Elder Wheat and The Condemned Child
- Alisa Kline
- Nov 27, 2024
- 8 min read
Updated: Nov 29, 2024
Elder Wheat was the second settled minister in Canaan. He arrived twenty-three years after the departure of local-boy-made-good Thomas Baldwin, who left for bigger things in 1790.
After Baldwin’s departure, Canaan went twenty-three years without a stated pastor. Twenty-three years of the long-winded trio of amateur preachers leading endless and tedious services. Every time a group formed to hire a preacher, which would require the payment of his salary, one reason or another got in the way. Either it was personal or doctrinal and Wallace suggests it was stirred up by the local elect who didn’t want to give up their speaking time.
The damn finally broke in 1813 making way for Elder Wheat.
Page 188
For many years previous to this date there had been no “stated” preaching. The people who professed to be Christians, were divided into cliques, and there were several persons who aspired to do the preaching.
They could talk long and loud, and because of this “gift” they successfully opposed the raising of money to pay “hireling” preachers from abroad. The people endured these gifted talkers with long suffering patience, and there seemed to be no remedy except in quiet submission or in active opposition.
The same persons who had disturbed and driven Elder Baldwin out of town, had exercised their gifts upon Elder Uriah Smith, upon Elder Ezra Wilmarth, upon Rev. Aaron Cleveland and other candidates for the pulpit down to 1813, when a united effort was made to break up the gifted monopoly and introduce an era of things that should be respectable, orderly and systematic.
Wallace revered Canaan’s early settlers for their sturdy perseverance and unshakable faith. These were not men of learning, but they were men of the bible and they were honored by Wallace for their wisdom and strength. That was the mold from which Elder Wheat was cut.
Page 188
53 years old, ripe and manly, with large experiences of human grief and suffering; would he come to Canaan, take charge of the souls in this church and gather up and soften the flinty hearts that were laughing at the dissensions among the saints? They sent their committee, he came, and preached a sermon two hours long. He told them he was a Baptist, but he was a Christian. They liked him, organized a society, and gave him an invitation to join his fortunes with theirs.
And so began a relationship that was to last nearly 15 years. But not without a few bumps along the way.
When Elder Wheat described himself as a Baptist but also a Christian, he was making clear that he felt able to minister to those of different denominations. The Meeting House did not belong to the Baptists, it belonged to the town. Because Baptists were by far the sect with the greatest numbers, they came to control the Sunday service. Periodically, the Baptists would give way to a Congregationalist or Methodist minister for a day. Navigating these quietly swirling waters would be the greatest task of every minister Wallace writes about from here going forward.
Page 190
Elder Wheat was a careful man in his intercourse with the people. He had cheerful words and friendly advice for every one. His labors in the pulpit were arduous; his prayers and sermons were almost of indefinite length, and he delighted in the loud music of his great choir, never omitting any of the stanzas in the longest hymns.
He labored everywhere, and was called often to attend funerals. In those sad occasions he was a very effective speaker, being naturally sympathetic and weeping with the mourners.
Please remember Wallace telling you how great Elder Wheat was at funerals, because he’s also going to provide some dramatic evidence that this might not always have been the case.
Wallace as a boy knew Elder Wheat. He was the minister Wallace grew up under and his writing about him still has a bit of a boy’s hero worship about it.
Page 190
As a soldier he had endured great hardships. One incident in his camp life he used to relate with much feeling. He was captured by the Indians and taken through the woods to Canada. After a time he made his escape and started out alone through the then unbroken forest, two hundred miles.
There were a few houses and small clearings along the upper waters of the Connecticut River, the smallpox prevailed in Canada, and the people along the clearings placed him in quarantine, not allowing him to come near their houses by day or night. He would come near a house and call to the people for food, then he would retire a considerable distance while they brought out victuals, and placing it upon a stump, eat and go on his way.
He passed through Canaan on that journey on his way to his friends in the southern part of the state.
On being asked if he ever killed any person during his seven years’ service, he would pause, draw a long breath, and say with a sigh, “I s’pose I’ve been the death of six hearty men.”
Wheat’s strain of Baptist faith was equally vigorous and manly.
Page 191
He was a great stickler for baptism; there was no salvation without going down deep into the water. It was his custom to wade far out until the water nearly reached his arm pits and when he had said the formula in that loud singing tone that echoed back from the woods on the opposite shore, he would plunge the candidate nearly to the bottom, bringing him up again with a jerk.
Elder Wheat farmed and remained vigorous into old age. Thus ends Wallace’s formal discussion of Elder Wheat in the book chapter The Baptist Church. But that’s not Elder Wheat’s last appearance in Wallace’s History, although it might be considered his high point.
On page 464, in the chapter titled simply Incidents, we get this account of Elder Wheat at a funeral for John Worth’s wife in 1816. It helps before reading to know that Thomas Paine wasn’t merely a founding father, he was also the author of The Age of Reason which, at the time, was considered to be a rejection of Christianity. Later scholarship came to see it as merely a rejection of the organized church. It wasn't popular in the faith community.
Page 464
The funeral was held in the meeting house one Sunday, which was thronged with sympathizing friends. Elder Wheat preached a long sermon on death and the darkness of the grave, taking for his text a whole chapter, and placing special emphasis upon the phrase, “Where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.”
For the first hymn the elder requested the choir to sing that screed by Doctor Watts, which is supposed to have been written when the doctor was oppressed by nightmare or indigestion. The verse reads:
“My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
Damnation and the dead!
What horrors seize the guilty soul
Upon a dying bed.”
[…]Pushee refused to sing it. […]
After his sermon he made a general address to the mourners. Then he became personal, and the ludicrous incidents which followed are related by an eye-witness.
He said he “had always been told that Brother Worth [the man burying his wife] was a courteous man, kind and considerate to everybody, lovin’ and honorin’ his wife as a true husband; but I learn with sorrow,” he continued, raising his voice, “that he is a convert to the helldamnin’, heaven-darin’, God-provokin ‘ doctrines of Tom Paine, the infidel author of the ‘Age of Reason’ Now, my duty to my God and my people, required me, even here in the presence of the remains of his lamented partner, who this day is restin’ peacefully in the arms of Jesus, to rebuke the devil and all.”
And there is no telling what the good elder might not have said, had he been permitted to finish his rebuke, but at this point an interruption occurred. Hon. Daniel Blaisdell rose in his pew with great energy and stood leaning forward with one hand extended, and mouth open to speak, with his wife, hanging to his coat tails. But Stephen Worth, the chief mourner, got the start of him, exclaiming, as he rose up that, “the time and place for such unfeeling remarks, even if they were well deserved, were ill chosen.”
[…] The elder, like the rest of them, was in confusion and when the uproar subsided a little, he quite grimly declared that he had spoken from report. He was glad to learn that Brother Worth was not an infidel, and even if he were, perhaps it would not become him to judge him.
Then the long services which had occupied nearly all day, were brought to a conclusion and the body laid away in the ground. Afterwards, when Judge Blaisdell met the elder, he asked him “what evil spirit beset him to attack Stephen Worth at that funeral. It was an unheard of outrage, such as only a crazy or drunken man would commit. Had he — ?”
Well, he had — for his stomach’s sake. It was good for him, and gave him courage and confidence.” “Yes,” retorted the judge, “and your courage, as you call it, caused you grievously to afflict a good man, whose heart is heavy with grief at the loss of a wife he loved. You, old man of God! to make a public scandal on such an occasion! Go now; commit no more such folly!”
Elder Wheat preached in Canaan for seventeen years after that event, but never made a similar speech at a funeral.
Really? He never made a similar speech at a funeral? Then explain this briefly noted speech at a funeral that we don’t get to until page 515. It is buried in a genealogical note about Daniel Blaisdell’s son William. This is from the chapter Old Families. Paragraph break and emphasis mine
4. William, b. March 11, 1789: m. Hannah Follensbee of
Grafton and had seven ch. ; Alvah, who m. Margaret Dunbar at X’ashua : m. 2d and had three ch. William A., son of William, Horace, Harrison, Alzoa, and two nameless.
At the funeral of one of them [one of the two nameless children who died in infancy] Elder Wheat preached the sermon, and stated his belief that “this infant was unregenerate, and is now writhin’ in burnin’ flames of hell.” William was angry. Left the Baptist Church and joined the Congregationalists, and ever afterwards refused to listen to Elder Wheat’s preaching.
I would say that this counts as another event where Elder Wheat proved somewhat unreliable at a funeral.
Just so you aren’t left thinking Elder Wheat a monster for his believing that William Blaisdell’s infant son was burning in Hell, he was merely following doctrine. I’m assuming that the parents of the dead infant were credo-baptists, who didn’t believe that a person could be baptized until they were able to make a reasoned decision to accept the divinity of Christ. Infants were not capable and so had to wait to be baptized.
In the older church, and in many modern churches, children were baptized at birth to insure their entry into heaven. Given his belief that without baptism, the soul is condemned to hell, it makes some sense that Elder Wheat believed this unbaptized infant was in hell, but the funeral was probably not the place for this discussion.
It is not related if Elder Wheat was drunk upon that occasion as well.
This is all more evidence that the History Wallace(s) produced wasn’t curated in the way a writer would usually shape their own work. Some of the chapters are direct copies of articles Wallace wrote for local publications in the 1880s. He clearly wrote those with an audience in mind.
But then, elsewhere in that great and dense volume, you will run into events that seem related to one of the set-piece articles. In some cases, the new events merely support the more formal telling. But in others, they add new light. This is particularly true when he writes about Noyes Academy, which comes up again and again throughout the book, wandering far and wide from the well-crafted chapter.
I am grateful for the whole messy jumble of it, but it does push me towards being a detective and wondering if some of the jotted notes and scribbled judgments might contain material upsetting to family members still living in Canaan. Perhaps his book wasn’t meant for publication in its entirety. But thanks to his devoted son, we get to pore over the whole, great patchwork mess of it.
Gary's paintings this week are an exploration of that weird, yellowy, winter morning light and the farmers who go to work as the sun is rising much as they did in Elder Wheat's time.
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