M E M O R I A L

CAMBRIDGE:

JOHN WILSON AND SON

UNIVERSITY PRESS. 1884

REPRINTED 1999

PREFACE

Who was John Harvard ? Why would he and his wife, Ann, leave what was to be a privileged life in England, as any Cambridge graduate was destined for ? This 1884 printing affords some rather salient insights into his life and personal philosophy gained by his studies at Emmanuel College.

We have here included a short bio of Samuel Stone, a contemporary of Harvard both at Cambridge, and in New England. Printed in 1899 in a re-issue of Stone’s Catechism, it gives us understanding into a very important fact; that Emmanuel College was created to produce a certain kind of leader, one who held to principles rather than pander to the throne.

"Rev. Samuel Stone was a native of Hertford,England, the son of John Stone, a freeholder of that place. Born in 1602 he was baptized on July 30th of that year in All Saints Church. Samuel probably received his early education at Hale's Grammar School , endowed and built in Hertford in 1617. He proceeded to Cambridge as a pensioner of Emmanuel College, matriculating there April 19, 1620.

This college had the not undeserved reputation of being a "mere nursery" Of Puritanism. It had been founded in 1584 by Sir Walter Mildmay. Upon the founder's appearing at court shortly after that event, Queen Elizabeth said to him, "Sir Walter, I hear you have erected a Puritan foundation," to which he replied, "No madam, far be it from me to countenance anything contrary to your established laws, But I have set an acorn, which, when it becomes an oak, God alone knows what will be the fruit thereof ."

Stone took his degrees of B.A. and M.A. in 1623 and 1627 respectively. Leaving the University he studied theology at Aspen in Essex

under Richard Blackerby. Recommended by Thomas Shepard, Stone went in 1630 to Towchester in Northhamptonshire, as a Puritan lecturer to

the church there, the pecuniary value of the Lectureship being about L30 per annum.

Here he remained until chosen as assistant to Thomas Hooker, then preparing to set out for New England. "

THE HARVARD MEMORIAL.

AT the dinner of the Alumni of Harvard University on Commencement Day, June 27, 1883, Mr. Joseph H. Choate, who presided, read the following letter:----

To the President and fellows of Harvard College.

Gentlemen, I have the pleasure of offering you an ideal statue in bronze, representing your founder, the Rev. John Harvard, to be designed by Daniel C. French of Concord, and to be placed in the south end of the enclosure in which Memorial Hall stands. If you do me the honor to accept this offer. I propose to contract at once for the work, including an appropriate pedestal; and I am assured that the same can be in place by June, 1, 1884.

I am, with much respect,

Samuel J. Bridge.

Mr. Choate had referred to the giver as "a pious worshipper at Harvard’s shrine, turning his face towards Mecca; "and , when the letter was read, the applause of the company compelled Mr. Bridge to make a silent acknowledgement. Later in the dinner, Dr. Ellis, referring to the subject said,----

"It is delightful for me to have heard for the first time this day that one of my boys ( turning to Mr, Bridge ), a member of that Harvard Society in Charlestown (to which Dr. Ellis had referred, and of which he had been the minister ), is to give the college a statue. It must be an ideal one; but our ideals, we are told, are always perfection, and, if there ever ought to be a perfect exposition of a good and lovable man, it must be that of John Harvard."

There were some necessary delays in the progress of the work; but the statue was in place in season for the ceremonies of unveiling, which was fixed for Oct. 15, 1884.

At three o’clock in the afternoon of that day there was a gathering in Sanders Theatre. Charles William Eliot, the President of the University, with Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, the chairman of the Board of Overseers, and other officers, were seated on the platform, and with them were Mr. Bridge and Mr, French, and those who were to take part in the services. The main floor, and other seats on the platform, were occupied by the undergraduates and second graduates. The first gallery held the invited guests, while the second gallery was thrown open to the public.

After the Harvard Glee Club had sung, the Rev. Edward E. Hale, D.D., led the audience in prayer, and then all joined in the Lord’s Prayer. The Rev. George E. Ellis, D.D., LLD., then delivered the principle address.

ADDRESS.

BY THE REV. DR. ELLIS.

Mr. President, Officers, Students, and Alumni of Harvard

College:

THE first words for this occasion are those of grateful recognition of the generosity which to-day presents to the college a personal memorial of its revered founder. The giver of the statue is here; but his modesty is the substitute for his speech. It is by his desire, as well as by official invitation, that I speak for him. It may well be so, as our acquaintance and friendship date back more than forty years, in his membership of the Harvard Church Society in Charlestown. He has been a wide wanderer, a traveller in all lands, having more than once circled the globe. As a confidential agent of our government for many years on the Pacific coast, he faithfully discharged high trusts. He has liberally endowed many aids to education, and fostered many young men in their school and college course. Holding in venerating regard his decent from one of the first English settlers in this place, he has caused a representative statue of him, as a Pilgrim, to be planted near by us, on the Common, a gift to the city. And now he has done a similar loving service to the college. The two statues commemorate two worthies of our earliest years, who doubtless met on this virgin soil, and who, we can imagine, may now exchange from their metal enshroudings some grave recognitions.

The oldest extant document which in type clearly recognizes the existence of Harvard College is a precious pamphlet with this title, " New England’s First-Fruits in respect to the Progress of Learning in the College at Cambridge , in Massachusetts Bay,," etc. It is a letter dated " Boston, Sept. 26, 1642." It was published in London in 1643, the year following the graduation of our first class of nine members. The letter gives a graphic and vigorous account of the first Commencement. This subject has the chief place in the pamphlet, the larger remainder being devoted to a most cheerful and hopeful account of the experience and prospects of the band of English exiles amid the stumps of their clearing in the primeval wilderness.

The writer says, that as soon as they had builded their houses, and provided for necessary food, for God’s worship, and for civil government, "the next thing we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and to perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust. And, as we were thinking and consulting how to effect this great work, it pleased God to stir up the heart of one Mr. Harvard (a godly gentleman and a lover of learning, then living amongst us) to give the one-half of his estate (it being in all about L1,700) towards the erecting of a Colledge, and all his library. After him, another gave L300; others after them cast in more; and the public hand of the State added the rest. The Colledge was by common consent appointed to be at Cambridge ( according to the name of the first founder) Harvard College." Then follows an account of an edifice, "very fair and comely within and without," with its spacious hall, for daily commons, a large library "with some books to it, the gifts of divers of our friends," and close by a grammar-school, under Master Corlet, "for preparing young scholars for Academical learning." The subjects of study, disputation, and declamation, are such as would try the wits, not only of the class just entered here, but of the matured seniors, who are already looking onward to the glories of class day through the grim perspective of the grind for final examination.

From that frank, and, so far as I can learn, never challenged account of 1642, it would appear that John Harvard, and not the Colony treasury, gave birth and being to this venerable seat of learning. In will and purpose, however, if not in deed, the Colony had the start. In the General Court, under date Oct. 28, 1636, it was "agreed to give L400 towards a schoale or colledge,"----L200 the next year, and L200 when the work was finished; the next court to designate the place, and to provide for the building. On Nov. 15, 1637, the Court ordered that the college should be at the New Towne, up Charles River, and a few days later a committee of twelve of the most honored among them was appointed to take order for it. In May, 1638, the name Cambridge was substituted for New Towne. On the 13^th of March, 1639, N.S., after Harvard’s death, it was ordered "that the colledge agreed upon formerly to bee built at Cambridge shallbee called Harvard Colledge." That name rightfully assigns an enviable and deserved honor to John Harvard.

And who was John Harvard ? Would that we could answer, if only in such information as is generally given on the gravestones of the worthy and honored ! His lineage and parentage, his birthplace and birthday, the dates of his leaving the Old World and of his arrival in the New, are to this time unknown to us. An earnest investigator has within this year come upon a clew which promises to relieve the mystery of his personal history. The few facts assured to us on record concerning him are the following.

Some of us have seen on the register of Emmanuel College, at the English Cambridge, his signature for his bachelor’s degree in 1631, and for his master’s degree in 1635. His rank as "pensioner" indicates independent circumstances, as, indeed, does the largeness of his gifts to the college, which would now represent a value of nearly thirty thousand dollars. He is described as of "Middesex." His contemporaries here gave him the title of reverend, and he is called "sometimes minister of God’s word." Whether he had received ordination in England by a bishop, or by his Puritan brethren, we don not know, as, indeed we know nothing concerning him, from his receiving his second degree till his admission as an inhabitant of Charlestown in this Colony, Aug. 1, 1637. With Ann, his wife, he became a member of the church, which gave him full rights of citizenship, Nov. 1, 1637. He received grants of land from the town, and was a member of a committee on "providing some laws." He had built a comfortable dwelling, the site of which is known in Charlestown. It was occupied by the minister of the town after his death. Chief Justice Sewall tells us of his enjoying its hospitality on the night of Jan. 26, in 1697, and of the pious and grateful memory of John Harvard, which came to him in his chamber. " Jan’y 26, 1697, I lodged at Charlestown, at Mrs. Sheppards, who tells me Mr. Harvard built that house. I lay in the chamber next to the street. As I lay awake past midnight, in my Meditation, I was affected to consider how long agoe God had made provision for my comfortable Lodging that night; seeing that was Mr. Harvards house. And that led me to think of Heaven, the House not made with hands, which God for many Thousands of years has been storing with the richest of furniture ( saints that are from time to time placed there ), and that I had some hopes of being entertain'’ in that Magnificent, Convenient Palace, every way fitted and furnished. These thought were very refreshing to me. " If the dwelling was still standing, it was burned in the conflagration of Charlestown in the battle of June 17.

We have seen that the project of a college was in earnest debate at the time of Harvard’s appearance in the country. It engrossed the anxiety of those, who, as we shall find, were his nearest associates. He saw the straits of these exiled lovers of good learning. Everything was then to be done with scant means for dong it. We can realize the extreme destitution of the college then; for all its presidents, including its now honored yet supplicant head, assure us that its destitution has never been surmounted. The young scholar and minister---hardly could he have been of thirty years of age---felt the touch of mortal disease. He thought of the property, considerable in those days, which he had left in England. By a nuncupative will preceding his death (Sept. 24, 1638, N.S. ) he bequeathed the half of his estate to the college. No probate or administration on his will appears as having been made here. The college records appear to recognize the receipt of only half the amount of his bequest. The brooding troubles of the civil war in England may have hindered or impaired its transmission. We know him to have been beloved and honored, a well trained and accomplished scholar of the type then esteemed. There is a tender reverence in every early mention of him. It may be said of him, in the words of Cotton Mather of another, that "he left his old English home, and took New England on his way to heaven."

His whole library went with his bequest to the college. The list is on the college records of 302 volumes. They certify to his scholarly qualities,---classical, philosophical, and theological,---and to his earnest Puritanism. This solid volume which I hold in my hand is the only one---then in some private use---that escaped the conflagration on Jan 24, 1764, which destroyed the college library edifice and all its contents, when the General Court occupied it, driven from Boston by the small-pox. This disaster caused an irreparable loss to the college. Harvard Hall was then the last remaining of the old or earlier buildings. It was erected in 1672. The night was one of a cold winter’s tempest of wind and snow. It being vacation, the students absent, only three persons were lodged in the buildings, all of which---Massachusetts, (the former) Stoughton, and Hollis Halls, the latter just completed, and Holden Chapel---were in danger, and actually kindled. The edifice contained all the relics and treasured gatherings of the college for more than sixscore years after its foundation. Besides the library of Harvard, the whole libraries of Drs. Lightfoot, and Theophilus Gale,---bequeathed or given to the college, rich in Hebrew, patristic, and classical lore, ---donations of learned societies and corporations, gifts of many generous private benefactors abroad and at home, medical preparations, and a font of Greek type, etc,. perished in the conflagration. There were about five thousand volumes. Valuable philosophical apparatus, of the highest quality of the time, and rich in variety, portraits of eminent men and benefactors, college records, and much miscellaneous matter, were included in the ruin.

By this volume alone we stretch a hand across the centuries, and hold a single relic of Harvard.

The founder of this college was an English Puritan minister. That fact is a fragment of an historical truth of large import. The distinctive character and qualities of the New England Colonies---impressed and effective from the earliest days, entailed and expanding and radiating over our whole country to this day of its extant and grandeur---are to be referred to that truth, which may be thus simply stated. A hundred scholars from Cambridge and Oxford Universities were concerned in the first planting of our wilderness settlements, with their churches, schools, colleges, and printing presses, during a period in which there was to be found scarcely a single college-bred man in all the other English Colonies here. More than thirty years after the first class were pursuing their studies in this college, Sir William Berkeley, the governor of Virginia, wrote to the commissioners of foreign plantations in London: " I thank God there are no free schools, nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years: for learning has brought disobedience into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best governments. God keep us from both !" This was seven years after the Bible, translated into the language of the natives, had been printed and published here. These statements sum up the whole explanation of the pre-eminence of New England in thrift, learning, science, and influence. Seventy of the hundred of those exiled scholars were from Cambridge, then a special Puritan stronghold. A score of them, contemporaries and associates of John Harvard, during some of his terms, might have shared the intimacy of John Milton. These exiled scholars were peers of those they left behind in erudition, in strength and grace of character. They brought with them their books, and the talent to make more books. They changed their atmosphere and surroundings, but not their spirits nor their minds. They had had the sharp discipline of angry ecclesiastical and polemical controversy, with the arguments of infliction, fines, and prison on the side against them. Their mastering aim was, that in the transition process then in progress, of the reformation, restoration, and reconstruction of their beloved English Church, all that had been incorporated into its doctrine, discipline, ceremonial, and ritual, from the repudiated Rome, should, in root and branch, be renounced, for the return to the simple, scriptural, apostolic model. They found no such dignity allowed in the country during the more than a century and a half before the Colonies won their independence; and those baronial prelates have since found no place here. They attended their flocks into the wilderness of hill and valley, and held over them a godly discipline, guarding purity in their households, and industry in the fields, and preaching strong doctrine in their pulpits. They sought out the most promising young men in their parishes, guided their studies, and sent them here for the best education the time would furnish. They brought with them the aches and scars and bruises of their conflict. They were intolerant---as all men the world over, in all time, have ever been and always will be, when they are in solemn earnest---for the truth or error. Austere, rigid, narrow, in many things unlovely, they really were; and this was simply because they put themselves under the same severities which they imposed on others. The very noblest thing about them was that teasing restlessness of spirit, that quickening energy of progressive thinking, which compelled them to outgrow their own limitations; so that they have relieved us from having such as our contemporaries, and stand to us only as most worthy ancestors. They have left us the most eminent heritage on the earth.

To provide a succession of ministers for the multiplying churches was the chief intent of this college. Ministers were the chief necessity of our early years. They may be as much needed now as then; but they do not appear to be so much wanted. A curious epoch of transition was soon marked here, of the need of college-bred men for other ranges of service. We find a series of graduates, who in their studies had the ministry in view, and who entered upon the preparation for, or even the trial of the work, but turned aside to the high places of the magistracy. Of such were Governors Joseph Dudley, William Stoughton, Gurdon Saltonstall, and Chief Justice Sewall, all contemporaries. But the type of New England Puritan ministers did not continue to satisfy all consciences. A Few English Churchmen, clerical and lay, there were, who believed that the ministry of the Christian religion did not depend alone upon the truth and power of its doctrine, but to be valid required also a certain official virtue communicated in the succession of these who held, and who only could impart it. So, just a century ago, our independence having just been established, qualified men were sent to England and Scotland to secure the desired gift. The gospel itself was never heralded with warmer joy in the darkest of Pagan regions than marked, for some among us, the return from Scotland, after his consecration, of that excellent and devoted man who signed himself "Samuel, Bishop of Connecticut," which he was not. Of course, this movement caused pain and ill-feeling to those trained in the New England churches, upon whose Christian standing it cast a slight. However, it brought under the light the shining fact that in no quarter, and in no age of Christendom, had more pious and devoted labors been spent by holy and faithful men for the Christian religion, than those which had been consecrated here in patient toil, in lifelong veal and love, for a hundred and fifty years. What has it been with them and through them ? Let the chief grace of the gospel, charity, estimate their purpose and work, and cover their error, if they were unwittingly intruders and interlopers on a field forbidden to them.

It would be a most grateful theme for an able pen to set forth the services of Harvard’s ministers in their frugal country parsonages. Their own sons alone, after a training here, furnish a signal and shining list of the wise and good, the honored and generous men in this community who came from those rural ministerial homes. Of such were Chief Justice Shaw and Dr, Jacob Bigelow, the illustrious heads of their respective professions. And what a constellation of the scions, sons and grandsons, of our ministerial stock, have we in the men of letters, who have produced such a considerable portion of our national literature,---Bancroft and Everett, Emerson and Hedge, Motley and Parkman, Holmes and Lowell !

The books in Harvard’s library warrant the belief that he would have welcomed the largest expanding of the field of good learning and fine culture. There is a discernable difference between the tone and spirit of the first-comers here, and those of their children of the first and second generation, born in the wilderness, who had no milk when they were babes, and no memory of the ivy growths, the sports and fond associations, of Old England. Those first-comers brought with them fond remembrances. So the young Harvard was not alone, companionless, friendless, when he came here. It may have been that more of those with them who he had heart-intimacies were then on this side of the ocean than the other. It was but the renewal for him of his college friendships, cemented by a deep, strong affinity of spirit. John Cotton of Boston, and Thomas Hooker of Cambridge, the first ministers of these towns, had been fellows and teachers at Emmanuel. Symmes, the minister of Charlestown, whom Harvard aided as his strength permitted, was of the same college. Many, many others, also, held him in their hearts. Would that they had told us more of him through their pens !

Reverence, love, gratitude, and honor have combined to enlist genius in their service, that they be a personal memorial of Harvard on these grounds, which his living feet, doubtless, often trod. There is not known to be extant a portrait or any delineation or description of his personality, his form or features. Is not the prompting, however, fair and allowable, that there should be some artistic memorial of him on these grounds ?

And if the contingency which has been imagined should present itself, of the coming to the light of some authentic portraiture of John Harvard, the pledge may here and now be ventured, that some generous friend, such as, to the end of time, shall never fail our Alma Mater, notwithstanding her chronic poverty, will provide that this bronze shall be liquefied again, and made to tell the whole known truth so as by fire.

Let us remember that the ideal can never transcend the real, though many light sayings assert the contrary. The gifted artist has wrought for us here an engaging and a beautiful object. Alone, in his workroom through the dull days of a whole winter, he was moulding the moistened clay in patient study, imitating the creative work by which man was fashioned out of the dust of the ground. And, so far as man’s gifts can complete the process, he has breathed into it a living soul. It holds the eye and thought gazing upon it in form, lineament, and feature. It shows us a young scholar in the academic costume and garb of his time, with the refinement and gravity of pure high-thinking. Gently touched by the weakness which was wasting his immature life, he rests for a moment from his converse with wisdom on the printed page, and raises his contemplative eye to the spaces of all wisdom. The seal of his English college is on the left of the pedestal, and that which was so felicitously seized upon for the college to which he transferred learning from the Old World to the New, is on the right. Let this memorial be richly garlanded with summer flowers on your high class days ! Let the pensive beauty of that sweet countenance be cheer and inspiration to the student passing by it, under fair, or clouded, or stormy skies, or by the illumination of the moon !

Would that those eyes had vision for the spirit, that they might look forth upon these clustering halls, the oldest and the newest, which keep the record and method of enlargement from the old plain solidity to the fresh ornateness of this years taste ! Would that they could behold the results of the transforming process on the domains of the Indian, the wolf, and the bear, to these crowded groups of young men in the vigor and promise of a most privileged life !

These are all before us. The graduates of Harvard now make the most numerous body of any one continued fellowship on this continent. And here is the centre of our common debt and love.

" O relic and Type of our ancestors’ worth,

That hast long kept their memory warm,

First Flower of their wilderness, Star of their night,

Calm rising through change and through storm."

Singing by the Glee Club followed, when President Eliot arose, and accepted the gift in these words:------

" It is my pleasant duty to declare that the University gratefully accepts the interesting and inspiring memorial of John Harvard which generosity and genius have conspired to produce. The University counts of inestimable worth the lessons which this pure, gentle, resolute youth will teach, as he sits in bronze looking wistfully into the western sky. He will teach that one disinterested deed of hope and faith may crown a brief and broken life with deathless fame. He will teach that the good which men do lives after them, fructified and multiplied beyond all power of measurement or computation. He will teach that from the seed which he planted in loneliness, weakness, and sorrow, have sprung joy, strength, and energy ever fresh, blooming year after year in this garden of learning, and flourishing more and more, as time goes on, in all fields of activity. Let us go and look upon this silent but impressive teacher."

As the President spoke his closing words, he led the way, accompanied by Mr. Bridge, and followed by the entire audience, but without formal order, to the area which had been reserved about the statue. As soon as the crowd had encircled it at a distance which enabled all to see, the signal was given, and the cloth which covered the statue was dropped.

The undergraduates were massed on one side, and, in response to the call of their leader, they greeted the unveiling with nine of their college cheers. They paid the same tribute to the giver and to the sculptor, and the ceremonies were over.

On the base of the statue is the name of the company by whom the casting was done,---The Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company, New York, 1884

On the front of the pedestal, which is of fine-hammered granite, is inscribed in gilt letters,---

The seal, in bronze, of Emmanuel College, * Cambridge, England, is let into the stone on the southern face. Corresponding on the northern face is the seal of Harvard College. On the rear face are the words,---

* The three hundredth anniversary of the foundation of Emmanuel College was commemorated with appropriate observances at Cambridge, England, on the 18^th and 19^th of June, the present year. Abundant honor was then done to its alumnus, John Harvard, as the founder of Harvard University. An invitation had been sent by the authorities of Emmanuel, that Harvard College should be represented on the auspicious occasion. In answer to the request, Professor Charles Eliot Norton was delegated as such representative. He attended, and took a prominent part in the exercises of the commemoration, at which the common interests and mutual regard of the Universities at the two Cambridges were amply recognized and confirmed.

The Chapel of Emmanuel, where the religious services of the Tercentenary were held, has been recently repaired and adorned. The eight windows---four on either side---are filled with the portraits of theologians, two in each, beginning with Augustine and Anselm, and ending with Sanscroft and Law. The third and fourth windows on both sides are occupied with the portraits of Emmanuel men. In the third window of the north side is John Harvard,---of course an ideal representation,---with Laurence Chalderton, first Master of Emmanuel, as his companion. Harvard holds a scroll bearing the words, Populus qui creabitur laudabit Dominium.