BISHOP HENRY POTTER.*
Thu Canons of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States require of a Bishop that he shall keep an Official Journal recording his visitations, his sermons and addresses, and his religious services, with dates and places, and also that the addresses which he is ordered to give to his Diocesan Convention shall be printed, bound, and pre- served. Dean Hodges has found these records, especially the last- mentioned, of great use in writing the Life of Bishop Henry Potter. His hero was much given to discussing events, plans, and policies. For this purpose he naturally availed himself of the opportunities with which these Annual Meetings supplied him, and he did not trouble to maintain a pedantic uniformity of ideas and opinions. Throughout his life the Bishop was very open to new Impressions, and he had large opportunities of utilizing them. He began his long ministry in 1857 in a village beyond the Alleghany Mountains. The ground had been taken up by the Episcopal Church half-a-century before, but with such small success that the first minister records in 1818 that he has no hope of being buried with the Funeral Service of his own Communion. Bishop Potter remained 4hore only two years, but it was long enough to convince him that human nature was not, as he had supposed, "substantially the same everywhere." It was a discovery that stood him in good stead later on, though he did not stay long enough at Greensburg to turn it to much account. In 1859 he moved to Troy, seven years later to Boston, and in 1888 to Grace Church, New York, where he remained for fifteen years.
When in 1883 he was elected Assistant-Bishop of New York, he had made his reputation. A writer in the Tribune, who had watched his administration of his parish, predicted that the keynote of his episcopate would be work, and that he would try to make the Episcopal Church " not only the Church of the rich and learned, but the Church as well of the poor and simple." Potter "was a Low Churchman by in- heritance, and a Broad Churchman by temperament," though he showed an equal readiness to work with and through High Churchmen. But they must one and all exercise patience, and allow their Bishop some part In deciding the lengths to which each might go in his own direction, He found the question of the Higher Criticism creating great excitement in the diocese. One of the New York clergy began to give a series of lectures on the Pentateuch. His treatment of the subject was now in the United States, and though, as Dean Hodges says, " since that time many of the propositions which then appeared destructive have been quietly accepted by conservative persons," the new Bishop thought that the lecturer was " distorting the perspective," and requested him informally to discontinue the course. He made no claim to do more than ask this, and Dr. Newton unwillingly obeyed. But he published the lectures, and the original complainants, seeing in this act a repetition of the first offence, asked whether any judicial examination was to be undertaken. "This communication the Assistant-Bishop quietly put away in Its appropriate pigeon-hole," and when, some years later, Dr. Newton himself pressed for the appointment of a Committee to • Belfry Codotan Potter, Sessolh Bishop of New York. By George Hodges. London : Harmillan and Co. L155. art-1 inquire into his teaching, the Bishop only filed the new papers with the old ones. His next difficulty was of a different kind. He admitted a novice into a newly founded Religious Order with the three life vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. This was strongly censured by the Bishop of Delaware, who had just become the Presiding Bishop. The correspondence that followed led to no change of opinion on either side, though it incidentally showed that Bishop Potter's opinion of the obligations of a life vow fell far short of that usually held by those who take them. In fact, he treated them as revocable either at the request of those who took them or at the discretion of the Bishop who accepted them. The correspondence ended, as regards Bishop Potter's part in it, with a declaration of his readiness to submit himself to the judgment of the American Bishops; but as they seem to have been almost equally divided on the question no judgment was ever given. In another case Bishop Potter had to deal with a clergyman who had adopted the Roman Service of Benediction. But the offender, though he had the character of being extremely impracticable, offered to discontinue the service " for the sake of peace and the avoidance of scandal," and not to resume it without episcopal consent, if the Bishop would waive the question of legality. The compromise was at once accepted, and the Bishop expressed great admiration of the reserve and self-restraint shown by the incumbent under a flood of newspaper and other criticism. These three cases lay quite outside Bishop Potter's ordinary field of interest. But his own devotion to practical and social work and to the very difficult task of making the Episcopal Church in any real senso the Church of the poor will recall to English readers Bishop Temple's very similar action when he was Bishop of London. He would then have heartily adopted Bishop Potter's view that " un- selfish devotion is not to be too sternly discouraged, no matter how open to criticism may bo some of its methods."
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