Memories of a Happy Life
by , Bishop of Massachusetts. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1926. 8vo. xiv+424 pp. Illustrated. $5.00.
BISHOP LAWRENCE’s book is an example and not a discussion of religious faith. It contains no more of the technicalities of faith than there are obscurities in the faith of the author. The many devout Churchmen who have been enabled by the Bishop’s serene example to stay within their Church ‘do not care so much for theories, principles, and homilies, as for real experiences,’and, since these experiences were all set down in the Fifty Years, the Bishop had no occasion to repeat them here.
His appreciation, however, of the helpfulness of ‘frank and real experiences’ leads him to tell in these Memories of personal matters, when he believes the telling will be helpful to others. Among such are his own ‘conditions of nerves which very few persons suspect, and almost nobody knows.’ He had no fun in publishing these, but here, as in his Fifty Years and in his sermons on Personal Religion, of which he says, ‘I know from many sources that I have been helpful,’ he knew that the account of his own troubles would help others. Thereby he adds another company to the multitude of his debtors.
Born of well-known and well-to-do New England stock, instead of choosing to carry on the successful business career of his forbears, he gave himself to the Church, and after the Andover Theological School he took the parish of Lawrence, Massachusetts, named after his grandfather, as Lawrence, Kansas, was named after his father. Thence he went to teach at the Episcopal Theological School, and in short order became its dean. When he decided, in spite of conditions of nerves, to leave the scholastic life for the worries and wears of the administration of the diocese of Massachusetts, he wrote in the little engagement book which his friends have seen so often (in his last, and best portrait, by Charles Hopkinson, he is holding it in his hand), ‘So go byT the happiest years of my life: God’s will be done. lie will set my face forward with glad faith.'
Beneath these thoughts, on this occasion as on former and on later occasions in his life, stood his strong sense of each man’s responsibility for the evil in the world. Throughout his career as Bishop, the struggles in which he succeeded and the obstacles which he overcame were not set in his way by an outrageous fortune. He sought them out. The Church Pension Fund is an example. ‘In the freshness of his youth’ he offered a resolution in the House of Bishops that every bishop should be compelled to resign at seventy. Then he saw the inadequacy and the stupidity of the church pensions, which left the aged clergyman to poverty and his parish to inefficiency. It took courage to confront such a great and confused wrong. It took more than courage, a sense of responsibility, to devote himself to righting it. The Bishop did not loosen his hand until the confusion lay in order and the wrong became a right.
All these things he did so gracefully, and with so much courtesy and humor, that the Life is as Happy to the reader as it has been to the Bishop, but these Memories are more than happy, for the white light of his character shows through every word he writes.
CHARLES P. CURTIS, JR.