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CHAPTER XV

THE WAYS OF A SEMINARY

T the conclusion of my college course I went directly to a mining town in the coal region of Pennsylvania, the name of which I have forgotten, but which I will call Mahoney, where I had an engagement to teach a parish school for the summer.

I lived, if I remember correctly, in the village hotel and my school was in the parish house. The rector of the parish was a Mr. Washburn whose son, Louis Washburn, was for many years rector of St. Paul's Church, Rochester, and is now the distinguished and beloved rector of Christ Church, Philadelphia. There are only two incidents in this period of my career that call for remark. The first of these incidents shows the inaptitude of the child mind for abstract propositions. I was endeavouring to convey to the minds of a class of boys and girls of the average age of twelve the abstract conception of a fraction. I told them that a fraction was a definite part of a whole. I might as well have said to them that a fraction was a jabberwock; my words, I soon saw, conveyed to their minds no notion whatever. So at last, to illustrate the conception, I took an apple, cut it into parts and, first holding the apple as a whole before the class, I said, "Children, what is this?" They shouted, "An apple." Then, taking a piece of the apple and holding it up, I said, "And what is this?" And with a louder shout they cried, "A piece of apple, sir." After years of experience in teaching, I am convinced that the average child cannot entertain an ab

stract proposition before the age of sixteen and a large minority never acquire the power of abstraction at all. It is this psychological fact that has given such wide popularity to the movies and the Sunday supplements.

The second incident worthy of remark during my residence in Mahoney had to do with the power of Holy Church to subdue the unruly passions of sinful men. The majority of the mining population of Mahoney were from the Emerald Isle. Every Sunday morning, before the few Protestants were out of bed, could be heard the "tramp, tramp, tramp" of these Irish Catholics on their way to and from their attendance at the Mass. I used to get up and go to the window and watch these pious people, men in their high hats, women with their covered heads, in their green kirtles; a decenter lot of people never presented themselves before their God for his loving approval; the few Protestants who later in the morning went to their Bethels and Ebenezers were not to be compared with these devotees of the true Church. So the Sabbath morning passed in holy calm.

But in the afternoon, presto change! the Main Street was thronged with Irishmen howling drunk and fighting mad. The Irish God was invoked, not to bless, but to damn. All along the street fists were striking; stones were flying; women, no longer in sober grey and green, but dressed in flaming reds and glaring yellows, stood along the side of the street applauding the prowess of their men, and if any woman's man seemed to be getting the worst of it, in she would go, biting and scratching and yelling like a wildWhat with the cursing of the men, the screeching of the women, the crying of the children and the barking of the dogs, it was pandemonium let loose in the streets of Mahoney on a Sunday. God had the morning, but the Devil owned the town in the afternoon. But stop; God was waiting to whip the Devil round the stump. When

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the pandemonium was at its raging crest and the waves of wrath submerging the reason of fighters, then look and see: behold, a black figure on a black horse came riding into the turmoil, whip in hand. He slashed to the right and to the left; the fighting ceased, the fighters fled away and Sabbath stillness settled once more upon the streets of Mahoney. Holy Church, in the person of the holy Father, had subdued the unruly passions of sinful men till come next Sunday. For so it happened on every Sunday while I lived in Mahoney.

When the summer was over and gone and the maples were red on the mountains, I bade farewell to stupid children, Irish saints and Irish sinners, and made my way back to New York, in time to enter upon the study of sacred theology in the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, situated in what was known as the village of Chelsea, but then and now included in the city of New York, the property of the seminary lying between Twentieth and Twenty-first Streets and Ninth and Tenth Avenues. In my day there were no such beautiful buildings as now adorn the square, the Gothic church with its spire, the Oxford Gothic students' quarters with their quads; nothing of this grandeur, only two grey-stone houses near either end of the square, in which were recitation rooms, dining-rooms, dormitories and residences of the Professors. These buildings accommodated between eighty and a hundred students who lived together as one family. The seminary course covered three years of study; the classes were the juniors, the middlemen and the seniors.

When I enrolled as a junior in the seminary, I was not subjected to the humiliations that made miserable the beginning of my college career. I had earned my right to the respect of my teachers and my fellow students. I came to the seminary from my college as an honour man, with

the logic prize and cum laude in philosophy. The seminary course included dogmatic and pastoral theology, Old Testament exegesis, including instruction in the Hebrew language; New Testament exegesis, with the reading of the Greek version, Church History and liturgiology. I do not think that there was ever an institution so inadequate to its purpose as this seminary when I was under its care. The professors were many of them clerical failures, whose friends had placed them on the seminary staff as a harbour of refuge. The professor of history did not have the historical mind; facts were nothing to him if they did not fit into his ecclesiastical, High Church theories; he was not honest with his class; in the course of his lectures he would refer his students to this and that obscure ancient authority, and I would find the substances of his lecture almost word for word in Mosheim, which was a textbook within easy reach of us all. This man was a brilliant, superficial talker, a fierce partisan and afterward a bishop.

The professor of pastoral theology, an utter failure as a preacher, was set to teach us the science and art of preaching. We were kept for a year on Gresley's “Treatise on Preaching," a book which any half-way intelligent mind could have read and mastered in three hours. I was asked such questions as these: "Mr. Crapsey, should a sermon be too long?" "No, Professor." "Mr. Crapsey, should a sermon be too short?" "No, Professor." "How should a sermon be, Mr. Crapsey?" It should be just about right, Professor." "Correct, Mr. Crapsey." I did not know then Bishop Potter's formula for the length of a sermon which was "twenty minutes with a leaning to mercy."

The professor of the New Testament exegesis was a senile saint, the loveliest of all lovely old men, whose mind would go off at a tangent and meander in the most alluring

way from the subject in hand until the hour was gone and he would say, "Well, well, gentlemen; you may take the same lesson for to-morrow."

The professor of dogmatic theology was nothing if not dogmatic; with him theology was based in belief, and so based it was not and could not be a science, and yet to him it was a science. The creed was to him as provable as the first proposition of Euclid. We were set to read Pearson on the creed, who proved the creed by the citations of irrelevant texts of Scripture which proved anything but the articles of the creed. We were given Brown on the articles, a book as big as a dictionary in which the poor articles were as lost as a handful of peas in a hogshead of water. We were given that funniest of all books, Bull's "Man before the Fall," which was a bull-it brought man forth, a perfected work of a perfect God, fully clothed with his divine perfections and yet such a fool that he lost all these perfections at the whisper of a serpent and the beguilement of a woman. I did not see all this at the time, but by this dogmatist was sown in my mind the seeds that in due season produced the deadly fruit of heresy.

The professor of Old Testament exegesis deserves honourable mention. Doctor Seabury was an old man ripe with the wisdom of age, never dogmatic, always delightful, always instructive; more ready to listen than to lecture. One morning when we had a knotty question of Old Testament exegesis before us he said, "Come, gentlemen; Saint Paul says, 'Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness'; let us have controversy and clear up the mystery." Then with a laugh we went at it hammer and tongs. I can see the old man now crouching before his sea coal fire, his grey eyes gleaming with fun as he urged us on. I loved that old man and he loved me, but alas as we shall learn, it was through this holy man that I came to a hard fall from grace.

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