The Kirk on Rutgers Farm Part 4

Like the old Market Street stoop with its fancy iron posts and rails the Lylian a.s.sociation has seen its day, but it amply justified its existence.

When one Monday evening Mr. Pinkham, the church treasurer, announced to the Lylians the sudden death of Dr. Hopper, there was consternation and adjournment.

Andrew Beattie, a theological student, had been called before this as co-pastor. He was installed as pastor May 29, 1888, having been persuaded to give up his intention of going to the foreign field. Mr.

Beattie lived down town, and his bachelor apartments on East Broadway were a gathering place for the young men, many of whom were in his Sunday school cla.s.s. He with others worked out the system of quarterly written examination and grading that since 1888 have been uninterruptedly in force in the Sunday school, long before other schools thought of such things.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Andrew Beattie]

The school was flouris.h.i.+ng with many young people as officers and teachers, all the activities of the church being centered on its nursery. The records were systematized, and articles in the church papers printed on the system, electric bells were installed, fire drills were inaugurated, discipline was rigid, visiting by teachers and districts was carefully regulated, the library given attention.

Mr. Beattie returned to his first love, resigning after eight months to go to the foreign mission field. After years of greatest usefulness in Canton, China, his health necessitated his return. Dr. Beattie is with his family in California, where he is in charge of a Presbyterian orphanage.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sunday School Room of Old 61]

V

[Ill.u.s.tration: Alex. W. Sproull]

Reverend Alexander W. Sproull followed Mr. Beattie on January 5, 1890, serving for three years. He had been Synodical Missionary in Florida.

After leaving Sea and Land he was incapacitated for further active service. He died December 13, 1912.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Col. Robert G. Shaw]

Another breach was made in the conservatism of the old church when one of the young trustees proposed to let the New York Kindergarten a.s.sociation use the room rent free for a kindergarten, then new in the neighborhood. The older, wiser heads were gravely shaken at this remarkable innovation, but it came on March 31, 1892, and with it the beloved Anna E. Crawford as teacher. The fairy G.o.dmother who maintained it was Mrs. Francis G. Shaw, giving the kindergarten the name of her son, Robert Gould Shaw. It was a happy combination this, and the little boys became strong men in the memory of the young Colonel who gave his life at Fort Wagner at the head of the First Colored Regiment. They buried him disdainfully "with his n.i.g.g.e.rs," but Robert Gould Shaw lived again in the lives of little boys trained to sacrifice at Sea and Land.

Nor will the Colonel's sister be forgotten: Mrs. Charles Russell Lowell, who gave her young husband in the same cause and thereafter lived a life that merited William Rhinelander Stewart calling her "one of the most useful and remarkable women of the Nineteenth Century." Her spirit of service was renewed in the little girls of the Shaw Kindergarten. The beautiful bas relief by St. Gaudens on Boston Common is less of a memorial than the kindergarten in Henry Street.

Mrs. Shaw died December 29, 1902, having supported the kindergarten for eleven years.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Shaw Memorial Kindergarten]

Another departure was an open air meeting establisht by Mr. Sproull, gathering at the church door Sunday afternoons. First things are hard things.

But a storm was brewing. Uptown churches needed money, their pastors were influential in the denomination and it seemed to many good business to dispose of the Market Street church.

So, on March 13, 1893, Presbytery ordered the church sold, declaring, to comply with the Corning deed, that "missionary work in the church or in that locality was no longer expedient." The church pointed out that 29 of the 57 churches in New York Presbytery had received less members during the preceding year, 16 churches had fewer members, 14 churches raised less money, and that 6 churches made a worse showing than Sea and Land in every single item reported on. There were then only 4 Protestant churches for 60,000 people. The battle was on, and the bitterness of the Briggs trial had not yet subsided,--the same Briggs who as a young man belonged to Market Street church.

Mr. Sproull's small salary allowance was discontinued and he was forced to resign, July 1, 1893. Then came hard times, no friends, no minister, no funds. But when the tale of bricks was doubled Moses came.

It was in the shape of a legacy from Borella. That saint on his death in Africa had left his estate in America to the Church of the Sea and Land and the American Seamen's Friend Society jointly. If Borella had lived he could not have arranged it for a better time.

Meanwhile by an accident the press of the city gained the whole story from the church's viewpoint, and thereafter all the news reports were tinged favorably to the down-town church that insisted on living. There were ill.u.s.trated articles on the church's history, caustic editorial comments, letters from correspondents, and everybody talked about the church. The ash barrels and the church doors had bills posted on them announcing that the Church of the Sea and Land would be sold at auction on April 19, 1893. The property, however, was withdrawn when the best offer was $15,000 short of what was expected. There was a lull.

In the spring of 1894 it became necessary to devise some means of helping the New York Presbyterian Church on 127th Street, which was buried by mortgages amounting to $118,000, about to be foreclosed.

Sea and Land was to furnish part of this and a mortgage was suggested.

The church trustees opposed this successfully, altho at first it was supposed their consent was not required. Without the knowledge of the church a sale was then again ordered January 18, 1895.

Preceding this, beginning October 1, 1894, the church had "affiliated"

with the Madison Square Presbyterian church. As Presbytery had formally approved this the Madison Square church remonstrated vigorously thru Dr.

Parkhurst, but feeling that Presbytery's action could not be relied on the Madison Square church withdrew at the expiration of its one year of affiliation.

Committees of prominent clergymen visited the church and were "warmly"

welcomed. It was suggested that Sea and Land unite with other churches, but it is a singular fact that, as when the Reformed church disbanded, so now, not a single church is in existence that was then mentioned for a refuge. A case in point is the Allen Street Presbyterian church. They had sold their building near Grand Street and for a time wors.h.i.+pt in the Market Street church. But in spite of earnest solicitation they erected an unfortunate structure in an unfortunate location in Forsyth Street.

After a short existence there they united with the Fourteenth Street church, and that church is no more!

Even the strong Madison Square church no longer preserves its ident.i.ty.

Meanwhile work went on, at first in desultory fas.h.i.+on, two or three times the young men had to conduct services. But thru it all Dr. A. F.

Schauffler, of the New York City Mission Society, was the church's consistent friend. His order to the city missionaries at the church to stay until the doors were shut was the one heartening feature of a time when the officers ordered the blue church flag raised and "no one from Sea and Land will ever take it down."

The Women's Branch always ably seconded these efforts under Mrs. Lucy S.

Bainbridge and later Miss Edith N. White.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Old Church Flag]

Instead of slowly dying out the work of the church gained momentum from day to day: Lodging house meetings, Sunday afternoon teas, free concerts, addresses by Gompers, McGlynn, Henry George, Parkhurst and others, sermons "against thugs in politics," and so on.

A permanent accomplishment of the nine months' intense regime of Alexander F. Irvine was the starting of _The Sea and Land Monthly_, the first number of which appeared in October, 1893. With characteristic impetuosity Mr. Irvine launched it, and it has been afloat for more than a quarter century.

The _Monthly_ has been a great storehouse: not only did it give from month to month the happenings at the church, but it brought to later generations an appreciation of the goodly heritage of years that had gone before.

The vital events in the congregation's history were recorded, but so was the personal history of its people. The coming of little messengers to the homes, their baptism, their reception into the church, their marriage, their death. Then began another cycle like unto the first.

And the _Monthly_ kept alive the interest of many a Sea and Lander who was adrift. It gave account of its stewards.h.i.+p to the friends of the church who supported its work. Few churches ever publish with such detail the annual reports as does Sea and Land.

Many are the kind words from near and far that have been said about the _Sea and Land Monthly_.

VI

[Ill.u.s.tration: John Hopkins Denison]

But if the Madison Square church withdrew officially it left behind more than the old church ever expected. It was a young man who, in October, 1894, reported to the Sunday school superintendent as coming from Madison Square. He was John Hopkins Denison, a grandson of Mark Hopkins, of fine New England stock. He had come to New York to become Dr.

Parkhurst's a.s.sistant when he was making war on Tammany. Those were the days of the City Vigilance League, when unsavory revelations were necessary to effect a change in city government. There was a meeting which crowded the old church to the second galleries when Dr. Parkhurst spoke. It was a n.o.ble battle and not without its dangers.

So when the Madison Square church went, Mr. Denison staid, and he was a prodigious worker. The quarters in the tower were enlarged for there were many visitors who bunked there.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Tower Study]

Mr. Denison set out to prove the right of the church to existence and he did it. He did more: he brought no end of friends that remained to the church. The thought of Cuyler to establish a mission, of Parkhurst to affiliate the church with a stronger one, was developed under Denison into an organization amply supported by the whole church, working out by itself its own local problems. It was no longer a self-evident proposition that a church not able to support itself must go.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 52 Henry Street]

One of the early steps was the establishment of a church house at 52 Henry Street. Mr. Denison said: "It was not an inst.i.tution--it was not even a settlement; it was simply a house where people lived. The time is gone by for men and women to come down as outsiders and pry into the homes of poverty and sin, and then return to their own life far away.