This text is part of:
[p. 118] beliefs which these men held, this, at least, none will question, that their religion bred men and women of sturdy, self-denying character, and prepared the way for a nation based on freedom and the rights of man. It was most fortunate that the ecclesiastical polity was in harmony with the spirit of liberty, that democracy in the church went hand in hand with democracy in the state. It was good when the time came that church and state were separated here and when; in 1833, the last remains of the connection of the church with the civil power were removed, religion entered upon a freer and wider career. The portrait of Rev. Ebenezer Turell, from which the frontispiece in this number of the Register is taken, was given to the First Church in Medford by Dudley Hall, Sen., father of the late Dudley C. Hall, to whom it came by inheritance from Turell Tufts, of Medford. It was loaned at one time to the Hon. Samuel Turell Armstrong, Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts, and a great-grand-nephew of Rev. Mr. Turell. The loan of the picture was continued to Mr. Armstrong's widow and on her death was returned to the church. The name of the painter of the portrait is not known, so far as can be learned.
Medford, MA. 1900.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.