USA > Massachusetts > History of the Diocese of Massachusetts, 1810-1872 > Part 13
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60. A. A. Lawrence, 'Diary', 1842- 1858, entry for 24 May 1843.
61. There was a drift of families from St. Paul's to Emmanuel and, later, to Trinity occasioned by the resignation of Vinton in 1858, and by the development of the Back Bay area as a residential district. Charles Hook Appleton and Amory Appleton Lawrence belonged to the second genera- tion of the Appletons and Lawrences of St. Paul's; their service on Trinity's vestry is memorialized in stained glass and mar- ble, but their earlier religious life was at St. Paul's.
62. Alexander H. Vinton, Rector, Me-
morial Discourse of Bishop Eastburn . . . December 8th, 1872 (Boston, 1873), p. 13. Vinton's reference to the granite-like minds of Trinity's members was in this same sermon, 'He [Eastburn] came to a congregation of practised and hardheaded thinkers, who yet had done their thinking on religious matters, and did not wish their thinking disturbed by dogmatic statements that traversed them through- out' (p. 14).
63. William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit: Episcopalian (New York, 1859), V, 297.
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THE DIOCESE OF MASSACHUSETTS
family and the Amory family included individuals whose marriages provided the parish with families of similar size.
The Amory family together with the families related to it by mar- riage formed a group in Trinity Church without which the parish would not have survived. 64 As merchants and traders in England, the family came to America by way of Barbadoes and the Azores. Thomas Amory, born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1682, visited Boston and Charleston, South Carolina, in 1719-20, but decided to settle permanently in Boston. His son, Thomas Amory, was the first of a line of Amory vestrymen at Trinity serving, though not continu- ously, from 1777 to 1910. As a group, the family was loyal to the British Crown and therefore allied to the Church of England. Like the successful English merchants of the eighteenth century, reli- gion was a settled issue with this group of families. The generation of Amorys born after the middle of the eighteenth century were politically good citizens of the United States. The children of Thom- as Amory and his younger brother John were in their turn the par- ents of offspring which made up a substantial part of Trinity par- ish. 65 More influential in the Diocese of Massachusetts, however, was the grandson of Thomas Amory, George M. Dexter, who served on the standing committee of the diocese from 1843 to 1857 and from 1865 to 1867, a period of eighteen years. 66 His services to the parish were no less outstanding. 67 He witnessed the burning of the church in Summer Street, but as a member of the building com-
64. Gertrude Euphemia Meredith, The Descendants of Hugh Amory, 1605-1805 (London, 1901), passim; George Ticknor Dexter, The Amory Family of Boston 1720- 1900, is a genealogical chart to go with the Meredith work.
65. Thomas Amory's (1722-84) chil- dren married into the Dexter, Linzee, Sul- livan, and Deblois families. John Amory's (1728-1805) wife, who was Catherine Greene, daughter of Rufus Greene, a ward- en of Trinity for sixteen years, was a first cousin of Gardiner Greene; their children married into the Codman and Lowell fam- ilies. The Lowells maintained their alle-
giance to the Unitarian Church. [Anon., ] The Greene Family in England and America with Pedigrees (Boston, 1901), p. 51; Tick- nor, Amory Family. Many members of the Amory family belonged to the Brattle Square Church in the last part of the 18th century. Brattle Square Church Records, passim.
66. JM, years cited.
67. Trinity Church, p. 206; Consecration Services of Trinity Church, Boston (Boston, 1877), pp. 46, 72; The Greene Foundation . of Trinity Church, Boston (Boston,
. . 1875), p. 44.
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mittee for the new church, fortunately 'he ... lived long enough to select the site and approve the design'. 68
As vestrymen or wardens in the three buildings that were Trin- ity Church, the Codman family revealed great loyalty to the parish. Stephen Codman was vestryman from 1803 to 1814, while his nephew, Charles Russell Codman, was vestryman and senior warden from 1834 until a year before his death in 1852.69 Charles R. Codman's father, John Codman, had become connected with the Brattle Square Church shortly after the death of his first wife in 1789.70 Their son Charles was baptized there, when he was a week old, on 26 December 1784.71 As an adult Charles Codman spent some time in Europe, and had not become a member of any church. At the time of his first wife's death in Paris in 1831, his brother John, minister of the Second Church in Dorchester, wrote him and urged him to make a public profession of the Christian faith in or- der that his children may 'look up to their surviving parent for Christian example'.72 Charles Codman followed his brother's ad- vice, became a member of Trinity parish, and shortly afterward (in 1836) married Sarah Ogden, also an Episcopalian.73 The difficul- ties which the Rev. John Codman had stirred up in holding fast to an Orthodox Congregational position in his parish at Dorchester could not have drawn his brother to that branch of Christianity. Trinity's rector, the Rev. G. W. Doane, had given that society, as well as the diocese, much to talk about at the very time that Charles
68. Dexter died 26 Nov. 1872; the pres- ent church was consecrated 9 Feb. 1877. Arthur H. Chester, compiler, Trinity Church ... an Historical and Descriptive Account (Cambridge, 1888), pp. 17, 58.
69. Ogden Codman, 'Genealogical Col- lections', at the Boston Athenaeum, p. 50. 70. Codman, 'Gen. Coll.', pp. 49-50.
71. Brattle Square Church Records, p. 191.
72. John Codman was minister of the Second Parish Church, Dorchester, from 1808 to his death in 1847. The bitterness among his parishioners in the first half dozen years of his ministry, and the with- drawal of a substantial number of pew-
owners was typical of the diversity of re- ligious belief and the irreconcilable posi- tion among church members. [Anon., ] Review of Two Pamphlets . . . Published on the Subject of Ecclesiastical Controversy in Dorchester (Boston, 1814), passim. Codman Genealogy, pp. 49-50.
73. Codman, 'Gen. Coll.', p. 67; in one of his manuscripts, 'Letter Books', Ogden Codman, Jr., writes of an Ogden ancestor of his grandmother's, Sarah (Ogden) Cod- man, who turned to the Episcopal Church from the Presbyterian, as the minister of the latter society had scolded him for working on the Sabbath.
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THE DIOCESE OF MASSACHUSETTS
R. Codman returned to Boston. By the summer of 1832, however, the parish and diocese were past the crisis. Codman found his way to Trinity Church, just as Amos A. Lawrence was to find his way to St. Paul's Church, while both their fathers, John Codman and Amos Lawrence, belonged to the Brattle Square Church.74 Charles Russell Codman, Jr., son of Charles R. Codman, was an officer of Trinity Church from 1867 to 1917.75
When Bishop Eastburn became rector of Trinity Church (as well as Assistant Bishop, and later, Bishop of Massachusetts), the con- gregation had become a group whose members had thought out their theology, and knew the Book of Common Prayer at least in part. The leadership and preaching of the rector were of secondary importance. Yet the members of Trinity Church never overlooked the fact that the Diocese of Massachusetts existed, and that its bounds exceeded the smaller limits of the parish.76 Trinity Church was parochial in the sense that the congregation itself determined what it did, and where it would do it, for the diocese. It did not rely on its diocesan for leadership, and in his turn, the bishop had no funds to create diocesan agencies, such as existed in the Diocese of New York. The Diocese of Massachusetts did not appeal strongly as a philanthropic interest to the generality of Episcopalians.
In the period before the Civil War, starting with the organization of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810, and then including many and various causes such as temper- ance, education, abolition of slavery, the feminist movement, the emphasis of philanthropists was general and catholic in scope; they supported causes benefiting the whole community rather than a
74. Brattle Square Church Records.
75. Henry Codman, Charles R., and Charles R., Jr., served Trinity in 1803-14, 1834-51, 1867-1917, respectively, which would include the occupation by the church of three different buildings. Trin- ity Church, pp. 205, 206, 208.
76. This analysis of Trinity Church is based on biographical material largely in genealogies already cited, about some members of the parish; also, A. H. Vin-
ton's Sermon of Bishop Eastburn, and fi- nally, on Bishop Griswold's report to the convention of the Eastern Diocese in 1840 (p. 15), both cited above, that "Trinity Church is still without a rector. A suitable minister in that station would strengthen our hands very much. The church is full and the parish prosperous.' John L. Wat- son was the minister-in-charge at Trinity, on the Greene Foundation, from 1838 to 1842. Trinity, p. 201.
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smaller group in the community. As an example of this wide out- look, Amos Lawrence, writing to his son and daughter-in-law, Amos A. and Sarah, the day after their marriage, gave them as his advice, to start right in married life, that they join the American Bible Society.77 An inclosure with this letter was a draft for at least $150.78 Of more concern in starting right in married life to the young couple was securing a pew in St. Paul's Church. Within a few weeks of their confirmation, Amos A. Lawrence had his own pew, 'directly behind Mr. Appleton's 2 pews'.79 In the next twenty years the Diocese of Massachusetts, directly and through its mem- ber parishes, received an increasing share of the donations of Epis- copal churchmen, but the diocese, with a few notable exceptions, did not draw forth the support which its wealthier members gave to religious, educational, and philanthropical organizations and in- stitutions in general. The great and stark needs of the diocese were on the obverse side of the coin; the opportunities latent in even a partial fulfillment of the needs were on the reverse side. Some in- dividuals in the diocese there were, of course, who saw both sides of the coin, when Bishop Eastburn began his episcopacy; others responded to the claims of the diocese only in the last decade of Eastburn's years in office.
77. 'A. A. Lawrence Letter Books', vol. IV, no. 80, letter from A. L. to A. A. L. and S. L., 1 Apr. 1842.
78. By a payment of $150 'or upward', a layman or minister became a director for life in the society. Amos Lawrence had previously made his son William R., and
his son-in-law, the Rev. Charles Mason 'life Vice Presidents', or directors for life. 'A. A. Lawrence Letter Books', ibid .; An- nual Report of American Bible Society 1842, pp. 6, 149-150.
79. 'A. A. Lawrence Letters', vol. 'U', 20 June 1842.
CHAPTER XII
M ISSIONS was the keynote of Eastburn's first words to his diocese, yet before he had spoken them, William Appleton had written the bishop concerning the Boston City Mission Society. Appleton offered to give the society $10,000 'to build a place of Worship when they have procured a location'.1 Rather than give his own parish this sum of money, Appleton noted in his diary that he believed 'the poor are more susceptible of religious impressions than those in the higher walks of life, therefore it is a good charity'. The reason that Appleton gave 'so large a sum is that without it I doubt if the object would be accomplished', and he felt that it might be 'a bond of Union among our Clergy, who most truly need it'.2 In 1839 Christ Church, Boston, 'whose members [were ] among the less affluent' of Boston Churchmen, contributed $1000 for a City Mission chapel, but no action followed.3 The idea of building a free church, by gifts of money, which carried with it no 'sittings' or proprietorships in pews, was an unfamiliar concept. The plan of a free church arose from the lack of any church 'at the south part of the city'. There were here, in 1837, some 300 adults and about 100 children who 'demanded ... the benefits of a free Church', and Sunday school. The need was met by free provision of a hall, fur- nished with seats, prayer books, the use of an organ, 'and the serv- ices of an excellent organist gratuitously rendered'.4 Of this group of 300 adults, one-third were Episcopalians 'from education, early influence, choice or other cause, and in about equal numbers Amer- ican, English, and Irish'." This group called itself the 'Free Church
1. Selections from the Diaries of William Appleton, 1786-1862 (Boston, 1922), 10 May 1843, pp. 101-102.
2. Appleton, Diaries, pp. 101-102.
3. JM, 1839, pp. 26-27.
4. JM, 1837, pp. 16-17.
5. Ibid.
[133 ]
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of Boston', and the Rev. Samuel McBurney had charge over it. The Free Church had an independent existence of only five months. The Boston Episcopal City Mission took over in July 1837, and its minister was appointed a missionary of that society. William Ap- pleton's gift of $10,000 finally built St. Stephen's Chapel on Pur- chase Street, which Bishop Eastburn consecrated on 5 October 1846.6
The difficulties which the Diocese of Massachusetts encountered in Boston were met and dealt with in the same manner, but without the large financial gifts, as in the case of St. Stephen's Chapel. The Church of the Messiah, organized in September 1843 to meet 'an actual demand for an Episcopal Church in the [again] southern section of the city', had its own church building seating 700, on Florence Street. Its first rector was the Rev. George M. Randall, later Bishop of Colorado. Another parish, also in the ever-extending south part of Boston, was St. Mark's. Unlike St. Stephen's Chapel and the Church of the Messiah, St. Mark's sprang from a meeting on 4 April 1851, of 'several gentlemen [who] met at the house of Charles H. Parker, Esq., to organize a new parish ... within the bounds of Ward 11 . . . '.7 This group of men had ascertained that the inhabitants of Ward 11 numbered some '10,480 souls . . . [of] essentially Protestant character'.8 The trustees of the Greene Foun- dation of Trinity Church purchased the property of St. Mark's Church in 1871. The Rev. C. C. Tiffany, assistant minister at Trinity, took charge of the congregation which held services in the church building on Newton Street. When Tiffany began his minis- try, the pew-rentals furnished the Church with some $5000 a year. Yet within a little more than a decade, services were discontinued.9 Reporting what was happening to the part of Boston situated south of Tremont Street, the rector of St. Mark's, the Rev. Leonidas B. Baldwin, said,
6. Appleton, Diaries, p. 121; JM, 1847, pp. 11, 65-66. In his diocesan address of 1847, Bishop Eastburn noted that William Appleton had given a fund of $10,000, and "the late Edward Tuckerman, Esq., of St. Paul's Church', had given $5000, the in-
terest on both sums to be used for main- taining a minister at the chapel. JM, 1847, p. 12.
7. JM, 1852, p. 57.
8. JM, 1852, p. 58.
9. JM, 1872, pp. 65-66.
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The evils which come from the instability of church connection are seriously felt in this parish. A community once stable and substantial is now largely supplanted by the transient population of a great boarding-house quarter. This social change at the South End, while it has not diminished, but rather increased, the necessity and burden of Church work in this closely inhabit- ed part of the city, has yet made it greatly more difficult to maintain by reason of the constantly diminishing financial ability and pecuniary re- sponsibility of the congregation.10
The Church of the Messiah flourished for twenty-two years under its rector, the Rev. George M. Randall. In 1859 gallery pews were added to the church, 'affording sittings for eighty persons, which are free'.11 Randall resigned in 1866, having been consecrated Mis- sionary Bishop of Colorado. The size of the parish, as indicated by the number of communicants reported in 1869, only three years after Randall's leaving, had shrunk about two-thirds. 12 The Church of the Messiah continued into the twentieth century, but the Dio- cese of Massachusetts relied on the parishes of the Back Bay for missionary work beginning about 1870. St. Stephen's 'Free Church' Chapel burned in the Boston Fire of 9 November 1872. When serv- ices could be held once more, a hall in South Boston was found to be a more suitable location.13 The growth of population in Boston during Bishop Eastburn's episcopate, as illustrated by the South End, showed that the diocese could meet the needs and demands of residents in this area for Episcopal worship, but it met them on the basis of help in 'getting going', not, however, in 'keeping going'.
While St. Mark's and the Church of the Messiah attempted to answer the demands for Episcopal societies in the south part of the city, a group which was to be known as the Church of the Advent organized a parish in the northwestern part of the city in Septem- ber 1844. A little over a year later, in November 1845, two men and five women organized in East Boston an Episcopal society called St. John's parish. This little group had considerably less impor-
10. JM, 1885, p. 104. William Dean Howells in his novel The Rise of Silas Lap- ham noted the social change at the South End in the late '70s and early '80s.
11. JM, 1859, p. 53.
12. The diocesan report gave 365 com- municants in 1866, and 120 in 1869. JM, 1866, p. 58; 1869, p. 78.
13. JM, 1873, pp. 93-94.
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THE DIOCESE OF MASSACHUSETTS
tance than the Church of the Advent, but it evidenced the basic pattern of diocesan development in the presence of the spread of other branches of the Christian Church, in increasingly industrial areas. From October 1845, St. John's, East Boston, used for its first place of worship 'a small store under Ritchie Hall', until 1848.14 In Ritchie Hall itself, the Unitarians held services for the first time beginning in September 1845. The Roman Catholic Church said its first Mass in East Boston at St. Nicholas Church, formerly the Maverick Congregational Society's church, early in 1844.15 The Episcopal society erected two churches, both of which were blown down, but their third building remained standing. In 1855, by the paying up of a debt of $3000, 'chiefly by the kindness of members of Trinity and St. Paul's Churches of Boston', the church was eligi- ble for consecration, which Bishop Eastburn performed on 13 No- vember. 16 On occasions such as this rescue of St. John's, East Bos- ton, in a real way the large parishes of the city of Boston proper were the heart of the diocese and its missionary effort. St. Paul's and Trinity constantly had lay and clerical members on the stand- ing committee, which meant that the demands of the Church in Boston and its immediate neighborhood were realized and dealt with on the parochial level by the same group of men who held the major responsibility for the welfare of the diocese as a whole. Bish- op Eastburn's diocesan address in 1844 illustrated the value to the diocese of aid given at the local or parochial level. The bishop pointed out that there were two subjects 'of peculiar interest', for which the convention should record 'devout and cheerful thanks- giving to God ... '.17 One subject was the William Appleton gift for a chapel already mentioned. The other, apparently more important as the bishop cited it first, was the 'rescue' of two parishes adjacent to Boston. The parishes were St. John's, Charlestown, and St. James', Roxbury. 'Through the generous, self-denying, and inde- fatigable exertions of a few members of our Church in this city,
14. William H. Sumner, A History of East Boston (Boston, 1858), pp. 649-650.
15. Sumner, East Boston, pp. 650-651, 655. The population of East Boston was
'about 6500' in 1847. Ibid., p. 535. 16. Sumner, East Boston, p. 650; JM, 1856, pp. 21-22.
17. JM, 1844, p. 25.
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seconded by the liberal contributions of those to whom they ap- plied for aid', said Eastburn, these two parishes had been delivered "from those pecuniary embarrassments by which they had been so long pressed to the earth, and which had at last brought them to the verge of immediate dissolution'.18 To the individuals who did this rescue work, the gratitude of our whole Church' was due, re- ported the bishop, and added that 'those gentlemen . . . by God's grace, were led to give up, for a time, personal ease, and the care of important personal interests, for the purpose of completing an ob- ject in which the salvation of immortal souls, and the honor of our Communion, were so deeply involved. ... May God reward ... [them ] tenfold into their bosom!'19 From Bishop Eastburn's words it appeared that the maintenance of already organized parishes took more effort and aroused less interest than the forming of new parishes. A parish with its rector and congregation that had been admitted to the convention was a known quantity at least theologi- cally. Only one parish, Nantucket, in the diocese had drawn East- burn's sharp reproval in his initial reports. In the threatened 'im- mediate dissolution' of two other parishes, not only was the 'honor' of the diocese involved, but to abandon the Church in Charles- town, the scene of the Ursuline Convent incident in 1834, would be to pay a gratuitous compliment to the Roman Catholic Church of St. Mary's, dedicated 10 May 1829.20
Another reason that the rescue of St. John's and St. James' Churches received Eastburn's high commendation was that in do- ing their task, the laymen and friends of the two parishes had shown, at least temporarily, how they valued the Church. They sacrificed, 'for a time', their leisure and their business. Bishop
18. JM, 1844, p. 25.
19. JM, 1844, p. 26. The annual reports by the rectors of St. John's and St. James' maintained the anonymity of the bishop's report. St. John's rector, the Rev. P. H. Greenleaf, mentioned the group as 'a few friends in Boston, whose names are well known, and whose praise is in all the churches . . . '. The Rev. Mark Howe of St. James' identified the benefactors as
the people of this parish, and the gener- ous aid of friends of the Church in Boston . . . '. Howe further noted that by the un- tiring 'Christian zeal and activity' of the "ladies' of his parish, $500 was raised. JM, 1844, pp. 67, 75.
20. Justin Winsor, ed., The Memorial History of Boston (Boston, 1881), III, 519- 520.
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THE DIOCESE OF MASSACHUSETTS
Eastburn stated his hope that 'such examples of disinterested de- votion to the Kingdom of Christ now so rare' among Churchmen would 'daily increase'.21 Not depending wholly upon such daily increase', the bishop suggested that no new church building should be undertaken without financial ability to complete it. 22
This lesson in financial responsibility did not miss its mark with the infant Episcopal society, the Church of the Advent, organized on 14 September 1844. The organization meeting took place at the house of Dr. George C. Shattuck on Cambridge Street. 23 Unlike the beginnings of St. Paul's Church twenty-five years before, the Church of the Advent started in the usual manner of Episcopal societies throughout the diocese. Services commenced on 1 De- cember (Advent Sunday) 1844 in a hall at 13 Merrimac Street. 24 Two factors determined the location of the parish in the north- western area of Boston. Church ministration 'to the poor and needy ... in the midst of a new and populous district' would be provided by the parish. 25 Also, the man named as the Advent's first rector, the Rev. William Croswell, already had many friends in this section of Boston. R. H. Dana, Jr., writing to his father before the parish was organized, remarked that 'Mr. Croswell is very popular at the North End, and we hope he will fill us up.'26 Unlike other self-supporting parishes in the diocese, the founders of the Advent organized the society 'for rich and poor alike'.27 Prior to holding the first services, the rector, wardens, and vestry circulated a 'printed card', which declared that the 'sittings will be free to all', and that the Church will be 'supported ... by the voluntary obla-
21. JM, 1844, p. 26.
22. Ibid. The Annual Convention of 1852 enacted a canon ostensibly enabling the standing committee, on the basis of financial condition or outlook, to control the admission of new parishes into the dio- cese. This 'Canon of 1852' was repealed in 1857. JM, 1852, p. 40; 1857, p. 46. In 1868 General Convention enacted a canon (Ti- tle I, Canon 21) which forbade the conse- cration of a church, unless it were free of debt. JGC, 1868.
23. A Sketch of the History of the Parish of
The Advent in ... Boston (printed for the parish, 1894), p. 15.
24. Sketch of Advent, p. 19.
25. JM, 1845, p. 59.
26. Letter of R. H. Dana, Jr., Boston, to R. H. Dana, Sr., 7 Sept. 1844, in Dana MSS (Massachusetts Historical Society). Croswell had been rector of Christ Church, Boston, from 1829 to 1840; then he had been rector of St. Peter's, Auburn, N. Y., where he had served under Bishop DeLan- cey of Western New York.
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