Abiel Holmes Wright

[On Tuesday, March 19, 1901, funeral services for Mr. Kellogg were held at the Harpswell church. At these services Professor Henry L. Chapman officiated, and spoke to the Harpswell people of the work and character of their beloved pastor. A choir of Bowdoin College students, members of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, sang appropriate hymns. On the next day services were held in the Second Parish church of Portland at which Rev. Abiel H. Wright, pastor of the St. Lawrence Street church and an intimate friend of Mr. Kellogg, delivered the following tribute, and Rev. Dr. George Lewis of South Berwick offered prayer. The burial was in the Western Cemetery, Portland, where are buried Mr. Kellogg’s wife and father and mother.]

In one of the pastoral psalms God’s thought and feeling concerning the death of his consecrated servants find this expression, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His Saints.” When the aged saint comes home from the toil and trouble of his earth-time services, there is joy in the heart of the Eternal Father. Angels rejoice when one sinner repenteth and the life of faith is begun on earth, but when the sinner becomes a saint and the long weary trial-way is trodden through to its end, when, as the Lord sees, His servant’s work is done, and he is received on high into the saints’ everlasting rest, then indeed the death of His saint is precious in His sight.

Fifty-seven years ago Elijah Kellogg began his life ministry as a preacher of the Gospel in the humble village of Harpswell Centre, where a few days past it was ended. What minister of Maine has ever been more widely known and loved by its people than was this saintly and revered preacher? As a young man of thirty years but recently from Andover Theological Seminary, he began his ministry among the Harpswell people; as an aged saint of God, nearly eighty-eight years old, known and loved far and wide in our land, he closed that ministry in his death, among the people he had seen grow up from childhood to declining age. He had baptized the children of those who were his first parishioners. He had buried the parents and in many instances the grandparents of those who loved, revered, and supported him during the last years of his laborious ministry.

If we ask why he remained among them, when called to other and more inviting fields of labor; why, when this honored Second Parish invited him to its pastorate in the time of its strength and prime, he declined to leave the little country church of forty or fifty members, the answer is, because he loved the Harpswell people. They were his first love, and they were his last love. Highly privileged people! God-blessed church! To have had this holy man of God living among them, passing by them continually, speaking God’s truth to them, serving them in their homes, their fields, their boats, their sanctuary, in the Christ-spirit of devotion, and living out his rich, fruitful life of faith among them to its end, content and satisfied to have their love and gratitude, and with his dying breath speaking his last loving benediction upon them every one. It has been a beautiful life of service,—a noble ministry for God and humanity.

We have often wondered what Elijah Kellogg would have been had he chosen to take his father’s pulpit, and the position and the prominence which it would have given him in our city and throughout our state. It might possibly have made of him a grander preacher than he was—and few are the preachers that ever came to Portland pulpits who drew larger or more satisfied congregations than did he; it might have made of him a more influential clergyman in our state than he was. But who will say he could have developed a grander character or won a fairer fame than now belong to him?

Elijah Kellogg was a man of deep and fervid piety—a man of prayer. There are guest chambers in our city where his voice has been heard in prayer for hours at a time, the memory of which is a benediction. There is a chamber on Munjoy Hill, in which I have often slept, which Elijah Kellogg frequently occupied as the guest of one of his former Harpswell families. In that chamber he wrote parts of many of his surpassing juvenile stories, and there he prayed often and long.

Being a man of prayer, it was his wish and will to abide where God would have him. It was God’s will that of the fifty-eight years of his ministry, the Harpswell people should have his service nearly all of the time for forty-three years, and part of the time each of the remaining fifteen years. During the ten years he was minister of the Seaman’s Bethel in Boston, as chaplain of the Seaman’s Friend society, he spent his summer in his Harpswell home, preaching and ministering to the people. Counting out the five years of his Topsham pastorate, we may say that his connection with the church of Harpswell Centre was practically unbroken for fifty-three years, and during his pastorate in Topsham he continued to dwell in his Harpswell home.

His work in Boston brought out one prominent characteristic of his ministry: his interest in and love of young men. Elijah Kellogg was every man’s friend, but he was preËminently the friend and helper of young men. As he delighted to write books for boys, which helped them to become right-minded and true-hearted young men, so he aimed in preaching and by personal effort to reach and save young men. He did so conspicuously in Boston. At the time when Dr. Stone was pastor of Park Street Congregational church, Mr. Kellogg was preaching in the Mariners’ church of that city. At that time Dr. Charles G. Finney was at work as a revivalist with Dr. Stone. Rev. Mr. Kellogg had been, and was then and subsequently, in the habit of meeting a class of young men in Dr. Stone’s chapel. From among those young men he trained Christian workers and led them down into the slums of the North End to help him in his work of holding meetings on the wharves.

One of those young men I knew years afterward, who devoted much of his spare time aiding Elijah Kellogg in his good work among the tempted classes of the North End. Two years later that young man came to Portland to live. He became a worker, then a member, of the St. Lawrence Street church. When Mr. Kellogg was back again in Harpswell, this young man was a prominent merchant and politician, and a well-known Christian worker in this city.

At the dedication of the new St. Lawrence Congregational church in 1897, Mr. Kellogg made two memorable addresses, in one of which he alluded to the lamented Henry H. Burgess, who had died in 1893, in these words: “When I was preaching in Boston, Henry H. Burgess was the bookkeeper for a paint and oil firm in that city, and a member of the Park Street Sunday-school. I was preaching at that church, and saw that the people were sending out old men to gather the young men into the Sunday-school. I told them they would never do any good in that way, and asked them why they did not send out young men to do this work. They said they did not have any young men to do it, and I said I would get some of them for the purpose. I preached one sermon, and the first Sunday after that I walked fifteen young men into that Sunday-school, with Henry Burgess at their head, and the next Sunday in came twenty more, and so on, until finally the building was crowded to its utmost capacity, and we had young men to work for us.

“When Henry Burgess came to Portland from Boston, I gave him a letter of introduction to Dr. Carruthers. He is no longer here,” continued the aged speaker, while tears of emotion coursed down his bronzed cheeks, “but though absent in the body, he is rejoicing here with us in the spirit.”

They loved each other, this aged minister and that strong young man, and they were helpful to each other. They have changed eyes and clasped hands, now, I believe, in the eternal home of the saints.

It was during Mr. Kellogg’s life in Boston, in his home on Pinckney Street, that he wrote his marvellous books for young people. Is there here man or woman, young man or maiden, who has not read them and received from them moral tone and stamina? Perhaps it is true to say, and no discredit to Mr. Kellogg to say, that he was more widely known as author than as preacher, and that he has probably done more for the moral health of American youth by his breezy, fascinating books than by his work as preacher and pastor. Yea, he has been a mighty preacher to young Americans by the eloquence of his industrious pen.

It would, I believe, be difficult to find an author who wrote with a more definite and practical aim to Christianize young people than did Elijah Kellogg, or one who had better success in the attainment of his high and noble purpose. Mr. Kellogg possessed a genius for that kind of literary work. That he had, in early years, the latent art of an accomplished rhetorician was proved in his student days, when he wrote and declaimed “Spartacus to the Gladiators,” while in Andover Theological Seminary. It is well, doubtless, that Mr. Kellogg’s literary genius was directed to the humbler, yet more practical and serviceable, art of writing books for the moral and religious culture of the young.

As a preacher Mr. Kellogg was great, both in the art of making and in the forceful presentation of the sermon. Rhetorical finish and enlivening humor were alike natural and easy to him. I never have heard a preacher who seemed more thoroughly to enjoy the effort of preaching, and few preachers excelled him in the ability to make his audience enjoy the sermon. How quickly could he change the amused interest of the congregation in the play of his humor into serious and solemn emotion by the power and pathos of his forceful appeals, applying the teaching of his sermon to the conscience and the heart.

He was a man of quick and responsive sympathies. His whole life was characterized by the spirit of Christian benevolence. He not only gave himself to his people to be ever and always their servant in things spiritual, but as truly in things temporal. He was their counsellor and helper in all their heavenly and earthly concerns. It was the habit of his life to keep a purse for the Lord, into which went one-tenth of all moneys received by him. Thus he furnished himself, systematically, with the means to extend aid to those whose sufferings appealed to his sympathies. It is said that he gave beyond his means, and often to his own embarrassment. His services as a preacher were in constant demand, from churches far and near, and he responded when he could. Not a few churches have been blessed by his labors, at different intervals, during his Harpswell pastorate. Here in Portland he was greatly beloved. For nearly one year he was the continual supply of the St. Lawrence Street church, and in the thought of its older members he is regarded as one of its pastors. Portland claimed him as her own. He preached at Cumberland Mills, at Wellesley, Rockport, and New Bedford, Massachusetts, and in other places he has served the church of God. The Congregational church in New Bedford extended to him a call, as did this Second Parish. But he refused all such calls, being unwilling to make any final severance from his beloved Harpswell people.

In 1889, after the close of his Topsham pastorate, he resumed full pastoral care of the Harpswell church, which had been served by others during his work elsewhere, and there he remained until God called him home. It was a wonder to us all how this venerable man, with the infirmities of extreme old age creeping upon him, could still keep on preaching in his eighty-eighth year, two sermons each Sunday, and ministering as a pastor to his flock.

His last visit to Portland was during “the Old Home week” in August, 1900. He opened the festivities of that notable week by preaching Sunday morning in this Second Parish church, upon invitation of its pastor, and preaching again in the evening of that day at Yarmouth; returning Monday morning to the residence of his niece in the old homestead of his honored father, the first pastor of this Second Parish church, who died in that historic house on Cumberland Street in 1842, aged eighty years.

Elijah Kellogg married, after the age of forty, Hannah Pomeroy, the daughter of the Rev. Thaddeus Pomeroy, pastor at Gorham, Maine, from 1832 to 1839. Two children survive this union, both residing in Melrose Highlands, Massachusetts, Frank Gilman Kellogg and Mary Catherine, the wife of Mr. Harry Batchelder. I was called to officiate at the funeral service of their mother in the Cumberland home referred to, and rode to the grave with her sorrowing husband. Returning from the cemetery, the aged, grief-stricken man, said, “Now I will return to my home to be alone with my God.” His words have been living in my memory ever since. They implied that he was sure of finding the God of all comfort in that secluded and desolated home on Harpswell’s shore. Who doubts but the God we love dwelt there with his aged servant, strengthening and supporting him in his loneliness and sorrow?

His children desired greatly to have their father with them in their pleasant homes, but he chose to dwell among the people whom God gave him to serve unto the end. “I will die in the harness,” he would say, in answer to their appeals. I have from the lips of his son the words of the last prayer he was heard to offer some days before his death. “I thank God for a Christian mother, who consecrated me to Christ and the Christian ministry,”—the prayer was followed by his repeating of the twenty-third Psalm.... Just before Elijah Kellogg passed away from earth, he delivered this touching message for his Harpswell flock, “I want to send my love to all these people.” Having loved his own, like his dear Lord, he loved them unto the end. Yesterday the message was delivered to them by Professor Chapman in his funeral discourse. The very last words of this venerable man of God, this faithful shepherd of God’s people, were, “I am so thankful.”

Let us not attempt to interpret the words; they teach us that his Christian heart was overflowing with gratitude to God. He was dying in a good old age, his children around him, his people near him. He was gathered to his fathers after a long, faithful, heroic, and noble life. He leaves with us a most precious and a most blessed memory. Our hearts, too, are full of gratitude to God for the life of Elijah Kellogg on earth.

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