title as undisputed, the father of American Liberal Christianity-meaning by this a Christianity, by whomsoever held, that asserts the absolute unity of the Godhead, and