Elijah Kellogg, the Man and His Work / Chapters from His Life and Selections from His Writings

by Unknown

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.