Fifty-seven years ago Elijah Kellogg began his life ministry as a preacher of the Gospel in the humble village of Harpswell Centre, where a few days past it was ended. What minister of Maine has ever been more widely known and loved by its people than was this saintly and revered preacher? As a young man of thirty years but recently from Andover Theological Seminary, he began his ministry among the Harpswell people; as an aged saint of God, nearly eighty-eight years old, known and loved far and wide in our land, he closed that ministry in his death, among the people he had seen grow up from childhood to declining age. He had baptized the children of those who were his first parishioners. He had buried the parents and in many instances the grandparents of those who loved, revered, and supported him during the last years of his laborious ministry.
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?