USA > Massachusetts > Massachusetts Episcopalians 1607-1957 > Part 7
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Brooks graduated in 1859 at twenty-three, and was ordained deacon by Bishop Meade of Virginia and accepted immediately a call to the Church of the Advent in Philadelphia. Then began the first of his three notable parochial ministries. He soon became known as one of the leading preachers of the city and one of its leading patriots. "Endowed by inheritance with a rich religious character, evangelical tradition, ethical temper and strong intellect, he de- veloped, by wide reading in ancient and modern literature, a personality and attitude of mind which appealed to the characteristic thought and life of the period. With Tennyson, Coleridge, Frederic D. Maurice and F. W. Robertson (all Englishmen of a conservatively liberal outlook) he was in strong sympathy. During the War he upheld with power the cause of the North and the Negro, and his sermon on the death of President Lincoln was an eloquent expression of the character of both men."
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Brooks' stay at the Church of the Advent was short. For, after only three years, the great parish of Holy Trinity lured him away, for the next seven years. At the end of ten years, he was re-called to his native Boston.
In 1868, Bishop Eastburn, after twenty-six years of rectorship at Trinity Church, found the endowments of the Diocese sufficient to enable him to devote himself exclusively to his rapidly growing Episcopal duties. At the age of thirty-four, Brooks became his successor, in a Boston religious climate with which he was uniquely fitted to cope. In 1870, cultured Boston was almost entirely Un- itarian. In 1890, the story was far otherwise.
Trinity parish, in 1869, had a gloomy stone church building on Summer Street. Even then the area was ceasing to be a residential neighborhood. Nevertheless, Brooks' Sunday sermons and his weekly religious lectures filled the old Church, much to the annoy- ance of the Sexton, who contrived in vain all sorts of little artifices to discourage the crowds. Brooks began to think of a bigger church in a better location. The great fire of 1872 providentially opened the way. Brooks and his sexton watched together as the flames gutted the old structure.
The immediate problem was the double one of finding a per- manent location for a new building and a temporary abiding place. The permanent location chosen was in what is now Copley Square but then a sandy stretch of recently filled-in land. There, after five years, the present church, designed by H. H. Richardson, came into being. The temporary location was the forbidding atmosphere of Huntington Hall, reached only by a long flight of stairs. There, enormous congregations worshipped twice a Sunday. When the new building was erected, Trinity Church became perhaps the chief religious center of New England.
A notable picture of the Brooks era and its spiritual anxieties is given by Bishop Lawrence in his autobiography entitled "Fifty Years," a book published at the time of his thirtieth anniversary in the episcopate of Massachusetts.
"I can now hear the voice of Phillips Brooks as he pleaded with his people for a return to St. Paul's teaching, 'Whom ye ignorantly worship, Him I declare unto you.' Revolting against the doctrine of total depravity, he drove home again and again the truth that, while of course all children inherit character and taints of evil, myriads of children are not born to be damned. With all the eloquence at his command he repeated again and again that every child is a child of God; and that the Church, knowing this, calls all to baptism, the symbol of God's recognition, the gate whereby each child as he grows older has the assurance that he has been brought visibly into God's family. His words fell like refreshing rain upon a thirsty field, and the faith and joy of the congregation rose to meet them."
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Puritan theology had so elevated the divinity of Christ as to make his manhood unreal. The unevitable reaction was the Unitarian movement which, in its second phase, made Christ only a superman. It was the work of Phillips Brooks to reclaim the divinity of Christ as against the Unitarian, and to proclaim His full humanity as against the Puritan and old Evangelical theology. Christ came to earth, not chiefly to be punished for human sin, but to give light and life to the children of men.
As to the new beliefs about the Bible, says the Bishop, "How well I recall the voice and flashing eye of Phillips Brooks as, stand- ing by the lecture pulpit in Huntington Hall, he lifted the people to such a spiritual conception of the inspiration of the Old Testament as to enable them to see how God, assuming the freedom of man's will to do evil or good, had potentially led them up through childhood and savagery until they could begin to appreciate the glory of His purity, truth and love, as revealed in the incarnation of His Son. Facts, interpretations, truths, errors shook themselves into right perspectives." "In the experiences through which my generation passed, young men found themselves changing the emphasis and perspective of their boyhood beliefs, and at the same time gaining a stronger hold on the fundamnetal doctrines of the Christian faith."
In 1877, the noble structure that is now Trinity Church, Boston, was completed. Here the glory of the preaching and the response continued for another fourteen years, with only two threats of change. For, in 1881, Unitarian Harvard took its courage in its hands and offered Brooks the office of sole preacher to the University and a professorship in Ethics. He was sorely tempted to accept, but Trinity's iron determination to keep him prevailed. Five years later, an election as assistant bishop in Pennsylvania, carrying with it the succession to the second largest diocese of the Church, was more easily declined.
It was while he was at Trinity that the considerable literary production of its Rector saw the light. As early as 1877 came the famous Yale Lectures on Preaching, material based on Brooks' own experience. (When Brooks returned from giving these lectures, with a naiveness not unknown to Harvard men, he declared that Yale was quite a college!)
Brooks' first volume of sermons appeared in 1878; his book on "The Influence of Jesus" in 1879. Numerous volumes of sermons appeared later.
The death of Bishop Paddock on March 9, 1891, when barely sixty-three, made a new election necessary. Brooks seemed to be the choice of most of the diocese, but would the General Church accept a man who was not "sound" on the Apostolic Succession and who once had invited a noted Unitarian (Edward Everett Hale of
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the conservative persuasion) to take Communion at a special service in Trinity Church ? Even to the older Evangelicals Brooks might seem to preach the old Gospel with power, but in an amazingly strange language. Some diocesan opposition was apparent at the diocesan Convention held on April 29 and 30, 1891. Brooks was nominated by Alexander H. Vinton, rector of All Saints, Worcester, a modified "Connecticut Churchman." On behalf of the Conserva- tives, Reginald H. Storrs, rector of St. Paul's, Dedham, nominated the Rev. Henry Yates Satterlee, rector of Calvary Church, New York, later to be Bishop of Washington and the founder of its magnificent Cathedral. Brooks was elected on the first ballot, by a vote of 92 to 58 in the clerical order and by 71 to 32 of the parishes, then still voting as units.
The consecration took place on October 14, 1891, just four and a half months after the election, a not unusual length of time when summer intervenes. Nine bishops were present and participating. John Williams of Connecticut, Presiding Bishop, was the Conse- crator. Thomas March Clark of Rhode Island and Henry B. Whipple of Minnesota, Apostle to the Indians, were the co-consecrators. The old-line high Churchmen were represented by William Woodruff Niles of New Hampshire and Abram N. Littlejohn of Long Island, the Anglo-Catholics by William Croswell Doane of Albany, and the newer and older Evangelicals by Henry Codman Potter of New York, Mark Anthony DeWolf Howe of Central Pennsylvania, and Ethel- bert Talbot, then missionary bishop of Wyoming and Idaho.
Bishop Brooks' episcopate lasted only fifteen months, but it brought about a diocesan renewal in which the Bishop played a great part. He visited every section of the Diocese, including the hill towns of the Berkshires, preaching to crowded congregations and confirming 2,127 people. His first Episcopal act was to transfer Father Hall to the diocese of Oxford. In his only Episcopal address, replete with constructive suggestions, the Bishop remarked on the peculiar situation in which priests in religious orders under foreign direction bore to the bishops to whom they owed canonical obedience. The immediate result in Boston had been that Fathers Torbert and Charles H. Brent, assistants to Father Hall, withdrew from the Church of St. John the Evangelist and took over the old church building of the Church of the Messiah in the South End, which had been abandoned in favor of a new location in the expand- ing Back Bay. There they established a great work among the poor under the name of St. Stephen's. Charles Brent was later to be the famous Bishop of the Phillipines. St. Stephen's, today, still exists in a small way in a non-Anglo-Saxon neighborhood.
Bishop Brooks' last Episcopal act was to celebrate the Holy Communion at the consecration of a Boston church on January 14, 1893. Almost immediately, he was seized by a painful disease, the premonitions of which had appeared even before the Consecration, and on January 23 he was gone, aged only fifty-seven.
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Boston was stunned by the news. Most of the Church regarded the event as a great calamity, though there were some who were relieved that the danger to Apostolic Order, incarnate in the person of Brooks, had been removed. When a telegram telling the news came to Tokyo, a Nashotah graduate, later to be a bishop in the home Church, was reported to have danced with joy. But Brooks sentiment, however, was strong even in Japan, where certain mis -. sionaries had made him into the Church's hero. The present writer recalls that, some fifty years ago, John Yasutaro Naide, later one of the first native Japanese bishops, came to study a while at the Cam- bridge Seminary. He immediately asked to be shown the grave of Phillips Brooks. The next day he said that he had revisited the spot, and as an act of homage had read a Brooks sermon over the grave.
On the day of the funeral, Trinity Church was crowded, while thousands stood without. To enable the outdoors congregation to participate, one of the hymns was sung and prayers said on Copley Square. The funeral cortege proceeded by request through the Harvard Yard, while the college students lined the roadway. Two of the Bishop's clerical brothers conducted the committal service at the grave in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.
The Memorial of the Convention of 1893
"The clergy and laity of the Diocese of Massachusetts, through their Committee, desire to express to the members of the family of their late Bishop, the Rt. Rev. Phillips Brooks, D.D., and to enter upon the Records of the Diocese, this Minute of their affection for him, and of their sense of the great loss, which by his death, had come to the Church of Christ not only in this Diocese, but through- out the world. He was our Chief Pastor but for little more than a year, and had only begun to call his children by name when he was taken away. Yet every part of the Diocese, and every one of its varied activities had felt the inspiration of his leadership, and his devoted labors had already been crowned with noble and permanent results.
"We found in him one who was a true Bishop and Shepherd, not only seeking to know his sheep, but willing to lay down his life for them. We recall with gratitude his many years of service in the Diocese, for which he was so well fitted not only by his preeminent mental and spiritual endowments, but by his birth and training in this community which he so deeply loved. We are grateful for his years of witnessing to the Gospel of Christ, to the generous Catho- licity of our Church, to the loving Fatherhood of God, and to the abiding brotherhood of humanity. Long before he became our Bishop he had won our admiration and affection as our ever helpful brother in the Ministry, as the great Citizen, the great Churchman, the great Preacher of Jesus Christ.
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"As our Bishop he had our unshaken trust and love, and he had strengthened our affection and confidence toward each other through the ties by which he had drawn us to himself and to our Divine Master.
"But beyond our grief for the loss of one who filled so nobly and adequately these official relations to us, we claim our share in the sorrow of the multitudes in many lands who mourn the loss of a friend. We sorrow most of all because there is lost to the earth a man in whom the life of Christ was visibly manifested. His life was always hid with Christ in God.
"Therefore we rejoce in the midst of our grief, that he has been enabled to enter into that closer fellowship and communion for which his life had so richly prepared him.
"The Diocese of Massachusetts will always count it to have been a blessing, that she had, though alas for so short a time, the Episcopal leadership of Phillips Brooks."
Charles L. Hutchins William Lawrence Charles Morris Addison Committee of the Diocese
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CHAPTER VIII. The Administration of William Lawrence 1893 - 1927
I.
At the Convention of 1893, amid a mountain of other business, an Episcopal election was held. There were only two real candidates. Dr. William Lawrence, Dean of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, was nominated by the Rev. John Cotton Brooks, the late bishop's brother, the rector of Christ Church, Springfield. Then the Rev. George S. Converse, for the Conservatives, nominated William Hobart Hare, the illustrious Bishop of South Dakota, "apostle to the Indians." A third nomination, that of Arthur C. A. Hall, then in exile in England, was made by the Rev. George J. Prescott of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Boston.
When the tellers brought in the tally of the first ballot, Dr. Lawrence was easily first in the lay vote. He had 72 of the 114 parochial units, Bishop Hare gathering 23 and Father Hall 12. In the clerical vote the story was different. Dr. Lawrence had 65 votes, Bishop Hare 56, and Father Hall 22. Nineteen complimentary votes were divided among nine other clergymen from within or without the Diocese. There being no concurrent majority, the chair declared, No Election.
In the second ballot, Dr. Lawrence slightly increased his lead in the lay order to 75 out of 110. The clerical vote produced a bare majority, 82 out of 160, for the Dean of Cambridge. The next day, William Lawrence accepted his election, pending the consent of a majority of the Bishops and Standing Committees of the Church.
The Consecration took place on October 5, 1893, eight bishops being present. The Presiding Bishop, John Williams of Connecticut, was again the Consecrator. Co-consecrators were Thomas M. Clark of Rhode Island and Henry M. Neely of Maine. The other five bishops were Frederic D. Huntington of Central New York, William W. Niles of New Hampshire, Henry C. Potter of New York, Alfred M. Randolph of Southern Virginia and Bishop Courtney of Nova Scotia.
II.
The story of Bishop Lawrence's early life could be told in quota- tions from his several books, particularly "Fifty Years" and "Memories of a Happy Life."
William Lawrence was born in Boston on May 30, 1850, to wealth, simple living and devout household religion. "My father was a successful merchant and manufacturer, but was at heart and in deed a farmer. He financed the emigrants to make Kansas a free State - hence 'Lawrence,' Kansas. He disapproved of John Brown, but helped him; ran for Governor when he was sure of defeat; was Treasurer of Harvard College and drilled the students at the opening of the Civil War; with Henry Lee he recruited the Second Cavalry ; headed subscription lists, raised money for Harvard Memorial Hall
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and all sorts of enterprises ; founded two colleges in the West ; built churches and worshipped in them. Our home was in Brookline, then a rural village. He rode horseback, mostly on half-broken brutes, for over fifty years, until he was nearly seventy; and made friends with everyone in town, especially the boys and girls. He never sent his children to Church, but always went with them, and we knew that his religion was the real thing.
"My mother was a woman of rare beauty and dignity, reserved, especially in matters of personal religion. As to her administrative ability, my father used to say that General Grant, if he knew her, would put her at the head of the commissary department."*
"My boyhood was passed in a large and happy family which, through the beautiful character of my parents, daily family prayer and Sunday worship, was saturated with Christian piety. Attend- ing the public schools, the Town Meetings and the rallies in the Civil War, I was filled with the spirit of American Democracy. I went through Harvard University, whose mottoes are "The Truth" and "For Christ and His Church." Knowing personally through my father's friends some of the leaders of New England's thought, literature and religion, I was brought up to face changes of thought and faith with an open mind and with courage."*
In such a rich heritage and environment William Lawrence was born, in a world, however, almost inconceivable today. The universe and the world were both small to the men of 1865. Modern astron- omy, archaeology, Biblical learning, biology, medicine, travel, etc., were still remote. William Lawrence grew up in the first flood of a totally different world, of science, history and religion. A good part of this revolution he has depicted in his accounts of Phillips Brooks already quoted. The sermons of Brooks and the lectures of Steenstra and A. V. G. Allen at Cambridge were the media of his transition from an intense, but limited religion to the larger outlook of his maturity.
William Lawrence's first work, after four years at Harvard and three years at Cambridge, was a curacy at Grace Church, Law- rence. For six years, from 1877 to 1883, he was rector there, a faithful pastor and progressively improving preacher. He labored with the managements of the Lawrence mills to have a better system of wage payments installed. Hitherto, the help had been paid by a monthly check, cashable at banking hours when no employee could leave work. The result was that grocery stores became the cashing and credit centers of the city, not to the real good of the worker. Later the monthly check was converted into a weekly payment in cash. The Seventies, though somewhat improved over the Thirties and Forties, were still a time of long hours, low wages, minimum job security and no injury compensation. In his diligent pastoral visit- ing, the son of privilege, necessarily, had his social vision enlarged.
William Lawrence, Fifty Years, p. 45, 6.
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In 1886, he was called back to his Seminary at Cambridge to be professor of Homiletics. Two years later he became Dean, after the untimely death of Dean Gray at fifty-two. As Dean he was a real friend and companion of his students. In 1893, the Diocese called him to great service in Church and Country, in an episcopate of 34 years.
The non-diocesan services may well be mentioned first. In 1917. Bishop Lawrence was instrumental in bringing into being, on sound lines, of the Church Pension Fund, a major achievement. A good part of the initial capital of $5,000,000 he raised personally. He was as successful in luring large subscriptions from strangers in Wall Street as he had been with friends in Boston.
His native Harvard made him an Overseer, and, in 1913, he was elected to that select and self-perpetuating body known as the President and Fellows of Harvard College, an organization which has the first or last say on all that happens at that great University. In this capacity, the Bishop spear-headed a ten million dollar drive for the University and a five million dollar one for the Graduate School of Business Administration. As president of the Board of Trustees of Wellesley, he was instrumental in raising several millions for that college.
By 1917, Bishop Lawrence was one of the leading men of the Church. To the Presidency of the new Pension Fund, he added the Chairmanship during World War I of the Church War Commission, as well as holding various other extra-diocesan posts, such as the presidency of the House of Bishops. Bishop Henry St. George Tucker, once Presiding Bishop of the Church, tells in his auto- biography, "Exploring the Silent Shore of Memory," about his first experience in the House of Bishops. As he sat at the back of the hall, it seemed to him that. Bishop Lawrence and Bishop Hall of Vermont about monopolized the floor. Bishop McKim of Tokyo, educated at Nashotah in its less ritualistic days, once told the writer that no one in the House commanded more attention than Bishop Lawrence. He always had something to say.
The Bishop's published writings are worth mentioning at this point. The earliest one was a biography of his father, "The Life of Amos A. Lawrence," dating from 1888. Amos Lawrence was al- most as great a figure in the secular world as was his son in the religious one. His principal physical memorial in the Episcopal Church is Lawrence Hall, the chief dormitory of the Cambridge Seminary. Then followed, in 1896, the "Life of Roger Wolcott," the high-minded Governor of Massachusetts. "The American Cathe- dral," came in 1919. Then, when the Bishop was well past his seventieth year, "Life of Henry Cabot Lodge," in 1925; "Memories of a Happy Life," (1926) ; "The New American," (1929) ; "Life of Phillips Brooks," (1930) ; and "Story of the Church Pension Fund," in 1931. At that last date the Bishop was eighty-one and had
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been retired for four years. His life-long companion, Julia Cunningham, whom he had married in 1874, passed away in 1927. Fifteen honorary doctorates came to the Bishop, beginning with an S.T.D. from Harvard in 1893 and closing with a D. D. from Williams in 1930, and an L. L. D. from Harvard in 1931.
Bishop Lawrence had the happiness of consecrating his own son, William Appleton, to the episcopate of Western Massachusetts in 1937, preaching the sermon. He was then eighty-seven, as mentally active as ever. His third daughter married his successor, Charles Lewis Slattery. The Bishop's youngest son, Frederic Cunningham, became a bishop fifteen years after his father's death, which took place in 1941 at the age of ninety-one.
III Bishop Lawrence as Diocesan
As one reads the early Convention addresses of William Law- rence, the outlines of a great episcopate already emerge. These addresses, as do his later books, reveal literary skill, apparently hard-won, concreteness and, occasionally, eloquence in expression. They portray confident and buoyant faith, solidly based on Scripture and undarkened by the guilt-filled ratiocinations of St. Augustine of Hippo. They reveal, further, an administrator ever vigorous, vigi- lant and skilled, a man of both vision and practical sense. It is no wonder that in five years the Diocese accepted him as a great leader. The general Church was to do so somewhat later.
Immediately after his Consecration, the Bishop plunged into as strenuous visitation of the Diocese as had Phillips Brooks. The nigh two hundred parishes and missions were almost all visited in the year. Three confirmations a Sunday, with three addresses to the candidates and three sermons, were the usual thing. Even the Sundays at his summer home in Bar Harbor included, often, some sermon somewhere in the Diocese of Maine.
The comparatively early deaths of Bishops Paddock and Brooks had produced a general feeling throughout the Diocese that the episcopal burden must somehow be lightened. The first expedient was to create five archdeaconries, with some rector acting as arch- deacon in his area. Thus the city of Boston was made one arch- deaconry. The other four were the archdeaconry of Lowell, compris- ing Essex and Middlesex counties and part of Suffolk county, the archdeaconry of New Bedford, comprising the southeastern counties of the state, the archdeaconry of Worcester, comprising the county of that name, and the archdeaconry of Springfield, covering the western and weakest part of the Diocese.
This arrangement did facilitate administration on a lower level, but did not relieve the bishop of much of his responsibility. For parishes, people and problems still continued to increase. Since
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suffragan bishops were not then canonically permissible, the only other alleviating alternatives were a Coadjutor Bishop or the division of the Diocese. To elect a successor to the Bishop in the person of a Coadjutor, many years before the Diocesan would naturally lay down his burden, hardly seemed appropriate. So a division of the Diocese appeared to be the logical, even if distasteful, answer. For Boston was the hub, as much to the Berkshires as to suburban Brookline. Furthermore, where should the dividing line be? Most of the wealth and strength of the Diocese and most of its parishes were in the Boston orbit. Again, where could an Epis- copal fund to support another bishop be found? What about the other diocesan funds which had their main source and their center in Boston ?
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