The Cornerstone
a brief life of John Murray for young people, by Irene Carrow Rees
XIV. Across the Border
Chapter XIV
ACROSS THE BORDER
"The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day."
LONGFELLOW.
His years of fatiguing travel with exposure to all kinds of weather and
the nights he had spent in prayer and preaching, began to tell upon Mr.
Murray's vigorous frame. At sixty-nine, he was an old man and growing
very feeble. His mind was keen as ever and his genial spirits were
still the life of every company he entered.
He was present at the installation of Rev. Edward Turner at Salem, June 22, 1809, and made the dedicatory prayer. It was almost the last time he took part in any special service. Mr. Richards of Portsmouth preached the sermon. The eager attention of the white-haired Father Murray, "as they had begun to call him, so moved Mr. Richards that he suddenly turned and seized him by the hand, exclaiming in the words of Elisha to Elijah, "My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and the horseman thereof. The act was startlingly sudden and Mr. Murray shook with emotion.
On October 19, 1809, came the stroke of paralysis which made him a helpless cripple for six years. He bore the trial with patience and sweetness. If there was any time when he showed rebellion of spirit it was when the bells rang for church on Sunday and he could not obey their call. Then sometimes he turned his face to the wall to hide the tears which streamed down his cheeks.
Once in a while at some special service or when the weather was particularly favorable, he was taken to church. On such occasions, the waiting people rose and stood in reverential silence as their white-haired old pastor was carried down the aisle by his strong young friends.
The Bible seemed always open before him. Mrs. Murray said that "he enjoyed excursions into all literature, but the Bible was his home." People came to him with their joys and their sorrows. Clergymen of differing denominations sought his advice or his interpretations of disputed Scriptural questions.
On the morning of August 27,1815, he became alarmingly ill, but he rallied and his physician told him there seemed to be no immediate danger.
"Is the time again put off?" he exclaimed, with a touch of impatience. "I want to go home."
Friday morning, September first, he seemed to lose consciousness of his surroundings. His right hand moved perpetually in a familiar preaching gesture as though he were addressing some invisible congregation. When Mrs. Murray bent her ear to his constantly moving lips, she found he was repeating text after text of Scripture. Saturday evening the restless hand was quiet and the whispering lips were stilled. At six o'clock on Sunday morning, September 3, 1815, without a sigh or quiver, John Murray went "home," as he had longed to do.
The funeral was held the following day from the North Bennet Street Church. The pulpit and galleries were hung with black and a long procession of the little children he had loved preceded the body up the aisle. Mr. Murray's dear friend and successor at Gloucester, Rev. Thomas Jones, preached the funeral sermon, with the text from Ecclesiastics xii, 7. The Rev. Hosea Ballou of Salem, and the Rev. Edward Turner of Charlestown, offered prayer.
He was buried in the Sargent tomb in the Granary Burying-ground. No stone marked the spot, and as the years went by there was a growing feeling among the now prospering Universalists that this was not a fitting burial for their great apostle who had stirred the country with the tidings of Universal Love. The means for the purchase of a lot at Mount Auburn and the erection of a monument was raised by voluntary contributions and on June 8, 1837, the removal took place.
There could be no greater proof of the change which had been wrought in public sentiment toward the Universalists than the tribute of this last service. The First Church was not large enough to hold the crowd which was patiently waiting outside when the doors were thrown open at two o'clock. Sebastian Streeter preached an impressive sermon from Joshua xxiv, 32: "And the bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel brought up out of Egypt, buried they in Shechem, in a parcel of ground which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor."
It was one of Boston's dreariest days, with a cold east wind and a drizzling rain: yet in this town where he had been treated with contempt and even stoned, his body was followed to Mount Auburn by a procession three-quarters of a mile in length and the crowd stood in reverent silence about the grave as Father Ballou preached the committal sermon.
There is probably not a person in the world to-day, and certainly there has not been a Universalist for many years, who holds the same views as did Mr. Murray. Long before his death it was a bitter cross to him that so many of the ministers whom he loved differed from him on doctrinal questions, but the essential principle for which he fought and suffered, the final reconcilement of every soul with the will of God, is still the cornerstone of our faith.
Although we have gained so much by our acceptance of the liberal thought, one cannot but feel in reading the old records that we are in danger of losing a valuable part of our birthright. One never realizes how far he has sailed from shore till he looks back at the ever widening distance between himself and land. So it has seemed in looking backward that we are drifting very far, some of us, from the safe harbor of prayerful consecration which made this pioneer of the liberal faith, willing to bear cheerfully, the contempt of his neighbors and the persecution of the State.
THE END