BEFORE we answer this question, let us ask and answer another question: What is a scholar? The dictionary definition is as follows:

“A learned person; one versed in any branch, or in many branches, of knowledge; a person of thorough literary or scientific attainments.”

As applied to the scholars whose branch of knowledge is history, it can be said that, negatively, a genuine historian does not approach the study of history with his mind already made up, and thus use history as a polemic or apologetic; that is, he does not use it to substantiate opinions already formed.

Positively, the truly scientific historian seeks to be fair and objective; he lets the facts speak for themselves; and only formulates his opinion when the facts are before him.

“A society without history cannot understand what it is doing; and a history without scholarship cannot understand itself.”

THIS STATEMENT of the great British classical scholar, Gilbert Murray, who was also an authority on foreign policy and international understanding, is answer enough. No Churchman can properly understand the mission of the American Episcopal Church if he is ignorant of its history. But there are other impelling reasons:

By and large, the textbooks used in schools and colleges to teach American history grossly neglect the part played by religion in the making of America. The spirit of secularism threatens to overwhelm American life, and if the Church fails to do all it can to portray the true place and contribution of religion in American history, it is blameworthy.

The part of the American Episcopal Church in this contribution to American life will not be known and understood unless we develop scholars who can and will tell the story. Publication is a necessary stimulus to productive scholarship.

Ecclesiastical histories and biographies are not, as a rule, profitable to commercial publishers. If the latter will not publish them, the Society must find the means to do so.

4. Throughout the Church, there is an increasing recognition of the fact that, before a vital program of Christian education can be developed for children, we must first deal with adults. One of the encouraging signs of our time is the growth of schools of religion for men and women. The purpose of these schools is to train up a nucleus of men and women in each parish who will be “ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you” (I Peter 3:15).

The need for brochures covering the different periods of Church history, suitable for laymen, has long been felt. The Society takes justifiable pride in the fact that it has not only supplied several gaps in the list of available brochures, but that they have been attractive, readable, and scholarly—neither apologetic nor polemical. Hundreds of the clergy and thousands of the laity have been grateful for what the Society has done in this field, and the response to its efforts has shown that this phase of its service to the Church has been sorely needed.

IF MORE MATERIAL WERE PUBLISHED, MORE INQUIRIES COULD BE ANSWERED

IT IS the proud boast of the Society that the most inconspicuous member of this Church can get as good service from it as can the Presiding Bishop. Most of the multitudinous inquiries that come are answered by our librarian, the Rev. Dr. William Wilson Manross, who is himself a distinguished historian and thoroughly familiar with the sources of the history of our Church.

The two items which represent the most frequent classes of inquiry are these:

Biographies and portraits of the clergy;

Information concerning parochial and diocesan history.

Considering the second item first, parochial histories are an important, if not an essential, source of diocesan histories; and the latter in turn are important to the historian of the various phases of our Church’s national history.

Concerning the first item, we have a right to expect, at the very least, that a complete ordination record of every clergyman in this Church from 1785 to the present time would be available. But this is not the case. From August 3, 1785, to December 31, 1884, 6,000 persons were ordered deacons in the American Episcopal Church; but the record of their ordination to the priesthood is either unknown or has never been published in any readily accessible form. Yet, with a reasonable sum of money available for research, most of these missing data, including birth and death dates in many cases, could still be secured and published. In a Church such as ours, which places so much emphasis on holy orders, this is a must item.

“Where can I find out the number of Catholic converts to Anglicanism?”

This query was addressed to the president of the Society as recently as July 10, 1950, by the director of the (Roman) Catholic Information Center, Buffalo, New York. Those whose reading is largely confined to the newspapers may assume that conversion is a one-way road—to Rome; but the Roman Catholic authorities know better.

The only reply which could be given was a sample—that of the Diocese of New Jersey. The Rt. Rev. Wallace J. Gardner, Bishop of New Jersey, has published an analysis of confirmations in that diocese for the years 1947, 1948, and 1949, in his episcopal addresses to the diocesan convention. This showed that in 1947, out of 1,893 confirmed or received, 164, or 8.6% of the total, came from the Roman Catholic Church; in 1948, out of 1,844, some 1l5, or 6.2% of the total, came from that Church; and in 1949, out of a total of 1,943, some 205, or 11% of the total, had been Roman Catholics.

For the ten years, 1940-1949 inclusive, 16,283 were confirmed or received. Of this number, 1,148, or 7% of the total, were formerly Roman Catholics.

But it would be unsound to deduce from this sample that this was a national average. In order to have a sound opinion on this matter, the Society will have to make inquiry of every bishop having active jurisdiction in the Church, and request a like analysis of his confirmation records for at least one year—say, 1949.

As a matter of fact, the Episcopal Church lacks adequate data as to the sources of its growth. Currently, in the Diocese of New Jersey (as a sample), 46%—almost one-half—of the confirmands each year recently have had a religious background other than that of the Episcopal Church. But we do not know what the national percentage is.

Some other questions asked of the Church Historical Society Library are the following:

Where were my grandparents married? Where is Bishop White’s correspondence with the civil authorities? Where are the papers of Bishop Provoost? What vestments were worn by the consecrators of Bishop Sea-bury? Did any English bishop visit the American colonies? Who was the first English bishop to visit the United States? How to start a study of the influence of Lux Mundi? How to start a study of the development of the Church of England in the South? Information concerning the educational work of American religious orders? Under what episcopal jurisdiction is Burma? What material do you have bearing on American Jewish history? Where can I find some early MS notes on the clergy of North Carolina? Where in the United States is there a monument to Bishop Heber? Where is the American duplicate of St. Mary-le-Bow? Information concerning revisions of the baptismal and burial offices? German editions of the Prayer Book? Early history of the Bishop White Library Association and Prayer Book Society? Why was the Order of San Grael awarded to Miss Louisa T. Davis? What was David Brearley’s contribution to the “Proposed” Prayer Book of 1785?

These samples illustrate the wide variety of inquiries. Many of them come from people who have no special interest in history, but who, nevertheless, find themselves in need of historical information.

PUBLICATION OF HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL WORKS

THIS is a most crying need. Nothing is so discouraging to the serious student, and nothing is so deterrent to productive scholarship, as the inability to publish the fruits of one’s labor. It vitally affects the welfare of the Church.

The Church’s spiritual and moral leadership cannot long survive the loss of intellectual leadership. The Primitive Church conquered ancient paganism because it out-thought as well as outlived and out-died the pagan world. The modern Church cannot hope to overcome modern paganism unless it can out-think as well as out-live and out-die the current materialism and secularism, which threaten to engulf the world.

Because few historical and biographical works dealing with Church history can hope to be commercially profitable, they must be subsidized. In so far as its means permit, the Church Historical Society must do this.

HAS SCHOLARSHIP ANY PRACTICAL VALUE?

THIS is the question which a certain type of layman often asks. The late George Eastman (1854-1932), of Kodak fame, once said to Dr. Abraham Flexner, distinguished educator and director of the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey: “I am going to leave my fortune for the aid of practical inventors like Marconi, and for the development of practical inventions like the wireless.”

“Do you not know, Mr. Eastman,” replied Dr. Flexner, “that Marconi would never have been able to invent the wireless without the researches in pure science of Michael Faraday, who died seven years before Marconi was born?”

Unfortunately, in his quest for practicality, Mr. Eastman never found a philosophy of life which was practical enough to save him from suicide.

Since then, the atom bomb has come right out of the minds and laboratories of pure scientists, and its practicality for evil makes us shudder.

Our Lord said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (St. John 8:32). Truth is the most practical thing in the world, and the historical scholar is primarily concerned with truth. Even for the layman, a right knowledge of history is one cornerstone of a sound philosophy of life.

Two great dangers, always latent in American life, are fanaticism and hysteria. Modern psychology has pretty well demonstrated that the fanatic is frequently unsure of his position, and needs to reassure himself by a violence which the man of knowledge and conviction eschews.

Hysteria is the loss of control over the emotions, whereby the intellect is disparaged and the will power diminished. This lack of balance sometimes results in mass hysteria, which is a terrible thing.

Scholarship is a corrective of, and a safeguard against, these two latent dangers in American life, because it stresses the importance of full and accurate knowledge, together with balance.

“Our stability is but balance, and conduct lies in masterful administration of the unforeseen.”—Robert Bridges, The Testament of Beauty.

In the Episcopal Church, scholarship is a safeguard against extreme and bitter partisanship, for every ecclesiastical historian, worthy the name, knows that no school of thought has ever had a monopoly of all the truth.

In 1945, after two years’ study, a special committee of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association brought in a significant report, Projects in American History and Culture. In the section on “The Historian’s Responsibility to His Times,” they said:

“In framing this report, your Committee on Projects has been very much aware that written history, whether it be good or bad, plays an important role in the contemporary world. Ideas which men have about the past influence their action in the present. The enemies of good order and sanity today have learned that lesson; Mein Kampf is both a historical treatise and an outline for action, and prejudiced men continually turn out books and pamphlets that distort the past in order to win adherents to programs which every real historian will recognize as intolerant, shortsighted, vicious in their effect upon the commonweal, and false.

“Your Committee believes that it is a primary function of the historian to stand in his own time as the guardian and advocate of a candid, sensible, and balanced body of organized fact and opinion about the past, and that in his books, no less than in his classroom, he should use whatever art he possesses to combat that particular ignorance which, if not combatted, may have dangerous consequences in the future * * *

“ * * * If the sound historian fails to supply his contemporaries with readable history that is to the point, they will go elsewhere for it, to unsound historians. For history of some sort, by their nature, men must have.” (Italics ours.)

What, pray, can be more practical than that?

THE VALUE OF SCHOLARSHIP TO THE LAW

By Spencer Ervin

[Mr. Ervin is himself a lawyer, a member of the Executive Board of the Church Historical Society, and an able, devoted and active layman of the Diocese of Pennsylvania.—Editor’s note.]

THE PURPOSE of the present brief section is to present an instance of what scholarship has accomplished for another profession—the law, in the reform of the administration of justice in America; and to describe the efforts and achievements of the originally small group of men who pioneered reform, backed by the generosity of one who had himself no relationship to the legal profession.

In 1906, the American Bar Association met in St. Paul. The principal address of the meeting was delivered by Roscoe Pound, then relatively unknown, on “The Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice in the United States.” The address was immediately denounced on the floor of the assembly of the Association. One speaker expressed the belief that our antiquated court organization and procedure of that day (and still to too large an extent of the present day) was “the most refined and scientific system ever devised by the wit of men.” Another decried the attempt “to destroy that which the wisdom of the ages had built up.”

The American Bar Association then was far from being the progressive force it has since become under the leadership or as a result of the efforts of exponents of Pound’s ideas. One of these was Herbert Harley, then a young newspaper editor in Manistee, Michigan. He had studied law at the University of Michigan, but had soon left the law for journalism. A fellow-townsman was Charles F. Ruggles, a wealthy lumberman, whose education had been confined to a few years of early schooling. Ruggles had been cheated by some dishonest agents in another state, and had been unable to bring them to justice. A casual remark of Ruggles’ about his legal misfortunes gave Harley an idea. Why not create an organization for improving the administration of justice, and get Ruggles to finance it? Ruggles was persuaded, and signed a contract providing for one year’s salary and expenses, to enable Harley to sound out leaders of the Bench and Bar.

Harley first called on the dean of his own Law School, Henry M. Bates, who gave him encouragement and a letter to John Henry Wigmore, who was also impressed with Harley’s proposal and sent him on to Chief Justice Olson of the Chicago Municipal Court, which under his leadership had become, or was on the way to becoming, perhaps the first modern court in America. Harley also saw Brandeis, Pound, Chief Justice Winslow of Wisconsin, and President Taft, all of whom approved his ideas and gave him continuous support in their promotion.

In 1924, when Taft was Chief Justice of the United States, he wrote Ruggles to thank him for the “generosity and public interest” which had led to the formation of the American Judicature Society, and said:

“I am deeply interested in the problem of facilitating the dispatch of business in our courts, and ridding them of the burden of complex procedure and delays. In maintaining the equality between the rich and the poor in the court, the greatest difficulty is the delay. A rich man can stand the delay and profits by it, but the poor man always suffers. There are two primary reasons why we have had delays. One is that the promotion of dispatch in the administration of justice is not a subject that attracts the popular fancy, and activity therein is really not a means of getting votes or securing a second term for legislators or congressmen or senators . . . The second reason is that we do not make some person responsible for the dispatch of business. A judicial force of judges ought to be under the executive direction of somebody, so that the number of judges needed to meet the arrears of business at a particular place should be under the control of one who knows what the need is.”

He then went on to mention the success of Chief Justice Olson in acting on this principle. But aside from President Taft and the few others mentioned above, Harley found little interest in his idea.

Nevertheless, reform was commencing to show its head. Olson’s system was working well, and Albert M. Kales, professor of law at Northwestern University with Wigmore, had published proposals for the reorganization of the Illinois courts. There were at least three leaders of the American Bar who saw what was needed: Frederick Bruce Johnstone, Frederick W. Lehman, and Nathan William MacChesney. Harley got together a small committee and organized The American Judicature Society. It was incorporated in 1913 (the same year the Church Historical Society was incorporated), and soon afterward Ruggles signed a contract agreeing to finance the work of the new Society up to a total of $40,000.

The basic concept on which the Society proceeded was that the administration of justice is a business, requiring not only technicians but administrators. Both elements were important. The technicians, lawyers and judges, must be better trained and more effective; bar admission standards must be raised; and judges selected for merit and given a longer tenure. Courts must be reorganized to emphasize administration: their procedure must be modernized and their branches unified under the direction of an administrator chief-justice. The American court system, which Pound had criticized, may be compared to a department store in which every department is completely partitioned off from every other, and a customer, entering at one door of the main floor but finding that the department he desires is on its opposite side, is obliged to take an elevator to the top floor, traverse a corridor, and then descend again to the main floor. It was, at the same time, a store in which each department head was completely independent, and it was no one’s business to attend to the whole.

There were important subsidiary points in the Society’s program, but the principal ones were those indicated. The program was to be promoted by means of a journal, and by undertaking research and publishing its findings.

Chief Justice Olson became the chairman of the Society’s Board, Professor Kales its research writer, and Harley the editor of its Journal and general promoter. Ruggles furnished, between 1913 and 1925, a total of more than $93,000 for support, or more than double his undertaking. By 1925, Rug-les had lost his fortune through business reverses and misplaced confidence, and it became necessary to find other support for the Society. Julius Rosenwald of Chicago came to the rescue in the interim by providing $2100 to finance the Society for a year.

Permanent support was found by enlisting the interest of readers of the Society’s Journal, from whom $1376 was obtained within two months. The Society lived on the contributions of readers from April 1927 to November 1928. It was then reorganized on a different basis, with dues-paying members, a nation-wide board of directors, and a president, Charles Evans Hughes. But Hughes became Chief Justice of the United States in 1930, and a successor had to be found. Newton D. Baker was chosen, and served until his death in 1938. Among later presidents may be mentioned Arthur T. Vanderbilt, reorganizer of the American Bar Association and now Chief Justice of New Jersey’s modern, unified judicial system. In 1936, the Carnegie Foundation granted the Society $6,000 a year for five years, on condition that it would increase its income from other sources. This was accomplished by an intensive effort to increase the number of members, who now number more than seven thousand.

The Society has had an important influence in the improvement of the administration of justice. That great legal scholar, John Henry Wigmore, writing in the Illinois Law Review just before his death in 1935, said:

“Every great measure for improving the administration of civil justice, now before the American Bar, achieved or pending, initiated in a proposal of the American Judicature Society. The metropolitan court organized as a single bench; the state-wide court, coordinating under one management the supreme, appellate and trial courts; the rule-making power exercised by the courts and not the legislatures; the state superintendent of justice; the organized corporate bar; the courts of conciliation, small claims and commercial arbitration—these and a score of detailed measures . . . had their initial proposals either in the Bulletins of the Society from 1913 to 1916, or in its Journal founded in 1917—as a perusal of its files will demonstrate. The American Judicature Society has been the greatest single influence for progress in its field....”

To Wigmore’s list may be added the Federal Judicial Council and the many state judicial councils; the New Jersey court system; the Missouri plan for the selection of judges; longer judicial tenure; and higher standards for admission to the Bar. The Society has both shown the way to improved justice and stimulated the foundation of other agencies dedicated to some special field of the same purpose.

The two prime disgraces of the Episcopal Church are its neglect of scholars and of clergy placement. The Church Historical Society and the Historical Magazine, in calling the attention of its members and readers to the first of these, believe that a necessary first step is to describe conditions, and a second to formulate a program for remedies. It is in connection with each of these steps that this brief account of a reform movement in another profession has been given.

WHAT SHOULD BE DONE?

LET it be noted that the productive scholars of this Church are as unselfish a group of men as any it possesses. They labor at study, research and writing without any expectation of financial reward, and even without any assurance that the fruits of their labor will be published.

Our first proposal is that, to aid the cause of research in Church history, the publication fund of the Church Historical Society should be enlarged.

As it is, the Society has to finance its publications on a shoestring. The increased cost of printing makes such an increase in its financial resources imperative. For example, the cost of printing a normal clothbound volume today is from $2500 to $3000—no other expenses such as advertising and promotion included. Pre-war costs of the same volume would have been from $1500 to $2000.

Our second proposal is that our theological seminaries should be strengthened. The theological seminary is an institution indispensable to the welfare and growth of the Church. Every one of them is undermanned as to faculty. Every member of every faculty, who has any gift for productive scholarship, is so overloaded with routine work that he has insufficient leisure to develop his God-given gift for research.

For example, in more than one seminary the professor of Church history not only teaches the whole field of that subject, which is too much in itself for any one person, but he is often saddled with liturgies and canon law, or some other such subject.

The Church’s laymen have for decades given lavishly to non-Church colleges and universities, and have left the Church’s theological seminaries to starve. How shortsighted! How can they expect their own parishes to be served by well trained clergy?

Fellowships, similar to the Guggenheim Fellowships, should be founded in connection with our theological seminaries, that persons gifted in research pertaining to the Kingdom of God may spend a year or two in intensive study without having to worry about where the next meal is coming from.

From 1607, even unto this day, the American Episcopal Church has been greatly dependent upon the scholarship of the Church of England. But one thing is certain: if we do not develop our own historians, the story of the American Church will not be written. To expect English scholars to devote themselves to American Church history is to expect the impossible; and to expect the impossible is to presume upon God’s goodness.

Let us therefore make it possible to raise up our own scholars and to erect our own scholarship—to the glory of God, to the upbuilding of His Church, and to the extension of His Kingdom.