DR. W.S. RAINSFORD A FORCEFUL FIGURE.
Fearless Utterances of the Rector of a
Famous Institutional Church in
New York.
Militant Christianity has for many years had no more energetic champion than the Rev. Dr. William S. Rainsford, rector of St. George's Church, New York City. When he took charge of the church in 1883, as a young man thirty two-years of age, its congregation had greatly fallen off. In twenty-two years of untiring work he built up the parish until it contained more than seven thousand members, included in a varied system of parochial activities.
Dr. Rainsford, who has resigned his charge owing to ill-health, used to be a man of great physical vigor, a fact which emphasizes this suggestion of the New York Sun's:
The physical exhaustion which sent Dr. Rainsford abroad and now compels his retirement from duties so arduous seems to be a calamity afflicting clergymen more than other professional men and men of affairs. Is this because the emotional strain is so much greater in the case of a clergyman?
Dr. Rainsford—who was born in Ireland and educated in England—was fearless in his pulpit utterances. In one sermon he said:
It is vain to cry out against a thing that a vast proportion of mankind believes is not wrong. You can't make an Irishman believe it is wrong to have beer with his dinner; you can't make an Englishman believe it. And perhaps that is why I do not believe it is wrong to have it with mine.