USA > Alabama > History of the Protestant Episcopal church in Alabama, 1763-1891 > Part 3
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18
*Dr. George F. Cushman's Memorial Sermon, page 17.
46
HISTORY OF THE
discomfiture was complete, yet he had no ground for anger; and the incident gave the chaplain an influ- ence that no amount of preaching could have brought. His chaplaincy marked a new era in the history of the institution.
But the time had come when Mr. Cobbs must exer- cise his great power in a wider field. St. Paul's Church, Petersburg, had for some time been a source of much anxiety to Bishop Meade, who himself took charge of the parish for a few months until he could find some one peculiarly adapted to so difficult a field. He decided that Mr. Cobbs was the man, and called upon him to come to Petersburg, not as a promotion but as a duty.
God's blessing attended Mr. Cobbs' four years rec- torship (1839-43), and a great material and spiritual harvest was reaped.
But circumstances arose which, in 1843, gave him no choice but to leave both Petersburg and Virginia. Bishop Moore had died in 1841, and Bishop Meade had become diocesan. The Assistant Bishop's theo- logical status had been fixed when he called Mr. Cobbs to Petersburg, but Mr. Cobbs' views while unequivo- cally held were not yet so positively set forth. The quietude of Bedford and the intellectuality of Char- lottesville had furnished him opportunity and incentive to study, and he had been growing stronger and broader and deeper in both spirit and intellect. But this growth, instead of degenerating into a vagueness of view that leaves all things unsolved and declares that Christians are but seekers after truth, made his grasp of the
--
47
CHURCH IN ALABAMA.
Faith delivered once for all more definite and uncom- promising. He held to the visibility and divine origin and authority of the Church, and he had come to say that next to his love and reverence for Christ, who was the Head, was his love and reverence for the Church, which was the Body. With such sentiments, he could not but yield the greatest respect to the Book of Common Prayer and abide to the full extent by the directions of the Rubrics. He believed that Friday was a fast day of obligation. He held that, since especial Collects, Epistles and Gospels had been in- corporated by the Church into the Prayer Book, the Church's manifest intention was that the Feast Days should be observed by especial services. Therefore when he went to Petersburg he revived the long- neglected observance of the Church's appointed feast- days and fast-days.
By some of the good people of Virginia, and among them was Bishop Meade, this innocent and pious re- formation was held to be a glaring rag of Ritualism, and an infallible sign of Romish tendencies. Mr. Cobbs' own parishioners found no fault with their rector. But elsewhere some of the laity complained. A few young deacons sniffed, as only deacons can sniff. But the Bishop made his displeasure perceptible throughout the national Church. He had requested the diocese to elect an Assistant Bishop. Dr .* Cobbs was respected by all the clergy and almost idolized by the laity, and to him the eyes of a majority of the Diocesan Convention of 1843 instinctively turned. So
Geneva College had conferred the D. D. on bim in 1812.
48
CHURCH IN ALABAMA.
inanifestly was Dr. Cobbs the all-but-unanimous choice of the delegates that the Bishop, in view of what he deemed a prospective calamity to the Church in Vir- ginia, felt it incumbent upon him to oppose with all his power the selection of a person of such unsound theological and ecclesiastical views. The Bishop's action left no doubt as to Mr. Cobbs' proper course. Through the Rev. Mr. Atkinson, afterwards Bishop of North Carolina, he announced that his name must not be placed before the Convention. In a short while he accepted a call to St. Paul's Church, Cincinnati, Bishop Meade's unprecedented action rendering it impossible for him to remain longer in Virginia.
Scarcely had he entered upon his new work, when the clergy of the diocese of Indiana elected him their Bishop. The laity did not concur in this election, as they deemed his acceptance improbable for many reasons. In the following year he was elected Bishop of Alabama. Not until after his death was it known, even to his family, that in 1841 the House of Bishops had elected him Missionary Bishop of the Republic of Texas, an election which was never sent down to the dioceses, as the lower House thought it inexpedient to assume responsibility for Church extension in that country.
It is a record seldom equalled, and disclosing a char- acter and a reputation seldom paralleled, that a pres- byter should within the period of four years have the eyes of three dioceses and of the Episcopate of the general Church turned upon him as one fit to be a Bishop in the household of the Faith.
.
CHAPTER II.
MISSIONARY CHARACTER OF THE COUNTRY.
B ISHOP COBBS proceeded to Alabama immedi- ately after his consecration, and entered actively upon his episcopal duties in November, 1844.
His work, he soon found, was distinctly the work of an evangelist and pioneer.
In the Tennessee valley two small congregations had been established, at Tuscumbia and Florence, four years before. The church at Huntsville, which had had a nominal existence for ten years, had just celebrated its first birthday as an organization. These three congregations, not numbering fifty communi- cants among them, were the only representatives of the Church in all that portion of the state north of a line drawn due east and west through Tuskaloosa. In Mobile, Christ Church was enjoying that numerical and financial growth that has ever been its good for- tune. It was the one strong parish in the diocese; and rivers, marshes, and pine forests separated it by three hundred miles and two weeks of travel from its nearest neighbor.
All other congregations of the diocese were, without exception, in the Black Belt, or middle district of the state. Their territory extended, in wedge shape, from east to west, with the edge resting upon the Chatta- hoochee river.
This peculiar stratification of the diocese rendered
49
50
HISTORY OF THE
it practically a Missionary Jurisdiction, whose three component parts were separated by great reaches of country either indifferent or hostile to the Church. Not five hundred communicants, whites and blacks, lived in the entire state, and, one-half of the entire number residing in Mobile, it is plain that the re- mainder of the diocese was thinly sown.
. Nor was the prospect of immediate growth at all .promising. Only eight clergymen-six outside of Mobile-were at work, and they necessarily divided their energy among so many interests, and expended their strength in the fatigue of so much travel in priv- ate conveyances over bad roads to minister to widely separated flocks, that the hope of the most sanguine was but to hold and develop the already established congregations. Demopolis, Livingston, and St. John's in the Prairies received the ministrations of the same clergyman. Another served two country churches forty-five miles apart, one in Dallas County and one in Lowndes. Tuskaloosa was, a little later, conjoined with Elyton, fifty miles away. Another clergyman worked the wide-extending field in East Alabama, comprising Yongesboro, Seale, Girard, Auburn, Tus- kegee, Tallassee, La Fayette, and West Point. In Southwest Alabama still another did the work at St. Stephen's, Bladon Springs, Butler, and Pushmataha. * Some fields even broader than these are comprised in a single missionary station today, but comfortable
*Stated services have not for many years been held in any of these places, except Auburn.
.
51
CHURCH IN ALABAMA.
steamboats, good railroads, and fair highways make them actually much more compact.
As weak as the diocese was numerically, it was even weaker financially. Bishop Cobbs came to Ala- bama on a salary of $1,500 a year and traveling ex- penses,* and, although in 1849 the Bishop had by un- tiring work increased the number of clergymen to what was the phenomenal number of eighteen, the number of congregations to twenty-six, and the number of com- municants to more than seven hundred, yet even then the diocese felt able to increase his salary to only $1,750; and this sum included his traveling expenses.
Ministerial salaries were as pitiably small as was the Episcopal salary, and were, in many cases, eked out by school-teaching. One of the largest parishes -a parish that enjoyed this distinction, though having fewer than twenty communicants-promised its rector $300 a year, and intimated the possibility of raising another hundred by the efforts of the women in fairs and mite-meetings. In some cases parishes would not promise their minister any specified sum, but would make the very commercial agreement that the weekly offertory-come rain, come shine-should constitute the rector's salary. This plan, while ob- viously open to serious objection-calling for more trustfulness in parson than in people, making the rec- tor an easy target for congregational caprice, and ren- dering it easy for uncourageous parishes to rid them-
*His traveling expenses in 1845 were $60. Generally he traveled in his own buggy. When he used the stage he was not permitted to pay fare.
.
52
CHURCH IN ALABAMA.
selves of undesirable ministers by the cruel method of "starving them out "-did not work at all badly in comparison with the too frequently experienced sys- tem of promising much and ifregularly paying little. Indeed, those clergymen upon whom the plan was tried bore witness that the salary averaged well, and, coming in regularly, allowed them to settle their grocery bills punctually .*
The meager support given the clergy was partly excusable by the necessity laid upon many congrega- tions of building for themselves houses of worship; but, after all due allowance is made, the great cause still remains: the laity were unwilling to test the Lord's promise to them that bring their tithes into His storehouse. Their penuriousness towards the Church resulted from their false, self-erected standard of spirituality, and felt exculpated by comparison of their own ministers' salaries with the salaries of neighboring Baptist preachers and Methodist circuit- riders. Refusing most properly to set up money as a yard-stick of spirituality, they refused most improper- ly to accept it as a weather-vane.
*Convention Journal for 1852, page 10.
CHAPTER III. MISSIONARY SOWINGS.
H AD a narrower man than Doctor Cobbs become Bishop of Alabama in 1844, it is probable that finding the Church already established in Mobile, Tuskaloosa, Greensboro, Montgomery, Huntsville, and Selma, and a few smaller places, he would have directed every effort towards the upbuilding of the congregations already established. The motive would have been, to make them strong centers of operations in the following generation. The motto would have been, " Concentrate."
But as it was Bishop Cobbs that came to the over- sight of Alabama, such was not the course pursued. The new Bishop's mind reverted to the scattering of the Church from Jerusalem and the consequent spread of the Faith. He felt that men, not parishes, were the proper centers of operations. His motto was, " Diffuse."
In following the line of endeavor suggested by this word, he did not neglect his duty to the flocks already gathered. He visited these first of all. He acquainted himself with them and made them acquainted with himself. When he visited a congregation it was not his chief object to get out of town at the earliest oppor- tunity that decency allowed. He visited the sick and the afflicted at their homes. He catechized the chil- dren in Sunday School. He gathered the Negroes and
53
C
54
HISTORY OF THE
preached them the Gospel. He met with vestries and discussed their present difficulties and future prospects. He counselled with the clergy as brother with brother. Not one of a Bishop's many duties to a congregation did he neglect or willingly forego. He was never happier than when the parish minister unfolded an extensive Episcopal program for the visitation.
But he was not satisfied that a Bishop's duty to his diocese ended with even the most faithful visitation of established congregations. He was not content merely to " fill his appointments " and go back home. As he passed through the country he sought all possible in- formation about isolated Church families and about towns wherein the Church's voice had never been heard. The former he either visited himself or brought to the attention of the nearest clergyman .* The latter he always visited and tested for their ability to receive the Church. In the earlier years of his Episcopate he visited many such places. Willingness to hear him was as warm an invitation as he cared to receive, and this willingness became yearly more and more pronounced among the people of all denominations. Truly insignificant was the unvisited hamlet lying within fifty or one hundred miles of the Bishop's line of travel. Among the first towns and settlements in which he made experiment were Tuskegee, Marion, Burton's Hill, Sumterville, Northport, Mount Meigs, Jacksonville and Montevallo. At every one of these
· * The Bishop kept a register of such persons, ad in 1860 had 103 communicants on this list.
55
CHURCH IN ALABAMA.
·
places a congregation was established, and, Tuskegee and Northport excepted, established permanently.
The almost uniform success that he met with in these pioneer visits impressed deeply upon the Bishop the need for more clergy. He felt that, do what he could, his hands were tied unless he could leave work- inen in the field. In 1846 he pointed, in addition to the towns just mentioned, to Livingston, Lowndesboro, Hayneville, Wetumpka, Eufaula, La Fayette, Talla- dega and Tuscumbia as favorable points for missionary work, in case he could secure missionaries. How true his foresight is indicated by the fact that in all these places but La Fayette and Wetumpka congregations are today living more or less fully the life of the One Body.
The Bishop's missionary zeal inspired the other clergy, and right heartily did they follow the lead of him who said not "Go!" but "Come!" The rector of St. John's, Montgomery, took upon himself the missionary charge of Mount Meigs in Montgomery county, Robinson Springs in Autauga county, Tus- kegee in Macon county, Hayneville in Lowndes county, St. David's in Dallas county, and Wetumpka (now in Elmore county). A little later, when St. Andrew's, Hayneville, had grown to the stature of a parish, its minister watched over the missions at Lowndesboro and Benton in Lowndes county, and Pleasant Hill in Dallas county. In like manner, points about Huntsville, Greensboro, Selma, and Mobile, received ministrations with considerable fre- quency and regularity.
56
CHURCH IN ALABAMA.
It is true that in not a few cases no permanent congregation was formed. There was much going to and fro of population. So young was the state, that Churchmen, like others, did not feel any hereditary love for their homes, and were easily persuaded to try new fields. Old churches passed away, and their congregations dissolved. But the individual mem- bers appeared elsewhere, and, though their personal labors and pecuniary interest were greatly reduced, they were not entirely lost to the Church.
At any rate the missionary work that was done among the villages and on the plantations was done faithfully, and subsequently bore much fruit. The kaleidoscopic changes in town and country congrega- tions, which for awhile seemed to proclaim the vanity of all the labors ministerial that had gone before, in fact brought about a homogeneity of the entire diocese that has in later days been a chief source of strength.
/ CHAPTER IV.
DIFFICULTIES AND DISCOURAGEMENTS.
G
REAT as were the geographical difficulties that beset the Church's growth, the theological difficulties were greater.
Marked distrust pervaded the community as to the evangelical and spiritual character of the Church. The Oxford Movement and the Tracts for the Times were not in sufficient perspective for men to judge rightly of their tendencies. "Puseyism " was a bogy that frightened many men, not merely those within the Church, but multitudes without it. It was felt that the Anglican communion was, somehow, on trial for attempted liaison with Rome. In 1844 the Gen- eral Convention had been importuned to reprehend and condemn "the serious errors in doctrine which have within a few years been introduced and exten- sively promulgated by means of tracts, the press, and the pulpit." This the General Convention had declined to do, and its declaration that "the Church is not responsible for the errors of individuals " was taken as an evasion of the matter-which it undoubt- edly was-and a confession of sympathy with the new-born evils-which it undoubtedly was not.
Newman, Wilberforce, Manning, Faber, and Ward, chief exponents of the so-called Catholic Renascence, seemed to declare the true character of the movement by moving into the Church of Rome. In America, -- 5 57
T
58
HISTORY OF THE
too, Romanism was beginning to lift its head, encour- aged by the great influx of Irish immigrants. Bishop Ives, the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of North Caro- lina, after a mental struggle which, in the course of several years, showed itself in the most remarkable vacillation, at length tendered his allegiance as a lay- man to the Bishop of Rome. Others accompanied and followed him.
It was a natural result of these defections that throughout the American nation Protestant Chris- tianity felt an increased distrust of the Church, and that in this decade the Church's growth was far less in proportion than the growth of the country. Mis- taking the nature of the disease, the "Memorialists " . of 1853-numbering among themselves the future Bishops M. A. DeWolfe Howe, G. T. Bedell, and A. Cleveland Coxe, and the distinguished presbyters William Augustus Muhlenberg, Alexander H. Vin- ton, John Henry Hobart, and Francis Vinton- ascribed this slow growth to our ecclesiastical polity and liturgical worship.
But Bishop Cobbs was not panic-stricken. That others had abused what was good did not make him therefore refuse it. He did not protect himself from suspicion by indulging in wholesale denunciation of the Oxford movement and its after effects. While others would fain have conciliated a caviling sectari- anism by a vandalism of order and rite that, after all, would not have produced any better understanding or closer affiliation, he quite contentedly allowed men to call him " a semi-Papist " for holding unwaveringly
59
CHURCH IN ALABAMA.
to the old paths. He exhorted the clergy " to adhere to their own principles and usages with uncompro- mising firmness, and always to perform the worship of the Church with the most scrupulous observance of the rubrics and canons." At the same time he urged against an increasing formalism, and insisted that the only way by which the clergy of Alabama could pro- tect the good character of the Church in Alabama was by clearly and explicitly setting forth the evangelical principles of the Church as contained in Prayer Book and Homilies-the corruption of human nature, justi- fication by faith in the merits and righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ, the need of a renovation of heart, of the sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit, and of a dutiful obedience manifested not only in the observ- ance of ordinances, but in the keeping of command- ments, and in the fruits of righteousness and holiness -if only this should be the faithful and consistent teaching of the clergy, the issue would not long re- main doubtful.
This would have been true but for other considera- tions, which cannot remain unnoticed:
The outside world was not moving toward the Church. Men were not hungering and thirsting for a better and purer form of religion than that which they already enjoyed. What they had they really enjoyed; and enjoyment was the popular conception of Christian perfection. Indifferentism wore the thin veil of liberality. Into villages and settlements any religious society was welcomed if it did not expressly or by necessary implication question the authority and
60
HISTORY OF THE
doctrine of prior bodies. Alabama was like the Roman Pantheon, wherein every God was welcomed but the Christian's God, who was rejected because He was " a jealous God."
Inoculated with the virus of this spurious liberality, many of the Church's own children grew up without adequate ideas of the high dignity of the Church, and her ministry and sacraments. They were igno- rant of her doctrines, careless of her sanction, indif- ferent to her privileges, neglectful of her ordinances; and finally, by inevitable consequence, turned their backs on their spiritual mother and went off into schism or worldliness. Their unwillingness to learn the teachings of the Church brought on inability to receive them. Neglecting the ministrations of the Church, they next denied her unity, holiness, catho- licity, and Apostolicity; and finding the teaching of the clergy out of touch with their own raw conclu- sions, denounced their erstwhile teachers as narrow and uncharitable.
For another hindrance the clergy themselves were to blame. They remained in their own parishes too continuously without holding converse and exchang- ing experiences with fellow clergymen, and thus failed to give and to receive the help that the parish priest so much needs to prevent either his peculiar trials from cowing him or his little successes from puffing him. The relation of paroikia to dioikia, of parish to household, seems to have been imperfectly appre- hended. Attendance on annual Conventions was mis- erably small and discouraging. It was impossible to
0
61
CHURCH IN ALABAMA.
bring the whole diocese to any concerted plan of ac- tion when only one-half the clergy attended the annual Conventions. This was an evil that the Bishop earnestly sought to remove ; but, though a measure of success attended his efforts, improvement was not per- manent until very shame at the absence of two-thirds of their order from the Convention of 1858 made the clergy themselves determine to reform. It could not but be a drag on the Church that, with twenty seven clergy entitled to a vote and more than fifty congre- gations entitled to representation, her Convention numbered, not eighty-five delegates, but only twenty- nine.
The migratory disposition of the clergy was another substantial hindrance. In the conventional year 1847-8 six clergymen removed from one parish to another or left the diocese. Of those who had elected Dr. Cobbs Bishop four years before only one remained in the diocese-the Rev. N. P. Knapp-and he had removed to another parish. In the five years, 1853 58, sixteen of the twenty-seven clergy resident the first year of the period left the diocese, and of the eleven that remained only six remained in uninterrupted charge of their respective congregations. These con- . stant migrations were unfavorable to Church growth, for in removing from one parish to another, even though remaining in the diocese, the clergy lost much of their slowly acquired influence, which they could neither transfer to their successors nor carry to their new parishes. The injury thus inflicted upon old con-
-
!
62
HISTORY OF THE
gregations was considerable; upon new ones it was incalculable.
Other serious obstacles demand passing remark. The Bishop's health was never good, and it was only by sheer force of will that he kept going. But even will power has occasionally to succumb. In 1847-8 the Bishop visited few congregations, confirming in the aggregate not quite two-score persons. Later in 1848, his own sickness in Huntsville, from June to November, and sickness in his family in Tuskaloosa, prevented him from making any visitations. For one reason or another several of the clergy were deposed within a short period. In 1846 the Rev. S. S. Lewis, long a tower of strength despite the ravages of con- sumption, was obliged to retire from work; two years later he passed away. In 1850 more than one-half the congregations were without ministerial services. In 1851 Mr. Lay and Mr. Morrison, in Huntsville and Montgomery, were entirely disabled by ill health. A similar reason carried Mr. Massey away from Mobile five months, and Mr. Cushman from Seale and Auburn nearly an entire year; and an overturning stage coach so injured the Bishop in his right shoul- der that he was disabled for a considerable period. In 1854 another prince in Israel, the Rev. N. P. Knapp, rested from his labors. Fierce conflict be- tween the rector and the vestry of Christ Church, Tuskaloosa, and a subsequent parochial schism of a year's duration, gave the enemy much occasion to blaspheme. Yellow fever devastated Montgomery for two months each of this and the two ensuing years.
63
CHURCH IN ALABAMA.
In the latter year, 1855, Elyton, Birmingham's fore- runner, summed up in one sentence the obstacle that to less extent dampened ardor and chilled faith in many other portions of the diocese : "The Church service has not been celebrated in this parish for about two years."
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.