USA > Massachusetts > Massachusetts Episcopalians 1607-1957 > Part 4
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At this time Bass was "only about twenty-seven years of age; young, strong and healthy, of a medium height, well-proportioned, having a pleasing face, with blue eyes and a fair complexion and light hair. The only defect in the face was the length of the nose. The two portraits painted at a much later date, give, however, the general shape and contour of the head."*
Shortly thereafter, Bass married Sarah Beck, who died thirty- six years later. Within six months of her death, Bass, then sixty- three, married Mercy Phillips, then thirty-four. The event caused no small talk in the town. Bass amused his little congregation by choosing sermon texts that made oblique references to the town talk. Thus: "My mercy will I keep (Ps. 89:28), and "Surely the fear of God is not in this place, and they will slay me for my wife's sake." (Gen. XX, 11). Mercy Phillips lived to be eighty-seven, a faithful companion to Bass for the remaining fourteen years of his life. Doubtless, she became known, as did the widow of Bishop Griswold, as his "venerable relic."
*D. D. Addison: Life and Times of Edward Bass. Boston, 1897. p. 53.
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The fifty-one years of the Bass rectorship were, for the most part, quiet ones. The most unpleasant incident, undoubtedly, was Bass' dismissal by the S. P. G. as an aider and abettor of rebellion. That Bass, however, was generally regarded in Newburyport as a Tory would seem clear from another incident. One night, when Bass and his wife were returning from a social gathering, they were espied by a mob of roughs and pelted home with sticks and stones.
After the Revolution, Newburyport blossomed again into pros- perity. Its merchants traded on the Seven Seas. Therewith St. Paul's Newburyport, resumed its quiet growth, and Bass became an honored man in State and town, making preaching journeys as far away as Kingston, Rhode Island. He became Massachusetts' leading clergyman and its logical choice for bishop.
The six years of the Bass episcopate were uneventful ones. The new bishop was wisely modest and made no pretensions to auto- cratic rule. The diocese recovered slowly from its Revolutionary disasters and grew somewhat, though the bishop made no attempt to visit Lanesborough and Great Barrington in the far west of his jurisdiction, or hardly any of the parishes in his additional diocese of Rhode Island. The successive diocesan conventions passed un- eventfully, with four to seven clergymen present, and two to six parishes represented by lay delegates. Until the second year of Bishop Griswold (1812) no parochial reports were made or, at least, recorded.
The bishop's life came to a quiet close on September 10, 1803, when he was seventy-seven. The last important act of his fifty-one years at Newburyport had been the consecration of its new parish church on October 8, 1800. Dr. Samuel Parker of Trinity Church, Boston, who preached the funeral sermon, spoke of him as "a sound divine, a critical scholar, an accomplished gentleman and thorough Christian."
Bass must be regarded as an old-fashioned Low Churchman because of his attitude toward Non-conformity, even if the High Churchmen in his day were not so antagonistic to Protestant sects and practices as was the later high Churchmanship of Bishop Hobart of New York and the still later Anglo-Catholicism. Bass was always friendly with his ecclesiastical neighbors and could be mighty in extemporanous prayer. These two considerations would seem to put him on the "low" side of the ecclesiastical fence.
Although the episcopate of Bishop Bass was more distinguished for the spirit and sense which he displayed than for any long cata- logue of episcopal acts and accomplishments, yet a few of these may be recorded. Thus, he consecrated two new churches, one at Ded- ham and one in Newburyport. He ordained nine men altogether, men who were to count heavily in the life of the infant church. Two were to be future bishops. One of them, Theodore Dehon, went to Newport, Rhode Island, and restored Trinity Church to its pre-
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Revolutionary prosperity. He declined any suggestion of election as bishop of the Eastern Diocese, and went, in 1811, to St. Michael's, Charleston, South Carolina, shortly thereafter becoming bishop there for a brief period of years. The second future bishop was Nathaniel Bowen, who served at Providence and elsewhere, and succeeded Dehon in South Carolina. Bishop Bass also assisted in one consecration, shortly after his own, namely, that of Abraham Jarvis, the second bishop of Connecticut. The other consecrators were White of Pennsylvania and Provoost of New York. Three bishops of the English succession thus united in setting apart a successor to the one American bishop of the Scottish line. Bass also took a prominent part in the General Convention of 1799. He helped greatly to eliminate a Canon which had given wide latitude to a bishop in dispensing with educational requirements for candidates seeking ordination. As an unusually well-educated man, Bass did not believe in laying hands hastily on the ignorant.
The episcopate of Bishop Bass was a day of small things. No new parishes were added, only old ones revived. Nevertheless, the foundations were being laid for the long and apostolic episcopate of Alexander Viets Griswold who, as bishop of the Eastern Diocese, consisting of all New England excepting Connecticut, in thirty years, brought five active dioceses into being, multiplying clergy seven- fold and communicants ten times.
In Massachusetts, Bass was succeeded in 1804 by Samuel Parker of Trinity Church, Boston, who, however, died within four months after consecration, without performing a single recorded episcopal act. This blow so discouraged Massachusetts Churchmen that they gave up the idea of having a bishop of their own and pro- moted the so-called Eastern Diocese, a federation consisting of the dioceses in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hamp- shire. Maine was a part of Massachusetts until 1820, when two little parishes at Portland and Gardiner organized a separate diocese.
By 1810, the four component dioceses had federated themselves loosely into the Eastern Diocese. Sufficient funds were gathered, chiefly in Massachusetts to provide $400 a year for the bishop's ex- penses. The man elected had to find his livelihood as rector of a parish, with sufficient energy and health to manage a far-flung jurisdiction. The only obvious choice was Alexander Viets Griswold of Bristol, Rhode Island, J. S. J. Gardiner of Boston and Theodore Dehon of Newport declining to be considered. Griswold, ordained by Seabury, was most reluctant, but finally consented. In May, 1811, he was consecrated the twelfth bishop of the American Succession, along with John Henry Hobart of New York.
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CHAPTER IV. Massachusetts in the
Eastern Diocese 1810 - 1843
Alexander Viets Griswold was born in Simsbury, Connecticut, on April 22, 1766, a son of a substantial landowner, "Squire Gris- wold." The Griswolds, who had come a century before from Massachusetts, had always been Churchmen. Alexander's maternal uncle, Roger Viets, who was to play a large part in his future, had been converted at Yale from Congregationalism to the Church.
When the Griswold family became financially ruined by the levies and exactions of the Patriots in the Revolution, Roger Viets invited his nephew to come to work and study with him at his farm. Since Roger Viets' allowance from the S. P. G. had been cut off by the War, he needed agricultural help to maintain himself as a parochial minister. Under this arrangement Alexander was to be prepared for the senior class at Yale. His precocious childhood seemed to point him to the career of college professor. However, Viets, soon after the Revolution, secured a parish in Digby, Nova Scotia, where the S. P. G. grants were still in force. This posed a problem. Alexander, though only nineteen, was affianced to a neighbor's daughter, Elizabeth Michelson, then but seventeen. Finally, it was decided that the young couple should marry and eventually follow uncle Roger Viets to Canada. In the meantime, the girl's family, having heard evil reports of Digby's climate, in- terfered. So Alexander went to work on a small farm he had acquired and began to prepare himself for a profession. College teaching seemed out of reach. Business and the Law attracted him temporarily, but with a heightened interest in the local church, the ministry became his goal. After nearly ten years of farm labor by day and long study by pine knot fire by night, he prepared himself for ordination. Diocesan Convention accepted him as a candidate, and Bishop Seabury at the end of his episcopate, ordained him deacon and priest.
The ten years of study on the farm prepared Griswold for ten years of labor in the cure of Plymouth, Harwinton and Northfield. These places were about eight miles apart and travel by foot or horseback the only possibility. As a result of his labors, Griswold was able to "add 200 communicants to the Lord's Table."
In the summer of 1803, Griswold visited Bristol, Rhode Island, on a vacation. St. Michael's being vacant, he was asked to preach. He refused an immediate call to be rector, but persistence on the part of the Vestry finally bore fruit. The next summer he sailed from nearby Hartford on the sloop of one of the town's hardy navi- gators, "Artic John" De Wolf. The salary, based on an endowment of land was $600, twice the remuneration in his Connecticut cure. When children multiplied, Griswold tried to get his parishioners to contribute from their own pockets to an increase in salary. But the canny vestrymen declined. A bargain was a bargain, especially when it was a good one.
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The Bristol church grew but slowly for seven years. Then, in the first year of Griswold's episcopate, a revival swept the town. The net results in St. Michael's were 44 adult baptisms and 100 con- firmations. Another revival ten years later, after the Bishop collapsed one Sunday in the pulpit, was almost equally productive. The bishop, with a weakened heart, could only guide the affair from his bed. His future son-in-law, Stephen H. Tyng, a divinity student with the Bishop, led the revival exercises, just as J. P. K. Henshaw, Griswold's successor in the Rhode Island episcopate, had done ten years before.
From this center in the extreme southeast, Griswold guided, for eighteen years, the remarkable growth of his far-flung diocese. In 1827 his wife died, and by 1829, ten of his twelve children had passed away of tuberculosis, germs then being something unknown. In addition a depression hit the town in 1827, destroying the local bank and the bishop's carefully accumulated savings. So, in 1829, he finally heard the plea of St. Peter's Church, Salem, and assumed its rectorship for six years. The bishop had married again, but the one child of the marriage, a boy of twelve, died of scarlet fever. In 1836, the Presiding Bishopric came to him by virtue of seniority, William White of Pennsylvania having then died at the age of 88. In these last years, the funds of the Massachusetts diocese had grown sufficiently to give the bishop an annual salary of $900, on which he lived in Boston with his accustomed frugality. In December, 1842, Manton Eastburn of New York was consecrated assistant bishop and elected rector of Trinity Church, Boston, a post he held for twenty-six years, until Phillips Brooks succeeded him in 1869.
When Griswold became Bishop of the Eastern Diocese, there were only fifteen clergymen in active service: eight in Massa- chusetts, three each in Rhode Island and New Hampshire, and Abraham Bronson in Arlington, Vermont. After thirty-two years, with two hundred ordinations, the number of the active clergy was about 100, and five dioceses were ready to go on their separate ways. Vermont, in 1832, had already elected John Henry Hopkins as its diocesan; Manton Eastburn succeeded Griswold in Massachusetts, and John P. K. Henshaw was his succesor in Rhode Island. In 1844, Carlton Chase, rector in Bellows Falls, Vermont, an old-time high churchman, was elected bishop of the half-dozen parishes of New Hampshire and rector of Trinity Church, Claremont. Two years later, George Burgess, the evangelical rector of Christ Church, Hartford - now the cathedral - and one of the leading preachers of the Church, began a twenty-year episcopate over the handful of churches in Maine, his main support being the rectorship of Christ Church, Gardiner.
At the Massachusetts Diocesan Convention of 1812, six out of eighteen congregations reported 348 communicants between them, 150 of these belonging to old Trinity on Summer Street, in Boston. Dr. Gardiner, however, added in his report that "on the great
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festivals, the communicants are nearly 300." Conspicuous by their absence from the report were Great Barrington, where the bishop had confirmed over 100 persons, as well as Marblehead and Dedham. St. Andrew's, Hanover, now blessed with a rector, Jacob G. Cooper, reported 35 out of the total 348. Actually, the number of diocesan communicants was probably well over 500. In 1814, twelve parishes reported only 478 between them.
In the Griswold episcopate, the Massachusetts part of the Eastern Diocese grew from eighteen parishes to forty-seven. Com- municants increased from 348 to 4,118. In 1843, the Sunday Schools enrolled 3,869. Missionary contributions, diocesan and general, had grown from nearly nothing to $10,000. All this reflected Griswold's intense interest in missions. In 1820, he was one of the founders of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Episcopal Church.
Where and how did all this Massachusetts growth take place ? Chiefly in the development of new congregations, nearly all of them in the Berkshires or in and around Boston. . Only two small mill village congregations appeared in central Massachusetts. In 1843, Wilkinsonville had 69 communicants and Rochdale 34, numbers about one-half those of the present.
In the western part of the State, the Connecticut impulse seems still to have been actively at work. Six new congregations arose in Springfield, Greenfield, Ashfield, Montague, Southwick and Bland- ford. These last three rural congregations disappeared long ago. Ashfield still remains a small village parish, with its vicar often doubling as the minister of the local Congregational Church. In Springfield and Greenfield the Church has grown enormously, though Springfield still has the lowest proportion of communicants to population of any large city in New England.
In the Berkshires, the story is the same. To colonial Lanes- borough and Great Barrington were added Pittsfield, Stockbridge, Lenox, Otis and Van Deusenville. Of these last two, Otis has given up the ghost and Van Deusenville barely lingers; but the first three now number some 1,800 communicants between them. Rural de- pletion and industrial growth tell the story.
In these same thirty-two years, the two Boston parishes of 1811 had become six, although the city was yet far from its present limits. Only the first annexation, that of South Boston, had yet taken place. The Back Bay was an expanse of tidal water, whose waves lapped the edges of the present Public Garden, and from whose banks boats containing British soldiers had begun the march to Concord and Lexington. The old parishes of Boston were Trinity on Summer Street and Christ Church in the North End. Trinity reported 350 communicants and Christ Church, with 241, was far from its present place as a historical shrine with a transient con- gregation. The new parishes were St. Paul's, now the cathedral,
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the diocesan seat of the rising Evangelicals, which counted 350 communicants and had as rectors the eminent presbyters, John Seely Stone and Alexander H. Vinton. The largest new parish after St. Paul's, was Grace Church, now extinct, which numbered 321 communicants, where the eloquent Thomas March Clark, later Bishop of Rhode Island, was the rector. There was also a "Free Church," that is one in a poorer area with no pew rents, which had 75 communicants. A second small parish, St. Matthews, South Boston, destined to wax and wane over the next century, had 49 communicants. To the north, across the Mystic river in Chelsea, St. Luke's, also destined to wax and wane, had emerged with 39 communicants. The rise of Romanism has largely engulfed St. Matthews, while St. Luke's growth has been constricted by an in- creasingly Jewish population.
In Norfolk County, there were two small colonial parishes, Christ Church, Braintree (now Quincy), a large parish at the present time, and St. Paul's, Dedham, now a parish of medium size. To these were added, in areas later to be annexed to the city of Boston, St. James, Roxbury, and St. John's, Jamaica Plain. St. James, Roxbury, once in a favored neighborhood, already had 143 communicants. It grew largely in the next seventy years, especially in the long rectorship of Percy Browne, an intimate friend of Phillips Brooks. It is now in a colored section of Boston and struggles on with a membership of 182. St. John's, Jamaica Plain, has seen better days, growing largely during three-quarters of a century, but now declining to 390 communicants. Africa and Rome tell the story with St. James; it is Rome and Jewry in the case of St. John's.
Farther south, in Plymouth County, there were colonial Han- over and Bridgewater, with over 100 communicants between them, and colonial Marshfield with 9. The first two were destined to grow steadily over the next century. Recently, Marshfield, borne on the suburban tide, has managed to secure a minister of its own. A half dozen other parishes also were to rise in Plymouth County in the next episcopates.
When we turn from the South Shore to the North Shore, the story is similar. The old colonial parishes of Newburyport, Salem and Marblehead grew slowly with the years. Four others arose in these thirty-two years. Of these St. Stephen's, Lynn, has become one of the largest parishes of New England; Andover has grown sizably because of Andover Academy and of its proximity to Boston and Lawrence, while Amesbury and Ipswich, with many ups and downs, are churches of moderate and considerable size respectively.
In Middlesex County, old colonial Christ Church, Cambridge (reopened in 1790) struggled slowly upward. Even by 1843, under the long rectorship of Nicholas Hoppin, it numbered only 43 com- municants. The people near Harvard Square were nearly all de- votees of Unitarianism or of the old Congregational Church. About
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1815, according to Stephen H. Tyng in his autobiography, the parish was served mostly by lay readers. He learned to play the organ (after a fashion, undoubtedly) to help in the services.
Another parish in Middlesex County, arising soon after 1825, was old St. Anne's, Lowell, where a cotton manufacturing village had arisen in the woods and pastures by a waterfall on the Merri- mac. The employees, initially, were recruited chiefly from the farmer girls of the area. They were paid three dollars a week (one- half being retained for their board in the Company dormitories), and were expected to attend Sunday Church and Thursday Prayer Meeting and to be in bed by nine o'clock. Otherwise they were not regarded as fit inhabitants of a strait-laced and twelve-hour-a-day community. By 1843, Lowell, linked by railroad and the Middlesex Canal with Boston, had become a city-called for a time "the Man- chester of America," after the cotton capital of Lancashire.
The small beginnings of St. Anne's, Lowell, were soon streng- thened by the coming of textile workers from the old Country and the old Church. By 1843, St. Anne's had 320 communicants, with 565 in Sunday School. This last number was to fall somewhat; doubtless, in part, because opportunities to learn to read were now to be found elsewhere than in Sunday Schools. Theodore Edson, a stout High Churchman of the older variety, was rector in Lowell for over half a century. Another High Churchman, St. John Chambre, a convert from Methodism, had subsequently a long rectorship, as did, still later, Appleton Grannis, a broad Churchman, an ex-curate of Trinity Church, Boston. The conservative temper of St. Anne's reasserted itself, recently in the election of Francis B. Downes, an Anglo-Catholic from Providence. Soon after his arrival a side altar, with a red light, were added to the fixtures of old St. Anne's. The two present parishes of Lowell, St. Anne's, with 865 communicants, and St. John's, with 469, still bear strong Episcopal witness in an Irish city of 100,000 people.
A third parish of Middlesex County, that of St. Paul's, Hopkin- ton, once a summer resort for colonial Boston, had, in Griswold's day, a small church intermittently open.
The three little parishes of Hopkinton, Wilkinsonville and Rochdale represent the far west of the Boston-centered parishes. Some forty more parishes within a twenty-mile radius of these three, were later to arise. Fifty miles away in Worcester work was begun as in Christ Church, Springfield, and St. John's, Northampton, long a small parish, until industry and Smith College brought larger growth.
In 1843, Bristol County was already experiencing a taste of diocesan importance. The old parish of St. Thomas, Taunton, had 200 communicants, and was to multiply that number five-fold. Grace Church, in the old whaling town of New Bedford, had 100 communicants and 192 in Sunday School. This number was to be
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multiplied nearly forty times when the capital of the town was diverted from the declining whaling industry to the manufacture of cotton. The moist climate of New Bedford, like that of Lan- cashire, was ideal for cotton spinning and its location made possible waterborne import of cotton and coal. Lancashire operatives came over in hundreds to the better pay and opportunities overseas. The result, after a century, was five parishes and 3,800 communicants in New Bedford and Fairhaven for the Episcopal Church.
In 1843, the little parish of the Ascension in Fall River had only 77 communicants. The same favorable conditions of damp climate and seaside location existed in Fall River as in New Bedford. Here the so-called "Fall River system" of heavy machinery arose, in con- trast to the lighter machinery of the Lowell system which women could manipulate. The result was heavy migration from England of male textile workers and their families. Lancashire accents were, for many years, to dominate the streets of Fall River and New Bedford. In 1957, the seven churches of Fall River and Somerset had some 2,750 communicants between them.
In the vicinity of Boston, we may note two harbingers of the future. One is little St. Mary's in Newton Lower Falls, once a textile village. In 1843, it had the respectable number of 126 commun- icants, a number that was to grow only slowly over the years, until the suburban tide lifted it to new levels. St. Mary's was the fore- runner of the eight present parishes in the city of Newton, with their approximately 4,400 communicants.
In contrast to this relatively recent multiplication of the Episcopal Church in the suburbs is the fate of St. John's in Charles- town, now a part of Boston. St. John's less than a century ago had 350 communicants worshipping in a large church. Today it reports only 80, in a very large population area.
During the days of the Griswold episcopate great gains were made in all the New England dioceses, gains much greater propor- tionately than the population increases. In Massachusetts, the growth was some ten-fold, 400 communicants to 4,118. In Rhode Island, where the bishop spent eighteen out of the thirty-two years of his episcopate, gains were about the same, communicants rising from 200 to nearly 2,000. In Vermont, despite a static population, the increase in communicants in the twenty-one years of Bishop Griswold and the first eleven years of Bishop Hopkins was almost as large proportionately, from 200 to about 1,600. Connecticut, with less spectacular growth, still remained the largest diocese of the area. In 1850, it had 9,300 communicants, only 300 less than the rest of New England combined. In New Hampshire and Maine, it was still a day of very small things. The dioceses reported, in 1850, 572 and 560 communicants respectively.
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What was the theological complexion of the New England dio- ceses in 1843? In Rhode Island, it was chiefly conversionistic Evangelicalism. This movement had the larger places, St. Michael's, Bristol, where the bishop was succeeded by a likeminded Evangeli- cal, John Bristed; St. John's, Providence, where Nathan Bourne Crocker for more than fifty years upheld the Evangelical doctrine; Grace Church, Providence, where several noted Evangelicals had been rectors, and St. Paul's, Pawtucket, where George Taft served for half a century, transmitting his beliefs to the Blackstone Valley parishes.
In Massachusetts, the Evangelical tide was steadily rising, coming to an ebb at the end of the episcopate of Manton Eastburn, after which Massachusetts became the chief center of Broad Churchmanship in the country and of Anglo-Catholicism in New England.
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