We have lingered about the opening scenes of the Bishop’s first year that we might gain an insight into his plans and methods, and realize something of his difficulties and successes.
During the early years, the Bishop is evidently intent upon the great purpose which consistently faced him—the creating of a national Haitien Church. After five years, his report to General Convention in 1880, tells us how earnestly he has been striving, more to strengthen the faith and character of the little parishes, than to extend faster than such faith and character can be established. The statistics show but a feeble increase in the numerical strength. “Nevertheless,” writes the Bishop, “there has been, during this period, that which figures cannot show, viz., an increase among its numbers of the knowledge of the ways of the Church, greater attachment to the same, and a decided deepening of their inner spiritual life. Our Church in Haiti also occupies the high vantage-ground of being the only denomination exercising independent local jurisdiction and aspiring to a complete national organization. In pursuance of this object, this feeble Church has now twice as many native ordained clergymen as all the other religious bodies combined. It has also more advanced stations than any of them, established in the interior country districts among the rural population, where the heathen customs of Africa have hitherto prevailed. Our work has conquered the esteem and respect of the Government and people of Haiti, and enjoys the full protection of the authorities under the guaranties of the Constitution and laws of the country.”
It is probably because of this conservative and cautious policy of Church extension, and still more because of the poverty of the people and the small amount available for clerical salaries, that we find no appreciable increase in the number of clergy and other workers. For the Bishop, in 1883, reiterates the statement, “we have no difficulty in finding the needed laborers; not only can we find them among ourselves in Haiti, but, in case of need, the whole of the British West Indies are at our beck and call, islands where the Church and Church training institutions have long been established. Therefore the only difficult problem that remains to be solved is that of supplying the money necessary to inaugurate the central training institution that we propose to establish.” Such an institution, it will be remembered the Bishop had had in mind from the very beginning.
Passing rapidly over the intervening years to 1895, the story reminds one of the more tragic record of the foundation-period in Liberia. There were successive angry waves of warfare, involving the Church through her people and property; and the sometimes surly, sometimes lethargic, aspects of peace, which in turn follow family outbreaks. There were rebellions against the ruling powers; and frequent changes among the officials upon whose stable protection the Bishop, in earlier years, had grounded so much of his hope. There were the severe losses of people, and the death of pastors and teachers, bringing burdens upon the Bishop’s aging shoulders. But through it, he battled bravely onward, filling the ranks as the communicants fell away, and slowly, very slowly adding to them; supplying the leaders as these passed on, and very slowly increasing their number.
In 1891 The Twenty-fifth Convocation of the Haitien Church (being the seventeenth of the Bishop’s episcopate) organized itself into a Missionary Society, of which each member of the Church was declared a member. The Convocation itself became the Board, while the Bishop and other officers formed the Executive Committee. The churches were growing in the spirit of self-help. The people of a mountain section, poor in worldly goods, earned the money for, and built the walls of, their church; and the President of the Republic gave $650 to supply the roof. The church at Port-au-Prince, destroyed some years before and hindered in its plans for rebuilding by various obstacles, was settled in a better location through the good offices of the President and Parliament. These are samples of the problems, some perplexing, still others stubborn, which delayed and harassed the workers. A year of peace (and there were not many) witnessed “some steps taken in advance for the further extension of our Gospel work. Three new stations (in 1890) for the preaching of the life-giving Word have been occupied.” One of these was initiated by a small band in the mountain region, who, gathered into the Church and knowing the blessing, desired to spread the Gospel to their unconverted neighbors.
In 1891 the Bishop records, with pride, the fact that one of his presbyters, the Rev. Shadrach Kerr, had been transferred to the Diocese of Florida. Mr. Kerr, while still canonically attached to Haiti, had been temporarily at work on the Isthmus of Panama, under Archbishop Nuttall of Jamaica. Another of the Haitien clergy had been transferred to Jamaica. Thus the products of the Church in Haiti were being spread abroad.
A farm-school for education and demonstration, established about 1887, and requiring three years of instruction for graduation, sent out its first class in 1890. One of the young men at once established a school in a needy mountain district. Thus was demonstrated the quality of these negro Churchmen.
The year brought much sickness, however; and amongst the victims was the young teacher, who had already begun the work of a missionary to his people. It was doubtless this visitation which constituted a call to the Bishop to hasten the establishment of a Medical Mission, so greatly needed, and which had already been his earnest wish. Two students had been sent to Boston, to be trained, one as a physician, and the other as a pharmacist. The Bishop sent an urgent appeal for sufficient money to establish these men in their professions upon their approaching graduation.
The year 1892—the fourth centenary of the discovery of America—was a memorable one in the annals of their history. “Here,” wrote the Bishop, “the first permanent settlement of Europeans in the New World was made. Here, later on, the first landing of African slaves in this hemisphere was effected. Here, following the example of the United States, the second colonial yoke of European vassalage was broken, and the second free and independent nation of the New World thereby established.”