In the history of the Diocese of Tennessee, the consecration of a second Bishop marked, of course, a distinct and important epoch. That Diocese had met with other losses than that of her ante-bellum Bishop. The war had swept away, to a large extent, the results of his work and that of his clergy. All the horrors of war had been visited upon the State and Diocese. Churches had been mutilated and destroyed and congregations had been scattered. The effects of the war were very deeply impressed upon the mind of the new and young Bishop in the first series of visitations made by him in his Diocese,—a sad and laborious journey beginning in November, 1865. The evidences of devastation were fresh and visible on every side. In some places, where before there were promising parishes and missions, there was no fit building left standing in which services could be held. Only three churches in the whole Diocese were uninjured and very few were fit for occupation. Many were in ruins. The returns from two of the parishes showed similarly severe inroads upon congregations. In one of these there remained 65 out of 147 communicants reported before the war. In the other, ten only remained out of 65 previously reported.
The Bishop never faltered as he confronted conditions which foretold the anxious care, the exhausting labors, the weary journeys, the disappointments, the fears and the griefs the coming years were to bring. It was with the utmost cheerfulness that he took up the burdens of the Episcopate, and in gathering up the disjecta membra of the Church in Tennessee and in strengthening the things that remained, Bishop Quintard was a marvel. In labors, in journeyings and in "the care of all the churches," he was truly an Apostle,—not a step behind any of the heroes of the American Missionary Episcopate. His jurisdiction, though nominally a Diocese, was virtually a Missionary District in all respects save that it never received its due proportion of the Church's funds devoted to Missionary enterprises.
With far-sighted statesmanship, Dr. Quintard perceived in 1865, that the Church's effectiveness could be enhanced by the Division of the Diocese of Tennessee and the establishment of the See Episcopate in the three chief cities,—Memphis, Nashville and Knoxville. And from that time on, a division of the Diocese that would increase the efficiency of the work of the Church therein, was kept constantly before the minds of the people. But strange to say, the very arguments used in support of the plea for the relief needed, were made the excuse for not granting it. "It is impossible for the Church to grow in such a large territory under the supervision of a single bishop, let him work never so hard nor so wisely," constantly pleaded the Diocese of Tennessee. "The Church is not growing fast enough in the Diocese of Tennessee to warrant a division of that Diocese and an increase of Episcopal supervision therein," was the invariable reply. And so it was not until five years before the Bishop's death,—not until after he had worn himself out by his efforts to perform single-handed the work of three Bishops in his diocese,—not until after repeated illness had warned him that he must have relief,—that a Coadjutor was elected and consecrated for him.
The wide-spread popularity of Dr. Quintard, his personal magnetism and the large-hearted charity he had manifested in time of war, were not without their effect for a time upon the work he had undertaken. Wherever he appeared there flocked to meet him his old friends of the camp and battle-field. They felt that the religion he preached, having stood the test of adversity in war-time, was a good religion for times of peace,—a good religion to rule the every-day business of life. They readily yielded in large numbers to his persistent appeals to them to confess Christ before men. In his record of official acts published in the Diocesan Journal from year to year, he noted such gratifying incidents as the baptism and confirmation at his hands of some of the officers and men with whom his acquaintance had begun on the battle-field or in camp. In the few months that elapsed between his consecration and the meeting of his first Diocesan Convention, 314 persons were confirmed by him in Tennessee, and that number was a good yearly average of his confirmations for nearly thirty-three years; and his 470 confirmations, 152 sermons and 112 addresses, reported to the convention in 1867, for the first full year of his Episcopate, were a sample of the pace he set for himself at the beginning of his Episcopate.
But as before the war, Bishop Otey in an Episcopate of little less than twenty-nine years, discovered that there was a remarkable tendency among churchmen to move away from Tennessee, so it was after the war, as Bishop Quintard was to find. Bishop Otey confirmed more than 6,000 persons in Tennessee, yet the Diocese never numbered more than 3,500 communicants before the war arrested its development. Many of those whom the ante-bellum bishop confirmed took their way, like the Star of Empire, westward, and began to colonize the Dioceses of Missouri, Texas and California. Bishop Quintard, by actual count, confirmed more than 12,000 persons, and yet his Diocese was never, to the day of his death, able to count 6,000 communicants.
Despite the difficulties of the field in which it was given him to labor for the upbuilding of the Church, the Bishop was in the forefront of every movement which went on in the Church in the latter part of the nineteenth century. He was a pioneer in the adoption of the Cathedral system in the American Church. He was among the first to utilize the work of the Sisterhoods in the administration of Diocesan charitable institutions. With his refined and cultivated tastes, it was natural that he should give attention to the improvement of ecclesiastical architecture in his Diocese. And he was a leader in the work of the Church for the negro. In 1883, a conference of bishops, presbyters and laymen was held in Sewanee, to consider the relations of the Church to the colored people of the South. A canon was proposed for the organization of work among colored people, which, when it came before the General Convention, was known as "the Sewanee Canon." It was never adopted by the General Convention but the work among the negroes in Tennessee was organized in accordance with its suggestions.
In the list of the American Episcopate, Bishop Quintard's name is the seventy-fifth. It is an unusual name, especially conspicuous by beginning with an unusual letter. These may seem trivial circumstances to receive mention here, but the fact is that they seem significant of the striking position which the Bishop held among his brethren, of the peculiarities of his personality, and of the attention he attracted to himself throughout the country. He was, as has been seen, a link between the ante-bellum and the post-bellum Bishop. He was likewise a link between the clergymen of the old school and those of the new. It is curious to those who knew him later than 1870, to see him represented in the portraits taken soon after his elevation to the Episcopate, wearing the "bands,"—the surviving fragment of the broad collars worn in Milton's time. He probably gave them up about the time of his first visit to England in 1867. He must have been among the first in America to wear his college hood when officiating. For it is related that after he had officiated on one occasion in a Church in Connecticut, a lady was heard to exclaim in great indignation, "The idea of that Southern Bishop coming to this church and wearing a Rebel flag on his back!"
In sympathy with the Oxford movement in the Church of England, he was a leader in that movement as it affected the Church in America, and so was called a "High Churchman," at a time when that term was of somewhat different application from what it is now. And he was then called a "Ritualist," and was regarded as an extremist though at the present day he would be considered a very moderate ritualist.
He was always a welcome visitor in all parts of the country and people not only delighted to hear him preach but especially enjoyed social intercourse with him. His conversation was extremely entertaining, partly because of the breadth of his experiences in times of war and in times of peace;—as a traveller in England and as the hard-working Bishop of a Southern Diocese, but also because his talk scintillated with wit and quick repartee.
When some one in New York asked him why he had named a Church at Sewanee, "St. Paul's-on-the-Mountain," he answered: "Sewanee is Cherokee Indian for 'Mother Mountain,' and you know St. Paul preached on Mars Hill." On another occasion a man was attempting to argue with him in regard to what he chose to call "the use of forms" in the Church. "Well," said the Bishop, "you know that when the earth was without form, it was void; and that is the way with many Christians."