USA > Massachusetts > Massachusetts Episcopalians 1607-1957 > Part 6
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Catholic of Wisconsin, in two Conventions, had also a third of the votes both clerical and lay. Inasmuch as there were only a handful of Anglo-Catholic clergy in the Diocese, it is evident that the old- time Churchmen, averse to the "radicalism" of the Evangelicals, old and new, preferred the new ritualistic radicalism of the orator from Racine. As a result, Benjamin Henry Paddock, rector of Christ Church, Brooklyn, emerged as the compromise choice. In the sixteen years of the Paddock episcopate, new movements were to emerge in force. After Paddock, the Bishops of Massachusetts have all been leaders of Evangelical Liberalism, Phillips Brooks, William Lawrence, Charles L. Slattery, Henry K. Sherrill, Norman B. Nash and Anson Phelps Stokes, Jr. At the same time, in or soon after the Paddock period, five Massachusetts Anglo-Catholics were to go forth as bishops, Edward Osborne to Springfield, Charles C. Grafton to Fond du Lac, Arthur C. A. Hall to Vermont, Robert Codman to Maine and Charles H. Brent to the Phillipines. The last was to become the great spiritual leader of a newer Catholicism; Hall and Codman were to remake their dioceses after their own image. Thus, with the deaths of Burgess in Maine (1866), Brownell in Connecticut (1865), Hopkins in Vermont (1867), Carlton Chase in New Hampshire (1870), of Eastburn in Massachusetts (1872), the Church all over New England was moving to new ground. In Connecticut and New Hampshire only, the old high Churchmanship lingered on somewhat longer.
That the Diocese both loved and respected its bishop is clear enough from a memorial resolution passed by the Convention of 1873. Thus we read: "During his episcopate our late Diocesan occupied a position of peculiar prominence in the Church and in the Community. Holding, with remarkable clearness and simplicity the doctrine of Justification by Faith, we seem, as we think of him, to hear the words, 'In whom we have redemption through his Blood, the forgiveness of sins;' 'This is His Name, whereby He shall be called the Lord our Righteousness,' was the burden of his preaching, as it was the joy and comfort of his daily life; and no testimony, we are assured, would be so grateful to him as that which all must bear, that 'in the temple and in every hour' he 'ceased not to teach and to preach Jesus Christ'."
"As a Churchman he loved the Church with true filial affection. The Prayer Book, in his estimation, was incomparable, was in thorough accord with the Word of God, and adapted to all estates and conditions of men; and he gave an emphatic 'No' to every proposition for its alteration.
"As a Bishop in the administration of the Diocese, as in all things else, he was faithful to his convictions of duty, and though often opposed, his thorough honesty of purpose and his brave, manly adherence to what he believed to be right and true, won for him the respect of his opponents.
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"Honored by the members of his own Communion, he was equally honored by his fellow Christians of other bodies for his talents, sound learning, fine general scholarship and admirable personal character; while those whose privilege it was to know him intimate- ly loved him for the general, kindly spirit which made him the courteous, hospitable, Christian gentleman, the warmhearted, steadfast friend."
"Liberal in his gifts, and loving to give according to his ability and opportunity, the Church in this Diocese is witness to his bene- factions, and many a poor man will rise up and call him blessed."
"We affectionately cherish his memory, and commend the holi- ness of his life as an example to all to follow."
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CHAPTER VI. The Episcopate of Benjamin Henry Paddock 1873 - 1891
I.
Bishop Eastburn passed to his rest on September 11, 1872, after an active summer of Episcopal visitations. Immediately thereupon, the Standing Committee of the Diocese took steps to increase the Episcopal Endowment Fund by $50,000, thus raising the income eventually to $6,000 a year. This was done mainly by assessments on the parishes.
The Standing Committee also called a special Convention for the election of a new bishop, to be held on December 4 in old Trinity . Church on Summer Street, Boston. The disastrous Boston fire of November 9, which totally consumed old Trinity, caused the election to be transferred to St. Paul's Church.
When the Convention met, it was evident that the ecclesiastical climate of the Diocese had greatly changed. The leading Evangelical candidate, Dr. Alexander H. Vinton of Emmanuel Church, Boston, was not able, in three ballots, to get a majority in either the clerical or the lay Order. Dr. Benjamin I. Haight, a New York rector and professor in the General Seminary, an old-time high Churchman, was, on the third ballot, elected by a majority of one (43 out of 82) among the clergy, and by a majority of one parish in the lay vote. Dr. Vinton received 36 clerical votes. This election Dr. Haight declined.
Thereupon, the Standing Committee, because of the "sharp division of opinion in the Diocese," decided on a cooling-off period, and remanded the Episcopal election to the regular meeting of Con- vention in May. This time the two leading names were those of Dr. Benjamin H. Paddock, rector of Grace Church, Brooklyn, and once more Dr. James De Koven, Warden of Racine College, Wisconsin, the leading Anglo-Catholic of the time. Dr. De Koven was a con- summate orator and Parliamentarian, who twice saved the Catholic party from condemnation at General Convention by appealing to the comprehensive character of the Anglican Communion. Ironically, though Dr. De Koven obtained once a third of both clerical and parochial votes in Massachusetts, his later election to the Diocese of Illinois was negatived by a majority of the Standing Committees of the Church including that of Massachusetts. On May 15, 1873, Dr. Paddock was elected Bishop on the third ballot, with 52 clerical votes, three more than a majority, and by 45 parishes out of 80.
II.
Benjamin Henry Paddock was born in Norwich, Connecticut, on February 29, 1828, and graduated from Trinity College, Hart- ford. He remained more or less a Connecticut Churchman to the end of his days. His main parochial cure was the rectorship of the then great parish of Christ Church, Brooklyn, New York, in which post he attained the national prominence which led to his election to what had become, then as it is now, the third largest Episcopal diocese in the country. He was consecrated fifth Bishop of Massa- chusetts on September 17, 1873, at the age of forty-five.
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III.
Three things stand out in the eighteen-year episcopate of Bishop Paddock. The first is the change in the ecclesiastical climate of the diocese, and that in a double direction. Massachusetts, par- ticularly Boston, was to become a citadel both of Anglo-Catholicism and of the new Broad Churchmanship, of which Phillips Brooks was the outstanding representative.
Bishop Paddock, as can easily be gleaned from his Convention addresses, was between the old and the new. He was an old- fashioned High Churchman, yet one who was aware that new vistas were opening out in the Church, both in ceremonial and Biblical knowledge. He was a strong Prayer Book Churchman, opposed to the introduction from the Roman missal of such things as the Bene- dictus Qui Venit and the Agnus Dei. The Anglo-Catholic practice of presenting very young children for Confirmation he considered highly undesirable. He remarked in one Convention address that he had confirmed such immature candidates rather than humiliate them by open rejection at the altar rail.
Shortly before Paddock's election, the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge had opened its doors. Two of the early pro- fessors were to be pioneers of the new theological learning. P. H. Steenstra's work was to recover the Bible for the modern student, and A. V. G. Allen's to bring in Greek theology in place of the Latin Augustinianism which Luther and Calvin had perpetuated and aggravated, and which was the special inheritance, with its doctrine of total human depravity and worthlessness, of the old Evangelical. Bishop Charles L. Slattery's biography of Allen brings out interest- ingly the struggle which went on in Allen's mind as it revolted against the narrow Evangelical outlook of Kenyon College.
Three obituary eulogies given by Bishop Paddock in his Con- vention addresses are also of interest. Speaking of Alexander H. Vinton, rector for many years of both St. Paul's and Emmanuel Church in Boston, he remarked in his 1881 address: "Only just now an eminent presbyter has fallen, who was one of us always in heart, but not canonically so at the last. Dr. Alexander H. Vinton has been so largely identified with this diocese during much of his life, that his loss is as much felt as if he were our own presbyter. He was a great, scholarly, and godly man; large-minded and great-hearted, and when aroused to its utmost his intellect showed its massive strength, and his eloquence became a thing of grandeur. Are we raising enough ministers like him, - great as well as good in the greatest and best of human callings ?"
Bishop Paddock was somewhat irked by the fact that the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge was governed by a body of self-perpetuating lay trustees, and that the bishop of the diocese had no control over it. He usually sent his candidates elsewhere. Nevertheless, the presence of John Seely Stone as its dean might
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well have reconciled him somewhat to this absence of episcopal authority. Speaking of Stone in his 1882 address, the bishop re- marked: "The Rev. John Seely Stone, D.D., Emeritus Dean of the Episcopal Theological School, died at Cambridge, within the pre- cincts of the School, on January 12 of the present year, nearly eighty-seven years of age. What a period in the history of the Church and of the nation those years span! When he was born (1795), this national Church had been organized only six years, and had four bishops and about two hundred clergy, instead of the sixty-five bishops and thirty-four hundred clergy of the present year. When he was a strong youth of nineteen, he was gaining his first sight of Boston, as an enlisted soldier from his native Berk- shire, marching hither in 1814 for the defense of Boston against the possible attack by the troops of King George the Third. In 1826 - before a good many of us who are not young were born - he was an ordained minister of this Church. From that time almost to this, he set forth the Gospel of Christ with a charm and a power rarely surpassed; and he lived as he preached all those years. Fifteen years ago he was elected Dean of the new Episcopal Theo- logical School at Cambridge; and that institution owes much of its present vigor and success to his controlling influence. At four-score he withdrew from this responsible and arduous office, and rested, waiting upon God."
Bishop Paddock's cautious welcome to the new learning is ex- emplified in his tribute to John Cotton Smith, a pioneer of the broad church movement, (1882) : "Dr. John Cotton Smith, learned and godly; fearless and gentle; large-hearted and broad-minded ; master of the new learning, but loyal to evangelical truth as distinguished from rationalistic or materialistic speculations and criticism; a Christian philosopher whose profound and clear thinking helped to strip respectability and influence from the superficial and conceited originality and great swelling words of some who are ever declaring how grievously thinkers are oppressed by the narrowness of the 'faith once delivered' and are striving mightily to stretch the limits of allowed belief until all their discoveries of stale old heresies con- cerning the inspiration of the Word of God, the Atoning Sacrifice, the value of Miracles and Prophecy, the Sacraments, and the final Doom of wilful sinners, shall find room and appreciative welcome. John Cotton Smith, the admirable scholar, preacher, pastor, was well-nigh one of our diocesan family. The beautiful Ascension Church, Ipswich, . .. is largely his work, and many hundreds of dollars were his personal gift."
The list of graduates of the Episcopal Theological School as they came forth in Bishop Paddock's day is another indication of the trend. To mention just a few of the Broad Churchmen who were to shed their influence far and near: William Lawrence, the future bishop; Theodosius S. Tyng and Edmund R. Woodman, who introduced the new ideas to the Japanese Church ; Endicott Peabody and Sherrard Billings, the famous pair who founded Groton School;
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Louis De Cormis, rector of St. Stephen's, Lynn, when Enoch R. Mudge built its beautiful church in memory of his children; Henry Sylvester Nash, the brilliant preacher and New Testament professor at the Episcopal Theological School; Julius W. Attwood, later bishop of Arizona, and John W. Suter, Sr., the well-known liturgist and custodian of the Standard Copy of the Prayer Book, as is now his son, John W. Jr., of New Hampshire. And to mention only one more out of others, Charles Morris Addison. Massachusetts was moving to a position of leadership in two widely contrasting new movements, Anglo-Catholicism and Broad Churchmanship. The solitary epis- copal representative of Broad Churchmanship before that day was Thomas March Clark, Bishop of Rhode Island, also for some years a presbyter of the diocese.
Theological change was one mark of the Paddock episcopate. A second was a great development in organization and institutions, educational, charitable and missionary. Many of these which now adorn the Diocese of Massachusetts arose in his time, notably Groton School, soon to rival the older St. Mark's. Bishop Paddock's dream of a girls' school to parallel these institutions for boys has not yet come to fruition. Connecticut, with St. Margaret's, Water- bury; Vermont, with the Bishop Hopkins School for Girls, and New Hampshire, with St. Mary's, in this respect outpace New England's largest diocese. A diocesan center, which Bishop Paddock often wished for, came after his death in the commodious building at 1 Joy Street, Boston.
A third feature of the Paddock episcopate was the tremendous growth of the diocese numerically, in clergy, new church buildings, in parishes and communicants. The 11,500 communicants of the last year of Bishop Eastburn had become about 30,000 by 1891, the date of Bishop Paddock's death. This growth, in eighteen years, exceeded by a little the tripling of communicants in Bishop East- burn's time, although it did not equal the ten-fold increase of the Griswold episcopatc. In all three administrations, English immigra- tion played a large part in church growth. The second constant factor was the presence of the Episcopal Church as a city of refuge for those who had fled from either the reactionary or the liberal movements in contemporary Protestantism. Indeed, in the Paddock era, this turning to the Church was more acute than at any time since the 1830's, when Thomas M. Clark abandoned Calvinism and the parents of Phillips Brooks took refuge from Unitarianism in the warm evangelical atmosphere of Dr. Alexander Vinton's first Massa- chusetts parish, St. Paul's, Boston. In Paddock's time, the Church of the Advent in Boston welcomed those who sought a substitute for lost Scriptural inerrancy in the Anglo-Catholic doctrine of the infallible Church. Those who still clung to the old Protestant doctrine of individual experience of Christ found new vistas and new faith in the Christology of Phillips Brooks, who brought many a strong layman and many a clerical candidate into the Church.
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Bishop Paddock was an able administrator and preacher. His Convention addresses give some idea of his preaching in their felicity of expression and their reminiscence of the Old Evangelical oratory, with its mastery of the rolling phrases of Holy Writ. He was a hard worker, making an average of 150 episcopal visitations a year in a diocese of large dimensions, besides attending numerous meet- ings and carrying on the endless interviews and administrative work connected with the office of a bishop.
Bishop Paddock died on March 9, 1891, when barely sixty-three years of age. He had been a hard worker through all his episcopate, with scarcely a vacation, except for a single trip to Europe. The lengthening cares of his office undoubtedly contributed to the short- ening of his life. It was slowly becoming evident that the Diocese of Massachusetts was too large for one man. But it took the tragedy of the Brooks episcopate, cut short by premature death, to force the lesson home.
When Bishop Paddock had gone, it became almost a foregone conclusion that Phillips Brooks, for twenty years now the master preacher of New England, should be his successor. He was elected with only minor opposition locally. Confirmation of the election by bishops and Standing Committees, with opposition stemming chiefly from his known attitude on Apostolic Succession (the only Apostolic Succession worth considering, he once remarked, was the Apostolic Succession of the Holy Spirit), was for a moment in question. But high Churchmen, like Doane of Albany, and others rallied to his support. Arthur C. Hall, the Cowley Father member of the Massa- chusetts Standing Committee, the future Bishop of Vermont, was recalled to England by his Superiors for voting for confirmation of the election, and a protest was read by two Anglo-Catholic priests before the Consecration ceremony.
Bishop William Lawrence, Brooks' successor, used to tell the following story. The day after the Brooks election he was walking through the Harvard Yard, when he met the Unitarian President of the University, Charles W. Eliot. Eliot remarked to him that he thought it a tragic mistake to take Brooks from his great pulpit and to make him a bishop. A bishop's chief job was to run around and confirm people. A couple of years later, when Lawrence himself had just been elected, he met Eliot again in the Yard. Eliot congratulated him, remarking that he was just the man for the job!
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CHAPTER VII. The Episcopate of Phillips Brooks 1891 - 1893
"This was the time of religious fervor well remembered by those of us who in schools and rectories and family pews watched and listened and took heed. The figures of Bishop Clark (of Rhode Island) and Phillips Brooks and others stirred vast congregations by their eloquence. The immediate result was electric, illuminating for a moment or for a lifetime, the souls of individuals and releasing spiritual currents in the multitudes who felt the irresistible con- tagion" Thus wrote James DeWolf Perry, at the end of thirty-five years in the episcopate of Rhode Island, as he recalled the days of his youth near the end of what we may call the Brooks era.
Phillips Brooks had a notable ancestry, ecclesiastical and civil, on both his father's and his mother's side. His earliest New England forbear, the Rev. George Phillips, came to Salem with Governor Winthrop. He was a Cambridge University graduate, ordained in the Church of England, who threw in his lot with the Puritans and died at only fifty-one. Wrote Winthrop in his journal: "He was a godly man, specially gifted, and very peaceful in his place, much lamented by his own people and others." George Phillips' grandson, Samuel, a man of energy and individuality, filled the pulpit of the South Church in Andover for sixty-two years. He was a preacher of power, who stood steadfast by the old Calvinistic orthodoxy, though maintaining friendly relations "with the neigh- boring clergy of a looser and more dangerous creed."
Samuel's grandson, also named Samuel, amassed wealth. His son, Judge Phillips, was a public figure of great distinction in the State. He it was who started Phillips Academy of Andover and the Andover Theological Seminary on their long careers. Into these foundations the wealth of the Phillips family, both male and female, was poured. Judge Phillips' granddaughter, Mary Ann, was the mother of Phillips Brooks.
The Brooks family of Medford, rich farmers and merchants, were the ancestors of Phillips Brooks on his father's side. A notable ecclesiastical forbear was the Rev. John Cotton. Phillips Brooks' great uncle, Peter Chardon Brooks, was reputedly the wealthiest man in New England. Phillips' own father, William Gray Brooks, came to Boston from Portland, Maine, to enter into the hardware business in Boston. He was a prosperous man in a small way. It was at the house of his uncle Peter in Medford that he met and won Mary Ann Phillips, marrying her in 1833.
According to Bishop William Lawrence, who knew both parents, Mary Ann was a girl of intense religious convictions who, later on, watched with pride and some anxiety the career of her great son. William Brooks, though never rich, "was a substantial citizen, courteous after the old manner, of a deep pleasant voice, well-read and of excellent judgemnt. ... Mrs. Brooks, alert in body and mind, commanded the household by her evident force of character." Phillips Brooks was thus made in the image of his ancestors. Three
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younger brothers, John Cotton, Frederic and Arthur, also entered the Episcopal ministry and were rectors and preachers of distinc- tion. "From their ancestry through their mother, these men were filled with an enthusiasm to preach the Gospel; in them were emotion, idealism, mysticism and strong character, typical of the settlers of New England."*
The Brooks family originally attended the Unitarian services of a relative, Dr. N. L. Frothingham. It was not a religious environ- ment to make Mrs. Brooks happy, and gradually Mr. Brooks grew tired of the cold intellectualism and increasing radicalism of his cousin's sermons. So the couple decided to try elsewhere. But orthodox Congregationalism, driven by the new Unitarianism into ever more reactionary positions, was not for them. "Neither the Old South, nor the Park Street Meeting House had the vital spark that Mrs. Brooks looked for. In St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Tremont Street they found a service which was somewhat un- familiar and stately and to Mr. Brooks irksome at first; but the preaching of the Rev. Dr. Stone was evangelical and practical. Hence, in pew number sixty, enclosed on all sides, between Mrs. Brooks at one end and Mr. Brooks at the door, six boys sat, stood, or slouched - kneeling was impossible in those ancient pews."
Brooks entered Harvard in 1851 at the age of fifteen. Long- fellow, Agassiz, Asa Gray and Benjamin Pierce were the great luminaries of what was still a small college. But the ordinary under- graduate saw little of them. Child in English, Lane in Latin and Cooke in Chemistry, all great names later on, were the real teachers. James Walker, the President, was a man of wisdom and influence among the students. Phillips Brooks, in his first great grief, his failure as a school teacher, went immediately to see him.
Phillips had no special interest in college marks, but read privately over a wide range of the ancient and English classics. Though he graduated only the tenth in a class of seventy, both in- structors and fellow students were struck by the thoughtfulness and literary style of his oral and written exercises. As one reads through the numerous excerpts from this period which A. V. G. Allen has gathered into his monumental biography of Brooks, one can hardly fail to see the lineaments of future greatness.
After graduation, Brooks undertook a mastership in the Boston Latin School, then under the strict rule and ferule of "Old Man Gardiner." Teaching a class of boys not much younger than himself, a class which had already sent three masters to the wall, turned out to be a humiliating failure. Gardiner added one bitter parting word of scorn - a man who failed at school teaching would never be good at anything.
* Wm. Lawrence, Phillips Brooks, p. 7.
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By January after graduation, Brooks went home to read and to ruminate for the next eight months. He thought again of the Ministry, in which idea President Walker, his own father and his rector, Dr. Alexander H. Vinton, all encouraged him. Yet he felt that he had moved away from the old Evangelical piety of his rector and his mother. Also, he noticed how clergymen avoided what seemed to him the acute moral issue of slavery; he wondered whether he could preach as he felt and believed, and still remain in the Ministry.
The decision was, finally, quickly made. The only remaining question was to which Seminary he should go. Harvard Divinity School, by then, was hopelessly Unitarian, Andover Seminary was too near home, and the General Theological Seminary at New York was not one which his rector would recommend. So the decision was to go to the only other Church Seminary then in the East, the Seminary at Alexandria, Virginia.
Brooks found the physical appearance of the Seminary on the Hill even more depressing than the intellectual. Dr. Sparrow, out of the whole faculty, was the only one who seemed to have real learning and a vital mind. However, Brooks found the social and religious atmosphere of the Seminary warm and friendly. His room-mate in a "miserable garret," with a bed too small for his huge frame, turned out to be Henry Codman Potter, son of the Bishop of New York, and himself later to hold the same office. The first two Broad Church bishops of the Episcopal Church (after Thomas March Clark of Rhode Island) met in the Seminary garret. Brooks received his first Communion at Christmas of his first year, when his mother visited him in Washington. He was not confirmed until the next vacation.
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