USA > Massachusetts > Massachusetts Episcopalians 1607-1957 > Part 9
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Upon the death of the father, the older son, George, had gone to Colorado and had become a farmer. In his sixteenth year Charles went to join him for a year. It was a year of adventure and outdoor life, as well as indoor reading. The young man devoured Shake- speare, Charles Lamb and Macauley.
Then followed a three months experience as a sixteen-year-old teacher at a small ranch school. Later, the East Denver High School gave him the necessary preparation for Harvard, which he entered in 1887, instead of going to Yale, as Harry Nichols had wanted him to do. A determining factor in this choice was a letter from Phillips Brooks whom the young student had consulted. This letter now hangs framed in Phillips Brooks House at Harvard.
* There is an interesting biography of Bishop Slattery, exquisitely written by his lifelong friend Howard Chandler Robbins. Harpers, 1931. Numerous quotations from it follow.
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Slowly and shyly the young man developed precious friendships. He became a remarkable student. "The A's kept coming with mon- otonous regularity, varied by an occasional A plus. .. Deficiency and irregularity in preparation had been made up by hard work."
The great formative influence in Slattery's religious life in college had been Phillips Brooks. When the great preacher was elected Bishop in 1891, Slattery had no doubt as to the Diocese in which he should be a candidate, or the Theological School in which he should study.
So, in September, Slattery found himself in Lawrence Hall at E.T.S., where he had roomed for a year in college. He was in the company of a small body of choice souls who were to be marked men in the Church in future years, such as Bishops Roots of China, Thurston of Oklahoma, Edward L. Parsons of California and Henry Bradford Washburn, many years Dean at the Cambridge School.
"In liberal circles the Episcopal Theological School was at this time at the height of its influence and prestige. No other seminary in the Episcopal Church, or perhaps in the entire Anglican Com- munion could boast a faculty of men of greater ability or more entirely devoted to the search for truth. Dean Lawrence was al- ready giving evidence of the administrative ability which was later on to make him in this respect the foremost figure in the American Church. Dr. Alexander V. G. Allen occupied the chair of ecclesiasti- cal history. In his Continuity of Christian Thought, a book dedi- cated to his friend, Phillips Brooks, he had explored the Greek tradition in the Christian religion and made the most original and significant contribution to theological thought that had come from the United States since the days of Jonathan Edwards. Doctor Steenstra, affectionately called "Steenie," eccentric, witty, learned, was teaching Bible exegesis with complete disregard of prejudices and conventional interpretations and complete faith in the methods of modern criticism. Doctor Henry S. Nash was teaching the New Testament and its background in Judaism in the same scholarly fashion, suffused with a profound spirituality, which made him the most influential person in the School. The younger members of the faculty, the Reverend Edward S. Drown and the Reverend Max Kellner were employing in their respective departments of Theology and Hebrew the same methods and exhibiting a similar spirit. Welded into unity by strong conviction and by misunderstanding, criticism and opposition from without, the school stood four-square, a citadel of liberalism, and a school of the prophets, the counterpart in the Episcopal Church of Union Seminary in the Presbyterian Communion."
The three short years in Seminary were soon passed. Growth in friendship kept pace with growth in scholarship. The future scholar, teacher and pastor was being gradually developed. Thus it was natural, in the welter of other alternatives, that Charles
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Slattery should begin work as a master in Groton School and pastor of the nearby congregation in Ayer. Dr. Peabody provided a home for him and his mother near the school buildings.
After two years at Groton and Ayer, Slattery listened to the Macedonian call of Harry Nichols and Theodore Thurston to come to Minnesota, where they felt that the clergy and laity needed to discover the modern world. Slattery, after consultation with Bishop Lawrence and others, regarded a call to the Cathedral Parish at Faribault as an opportunity of the first magnitude. He was destined to do a great work there from 1896 to 1907.
The Cathedral parish had some 400 communicants, and several hundred attendants from the Shattuck School for Boys, St. Mary's School for Girls, and the Seabury Divinity School. Winter congre- gations were thus large, even if the salary was small, only twelve hundred dollars. But Slattery was a bachelor, still in his twenties and accustomed to rigid economy, and living expenses were not as high in Minnesota as in the East.
Then began a pleasant association with Bishop Whipple, now nearly eighty, who had founded all these institutions and much else besides. "The Cathedral was a large building seating about a thousand, dignified in interior, but not very attractive. The service was more elaborate than the new Dean was accustomed to, but not extreme, and he had sensibly decided to fall in with the customs. . . The only thing that he did not like was the use of wafer bread, a usage which he thought detracted from the symbolism of the Lord's Supper." Somewhat later the use of wafer bread and altar candles was dropped, and no one seemed to care.
The Old Testament professor at the Divinity School was a bit suspicious of the new arrival with his modernistic ideas on the Bible. Slattery wrote: "I know he considers my coming a calamity, but he has really been very kind, and no one could be a more faithful parishioner."
The great problem in an otherwise satisfactory parish was to get men to Church. Slattery solved it, in part, by starting a Men's Club of fifty, all pledged to attend Evening Service. These services were shortened and the addresses were generally on the Old Test- ament and its spiritual values. The Evening Service attendance grew from thirty to two or three hundred.
Thus the years lengthened to eleven. Bishop Whipple's second wife, a wealthy woman, provided the parish with a beautiful new deanery. After the Bishop's death, Slattery gathered the money to add a fine memorial tower to the Cathedral.
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As might be expected, Slattery was besieged with calls to go elsewhere. He accepted a call to St. John's, Providence, then one of the chief parishes of New England, but withdrew it on the sudden death of Bishop Whipple. His name began to appear in Episcopal elections. Thus ancestral Maine gave him a good vote when he was only thirty-two and had barely completed five years at Faribault. (The Diocese, chose the Catholic path and Robert Codman, the wealthy rector of St. John's, Tremont St.). In Minnesota, he could have been an active candidate, but preferred to electioneer for others. Calls came to theological professorships, both in Faribault and at the General Seminary, as well as calls from Chicago, Syracuse and Springfield, Massachusetts, to say nothing of the chaplaincy at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. On the advice of Bishop Lawrence and of Dean Hodges of E.T.S. he selected Christ Church, Springfield, Massachusetts.
The three years of stay here were full of accomplishment in material things, in preaching and in pastoral work. In this last, for example, Slattery was so diligent in tracing down the lost that he even discovered one of them, a young woman, in a house of ill fame. He was successful in persuading her to start life anew.
Writing and preaching, as well as parochial administration, were making Slattery a marked man in the Church. The General Seminary in New York called him again, and sermons in Holy Trinity and in old Trinity led eventually to the call to what was then the most influential parish in the Church, Grace Church in New York City. There he was called upon to take up the mantle of William R. Huntington, long "the first presbyter of the Church."
At Faribault Slattery had written four books, two of them biographies and two of them of a theological nature. The biogra- phies were those of Felix Brunot, the old family friend and out- standing citizen, and of Edward Lincoln Atkinson, a close friend, early cut off by drowning in what might well have been a great career. The theological treatises, adapted to popular use, were a study of Christ entitled "The Master of the World" and a treatise on immortality entitled "Life Beyond Life." For the last two writ- ings the Episcopal Theological School broke its historic reserve and gave Slattery the degree of D.D.
The brief, but memorable rectorship in Springfield produced two more books, The Historic Ministry and the Present Christ and Present Day Preaching, meant as a handbook for those who wished to preach in a liberal vein.
The twelve years in Grace Church saw two more biographies. They were of his old teacher in Church history, entitled Alexander Viets Griswold Allen, and of his beloved diocesan in New York, en- titled David Hummell Greer. Other books were the Paddock
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Lectures of 1911-1912, The Authority of Religious Experience (1912), the West Lectures at Stanford University (1915), The Light Within (1915), Why Men Pray (1916), The Gift of Immortality (1916), A Churchman's Reading (1917), The Holy Communion (1918), With God in the War (1918), Certain American Faces (19- 18), The Lord's Prayer (1920), The Ministry (1921).
After his consecration as Bishop Coadjutor of Massachusetts, he wrote The Spirit of France as Told in Forty-two Sonnets (1923) and, in 1924, the biography of another close friend, William Austin Smith. Then followed Bible Lessons in 1925, The Words from His Throne in 1927, and Following Christ (1928.
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"Grace Church, beautiful and commandingly situated . . . The congregation was composed of quiet mannered people with a back- ground of the best traditions of old New York. The generosity of the congregation was proverbial. Its gifts, exclusive of income from endowments, amounted annually to between two and three hundred thousand. Missionary bishops were elated when given the opportunity to present their needs to the people of Grace. In in- stitutional work twenty or more buildings and twice as many paro- chial agencies showed the diversified activities of the parish. In the beauty and order of its services Grace Church had become quite as validly the norm for Episcopalians as the Abbey was in England for those who preferred a more elaborate ritual. In public affairs, a former rector, Henry Codman Potter, had been the first citizen of New York; his successor, Dr. Huntington, had become an influential if less conspicuous force in the life of the city, and one greater than Bishop Potter in the councils of the church. ... Grace Church had a tradition of which to be proud."
Slattery followed this tradition for twelve glorious years, fol- lowing in the steps of his predecessor and filling his shoes.
For one who always put the personal emphasis first, Doctor Slattery was curiously methodical. Every call was at once entered on a card, with notations. In case of serious illness the card would show from half a dozen to a dozen calls within a month.
Slattery was thus even more a pastor than his predecessors. He was equally successful as a preacher. As a public figure he was undoubtedly less conspicuous. His long-time friend, William Austin Smith, then editor of the Churchman and a chronic crusader, felt that Slattery was lacking in the crusading spirit. Many good men are, yet often achieve great things.
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Much as Slattery preferred to restrict himself to the incessant duties of his great parish, he could not entirely avoid diocesan com- mittee meetings and obligations to the General Church. He served on the Social Service Commission of the Diocese, as president of the Standing Committee and as clerical deputy to the General Conven- tion. In this last he succeeded to the post of leadership in Prayer Book revision which Huntington had filled so long. Just as his pre- decessor had steered the General Church through the revised Book of 1893, so Slattery was largely responsible for the version of 1928. Grace Church and its daughter parish, the Church of the Incarna- tion not only led the Diocese in contributions for Missions and for the building of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, but also in gifts for the Five Million with which Bishop Lawrence was launch- ing the Church Pension Fund.
These considerable biographical details, as in the case of Phillips Brooks and William Lawrence, emphasize the greatness of the three men whom the Diocese of Massachusetts successively elected to its episcopate. "Coming events cast their shadows before them, and the shadow of the Episcopate lay upon the path of Charles Slattery almost from the beginning of his ministry." Not a few men in Maine, Washington and Maryland voted for him. "Twice in New York he had narrowly missed election."
In 1919, Slattery was confronted with the decision whether or not to accept election as Dean of the Episcopal Theological School in succession to Dean George Hodges. The pressure to stay in New York prevailed over the counter-pressure to go to Cambridge.
When in 1922, Bishop Lawrence asked for a coadjutor, all eyes were turned to Grace Church rectory. Slattery, however, was not elected until the second ballot. The suffragan, Samuel G. Babcock, received, for personal and conservative reasons, not a few votes. The only other important candidate was the rector of Trinity Church, Boston, Alexander Mann, one of foremost presbyters of both the Diocese and the General Church, who had been for three General Conventions president of the House of Deputies. Shortly after this election, Dr. Mann, already sixty-two, who had previously declined two other calls to the episcopate, accepted the Diocese of Pittsburg.
The consecration took place in Trinity Church on October 31, 1922. Bishop Lawrence was consecrator as well as preacher. Co- consecrators were Beverly Tucker of Virginia and Bishop Babcock. A dozen visiting bishops were also on hand. Slattery, however, was seriously indisposed. He had come up from New York the previous day lying on his back in a special compartment. At the Consecra- tion service, the present writer, who was seated not far off, wonder- ed whether he would not faint away. Bishop Slattery said, after the service, that he hardly knew what had happened. But a long rest in the afternoon braced him for the Churchman's Club dinner in the evening and the customary speech.
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Bishop Lawrence assigned to his coadjutor the charge of the Diocesan Church Service League, the coordinating organization of the activities of the Diocese, and the charge of the self-supporting parishes. The missions remained in the hands of Bishop Babcock. Charles Slattery was thus shielded from the complications which beset the administration of missionary parishes. Did he ever come to realize them ? Once, when he was lecturing at the Wellesley Con- ference, the author heard him give an outline of a proper clergy- man's day. The morning hours were to be reserved for office work, consultations and perhaps visitation of the sick, and the preparation of sermons. The hours between two and four should be rigidly re- served for reading. Before four o'clock parishioners were not ready to receive you !
Bishop Slattery rented a six-story house on Marlborough Street in which to live. It had no elevator and the heating arrangements were not of the best. One day Bishop Lawrence came in and found the house cold, the Coadjutor sick in bed and all the servants gone. He took off his coat and stoked up the furnace. On returning home, he and his wife decided that the Coadjutor must temporarily be moved to their own more comfortable house. There Slattery re- newed the acquaintance of one whom he had known as an athletic young girl who lived in the Deanery next to Lawrence Hall. Sarah Lawrence was now a woman of forty-four, experienced in social work and a trustee of Wellesley College. Reacquaintance soon blossomed into romance, greatly to the delight of the Diocese and of Slattery's friends everywhere. The marriage took place in St. Paul's Cathedral on November 19, 1923, Bishop Lawrence, assisted by Dean Rousmaniere, officiating.
In the meantime, Slattery had plunged, with his customary assiduity, into his new assignment. After a Confirmation he never failed, before going to bed, to send a little note of congratulation or encouragement to the man who had presented the candidates. After his marriage, with the social connections that that involved with all Bay Bay, Boston, this often had to be a midnight affair.
One characteristic note of Bishop Slattery's brief episcopate might be entitled Christian Unity. That was the theme of his address to the Churchmen's Club on the night of his consecration. Shortly thereafter, he addressed the Unitarians on the same subject, urging them to be reconciled with their cognates, the Orthodox Con- gregationalists. That, however, would have been to them a reversion to the teachings of Emerson and Channing and an abandonment of Theodore Parker, who gave up the New Testament idea of Christ as subordinate to the Father for that of Jesus as the supreme religious leader of mankind. Slattery's main point, that like should gravitate to like, was, of course, well taken. It was slowly and painfully to be applied in not a few Protestant mergers of the future.
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This idea of the gradual reintegration of similar churches, favored, incidently, by the Lambeth Conference of 1920, was thus Slattery's characteristic conception of uniting the ideal with the practical. In the General Convention of 1922, held shortly before his consecration, his idea received an acid test in the so-called Concordat with the Congregationalists. The object of this was to enable Con- gregationalist ministers to receive Episcopal ordination without leaving their own Fellowship and thus be authorized to minister to Episcopalians in communities where there was no Episcopal Church, or no Episcopal minister. The new Canons were impressively argued for, as well as strenuously opposed by the sacerdotal isola- tionists of the Church, led by Dr. Van Allen of the Church of the Advent in Boston.
"Humanly speaking, Dr. Slattery saved the day. He admitted the risks, but urged that every time a bishop ordained a man in this Church, he took a risk, and he said he knew of ministers in other churches, who, for the sake of Christian unity, would favor- ably consider such ordination. Doctor Slattery ended on a note so high as to lift the Convention out of the atmosphere of party strife, appealing to the chair for the saying of the Collect for Whitsunday before the roll was called. The deputies stood and a solemn hush fell as they prayed for a right judgement in all things through the aid of the Holy Spirit. The roll was then called, the votes cast and the Concordat was adopted. The Church had made a venture of faith." Actually, the Concordat as a whole passed the House of Bishops, but was approved only in part by the House of Deputies. Only three men have been so ordained.
Bishop Slattery was quite sure that a patient exhibition of conflicting ideas within loyalty to a single Master in a single com- munion was the way to demonstrate the future unity of all Christ- endom. In brief, if Episcopalians who differ from each other as much as most denominations differ, can unite in the bond of peace, so can Christendom as a whole. "Those who really see the vision of a united church of Christ are not dreaming of a great propaganda of one group who shall bring all the other groups to its ways of thought and worship. They see men of many minds, of differing temperaments, joined in the love of a Lord who understands and claims them all as His, however they fail to understand one another." As for the vexed question of truth, the thing is to know that "the truth is not what we ourselves, individually, can gather into our souls and hearts and minds, but that truth is an enormous reality, which we can tap here and there on the edges. At least we can stand before it with reverence for its mystery, asking God to show us, in some far eternity, the whole mystery, and meanwhile asking Him to give us grace to enter into its beauty."
The bishop's reverent semi-Agnosticism as to Truth would hardly meet the ideas of temperamental or ecclesiastical dogmatists, Protestant or Catholic. The bishop's point of view, that of the
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Mystics, is expressed in one of his Convention Addresses: "As we face the problem of Church Unity, we must pray for imagination, for grace, for unbounded love, to put aside every preconceived idea, to open the heart wide to the influence of the Holy Spirit, asking Him and Him only to guard and protect His Church."
In 1925, Bishop Lawrence announced that on May 31 he was turning the whole administration of the Diocese over to his Co- adjutor, reserving only his title. So, much was added to an already full schedule. As a result, the bishop's notebooks began to show a shrinking, even if still impressive, list of "Books Read." Instead of sermon notes, there came notes on postulants and candidates and possible recruits. New sermons dwindled. Mrs. Slattery, who ac- companied her husband on all his Visitations, must have known by heart his various confirmation addresses and not a few sermons from his old homiletical quiver. However, as they were always de- livered without notes, repetition always brought some freshness of phrase or illustration. Another interesting item in the notebooks was "Possible clergy for Vacant Parishes." These contained brief biographical notes, with comments on the abilities and weaknesses of the persons listed and tentative suggestions of parishes that might be suited to them. "Bishop Slattery was an unusually good judge of men, and his care to get the right men in the Diocese and have them settled in parishes for which they were suited showed farsightedness which as the years went by was increasingly vin- dicated by the results."*
The work of Prayer Book revision, leading up to the version of 1928, became increasingly arduous. For every word and detail had to be looked at. The changes were to be in the direction of making the book meaningful for those in the pew. Thus, said Slattery, "Baptism is lifted into the expression of God's loving care for his children; the marriage service (by ommission of "obey") makes the wife the equal of the man in privilege and responsibility; the burial service substitutes New Testament trust for Old Testament fear; aspirations of our time for social justice, good government and world brotherhood are recognized; services may be made shorter, and with hymns and sermon, may have a new force and a new unity. In a word, without ceasing to be the book of the ages, the prayer book becomes also the book of this generation."
This work was so well done that Bishop Slattery found himself the head of another Commission of the General Convention, one to revise the Lectionary. Later, Bishop Slattery had to busy himself with the revision of the Hymnal, that is of the words. The new musical edition was to come in 1940.
* Robbins, p. 259.
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How crowded the short years were might be illustrated from a couple of examples. "The note of personal religion so strongly and persistently struck in the Cathedral (under Dean Rousmaniere) meant more to Bishop Slattery than can easily be expressed. From his evangelical boyhood throughout his life, and in every phase of his ministry, this had been foremost. Not only in his books, but in his personal belief and practice he was above all things a man of prayer. ... Now as chief pastor of a great diocese this desire was still foremost, and led him to do much for his clergy in arranging for quiet days."
Bishop Slattery knew from experience that "prayer is exceed- ing hard work. It is not, as the vain ones suppose, merely words or merely thoughts or merely contemplations. These are but en- trances to an absorbing work. Prayer is the ruthless breaking down of selfishness; it is stiff climbing; it is rising to the majesty of the living God. Prayer means all that a man has, all that he is, all that he hopes to be; it means his whole heart. Prayer asks everything, but it gives the all-in-all."*
The summer of 1925 was spent in Hancock, New Hampshire. The "vacation" consisted chiefly in a change of scene and of work. The bishop writes to Dr. Nichols: "I have been busy all summer, letters as many as the old days in Grace Church almost; and articles for various magazines promised last winter." One of these was a vivid account of the Council of Nicaea (based possibly on the graphic picture of Dean Stanley) ; another was on the topic, "Why I am an Episcopalian." The bishop was always writing articles for the Churchman, often anonymously, as well as reviewing books as varied in theme as German theology or detective stories.
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