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William Chauncey Pond

I thank you for this greeting and I thank the President for his introduction. The program as printed calls for reminiscences. Reminiscences and history are not equivalent terms. History is scientific. In the introduction to his Gospel, Luke gives us in a few words the very elements of the science of historical research. But reminiscences are remembrances. Somebody remembers. They are thus personal and they have two disadvantages. One is a narrow scope. I am called to give reminiscences of the Seminary prior to the Civil War. But that means a long time before I was born, and I can’t remember anything about it. I simply have an impression that Dr. Smith, who preceded my father in the chair of theology, was a man after my father’s own pattern and heart, but I don’t know whether that is true or not. The reminiscences that I give must cover simply the period of my own relationship to the Seminary as a student and a graduate. Then reminiscences being personal call for a too constant use of the personal pronoun, first person, unless one can contrive some circumlocution which means the same thing and is a good deal more awkward. So you will excuse me if I use the personal pronoun, first person singular.

My remembrances of the Seminary gather around four points. The first one is the Seminary as hospitable to truth—to new truth, to old truth, to any truth. Its motto might have been in this respect, "Prove all things, put them to the test, see whether there is truth in them, and if there is truth get it, and if there is no truth reject it." The Seminary, when I was a student, was singularly hospitable. I remember how our reading room was encumbered with charts, numerous figures and sums, additions and subtractions and balancing of things, which went to prove that if Daniel told the truth, and John in the Revelation told the truth, the world was coming to an end in 1843. And they hung there until 1843 ended successfully.

My father was a new school theologian, as it was characterized at the time. There is a letter still in existence, seen by my sister, a letter from Dr. Pomroy, pastor of the First Parish Church here, to my father before he arrived, before he started from Massachusetts, begging him not to bring any of his new ideas. But the new ideas came; they were inseparable from him, and they would have been to this day. My father’s method of teaching theology was his own. I hesitate to think about it or speak about it, because it might seem to criticize the methods of other professors. Certainly it is not in that spirit that I speak at all. But his lectures were simple, in plain language, with no attempt at elaboration, with none at all of the Germanic culture in them, indicating the direction which our thought should take, the main points to be considered. Those lectures have been published. [Enoch Pond. Lectures on Christian Theology. Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1875.]

So simple they seemed to me to be, that I was quite surprised when I heard that Rev. Dr. Moore, the first professor of theology in our Pennsylvania Theological Seminary—and a man, I will stop to say, both in culture and in capacity and in spirit the full equal of any professor of theology that has ever taught it in this country—had adopted my father’s lectures because he had a class of three, and they were neither of them prepared in any way by special training for the ministry, and those lectures seemed to fit the case. And I have heard since that they were used in the theological seminaries of the American Missionary Association among the colored people.

So they go on their way doing good work. But they did good work for the best of us. He gave us these lectures and then he indicated the best reading for us in the library on the theme, and after we had read a while, then he called us together for a symposium, and those were exceedingly interesting exercises. We fired shots at each other, harmless shots; we asked all sorts of questions, and he asked questions of us, and we came into close relationship—friendly relationship, though relationships that involved differences of thought—and after that we were to prepare essays on all the most important themes. This method induced enthusiasm and brought to pass freedom.

Enthusiasm was characteristic of our theological classes. I had myself an interesting indication of it. We were [discussing] the existence of God, and with the courage of youth I said that that ought to be demonstrable, and with the help of God I would demonstrate it before I got through. And I think I consulted every book in the library with extreme diligence and found one book that undertook to put it in the form of theorems like my geometry. I said, "This is the book for me." But when I studied it, the demonstrations did not demonstrate, and I was not satisfied. One cold night in the winter, I woke up and found that I had dreamed the whole thing out. I had it clear as a bell, an absolute demonstration of the existence of God. Regardless of 22° or 23° below zero, I leaped out of bed, threw a comforter around me, hastened to my desk, drew out some paper, got my inkstand and my pen and dipped my pen into the ink and put it down on the paper—and there the whole thing stopped. The first word couldn’t come, and my demonstration and my effort at demonstration ceased.

But I learned one good thing, one true thing: that finite logic is not going to take in the infinitude of God. And if we cannot believe in God without logical demonstrations within the range of our intellects, we cannot believe in him at all. But we can believe in him. We know him by intuition. The fundamental intuition is the intuition of God. We know him by the grace of God in the baptism of the Holy Spirit, till you know God as you know yourself. You know God exists just as you know that you exist yourself by absolute consciousness, and I am sorry for anyone that is to preach the gospel that has not come to that point where he knows God’s existence as he knows his own.

This method opened the way for differences of opinion. We used to have old school students and new school students in almost every class. I remember that when I was in the Seminary, two college mates of mine two years ahead of me were known as leaders. Dr. Webb—Mr. Webb then but Dr. Webb afterwards, a prominent pastor [from] Boston, chairman for many years of the prudential committee of the American Board—was the old school man, and Mr. Skiel—a very modest but equally intelligent man—was leader of the new school side. Not that there was partisanship, but there was comparison of views, and all under my father’s guidance.

The freedom perhaps is indicated as well in my own experience as otherwise. For when we came to the divine decrees, somehow I got hold of the premises upon which Calvinism is founded, and when a man gets hold of those premises and proceeds logically, there is no stopping till you get to ultra-Calvinism, almost fatalism, and I got there. My essay was quite in contradiction with my father’s new school lecture. It had the thing pretty clearly reasoned out from the premises. Well, my father listened to it and didn’t say a word. I really expected he would, but he didn’t. And at length we came on the doctrines respecting repentance, faith, the condition of salvation—a gospel by means of which we might perhaps save men and win them to Christ—and I came up plumb against my old essay. It wouldn’t stand. The two couldn’t stand together at any rate. So with some shamefacedness I reviewed the matter, examined the premises, and I found they didn’t hold. I got round to my father’s standpoint and started there and have been comfortable ever since. I must not delay longer upon this, but it was a great thing from that time to this that [the Seminary] welcomes free thought, is not afraid of free thought, free speech, with Christian brotherhood.

Another center around which my reminiscences gather is the hospitality of the Seminary towards men of comparatively little culture. There are those men. There are multitudes of them that if encouraged have the zeal, the earnestness, and the special fitness for some fields, fields where Congregationalists have failed because we hadn’t men adapted to that work.

I remember [two] persons who seemed to be hopeless cases. One was Marcus R. Keep. I don’t know that any of you ever heard of him; [it was] a long time ago that he went to heaven. But he was a tall, gaunt, ill-dressed and scarcely well-kempt man as I remember him. I don’t think that Abraham Lincoln, when he came out of the Kentucky wilds, was any more awkward than Marcus R. Keep was. He didn’t know very much when he came out. He was awkward. When he talked in prayer-meeting, sometimes he didn’t exactly meet the tastes of the people. Sometimes he was laughed at. But the man stayed, and Bangor Seminary wrought him, and when Bangor Seminary got through with him, he went up into the far east—that is, the Aroostook country—and there he preached the gospel and won souls till God called him higher. He did a work which I don’t suppose that even my brother, the President, could do.

Another was John Dodge. He came so rude, so uncouth, so destitute of whatever would seem to constitute a Congregational minister that my father himself hesitated about it, but he took him in. He stayed there. He studied. He came out a gentleman. He came out to be pastor of what was then one of the most important of our country churches, the church in Waldoboro, afterwards to be pastor of a certain prominent church in Massachusetts. Wherever John Dodge went, souls were won to Christ.

Another case that occurs to me, a different case, is that of the eminent pastor who is to speak to us this evening, pastor of what might be called the cathedral church of Congregationalism in New England, who graduated from this Seminary to seek other advantages, inspired by what he learned here, and to become what he has. Whether the other Seminaries that require a diploma before they receive persons to the study of theology are right or wrong, I am sure that if we are going to do the work that we ought to do as a denomination in the world, there must be the opportunity for those who cannot pass through college still to learn the truth and preach the word.

Another feature around which my reminiscences gather is what I might call "the clinical use of students," the clinical privileges which students had in Bangor Seminary for clinical practice. Medical colleges afford it and couldn’t afford to do without it. But in my day I suppose that a student in Andover Seminary in the middle class, if he should venture to preach, would be subject to discipline. It was not so in Bangor.

One of my pleasantest recollections is how Daniel Webster Pickard, the brightest man there was in our class and the youngest man, of precious memory, the first one called higher. I had a parish—I think it was called Osgood District, five miles out of Bangor—and we wrought there, preaching on alternate Sabbaths. I superintended the Sunday School and he taught the Bible class. Every now and then we took advantage of my father’s horse and chaise to go out and [would] part company at some parting of the ways, so as to double our work in pastoral visitation. I do not know what use God made of what I did then, but I know that it was good practice. It was a good thing to do before we were put where responsibility was exclusively our own.

After that, there was preaching constantly. Brethren were encouraged to preach, to accept service from the Maine Missionary Society and go and preach, [so we would know] something besides the abstract and the professional when we got out of the Seminary.

And finally, my recollection of Bangor Seminary is of a spiritual element in all its operations and recognition of the Christ as the center of Christian thought and of Christian action. It is true that the theology taught there had—for one of the foci, at any rate, of the ellipse—the moral government of God, and a great deal was made of it. The son of the Professor of Theology at that time stood five hours before a Council called to install him as pastor of the Third Congregational Church in San Francisco, and the Council after that had to take a whole hour to consider whether they would go forward and authorize him or not. But they finally said, so I was told, that he was a good man and they guessed he would come out all right, and so they let him go.

The heresy consisted in letting go [of] the moral government of God as something that God had to do with and wasn’t much of our concern, that God could manage his own affairs and could provide his own way to forgive our sins, and that we need not task ourselves to consider whether he was paying a ransom to Satan in the sufferings of Christ, or whether he was providing an equivalent in the moral government of God by the sacrifice of Christ. The main thing was the fact that Christ died for our sins. That was Paul’s gospel, one-half of it, and that he rose again for our justification. And that fact is enough for us.

Perhaps you will pardon me if I speak of one matter that the word "fact" has called to mind. When we graduated in 1852, our graduation services in Bangor used to throng this church. I suppose they do still. There was one man who spoke on "Fact and Philosophy." The ultimate end and object in the address was that the facts were the essential things, and in the philosophy we had liberty. In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity. And the plea was that we should agree about the facts of the gospel and cling to them, grapple with them as with hooks of steel, but that in respect to the how and the why and any attempt on our part to set God right, we might have liberty to differ.

Well, when the whole thing was through and the speaker was going out of the door of the church, Rev. John Fiske—of gracious memory, a son of Bangor, pastor in Bath, one of the foremost men in Maine—grasped his hand and said, "William, I like your delivery." Good Father Cummings in The Christian Mirror spoke very complimentarily of the exercises generally and said that most of them were orthodox. It was the son of the Professor of Theology, whose father let him out, that Father Cummings thought was not quite orthodox. I don’t just know where that comes in under my reminiscences, but it comes in.

The facts, my brethren, the facts are Christ—Christ crucified, Christ risen. Our business is not with ethics, not with politics, not with philosophy, but with Christ, center and soul of the whole. Now some of our brethren are getting astray on that. One of the dear brethren that is in California, a graduate of our Seminary, preached a sermon in my hearing in which Christ was magnified, and I shook hands with him afterwards, so warmly saying how greatly I enjoyed his magnifying of Jesus Christ.

"Oh, yes," he said, "but I can’t do that very often. I should exhaust the subject."

"Why, brother," I said, "it is an endless study." And it is. You will never exhaust the subject, my friends. And you will not do Christ’s work, you will not feed the flock unless you go preaching Christ. Ethics are all right if Christ is all through them. Politics are sometimes right if Christ is all through. Philosophy is all right if in any way it brings us nearer to Jesus Christ instead of putting us further away. I know a church in California with an able pastor, a faithful man according to his own idea. He wanted to get the church right, ethically right, and he was preaching on friendship, on loyalty, on good behavior generally, Sabbath after Sabbath—good sermons, but somehow or other there was no Christ in them from beginning to end. His prayers ended with "for Christ’s sake," the hymns had Christ in them, but we listened to his sermons and had nothing of Christ, and we had a half-starved church with all the indications of half-starvation. Nothing succeeded. The Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor went down, Sunday School declined, finances got hard, [the] congregation greatly diminished. A gaunt figure, ill-fed, that church presents today.

And why? Christ says, "Feed my sheep… Feed my lambs." Feed them with what? Study the sixth chapter of John: "This is the bread which came down from heaven." This is the bread, the living bread. This is the bread of God... And if we feed our people on the living Christ—the Christ that died for our sins and rose again and is alive forever more, the Christ that is with us wherever we are, our constant companion and our confidential friend—Christ will be the life of the church, Christ will be our victory.