In 1899 a relatively obscure priest working in a City Mission in the slums of South Boston was compiling a book on prayer from articles he had written for the Saint Andrew\u2019s Cross, a magazine of the recently established lay order of the Protestant Episcopal Church known as the Brotherhood of St. Andrew. Seven years before, this celibate priest had left the Order of the Cowley Father\u2019s whose House was just across the Charles River in Cambridge. Although he left the order over a dispute between his superior, Fr. A. C. A. Hall and the Order\u2019s Father Superior in England, the young priest never left the inward embrace of the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience\u2014even less did he leave behind the spiritual disciplines of the religious life he had learned so well under Fr. Hall\u2019s steady hand. Somewhere between his pastoral and social work among the sordidness and squalor of the South End\u2014replete with red light district, street waifs, immigrants and vagrants\u2014 and his late night vigils of intercessory prayer or early mornings spent in meditation, not to mention the full round of parish duties, he found the time to write. In the final chapter of his little book, With God in the World, he wrote words that now appear as strangely prescient for his own life: \u201cMen\u2014we are not thinking of butterflies\u2014cannot exist without difficulty. To be shorn of it means death, because inspiration is bound up with it, and inspiration is the breath of God, without the constant influx of which man ceases to be a living soul. Responsibility is the sacrament of inspiration. . . . The fault of most modern prophets is not that they present too high an ideal, but an ideal that is sketched with a faltering hand; the appeal to self-sacrifice is too timid and imprecise, the challenge to courage is too low-voiced, with the result that the tide of inspiration ebbs and flows.\u201d He was to parse this belief taking root in his soul, with the phrase \u201cthe inspiration of responsibility\u201d. Within two short years he would have the opportunity to test these words with his life.<\/p>\n
His name was Charles Henry Brent, born the son of an Anglican clergyman from New Castle, Ontario in 1862. How Charles Brent, a Canadian by birth, came to be a priest in of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts and under the episcopacy of the renowned Phillips Brooks, and later, the almost equally celebrated Bishop William Lawrence, is itself an interesting story we haven\u2019t time to explore. Suffice to say that God seemed to be grooming through the seemingly quixotic twists and turns of providence a bishop not merely for the church or for one nation, but for the world\u2014a man, of whom it could be said, he was Everybody\u2019s Bishop<\/i>.<\/p>\n
You may find Part One there<\/a> and Part Two here<\/a>. Take the time to read it all.<\/p>\n #OTD<\/a> March 27, 1929 — \u2627 Today in Christian History (@HistoricalRook) March 27, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n
Death in Lausanne, Switzerland, of Charles Henry Brent, an Episcopal priest active in the ecumenical movement. Two years before his death, he had presided over the 1927 World Conference on Faith and Order, in Lausanne, Switzerland. pic.twitter.com\/NgUT4qgI34<\/a><\/p>\n