USA > Rhode Island > Providence County > Providence > A history of Grace Church in Providence, Rhode Island, 1829-1929 > Part 9
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The committee of notification to proceed to West Philadelphia was a double one, consisting of Amos D. Smith and John B. An- thony, Wardens, and J. Lewis Peirce, representing the Vestry, and the Rev. William M. Rodman and Albert S. Gallup repre- senting the Corporation.
With the coming of a new Rector the Vestry were particularly anxious that their beloved ex-Rector and Bishop should feel that Grace Church was still bound to him by special ties and was to some extent his church. They therefore voted to tender to him and his family the free use of such pew owned by the Corporation as he might select and recorded their entire concurrence with his expressed desire to regard Grace Church as the proper place for
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holding ordinations and other episcopal services. Such Grace Church continued to be in general until the funeral of Bishop McVickar and the consecration of Bishop Perry.
Mr. Kellogg, then rector of The Church of the Saviour, West Philadelphia, and just turned thirty, was a man of vivid personal- ity and great attractiveness of manner and expression. Sunday, April 28, 1867, the first Sunday after Easter, was fixed for the beginning of his rectorship, and Bishop Clark appointed the annual Confirmation for the quarter-before-eleven service that same morning. No doubt, as we know he did on similar occasions, he introduced Mr. Kellogg to his old congregation. The Bishop gave the address to those confirmed and the new Rector preached the sermon.
Mr. Kellogg was not slow to make his plans for a vigorous and systematic work for the ensuing year. In September, 1867, he published in detailed and elaborate fashion:
"A Scheme of Services, Collections, and Parish-Work in Grace Church, Providence, for the ensuing year."
The second service on Sunday was to be at 7.30 p. m. on the first Sunday in the month. On the other Sundays it was at quarter before three from October to May, and quarter past three from May to October. From October to Lent there was on Wednesday evenings "a Service and Lecture in the Chapel" at 7.30, and Teachers' meeting every Friday evening. In Lent the union services were continued in Grace Church on Monday and Tuesday at 5 o'clock, and on Friday evenings there were "Ad- dresses preparatory to Confirmation."
Mr. Kellogg continued the early Morning Prayer at six o'clock on Easter, with the annual Confirmation service at quarter before eleven,-a custom begun at this time and kept up very generally by Bishop Clark for some twenty years. He had himself regularly confirmed in Grace Church in Eastertide, but not often on Easter Day.
The "Scheme" continued with plans for the three church organizations, the Sunday School, the Relief Society, and the Missionary Sewing Society. These three Mr. Kellogg proposed to merge, at least so far as the Treasury was concerned, into the "Parish Aid Society."
Among the items in the "Scheme" are the following:
The Rector will (D. V.) be at his residence, No. 334 Broad Street, on Tuesday Evenings to receive such persons as may desire to meet him.
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At the time of the Holy Communion, those waiting in the aisles for an opportun- ity to come to the chancel-rail, should stand in line on the right side of the aisles, thus leaving a clear passage for those who have received the elements to return to their places.
The elements should always be received with an ungloved hand.
Persons ready to take part in parish-work are desired to let it be known to the Rector.
Clear, full responses, and general observances of the postures usual in the conduct of our services, as they are much needed, so will they add to the reverence, pleasure, and warmth of our worship.
Between the call to their new Rector and his coming in April the Church decided to rearrange the chancel and to provide a sounding-board over the pulpit "to relieve the difficulty of speak- ing and hearing." The acoustics of Grace Church have never been good, and quite likely Mr. Kellogg was known to lack a voice of such unusual power and richness as Bishop Clark's. From the old pictures it seems likely that it was at this time that the font was placed in the middle of the cross aisle and the reading-desk and pulpit moved farther away from the front pews. The changes were, as usual, made under the competent advice of Mr. Upjohn.
At the annual meeting of 1867 the tax was increased from ten to twelve percent to provide for the larger salary. On the recom- mendation of the Vestry, the Church, after over thirty years, again made provision for a rectory. Two houses and a consider- able piece of land were purchased for $12,500 on the corner of Greene Street and Parker Place. As the houses were leased and the one intended for a rectory needed extensive repairs, Mr. Kellogg did not move to Greene Street until the fall of 1869.
It was as a result of the enthusiasm and zeal of the Rector and at his bidding, no doubt, that the Corporation meeting at Easter, 1869, was attended by sixty-nine members, a number probably never equalled before or since, thirty being a large meeting in those days when the Corporation was restricted "to white male pew- owners and lessees." The confirmation class on that Easter Day was of rather unusual size, having twenty-nine members. Clearly Grace Church approaching its fortieth anniversay was in a healthy condition. The annual report speaks with pride of "our in- defatigable Rector and his faithful assistant," the Rev. Robert Charles Booth, a deacon, who worked in a mission on Eddy Street near Ship Street, opened in April, 1868, and supported by voluntary subscription. From the Corporation Mr. Booth received the munificent sum of $80, the amount of the appropriation for the supply of the pulpit during the Rector's vacation.
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A considerably larger amount was paid him from other sources, probably the Parish Aid Society and the Sunday Offerings, a fund which was still administered by a special committee of the Vestry entirely independently of the Church finances. From time to time, however, we find references to contributions from the Sun- day offerings to the general treasury.
In connection with the Parish Aid Society there was held in 1868 what seems to have been the forerunner of the "Every- Member Canvass," with which we are familiar, and the earliest effort of the kind in Grace Church. In the first report of the Parish Aid Society the Rector says:
"The work of this Society may be summed up as follows. Two- thirds of the families of the Congregation have been contributors to its treasury. Twenty-four ladies have acted as collectors, and have raised an average of ninety-four dollars each. Including $500.00 obtained through the exertions of Mr. S. Brownell, for the Christmas Festival of the Sunday School, the whole amount paid in to the Treasurer up to November I, has been $2,757.71. Very generally the collectors have been kindly received in the Congregation, while their own work has been done with much patience and diligence. The prevailing good disposition on every hand towards parish work is gratifying and full of promise for the future."
In urging the workers to even greater efforts Mr. Kellogg stressed various pressing needs of the time.
"The Freedmen, on whose education the prosperity of half the country largely depends, are in need of instruction. The whole South is prostrate in regard to its parishes and seminaries, and dependent on the kind help of her more prosperous friends. We ought to take a larger share in meeting such claims; but it can only be done by an increase of gifts. Knowing well that last year has been one of business depression, we are not insensible to the spirit in which last year's work has been done, nor to the fact that the Parish has exceeded the contributions of several preceding years by $2,500. Still, while one-third of the congre- gation contribute nothing, and while the subscriptions made are far from being equally proportioned according to the donors' ability, we cannot but think this Parish is capable of doing much more than has been done in the past. If all gave, each according to his means, our treasury would receive at least the double of last year's income."
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It is from this rectorship of sixty years ago that the House of the Intercessor, or Grace House, dates. Many of the families in the Eddy Street mission lived in the neighborhood of West Clifford Street and Mr. Kellogg became much interested in providing them with a suitable chapel and Sunday School room. To this was joined the idea of providing in homelike quarters "four suites of two rooms each" for some of the poorer parishioners of Grace Church. In the Vestry report of 1870 this house is described as "doing a noble work." Robert H. Ives was interested enough to buy the land at the corner of West Clifford and Portland Streets and lease it to the Vestry of Grace Church as Trustees. On this lot a frame building was erected at a cost of slightly over $3500. It was planned to have the sum needed raised by general sub- scription, and some $1600 was thus secured. The interest of the large and flourishing Sunday School of about 500 scholars was then solicited and over $200 raised in a few months. As the Sunday School undertook to raise the $1700 still lacking, the Vestry assumed the debt and lent the money for finishing the House of the Intercessor from the Cemetery Fund. Before the next Easter (1870) there came forward to support the enterprise Mrs. Frances Jones Vinton, the wealthy widow of Amos M. Vinton, first Secretary of the Corporation and older brother of the third rector. Mrs. Vinton, who was for many years active in Grace Church and its missionary organization, seems to have been especially interested in ministering to the physical and spiritual needs of the poor. She offered to complete the purchase of the land at a cost of $1,000 and to give it to the Rector and Wardens if the whole property, or its proceeds, should be set apart forever for these charitable purposes. Later she gave $1,000 for repairs to the House of the Intercessor, the balance to be used to establish a fund for the poor of the parish.
In this House of the Intercessor a promising little Sunday School of some sixty-five scholars and twelve teachers was soon formed. At the chapel services, for which a reading desk was given by St. Stephen's Church, there was for a time an average congregation of about fifty. Neither the Sunday School nor the Chapel, however, could long be maintained, and in our time there has been little use for the rooms for poor parishioners. Many of the younger members of the congregation remember the house very pleasantly and gratefully as the home of Deaconess vonBrockdorf, of Deaconess Payne, and later of Miss Appleton and Miss Searle. At various times it has been the center of useful activities and
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interests. At present, with little prospect of sufficient usefulness to justify its continued maintenance, with the approval of the Corporation and Vestry, the Rector and Wardens have in mind the sale of the property and the establishment of a fund for similar purposes.
At the Easter meeting of 1870 the Vestry reported the expendi- ture of over $5,000 on the church edifice in the provision of new carpets, new furnaces, repairs to windows and roof and especially the decoration of the walls of the church. It seems likely that it was at this time that the inscription "The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him" was placed above the chancel arch. In spite of the fact that the decorations were under the advice of R. and R. M. Upjohn, they do not seem to have been very satisfactory and were frequently the object of criticism.
With the rectorship of Mr. Kellogg comes the first record of any vacation for the rector at the expense of the Corporation. From 1867 on, a regular item of expense was for supplying the pulpit during the month of August, when it is evident that the rector had his vacation. Early in the summer of 1870, however, there came a request from the rector that he might take "his usual summer vacation" at once "instead of waiting until August." It is said that the occasion of this unusual request was that Mr. Kellogg had become the object of criticism from certain quarters which he took very much to heart. It is clear that he was greatly dis- turbed, for late in July he sent in his resignation, saying, "I find my vacation fully expired, but I am far from ready to resume duty at Grace Church. Conscious of my inability to serve that Con- gregation with justice to its claims and satisfaction to myself I think the better course is to surrender the rectorship into your hands." The Wardens and Mr. Benjamin F. Thurston, at that time playing an active part in all important deliberations of the Vestry, were appointed a committee to confer with Mr. Kellogg and ask him to reconsider. They reported, however, that Mr. Kellogg was impelled by conscientious motives to adhere to his determination. His resignation was thereupon accepted with expressions of regret, appreciation, and good will. Shortly after, he accepted a call to his former parish of St. Matthew's Church in Philadelphia where he was much beloved. One of his most significant accomplishments there was that of taking a leading part in forming an organized charities association in that city,- probably the first of these now indispensable agencies for social welfare.
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Full of zeal and energy, fertile in planning, and optimistic of results, Mr. Kellogg speedily won friends wherever he went. He seems, however, not to have been wholly adapted to this New England community, or perhaps to the ministry. With marked literary gifts, he eventually withdrew from the priesthood and devoted himself to his writing. He was the only one of the living former rectors who did not personally share in the Jubilee Cele- bration of 1879. A cordial letter from him, however, was read at the Saturday afternoon gathering.
It was a tribute to the zeal and enthusiasm of Mr. Kellogg that the Vestry again went South in search of his successor. At a meeting in October, on motion of Mr. Thurston, a committee, consisting of Mr. Anthony and Mr. Augustus H. Hoppin, was appointed to visit Wheeling, West Virginia, and Covington, Kentucky, for the purpose of hearing C. George Currie and David H. Greer, two very promising young preachers of the time, and to make inquiries as to other clergymen who might be considered for the vacant rectorship. So well was the committee pleased with Mr. Currie, however, that they did not seek farther. Mr. Anthony in 1904 gave an amusing account of their visit in Wheeling and its results.
"On Sunday, both morning and evening, Mr. Hoppin and my- self went to church, apart from each other, and by different routes. In the afternoon I attended Mr. Currie's Sunday School, and sat far back, entirely by myself. I was disappointed that the Rector did not come to greet a stranger.
"Mr. Hoppin made pencil sketches of Mr. Currie in the chancel and in the pulpit, and I took extended notes of the two sermons we heard. (I have the pencil portraits with me.) After the evening service we went to the vestry-room and were immediately greeted by the Rector as though we were old acquaintances. Dr. Dyer had telegraphed that a committee was coming, and who we were: Mr. Currie had found no difficulty in identifying us, im- mediately on our arrival.
"Our committee made a favorable report on our return; ex- hibited portraits, and read the sermons we had heard."
The Vestry at once voted unanimously to invite Mr. Currie to the vacant rectorship at a salary of $3,500 and called a meeting of the Corporation for November 2Ist to approve the transaction. Later free use of the Rectory was added to the salary.
Mr. Currie, leaving his family still in the South, began his ministry on Sunday, February 5, 1871. It is evident that he came
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with considerable hesitation and that affairs here were not such as wholly to remove that feeling. He seems to have been doubtful of his welcome, somewhat disheartened by the coldness of the congregation in their responses in the services, and appalled at the greater cost of living in Providence. In less than three weeks he wrote formally to the Vestry asking their frank judgment on the "experiment" of his coming and whether he was likely to get thorough support in Providence, or had better return to his former parish,-still open to him,-where he knew he would have whole- hearted backing. On the Vestry's sending him a letter signed by all present, with the fullest assurances of satisfaction and support, Mr. Currie wrote :- "It appears now that the anxiety I felt as to my relations to the Parish were unnecessary and that things were in reality going as well as could be expected at so early a stage I see now that my difficulties have been under the Providence of God removed."
It was probably in accordance with Mr. Currie's desire to have the congregation take more active part in the services that the Vestry in March directed the Committee on Music to arrange with Mr. Downes, the conductor of the choir, that the creed and responses be not chanted at the evening service, that the anthem be dispensed with, and that the character of the music be of a more congregational order.
It seems likely that Mr. Currie never was wholly cured of his doubts as to his adaptability to the position here. After only a little over a year, he received a call to St. Luke's Church, Phila- delphia, in June, 1872, and accepted it so promptly that the Vestry had no time to remonstrate. He told Mr. Anthony afterwards that while in the West he had found it necessary to discount fifty per cent. from what people said to him, to get at the exact truth; here, he should have added fifty percent.
It was during this rectorship as well as during the last years of Mr. Kellogg's and the first of Mr. Greer's that the Sunday School of Grace Church seems to have been at the height of its popularity and we may well believe of its usefulness. Including the school of about fifty at the House of the Intercessor there were some five hundred and thirty scholars and sixty-two teachers. The value of a Sunday School then, even more than today, was determined by the unconscious training in ideals and character afforded by the personality of the teachers. In the Sunday School at Grace Church of that time there were splendid personalities with whom the scholars came in contact. Among the teachers were several
ORIGINAL CHANCEL OF PRESENT CHURCH FURNISHED AS IN 1870
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of the leading men and women of the parish. The superintendent at that time and for nearly a decade later was a most influential and devoted churchman, Shepard C. Kinsley, then at the height of his power in the Sunday School, with which he was connected for over forty years, including over twenty years as superintendent. When Bishop Henshaw went on that journey to Maryland from which he never returned, he said to Mr. Kinsley, "You look after the Sunday School till I come back." More than a quarter of a century later, in telling this, Mr. Kinsley could say, "You see I'm still on the job." Mr. Kinsley died suddenly in 1880. One of the most beautiful windows in the church was ordered in England by Mr. Greer to be his memorial. The Sunday School of Mr. Currie's day was a school so full of strong personalities, exercising marked influence for good, that Mr. Currie vividly recalled them in writing from Europe more than thirty years later for the seventy- fifth anniversary.
."Then, those Sunday School anniversaries, when Father Kinsley,-as I always used to call him in my thoughts, was super- intendent, and Mr. John B. Anthony was a teacher, and Mr. Gus Hoppin and Mr. Peirce and Mr. Knight-though possibly Mr. Knight was only a Vestryman, I am not quite sure, but in any case, like the others he stands out a distinct figure to me, as that of a strong, good man and hearty friend of Grace Church,-and the lady-teachers, too, Miss Amy Smith (Mr. and Mrs. Amos D. Smith's daughter), and Mr. Kinsley's sons and daughters, and my dear friend Mrs. Talbot and Miss Green, and any number more. All these come often before my mind. I am getting old now, for I turned seventy last Sunday, and names have slipped away-but the old personalities and familiar faces of Grace Church I remem- ber today as distinctly as ever."
Although the first two attempts to secure a rector for Grace Church from the strong dioceses to the south had not been crowned with great success, the Vestry was ready to make a third venture in that direction. Accordingly, on the resignation of Mr. Currie the minds of both pastor and Vestry turned to a young man from West Virginia, born in Wheeling, where Mr. Currie had been rector, who had received more than passing thought two years before and who had even then, at the age of twenty-six, been highly recommended for Grace Church by competent judges. Doubtless it was fortu- nate for the future of Grace Church that the call to David Hummell Greer was made in 1872 rather than in 1870. The young thinker who returned from eleven months of travel in Europe in the spring
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of 1872 was a far different man from the back-country stripling who was in 1870 rector of a prosperous church of no great size in Covington, Kentucky, virtually a suburb of Cincinnati, and who was, even at that time, well-nigh submerged in a sea of uncertainty and doubt from his sudden contact with the larger world of social and intellectual activity into which he had been plunged. A boy- hood spent in primitive fashion in the western mountains of what was then Virginia, college days in a small denominational college, and theological training of robust but narrowly traditional Evan- gelicalism under Bishop McIlvaine and Bishop Bedell at Gambier, Ohio,-these had hardly opened this young preacher's eyes to the richness of the life of the Episcopal Church, to the great varieties in American social life, and still less to the dizzying advances in scientific and philosophical thought in the world at large.
In a mood, then, of doubt and humble distrust, yet with an earnest determination to find light and strength, Mr. Greer broke off what appears to have been a remarkably promising rectorship in Kentucky, and in June, 1871, sailed for Ireland. Thence he made his way to London and, after a few weeks, to the continent, where he visited many cities, small and great, in Holland, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. Finally, at Naples, he seems to have found the assurance of reconciliation between his boyhood faith in a Divine Saviour and the researches of modern science. He knew his Darwin, Huxley, and even Herbert Spencer well. But, while he accepted much that they taught as true, he realized that his belief in his Lord and Master and his faith in His saving grace rested on firm and unshaken foundations. From Naples he wrote to his friend, Rev. Heman Dyer, D.D., in New York that he was coming home in May and would be glad to accept a call to any suitable parish, great or small.
It was destined to be of incalculable benefit to Grace Church that it had been put into the mind and heart of this baffled searcher after truth to give up his charge at Covington and devote himself heart and soul to getting to know the world by months of sojourn abroad and to thinking things through, deliberately and leisurely, in the light of the revelation of the Holy Spirit, brought to him through every channel he could command. Soon he was to prove himself in Providence the comrade and the peer of some of the most highly endowed and best-trained minds in New England. Even with his great natural gifts it seems unlikely that the young Greer could have impressed these elder friends as he did without the equipment he derived from those months of thought and study
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abroad. Indeed, as it was, Mr. Greer's warm friend, Phillips Brooks, with his own rather excessively advanced education, is said to have felt strongly the effects in Mr. Greer of his early educational limitations.
On landing in America, Mr. Greer proceeded to Boston and preached that month at St. Paul's, then without a rector. On that occasion he was heard by Bishop Lawrence, as a college student, and by a vestryman of Grace Church, Providence, who seems to have been more impressed than was the college youth and who urged the choice of Mr. Greer on his colleagues when Mr. Currie's resignation came a month later. On July 14th Mr. Greer preached in Grace Church and no doubt fulfilled the expectations raised by the praise that had come from many quarters. In spite of the full chin beard,-almost a badge of the ardent evangelical clergy among whom he had been trained,-he must have seemed very youthful for so important a charge. He began his ministry before he was twenty-eight years and six months of age, being nearly six months older than was Mr. Fuller when he became Rec- tor, and younger by five months than Dr. Vinton, the only other rectors to take office under thirty.
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