before but a small part of the people had been admitted. Prayer was offered by Rev. M. L. Richardson of Sturbridge, after which the president delivered the address of welcome, introducing the orator of the day, Rev. G. M. Hyde, D. D.
. . . it was voted "that the Rev. G. M. Hyde, D. D., be requested to write out for publication, with such additional facts as he may wish to incorporate, his historical address on the early history of Brimfield delivered October 11, 1876."13
Carefully and thoroughly he assembled thick files of notes, and was preparing the manuscripts when the interrupting hand of providence was laid on his head; now, his destiny was in Hawaii. He could not deliver the Lee Centennial Address, nor could he finish the town's history. He turned over the completion of the task to his uncle Alexander; with the work so far advanced, he was credited with the authorship. The Brimfield book was also given over to other hands, but again, because the notes, statistics, and genealogies had been largely completed, Hyde was designated author. This history was published in 1879, the Lee history in 1878.
He was hard at work on the research and text of the histories when an inquiry from the American Board of his possible interest in the mission position in Hawaii reached him. This was in November 1876.
His life was confusion in the agonizing weeks of consideration until January 16, 1877 when the clouds lifted and he could see his way clear to a new horizon, the Hawaiian Islands.
NOTES
1. Henry Knight Hyde, op. cit., pp. 23-24.
2. Centre Congregational Church Records, 1856-1886.
3. Henry Knight Hyde, op. cit., pp. 21-22.
4. Monday Evening Club of Haverhill, Minutes. "December 12, 1870. Rev. C. M. Hyde nominated for membership . . . January 61, 1871. Rev. G. M. Hyde ballotted on and the result was unanimous."
5. Letter Donald C. Freeman to author, Jan. 6, 1970.
6. Jean S. Pond and Dale Mitchell, Bradford, A New England School (Haverhill, 1954).
7. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions of Boston was largely a non-denominational effort. In this book it is referred to as the American Board, ABCFM, or simply, Boston.
8. Centre Congregational Church Records, 1856-1886, Nov. 18, 1875.
9. Ibid., Dec. 1.
10. Ibid., Dec. 15.
11. The Rev. Charles M. Clark, Historical Sermon given at the 75th Anniversary exercises of Centre Church Oct. 11-12, 1908. Clark was The Waldo Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Bangor Theological Seminary.
12. Charles M. Hyde, Lee, A Centennial and a History (Springfield, Mass., Clark W. Bryan & Co., 1878), pp. 352.
13. Charles M. Hyde, History of Brimfield, Historical Celebration of the Town of Brimfield (Springfield, Mass., Clark W. Bryan & Co., 1879).
Chapter 4
"BEHOLD . . . AN OPEN DOOR"
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK, discoverer of the Hawaiian Islands, seldom was wrong even in prediction. The Rev. Dr. Hyde, however, was later to allude to one error in Cook's judgment in a sermon to the newly organized Central Union Congregational Church in Honolulu:
In Captain Cook's account of his Voyages to the South Seas, when he has given his description of the people whom he had seen, he says in regard to the probability of their even hearing the Gospel: "It is very unlikely that any measure of this kind should be seriously thought of, as it can neither serve the purpose of public ambition, nor private avarice, and will without such inducements, I may pronounce that it will never be undertaken." What a mistake Captain Cook made in his calculations! How little did he imagine that his published narrative of what he had seen, was one of the divine providences for accomplishing the very thing which he predicted would never be undertaken! It was Carey's reading Cook's Voyages that stirred his heart with the desire to go to the heathen, and so the whole vast scheme of Modern Christian Missions originated.1
It was the fortuitous placement of a native Hawaiian boy, Henry Obookiah,2 in friendly Congregational hands in Connecticut that led to his becoming the first native Hawaiian to be baptized as a Congregational church member, April 9, 1815. He had shipped aboard the Triumph, a trading vessel, in Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, in 1808. He was sixteen. Befriended by the Captain of the ship, then by students at New Haven's Yale College and by members of New England churches, the young Hawaiian went from total illiteracy to eloquence in English in less than a decade. His short ten years in Connecticut inspired the American Board to an action that would irrevocably involve the Sandwich Islands, as Hawaii was then familiarly known.
In two contrasting coincidences, young Henry arrived in New Haven about the time of the founding of the American Board and died in Cornwall, Connecticut February 17, 1818, close to the date of the death of Kamehameha I of Hawaii. The first company of missionaries was formed in 1819 and sailed to establish the American Board's first mission in Hawaii.
The mission, supported by sailing after sailing of successive "companies" of missionaries, extended to 1863. In those 43 years3 more than 50,000 natives were received into the church, solid coral stone meeting houses were erected, the Hawaiian language was reduced to writing with an alphabet of its own, the Bible was translated from the Greek. A constitutional monarchy and a public school system were established. Private boarding schools for the native boys and girls were opened on all the islands. The churches flourished with large congregations. The gospel message had reached a large majority of the Hawaiians.
Then "came the time where the islands were to be recognized as nominally a Christian nation and the responsibility of their Christian institutions was to be rolled on themselves."4 The Civil War was placing a strain on American Board finances and this, coupled with strong demands for service from all quarters of the globe, hastened a visit to Hawaii by Dr. Rufus Anderson, senior secretary of the American Board.
In June 1863 he met with the Hawaiian Evangelical Association for twenty-one days of debate. The Association agreed to assume the responsibility for self-support and autonomy and no longer look to the American churches for management and control. The mission, as such, was disbanded.
John Erdman, seventy five years later, commented on that "annual Meeting of the Missionaries in 1863 [at which] several momentous questions were decided":
First, should the large parishes handled by the missionary fathers be divided into a number of separate churches and Hawaiian ministers be placed in charge of them? The answer was yes, and this was adopted as a policy so that gradually the original 22 churches, during the next 10-year period, became 58 with only six of them under haole5 pastors.
Another great question was, should new missionaries be sent from America to fill vacancies caused by death and withdrawal of the early missionary fathers? The meeting decided that although there was still work to be done by the missionaries, probably the children of the missionaries who knew the Hawaiian language could meet the situation. Previous to 1863 the Hawaiian Evangelical Association had been composed of missionaries only, but now the constitution was amended so as to include Hawaiian ministers and a certain number of deacons, and the language of the meetings became Hawaiian.
This momentous gathering also set up an Executive Board called the Board of the Hawaiian Evangelical Association composed of 18 elected members, six of whom were Hawaiians. This Board was authorized to help needy churches, to send missionaries to other lands, to train ministers for the churches, to train suitable wives for them, and to publish books.
Thus was the whole missionary movement radically altered. Rev. S. C. Damon in the Friend of July 1863 states, "This marks an important crisis in our ecclesiastical affairs. Hereafter we shall refer to 1863 as the period when the Christian Evangelical Community on the Islands attained its majority and assumed the attributes of manhood."
The church work had been set up and geared to minister to a homogeneous people speaking one language, living a simple life. But that people in the next four decades rapidly diminished in number from 67,000 in 1860 to less than 38,000 in 1900. Rulers