<\/p>\n
As we approach the national political campaign of 1968 a lot of people are getting downright cynical. On every side you run across some such pronouncement as the following that appeared in a recent book. Just listen to this: “Our patriotism seems of late to have been exchanging its time of confident hope for a note of despair. Anxiety seems to be daily increasing in the minds of thoughtful Americans. We fear that grave defects in our government are working against our liberty. A marked and alarming decline in statesmanship, a rule of folly instead of wisdom of levity instead of sober thought in legislation, threaten to shake our trust not only in men, but even in the principles upon which our government rests. The two great national parties are dying for want of any unifying and vitalizing principle. Without able leaders of patriotism and integrity, our parties are without policies and without aims.”<\/p>\n
Doesn’t that sound familiar? Isn’t that what we” are “hearing on Bvery band” about politics and government in 1968? Who do you think wrote it? No, it was not Drew Pearson or Walter Lippman, not anyone of our numerous columnists. Nor was it any of the “Manchesters and the Schlesingers and their kind, who have rolled from American presses so many books about the Kennedy era. Nor was it George Kennan or any other former ambassador venting his spleen in print.<\/p>\n
That doleful statement was made 89 years ago, in the year 1879, by Woodrow Wilson, on the occasion of his graduation from Princeton. You can find it on Page 57 of a new book, “Woodrow Wilson, the Academic Years” by W.W. Bragdon. The lesson we should learn is one that I have had occasion to point out more than once on this program. There never has been a time in history when people have not deplored the doctrine in politics, economics, morals and religion. For such people the golden age is always in the past. The future is sure to be worse than the present. Benjamin Franklin called attention to this trend in human nature, when he wrote in the “Autobiography”, “There are croakers in every country always boding its ruin.”<\/p>\n
Of course there are things in modern society that many of us, especially we older people, do not like. It may be true that life today is more permissive, less tied to a moral code, than it was in the past. It may be that dishonesty, graft and corruption in high places are more rampant than ever before. It may even be that, in some circles, mini-skirts and mini-morals go together. But I can assure you that when people of my age were in their teens, there were older persons then who were sure that our generation was bringing ruin to the nation. But somehow the nation survived, as I am sure it will survive the Powells and the Dodds, the hippies and the flower people.<\/p>\n
Now, with that preaching off my chest, let me tell you about a real preacher, who wrote in 1830: “I was last week called to visit the First Church in Vassalboro, which had long been invisible. I aroused them and baptized 46.” The man was writing about the church founded by Thomas Adams at Getchell’s Corner that in our time has become the Adams Memorial. By 1830 Adams himself had moved to Winslow, and gradually the church in Vassalboro had suffered decline.<\/p>\n
Now the preacher who baptized 46 persons at Vassalboro in 1830 was one of those numerous early itinerant preachers who traveled about the country in primitive days. He was by denomination a Baptist named Henry Kendall and his career was typical of the wandering preachers of 150 years ago.<\/p>\n
In 1853 he wrote and published an account of his life, and it is from the pages of that old book that we learn about this man of hell-fire and brimstone. Sometimes, like other such wanderers, Kendall settled down in one place for several months. This is what he did in Topsham in 1818, where, as he put it, “though I had no call from that church, I bought a small farm and waited for the Lord’s further orders.” Kendall found the Topsham church badly divided and he ran into a situation that made it even smaller. As was altogether too common at that time, a number of his parishioners persistently got drunk. That was bad enough for outsiders, but when the offenders were church members. Kendall insisted on strict discipline. He wrote: “Intemperance in the church required expulsion of half the male members and several women, reducing the membership to eight.” But Henry Kendall revived that church, brought its membership up to 50, and built a meeting house.<\/p>\n
We have a picture of those old-time wandering ministers that gives a glimpse of what Henry Kendall’s preaching was like. The picture is from the pen of James T. Champlin, President of Waterville College, and the man who persuaaed Gardiner Colby to make so generous a gift that the grateful trustees changed the college name to Colby. In 1853 Dr. Champlin wrote: “Those itinerant preachers attacked the consciences of their listeners much as the woodsman attacked trees. In both cases, as blow after blow was dealt, the forest reverberated with the sound. Without public conveyances, without even real highways, those preachers tracked long distances from settlement to settlement.”<\/p>\n
Champlin continued: “Those early preachers influenced the whole religious system of Maine. The old parish system, brought from Massachusetts, had so secularized the churches by the turn into the nineteenth century that few traces of evangelical religion remained. Those itinerant ministers preached doctrines strange to the people used to calmer, less hell-fire preaching. They were spurned and reviled, but many who came to their meetings to mock returned to pray. Communities were aroused, many churches reformed and invigorated and allover Maine new churches sprang into being. Those early preachers performed in Maine what Whitefield and Edwards had done elsewhere a century earlier. They broke the tradition of the Puritan Churches and revived the fast-vanishing doctrine of the new birth.”<\/p>\n
Henry Kendall was a Maine native born in what is now Sanford in 1774 of a very poor family. When the boy was only five years old, his father became a religious fanatic, and involved his family in great distress. He could never earn enough to support his wife and children. When Henry was ten, he was sent to live with Captain Simeon Hatch of Wells. He was treated kindly by that equally religious family. Mrs. Hatch offered Henry a penny for every hymn he would learn by heart out of the old Watts hymnal. The boy at once memorized thirty hymns. He said that his life in the Hatch home was the only happy period of his boyhood.<\/p>\n
Henry’s fear for his mother’s welfare was his great concern. Knowing that she feared his father would kill her, Henry was relieved to learn that the man had disappeared. Henry then returned home to help his mother, but she could not keep the family together so Henry and the other children were tossed from one relative to another.<\/p>\n
When he was 13, Henry was apprenticed to a tanner at Central Harbor, N.H. The man proved to be a merciless tyrant, and Henry afterwards wrote: “My master’s neglect of my suffering, especially in cold weather, was worse than I can describe. Both master and mistress thumped me until I fainted, and whipped me so that I carried scars for weeks. I was treated like a slave, and sometimes wished they would kill me outright. During my whole apprenticeship I had only three weeks of school. When I finally reached the age of 21, after eight years of misery in that awful home, they gave me a few old clothes, but no money, and let me go.”<\/p>\n
In 1795, soon after his release from indenture, Henry Kendall married and joined the church. He felt a call to preach and began to do so in 1801. Somehow while learning the trade of a shoemaker, he had gained a little experience in the tanning industry. A man in Meredith, N.H. offered him an acre of land if Henry would set up a tannery and operate it. So Henry proceeded to locate the tan yard, the bark house, the tanning vats, and to build a shoemaker’s shop. He also put up a house and barn. With no experience in business, Henry had neglected to get a deed to the land. One day his supposed benefactor said: “Henry, if you will give me a bond to stay here and carryon the business for the rest of your life. I’ll give you a deed. Otherwise you don’t get it. You stop this running around preaching. I got you here for a tanner and shoemaker, not a minister.”<\/p>\n
But Henry Kendall was determined to be a preacher. A fellow churchman, returning from a trip to Maine, told Henry of the religious need in that wilderness district of Massachusetts. Attending a conference in Newburyport, he met a man who was to influence Henry tremendously. The man was Jeremiah Chaplin, then a minister at Danvers, Mass. who twenty years later would be the first President of Waterville College.<\/p>\n
In the summer of 1802 Henry Kendall got a settlement of $200 and turned the tannery and shoeshop over to the landowner. Leaving wife and children with her mother, Henry set out for the new settlements in Maine. Visiting several places in the Kennebec area, he preached at Mt. Vernon, at Palermo, and went on to Belfast where he met the great Baptist missionary, Isaac Case.<\/p>\n
After an absence of four months, he started back to his family with a hundred dollars in his pocket. Near Portland he was attacked by three rough characters and robbed of all his money. Back in Meredith he wrote: “The good Lord directed a skillful doctor to pass through this town, who gave me wonderful medecine. I was soon able to work and earn a little for my family, also do a little practicing.”<\/p>\n
In 1804 he accepted a call to Litchfield. where he moved his family, ran in debt for 20 acres of land, but managed to put up a house. though he moved into it in December before, as he put it, “there was a planed board anywhere inside or a pane of glass in any window.”<\/p>\n
Scratching out a meager living on the farm, Henry devoted half his time to itinerant preaching. He held revivals in North Augusta. Bowdoinham, Sidney and Vassalboro, at New Sharon and Mercer and was for a time settled minister of the Bloomfield Baptist Church. He made a trip up the Piscataquis River where he said people had not heard a sermon for seven years.<\/p>\n
Henry Kendall lived a turbulent life. Several times he was attacked, twice he was arrested for disturbing the peace, once he was tossed into the river. They were fantastic zealots, those old-time itinerant preachers, but they carried the gospel message where other ministers dared not go when it sometimes took superior courage to preach in the Maine wilderness.<\/p>\n
Year: 1968<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #757, Broadcast on February 18, 1968<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1199,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8797"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8797\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}