 | Annals of Henrico parish |  |
Rt. Rev. A. M. Randolph, D. D., LL. D.,
Assistant Bishop of Virginia 1883-1892, when he became Bishop of Southern
Virginia.
ADDRESS
Delivered by Rt. Rev. A. M. Randolph,
AT OLD ST. JOHN'S CHURCH, JUNE 10, 1891, 150TH ANNIVERSARY.
I must rely upon your love for this old Church and your
reverence for its associations, for your interest and kind attention
as I discharge the grateful duty which my valued
friend, your rector, has assigned to me. It has often occurred
to me in the last few years, that a sense of the value of
our history and reverence for our past is growing in this,
our new land and in this age, which we are in the habit of
designating as above all others a material, mechanical and
practical age. The organization of societies for preserving
memorials of the past, the revival of interest in the historical
societies of the different States, the reverence for the old
churches and the efforts to rescue them, where it is practicable
and in some cases when it is impracticable and useless,
the renewed interest in our colleges in historical studies—
all these are symptoms of a revival of the historic spirit and
an assertion of the historic instinct which has always been
one of the strongest elements in our Anglo-Saxon character
and civilization. That historic instinct has been the characteristic
of all the progressive nations of the earth—the races
that have been without it have fallen further and further
behind in the march of civilization; they have gravitated progressively
toward the animal life of living from day to day;
each day forgetting yesterday and oblivious of to-morrow,
learning nothing, sowing no seed and gathering no harvest.
How can we comprehend the present but through the past?
Where are the roots of our laws, our institutions, our habits
and customs but in the past? In studying the history of our
forefathers and of our land we are studying ourselves. We
are finding out how we came to be what we are; we are
laws and our institutions. In following the fortunes of our
fathers we are finding out the influences that formed our
minds and educated our infancy and molded our nationality.
That is true of our general, or as some would call it,
our secular history. But there is really no such thing as
secular history; all true history is the record of the education
of nations and races under the teachings of Providence
and the movements of the Spirit of God upon the hearts of
men. But the highest kind of history is the history of
Christianity—the Church, and when I say the church I
mean the aggregate of all the forms of the churches that
hold the essentials of Christianity. This Church in its spiritual
work, in its intellectual work, in its influence upon
individuals and upon masses, this constitutes the unity of
modern history. The Church of Christ lies behind everything
as a moving, modifying, conditioning force. Ever
since it began its work in the world, on the side of good and
blessing, it has been the soul of all true civilization; it has
been the inspiration of all true liberty; it has been the guide
and the light upon the pathway of all true knowledge. Upon
the side of evil it has suffered its divine energies to be abased
in the vile fetters of Priest-craft, in the blood paroxysms of
fanaticism. All human passions have taken hold upon it,
sheltered themselves behind it, justified themselves by its
name. Its gospel of peace has been perverted and turned into
a sword that has separated father and son, husband and wife,
nations and people one from another, so it has penetrated in
everything, modifying and conditioning the evil, and furnishing
the motive forces of the good.
Modern history is a body Christianity, and its churches
are the soul of that body. To-day we are to think of some of
the events, and gather some lessons from the history of one
old Church, as we sit within its walls; they are one hundred
and fifty years old. For these long generations it has been
standing upon this hill, that is older than itself by illimitable
years, it has been looking down upon the river that has been
flowing on to the sea just as it is to-day, ages and ages
before its foundation stone was laid, but if nature is older
everything else around it is younger. It has seen the birth,
150 years. Well, how did it come to be here? And to
answer we must go back for a brief sketch of history.
On the 20th of July, 1588, the English Admiral Lord
Howard went out from Plymouth, and early in the morning
discovered the Spanish Armada entering the British channel.
For ten years Philip, of Spain, with the Roman Catholic
powers, had been gathering their resources and their strength
to crush England, our mother land. The Armada had one
hundred and thirty-six battle ships, the largest then known
to naval architecture, beside one hundred vessels to attend
them. From the other end of the channel the Duke of
Parma, with another army, was to meet them; they were to
drive the little British navy from the channel, land their
armies upon the English coast and, gaining a foothold, pour
in upon England the Catholic powers of Europe, to crush
Protestantism. That was the plan. England had done her
best to get ready for this death grapple with her enemies,
but the odds were fearfully against her; she had 34 battleships,
and they went out that morning, the 20th of July,
1588, to meet 136 battleships, all larger than any one of
hers. The Armada moves with majesty up the Channel.
The coast of England is crowded with her brave people,
watching the stately ships in battle array. Are they to pass
unscathed? Are the English captains, the daring sailors
who have borne the English flag around the globe, are they
afraid of the mighty odds? The Armada moves on, the
English Admiral lets them pass, and gathers his vessels
behind them, between them and the ocean, and bears down
upon them with southwest wind. The next morning, the
21st of July, he is closing upon their rear. At daybreak
the English captains call their brave crews to the deck. They
join in this old Church service, the same as yours in this
Church. They kneel around the Lord's table, and take the
Holy Communion and sing a Psalm, and then they go down
to the battle—Howard and Drake and Frobisher and Hawkins
commanding and leading to the fight, and you know the
story, the most gallant episode in modern history. For seven
long days and nights they hang on to the rear of the mighty
navy of their enemies. Manœuvering and fighting day and
Galleons would close around them, but they would shake
them off, and speed away upon the wind, and come back and
close in again. They fought in four great battles. When the
second is over, Sir Francis Drake sends a message to his
brave Queen Elizabeth, "Your majesty must pray for us in
all the churches in England, and by the help of God we will
drive them from the sea." And England was praying in all
her churches, the simple, solemn prayer of the old litany
that we hear in this Church every Sunday, "From our enemies
defend us, Oh Christ," and the prayer was answered,
and the proud navy was driven and broken and shattered,
and England was saved. And what has that to do, you will
ask, with the colonizing of this continent, with Jamestown,
with Richmond, with our Protestant religion in America? It
has this to do: That gallant fight of your forefathers in the
British Channel broke the Spanish and the Roman Catholic
power on the sea, opened the free ocean for England's civilization
and religion and people to plant themselves on this
continent. But for that the civilization here as far as we can
see would have been that of South America, or of Mexico.
The Anglo-Saxon race, and the Protestant faith, and the
Bible would have been kept back from America perhaps two
centuries longer—that was 1588. Nineteen years after that
our English forefathers landed and settled at Jamestown in
1607 and built the first Church, and the worship of the English
Litany for the first time awoke the echoes of the wilderness
in America, and four years after that (1611) Sir
Thomas Dale comes over with a goodly company of English,
passes Jamestown, pushes up our river, and settles upon the
Peninsula that is cut off by what is now known as Dutch
Gap; calls his settlement Henricopolis, after Prince Henry,
the eldest son of James the First, builds what was at that
time a handsome church, and Whitaker, a clergyman of the
English Church, and one of the noblest Christian men of his
age, is placed over it as its pastor and rector. That Church
is the mother of this, the parish is the same, and Whitaker
is its first minister. He was a graduate of Cambridge University.
A contemporary thus writes about him: "He did
voluntarily leave his warm nest, and to the wonder of his
this hard but in my judgment heroical resolution, to go
to Virginia and help to bear the name of God unto the Gentiles."
Whitaker had a warm nest in his old English home;
his friend says it was a wonder and amazement that he came
to this wilderness country. That illustrates another historic
lesson upon the motives and the spirit of our forefathers in
coming to this land. By the kindness of a literary friend I
have the recently published volumes by Alexander Brown,
an honored citizen of Virginia, a member of the Virginia
Historical Society, a member of the American Historical
Association, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society of
England. Its title is, "The Genesis of the United States."
In my judgment it is the most valuable contribution to the
history of the origin of our country that has been made during
the present century, made from materials that have been
hitherto either inaccessible or unknown to exist. In the last
fifty years there has been great advance in the study of history
as a science, and it is a matter of congratulation that we
have in Virginia this cultured gentleman, who has given and
is giving his life to opening the fountains of history in the
publication of original manuscript; so that we need no longer
manufacture history out of our own brains or upon the plane
of our passions or sectional prejudices, but from the only
true sources of historic verities. I find in these volumes a
published discourse by the Rev. William Symonds, of the
English Church, delivered at White Chapel, London, delivered
in the presence of the Honorable and Worshipful the
adventurers and planters for Virginia, the 25th of April,
1609, just two years after the settlement at Jamestown. You
must think of that congregation as composed of men, some of
whom had made up their minds to come to Virginia, some
were doubting and hesitating, others were skeptical; the leading
spirits were full of high enthusiasm and religious hope in
the enterprise. It was the first discourse ever published in
behalf of Virginia and the infant colony. It gives you a
living picture of their feelings that surprises the popular
and the ignorant conception of their motives. They were
not vulgar adventurers; they were not self-seeking traders.
The appeal that is made to them in this sermon is upon the
the promise of God, the guidings of Providence and the inspiration
of religious faith. It seems to confirm the proposition
I announced a few moments ago, that around all great
movements in modern history Christianity is an atmosphere
and the Church of Christ a leading factor and motive power.
The text of the discourse is Genesis 12, verses 1, 2, 3: "For
the Lord said unto Abraham, get thee out of thy country,
and from thy kindred and from thy father's house, unto the
land that I will show thee, and I will make thee a great nation,
and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed."
He expounds his text with stately rhetoric but with the
solid sense of our English forefathers. He is answering the
various reasons for not going. "One saith England is a sweet
country;" true indeed, and the God of Glory be blessed that
whereas the country was wild as a forest and the people were
naked, by the civil care of conquerors and planters it is now
become a very paradise in comparison of what it was. "They
shrink from the great deep, that were sure enough perils
then." He tells them that Sir Humphrey Gilbert forty years
before had told his officers and sailors as their little bark was
tossed in the wild storm, "Be of good cheer, my friends, it
is as near heaven by sea as by land." I give you these extracts
to show that he is moving them to courage and to hope
upon grounds of religious faith. Another discourse by Crashaw,
a distinguished clergyman of the English Church, is
preached in London before the company and the emigrants
to Virginia in February, 1610. Of that the historian says:
"There is no nobler sermon of the period than this." That
comes still nearer to us, for those who listened to it were
probably the men who came with Dale and settled Henricopolis
in 1611. The text is Luke 22d chapter, 32d verse:
"But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not." I have
not the time to quote from it to any extent. Its divisions are
seven discouragements from going and seven encouragements
to go. It is full of genuine power and appeals to the
loftiest motives that can move Christian men. It closes
with this eloquent salutation to Virginia: "And thou, Virginia,
whom though mine eyes see not, my heart shall love,
how hath God honoured thee! Thou hast thy name from the
have thy form from one of the most glorious nations under
the sun. But this is only a little portion of thy honor, for
thy God is coming towards thee, and in the mean time sends
to thee and salutes thee with best blessing Heaven hath, even
His blessed Gospel! Look up, therefore, and lift up thy
head, for thy redemption draweth nigh! And He that was the
God of Israel and is still the God of England will shortly, I
doubt not, bring it to pass that men shall say, blessed be the
Lord God of Virginia, and let all Christian people say,
Amen." This sermon was printed and distributed to the
company, and to all who came here to plant an old Commonwealth.
Its title was, "A New Year's Gift to Virginia," and
underneath the title was this stately Antiphon:
ENGLAND TO GOD,
"LORD, HERE I AM, SEND ME."
GOD TO VIRGINIA.
"He that walketh in darkness and hath no light, let him
trust in the name of the Lord and stay upon his God."
VIRGINIA TO GOD.
"God be merciful to us and bless us and cause the light of
thy countenance to shine upon us; let thy ways be known
upon earth, thy saving health among all nations."
ENGLAND TO VIRGINIA.
"Behold I bring you glad tidings—unto you is born a
Saviour, even Christ the Lord."
VIRGINIA TO ENGLAND.
"How beautiful are the feet of them that bring glad tidings
and publish salvation."
Men to be reached by such noble appeals as that were not
men of the common, the baser sort. This same high hearted
religious spirit appears in them as we see them again, after
they have crossed the Atlantic and landed here, near to us
and begin the work of building America. Whitaker writes
of Sir Thomas Dale, soon after they land in 1611: "Our
religious and valiant governor, a man of great knowledge in
divinity and of a good conscience in all things, both which
afterwards: "We preach in the forenoon, catechise in the
afternoon; every Saturday I exhort in Sir Thomas Dale's
house." In 1612 Pocahontas had been taken prisoner by the
English, and Dale is now Governor of the whole colony. He
labored long and tenderly to ground the faith of Jesus
Christ in the heart of this Indian Princess. He writes about
her in 1613: "Were it but for the gaining of this one precious
soul, I would think my time, toil and present stay well
spent." Whitaker baptizes her, and in April, 1614, marries
her to John Rolfe. Very soon after this she and her husband
removed to the neighborhood of Henricopolis, not far from
Richmond, and there they live until Pocahontas leaves Virginia
to die in England. There this famous Indian Princess
and gracious child of the wilderness, whose blood flows
in the veins of some of your own people to-day, listened to
the sermons, joined in the responses of the English Liturgy
and knelt at the communion table of this, your old parish, in
its infant days. I should think you would always read that
passage of your history with tender and loving eyes. Just
after this Whitaker writes: "Though my promise of three
years' service to my country be expired, I will abide in my
vocation here until I be lawfully called from hence." Your
rector, in his admirable summary of the history of the Parish,
says: "He was indeed lawfully called by Him whose providence
is supreme," within a very short time, for in the spring
of 1617 this, our first rector, the gentle and earnest Whitaker,
known to history as the "Apostle of Virginia," was
called away by sudden death. In 1619 a successor to the rectorship
of the Parish is found in the Rev. Thomas Bargrave.
During his ministry a law was passed by the Colonial Legislature,
which illustrates the connection between Church and
State, imported to America from the mother country. Perhaps
some clergyman with small salary and poorly paid,
who struggles to do his work and feed and clothe his children,
might find some grim comfort and cool philosophy in
this provision and advice of the State to our early missionaries.
The law enacts that each clergyman shall receive
from his parishoners 1,500 pounds of tobacco and 16 barrels
of corn, quite a good provision for the times. But the law
to 200 pounds the minister must be content with less. On
the one side it was doubtless a signal advantage to the Episcopal
Church in its infancy to receive the support of the
State as the established Church; on the other hand there were
disadvantages from that (to our American ideas) unnatural
connection, which hindered its development and progressively
weakened its power with the masses of the people up
to the period of the Revolution, when the connection was dissolved.
The Wardens of the Episcopal Church, under the
laws of the State, discharged in a measure the duties of our
chief of police and of your attorneys for the Commonwealth.
They were the legal guardians of public order and peace,
and the vindicators of justice. When these officers represent,
as among us, the sovereignty of the people as the fountain
of law, and when they discharge that duty faithfully,
they ought to be among the most honored and popular of our
citizens. Transfer that function to the officers of your
churches and at once you would realize the inevitable
estrangement of the hearts of the people from the church
by reason of the unnatural coalition and identification of
civic and ecclesiastical functions.
The Episcopal Church suffered from this prejudice from
no fault of its own. Nay, it is a part of the debt of gratitude
that all of our citizens of every denomination owe to her,
that in our early days she bore this burden and discharged
this thankless duty that had been imposed upon her with
becoming fidelity. With the time at my disposal I might
tell you the story of the life of this Parish from 1619 to the
building of this Church in 1741; of the great university for
which the money had almost been raised in England and in
the Colony, which would have been located at Henricopolis,
or perhaps here in Richmond; of the great calamity of the
Indian massacre in 1622, which swept over the Colony,
destroyed Henricopolis and almost extinguished the Parish
and put an end to the scheme of the university. The Parish
revives from the calamity, struggles on with its ups and
downs, its changes and vicissitudes, recording here and there
noble work from faithful pastors, and noble sacrifice and
devotion from its members. When your vestry book was
Curles Church, on the north side of James river, ten miles
below Richmond. That Church has been demolished in the
last half century. The only relic of it that remains is the
bowl of your baptismal font. It was found miles away from
the site of Curles Church in a cellar, where it was used as
a mortar for beating hominy. And here it is to hold the
sacred symbol of the waters of baptism, wherein God declares
your children to be His children, and the Holy Spirit
His gift to them, and Christ's redemption their glorious possession.
In 1739, under the ministry of the Rev. Wm. Stith,
the grandson of William Randolph, of Turkey Island, who
had received the best education that America and England
could give, and who afterwards became the historian of Virginia,
the plan for building a new church was agitated. After
some debate, and acting under the advice of William Byrd,
a distinguished gentleman of the Colony, who gave the land,
the Vestry of Henrico Parish chose this spot, called Indian
Hill, in Richmond. Under the superintendence of Richard
Randolph it was built and entered for worship on the 10th
of June, 1741, one hundred and fifty years ago to-day.
Your kind rector and friends, who take a loving pride in the
honored memories of the Parish, have pointed out to you and
to visitors from all parts of our country, who never leave
Richmond without a visit to St. John's Church, the lines,
the walls and the dimensions of that old Church. It has
been added to and altered since, but the old bricks, the pulpit,
the sounding board, the timbers and the forms are all here in
this building where we worship to-day. It stands here and
does its blessed work for the infant days of Richmond, training
its children, marrying its young men and maidens, burying
its dead, and breaking the bread of life to its people
through the colony days until the cloud of the Revolution
breaks upon the land. The Virginia Convention of 1775
met in these walls on the 20th of March. Mr. Selden, the
rector, and the ancestor of many of your worthiest families
to-day, is the chaplain of that famous Convention. It is composed
of remarkable men for any age or any country. Our
children are familiar with the great debate upon the question
of peace or war with the mother country. Yonder is the
natural orator of his time, arose and uttered the words that
perhaps told more upon the world than any single speech
that history tells us of. They tell us that his voice was calm
when he began, but when he closed it shook the walls of this
old church, and sounded like the shout of a warrior. When
he sat down the assembly had lost its composure; they all
leaned over and kept still, their eyes fixed on his pale face,
and then by common consent, the die was cast and Virginia
cast in her lot and led the cause which triumphed in the
establishment of popular government and American liberty.
Before the eight year war was done, this old Church passed
through an experience of desecration and humiliation. When
Richmond, during the Revolutionary War, fell into the
hands of Arnold, this sacred place was made a barracks for
the British soldiery. It must have seemed to pastor and people
that the final word in their parochial history was then
being written. But the storm passes away and the sun comes
out again, and the old Church takes its place as the leader of
the affairs of the Church in Virginia. In May of 1785 the
convention of the reorganized Diocese of Virginia was held
in Richmond, and its religious service was held in this
church, the sermon being preached by the Rev. John
Bracken. Edmund Randolph, afterwards Governor of Virginia
and then Attorney-General of the United States, and
then Secretary of State, and pilot at the helm of government
in its first voyage over untried and stormy seas—this man
was the lay delegate of your Church in that important Convention.
He drew up this remarkable appeal to the members
of the Episcopal Church in Virginia, representing its wasted
condition, and exhorting them to rally to its support. In it
occurs the sentence which has become famous in Church history:
"Of what is the Church now possessed? Nothing but
the glebes and your affections." Randolph also reported and
advocated resolutions that were passed by this Virginia Convention
with the members of the Protestant Episcopal
Church in the other States of America! For thirty years
the Rev. Mr. Buchanan ministered in this Church; years of
depression they were for your Parish, but years of brave and
cheerful and self-denying work for your pastor. A kindly
us of the loving brotherhood between your rector, Dr. Buchanan,
and the Rev. John Blair, Presbyterian minister in this
city. The Church was loaned to our sister Church, and each
minister, Blair the Presbyterian, and Buchanan the Episcopalian,
ministered to their respective congregations on alternate
Sundays. It may be that the kindly relations between
these two pastors of different churches may have helped to
transmit to our people in Richmond a spirit of sweet reasonableness
and of kindly brotherhood between the various
denominations of Christians. To this simple beginning, under
the blessing of God, may be traced perhaps a stream of
higher Christian civilization upon the subject of the relations
between the various Protestant Churches of Christendom
than we find in some other communities. The Church
that asserts exclusive claims for its ministry, its worship, its
organization, is unconsciously to itself its own worst enemy.
The Church that believes in itself, is loyal to itself, but loves
and believes in and welcomes with a brother's fidelity the
sister churches around it, is the Church for the people of
our land. The time would fail me to tell more of the story
of the rectors who have ministered to the generations through
all the years of the present century—of the Rev. William
Hart, who comes after the death of Dr. Buchanan in 1822,
who seems to have been among the first of the Christian ministry
in our country to recognize the power and the blessing
of Sunday school work as the nursery of the Christian
Church. Then the Rev. William Lee, who becomes rector
in 1828, and under whose ministry the Church takes the
name of "St. John's"; of the Rev. Edward Peet, the Rev.
Robt. Croes, the Rev. J. H. Morrison, and of the Rev. Henry
S. Kepler, of the Rev. John T. Points, the devoted missionary
who occupied the rectorship in succession from 1830 to
1860; of the Rev. Dr. Norwood, who begins his ministry
in 1862 and resigns the rectorship in 1868—years of tribulation,
but years when your people were making names in
history that are never going to die. Dr. Norwood's form,
his face, his strong words in this pulpit, his faithful pastorate,
are all living in the memories and the hearts of your
people to-day. Then comes Dr. Henry Wall, of whom you
leaves you in 1875. Then comes the Rev. Alexander W.
Weddell; you can tell me more about him than I could tell
you. He had high aims and a manly heart, a lofty enthusiasm
in the work of ministering to souls. You have put a
beautiful monument at the door of your church that tells
in eloquent words the record that he made among you. For
your children's sake may God keep his memory green, and
here your old church has stood, all through these years that
we have travelled. It has been looking down from this hill
upon Richmond and seen all the stages of its life. It has
rejoiced in the birthdays and in the cornerstone laying of
all these other churches, its children. On the hill by the
river it has watched the sure growth of your beautiful city
of the dead, and through the trees it has caught glimpses
from its tower of the marble monuments, in the morning and
the evening sunshine. Down beneath, the scattered village
of the colony is growing into a city; far out on the landscape
iron roads are coming year by year to bring commerce to its
merchants and custom to its industries. The hum of machinery,
the multitudinous sounds of a city have been growing
deeper year by year, as they have been borne up to the
old Church on the hill. How wonderful is the moral, and
spiritual significance of a city. Some one has said: God
made the country, man made the city; but God made the city,
too. The city is His ordinance for the necessities of human
civilization. He ordained it to be the workshop for the
country; the point where the commodities of all climes meet
and thence are distributed to the peoples and the nations.
And it is His ordinance that it is also the type and the
prophecy of the final destiny of a redeemed humanity, of a
city not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, its thronging
toilers, its great charities, its courts of justice, its halls
of education, and of legislation, its blessed homes, its sorrows,
its sins, its shame, and amid them all its Churches,
pointing away, pointing upward. What is a city but a realization,
a living symbol of a world that is fallen, but a world
that has been redeemed? And the Church of Christ the
Saviour of men, how it stands at the centre of all the activities
and varied life of the city, how it interprets the city to itself,
children to be members of Christ and His children, how the
weary toiler, the merchant harassed with his cares in the
week come to the Church on Sunday to drink of the springs
of Elim in the worship and the word of God, to refresh him.
How the dens of shame, the homes of the prodigal look away
and up to the Church dimly and gropingly and cry, "Come
to us, seek us, save us, for we are lost." Such is a city; such
is the Church that stands in its midst. In closing, let me
point to one or two lessons that St. John's teaches us to-day.
It teaches us to persevere, it teaches us to hold on, it teaches
us that the day of our usefulness and our work as a Church
may seem to be at an end, but we must be patient. God has
work for us to do. Three times in its history its Vestry
and its people were about to move away and build a new
church, but the providence of God kept it here. When the
Monumental is built you said, "That will take away our life,"
and it seemed to do it for a long time. When St. Paul's is
built you said, "Our fate is sealed, we must not expect our
people to pass by these beautiful Churches and come miles
away to worship in these old walls." But the old Monumental
is new and strong and full of Gospel life, and St.
Paul's is strong and beautiful, and old St. John's is here still
—more vigorous in its old age a long way than in its youth,
warmer with the spirit of Christ than it was in the morning
of its life, doing a wider work than it has ever done before.
The lesson is, hold on; the tide may ebb to-night but it comes
in glad and strong in the morning. And then St. John's has
its lesson to the country, to our loved land on this its one
hundred and fiftieth birthday. You remember the name of
the man I mentioned who superintended the building of these
walls in 1741. You remember again the same family name
of the man, the layman who represented you in the important
councils of the Church after the Revolution. These men
were great grandsons of one of the earliest members of your
Parish. A simple, strong, true man he must have been; out
of his loins sprang three great men. He was the ancestor of
Chief Justice Marshall, the greatest jurist of America. He
was the ancestor of Thomas Jefferson, the greatest political
thinker of America. He was the ancestor of Robert E. Lee,
of that other statesman who was Junior Warden after the
Revolution, and who represented you in the Diocesan Council
of your Church, and whom, though much misunderstood, I
regard as one of the greatest and purest of American politicians.
Strange that they all should have come of the offspring
of this simple strong man, who lived at Turkey Island,
just below our city. St. John's to-day reminds its country
of old days of plain living and high thinking, and speaks
words of warning to these days, when greed of gain threatens
to paralize the intellect and corrupt the heart and undermine
the foundations of the nation. It tells of days of
political purity to these days of strange and defiant and
shocking political corruption. It speaks words of hope, too,
to its dear country. It says, I have had my dark days and
have seen the light break through the clouds. Trust God—
trust in the people led by the spirit of God. Trust your
godly mothers to teach the children the ten commandments.
Trust your godly fathers to teach your boys to keep their
bodies in temperance, soberness and chastity. Trust your
churches and stand by them as they raise the standards
against the enemies that come in like a flood. Remember the
Sabbath day to keep it holy. Love your neighbor as yourself
and reform and redeem your country by first getting the
spirit of Christ to reform and redeem you. That is St.
John's message of hope to America. It speaks to us to-day
of the permanency of the Christian Church and Gospel.
Other institutions may grow old, like machines and old
vehicles that are superseded by the forces of nature that we
harness to do man's work and to turn the wheels of his material
progress; but steam and electricity, natural selection
and evolution, science and wealth cannot cure the soul. Each
new soul that is born begins from the beginning; each new
generation has the same temptation to fight; makes the same
mistakes; wanders into the same errors; makes the same shipwreck.
Sin and sorrow and death are always the same,
always new, and the Church of the living God, and that
brings to the nations the healing leaves of the tree of life,
must stand to tell men of the fountain for sin and of the hope
of redemption and of the gift of the Spirit.
God bless you, dear old Church, minister and people, and
give you in the coming years, when Richmond may widen
out into a great city, a still wider field for your activities and
blessings more abundant to crown your work. Keep close to
the promise, "Lo I am with you always, even unto the end of
the world."
| Annals of Henrico parish | |