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St. Peter's Church
in the
City of Albany
Commemoration
of the
Own Hundredth Anniversary
November, A. D., 1916
GEN
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01876 8900
GC 974.702 AL12STP
.
11
ST. PETER'S CHURCH-1916 (Corner stone laid June 29th, 1859)
St. Peter's Church
in the
City of Albany
Commemoration
of its
Two Hundredth Anniversary
November, A. D., 1916
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015
https://archive.org/details/stpeterschurchin00stpe_0
The Rector Churchwardens and Vestrymen of the Parish of St. Peter's in the City of Allany, New York invite you to be present on Saturday, November the twenty- fifth, Anno Domini, One thousand nine hundred and sixteen at half after ten o'clock, at the celebration of the
Two Hundredth Anniversaryof The First Service held in St. Peter's Church
and at the other services and ceremonies. during the week beginning Sunday, November the nineteenth and ending with Sunday, November the twenty sixty
THE FIRST ST. PETER'S CHURCH-1715-1802
Events of the Commemoration - 1916 -
Sunday, November 19th
8.00 A. M. Corporate Communion of the Parish Organ- izations.
11.00 A. M. Corporate Communion of the Parish and Historical Sermon by the Rev. Walton W. Battershall, D. D., Rector Emeritus of St. Peter's Church and Archdeacon of Albany.
4.00 P. M. Choral Evensong and Sermon by the Rt. Rev. Richard H. Nelson, D.D., Bishop of Albany.
Monday, November 20th
8.30 P. M. Reception at the Albany Institute and Historical and Art Society for the Clergy and People of Albany and the Clerical and Lay Deputies to the Diocesan Convention.
Tuesday, November 21st
10.30 A. M. The Opening Service of the Forty-eighth Annual Convention of the Diocese of Albany in St. Peter's Church and the Convention Sermon by the Bishop of Albany.
Thursday, November 23d
7.00 P. M. Bicentennial Dinner at the Hotel Ten Eyck.
Friday, November 24th
Musical service in St. Peter's Church. Rossini's Stabat Mater, rendered by St. Peter's Choir.
Saturday, November 25th
11.00 A. M. The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the First Service held in St. Peter's Church. Holy Communion and Sermon by the Rev. William T. Manning, D. D., Rector of Trinity Parish, New York City.
Luncheon for the Clergy at the Hotel Hampton.
Sunday, November 26th
8.00 A. M. Holy Communion.
11.00 A. M. Morning Prayer and Sermon by the Rector, the Rev. Charles C. Harriman.
4.00 P. M. Choral Evensong.
St. Peter's Harish Clergy and Staff THE RECTOR THE REV. CHARLES C. HARRIMAN
THE RECTOR EMERITUS THE VEN. WALTON W. BATTERSHALL, D. D.
THE CURATE THE REV. TAGE TEISEN
ORGANIST AND CHOIRMASTER FRANK SILL ROGERS, Mus. D.
PARISH SECRETARY GEORGE P. HOFF
THE CORPORATION
LEGAL TITLE The Rector and Inhabitants of the City of Albany in Communion of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the State of New York
RECTOR THE REV. CHARLES C. HARRIMAN
WARDENS
ROBERT C. PRUYN WILLIAM GORHAM RICE
VESTRYMEN
JOHN T. PERRY, 1916 LUTHER H. TUCKER, 1918
WILLIAM P. RUDD, 1918
SAMUEL W. BROWN, 1917
JOHN H. MCELROY, 1917
THOMAS I. VAN ANTWERP, 1918 FREDERICK E. WADHAMS, 1917 DELANCEY PALMER, 1916
CLERK OF THE VESTRY LUTHER H. TUCKER
TREASURER DELANCEY PALMER
SEXTON GEORGE W. McNARY
CARETAKER MISS FRENCH
CHIMER WENDELL M. MILKS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
St. Peter's Church-Frontispiece. PAGE
The First St. Peter's Church. 5
The Ven. Walton W. Battershall, D. D.
7
The Rt. Rev. Richard H. Nelson, D. D
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The Second St. Peter's Church.
23
The Interior of the Present Edifice.
43
Rt. Rev. William Croswell Doane, D. D
63
Frank Sill Rogers, Mus. D
74
Rev. Charles Conant Harriman
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THE VEN. WALTON W. BATTERSHALL, D. D. Rector-1875-1912 Rector Emeritus since 1912
An Historic Harish
Sermon preached in St. Peter's Church, in the City of Albany, Sunday, November 19th, 1916. the opening day of the Bicentennial Commemoration,
BY THE Rev. WALTON W. BATTERSHALL, D. D.
Rector Emeritus of St. Peter's Church and Archdeacon of Albany
O, go your way into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise; for the Lord is gracious, His mercy is everlasting; and His truth endureth from genera- tion to generation .- From the One Hundredth Psalm, en- titled "Jubilate Deo."
The most significant and enduring memorials of a nation's life are the structures that register its faiths and ideals.
An institution representing any phase of civilized life that has had two centuries of history is an ancient and monumental thing in this new world of the West.
These two facts determine and interpret our commemora- tion of the two hundredth anniversary of the first divine service, held on the 25th day of November, 1716, in the little stone church built in the shadow of the English fort in Albany. It took the name of St. Peter's Church and was the first permanent foothold of the faith and ritual of the Church of England west of the Hudson River.
The old Hebrew temple-song, from which I have taken my text, strikes the keynote of our commemoration. Its trumpet-like, eternal words give the moral perspective of the scenes and figures that I shall sketch this morning. It is a work of love, undertaken in obedience to a com- mand, in which I recognize the voice of a love that was born over forty years ago.
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I shall touch with rapid stroke only a few salient points, points that have a large reference and are yet distinctive in the history of St. Peter's Church in the city of Albany, a church ancient and venerable, according to the measure- ments of our American life, where nothing is old except human nature and the insistent problems of the soul and the world.
The beginnings of things are seldom imposing. The real and ultimate value of men and events is usually undiscov- ered in the day when the men lived and the events occurred. This is true not only of the slow tread, but of the swift drives of the world's march.
The songs of the church and the songs of a people hold meanings that come not only in crises of our personal life or national tragedies like those enacted on the colossal battlefronts of Europe, where the empires of the old world, the ancient seats of Christendom, with unparalleled ravage and slaughter and exhaustion of vital and economic force, are recreating themselves into a new world.
But the historic manias and catastrophies that have crucified humanity are unnecessary for the evoking of heroes and the fashioning of sacrificial men and women. Religion of every type, in every age, has put human life against a measureless background, on which in normal, constructive ways, men of today, like the men of yesterday, prove their heroic quality and work out their histories of interwoven mistake and achievement.
Among the mistakes that became achieve-
Dream of Henry Hudson ments is that of the intrepid English sailor,
Henry Hudson, who, under commission of the Dutch East India Company, sailed his little ship, " The Half Moon," up the stream that today bears his name, and dropped anchor a few miles below the present site of Albany. His dream was the old-world dream of finding a western ocean-path to China. It is only in our own day that the dream has been verified in that adventurous gateway at Panama, through which at last, on the equatorial belt of the earth, the two great ocean highways interflow. History in its own fashion translates its dreams into facts.
Henry Hudson's exploration gave the beautiful river and
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its outlying country to Holland, whose sturdy racial imprint still lingers on the banks of the Mohawk and Hudson, and the vast commercial metropolis at the seagate.
When England, on an old, uncertain claim, in 1664 seized the Dutch settlement on the spacious harbor, which is now, as then, the keyhole of the continent (it was a bloodless seizure, a case of unpreparedness), the little trad- ing post on the upper Hudson took the name of Albany from the Scotch title of the Duke of York, the new lord of the province. The Dutch and English, who made up the scant population, quietly accepted the event, and lived in the amity of an ancient friendship, based upon kindred religious and political ideas, in defense of which they had fought, shoulder to shoulder, on memorable battlefields.
Primitive Albany was a commercial venture, protected by a fortress on the edge of civilization.
For fifty years after the day on which the flag of England was unfurled over Fort Frederick, the garrison and English families within the stockade found gracious hospitality in the old Dutch Church at the foot of Jonker Street (now State Street), and also in the Lutheran Church on the south of Jonker Street. At hours on Sunday when these two churches were not used by their specific congregations, and sometimes for long periods when they had no pastor, their doors were open to clergymen whom the Church of England sent across the Atlantic for frontier work in the province.
Meantime the English percentage of the population was rapidly overbalancing the Dutch. Evidently there was need of an English house of worship in Albany.
This was the conclusion of the Rev. Thomas
First Chaplain Barclay, who was commissioned chaplain of in 1708 the fort in 1708 and the year after was ap-
pointed by the Church of England " Society for the Propa- gation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts," missionary to the Mohawks.
He was a Scotchman of fervent zeal, untiring toil, kind- liness and common sense. In the published "History of St. Peter's Church " you will find a long letter in which he renders to "the Venerable Society " an account of his
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work in Albany and among the Indians in the Mohawk country. It gives an intimate, graphic picture of the time and the man.
In the church annals of Albany Thomas ,Barclay is an historic figure, worthy to stand beside the large-hearted Dutch Dominie Megapolensis, who, half a century before the period of Barclay, consoled Peter Stuyvesant at the capitulation of Fort Amsterdam and in Rensselaerwyck, the Dutch settlement up the river, gave cheer and rescue to the heroic Jesuit priest, Père Joques, who had escaped from the Mohawks with their torture marks on his body.
These three names, Barclay, Megapolensis and Père Joques, represent the type of man and the sense of brother- hood in Christ that were demanded and were created in the church work of their period. The church work of today has the same need and the same creative power.
My reference to Barclay's letter, cited in the history of St. Peter's Church, opens to me an opportunity to make an acknowledgment that is due to the historian of St. Peter's. In your behalf and my own, I here express my deep appreciation and gratitude to the Rev. Joseph Hooper, now broken by laborious years of study and priestly service, who has told the story of St. Peter's with a precision and picturesqueness of detail that make of it a book of unusual interest and of a distinctive literary value in the historiog- raphy of the American church. Full as much material as that incorporated in the history remains in manuscript in the chest of St. Peter's archives.
Thomas Barclay built and was the first rec- Building of the First St. Peter's tor of the church whose founding we com- memorate. At his request, in 1714, Governor Robert Hunter issued letters patent granting for an English church and cemetery a plot of ground in Jonkers Street below the hill crowned by Fort Frederick, whose northeast bastion stood on the site of the tower of the edifice before whose altar we worship this morning.
The incidents of the building of the first St. Peter's give us a curious glimpse of the period and the men who were shaping its events. Holland blood and English blood had a trait in common. Each was quick to fight for its point
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of view-a trait that foreshadowed subsequent events in the history of the Colonies.
Against the Governor's patent the Common Council of Albany made protest on the score, not of divergent theolo- gies, but of municipal rights. It issued notice to the work- men to suspend the laying of the foundation of the new church. It threatened arrest. It petitioned the Governor, to whom a messenger was sent by express in a canoe to New York, a journey in those days of such magnitude that the church was well under way by the time the return voyage was accomplished. The Governor was obdurate and the work went on.
At last the little stone church, 42 by 58 feet, was com- pleted and the indefatigable missionary had the joy of reciting at the altar he had built the ancient prayers and creed of the prayer book of the Church of England.
This event, which we commemorate this week, solved a problem which had arisen in the mind and conscience of the Governor of the province. Permit me a word regard- ing this problem. Its echo lingers in the air of today.
Queen's Anne's In 1712, four years before the building of the
Communion first English church in Albany, Queen Anne
Set had sent to Governor Hunter two sets of communion vessels. Each set comprised six pieces of mas- sive silver, engraved with the royal arms and an inscription. One set of the sacred vessels was designated to her Indian chapel of the Mohawks. This was promptly delivered to the chapel that had been built for the tribe at Fort Hunter, near the junction of the Mohawk River and Schoharie Creek. St. Ann's Church, Amsterdam, may fairly be considered the descendant and the present day memorial of this Mo- hawk chapel.
The other Queen Anne communion set bore this inscrip- tion: "The Gift of Her Majesty Anne, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France and Ireland, and of Her Plantations in North America, Queen, to her Indian Chapel of the Onondawgus." This chapel was projected but never built. How should the Governor, the provincial represen- tative of the Queen, fulfill her pious intention except in the way he did ?
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When St. Peter's Church was built in the frontier town of the province, the radiating point of the evangelization of the Iroquois tribes, he consigned to the custody of that church the communion plate, which the queen had desig- nated to the unbuilt chapel of the Onondawgus.
This official act of Governor Hunter was confirmed by Sir Henry Moore, Governor of the province in 1768, and also has been confirmed by two centuries of faithful guar- dianship of the sacred vessels by St. Peter's Church and reverent use on its altar.
This historic incident, which is in evidence today, brings out in strong relief a distinctive feature of the ministry of Thomas Barclay and of the early rectors of St. Peter's, to whom the Bishop of London committed his work when, worn out with zeal and hardship, he died, as a lone sentinel dies on an advanced battle line.
Fully as important as their ministry to the garrison and the English population of Albany was the mission they accomplished in bringing the faith and morals of Christ to the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.
It is pertinent on this occasion that I should call your attention for a moment to a critical page in our American history. The fact stands out that it was the political sagacity of the burghers of Albany and the missionary labors of its Christian pastors that won the fealty of the Iroquois, that riveted the " covenant chains," in the poetic Indian phrase, by which the tribes of the great confederacy became the allies of the English in their long-drawn fight with the French for the sovereignty of the continent.
We cannot read aright the early history of Albany except we recognize the eventful racial and political issue, which at that epoch hung in a quivering balance, into the scales of which the sword of England and the sword of France were flung.
Just now it is well to recall that, almost two hundred years ago, this frontier town of the old province of New York was the outpost, the acute point of a crisis that involved issues as momentous as those at stake in the European crisis of today.
In a real and practical way the confederacy of the Iro-
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quois was of tremendous count in the events that worked out the decision of the historic duel, whose prize was the continent. It knit together the fierce tribes of a virile race, which in its first contact with civilization appropriated its vices, a race creeping toward the setting sun; but those warrior tribes held the forest trails between the Hudson and the St. Lawrence. Then, as ever and as now, religion was a force in the communal life of men, in war as in peace.
At the time it was open question whether the Anglican or the Latin type of Christianity should have the training and secure the allegiance of the Indians.
The work of the English missionaries among the Mohawks and the confederated tribes, the judicious hospitality of the Dutch and English pioneers gathered within the wooden stockade of ancient Albany, the rendezvous, the trading post, the covenant house of the Indians, these were import- ant factors in shaping the event which was concluded on the Heights of Abraham, where the heroic Wolfe was slain at the moment of the victory that gave America, north of the Spanish settlements, to England.
Through all the early chapters of the history of St. Peter's Church we catch echoes of the successive campaigns of the French and English War.
In the rectorship of Henry Barclay, the third rector and son of the first (he afterwards became rector of Trinity Church, New York), the French Indians made the Mohawk Valley a scene of ravage and massacre. All the country around Albany and the headwaters of the Hudson was terrorized. It was the first act of the historic drama.
During the rectorship of John Ogilvie in 1754, another echo is registered in the sermon that was preached in St. Peter's before the congress of commissioners, which repre- sented six of the most prominent colonies. The congress met in Albany in the old City Hall on Broadway. Its initial purpose was to renew the " covenant chain " which bound the Iroquois in fealty to the English. It was a significant event in our colonial history, a prophetic note of that event- ful congress, which assembled in Philadelphia in 1776.
A tragic echo left its trace in the "Church Book " of St. Peter's which registers under the date September 5,
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1758, the expenses of the burial of Lord Howe, who was killed in the march on the fortress of Ticonderoga. His body was brought to Albany by young Philip Schuyler, and lies beneath the vestibule of the present St. Peter's.
When the war that welded the provinces into a nation broke out, Harry Monroe was rector of St. Peter's. It brought a crisis, a clash of convictions, held with con- science and honor by both pastor and people. In those troublous days there is an incident which is significant. The bell of the first St. Peter's which, from the tower of the present edifice on New Year's eve at midnight spells out, in its high-pitched voice, the numerals of the New Year, was the first bell in Albany that announced the pas- sage of the Declaration of Independence.
It is sometimes said that the Church of England is an institution that was born from and represents simply a phase in the political history of England.
This evidently was not the opinion of the influential churchmen of Albany, who pledged their fortunes and lives in the momentous revolt that gave birth to the great republic which thus far, at least, has furnished the world a proof that justice and freedom and organized life can be duly enacted and enforced by the sovereignty of the people.
Among those churchmen was General Philip Schuyler, who, in the long-drawn fight that made us a nation, was the war chief of the province of New York, who in fact was the architect and the hero of one of the battles that have been turning points in the world's political history.
This capital city of the Empire State was at last awak- ened to the fact that the chief glory of a city is the heroic men it has bred, and has fitly erected a monument in the Capitol Park to one of its sons, a brilliant soldier of the Civil War. May the time come when it shall go further back in the perspectives of its history and, for the honor of its name and the inspiration of its youth, enthrone the statue of one of its foremost citizens and historic heroes, General Philip Schuyler.
In St. Peter's burial lot in the Albany Rural Cemetery there is a tombstone which bears this inscription: "Here lies interred the remains of the Rev. Thomas Ellison,
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A. M., of Queen's College, Oxford, one of the Regents of the University of this State and for fifteen years rector of St. Peter's Church in this city, who departed this life 26th April, 1802. Erected as a tribute of respect by his friend, P. S. V. Rensselaer."
Ellison, four months before his death, signed the contract for the building of the second St. Peter's Church. It was built on the site of the present church and was a dignified specimen of the ecclesiastical architecture of the period. It must be said, however, that neither the fashion of life nor the fashion of architecture in the Georgian period can be called inspiring.
But let me speak of days within my memory and yours. St. Peter's has given three bishops to the American church, men of strong personal accent, trained faculty, moral and intellectual power, dedicated to the work of the church. Horatio Potter, William Croswell Doane and Cameron Mann. Bishop Potter and Bishop Doane were rectors of St. Peter's. Bishop Mann was curate of St. Peter's in the early years of my rectorship and is now the Bishop of South- ern Florida. The names of its three bishops enrich the history of this parish. Their personal friendship has en- riched my life.
Henry Hudson was great by reason of the courage and dedication he put into his dreams. This is true of the rectors of St. Peter's Church through its two hundred years of history. In every case the limitations of the man, his period, his range of vision, fashioned his dream. But with high intent, in a manly fashion, he worked out his dream, which was at least three-quarters true. They have bequeathed to us this ancient parish and this majestic house of God.
This is the inheritance that comes to you today; a parish with a history, the record of a corporate life, which has included events and personalities that figured largely in their day, a church whose noble, devout architecture makes it notable among the churches of the land. It is what a church should be, an education and a prayer.
Reproductions of the art and the emotion of remote ages are usually feeble, formal and pretentious. But if the art
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be honest, if the emotions that inspire the art be elemental to our human nature, if they express the struggle, the faith, the aspiration of the soul in man, they are eternally true, and they find a voice in noble forms of art and architecture.
This house of God is proof of this. It is an honest inter- pretation and embodiment of this. Do you not feel it as you cross its threshhold ? I recall a Sunday of my boyhood when by chance I attended an evensong in St. Peter's, and the spirit of the worship, wrought into the edifice, cast its spell upon me.
I do not wonder that you have built into its walls the memorials of your loves and loyalties. The sacred fabric that holds the altar of Christ in all ages has been the place for the sacred things of the heart and hearthstone.
This church to you and to me is a House of Memories. Honored names, strong and gracious presences, throng upon me as I speak to you this morning.
But this church stands for something more than this. It is not an ancient monument on a shore from which the vital tide has ebbed. It stands on the great thoroughfare of the Albany of today.
This parish of St. Peter's, like all living things, has renewed itself under the leadership of a man who inspires trust and affection. May God be with him in his devoted, intelligent work of adjusting this ancient parish to modern days.
Five months ago there was granted to it a munificent proof of the loyalty and love that have grown about this altar. It was a large gift, with a large and deliberate intention. It illustrates a significant trait of the day in which we live. More than that, it illustrates a devout and practical man's estimate of the meaning and the value of St. Peter's Church in the City of Albany; his recognition of the persistent, practical work of its organizations for the training of youth and the relief of those who are crippled in the struggle of life.
St. Peter's Parish of today is a product of and a force in the energetic and complicated life of today; life in the conditions and opportunities of this Republic, the great experiment whose fortunes we hold in trust.
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It is a liberated life, free and strong and creative. It has its freedoms, triumphs and despotisms. It drops off into abysses as deep as those of the social structures of old times.
Here and now, as always, the weak and the untrained" go under. The divine Christ, Whom we worship, came to rescue these. His church from the very first has sought out and cared for these. By virtue of this it has wrought out the commission of its Master and, among the strong, assertive forces of the world, has won reverence and dominion.
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