USA > Rhode Island > Rhode Island Episcopalians 1635-1953 > Part 4
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A slightly earlier trip by the Bishop through the northern part of the State, through Greenville, Chepachet, Harrisville, Round Top, Pascoag and Huntsville, brought good congregations, but no immediate results. It was six years before St. Thomas', Greenville, came into being. An attempt to establish a mission in Chepachet failed, as did the one in 1816, and again later in 1946. It was many years before Calvary Mission in Pascoag, after several initial ventures in Burrillville, became firmly established, thanks to the influx of English mill workers. In northern Rhode Island the rural Yankee has remained largely aloof from the blan- dishments of the Episcopal Church. "Piscopals mos' bad as Catholics."
One of Bishop Henshaw's first accomplishments was the incorporation of the Diocese. By legislative act, in 1844, the Rhode Island Episcopal Convention became the legally recognized representative of the Church in the State. Other early projects were a "Depository" for hymnals, prayer books and Church literature and a Church high school. This last never materialized, though the Depository did good work for some years. The four present diocesan schools came much later.
The vigorous administration of Bishop Henshaw found its expression in diocesan integration and in extension into new fields, rather than in any large numerical gains in the older parishes. The new parishes were St. Philip's, Crompton, in 1845, and, in 1847, St. Peters', Rockville, now Manton; in Providence, in 1843, Christ Church, not the present one, but a temporary one of colored people, as well as All Saints Church in 1847, then called St. Andrew's, came into being. In 1852 Newport acquired a third parish in Emmanuel Church, while two years earlier St. Thomas, Greenville, began its century of vicissitudes. Both St. Thomas' Church and St. Peter's, Manton, were stone churches of village Gothic archi-
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tecture, costing less than $5,000 to build. Other new missions were St. Mary's, South Portsmouth, and the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Middle- town, both dating from 1843. Nine permanent missions in all were added to the eighteen left from the Griswold era. Communicants rose from 1997 to 2428. The Church School gains were much less, the 2246 pupils of 1842 becoming only 2363 in 1852. The rise of public schools seems to have reduced the numbers of those who came on Sunday to learn to read and write.
Soon after the 1852 Convention Bishop Henshaw went for recupera- tion to Maryland. There, on the 20th of July, he suddenly passed away. The funeral was held at Grace Church, Providence. There were present several bishops, including the Rt. Rev. John Williams, assistant Bishop of Connecticut, who preached the sermon.
On the 28th and 29th of September a special Convention was held at St. Stephen's Church, Providence, to transact whatever ordinary or extraordinary business the diocesan situation called for. In this last cate- gory was the election of a new bishop. The Rev. Francis Lister Hawks, a noted Evangelical, was duly chosen, but shortly afterward declined his election. At the annual Convention in 1853 the aging Rev. Nathan B. Crocker, rector of St. John's Providence, was elected by the clergy. The laity, however, when called to vote, refused to ratify the clerical choice. It was not until a second special Convention was held on September 26 in 1854, that the Reverend Thomas March Clark, D.D., rector of Christ Church, Hartford, Connecticut was elected the fifth Bishop of Rhode Island. In this interval of time Bishops Burgess of Maine and Williams of Connecticut performed episcopal duties in the Diocese.
The several resolutions on the Bishop's death passed by the Conven- tion, the Standing Committee and by a special meeting of Bishops and Clergy from the dioceses of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania and Tennessee, are too long to be quoted. They all emphasize not only the lovable character and the spiritual and intel- lectual gifts of the Bishop, but also his business efficiency and wide influ- ence in the general Church. That so many clergy from so many dioceses could gather in a memorial and testimonial meeting speaks louder than words of regret and remembrance duly resolved and inscribed.
What sort of a churchman was Bishop Henshaw? In his own eyes he was a first century Churchman, believing in immutable revealed truth and apostolically revealed Church Order. In his charge to his clergy at his last Convention, on the duties of the Ministry, he exhorted them to stand four-square against the errors of Protestant sectarianism, of Boston liberalism and those of the old medievalism, as well as those of the new movement emanating from Oxford.
"Let our Church stand firm and unmoved as she did in the olden times when she acquired for herself that noble appellation-The Bulwark of
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the Reformation. Pride and ignorance may affect to consider our com- munion as affiliated with Rome, and sympathizing with certain of her errors. But we know, and Rome knows, that there is no insurmountable bar to her victory over Protestantism, but that which is raised by a communion having a claim truer than her own to all which is Apostolic in Institution, Primitive in Discipline, and Catholic in Faith ... Let us not fail to meet her on this true ground as the most ancient and deadly foe of Apostolic Episcopacy and originally revealed Truth ... Our chaste Ritual will bear perpetual protest against the mumbling formalisms, the meretricious superstition and the dead language of the Missal or Mass Book. The sublime, intelligible, rational forms of devotion, embodied in our Book of Common Prayer for the joint use of Minister and People, will not suffer by contrast with the idle fripperies and sacerdotal shows which are exhibited for the admiration, rather than the edification, of the people. Our Baptism, with pure water, accompanied by the sign of the cross, will not suffer by contrast with the salt, and spittle and exorcisms with which Rome has degraded the sacrament of our engrafting into Christ. Our holy Rite "of laying on of hands' will condemn that spurious Confirmation, which consists in the application of the chrism to the forehead and a slight tap upon the cheek of its unenlightened and almost infantile recipients. Our Eucharistic offering and holy communion in the Lord's Supper exposes the deception practiced by Rome in with- holding half of the sacrament from the laity, and blasphemously pre- tending to offer in the Mass a propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead; while church views of the real participation of the faithful in the aliment of the body and blood of Jesus afford a strong protest against the idle fiction of Trans-substantiation. The pure doctrines of our Articles, Homilies and Liturgy contain the testimony of the Church from the beginning against the corrupt dogmas of Rome; and more especially our steady maintenance of the fundamental doctrine of justification by grace through faith in the meritorious sacrifice of the cross, presents an impreg- nable barrier to her system of self-righteousness and fancied works of supererogation.
"I charge you, beloved brethren, adhere steadfastly to old truths and primitive Institutions exhibited in the Bible and embodied in the Book of Common Prayer, as the best preservative under God, from the false systems of Superstition, on the one hand, and of Radicalism on the other."
How shall this be best effected? "When all shall realize that love and not controversy is their proper element, that works of charity and piety are their fitting employment; that to alleviate the miseries and advance the salvation of a perishing world is the great end of the Christian Religion, and act accordingly; when the only strife among us will be who shall be most holy and do the most good, then God, even our own God, shall give us His blessing; then Zion will arise and shine in the beauty of holiness, and become the joy and praise of the whole Earth." Thus spake one of the leading Evangelical preachers of his generation.
The words, uttered on June 8, 1952, were to be the Bishop's last will and testament for his Diocese. Little could he foresee that, while his
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beloved Diocese would grow twelve-fold in a century, she would be "corrupted" both by Boston radicalism and the ritual emanating from Oxford, and these often in alliance. Furthermore, he would never have dreamed that the hosts of Rome, then but a feeble folk, would so out- number Protestants and Jews, Orthodox and Pagans, that the colony of Roger Williams would be well on its way to be the first clerical State in the American Union.
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CHAPTER IV. The Episcopate of Thomas March Clark 1854 - 1903
The Right Reverend Thomas March Clark
I
Thomas March Clark was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts on July 4, 1812. His father, a strict Presbyterian, was a shipowner whose vessels sailed on many seas. In his "Reminiscences", published in 1895, when he was eighty-three, Bishop Clark tells us about this aspect of his early days: "I well remember what a delight it was when one of my father's vessels arrived from Russia or Antwerp or the West Indies, or some other land, with its rich furs and strange wooden shoes and coco- nuts and yams and plantains, guava jellies, limes and tamarinds."
The shipping glories of Newburyport were, however, soon to pass away. The damage to trade caused by the War of 1812, with the sub- sequent drift of commerce to Boston, left the beautiful old town econom- ically stranded. "I grew up with the impression that the world was finished just before I was born, and that nothing more would ever be done to it."
Those were the days, as the Bishop recalls seventy-five years later, when few persons went thirty miles from home, when the finest of New- buryport's colonial houses could be rented for a hundred dollars a year, when curfew rang every night at nine. There were no matches, ice, street lights, running water, steamers, railroads or anesthetics. "So things floated on, while the elements were brewing to produce the social cyclone which has been raging ever since."
Today we are apt to look back upon 1895 as one of the halcyon years of normalcy. Actually a fundamental revolution had occurred in American political, social, economic and even religious life. Still more was to come.
Religion was a central feature of the Clark family life. Thus, when the Sabbath came round, Sunday School began at nine, morning service and a lengthy sermon followed at ten-thirty. A brief sermon was read to the family at lunch, doubtless prepared before 6 o'clock on Saturday evening. Then came afternoon service and perhaps a stroll in the garden, where, however, no flower or apple might be plucked. Still later in the day, the Presbyterian "Shorter Catechism", not so short by Episcopalian standards, was recited by the children. "Last came the hymns, and a little good, plain, simple talk, that came direct from the heart and did us good, and made the tears start as we all stood up to pray (no sound Presbyterian ever knelt in prayer at that period); and so the love of Jesus reached our souls through the hearts and not the intellect of those who led us to the Cross."
The nine o'clock Sunday School, held in the Town Hall, was an inter- denominational affair, after which the children filed in procession to their respective places of worship. "I cannot say that the exercises did me much good, or excited any feeling but that of extreme weariness. Our superin-
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tendent was an aged gentleman who had in his earlier days run a dis- tillery --- a very good sort of man, but without the faintest conception of a child's nature . . . My own teacher was a very exemplary and quiet maker of blocks and pumps, who, after we had recited our texts of Scrip- ture and the hymns assigned to us, having nothing special to say, very prudently left us to ourselves for the remainder of the hour. The children of this generation have occasion to congratulate themselves upon the change that has come to them, with their Sunday School libraries and periodicals, and processions and banners, and all the other accessories intended to make the school both edifying and attractive." Since 1895, we Episcopalians, like others, have been deploring the failure or in- adequacy of the Sunday School!
Part of the future bishop's education was at Boarding School, of which he had no pleasant memories. "The introduction of running water into our houses reminds me of the cold mornings ( at school), when I had to go out with my birch basin and break the ice in a pond for water to wash with, and this when I was only ten years old . .. at one of those awful boarding schools, to which even Dickens has hardly done full justice, for I could tell of horrors as great as those he describes."
At seventeen Clark was at Yale College, where religion had recovered the ascendancy which it had lost after the American and French Revolu- tions. However, the cloven foot of modernity was already appearing. For Professor Silliman, in his Geology class, was propounding the then novel and shocking theory that Creation had been not an instantaneous but a gradual process. The seven days of Creation, enumerated in Genesis, were seven geological ages. This theory, now superannuated among modernist Christians, but still used by Fundamentalists and Roman Catholics to bulwark Old Testament infallibility, shocked Clark's father and a neighboring clergyman when the young man brought it back from Yale. "I shall never forget the horror with which they listened -- the idea of such a thing as process being abhorrent to their minds."
Though Clark learned much from his other professors, Silliman's instruction would seem to have been the most far-reaching in its ulti- mate effect. His English professors, doubtless, helped to develop his feeling for English diction, later to be reflected in a love for the beauties of the Prayer Book. The Episcopal Church, however, was not yet on Clark's horizon, in spite of a friendship with William Ingram Kip, later to be Bishop of California.
From Yale the young student went on to the Seminary at Princeton, where supralapsarian orthodoxy made the salvation of the few and the damnation of the many a cornerstone of the faith. "By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men and angels are pre- destinated unto everlasting death . . . Their number is so certain and definite that it cannot be either increased or diminished." (Presbyterian Confession of Faith).
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The Princeton system of 1830, like the Roman of today, was designed to place an iron curtain around the mind of the seminarian. Thus, when Clark once undertook in class to defend the "godless" science of Geology, both his professors and his fellow students were horrified. He was told emphatically that men came to Seminary to be taught, not to think for themselves. Clark, however, continued to think, and, within five years, was in the ministry of the Episcopal Church.
Various factors undoubtedly conjoined in slowly changing over the outlook of the young theological student. The comprehensiveness of the Episcopal Church, where men could differ and still remain in one fold, appealed to him throughout a long life. Again, the theological stability and sanity of a Church which held fast to the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds must have appealed to him, as to many others. For Unitarianism, once confined to Boston and Cambridge, was then on the march. The radical Gospel according to Emerson, William Ellery Channing, and Theodore Parker, was splitting New England's Congregationalism into two camps, Unitarian and Trinitarian For many, in the 1830's, the Episcopal Church became an ark of Christian safety. Clark, later at least, glorified the idea of unity in diversity, of the old creeds fertilized by new ideas.
Clark was first drawn to the Episcopal Church by attending the ser- vices and sermons of two of the leading Evangelicals of the day, Hare of Princeton and Bedell of Philadelphia. "As there was no afternoon service in the Seminary chapel, some of us formed the habit of attending the new (Episcopal) Church, where the simplicity of the service and the liberal fervor of the preacher combined to impress us very favorably. At this time I passed a Sunday in Philadelphia and went to St. Andrew's Church, of which Doctor Bedell was the rector, attracting great crowds by his elo- quence and earnestness. I was deeply impressed by the whole scene, as all I had known of the Episcopal Church was in a very small way, and I remember thinking on my way home that, if I thought I could ever have any Church like that, I should be inclined to enter the Episcopal ministry .. . In less than ten years I became the rector of St. Andrew's Church."
This change, however, was not yet. Clark went back to New Eng- land and tried out the Congregational Church. "I supplied the pulpit of the Old South Church in Boston for a little time in 1835, and my entrance into the Episcopal Church was precipitated by consciousness of my unfit- ness to express in extemporaneous prayer the sentiments of an intelligent congregation whose Christian experience had in a great many cases been matured before I was born."
Thus it came to pass that in 1836, when twenty-four, Clark was ordained deacon by Bishop Griswold in old Trinity Church, Boston, a building later to be supplanted by the new one in Copley Square. Most of the next eighteen years was spent as rector of the two important parishes of St. Andrew's, Philadelphia, and Christ Church, Hartford. There, one Sunday morning in September, 1854, the aged Bishop Brownell of Connecticut handed him a telegram after church. It contained the sur- prising news that he had been elected Bishop of Rhode Island.
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After due legal notification, Thomas March Clark accepted and was consecrated a Bishop in the Church of God in Grace Church, Providence, on December 6, 1854. He immediately began a visitation of the Diocese. He did not, however, take up the rectorship of Grace Church, vacant for a year and a half since the death of Bishop Henshaw, until the fol- lowing spring. Clark's consecrators and presenters were Bishops Brownell of Connecticut, John Henry Hopkins of Vermont, George Washington Doane of New Jersey, George Burgess of Maine, and John Williams, assistant bishop, at that time, of Connecticut.
II
When the first ten years of the Clark episcopate had gone by, the Bishop was able to tell Convention a wonderful tale of diocesan progress. Communicants had increased nearly fifty percent in ten years, rising from 2,543 to 3,721. Sunday scholars had doubled-coming up from 2,231 to 4,238, with a large increase likewise in teachers. Contributions for mis- sionary and charitable purposes had reached the unprecedented total for ten years of $161,140, of which wealthy St. John's, Providence, had given nearly one-half.
There were also six new parishes admitted to union with Convention, namely, the Church of The Messiah, Providence (1856), St. John's Bar- rington (1859), and Church of The Redeemer, Providence (1860), the Church of The Saviour, Providence (1863), and Trinity Church, Scituate (1864). Trinity Church, Pawtucket, though founded in 1845, did not legally become Rhode Island territory by cession from Massachusetts until 1863.
Three of these parishes, as one may notice, were established in the rapidly growing city of Providence. Here the communicant increase was nearly double, 722 to 1,340, while the increase was under thirty percent in the rest of the State, 1,821 to 2,381. This aspect of diocesan growth was in direct contrast to the conditions in the Henshaw episcopate, when increase came largely by the founding of new parishes in the mill villages.
Outside of Providence some parishes gained and some lost. There were considerable increases in the cotton mill parish of Christ Church, Lonsdale, and at rural St. Paul's and St. Mary's, Portsmouth. St. Michael's, Bristol, in contrast to its recession in the Henshaw period, grew somewhat. Warren and Westerly lost considerably. Woonsocket, then a cotton rather than a wool town, on the contrary, gained heavily. Curiously enough, St. Paul's, Pawtucket, which added relatively few communicants, had 516 funerals and 329 weddings in these ten years. Woonsocket had no less than 247 burials and 208 marriages, Lonsdale 176 funerals and 75 weddings. Marrying and giving in marriage, burying and being buried, was big business by the banks of the industrial Blackstone.
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The Sunday School gains-a doubling of pupils-were never again repeated in any subsequent decade. Here the Providence churches were conspicuous. Grace Church, the Bishop's parish, steadily increased its Church School pupils yearly from 162 to 513, while all the others gained in equal or even greater proportion. St. John's only had little advance. Neighborhood conditions and the failing hand of Nathan Bourne Crocker doubtless played their part, as well as the competition of the nearby and newly-established parish of The Redeemer, the Church School of which waxed as that of the old parish waned.
When it came to the supply and salaries of the clergy, Bishop Clark had a much sadder story to unfold to Convention. Although the number of the clergy had increased in ten years from 28 to 38, only 12 of the original 28 were still in the Diocese. Twenty-eight men had been ordained, and now no candidates for Orders remained.
Part of the trouble the Bishop ascribed to the inflationary conditions of the time. In the Civil War period profits were enormous, prices had doubled, wages went up thirty percent, but many clerical salaries re- mained stationary. Said the Bishop:
"It is true that no man is fit to be a minister of Christ who looks upon his flock mainly with an eye to the value of the fleece; but it may have some effect in repelling one from the office of a Shepherd, if he feels that he is to be hampered in the discharge of his work by pecuniary embarrass- ments, distracted from his studies by the pressure of liabilities which he does not know how to meet, and subject to reproach for which he is con- scious that he ought not to have been held accountable. There are many clergymen who are called to pay two dollars today for what cost them one dollar five years ago, while their income remains the same as it was. I am happy to say that our Convocation have greatly increased the ratio of pay to the missionaries in their employ, though their number has been diminished. We have at present but three missionaries engaged in our service, while we ought to have at least double this number. Ten years ago, when there were but twenty-five (active) clergymen in the Diocese, the contributions made to Convocation (the diocesan missionary agency ) amounted to $1,859; during the last year, with thirty-eight clergymen, the receipts have been only $1,551." Yet "there has never been a time when the call for our services was so importunate as it is now ... If we do not come to the rescue, in many quarters the moral wilderness must remain barren and uncultivated."
These words re-echo the constant theme of the Bishop's Convention addresses for many years, until things improved. The good women of the larger parishes contributed substantially to the missions in exotic foreign lands and in our own romantic West, but only grudgingly for the Christianization of the nearby countryside.
"Would to God it were in our power to cultivate all the waste places that lie within our State! If we fail to do it, there are no indications that any other body of Christians will. We have, within the last two years
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or three, established our services in communities where not a solitary Churchman was to be found when we commenced, and where no stated worship existed before. If we had the men and the means, we could do the same things in many other communities. There are large townships in this Commonwealth where there is scarcely a preacher of the Gospel, of any name, to be found ... The people who live in our larger towns and cities have no adequate conception of the spiritual destitution which prevails in the interior of the State. Labor, in the field and by the high- way, goes on from morning till night on Sundays as freely and openly as on any other day in the week. No church-bell calls the people to prayer; from year to year, no word of Gospel truth falls upon the ear; no Sunday School invites the children to enter, and they grow up to maturity with- out one religious association and perhaps without one word of religious instruction."
Two decades later the Bishop was able to report that the Episcopal ยท Church had occupied nearly all needed territory. Other denominations, we may add, particularly the various varieties of Baptists, had also reached out. Where no given denomination worked, community chapels were occasionally erected. There some good women would, at least off and on, run a Sunday School. When funds accumulated a bit, they might be spent to "hire" a preacher for occasional sermons.
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