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.
