Sermon by Rev. Diane Rollert, 7 June 2009
Imagine a heavy box filled with legal-sized bound ledgers, each with pages and pages of handwritten minutes spanning years and years of the history of the Unitarians of Montreal. The very first year of the very first ledger: 1842. The words flow on and on in longhand, documenting each decision, each discussion, each person present, each sum collected. Precise sentences in faded brown ink line up exactly, from margin to margin, a feat of human perfection hard to fathom today.
The first book of minutes in the box is but one resource among thousands in our archives. But it tells us that on June 6th, 1842, 15 men gathered on a Monday evening to “take into consideration the measures necessary to establish permanently Unitarian Preaching.” There it is, the date of our founding. Happy Birthday, Unitarian Church of Montreal. … And then again, maybe not… It took another two weeks until the group fully solidified their commitment and ratified their constitution as the Christian Unitarian Society of Montreal on June 20th 1842. Let’s just say that June is our birthday month.
How powerful to hold that ledger in my hands knowing that it contains a record created by Unitarians who were living and breathing 167 years ago. The meticulous handwriting makes the feeling of connection ever the more real. Yet the facts are dry. These are meeting minutes, after all, and I want to know more. I want to feel the flesh and blood of those first Montreal Unitarians – who they were and what they felt as they made history.
As someone who lived and studied in the cradle of American Unitarianism, I’ve been looking for a link between the history I came from and the history I’ve found here. Delving through the archives this week, I found some surprises – enough to make me want to jump up and down with excitement. However, reading our history, I see how seriously we take our ministry and our ministers. It would be most unseemly for a minister of this congregation to behave without appropriate decorum. I’ll just tell you that my all-time Unitarian hero, Dorothea Dix, was instrumental in helping this congregation fully establish itself in the 1850s…but that’s a story for another day.
In reading the minutes from 1842, it is pretty evident that only the names of men were recorded. We don’t know if there were women physically present on the day that this congregation was founded. That was how things were done then – or so it seems until you read between the lines. Men held official positions on boards and committees while women worked behind the scenes getting done what the men presumably decreed. It would be rather amazing if the name of any woman had been written down for the historical record of that year.
In our case there are two women. The names of Elizabeth Langdon Cushing and Elizabeth Holyoke Hedge have survived in anecdotal references because they were both undeniably instrumental in the founding of the Unitarian movement in Montreal and hence in Canada. Both grew up in the heart of Bostonian Unitarianism and settled as married women in Montreal.
Elizabeth Cushing was the daughter of Rev. John Foster, a Unitarian minister, and Hannah Webster Foster, anonymous author of the novel The Coquette. Published in 1788, Hannah’s novel told the story of a young woman lured from the path of righteousness (saccharine for our tastes today, but it was a best seller then). Hannah raised her three daughters to be educated free thinkers, and all three became authors. Elizabeth would come to be respected as this church’s first matriarch until her death in 1886 at the age of 91. She would have been in her forties when she began to agitate for the founding of a Unitarian movement in Montreal.
Elizabeth Hedge was the youngest daughter of Professor Levi Hedge of Harvard, and the sister of the renowned Unitarian theologian Frederick Henry Hedge. In 1831, at the age of 20, she married her cousin William Hedge. William became the owner of a wholesale hardware business, which presumably brought them to Montreal.
I’m trying to imagine the lives of these two women before they married and moved to Montreal. Surely they travelled in Unitarian intellectual circles. Elizabeth Cushing grew up in the glow of her mother’s literary fame. Elizabeth Hedge grew up in an academic family. Her older brother, Frederick, had been a prodigy. When his father decided he wasn’t mature enough to study at Harvard, Frederick was sent to Germany for three years at the age of thirteen. It was that kind of family.
Frederick Henry Hedge became deeply influenced by German philosophy, particularly by the work of Kant. In 1836, while his sister Elizabeth was most likely keeping house and raising children in Montreal, Frederick became one of the founding members of the Transcendentalist Club along with Ralph Waldo Emerson and others. They often called it Hedge’s Club since they only met when he was visiting from Bangor, Maine, where he served as a Unitarian minister.
Frederick eventually distanced himself from the Transcendentalists, particularly from the more radical members who espoused the end of all organized religion. The radicals argued that houses of worship were unnecessary when God and nature were everywhere. Frederick countered with his view that all spirit needed and demanded a concrete place to be held. He would write in his book Reason in Religion (Book II, Chapter V. “Spirit in the Letter”):
“All revelations and reforms, after passing through the fluid stage, arrive at a solid one: after living and working as disembodied spirit for a while, they crystallize into stated, formal agencies, and settle down into scriptures and churches. …
“You have a vision of excellence; it fills your whole soul; your spirit is aglow with it; it is your spirit for the time; and could your spiritual interior at that moment be laid open and portrayed, as a photograph fixes the fleeting expression of the countenance, the portrait would be that of a hero or a saint. What boots it, if you do not embody that spirit in some word or work? It expires with the pulse of the breast; it evaporates with a breath, and no man is benefited by it: it was and is not, and no memorial of it remains to kindle aspiration in another, or to rekindle it in yourself. But express that spirit, record it in some way, embody it somewhere, and you add something to the spirit’s life and the world’s riches.”
Hedge agreed that denominations and churches do harm when they became dogmatic and rigid. But he also believed that the human spirit required community and traditions in order to be fully expressed. Individuals wandering alone in the wilderness get lost, he would have said. They need something more, and that’s why they must create rituals, build houses of worship and form denominations.
Frederick Hedge’s sister, Elizabeth ,was surely living in the wilderness, in the hardship post of Montreal, after a genteel upbringing near Boston. As Walter Norton Evans wrote in 1892 in an unpublished history of the Church of the Messiah:
Although Montreal was “the commercial metropolis of Canada, the most active, energetic, and prosperous city in the Colony, in 1830 its population did not exceed 50,000; its wealth was moderate; its educational opportunities limited; and its religious thought, if not actually narrow, at least non-progressive…”
According to Evans, “there were longings among the Unitarians of the city for the establishment of regular worship” as early as 1830, but no active steps were taken until 1832.
“This year, 1832, was a momentous one in the experience of Canada in general, and of Montreal in particular,“ Evans writes. “On the 9th June cholera broke out in Quebec, and on the 10th people were startled by the report that several cases had declared themselves in Montreal; its attack was as sudden as its progress was rapid. ... Between the 10th June and the 21st September, there were 4420 cases of which 1904 were fatal, or about three cases in every seven. Business was brought to a standstill and large numbers of benevolent individuals devoted themselves to nursing the sick and the dying; not a few becoming martyrs to their unselfishness and their high sense of duty. In the midst of all this pain and sorrow, the Unitarian movement had its birth.”
Rev. Mr. Hughes from Yoevil, Somerset, England, “on the afternoon of the 29th of July 1832, preached the first Unitarian sermon ever heard in Montreal, and it is believed, the first in Canada…”
“This was a red-letter day among the little body of believers,” Evans continues, “wearied and worn as they were by general anxiety, and by their persistent devotion to the sick and suffering. This stimulus to their faith fell on their souls like streams in a thirsty land; and they went forth from their meeting in that little school-room [rented by Benjamin Workman], with new life and fresh hope.”
Hughes preached several times that week and then he and his daughter headed westward. By the time they reached Coteau-du-Lac, Hughes “was seized with cholera.” It is said that he died exactly a month from the date that he first preached in Montreal.
Evans writes that, “A new spirit seemed now to take possession of the Unitarians of the city, stimulated by the active ministrations, and by what seemed like the almost martyr-dying of their first minister.”
After the loss of Hughes, several ministers came to preach. One stayed for a whole year and then returned to Boston. Then cholera broke out again in 1834. Business was crippled, and political strife broke out. The Rebellion of 1837 painfully divided the Unitarians as some joined the rebels in an attempt to overthrow British colonial rule. Rebel activist and Unitarian, Thomas Storrow Brown, was at the forefront. He eventually fled south to the United States.
“Thus the first Unitarian movement in Montreal, which began in sorrow ended in disappointment. But not in despair,” wrote Rev. William Barnes (UCM 1879-1909) in a sermon at the turn of the century. In 1838, the first Unitarian baptism in Montreal took place when a minister from Salem, Massachusetts, baptized four of Elizabeth and William Hedge’s children. “In 1841, the desirability of another attempt to organize a society became evident,” Barnes wrote. “Certain ladies – Mrs. Hedge and Mrs. Cushing especially – were among the first to urge this need. Let it be remembered that our Church of the Messiah owes its beginning to the zeal of these good women.”
According to the annual report of 1842, “In the summer of 1841, some ladies who found their position under the Trinitarian preaching irksome and difficult to be borne, were determined to revive Unitarian Preaching, if but for a short period, and through their impulse the Rev. William Ware of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was induced to come and preach for three Sabbaths.” As the story goes, the two Elizabeths contacted friends in Boston on their own initiative, and made the arrangements. That September, the minutes record, a letter was read from Mrs. Cushing urging the Society to engage a permanent minister. A minor detail, it might seem, but it is significant that her name was recorded, and, that after considerable discussion, action was taken.
During that time, Elizabeth Hedge and her husband William had been hosting Sunday services in their home in Haymarket Square (now Square Victoria). In the spring of 1842, the Hedges obtained a house on Fortification Lane (now McGill Street in Old Montreal). They converted the ground floor into a chapel that could seat 150 people. After William Ware left, the Rev. Henry Giles, an eloquent Irishman, came to preach for the summer. At the end of his stay, he married one of Elizabeth Cushing’s sisters and took her back to Boston. One can only imagine the story behind that.
A year later, the congregation called their first permanent minister, Rev. John Cordner, a young and newly ordained minister from the Remonstrant Synod of Ulster, a distinctly Unitarian branch of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. Cordner would serve for the next 36 years.
During those early years, when the church was founded, I wonder if sister and brother Elizabeth and Frederick Hedge corresponded. Did she write to him of the challenging years of cholera and rebellion? Did she share with him her hopes and frustrations? Did he encourage her to move her spirit into something permanent, to never give up dreaming of a Unitarian Church in Montreal? Or did he watch her example, how she took adversity and turned it into something meaningful? Did he watch her little community establish itself, and note this was what the spirit did when it was challenged? Who inspired whom? We will never know.
Each Unitarian who found his or herself in Montreal could have easily found faith alone. Yet they chose to establish themselves into a congregation. They called ministers, they built buildings, they wrote prayers and they set down traditions. We may not practice exactly as they did, but the DNA they set down 167 years ago remains in the lifeblood of who we are today.
As Frederick Henry Hedge wrote:
“Express that spirit, record it in some way, embody it somewhere, and you add something to the spirit’s life and the world’s riches.”
