V

ISITORS to New England in Nineteen Hundred and Twenty, whatever shall be the nature of the celebration of the Pilgrim Tercentenary, will wish to see old Plymouth as little changed as possible. By tens, yes, by hundreds of thousands, they will linger about the sacred precincts of old Burial Hill. From that eminence they will look down upon the roofs of two buildings, almost directly under their feet. These are the present meetinghouses of the orthodox Congregational and the Unitarian Congregational churches.

I know of no spot where the separation of the independent churches into these two bodies seems more scandalizing than here where it intrudes on memories sacred alike to religion and patriotism.

Men will be affected differently by the spectacle, according to their own tenets and temperaments. The scurrilous will scoff at all religion; the cynical will smile sardonically at the weaknesses and follies of mankind; the friends of independency will grieve; the believers in strongly centralized church government, or in the apostolic succession, will point a moral; the members of the Congregational and Unitarian churches will not escape a sense of shame.

confounded and their very names forgotten. Today, with none of these predictions fulfilled, the followers of these two historic New England churches, have come to look upon the breach as permanent, and to accustom themselves to a situation which they find no way to alter.

The actual theological controversy has lost much of its meaning to the present generation. It is not the fashion of modern pulpiteers to instruct their hearers in matters theological. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the actual differences between these two religious bodies had disappeared. The worshipper in the orthodox church, however "liberal" its cast, is educated in a type of religious thought quite alien to the mind of the thorough-going Unitarian. The doctrines of the Trinity and of the Atonement may be without meaning to the orthodox Christian, at least in his direct consciousness, but that feeling out of which they grew, remains with him as the essence of his faith. We shall make little progress in the work of recruiting these denominations, until we recognize their actual differences. Not by cavil and reproach, but by appreciation can a middle ground be found upon which both can stand.

The Trinitarian Congregationalist is a worshipper of Christ; the Unitarian Congregationalist is a disciple of Jesus, who seeks to follow, but does not worship his master. The Trinitarian Congregationalist finds the worship of the Unitarian Church coldly intellectual. There is, to him, something missing in it. At times his deepest religious sensibilities are shocked. He does not always know the source of his discontent, but he is none the less discontented. He leaves feeling that he has been given "Stones for Bread." The Unitarian Congregationalist finds the worship of the Trinitarian Church

The pulpit fulminations of the generation which witnesses this disruption that beheld the descendants of the Pilgrims and Puritans saying to one another, "We cannot worship God together," prophesied, each from his own standpoint, the speedy downfall of the opposing cause. The liberal faith of the Unitarian was to sweep away all opposition, and become the accepted religion of mankind, or, from across many an elmshaded green, the worshippers within the white-walls of the orthodox meeting-house heard how speedily the deniers of the true faith were to be

deeply tinged with superstition. It seems to him to be unreasoning and emotional. He is shocked by by absence of the keen, incisive ethical note so dominant in his own church. He departs unhelped and uninspired. Until we see clearly that which is sacred, that which is lovely, that which is Christian, in both of these types of worship, there is little hope of an ultimate reconciliation of their respective churches. And this seeing must be sympathetic and loving. It must be in the hearts of the clergy as they minister from Sabbath to Sabbath to their respective Congregations.

If every orthodox Congregational minister said, every Sabbath, to himself: "Today there may be in my congregation men of the Unitarian faith, to whom I should like to give something that will feed and not offend," and if every Unitarian minister should enter his pulpit with a like attitude toward the Trinitarian worshipper, the ministrations of both would be enriched and benefitted.

In so doing, would either be false to his faith? There is the crux of the whole question.

The writer maintains that they would not be false to that in the heart of each out of which the two standpoints have arisen. They would be false only to its philosophical form and dogmatic statement. But this last has long ceased to be of any possible use or benefit-and that is equally true of both. The Unitarians infinitely single, personal God,

that awful Egoist of early Unitarian teaching is quite as foreign to modern thought as the three-fold personality of the obsolete Trinitarian philosophy.

The high love of truth, and insistence on ethical purity, which lay at the heart of the Unitarian faith, is not dead, and can never die. The reverence rising into warm devotion and worship of the Mind of Christ as revealed to himself in the worshipper's experience, which lies at the foundation of the Trinitarian faith, and which created the intellectual need which his dogmatic theologians so blindly sought to meet with their doctrine of the Trinity, that also can never die. And these two heart needs are far from being irreconcilable. They call for mutual recognition-no more, no less.

If the leaders of these two denominations could show to their followers this way of ultimate reunion, the Tercentenary of the landing of the landing of Pilgrims would be fittingly celebrated by an event of the utmost beneficence-an event that would do more than Agricultural Schools or the department at Washington can ever do for the revival of New England rural life. When the old white meeting houses whose doors now too often swing emptily in the wind, and down whose forsaken aisles wander the sheep and the straying dog, could again minister to a united congregation of worshippers, there would soon cease to be a "problem" of Rural New England.

T

HIS is an attempt to retouch

the fading and perishing portrait of Captain John Foster Williams of old colonial Boston, a long forgotten naval hero. We must unveil this portrait in fancy for no print of the features of the sturdy old viking of the Revolution, so far as I have been able to discover, is now in existence. Yet the picture I shall draw of him with the pen, feeble and imperfect though the lines may be, will serve in a measure to conjure up his image in the mind's eye.

This prince of privateers, although his story is dismissed even in the larger histories of the naval operations of the Revolution, with perfunctory paragraphs, was not without his Boswell, and it is largely from a rare little book of personal adventures, written by Ebenezer Fox, a Roxbury man who took part in the great struggle with England, that I have drawn the greater portion of my material. Fox wrote the history of his own Revolutionary adventures for the amusement of his grandchildren, and the book, privately circulated, is now rarely to be met with, but its fidelity is vouched for in a letter to Mr. Fox's son, written by Jared Sparks. The illustrations that accompany this sketch are from this book.

In our times when Uncle Sam needs soldiers or sailors he hires rooms in various towns and cities, puts an officer in charge, sets a private or two at the doorways, standing as rigidly as wooden Indians, and by means of lithographic announcements, endeavors to lure Young America into the ranks of enlisted men. Such methods would be too prosaic for Captain Williams. He knew the men of his day and generation. He knew that to lure them into the country's service in the great struggle with the mother coun

try, he would have to appeal not only to their patriotism but to their imaginations.

And so, when Captain Williams was assigned to the command of the Massachusetts state cruiser, the "Protector," which was designed to prey upon British commerce and such ves sels of the British Navy as its Captain dared to attack, he determined to make the life of a sailor fighting for prize money as well as glory, appear so alluring, that the youth of Boston, and indeed of the state, would hasten to enlist under his standard.

Captain Williams had a jolly minor officer full of fun, fond of jokes, prac tical and otherwise, and a capital hand at singing a song. This officer, whose name it is to be regretted, has not come down to our age, was assigned by Captain Williams, to march at the head of a band, dressed in picturesque Continental uniform, sing stirring sea and war songs, and harangue crowds encountered on the route, urging the young men and such of the larger boys as appeared to be competent, to fall in behind him. One stanza of a song he used to sing was as follows:

All ye that have had masters

And cannot get your due, Come, come, my gallant boys

And join with our ship's crew.

No profound knowledge of human nature is essential to anticipate what invariably followed. Young men and large boys, many of them weary, it must be said, of the restraints of home and masters to whom they were apprenticed, fell in behind the recruiting officer with a huzza and followed him to the station at the head of Hancock's Wharf and eagerly put their names on the ship's roll while Captain Williams looked approvingly on. It

wasn't long before a crew of 330 men and boys, large and strong enough for duty had been recruited and Captain Williams was ready to sail out of Boston in search of the hated Britisher afloat.

Many of the men, it must be admitted, let their enthusiasm run away with their discretion and a large part of the crew in all stages of intoxication had to be driven or dragged aboard. Once aboard and sobered, the crew was put under a discipline of which not even the W. C. T. U. could complain. Captain Williams was a strict disciplinarian but he was not without the arts of the politician, and to get his men he was as free in making promises as the politician eager for votes.

So great was the renown of Captain Williams throughout the New England colonies that boys in distant towns and hamlets ran away from home to join him, among others being young Edward Preble, who was afterward to win an undying name in American naval history, by his achievements in Tripoli. Young Preble, who was the son of General Jeddiah Preble, was born in Portland, Maine, August 5th, 1761, and at the breaking out of the Revolution, was a mere boy. He had, however, run away from home to join a privateer in the early days of the struggle with the mother country, and when his father found him bent upon joining Captain Williams, despite all ob

stacles, he permitted the boy's will to prevail and obtained for him a midshipman's berth on the "Protector."

Before being assigned to the command of the "Protector," Captain Williams had been in command of the Massachusetts state cruiser, the "Hazard," fourteen guns, and with this in the spring of 1779 he had an hour's engagement with the British privateer of eighteen guns, the "Active," and forced her to strike her colors after being badly crippled. The "Active" lost thirty-three killed and wounded. Captain Williams' loss was only eight. It was for this victory that he received the command of the superior cruiser, the "Protector."

The "Protector" had been at sea only a short time when it encountered two British sloops of war, either of which would have been a match for her, but when Captain Williams raised the stars and stripes and prepared for battle, the sloops crowded on all sail and made all haste to get away. This show of cowardice put heart into Captain Williams and his men and gave them a contempt for their British foe that they never lost until the "Protector" went out of commission. Every effort was made by Captain Williams to get within fighting distance of the sloops, but they were copper bottomed, and better sailors than his ship, and managed to get away.

Captain Williams' first actual battle was one of the fiercest fought on the seas in the course of the Revolution