alone. He tutored a boy in the family of the Hon. John Stoddard.
Upon returning to New York in the fall of 1853, he was mentally and financially ready to apply at Union Seminary. There is little information at Union of his year of study. He was, however, back in his home town among worthy companions, doing graduate work in religion and generally getting into the specifics of his training for the ministry.
There was another hiatus ahead for the prospective seminarian. His father's brother, Alexander, operated a private school in Lee, Massachusetts, and brought Charles there to teach the school year 1854-1855. There was some reluctance on Charles' part, but he felt the obligation to aid his family and not benefit at the expense of the younger children. So he taught school for his uncle.
But that year was not the end of the break with seminary plans. It was during this year that his father, Joseph Hyde, sought a better environment for the children's upbringing and moved to a farm in the southern Berkshires close to the village of Sheffield and only a few miles from Lee where he opened a school as his brother Alexander had done. He called it the Sheffield Private Boarding School. One of the principal factors in this decision was the availability of Charles, by now a teacher of some experience. It was again with some misgiving that Charles entered into the life of the school his father had set. It was not a large school and was conducted in the farmhouse where lived his parents, his two brothers and four sisters.
Large or not, the work was demanding, for not only did he manage the school and teach, he worked at the farm chores. The eldest in the family, he had little choice but to stay with this routine and this he did without complaint for four years.
He was busy with the school and farm work but not too busy to obtain a license to preach from the Berkshire South Association in Lenox on April 15, 1856. He appeared as "supply" preacher many Sundays in Sheffield, Lenox, and Lee. After five years of teaching, with what savings he had in his purse and with his father's blessing, he entered Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey, in the fall of 1859. His plan was to earn a degree in theology and enter the ministry. He completed the two-year course in one.
Princeton was a seminary of stern orthodoxy. It was not only a discipline for him but it gave him an understanding and sympathy for Presbyterian theology which he came to realize differed very little from his Congregational faith; there was a difference in polity but little in theology. It was likely the early connection with a Presbyterian seminary that confused writers who were dealing with some phase or other of his life in later years. He was frequently labeled a Presbyterian.
The autonomy and democratic humanitarianism of the Congregational church were his guidelines; these from his Hyde inheritance. He was reared in that atmosphere. Congregationalism became almost a synonym for Puritanism through its freedom of worship in a self-governing church body. This was the essence of the Congregationalism of his youth.
The Rev. Gardiner Spring at Princeton was one of young Hyde's favorite professors, a Calvinist and a great teacher. Through the scholarly leadership of this man and the earlier earthy teaching of schoolmaster Mark Hopkins, Hyde was taken unquestioningly to a full acceptance of the theology of Calvin and the freedom of worship and autonomy of the Congregational Church.
Seminarian Hyde, upon graduation from Princeton in June 1860, was ready for his first church. Surprisingly, the first call came easily and without much ceremony. He was asked to supply in the pulpit of a church in a tiny Connecticut hamlet by the Biblical name of Goshen, a rural church serving a little band of Christians who made church history. By broad coincidence this may well have possessed the unconscious suggestion leading to a career in Hawaii for the Rev. Mr. Hyde who could not have missed sensing the tradition established in the 1819 ordination of two missionaries.
On September 28, 1819 Hiram Bingham and Asa Thurston who were to be members of the historic first missionary company to the Sandwich Islands in 1820, had been ordained at this Goshen Congregational Church. They were to return to that same church in September 1869 for the 50th anniversary of their ordination. The sesquicentennial of the 1819 ordination was commemorated at the same church under its new name, United Church Congregational on September 27, 1969. It was so strong a sense of tradition in Goshen that this church became known as the "birthplace of the Hawaiian Mission."
He started preaching in Goshen in the late summer of 1860 and continued there with fair regularity until the early part of 1862. Since he was a supply pastor he was not regularly "called" to the Goshen pastorate; hence, his name does not appear in the official roster of the church.
The small rural quality of this church did not constitute much of a challenge administratively or in pastoral relations but it gave nearby churches a chance to look him over.
The deacons of the Brimfield Congregational Church came, liked what they saw, and gave the young minister his first opportunity at a regular "called" town congregation. He was still single and 30 years of age. Any consideration, thus, was his own responsibility and he decided to go to Brimfield.
NOTES
1. Williams College, Catalog, intro.
2. President Garfield, one of Mark Hopkins' pupils, said, "A log in the woods would be a university if President Hopkins sat on one end of it and a student on the other."
3. Henry Knight Hyde, Charles M. Hyde, A Memorial (Ware, Mass., Eddy Press, 1901), pp. 5-11.
4. Ibid.
5. Williams College, Bulletin, Report First Decennial Meeting Class of 1852, Williams-town 1862.
Chapter 2
THE BRIMFIELD "CALL"
THE BULKY, rather stilted, autonomous ordination processes of a Congregational church were first officially applied in the career of Charles McEwen Hyde upon his receiving the call to his first full pastorate at Brimfield, Massachusetts. This call in the words of his son, ". . . came to him largely through the influence of his uncle William at Ware, who was well and favorably known by the Brookfield conference of churches.
"The church in Brimfield [the Brimfield Church and Society] had a long history back of it, having been organized in 1724 when the township included parts of what are now Palmer, Monson, Warren, Holland and Wales.
"Beginning at a time of close union between church and state when none but church members could vote at town elections, when the bounds of parish and town were co-terminal, and when the population was equally taxed for the support of both, it had exercised a most important influence in the town's history."1
This beautiful New England town, founded in 1731, is somewhat off the mainstream of traffic and is therefore preserved esthetically and culturally today, in the same appearance and with the same town manners as in 1862.
Henry Hyde goes on about the town and its people:
The town itself was one of the oldest in Western Massachusetts and though not large, possessed a number of families of good New England stock, in many cases the descendants of the first settlers. Nestling peacefully among the hills, the lack of water-power had fortunately prevented the desecration of its natural beauty by the erection of mills and factories. The railroads too had passed it by and so, larger than many New England rural communities, it had retained the characteristics of the best stage of development of such towns.
Almost entirely agricultural in its interests the town has ever maintained an active interest in church and educational work, thus living up to its best inherited traditions. The men enjoyed discussions of knotty religious problems and the women planned for the aid of religious enterprises far removed from their own borders: a people hard to move, not given to outward manifestations of enthusiasm, yet possessed of the saving characteristics of honesty and common-sense, not treating the deep things of life lightly but according them the reverence they deserved. . .A rural community like this, somewhat removed from direct contact with the larger movements of the world, naturally becomes more or less self-centered and the harmless gossip of the neighborhood relieves the pressure of isolation. As when the New England farmer makes a new clearing and starts to cultivate the land before given to forest growth, he finds the soil strong; so, when the New Englander's reserve is cleared away