IMMEDIATELY after the adjournment of convention, Bishop Chase passed a pleasant day or two in Hartford, rejoicing to find his old-time parishioners as loyal as ever,--and then the indefatigable, indomitable old man sailed for England, to plead the cause of a new church college five hundred miles further than Kenyon toward the setting sun! This second voyage is invested with pathos; when he went to plead for Ohio he was in the meridian of his powers,--but that was twelve years before, and now his days were declining. In the interval, one by one among those who had befriended him then had dropped into the grave; he was especially saddened by the loss of his most valued friend, Lord Gambier. Moreover the English church was herself in straits, was being wounded in the house of those who should have been her friends; and yet,--a most encouraging sign of her vitality, however discouraging to his mission,--was beginning to realize her responsibility toward those of her communion in Ireland, Canada, India, and Australia. Chase's appeal was wholly unexpected; his welcome in England was a warning that would have disheartened any but him; his friend Lord Bexley told him not to look for success in founding a second college in the Mississippi valley,--pityingly salving the hurt of his words with a present of fifty pounds. The archbishop of Canterbury politely invited him to visit Lambeth,--but mentioned the above imperative claims upon his purse. He was cheered, however, by a cordial letter and gift of a hundred pounds from the faithful Kenyon; Lady Rosse, too, was still living, and testified to the permanency of her interest by the munificent gift of two hundred and sixty pounds,--so that actually he did better at the outset than before. His chief resources in the way of argument were the large number of English emigrants in Illinois, and the danger of their loss to the church, together with the phenomenal strides that Roman Catholicism was making in that region. In less than four months the subscriptions mounted up to the equivalent of seven thousand dollars, and two months later,--April, 1836--he sailed for home with pledges amounting to ten thousand,--so that out of the lion came sweetness at the last.

Before his departure, he had engaged his newly consecrated brother to visit his diocese for him, and so, shortly after the close of convention, cheered by wide and deep interest in his missionary venture of faith, witnessed to substantially by contributions aggregating upward of three thousand dollars from churches in New York and Philadelphia, increased by generous offerings from Upfold's and Whitehouse's parishes in Pittsburg and Rochester, Kemper left the East for Indiana and Illinois. Those territories had been admitted into the Union as states in the years 1816 and 1818 respectively. Up to that period the larger portion of them still owned the sway of primeval nature; simplest frontier conditions prevailed; there was a mere fringe of settlement upon their southern bound, along the bank of the Ohio river; the bison still roamed over their grassy northern savannahs, and in the woods wolves, wildcat, deer and foxes multiplied. The settlers had to confront the red man at every turn; even as late as 1832 they were stricken with panic at the raid of the Black Hawk. These conflicts tended to intensify the vigilant, militant spirit, sufficiently pronounced from the first, of the hardy pioneers, picked men of their kind. An ardent individualism was the note of the hour, whether in religion or politics, economic or social life. All sorts of eccentric characters were largely in evidence; it was an age of humors. Every clearing in the forest was an independent principality, producing pretty nearly everything that was consumed upon it. It was the log cabin age; in the midst of a clearing still marked by charred stumps and gaunt trunks of trees that had been deadened by girdling the bark around at the base would stand a rude dwelling of logs notched at the ends, thus producing dove-tailed corners, the crevices in the walls chinked with clay, the chimney outside, at one end. Within was a single room below, a loft above, the furniture of the room consisting chiefly of beds, with splint chairs and stools, and a shelf holding crockery, calabashes, a rifle and powder-horn. A big bowl, after doing duty as a wash-basin, would be pressed into service for mush or milk, which with balls of corn bread, pork, and greasy "chicken fixin's"--fried fowl--were the staple fare. Log walls thus fashioned were poor protection from the wind, which in winter would search them, shrunken with cold, and circulate in gusts about the draughty abode, making the pine torch or candle flare. Through holes in the roof one could see the stars. When time came to retire, modest men folk would step outside, to study the signs of the weather!

All manner of bilious attacks, pleurisy, fever and ague, were the plagues of those raw clearings; malarial fever, it has been said, was then the Grendel of Indiana, sometimes depopulating whole settlements. Yet it may be doubted whether this was any more owing to the climate and the newly opened, soil than to unsanitary habits, such as laboring under the noonday sun, and so getting overheated and then chilled. If there is one thing that sentient, hot-blooded creatures must have it is warmth; one cannot therefore think severely of poor sufferers who in the deadly chill of a fit of ague filled themselves with alcoholic stimulant. Tea and coffee were rare and expensive luxuries in the backwoods; quinine apparently was not available; so the plague of ague was accompanied by a plague of whiskey. The women consumed quantities of injurious drugs, for quacks and their specifics abounded.

About one such lonesome spot amid the wet forest the following veracious conversation between a settler and an inquiring stranger is reported to have taken place. The melancholy, monotonous, monosyllabic replies tell volumes. "What's your place called?" "Moggs'." "What sort of land thereabouts?" "Bogs." "What's the climate?" "Fogs." "What's your name?" "Scroggs." "What's your house built of?" "Logs." "What do you have to eat?" "Hogs." "Have you any neighbors?" "Frogs." "Gracious! Haven't you any comforts?" "GROG."

Yet such unromantic toilers, with their sordid cares and sufferings, and discouragements often, were the nameless pioneers and hewers of great states to be. Nor were their lives all winter, but had an equal share of spring and summer days, and their long hours of labor were followed by evening rest. And to the traveler by miry roads through the murky forest the forlornest of their clearings seemed a paradise, for it lay open to the sun and afforded dry standing ground.

It is no wonder that every farm was sufficient to itself in those days; it had to be,--for the difficulties and dolors of transportation were excessive. For much of the year the roads were practically impassable. (Here we may take a picturesque glimpse into the prehistoric past of the West: the road in whose mud the straining wagon sank to its axles had been the pathway of the light-footed Indian, and before him, the trail of the buffalo. To complete the picture: the Indian camps and trading posts whither these trails led were already becoming the sites of white men's villages, destined to grow into great and famous cities.) All travelers tell of the terrors of those roads; the cleverest of them has recorded that in spring "traveling by land becomes traveling by water, or by both mixed,--mud and water;" and he defined forest travel as "a taste of 'ma'shland,'--rooty and snaggy land,--of 'corduroys' woven single and double twill, and fords with and without bottom." Once, inquiring his way, he was directed--but with the warning that it was "the most powerfulest road!"

Politically and religiously, these states were cradled in Jeffersonian Democracy and Methodism,--individualistic both. It has been remarked that the tendency of the frontier was ever away from the influence of Europe. Prejudice amounting to hatred--which would naturally be intense among the many Irish immigrants--was felt and expressed toward England, and was extended toward New England, partly because of its attitude in the war of 1812. The frontier has been termed a crucible, in which the most diverse human elements were fused into something new, composite, un-English,--transmuted, shall we say, into the pure gold of Americanism? The year that Illinois was erected into a territory, Abraham Lincoln was born amid frontier conditions in the adjoining state of Kentucky; at the age of seven years he was taken by his parents to Indiana when it became a state; and when he had attained his majority, he settled in Illinois.

The intimate relations of prejudice and ignorance were copiously illustrated; prejudice against the old country, against old societies and their forms, contempt of the past, as of a bondage it was well to escape, excused ignorance,--and that intensified prejudice. Education and true religion had a hard struggle to survive; "schools and preachers," said a governor of Illinois, "could be dispensed with better than corn meal." There was a prevalent prejudice against education on the supposition that it unfitted boys and girls for workers and housewives. Unlearned preachers were supposed, by those that were themselves illiterate, to be "more favored than man-made ones,"--and people who thought thus were accordingly given over to the bedlam of camp-meeting revivals, the one intense excitement of the day, culminating in the hideous, hysterical, "holy laugh"; and to the ministrations of ranters like him who, mistaking the passage in the Apocalypse about "a pair of balances," read it "a pair of bellowses," with which, he explained, the wicked would be blown to destruction in the fiery furnace! Yet many of those circuit-riders were devoted men, who very early penetrated to the remotest settlements and were the one uplifting agency among them. They received no salary: most people thought that attendance upon their preaching was sufficient compensation,--and we cannot blame them, judging by the above quoted discourse. They were freely entertained, though, wherever they went,--were not expected to pay at ferries or taverns.

Spurious, factitious religious excitement had its inevitable consequence in infidelity even to the pitch of blasphemy. The more cultivated scepticism of Jeffersonian grain was amply defined by the politician before quoted: "One Christian creed is as good as another. The creed of each must be right to himself when it is founded on the best lights in his power. It matters not what particular faith any Christian may possess; it is quite immaterial how he arrives at it, so that it is reached with honesty and sincerity."

The erection of these territories into states did not alter the above conditions, but gave them wider scope, while introducing new factors. Everything henceforth was on a larger scale, even the epidemics of malarial fever, which recurred with desolating effect, appalling prospective immigrants and checking, each time, the inflow of population. One cannot make too emphatic the fact that these states were cradled into being through utility; they were business ventures, and ran each other hard in the matter of advertising. The settlement of the West has been described as an industrial conquest. Freedom, religious or political, was not its motive; no one fled or had cause to flee from the East because of oppression. The impelling power was the desire to better one's condition; the highest, purest motive discernible was that on the part of parents to give their children a better start in life, materially,--for certainly none went West for the sake of higher education. Hence the utilitarianism, and that of materialistic cast, that was the presiding genius at the birth of state after state. And a people's origin is more than half of the whole. "The intense mental activity and untiring energy of the people," wrote an observer, "in the pursuit of wealth, threaten serious results to their social and moral well-being." And yet we must remember that thousands of years of civilization were at their back; the inheritance of ages ran in their blood; the great human needs were not obliterated from their souls but stifled in them, and only waited an opportunity to reassert themselves.

As in the case of Ohio, territorial officers had brought their slaves into Indiana and Illinois, and when state constitutions came to be drafted for the latter there was agitation
over the introduction of slavery, which became more excited after the admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1820. Three and four years after that date determined efforts were made to naturalize the system in Illinois, the strongest argument being the numbers of Virginians and Kentuckians that crossed the state with their negroes, to settle in Missouri. Had the initiative of the latter been followed by Illinois, it is believed that it would have created a reflex wave of slavery that Indiana could not have resisted.

The backwoodsman and squatter fought shy of encroaching civilization; it was noticed that they could not abide the vicinity of a school, which seemed to mark a descent of their children in the social scale; they accordingly took what they could get for their clearings and followed the sun, crossing the Mississippi into Iowa, leaving schools and the Sabbath behind. Indeed, migratory habits became confirmed in them; "every one in Puddleford expected to move somewhere else very soon;" farmers would shift from place to place half-a-dozen times, as superficial cultivation and neglect of the principle of rotation of crops exhausted the soil. It was a picturesque sight to see their "prairie schooners,"--wagons with swelling covers of white cotton cloth stretched over hoops, and containing their belongings,--toiling along a dusty road, followed by the cattle. As a precaution against the fierce fires that periodically licked the prairies, they would choose sites for their cabins upon the edge of a strip of woodland.

To the plantations that thus changed hands more careful cultivation would be applied; and ere long a frame house would rise upon one and then another, the abandoned cabin being relegated to the uses of a summer kitchen and winter wood shed. Now at last parlor was separated from kitchen as bedrooms were from both,--and from each other! The evolution of the dining-room marked a yet higher stage. And now an occasional pianoforte appeared--that symbol of advanced civilization,--together with horsehair covered furniture, a rag carpet, stove, timepiece, grotesque likeness in crayons, and mirror whose only virtue was that it never flattered. "Settlements" sprang up, consisting of "a smithery, mill, tannery, and above all, a store"; "cities" were named before the roots had been grubbed up from their central squares, whereon courthouse and tavern faced each other, while on a corner stood the jail.

The sentiment of loyalty, that guarantee of good government, had not been developed toward either state; nothing yet had been done to elicit it,--there was nothing to be proud of. Indiana and Illinois could be abused anywhere with tacit consent. Money was scarce; there was much indebtedness; and financial honor Was at as low an ebb as civic spirit. "Cheap public service," was the cry; the honor of holding office was estimated as sufficient compensation; salaries were so low that no poor man, for example, could be state governor unless he stole. The spoils system was evolved by frontier politics, and bequeathed--a pernicious legacy--to the nation. Those politics were characterized by one who knew as "nasty, pitiful intrigues and licentious slanders. Any silly charge, if uncontradicted, defeated an election. Defaming and clearing up, cursing the administration and treating to whiskey, constituted an electoral campaign. Even youths, as future voters, were courted and cajoled till they grew conceited, positive, insolent."

The evils of defective education and a lack of literature and wholesome pastimes became glaringly apparent, spiritually, intellectually, and morally, among the young men of the rising generation. They mistook dissipation, we are told, only too often for manliness; they hung around saloons and billiard-tables; for their untutored energy and natural craving for excitement, denied healthy outlet, drove them, in the reactions of drudgery, to hard drinking, gambling, and seduction. Their headstrong passions forced expression in a veritable monotony of profanity. Abuse of stimulants led to equivalent abuse of the great narcotic; consumption of tobacco was inordinate in all its forms, smoking, snuffing, and chewing with its consequent spitting: present day opinion, rendered dispassionate by the passage of time, is ready to admit that Dickens' "Chuzzlewit" affords a not unfair picture of some of those raw communities. In many of them a spice was added to life and delays of justice were expedited by occasional "necktie sociables,"--lynching parties. Yet it is the testimony of an experienced and critical observer that in the roughest districts of the West, tyrannized over by bullies and "eye-gougers," a sensible, self-controlled man could go about his business without molestation.

This was the palmy time of the flat-boatmen of the Mississippi; the frontier of commerce was approaching; and we are reminded that the people of the new states were beginning to manifest new and varied wants. The age of homespun and leather wear was passing away; manufactured goods and a few luxuries were beginning to be brought down the Ohio from Pittsburg and up the Mississippi from New Orleans. The highest ambition of the growing youth was to go on a flatboat to the latter city.

We have spoken of Dickens' strictures. Not the West only, but the whole country as well was then characterized by that peculiar sensitiveness that betrays the justice of criticism. Young men especially who had grown up in western settlements, who had seen nothing of the world and so had no standard of comparison, whose uninstructed minds and consciences were possessed by the most uncouth ideas, self-confident and satisfied, prone to exaggerate, bitterly prejudiced against the East because they knew nothing of it, not given to reflection or self-criticism, grew frenzied under the criticism of others. They made no pretence of good manners; at meals bolted their meat in silence,--conversation at such times would have seemed folly to them and a waste of precious minutes; the amenities of life, such as "please" and "thank you," struck them as suited to effete monarchical societies, but as incongruous with free-born, independent Americanism. Force of character and self-reliance are admirable qualities, certainly,--but mark the nemesis of this pugnacious, iconoclastic spirit, this illusory self-sufficiency, contempt of the past and of old authority: it is simple ignorance and vulgarity. Rejecting what is good in the old one is given over to what is coarse and bad in the new; his pretended freedom is actual bondage to the baser elements of society and his own nature, is resoluble into a plea for license and anarchy; his contempt of the great names of old delivers him up, hoodwinked, to undiscerning idolatry of contemporary opinion and reputations. This attitude of mind is responsible, by way of disgusted reaction, for the Anglomania of an ensuing generation; and both betray unstable equilibrium.

The most effectual efforts to control the frontier that were put forth by the East were by sending thither missionaries and schoolmasters. Baptist exhorters had followed close upon Methodist, and now came Campbellites, or Disciples, Cumberland Presbyterians, and representatives of innumerable curious sects beside, such as the Soul-sleepers, whose distinguishing tenet was that disembodied souls are in a somnolent state between death and the day of judgment.

These missionaries received meagre stipends from home and nothing in the field, and hence had to work with their hands, chop wood, and plough for their living. So it came about that they were often denounced in the East as "given to secular employments!" One of them, a Presbyterian, proposed a new society: "The-make-congregations-by-what-they-voluntarily-promise-society,"--for "most clergymen do perform all they ever promise and often a very great deal more."

One of these worthy men who at his first coming was discouraged by the survey, for the young people in particular seemed to have lapsed into heathenism, made the cheering discovery after a little effort that though religious feeling, through disuse, had become dormant, it was not extinct, and that only regular and faithful work was required to cause the nobler qualities again to assume control. There is interesting evidence of the fact that soon became notorious to all observers, that churchless villages were backward, rude, vicious, and failed to attract settlers; hence it became good business to solicit and advertise ecclesiastical privileges. But with the multitude of sects mutual antagonism flamed more fiercely. The five hundred citizens of the capital of Indiana were divided among ten religious sects: "Almost every householder had a 'meeting' of his own and in his own dwelling." A schismatical, self-righteous spirit was abroad, that "magnified differences, hunted more diligently than intelligently for scriptural excuses for division, and perverted texts to support creeds and uncharitable criticisms of varying creeds." Such was the common burden of sermons; there was no exchange of pulpits in those days! "Most that was done at many of our meetings was to revile others and glorify ourselves. Extra saints used to resort for worship to the top of the courthouse steeple. Men thought there was one church in the world and that their own, and wondered what judgment would fall on other denominations. They were possessed by a disposition to dogmatize, to settle not only their own faith but also their neighbors', and to stand resolutely and dispute fiercely for the slightest shade of difference of religious opinion." And finally, that opinion was badly mixed up with politics, and confounded with noise: "a quiet religion in Puddleford was no religion at all!"

After the suppression of the Black Hawk insurrection in 1832, immigration of better quality from the South, New England and Great Britain began to pour in, bearing with it property, education, and some sound religion. Now the northern tiers of counties began to be settled; neat white cottages, of New England style, with pine trees flanking the approach to the door, began to appear; towns sprang up and soon numbered their thousands, and boasted many stores, among them a bookstore, hotels, newspapers, schools and churches. Now appeared Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Universalists, Unitarians, "and a few Nothingarians." Trained lawyers replaced the old-time pettifoggers, and physicians the quacks. Lyceum courses of lectures, universities, and charitable institutions drew within the horizon of the possible; and we hear mention of musical societies and another sign of the approaching frontier of culture, albeit untimely: a wandering artist, a disconsolate swallow of premature culture, dies in one of the settlements. Temperance societies are organized, to suppress intoxication at elections, primarily; and, best of all, progress in pure religion is recognized as "an index to the dignity and elevation of society, of states, of human life." Interest in it deepens, young men begin to seek the ministry; educated clergymen are called to urban parishes, and institute Sunday-schools; written sermons and chaste eloquence replace the spontaneous ranting of former time, and sacred music and song the discordant noise.

The first Episcopal minister of whom we hear in these quarters was an almost mythical being named Henry Shaw, who, in 1823, gathered a congregation at Vincennes; but who he was, whence he came and whence he derived his orders, no one knows. We no sooner hear of him than we hear that he "quit preaching and was elected to the legislature"; and from later ambiguous allusions we infer that his character was not of the best,--that, in a word, he was a clerical adventurer. What finally became of him is also unknown; out of the dark into the dark he goes.

The same year an emissary of the infant Domestic Missionary Society of the church, sent out to reconnoitre in both states, organized a hopeful parish at Albion, Illinois, whose history is conclusive as to the practicability of an early introduction of the church into this region. The nucleus of the parish was composed, without doubt, of a cluster of English immigrants; much zeal was manifested at the outset, and a rector was called from the East. Upon his declination, the congregation entreated the Missionary Society for a supply; and when that appeal also proved unavailing, it dissolved away.

Such experiences as these should quiet all plaints about the irreparable loss the church is supposed to have incurred through her comparatively late entrance into this field; the time was not ripe. Both men and money were needed for the work, and neither was at hand. The General Seminary only graduated its first class that year, the Theological Seminary of Virginia was located at Alexandria, and Bishop Chase went abroad to solicit funds for a western seminary. Even for the East the supply of clergy was sadly inadequate. Funds were also lacking; the Missionary Society was in its inception, and after a moment of promise had to struggle for life against a decline of interest. Undoubtedly it should have sent a bishop instead of a priest as its first missionary to the West, but in 1823 such a step would have seemed utterly impracticable. No society can be imagined where Episcopal services were more needed than in Indiana and Illinois at that time, and on the other hand there was none where they were less wanted. A bishop would have had terribly hard work and could have accomplished scarcely anything for ten years; still, he should have been sent. Not until after 1832 was the soil prepared for the church's seed.

Leaving his young children in charge of their relatives in Philadelphia, and accompanied by the Rev. Samuel Roosevelt Johnson, Bishop Kemper reached Indiana in November, 1835. A word is necessary concerning his companion, who was destined to exert a moulding influence upon the new diocese. He was the son of a distinguished minister, a scholar and eloquent preacher, of the Dutch Reformed communion, whose name, originally Jansen, had by simple change of spelling been conformed to its English homologue. After graduating at Columbia College, the younger Johnson received Episcopal ordination, and now, at the age of thirty-three years, attended Bishop Kemper upon his first missionary journey.

They discovered that in the whole state of Indiana there was one lone missionary of their communion, located at the capital, but not one church. New Albany was the largest town, numbering upward of three thousand inhabitants, and this and Evansville, where there were seven hundred souls and no minister of any kind, seemed to be highly promising stations. Having traversed the southern part of the state, the bishop sought to reach St. Louis by river, and touched at Paducah, a growing town of a thousand inhabitants, that could boast a theatre, but not a single place of public worship. Something untoward must have happened to the travelers, for they now had to take an open wagon, wherein their trunks served them for seats, and drive across the southern end of Illinois. After toiling through a swamp fitly called Purgatory, they arrived at St. Louis in the middle of December. Here there was an organized parish and church building, the only one in the jurisdiction of Missouri, in which there was not a single clergyman,--an exact converse of the case in Indiana.

The arrival of Americans, after the Louisiana purchase, in the old French military and trading post of St. Louis, was followed by municipal incorporation, the organization of the fur trade, a post office, newspaper, school, and bank; and the appearance of the first river steamboat, in the summer of 1817, marked a fresh era in the life of the place. The year after, the foundation of a Roman Catholic cathedral was laid, and in 1819, the year of Chase's consecration, the Episcopal parish of Christ Church was organized. After a period of suspended animation, a church building was completed in 1830, but even after that there was a vacancy until Bishop Kemper assumed the rectorship and secured the services of the Reverend Peter Minard as assistant minister. Apart from the metropolis, there was hardly a town in Missouri worthy of the title, but only straggling villages and a scattered and ever moving population of frontiersmen, stock raisers and small farmers. Civilization here did not differ materially, save in the points of slavery and the frequency of duels, from that in the states immediately to the eastward. There was little capital or credit, and so, in the midst of undeveloped and almost inexhaustible natural wealth, the people were generally poor. The religious among them were possessed by bitter sectarian prejudices; Roman Catholics were numerous, and had had a resident bishop since 1826; irreligion was of mutinous and blasphemous rather than of intellectual, sceptical cast. Thomas Hart Benton, the representative statesman of the frontier, held the vote of the state in the hollow of his hand. Bishop Kemper met him, but they cannot have been congenial, for Benton, though brought up in the church, had connected himself with the Methodists, and the bishop's prejudice against Jefferson had descended to Andrew Jackson and men of his party.

Still attended by Mr. Johnson, the bishop spent the winter of 1836 in Illinois, fulfilling his promise to Chase. Early in January he consecrated the church at Jacksonville, and in February organized the parish at Alton. The cold proved intense and travel difficult. In the course of this visitation, apparently, he recrossed the Mississippi and stood for the first time on the soil of Iowa; for in consequence of his representations Dubuque was made a station of the Missionary Society.

Iowa has been called "a great meadow between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers"; it contains a greater proportion of rich, arable land than any other state in the union. Its name is said to signify "beautiful land," and the impression made upon the favored ones who first looked out over its undulating prairies, with their waving grass and flowers, was not that of an aboriginal wilderness, but of "a lately cultivated country, suddenly deserted by its inhabitants." As a territory it had been attached to Missouri until that became a state; thenceforth for many years its condition has been aptly defined as political orphanage, until in 1834 it was appended to Wisconsin, which was itself an appendage of Michigan territory. Dubuque had just been laid out, and, the year of Kemper's visit, the site of Davenport was surveyed, and its streets were planned. The population of the territory was estimated at upward of ten thousand souls.

Kemper now heard of "Milwalky in Ouisconsin" as a hopeful site for a mission station, and soon after, in view of the erection of Michigan into a state and consequent separation therefrom of Wisconsin territory, the few church people in the latter, at Green Bay, conceiving that they were thereby separated from Michigan diocese, applied to him for Episcopal services. Much feeling was excited by this action.

He was then on his way to the East, where one of his first acts was to join in the consecration--the first in which he took part,--of Samuel Allen McCoskry, of Pennsylvania, as first bishop of Michigan. Kemper could testify that in the three states he had just inspected he could easily find places for a hundred missionaries, and he put so strongly the case for church building in the West that a society was formed in New York to promote it. His aim in his eastern tour was threefold: to plead in the seminaries for men to volunteer as missionaries, and, everywhere else, for means to sustain them, and also to start a church college west of the Mississippi. It needed only six months' experience to convince him of the wisdom of Bishop Chase's ideal. For some weeks he had difficulty in getting a hearing for his college plan, and was somewhat chagrined, when on a sudden the tide turned and within twenty days he secured for it subscriptions amounting to as many thousand dollars, and thus ensured its foundation. After this, wherever he went the keenest interest was aroused in his work,--an interest that was attested then and in after years by gifts to the cause from eastern clergymen and laymen, divinity students, ladies old and young, (widows and orphans, one may truly say), Sunday-school children, parochial missionary societies and entire congregations. It should never be forgotten that, as the western states were peopled from the East and their development depended upon eastern capital, so their dioceses owed their being to the grace of God acting upon eastern hearts, and producing the fruit of self-denial.

November found the bishop back in St. Louis, anxiously expecting the promised arrival of two clergymen, and his disappointment was keen when he learned that they had accepted positions elsewhere. Meantime there was borne to his ears on every wind the Macedonian cry, "Come and help us." The prospect of a gift of land and subscriptions for a college at Lafayette, Indiana, where his friend Johnson had just organized St. John's parish, drew him thither in haste; and during his absence, early in January, 1837, an act incorporating Kemper College was passed by the Missouri legislature. The bishop had chosen the title, "Missouri College," but exception was taken to it, and at the last moment his name, as that of the principal trustee, was substituted, without his knowledge.

The year then opening was a troublous one, in both church and state. Kemper was engaged with his brother bishops, McIlvaine, McCoskry, and Otey, and for some time vainly, in endeavoring to restore peace to the agitated diocese of Kentucky, whose bishop had been accused of falsehood. They brought in a verdict that excited loud cachinnation: "Guilty, without criminality." Their meaning was perfectly perspicuous: Bishop Smith had made a misstatement, but without culpable motive.

The financial panic that swept the land like a cyclone in 1837 wrought havoc with the credit of these states. Their currency had been inflated with worthless paper, and wildcat banking brought in its revenges. No moral principle had been recognized in the management of many banks; it is said that in Michigan there was a mutual understanding among them, and that the same silver and gold were dispatched from one point to another ahead of the inspectors, and exhibited to them at bank after bank. The demoralizing, disintegrating folly was exposed of making haste to be rich; of undertaking internal improvements at other people's expense, and thinking to pay for them with riches manufactured by the printing-press; of imagining that something could be made out of nothing, or out of land itself without steadfast human labor. The crisis was so severely felt in Chicago, which in only a couple of years had sprung from a village into a town, that people were forced to raise vegetables in their house lots, to keep from starving. Ere long, payment of interest ceased upon the state debts of Indiana and Illinois. The intoxication of speculation was followed by weary years of depression; and this grievously affected the missionary cause.

1837 also marked a crisis in the anti-slavery campaign. Elijah Lovejoy, a Whig, Presbyterian minister, and editor of a denominational journal that opposed slavery, came to a violent end at Alton. A career like his served to confirm Kemper in his abhorrence of the mixture of politics with religion; and he always thought that the methods of the abolitionists defeated their chosen end, and tended to perpetuate slavery.

His unconquerable optimism in the face of financial disaster is inspiring. He still hoped to prove "that if Indiana was ever lost to the church, she is regained." He had the satisfaction of laying the corner stone of a church at Crawfordsville, and of organizing Christ Church parish at Indianapolis. He was kindly received at New Harmony, and made the acquaintance of Robert Dale Owen. He had no sympathy with Owen's communistic scheme, and had a horror of infidelity; but personally the intercourse between them was courteous and friendly, and the bishop enjoyed examining the philosopher's fine library and collections illustrative of natural history.

In the late autumn he was speeding across Missouri to Fort Leavenworth, the most important post on the frontier. Colonel Stephen Kearny, the commandant, had begged him to secure a chaplain for it. The bishop's account of the trip is so vivid, and expressive of his buoyant spirit, that it is well to quote from it. "I have now experienced a little of western adventure, and really entered into it with much more spirit and enjoyment than I could have imagined. Shall I tell you how we were benighted and how we lost our way, of the deep creeks we forded and the bad bridges we crossed,--how we were drenched to the skin, and how we were wading for half-an-hour in a slough, and the accidents which arose from the stumbling of our horses? But these events were matters of course. We had daily cause for thankfulness and praise. ... What a proof of the sluggishness of our movements is the fact that, so far as I can learn, I am the first clergyman of our Church who has preached at Columbia, Boonville, Fayette, Richmond, Lexington, Independence and Fort Leavenworth,--in a word, I have been the pioneer from St. Charles up the Missouri!" And so he trod for the first time that portion of the vast tract then vaguely known as the Indian Territory which in after days was to take its name from the tribe of Kansas Indians.

The earliest record of that territory is of one of those violent summer hailstorms that still distress the farmer. On a sultry and dazzling afternoon in June, three centuries before Kemper's visit, a Spaniard named Coronado was crossing its treeless plains, when of a sudden the sky was overcast and he and his troop were pelted with hailstones as big as oranges. Its only development up to Kemper's day was owing to its being threaded by the Santa Fe trail for traders between Missouri and Mexico. What he saw of the possibilities of mission work among the Indians there interested the bishop profoundly.

On his return to St. Louis, where he hoped to rest for some months, doing pastoral work, looking after his college, writing letters and reports, he found a letter awaiting him from Bishop Otey, entreating his company upon a tour in the southwest. The two bishops had been closely drawn to each other at the time of the Smith trial, and ever after were faithful friends. To Kemper the invitation came as a constraining call, and accordingly, in January, 1838, he dropped down the great river to Memphis, where news reached him that Otey was prostrated by an attack of fever, and begged him to make the visitation in his stead. "If possible, I shall gratify him," Kemper wrote home, "for I am much attached to him, and I belong entirely to the Church." So began a magnificent tour which, taken in connection with his other activities, affords the most impressive spectacle of the expansion of the church throughout the land at the opening of the second generation of the nineteenth century. His route lay through Natchez, New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola, Tallahassee, Macon, Columbus (Georgia), Montgomery, Greensboro', Tuscaloosa, and Columbus (Mississippi), and terminated at Mobile and New Orleans, whither he returned in May. He could report that in about four months he had visited nearly all the parishes in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, confirming in nearly all; that he had consecrated eight churches and advanced two deacons to the priesthood; and that he had become a living witness to the church at large of the wants, claims, and prospects of the southwest. He estimated that at least fifty missionaries were needed there immediately, and put the pointed question: "Is climate ever to be taken into consideration by those who have solemnly bound themselves at the Altar of God?"

This superb tour was the prelude to the consecration of Leonidas Polk.

Among the testimonies to the genial impression produced by Kemper's personality we select two from Mississippi, from the missionaries at Woodville and Columbus. "I cannot doubt that the labors of this amiable and excellent prelate will greatly advance the interests of the Church in this destitute region. His indefatigable zeal and amiable manners have secured him friends in all who have known him." "He was the first Bishop that had ever been in this region, and I am happy to say that he made a good and wholesome impression for the Church. Our people were very much pleased with him in the pulpit, and delighted with him in the private circle. We only regret that there is but little hope of our seeing him again."

No sooner had he returned north than he started upon a visitation of Indiana, and presided over its diocesan convention. At Vincennes he walked and talked with General William Henry Harrison, who owned property in the town, to such good effect that he obtained from him a gift of a fine lot of land for a church. He preached at New Harmony in a room that Owen had helped prepare for service.

In the growing town of Milwaukie (as it was then spelled) a parish had just been organized by the name of St. Paul. An experienced missionary named Richard Cadle, who had formerly been employed by the board of missions in Michigan, had been transferred to Wisconsin, where he was busily gathering congregations. That territory and Iowa were now formally placed under Kemper's jurisdiction, and in July, for the first time as bishop, he entered Wisconsin, with which his relations were destined to become the most intimate of all.

The imaginative charm of this wonderful career lies in the illimitable perspectives opened by it into space, time, and eternity.

Until within only four years of his visit traffic with the Indians had been the one interest of the territory, and the fur-trade had opened up and marked out the way for all its future development. Green Bay, Milwaukee, Fond-du-Lac, Oshkosh, Sheboygan, Madison and many other towns stand upon the sites of Indian villages and trading-posts, and many a highway was once an Indian trail. The water ways had early been well explored by French voyagers and Jesuit priests. The Black Hawk war first advertised the country, and in the summers immediately ensuing waves of immigration, of good quality, native American and protestant, broke upon its eastern coast. Methodist and Presbyterian ministers put in an appearance, schools were opened and newspapers started at Green Bay and Milwaukee, and mail was carried up the coast once a week. Kaleidoscopic changes marked the infancy of the territory; it participated in the speculative excitement of the year 1836, which reached its height in Milwaukee in a building mania; after the collapse, next year, a thousand dollar house-lot could be bought for a barrel of pork or flour, or a suit of clothes. For some time after, immigration was checked. At the date of the bishop's visit, the white population of the territory amounted to twelve thousand souls. He passed through Prairie du Chien, Cassville, Mineral Point, Madison, and Fort Winnebago, preaching and administering the holy communion, and early in August arrived at Green Bay, where he confirmed six persons and laid the corner stone of Christ Church. He also visited the Oneida settlement at Duck Creek, being escorted thither by a mounted guard of thirty Indians, and laid for them the corner stone of Hobart Church. He then retraced his steps, and heard news that agitated his manifold jurisdictions: that he had been elected to the bishopric of Maryland.

The following tribute, elicited at this juncture from the vestry of Christ Church, St. Louis, witnesses to the esteem in which he was held:

"Resolved, That Bishop Kemper seems particularly fitted for his present situation as Missionary Bishop at the West, not only in the great essentials to be expected of every Bishop, piety and devotedness, but in the lesser qualities which are all important to his efficiency and success in this region; viz, firm health and constitution, which have been tried by the climate; a cheerful temper and popular manners, enabling him to come in contact with our heterogeneous population, with favorable impressions on their side to the cause in which he is engaged; and great prudence and caution, peculiarly requisite amidst a population made up of almost all religions and nations, whose moral and religious character is yet unformed, and where different denominations of Christians are striving to make establishment.

"Resolved, That we bear testimony to the activity and perseverance of Bishop Kemper while he has been amongst us, and to the great services rendered by him.

"Resolved, That, in our opinion, his removal from us would be to undo much of what has been done and is in progress, favorable to the growth of the Protestant Episcopal Church amongst us; that it would require of his successor several years' labor and travel to gain the practical information possessed by Bishop Kemper of the wants of the West, and to inspire the confidence of the scattered friends of the Church, to the degree now acquired by him, from personal intercourse with them at their homes throughout this vast region.

"Resolved, That his presence seems necessary to Kemper College, an institution just commencing here under favorable auspices, of which he may be styled the founder, and is relied upon to procure for it proper professors and instructors, as well as necessary patronage for the future."

This action of the vestry, widely disseminated, no doubt expressed and helped to confirm the convictions that actuated Kemper in his refusal to forsake his proper and chosen sphere of labor, to the great relief of all concerned save the people of Maryland; and it was so clear and emphatic that it put a quietus upon any future attempt to withdraw him from his western field. An allusion in the first resolution, to his "firm health and constitution," may have sounded somewhat surprising, but it is a fact that he had completely outgrown the delicacy of his early years in the ministry, so that he positively enjoyed the intense cold of the wintry plains,--protected against it as he was in the fashion we will let him describe in his own words, momently.

The last resolution touched a subject very near his heart. A desirable property had been bought in the neighborhood of St. Louis, building had been begun upon it, and that very autumn Mr. Minard began instruction in the preparatory school of Kemper College.

On his return from general convention, the bishop was twice overturned in vehicles between Baltimore and St. Louis, but without serious injury. He consecrated the completed fabric, "of wood, in the Gothic style," of Christ Church, Indianapolis; and here a carelessly worded or printed report would seem to indicate that on one and the same day he was consecrating a church in Indiana and galloping across western Missouri on his way to the Indian Territory! Similar powers of bilocation are reported of mediaeval saints. It was in fact the middle of November that found him engaged in the latter journey, but the momentary confusion affords a kinetoscopic impression of the celerity of his moments. In letters to his family, he pictures himself as chilled to the heart and shaking with cold while eating in a wretched cabin without a window, so that the door had to be left open for light; the meal consisted of corn-dodgers and coffee, without butter or sugar. The tract through which he rode, on horseback, was sparsely inhabited, and what people there were were pitiably poor. He went once for twenty miles in a driving snowstorm without seeing a house; one night he was glad to share with eleven others the shelter of a log house of a single room; the snow drifted in and lay in heaps upon the middle of the floor: no one troubled himself to remove it, and it did not melt in the slightest degree. Fastidious though the bishop usually was about his toilet and the like, he enjoyed this extraordinary experience. Of course he could not have existed without the wraps that he describes: "I have on thick blue cloth leggings, buffalo moccasins over waterproof boots, a lion skin greatcoat with collar turned up and a handkerchief around it to keep it tight, another handkerchief around my ears, and want nothing beside but a mask of rabbit skin." He was deeply disappointed at the condition in which he found the lately deported Indians, professedly Christian, whom it was his object to visit; they were abandoned to the evils of intemperance, having been debauched by the rum-sellers of the border.

In picturesque contrast with this freezing tour was his visitation in Wisconsin the succeeding summer: the heat was intense, and the mosquitoes were so many and fierce that he had to wear a veil, for protection. His recommendation that Racine be made a mission station was adopted. On his way down the Mississippi he stopped at Dubuque and Davenport; in fact, for 1839 and the following year it is sufficient to record that he repeated his regular routine of visitations in Indiana, Missouri, Wisconsin and Iowa, only interrupted by his annual tour to the East.

Turning to the state that he was continually encircling on these tours, we find that all through these years it was suffering acutely from the stringency in the money market, and that in consequence the diocese remained stationary. In 1837, Bishop Chase consecrated St. James' Church, Chicago,--and then the panic and ensuing hard times put an abrupt stop to church building. The diocese numbered eleven clergymen; there was sore need of traveling evangelists, as the bishop declared to his convention; he lamented the fact that he was its only itinerant, and often had to stay at home for lack of funds. It was almost too much to expect a man of his age and size to undergo the toil and exposure of such travel,--over the wind-swept prairies, through creeks and sloughs: in 1838 a carriage in which he was riding was upset and some of his ribs were broken. On his diocesan tours he never failed to find a welcome in the loneliest hamlets and solitary cabins; the people were very friendly, but mostly without means, and engaged in a desperate struggle for bare subsistence. In such a situation it behoved a minister to go and seek, he said, without waiting for a call and salary; and he pointed out that the conditions of the primitive church were repeated in this country, where there is no public support of religion. Missionaries must be content with corn meal, molasses, and pork, instead of bread, sugar, butter, and beef; they must be prepared to endure hardships, yet will not lack compensations; a buffalo coat and boots, for example, with warm cap and gloves are great comforts,--and the coat makes an excellent blanket. In a new country versatile genius is in demand; the missionary should be something of a doctor, nurse, and cook.

Bishop Chase was delayed by the hard times in the execution of his educational project. In fact, he had to encounter in Illinois the same difficulties that in Ohio had beset the locating of Kenyon College. No good land was to be cheaply bought; everywhere he found "individual cupidity" in conflict with and defeating "public utility." After some years he succeeded in getting a site according to his mind: a low, wooded ridge along a creek, in Peoria county; and on the 3rd of April, 1839, he had the satisfaction of laying the corner stone of the chapel of Jubilee College. It was a beautiful day, and the knoll was thronged with folk from far and near, who found sitting room on the heaps of stone just quarried for the chapel. The bishop said that never before in his life had he been filled with such solemn gladness; and he explained that the name he had chosen for the college suited best of any his feelings and circumstances: "after seven years I rejoice in a return of God's favor."

The year 1839 saw the second crisis in the history of Kenyon College, and Chase remarked, with a considerable degree of pardonable satisfaction, that his successor in the bishopric of Ohio was forced to adopt his position. Dr. Sparrow had rallied the opposition to Bishop McIlvaine, who had no alternative, he said, but to quell it or quit the diocese. So battle was joined and the bishop triumphed,--for the diocese did not seek another episcopal resignation; McIlvaine said, later, that he would have resigned had he been outvoted. His opponents on the college faculty were removed; Sparrow left Gambier, an "earthquake of feeling in his heart." But the change did not work well; confidence declined; and before very long McIlvaine himself vainly sought Sparrow's return, promising himself to leave Gambier.

Chase's English funds, all that he had, had been consumed in the purchase of land and beginning of building at Jubilee, so he had to look around for means, and resolved to travel for his college through the southern states. He applied to Kemper for his good-will, and received the following note:

St. Louis, Mo., Nov. 29, 1839.

The plan of the venerable Bishop Chase is exceedingly interesting, and one of great importance to the future prosperity of our country, and the welfare of the Church of the living God in the Diocese of Illinois. I wish him every success in his noble and arduous undertaking.

JACKSON KEMPER,
Missionary Bishop of Missouri, Wisconsin, Iowa, etc., and Acting Bishop of Indiana.

New Year's day, 1840, Chase was in New Orleans again,--when suddenly a clergyman appeared, begging for Kemper College. "How like my former trials!" he exclaimed, recalling the competition when he was first in England. He only obtained in that great city fifty dollars for Jubilee; but arrears of salary thirty years old were paid him by Christ Church. He sailed in a schooner to Charleston, where he succeeded in raising an endowment of ten thousand dollars for a professorship. Thence he proceeded to Savannah and Columbia, where the Reverend Stephen Elliott gave him two hundred dollars. "I never was better treated," the bishop testified, "than in South Carolina and Georgia."

At Norfolk he visited a man-of-war that was lying in the harbor, and found that the sailors preferred the Church service to any other: "The Church they regard as the regular troops; all others, as the militia." Thence he traversed the northeastern states with a fair degree of success, getting subscriptions in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Brooklyn and Hartford.

The year 1841 was a notable one in the history of Kemper and his group. His college at St. Louis was then in running order, domiciled in its own large hall; more than forty students were receiving instruction in mathematics, the classics, rhetoric and "belle lettres," from a faculty of three professors,--but over the institution hung an ominous debt of nearly five thousand dollars; a storm was brewing in that cloud, then only as large as a man's hand. The grammar school continued, alongside the college, and the bishop's ambition now was to engage a theological professor and open a seminary. In January he journeyed east with this in view, and also to seek missionaries for the upbuilding of the church in Wisconsin; and at the General Seminary met four students who gave themselves to him for the latter work. Here comes into relief the importance of seminary courses in apostology; those young men had been inspired by Dr. Whittingham's lectures in church history, in which he caused to pass before their mental vision the heroic figures of the golden age of missions, which ever after loomed and beckoned upon their spiritual horizon: Columba and his companions, mariner missionaries among the western islands of Scotland; St. Gall, amid the Swiss mountains; Boniface, the apostle of sylvan Germany; Willibrord, of the Frisian dunes, and Ansgar, of the Scandinavian lakes. Their hearts had burned within them as they heard Kemper tell, upon his previous visit, of similar splendid opportunities in the boundless West, and they had eagerly talked the matter over in their rooms, taken trusted advice, and come to an affirmative decision. Their names were William Adams, James Lloyd Breck, John Henry Hobart, and James Warley Miles. The first, an Irishman, was the matures! in mind as in years; he was a thinker and scholar, fond of the contemplative life, yet no dreamer, quick-witted, and a born teacher. Breck was his junior by several years, but became the soul of the movement. He was born near Philadelphia in 1818. His parents were church people, and from the first he enjoyed catholic nurture. At the age of twelve he was placed in the school that Muhlenberg had just opened at Flushing, Long Island, whither Bishop Kemper also sent his sons, and there, for the six ensuing impressionable years of his life he responded to the moulding influence of that great evangelical catholic. There the precocious youth resolved to devote himself to a celibate ministry; stringent discipline was what his nature craved; and the religious life, narrowly interpreted in its mediaeval sense,--that is, the ascetic,--became henceforth his lode-star. He was so well advanced in his studies at Flushing that in 1836 he was able to enter the junior class in the University of Pennsylvania, whence he passed, after two years, to the General Seminary. Hobart was a son of the bishop of that name. His dominant inspiration was missionary. Only after much urging, and then with extreme reluctance, could his bishop be persuaded to relinquish his claim to Hobart's services, while Miles's positively refused to let him go, saying that he was more needed in South Carolina, his native state. This was a great disappointment to all concerned, for, according to Breck's testimony, to Miles was due the first suggestion of a religious house somewhere on the western frontier, to evangelize and educate the people.

On the fourth of March, General Harrison was inaugurated President of the United States,--a victory for the northwest, as Jackson's election was for the southwest, marking the rise in political importance of those sections,--but after exactly one month he expired. Dr. Upfold improved the sad occasion to administer a severe castigation to his people, upon a text from the prophet Jeremiah: "My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water." During his ten years' pastorate at Pittsburg, Upfold had become a power in his parish, the community, and the surrounding country. He had paid off a debt upon his church, had had the edifice thoroughly repaired and a fine organ placed in it; and, unwilling to let his activities be circumscribed by parochial routine, had ministered to vacant parishes in the neighborhood of the city, and made missionary excursions that familiarized him with the needs of western Pennsylvania. The sermon referred to was one of his greatest homiletic efforts; it was an exposure of the short-sighted worldliness of the American populace, and the evils of the times. The people have forgotten the Lord their God, and are given over to irreligion and accompanying profligacy, peculation and speculation; departing from republican simplicity, they are abandoned to the pursuit of luxury and its means; have imported debased amusements, and lavish their wealth on "histrionic adventurers, singers, fiddlers, and lascivious dancing girls." Sabbath breaking, profanity, and intemperance are fearfully common; the press is obscene; the love of money has become idolatry. Money is the god of thousands, and its acquisition the passion of the age; avarice and indulgence are the ruling propensities of the nation. Wealth had become a source of confidence, making men feel independent of God,--hence the scourge of the late financial disasters, for recovery from which the besotted people looked every way but the right one, putting their reliance upon industry, the richness of the soil, republican government,--and especially upon a man, William Henry Harrison, whose election was to cure every ill and restore confidence and credit. And now he is taken from their eyes.

A union of church and state, the preacher concluded, is to be deprecated, but no infidel state can stand. Without religion there can be no stability; government will degenerate into anarchy, as during the French Revolution. "Religion, practically recognized in our public affairs, and by our public men, is the great safeguard of our liberties."

Immediately after graduation from the seminary, Adams, Breck and Hobart were ordered deacons, and accepted by the board of missions for work in Wisconsin. Hobart left first, to survey the field; the others followed in September; they made Prairieville (now Waukesha) their centre of operations, organized a parish which they called St. John's in the Wilderness, and itinerated in every direction for a radius of fifty miles.

The missionary jurisdictions of Indiana and Missouri had by this time been organized as dioceses, Kemper presiding; and the former now eagerly elected him as its diocesan, but he declined. The time had not yet nearly come for him so to settle down, and he was deeply interested in his college and the Wisconsin mission. It was a moment of hope and energy in Indiana; Dr. Bryan Killikelly, missionary at Vincennes, was in England that summer, pleading for his work, and with the cordial assistance of the bishop of London obtained over two hundred pounds sterling to help him in building his church.

Dr. Andrew Wylie, an eminent Presbyterian dominie, and president of the state university at Bloomington, alienated by the violent controversies within his communion, and concluding that "sectarianism is heresy," applied to Kemper for ordination. This famous conversion fluttered the dovecotes of western Presbyterianism as a similar event, the conversion of a rector and several tutors of Yale College, had agitated the Congregational societies of New England more than a century before.

The bishop was the recipient this year of a legacy from some maiden ladies of Philadelphia. He accepted an invitation to preach the triennial sermon before the board of missions in St. Paul's Chapel, New York, and took as his text the admirably appropriate passage in the tenth chapter of St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, the thirteenth and following verses. At the close of a glowing incentive to missionary duty, he spoke, as his audience expected him to speak, of his own field, in prophetic strain: "With respect to the western portion of our own country, the mighty West, the seat of future empires,--from whence the arts and sciences and, if we are faithful to our trust, the elevating and holy doctrines of Christianity in all their vital influence are to extend far and wide, through Mexico and the almost boundless plains of South America to Cape Horn and the Isles of the Pacific,--even in the West, amidst the wildest speculations, the most intense excitement, and the all-absorbing desire to be rich,--even there the Church has been planted, and in many a village is to be found a band of faithful worshippers.

"To theological students, in whose welfare I am most truly interested, I can speak with plainness; for at the present day, if amid the prodigious efforts of Popery, the beautiful example set us by various denominations in this country, and the delightful, the noble stand which our highly honored mother, the Church of England, has at last taken in reference to missions, there is even one, looking to the ministry, who has not in all sincerity and from his heart said to his Saviour, Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth,--and is not ready to say to the Church, Here am I, send me,--he has mistaken his calling. The spirit to be cultivated at the schools of the prophets is the spirit of unreserved and entire devotion to the cause of Christ Jesus and Him crucified. The heart, the whole heart is required."

On the second Sunday in Advent, Andrew Wylie was ordered deacon, being upward of fifty years of age. It was felt to be a deeply interesting, indeed momentous event in the history of the infant diocese of Indiana. The ordination took place at New Albany, and Samuel Roosevelt Johnson was the preacher. In his sermon he set forth in incisive terms the doctrine of a catholic deposit,--a trust, not subjective, but "a witness which God has given His Church, independent of us, transmitted to our care, which we must accept and faithfully declare and hand over to the generation which shall succeed, without addition, diminution, or reserve.

"I would prefer grace to knowledge that might lead to grace,--would rather possess my privilege than know of it."

The ordinand cordially assented to these sentiments,--indeed, the preacher and he were the formative ecclesiastical influences of the diocese. Wylie was its representative at the next general convention, whereat his was the only voice raised in defense of the Oxford tracts. It has been pointed out that a wave from Oxford that had just struck New York, leaped over Pennsylvania and Ohio, and then poured along the same parallels, inundating Indiana and Wisconsin, eddying around and finally engulfing Illinois. Hence the desperate efforts the evangelical association made to check its further progress by placing their men in Iowa, like stones in a wall, having the Mississippi for a dyke.

Little did Henry Lee dream at that time of his coming relation to the latter see. After finishing his course at Cheshire, he moved to Massachusetts, taught school for a while at Taunton, carrying on his theological studies privately, was ordained by Bishop Griswold, and installed, in 1840, as rector of Christ Church, Springfield.

Joseph Talbot meantime left his native Virginia for Kentucky, and engaged in business in Louisville. He was baptized the year he attained his majority, and in 1841 began his preparation for the ministry. At that date, Hawks had for some years been in holy orders, and was in charge of Trinity Church, Buffalo; and Vail had given evidence of unusual activity and ability. After graduating at the General Seminary, he was ordered deacon by Bishop Brownell, and was called to be assistant at St. Paul's Church, Boston. While thus engaged, he organized All Saint's Church, Worcester. He was priested by Bishop Griswold on the feast of the Epiphany, 1837, and was rector of Christ Church, Cambridge, for two years thereafter, when he returned to Connecticut. In 1841 he brought out his remarkable book, "The Comprehensive Church," which was read in manuscript and approved by Bishop Brownell.

Its thesis is that everything necessary to Christian unity and ecclesiastical union, with nothing superfluous, is to be found in the Episcopal church. Its tone is tolerant, undogmatic; it is an interesting contribution from the ecclesiastical side to the literature of the age of Henry Clay and compromise. The writer explains at the outset that he does not intend to discuss disputed points, such as apostolical succession or the principle of a liturgy. His initial premise is that originally all Christians were churchmen, and that religious divisions are great evils. He refuses to surrender the term "Catholic" to the Roman church, and defends the church of England from the charge of schism: the papacy was never universal, and had no lawful authority over England, no authority to excommunicate a national church; Roman excommunications are valid only in the Roman diocese; England broke with the Roman, not with the universal church. As regards the relation of the English and American churches, the brave claim is advanced that the current figure of mother and daughter must yield to that of sisterhood, on the principle of the equality of national churches; a declaration of ecclesiastical independence! The Protestant Episcopal church was moored, theologically and every way, alongside the English, until Vail cut the cables. Sectarianism seemed to him without excuse; its principle he defined as "continual separation, in order to secure the most exact assimilation," until at last unity is resolved into its units, and the sect becomes the individual. He answers the popular apologies for division on the ground of its supposed benefits,--increase of zeal, for example; pointing out that such increase is difficult to distinguish from fanaticism, and is moreover outweighed by the skepticism it engenders; whereas there never was more genuine and heroic zeal than in the early ages, when the Church was one. The arguments of the Baptists are completely turned by the fact of the rite of confirmation and admission of the lawfulness of immersion. It is admitted that the one distinctive point in each denomination is generally a truth, made disproportionally prominent; the question is, Is there in existence any religious organization that combines the truths of all?--and the author answers, Yes, the Episcopal, "because, in its system, those points which its own members hold essential and which are not provided for in any other system, and those also which are held essential by the various other denominations, are distinctly recognized and amply provided for." In it "the elements of the three great systems, the Episcopal, the Presbyterial, the Congregational, are so combined that the entire strength of each is preserved." The laity have a share in its government, parochial, diocesan, and national; in fact, its constitution bears a striking resemblance to that of the republic, with which it is geographically co-extensive. (Happily for the writer, Kemper had just made this last claim good.) The theory of the Episcopal church is, that the church of Christ is itself the great Missionary Society appointed by Him, and that His sacraments are as free to all His true disciples as are the benefits of His precious blood. As to doctrine, there have been and are, both in the English and American churches, both Calvinists and Arminians among both clergy and laity. And forms of public worship may be changed by the will of the majority. The author regrets that churchmen themselves too often exhibit sectarian spirit, not realizing the largeness of their communion, and how many diversities of opinion and practice are permissible in it. "It is treason against nature and nature's God," he exclaims, "to attempt to shape all the varieties of individual, mental, moral, and physical character, by one exact and elaborately contrived standard of human rules. ... It is the fundamental error of sectarism, ...--an error into which the weakness of men is continually falling. It springs from that inordinate but hidden self-love, which causes every man to look at himself as the standard of perfection, to which all others must be made to conform.

"The great fault of ecclesiastical legislators, in all ages of the Church, has been in legislating too much. ... They seem to have forgotten that there are laws in nature itself and in the Gospel as well as in their codes of canons. They ought to have faith in the common sense and the deliberate judgments and the sincere hearts of Christian people; they should trust much to the laws of experience, the laws of the human mind and affections; they should have calm confidence in the gracious care of the Holy Spirit, the superintendence of the Head of the Church."

Such is the argument of Vail's remarkable treatise, the most remarkable, indeed, about the only publication in book form produced by the group around Bishop Kemper. It may reflect too fully the spirit of compromise of the age out of which it arose,--may be too pliable in some of its applications,--though he maintained that in practice extreme tendencies would be automatically adjusted,--but its spirit is in line with sound Anglican and truly catholic tradition,--is in truth identical with the spirit of Richard Hooker and, further back, of Bishop Pecocke; and those who cry out against it owe to it their foothold in the church. It offers a refreshing contrast to the violent party contests and ecclesiastical trials of its day; it indicated, long before, the lines along which the church was to progress; and, finally, in its clear-cut distinction between nature and sin it was far in advance of the times and still remains so in a measure.

Kemper's plan of visitation of all his dioceses and jurisdictions for the year 1842 reveals a general intention of spending a week at every parish or mission station visited. This may have been the common custom then; Bishop Cobbs followed it, and so had time to call upon every church family in every place, become personally acquainted with every individual, and so be in truth the chief pastor of his diocese. Kemper reported this year that there were thirty-one clergymen and that he had confirmed one hundred and ninety-one persons in his field. In a report from Prairieville, Wisconsin, rendered by William Adams, as clerk of the associated mission, we find the following reference: "We have had an interesting visit from Bishop Kemper. We believe he is satisfied with our efforts. And though in his services he wore the robes appropriate to his office, a thing before unheard of in this region, still we have heard no complaints, and we know that the dignified and impressive way in which he performed the solemn duties of the Episcopate, as well the reverential suavity of his natural manner, have brought it close to the most careless, that the commission borne by an apostolic bishop is not of man, neither by man, but of the Holy Ghost."

In the same report a "Catholic feature" of the mission is noted,--classes of adult catechumens, conducted by the brethren; and an intention of having weekly communions, "according to primitive practice," is recorded. To this end the brothers had sought to secure the services of the good missionary priest, Richard Cadle, and to convert him into the Father Superior of their order,--but the worthy man shied at the novel honor. With funds that Hobart had obtained at the East a beautiful tract of land was bought about Nashotah (signifying "Twin Lakes"), and thither, in August, the mission was moved. The following October, Adams and Breck were advanced to the priesthood, and the latter was made head of the religious house. A few theological students answered to the lay brothers of Vallombrosa; they supported themselves by farm work, etc., according to the primitive method at Gambier. The community rose at five o'clock, had services (lauds or prime) at six and nine in the morning, on Wednesdays and Fridays the litany and on Thursdays Holy Communion at noontide, and services at three and half-past six o'clock in the evening, answering to nones and vespers. Now at length, as Breck wrote home with glee, he began to feel that he was really in a monastery. But within a year from that hopeful start it seemed as if the community would be dissolved. Adams had a severe attack of pneumonia, felt unequal to bearing the business burdens of the house, and returned to the East; Hobart lingered a few months longer, and then followed; and Breck began to think of moving further west.

At this period Kenyon College was in such financial straits that it was in imminent danger of being lost to the church,--but a mighty effort was made, collections were taken for it on a large scale among congregations throughout the eastern dioceses, and it was saved; but the extraordinary exertion resulted in a deficit in the missionary treasury that reduced many a poor minister on the frontier to pinching poverty.

One is startled to hear that in 1843 a medical department was annexed to Kemper College and already boasted of the formidable number of seventy-five students. The attention of the church was called to this Protestant Episcopal University west of the Mississippi, which "promised a rich return for its fostering care," and seemed destined to "hand down the name of its beloved founder to other ages." There were but a score of students, however, in the collegiate department, at whose first commencement the bishop presided that summer.

The good example set by his young itinerants in Wisconsin moved him to urge the appointment of two or more missionaries of similar type to operate in Indiana. That diocese now made another attempt to perfect its organization, electing Thomas Atkinson of Virginia as its bishop,--but he declined. Its leading presbyter, Roosevelt Johnson, waived a like offer. Missouri diocese had similar aspirations and electoral difficulties, which it solved by throwing the onus upon the general convention, entreating it to choose a bishop. In 1843, Cicero Stephens Hawks accepted a call to the rectorate of Christ Church, St. Louis; and the favor with which he was received determined the choice of the convention. On the 2oth of October, 1844, (the day of Cobbs' consecration), and in Christ Church, Philadelphia, he was consecrated bishop of Missouri by Philander Chase, now presiding bishop, assisted by Kemper, McCoskry, Polk, and DeLancey.

With this event terminated what is in one way the most interesting period of our hero's life,--the dawn, or morning of his episcopate, with its wide and long vistas, its freshness and promise. Wonderful indeed was the accomplishment of those nine mystic years, especially when we consider that it was before the days of railroads,--that he had to toil painfully in wagons, on horseback or afoot along wretched roads over boundless tracts that the traveler now crosses smoothly, gliding at the rate of a mile a minute in a palace car. One outlet of his energy having been stopped, we become aware of a certain limitation; yet the setting off of Missouri simply freed him to expand in other directions. Truth to tell, he had felt least at home in that state; out of the city of St. Louis and two or three towns, he had always felt balked by the class he had to deal with,--the unimpressible "poor whites." The era of beginnings was not wholly over; and the noonday of his episcopate which we now enter was equally missionary with the earlier period, and possesses an interest of its own. As a happy aid to the memory, it may be pointed out that the remainder of his career is articulated into five-yearly periods: in 1844, Hawks became bishop of Missouri; in 1849, George Upfold, of Indiana; in 1854, Henry Washington Lee, of Iowa; in 1859, Henry Benjamin Whipple, of Minnesota; in 1864, Thomas Hubbard Vail, of Kansas. Would that for symmetry we might add, in 1869, Ozi William Whitaker, of Nevada; but, though an indirect connection may certainly be traced, that field lay beyond the utmost western verge of Kemper's horizon. These dates, furthermore, coincide with epochs in his life that are divisible by five, thus: fifty-five years, sixty, sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five, and eighty years.

For some time his centre of interest and of gravity had been gradually shifting from Missouri to Wisconsin, from St. Louis to Nashotah,--and the latter henceforth became his base of operations. The winter of 1845 was spent in Wisconsin, partly at Milwaukee, where he consecrated St. Paul's Church, partly at Nashotah, which he visited repeatedly. So much of the latter half of the year and of 1846 was passed in Milwaukee that that city may be regarded as his transitional residence. It received a city charter in the latter year, having attained a population of nearly ten thousand souls, of the most heterogeneous character; already nearly every European nation was represented in it, and every sect. It was erected into a see of the Church of Rome, and a Swiss priest named Henni was made its bishop; at the same time, Universalist and Unitarian societies were formed there. In its diversities, Milwaukee was a type of the territory of which it was the metropolis, into which a veritable human deluge was pouring; long before the last Indians were removed from its bounds, English, Scotch, Irish and Welsh, French, Belgian, Dutch, German, Swedish and Norwegian, Polish and Hungarian immigrants were swarming there; after the revolutionary disturbances of 1848 (in which year the territory became a state), the inrush from Europe resembled a stampede; in a single year the increase amounted to almost a hundred thousand souls. And so Wisconsin became the polyglot state of the union, its foreign-born out of all proportion to its native or American inhabitants. This is its distinction, and it makes it a fruitful field of study and its future a problem for the human biologist.

In November, 1846, Bishop Kemper took possession of a rustic homestead, thenceforth humorously known as "the Palace," hard by Nashotah, and for the first time since leaving Norwalk, a length of eleven years, had a house whither he could bring his daughter, now a young lady, from Philadelphia. For all those years he was literally a homeless wanderer; a lot hard to be borne by one whose domestic tastes and ties were as strong as his. With deep delight he kindled his hearth-fire again, and unpacked his books and other souvenirs of his old home and vanished wife. The year following his father died, at the age of ninety-eight, and the bishop's two unmarried sisters came to live with him. And two years after that his son Lewis, who seems to have resembled him in temperament and character, was graduated at Columbia College and began the study of theology at Nashotah. So the bishop had at last quite a family gathered about him, amid which he led a serene and beautiful existence.

He rose early, at five o'clock in summer and six in winter, and attributed his established health in large measure to his habitual morning bath in cold water, followed by the use of the flesh brush. He was punctilious about his toilet. At a quarter before seven he had family prayers, and at seven breakfasted, always taking two large cups of coffee with a great deal of sugar. He had a good appetite, healthily stimulated by the varying fare of the changing seasons; he welcomed the new vegetables of spring, the fruits of autumn, and especially the first hot buckwheat cakes in winter with boyish delight. The rest of the morning he spent in his study, preparing for official duties, attending to his correspondence, making up his accounts, and reading. He made it a rule to read daily in his Greek Testament and in some solid book, preferably of divinity, and generally found time to do some light reading beside, making it a point to keep up with the news of the day through journals and reviews. He enjoyed books of humor, particularly, it is remembered, as a hit at the Yankees, Judge Haliburton's "Sam Slick"; but strangely enough did not care for "Pickwick" or Dickens' other books. He disapproved of Bulwer's novels; his repugnance to that meretricious writer resembled the sentiment he entertained toward Lord Byron. When strongly urged, on some occasion, to read a novel of the season, he refused. He let his children read Scott's romances, but not too many of them at a time, fearing lest they should acquire a taste for fiction. He cared little for poetry, even for Tennyson's or for Keble's "Christian Year"; strange as that would seem, were we not aware of his imaginative deficiency.

At one o'clock he dined with his family and frequently had guests, for he cultivated the grace of hospitality, which was to him both a duty and pleasure, and made indeed a model Episcopal host. In memory of White, he always had his candidates dine with him immediately after their ordination. His house became a gathering place for the clergy, and he entertained distinguished visitors from the East, in increasing numbers after Nashotah became a station on the railroad between Milwaukee and the Mississippi. His was a liberal soul; and so simple were his tastes and so perfect was his economy that out of his annual missionary stipend of fifteen hundred dollars he was able to give largely to struggling missions in his field; there was probably no one in the church who gave away more in proportion to his income than he. He hardly ever had wine upon his table, one of the few exceptions being Christmas day, which, after he had formed a home in Wisconsin, he always tried to spend with his family. He sometimes drank a little beer, but weeks and months would often pass without his touching it. He liked desserts, having indeed a taste for sweets, as he had also for bright colors.

After dinner, if weather permitted, he would drive for hours or ride horseback, for he never acquired the habit of taking a nap in the afternoon. He liked to be much in the open air, and to this also he owed the firm health of his maturer years. If it were cold, he wrapped himself up well, having a horror of being chilled. Yet he did not suffer, happily for one who had to be exposed in all weathers as much as he, from extremes of temperature; the crisp cold of the northwestern winter was exhilarating to him. His temperament was sanguine. He observed natural objects with an attentive eye, and taught his children to do the same. Yet he was not particularly fond of animals,--never made a pet of cat or dog, for instance,--though he could not bear to see them suffer; he was exceedingly, almost morbidly sensitive about having any horse, cow, calf, or even chicken killed on his place, and disliked to be told of it. He was considerate of his domestics, and they revered and delighted to serve him. He preferred to help himself as much as possible; carried his own portmanteau upon his travels; and never coveted precedence or expected to be waited upon. The terrible problem of poverty (save that of his missionaries and their families!), of the relation of capital and labor, did not force itself upon his notice in that environment and time, but his view of the source of happiness for the farm hands and other laborers of his little community shows what his attitude would be: he believed that if in all the relations of life all men would sincerely take the Lord's prayer upon their lips, be actuated by belief in the creed, and square their conduct by the ten commandments and the catechism--especially that part of it that treats of one's duty to one's neighbor,--all the difficulties of life would not only be resolved but would never arise; and who can deny that the most threatening problems of crowded factories and cities would yield to such treatment? He had a horror of debt as of a plague, impressed it upon his clergy, and earnestly discountenanced ambitious schemes of church building beyond a congregation's means. It was an article of his ethical and spiritual creed to make payment when it was due; he scrupulously avoided getting into a position where he might have to be asked for it twice. In all financial dealings he was governed by that old-fashioned sense of self-respect, honor, independence, manhood, that cannot live and sponge upon others for goods or service. Connected with this attribute was his conscientious recognition of social obligations; all through his busy episcopate, as time and strength permitted, he was particular about making and returning calls.

At supper, which was at six o'clock, he always took two large cups of tea, very much sweetened; and afterward sat and talked with his family and friends. At nine he had prayers, and retiring immediately after, was in bed by ten. His mode of life and mind conduced to tired nature's balmy restorer; he slept without waking until daybreak.

Sunday he kept as a day of holy rest and refreshment, equally removed from the strictness of the Presbyterian and the laxity of the Romanist. He always appeared at both morning and evening services; paid pastoral visits to the old and infirm; and gave such Christian hospitality as did not encroach upon his servants' rest. He never read newspapers on that day, or traveled if he could possibly help it. His children looked back to the Sundays spent with him as to glimpses of paradise on earth; and Christmas was the crown of all the year. Every Twelfth-night he entertained the students of Nashotah.

At first the members of that community, to the number of three clerical instructors and six students, were all accommodated in one small frame house of five rooms, that served as chapel, lecture-hall, library and dormitory! The kitchen and refectory were the cabin that had sheltered the missionaries upon their first arrival. The frame building was known as the Blue House, from some sky-blue paint, a present to the mission, with which it was covered. In a tiny room, where only four persons could receive at a time, the holy communion was administered. The problem of accommodation was solved in a larger room upstairs, by having five bed-frames hinged upon its walls so that they could be folded up by day, and the bedroom be thus converted into a study. The men slept on straw pallets. Breck, the president and superior, was one of the occupants of this room, a corner of which was his office and study, his desk and table being an empty box set on end. He was then the presiding genius of the place. The key to his character is military; he was by nature a soldier, by grace a Christian and ecclesiastical soldier; he longed for discipline, and was only happy when obeying and exercising it. His tall figure, in cassock and girdle (the dress adopted by the brothers), reading the roll call, for the major part of the year before daybreak, by lantern light, after the rousing bell had rung out from an old oak-tree,--such was the striking picture that ever after haunted the memories of his old pupils.

The community lived by faith, and was not allowed to suffer. The students were expected to do at least four hours of outdoor work a day. One of them served as cook, others as washermen, and of their exploits in the former line especially amusing anecdotes used to be told. A favorite and healthful mode of recreation was rowing upon the lake. On Sundays they were all engaged in lay reading at villages and scattered farmhouses for many miles around. After a chapel was built at Nashotah, the people of the neighborhood came to worship there, and so was formed the parish of St. Sylvanus.

After an absence of a year and a half, William Adams returned from the East, to the relief and encouragement of the brethren, stipulating that he should not be expected in future to assume the business management of the house, but should be left free to devote himself to educational and clerical functions. Henceforth, accordingly, he applied himself to inculcating "Pearson on the Creed," an ounce of which, he was used to say, was worth a pound of Paley. His method of instruction was textual, and he required his students to commit long passages to memory.

As the number of students increased, fresh accommodation was needed, and a shanty was raised and divided by partitions into cells seven by nine feet in size. Beside the lake a baptistery was built, whereat the sacrament was administered by immersion.

In those early days there is no doubt that Nashotah excited widespread and extraordinary interest and curiosity. Eminent churchmen came a long way to visit it, among them Kemper's old friend and Breck's preceptor, Dr. Muhlenberg, who was accompanied by the accomplished William Ingraham Kip, then rector of St. Paul's Church, Albany. Dr. Kip formed with the young head of Nashotah House a friendship that was destined to have important consequences. Bishops McCoskry and Upfold were frequent visitors. To Bishop Kemper's daughter, who spent a day there in the summer of 1845, Nashotah seemed an earthly paradise, a realization of the idea one would form of "the first beginnings of one of the pure old monasteries." She was particularly impressed by Breck's profoundly reverential manner at the time of the early celebration, as if he were "in the immediate presence of the God whom he was addressing." The altar (no communion table!) was raised above the chancel floor, and on it stood a large cross flanked by vases filled with white flowers.

Miss Kemper was right; Nashotah was the Cluny of the American church in the nineteenth century. And, the year of her visit, a derivative idea found embodiment, like Camaldoli amid its mountains, at Valle Crucis, in Bishop Ives' diocese of North Carolina.

To many worthy people, however, like the old lady, somewhat mixed in her ideas or expression, who confessed that she preferred "an honest pulpit, with legs!" and who balked at flowers in the font on Easter day, for fear that they inculcated the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, these doings and appointments seemed altogether Romish and wrong. This was the year of John Henry Newman's secession, when suspicion and acrimonious party spirit reached their acme. It was also the year when the trial of Bishop Onderdonk of New York issued in his suspension. During that painful trial of his old schoolmate and college classmate Kemper's hair turned perceptibly grey; he felt the scandal and disgrace as acutely as if it had been a brother's. And now his turn came to suffer personal detraction; all the evidence we need of the rancor of party spirit in that troublous time is that unkind insinuations were circulated touching Kemper's soundness in the faith! In a circular letter to the clergy of his jurisdiction, issued in the winter of 1846, he directs them to "report without reserve all the efforts I have made, directly or indirectly, to influence you to adopt peculiar views or party feelings." What those views were appears from an indignant disclaimer, in reply, from the missionary at Laporte, Indiana; an article had appeared in the public press "intimating, or rather affirming, that the deficit in the revenues of the Church for domestic missions was owing to the semi-papal views of many of the domestic missionaries." From the chorus of denials of these injurious insinuations one may be selected as a type. Dr. Killikelly of Vincennes bore witness that the bishop's "unobtrusive goodness and patient endurance of fatigue and privations in his arduous undertaking have gained for him the high esteem and admiration of all classes of the community. If any doctrine has had the preeminence in the sermons that we have listened to [from him], it has been the great doctrine of justification through faith in the atonement of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. He has, on all proper occasions, set forth and contended for the Church as she has been handed down to us from the Reformers."

Like his friend Muhlenberg, Bishop Kemper had in the beginning sympathized with the Oxford Movement, but toward Rome he shared in full measure the strong feeling of aversion of the English church and nation. As to partisanship, we know his dislike of secular politics, and as regards the ecclesiastical species his sentiment was equally strong if not stronger. He hated and abhorred party spirit in the church, and disliked the terms "high" and "low." The term "broad," as descriptive of a type of churchmanship, was not in vogue until after 1850. As to any exercise of undue influence upon his clergy, no bishop ever abstained more scrupulously from the slightest shadow of it. He never said a word or lifted a finger to influence an episcopal election, such as Hawks's, for instance, in any of his dioceses. The attacks upon Nashotah filled him with sorrow and apprehension, and he hastened to its defence in his report for 1845: "That it is worthy the patronage of every sound Churchman, I have no doubt. In thorough training upon the truest principles of the Gospel, as a religious house, similar to those of primitive days, where retirement from the world, frequent and ardent communion with God through all the ordinances of his Church, industry, hard study, obedience, and the spirit of self-sacrifice will be duly inculcated; in these respects it will, I believe, fully realize, if properly cherished, the most sanguine expectations of its best friends. Party spirit, and the topics which occasionally agitate the various dioceses of our country, are unknown there. Simply to the Church they cling."

"This last sentence was exceedingly infelicitous as an apology,--a seeming justification of the charge of the enemies of the school that in its devotion to the church its grip upon the cross was relaxed; that the tendency of its teaching was to substitute dependence upon rites and ceremonies for the interior operation of divine grace and personal religion.

In an address to the diocesan convention of Wisconsin, the bishop enlarged upon the need of long and thorough trial of the motives, Ability and acquirements of candidates for holy orders, for lack of which many have afterward injured and disgraced the fold. The clergy have to encounter "the strongest minds, ignorant of the sublimest truths, perverted by every species of error. What knowledge of mankind, and of the Holy Scriptures, what faith, meekness, and perseverance are necessary to bring such men under the influence of the Gospel!" And he urged all candidates to go to Nashotah, where "the discipline and instruction have been so correct."

The diocesan committee on the state of the church reported that that school had at times been unjustly reputed unsound in the true Protestant faith.

On another occasion the bishop declared that "the sons of Nashotah have never wavered in their allegiance and devotion to the Protestant Episcopal Church,"--but such boasting went before a fall: immediately afterward it became a humiliating necessity to announce the deposition of William Markoe for Romanizing errors. Markoe was a scion of a rich and fashionable family of Philadelphia. He studied at Nashotah, and after finishing his course at the General Seminary, returned thither as chaplain. He built a church in the adjoining village of Delafield, and furnished its altar with elegant ecclesiastical embroideries brought from England. His submission to Rome caused Kemper "deep and unfeigned sorrow."

A certain Gardner Jones imposed upon the authorities of the school and was appointed professor of Hebrew, but coming under suspicion, and charged with being a Roman priest, he suddenly withdrew to a Romish seminary in Indiana.

Episodes like these, and the unfortunate fact that, beside Markoe, five sometime students at Nashotah went (to adapt an expressive westernism) the whole Roman hog, were gleefully greeted by assailants of the institution as complete justification of the suspicions that from the first they had entertained.

In this relation, Breck's opinion of Newman's perversion is of interest; he held that it was a proof of the want of true Catholicity in the Anglican communion, whence yet it was cowardice to run away. It is said that Breck's fraternal biographer did not lay all the evidence before the public,--evidence that would show that there was a time when the president of Nashotah House himself was on the verge of perversion.

Under the pressure of these agitations, Bishop Kemper was forced to assume a position that admitted of no misunderstanding, and to adopt a tone, in instruction, admonition and condemnation, of unwonted severity. He lectured on "the scriptural principles of the reformation of the Church of England," lauding "the glorious martyrs, Ridley, Cranmer, and Latimer ... our great and glorious English reformers, whose blood enriched the Church." He called upon the Wisconsin clergy to rally around their "primitive symbols, evangelical worship, and admirable articles," all needed in the present time quite as much as at the Reformation, and all "wonderfully and delightfully conformed" to the inspired volume. "I am exceedingly solicitous," he said, "that as a diocese you take a right-minded and conservative stand amid the agitations that now disturb our Zion. Avoid party spirit, often as rancorous as it is groundless, and nourished by mischievous beings who attack with virulence whatever is not conformed to their imperfect views, and revile church members in religious papers. ... I beseech you, let no party spirit exist among us." He warned them that "a corrupt church is using every effort to bewitch the world by her sorceries. ... The soul-destroying errors of Mormonism and infidelity are prevailing, and those of Rome and rationalism are applauded, and dealers with familiar and diabolical spirits are often to be met with." He denounced "the blasphemies of Rome; ... the dark designs, Jesuitical practices, idolatrous rites, and unfounded claims" of the Roman church; her friendship is "death to our hopes, and our most formidable evil." Yet some have fallen into "her more than Egyptian bondage; ... bright but perverted intellects flee to this refuge of lies."

Whitehouse believed in the "martyr witness of the Waldenses and Wickliffe," and the "vigorous and productive protest" of the Reformation; Vail deplored "the fatal corruptions and idolatries of the Romish communion;" and Chase was very bold: he enjoined upon his clergy to "avoid the traps of new doctrines; wild schemes of salvation on the one hand, and the piebald fripperies of Romanizing tendencies on the other;" assuring them that as he traveled about Illinois he encountered many "Jesuits and other Romanists, whose object it is to corrupt the faith once delivered to the saints, ... and to subjugate America to the papal power." Hence the importance of united effort among all Protestants, to guard against a threatened relapse into the "ignorance and superstition of the dark ages." He was roused to a pitch of indignation by an impudent invitation to the Protestant Episcopal Church to turn Romish: "martyrs died," he retorted, "rather than own the corrupted creed of the Romish church, or submit to the usurpations of her self-created pontiff." We look up to the throne of God, not to the chair of the pope; we should "commit a great sin by acknowledging an earthly spiritual monarch, in calling the pope our master, when Jesus Christ is our only universal Bishop, as he and he only was such to the Apostles and first Bishops of the Church." It is a suggestion "repugnant to our consciences and abhorrent to our feelings. Rome is a precipice including the gulf that is beneath her; 'approximations to Rome' are not innocent: it is a sin to think of her idolatrous practices without abhorrence; to look upon her with complacency is adultery of the heart. But Rome is said to be changed now. Where is the proof? Can infallibility change? [By this claim] she hath incarcerated herself in error and thrown the key away." Her mass is idolatrous; her gaudy trappings were plucked from heathenism. He deplored the sophistry of modern apologists for the church of Rome; a disposition "to reform the Reformation" was at work in the Episcopal church,--whereas "to be in the Church with Romish sentiments is a crime."

The severity of these expressions gave umbrage to many; but shortly after their utterance, Newman's lapse silenced all criticism.

A glance at the experience of the Roman intruders into Chase's diocese is instructive. One of the earliest priests that appeared in Chicago was a deep-drinking Irishman named O'Meara; "a notorious scoundrel," exclaimed one of his own order: "may God preserve Chicago from such a priest!" It soon became necessary to have a bishop on the spot, and in 1844 an Irishman named William Quarter was consecrated for the new see, and began to build a cathedral, college and female seminary; but O'Meara and his tactics made his life a burden, and after four years of contention, Bishop Quarter gave up the ghost. He was succeeded by a Jesuit, who proved unequal to the situation, and was shortly transferred to Natchez, where he had all the time he wanted for reflection. The next bishop, O'Regan, was accused of arbitrary conduct, and was in perpetual controversy with his subordinates and with prominent laymen; three priests abandoned his diocese, and within six years from his appointment he sought peace by resignation. His successor, James Duggan, was selected because of his conciliatory disposition; he was devout, amiable, and of cultivated mind. He had endeared himself to the whole community, not only to both clergy and laity of his own communion but to Protestants as well,--when the strange discovery was made that his mind was affected (it may shrewdly be suspected that his malady was a liberal spirit), and he was suddenly and silently removed. Meantime, revolted priests were much in evidence as popular lecturers, exposing the secret processes of the Roman machine, and being assaulted by Catholic mobs.

Such was the peace of the church whither "bright but perverted intellects" fled for infallibility. For this experience was not local or peculiar, but was a type and summary of the history of the papal communion in America. Quarrels about property, quarrels of bishops and priests, of priests and people, of people with their bishops over the removal of popular or retention of unpopular priests, make up the staple of the history of the collision of mediaeval hierarchical claims with the American spirit.

Our picture of Bishop Kemper's environment would be materially lacking did we not interpret his reference to Mormonism. That strange religious hybrid, an unnatural compound of Judaism, Mohammedanism, and anthropomorphic polytheism, with its baptismal immersion, its visions, prophecies, miracles, faith cures and gift of tongues, left its trail all over the northwest in the very years of which we are treating. Ousted from Ohio and Illinois, it ramified in Missouri, Iowa, and Wisconsin, being introduced into the last named territory in 1844 by one James Strang, who took to himself five wives and set up his latter-day monarchy on an island in Lake Michigan. Bishop Chase mourned the delusion, which seduced many English immigrants from the church. Having been inquired of about the validity of its baptism, he burst out: "Have I lived to see the day when Mormon baptism is put on a par with other dissenters'?"

Joseph Smith he characterized as "a second Mahomet, a false prophet, who is deceiving his thousands;" his revelation is a lie, like the Koran, a dreadful imposture, ruining immortal souls. Such apostasy is denounced in the Bible, and is darker than schism. Submission to Mormon baptism is sin, to be repented of; Smith's baptism is null and void, no matter what form of words is used; it is even worse than nothing, for it is sin, God's name being taken in it in vain.

Jubilee College matters take up much space in Chase's reports. More professorships were needed, also scholarships for candidates for the ministry,--as experience showed that the wealthy would not give their sons to God and that the willing had no means. In 1845 he had the pleasure of reporting a clergy list of more than twenty names in Illinois, seven churches ready for consecration, classes numbering nearly fifty students at Jubilee, and thirty-five scholarships, obtained on a recent begging tour in New York and New England. By the year 1847 he had become so infirm that he had to be seated while preaching; yet his candidate for an assistant bishopric was rejected at general convention by a close party vote, so widespread was the prejudice against his administration as "self-willed." It had contributed, nevertheless, to form a better public sentiment throughout the great commonwealth, at whose birth anti-christian influences had presided. For some time all college charters granted by the legislature of Illinois contained a clause prohibiting the inculcation of any creed; but in the year just mentioned, after some difficulty, Bishop Chase succeeded in getting a charter for Jubilee without the obnoxious clause; and in July he presided at its first commencement, at which five of its students received the degree of bachelor of arts.

In 1849, Robert Harper Clarkson, having passed through college at Gettysburg, and having finished his preparation for holy orders under Bishop Whittingham's supervision and been ordered deacon by him, accepted a call to the charge of St. James' Church, Chicago. At the time of his arrival there, the city was still only an overgrown village, though it claimed twenty-five thousand inhabitants. Its streets were still roads, a few of which boasted plank sidewalks along part of their length; there were no public conveyances, no gaslights, no sewers; until within a short time before hogs had run at large in the streets. That very year it suffered a fearful visitation of cholera; Clarkson showed of what mettle he was made by his care of the plague stricken; and he won the heart of the community.

The reader will be able to understand, perhaps to share, Bishop Kemper's "utter astonishment" at the news that in 1845 Kemper College was closed. The debt before mentioned had rolled up to twelve, or according to one estimate sixteen, thousand dollars; no relief could be looked for in St. Louis, where the churches were all in debt; the faculty had been just supported for a year by the tuition fees, and had such faith in the institution that they offered to conduct it for another term with no other salary than such fees supplied; but the trustees felt bound to close its doors. A fatal decision, for while there was as much life in it as the faculty manifested there was hope; the students were doing well and would have disseminated interest; and there was every probability that some one would come to its relief and save a property (at the present day of fabulous value) for the church,--but after the teaching force had been dissolved the difficulty of a revival became insuperable. For a time the building was used as the county courthouse. Its loss was a terrible blow to the diocese of Missouri, in which at the time it engendered much ill feeling, and which was affected by it through all the coming years in ways impossible fully to estimate. Bishop Kemper was never after able to allude to it without tears in his eyes. Of course it was complained that Bishop Hawks had not exerted himself as he might have done to save the school; and it is a fact that his interest was absorbed in a proposed mission, of itinerating and educational type like Nashotah, for which a hundred acres of land, shortly increased to upward of three hundred acres, were given him. The people of Palmyra, by their liberality, manifested such zeal in behalf of the new institution that it was located in their midst, in 1848, under the title of St. Paul's College.

The summer of 1845 was intensely hot and told on Kemper's strength; the following winter was intensely cold; and the summer and autumn of 1846 were humid and sickly. The sufferings of the missionaries, their wives and children, were severe,--sufferings, it was said, of which the church triumphant would know though the militant church never could, and indeed seemed not to care about. The zeal of the former decade had grown cold; there was a manifest decline of interest in the western mission field; people were weary of annually repeated appeals for aid, and thought that after ten years more missions and dioceses should have become self-supporting. Yet in those trying years many a worthy minister tasted the uttermost bitterness of poverty; one had to subsist, with his family, upon a diet of potatoes, and another's wife was without shoes. In their extremity they would borrow of each other's little stores, not wishing and not able to apply to the world, which demanded the exorbitant interest on loans of twelve per cent, per annum. Bishop Kemper candidly confessed that, though not in despair, even his cheerful spirit was cast down; and Chase declared, in his downright way, that the suffering of the clergy through breach of promises made to encourage them to turn to the West as missionaries was bringing the good faith and moral character of the church into question. The problem of clerical support pressed with equal weight upon Whitehouse, his successor in the see of Illinois; indeed, from the ever intensifying strain of admonition, entreaty, expostulation and denunciation that runs through his addresses one would infer that the situation was steadily growing worse. An experience of only two years was enough to convince him that, as a rule, salaries in that diocese were not only disproportionately low in comparison with ministers' services but were even insufficient for their necessary expenses, their material needs; while salaries that had once been fair, but remained the same while the cost of living had increased, were thereby rendered equivalent to a positive reduction. The voluntary system, Whitehouse continued, is sometimes regarded as permitting breach of promise of support and non-payment of subscriptions. It were a sad hour if this dependence on the religious sense of the country were found insufficient or misplaced. Some ministers are almost starving; and what of their future and that of their families? "They are ground down to the veriest pittance, and life's heartiness, dignity, affection and power are shrunk and withered by the shifts of poverty," in times of unprecedented commercial prosperity. Certain of the laity who came West poor, a few years since, and are now rich to repletion, think that they have done all that can be expected of them if they pay the rent of a pew. Continual changes of place made by ministers, so deleterious to the progress of the church, are owing to the "bad faith of the laity in pecuniary provision." Year by year he returned to the charge, deploring "the galling bondage imposed by cares of worldly maintenance on the spiritual energies. ... It is mere mockery to preach to such [sufferers] against 'the love of money.' A brawny, ignorant laborer delves as much from a ditch. The ministry is free from the spirit of covetousness."

Years before, Chase had singled out wealth as the popular idol and covetousness as the besetting sin of the West; yet all, he said, "are very jealous of the affections of the clergy in this respect, and fain will starve their bodies to save their souls."

"The demand for ability in the ministry is at its maximum, the means of securing or rewarding it at a minimum," Whitehouse concluded; and later, in a tone embittered by the injustice and impiety of such dealings, he exposed the fact that many a salary was a speculation on a preacher's ability to draw a crowd, and if he failed, pledges were broken, irrelevant faults would then be imputed to him, and finally he would be ousted from his place.

"Our clergy," said Clarkson, "do not as a rule receive what is sufficient for their needs or what is commensurate with the means of their congregations." Most parishes determine salaries according to the least they can offer instead of the most they can raise; and lack of heart among the clergy, frequent changes, and long parochial vacancies are the result. This, however, one may say in passing, is far better than to make liberal promises, largely based on the estimated contents of a clergyman's private purse, or that of his wife, or having made them, to pay according to his supposed actual expenditure for the necessaries of life.

Bishops shared the penury of their clergy. In beginning his work, Kemper impressed upon the people of his jurisdiction the importance of starting funds for the support of diocesan bishops; but, a dozen years after his appeal, Upfold was in receipt of an episcopal salary of one hundred dollars a year. His salary as rector of St. John's Church, Lafayette, was six hundred dollars, out of which he had to pay three hundred for an assistant. The inadequate support of his clergy was the burden of Up-fold's addresses: "Many receive little more annually than the wages of an ordinary day-laborer, and some not so much." The common and stereotyped plea, in extenuation, is that of "hard times"; but these, if hard to the laity, are harder still to the clergy. There is ability to remedy this bad state of affairs, if not by money, at least by providing the necessaries of life. He adduced, as a warning, the fact that God can and often does take away means that are abused to purposes of "personal and selfish gratification only;" and besought the people at least to pay their minister's pittance punctually, for neglect of this simple business principle, mournfully common in this particular relation, was the cause of serious embarrassment to the helpless clergy and harassing and unjust suspicions among their creditors.

It is melancholy to contemplate the underlying stratum of human suffering in which the bases of all the western dioceses were laid. But it gives the right perspective to know that these ills were by no means peculiar to churchmen: a devoted Presbyterian missionary, who in the course of his career organized twenty-eight congregations, did not receive from his people for the first six years of his work the amount of Upfold's episcopal salary for the first year.

Everywhere there was crying need of a "Make-congregations-by-what-they-voluntarily-promise-Society."

Distressing as it was, the situation would have been intolerable but for the efforts of Christian women, who, not having the money they wished to give, earned it by the sacrifice of time, material, and skilled labor, and turned the proceeds over to vestries to complete the purchase of building lots, the building and then the furnishing of churches, and to pay arrears of ministers' salaries. Sales of eatables and fancy work are no doubt a frontier method and not the most dignified means of ecclesiastical support, and the motives of the buyers, while certainly not bad, may not be the highest,--but none can impugn the purity of motive of the kindly earners, evidences of whose zeal are plentifully scattered through the early records of the dioceses of Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa.

In explanation of the long drawn and bitter indictments of financial dishonor brought against their people by the pioneer bishops, one must frankly accept the statement that in the West, both northwest and southwest, a quite different standard of financial honor from that of the long-settled East was in possession of the field,--a standard to which men like Kemper, Whitehouse and Upfold could not accustom or reconcile themselves. The debtor and creditor legislation of American commonwealths, says the author of "The Winning of the West," is not pleasant reading for one who is or would fain be proud of his country. The reader would do well to peruse again the opening pages of this chapter, descriptive of frontier conditions, with reference to their bearing upon the subject in hand; remembering this rule, that pioneer traits persist as survivals in the place of their origin. Religion was not a motive in the settlement of the West. European and English ideals were despised; English immigrants fell away from the communion of the church. The influence of the past and all authority seemed a hateful and ridiculous bondage. The West, remarked Whitehouse, is new, impetuous, defiant; pioneering as if nothing social or religious were settled. A curious and interesting indication of the independent temper of the people has been recorded: it was practically impossible to induce them to kneel in public worship. There existed no reverence for the ministry as of divine appointment; the estimation in which it was held was betrayed by the expression which often struck unpleasantly upon Whitehouse's ears: "to hire a minister." It was an inclement climate for episcopal prerogative; an anecdote which if it be not true is at least well invented is told of a burly Irishman who had some business with Bishop Upfold, who answered his rap at the door: "Is Misther Upfold in?" "Sir, the Bishop of Indiana is before you!" Quick as thought the visitor turned on his heel--"Och, and now he's behoind me!"

Enough has been said of the miasma of infidelity and materialism, and the incessant shifting of the population of the frontier, which had such a depressing effect on all religion, and of the intense individualism, profound ignorance and bitter prejudices of the sects, that operated so adversely to the church's progress. The immigrant sought no continuing city, came without thought of making a permanent home, formed no local attachments; in Chicago, it was said, a minister was the pastor of a procession. This continual moving about and solution of ties was highly injurious to domestic and religious feeling. Vail pointed out that the two chief perils of the spiritual life in a new country were business and pleasure: the hurry to get rich, the fever of speculation, and the rush for amusement, afforded by traveling concert and theatre troupes, shows of all sorts, the circus, horseraces and balls. Bovine comfort in the sense alone, relieved by a little excitement once in a while, was the low ideal of the masses, while even harder to reach and influence was the class of honest, virtuous, moral citizens, many of them benevolent, and some among them readers of the Bible, who were members of no religious body and felt no need of salvation.

The conclusion is inevitable that, however it were, the church and western society were ill adjusted in that day. The populace was devoid of "the church idea"; our "Catholic heritage," historic episcopate or apostolical succession, and "incomparable liturgy" did not appeal to it in the least. A popular objection to the prayer-book service was its sameness, day after day. Of course it was easy to rejoin that it was positively too reverent and devotional in tone and spirit for an irreverent and undevout multitude and age. But it would manifest only proper humility if, before seeking to shift the whole onus upon a reprobate age, church people were to ask themselves if they may not have been a little in fault, a little too self-complacent, too quick to take offence at irregular zeal, too narrowly devoted to our order and forms,--in a word, too restrained and exclusive of emotion; making an idol of conformity, "dying of dignity." It is always well to see ourselves as others see us; and to the Methodists, for example, the "old church" still seemed, mistakenly, of course, to be the petrifaction that it had been in the latitudinarian age.

Many reasons have been alleged for the parsimony of church people in supporting their ministers. The extra expense