Anglican Commemoration
Bishop, Missionary, & Pioneer of the Ecumenical Movement
March 27 · d. 1929
also known as Charles Brent
Charles Henry Brent (1862 to 1929) was a Canadian-born bishop of the Episcopal Church who served as Missionary Bishop of the Philippine Islands and afterwards as Bishop of Western New York. He chaired the Philippine opium committee, presided over the first international meeting on drug control at Shanghai in 1909, and served as senior chaplain to the American Expeditionary Forces in the First World War. In 1927 he presided over the First World Conference on Faith and Order at Lausanne, the gathering that opened the way to the World Council of Churches. He is commemorated on March 27.
Charles Henry Brent was born in 1862 at Newcastle, in Ontario, the third of ten children in a country rectory. His father was the Anglican rector there, and he served that one parish for forty-two years. Near the end of his own life, after he had chaired an international commission and presided over a conference of a hundred and eight churches, Brent looked back and named the three things he was grateful for: that he was Canadian born and bred, that he had a mother whose character and spiritual culture were the peer of the best, and that a country rectory, where his father served for forty-two years, sheltered his young days. He never lost the measure of that house.
He went to school at Port Hope and took his degree at Trinity College, Toronto, in 1884, with honours in the classics. He was ordained deacon in the Diocese of Toronto in 1886 and priest the next year. There was no seminary. What formed him instead was three years in Boston, from 1888 to 1891, living and working with the Cowley Fathers, the Society of St. John the Evangelist, under Father Arthur Crawshay Alliston Hall, though he never took vows. Afterwards Phillips Brooks, the Bishop of Massachusetts, sent him to St. Stephen's, a mission parish in the Boston slums, and he stayed ten years. It was there, on Good Friday 1902, that he preached on the seven last words and said the thing about sympathy that has outlasted the address around it: "Sympathy never comes from above, always from beneath: it knows the whole story, and more."
In 1901 his mother died, and in the same year he was elected Missionary Bishop of the Philippine Islands. He was consecrated in Boston that December and arrived at Manila in August 1902, on the same ship as William Howard Taft, the Governor-General. The islands had been American for three years; the war that made them so had only just ended. Brent founded a cathedral in Manila in 1903, and in the same year a free dispensary in Tondo named for St. Luke the Beloved Physician, which grew into a hospital. He opened a mission at Zamboanga in 1905 for the Moro people of Mindanao, a school at Baguio in 1906 for Igorot boys, and another at Baguio for the children of English-speaking families.
What he saw in Manila that would not let him alone was opium. In 1903 he chaired a three-man committee on it, with Major Edward Carter, the Commissioner of Public Health, and Dr. José Albert, a Filipino physician; their recommendations came in 1904. The work carried him outward. In February 1909 he went to Shanghai as chief American delegate, with Hamilton Wright, to the International Opium Commission, and the other delegates elected him its president. It was the first international meeting ever held on the control of drugs. The convention that followed from it was signed at The Hague on 23 January 1912, the first binding treaty of its kind. Years later the province of his birth put up a plaque to him at Newcastle, and it is worth noticing what a government chooses to remember: the plaque is about the opium work almost from beginning to end, and the churchmanship arrives last.
The other thing that would not let him alone was the division of the Church. At the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910 he proposed a conference on the faith and order of the Church, and his own General Convention adopted the proposal unanimously that year. Then it took seventeen years. Robert Hallowell Gardiner, a Boston layman and lawyer, became secretary of the joint commission and did the correspondence and the diplomacy that turned a proposal into a gathering; when Gardiner died Brent wrote his memorial volume. A hundred thousand dollars from J. P. Morgan paid for it. In between came the war: Pershing, whom Brent's biographers record he had baptized and confirmed in the Philippines, asked him in 1917 to build a chaplaincy for the American Expeditionary Forces and then to run it, and the soldiers called him the khaki-colored bishop. Out of that year he wrote a chapter on facing death which begins: "The fear of living is always due to a single cause, the deliberate refusal to accept life as a high-hearted adventure in the name of God and for the sake of mankind."
On the morning of 3 August 1927, in the cathedral at Lausanne, he preached to the delegates of a hundred and eight churches on the seventeenth chapter of St. John, where the Lord prays that they all may be one. "It is for conference, not controversy, that we are called," he told them. "Conference is a measure of peace; controversy, a weapon of war." They elected him president of the conference unanimously, and it sat until the twenty-first of that month.
He did not go home again. He represented his Church at Cosmo Gordon Lang's enthronement at Canterbury on 4 December 1928, his last public appearance; on his physician's advice he stayed in Europe, three months at the American Embassy in London, Paris on 21 March 1929, Palm Sunday at Holy Trinity on the twenty-fourth. He died at Lausanne on 27 March, aged sixty-six. The city buried him in the ground it keeps for distinguished foreigners, under a Celtic cross, and the stone calls him a soldier of Christ, a servant of humanity, an apostle of Christian unity. He had written, a decade before, that death in its Christian character is a superb victory, crowning all the victories of life. In 2014 some two hundred Filipinos, alumni of a school descended from his mission, flew to the village church in Ontario where he was born, and one of them said that at last they were reconnected with Bishop Brent.
You are probably not going to preside over anything. But Brent's own claim was that the demanding things are not reserved for the few: there is never any absolution from a duty for which a man has a capacity, and the art he had in mind was prayer, which he thought every Christian could learn and none could be excused from. He also thought fear was a single thing with a single cure, the refusal to take life as an adventure undertaken for God and for other people, cured only by flinging self-protection away and trusting yourself to some large purpose. He was not a tidy man; the record shows him sincerely reforming and structurally complicit in the same acts. That is what most lives look like from inside. What duty do you already have the capacity for, and have been quietly excusing yourself from?
The documentary situation for Brent is the opposite of the usual one. He is a modern author with a single great archive and a corpus he published himself. The Charles Henry Brent Papers at the Library of Congress run to some 14,740 items in 72 containers, thirty-two linear feet, spanning 1860 to 1991 and thickest between 1901 and 1929: diaries kept across the whole episcopate, sermon manuscripts from 1890 onward, drafts and galley proofs, scrapbooks, a dedicated file on the opium conferences. His sister Helen C. C. Brent deposited them in 1954 and gave them outright the following year; Frederick W. Kates added material in 1957 and 1958, and further gifts came in 1979 and 1996. Copyright in his unpublished writings is dedicated to the public domain. The finding aid also records papers gathered by Remsen B. Ogilby, who died in 1943, for a biography he never published.
Against that archive stands his own printed work, a dozen or more books issued mostly by Longmans between 1899 and 1929, several of them digitised and out of copyright: With God in the World (1899), The Consolations of the Cross (1904, the Good Friday addresses of 1902), Adventure for God (1905), With God in Prayer (1907), Leadership (the Noble Lectures, delivered at Harvard in December 1907 and published in 1908), The Mind of Christ Jesus in the Church of the Living God (1908), The Sixth Sense (1912), The Revelation of Discovery (1915), A Master Builder (1916), and The Mount of Vision (1918). The Lausanne sermon was separately published as The Call to Unity. Two posthumous collections followed, Adventures in Prayer (1939) and Things that Matter (1949), the latter edited by Kates, who also drew the prayer anthology No Other Wealth (1965) out of the Library of Congress papers. There is no critical edition of his works and no complete bibliography in one authoritative place.
The biographies are few and early. Eleanor Slater's Charles Henry Brent: Everybody's Bishop appeared in 1932, three years after his death, and is the source behind most secondary accounts of the death and burial. Alexander C. Zabriskie's Bishop Brent: Crusader for Christian Unity (1948) remains the standard life and preserves his own 1926 reflection on his beginnings; it is dated and still the best. George E. DeMille's history of the Episcopal Church since 1900 (1955) supplies several Philippine dates. Modern scholarship is thin and specialised: Mark D. Norbeck's 1996 article in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research is the source for the private life, and Daniel J. P. Wertz's 2013 article in Modern Asian Studies for the colonial reading of the opium project.
Several things are genuinely contested. The Manila cathedral's groundbreaking is given as January 1905 in one line of citation and January 1906 in another; what is safe to say is that the church was founded in 1903 and the building rose between 1905 and 1907. The founding date of the Baguio school for English-speaking children is given as 1909 by the school itself and 1906 by DeMille. The Lausanne conference is often said to have closed on 12 August; the printed Proceedings, whose own title page reads August 3 to 21 and whose contents end with the closing service in the cathedral on Sunday the twenty-first, settle that against the shorter figure. The number of delegates is variously given as 394, 400, and 406; only the count of a hundred and eight churches is stable. And a widely quoted line about unity being no luxury but a necessity, and about unity at all risks, circulates everywhere under his name with no source attached to it anywhere; it is not printed here.
Brent's commemoration is not a canonisation. There was no cause, no postulator, no inquiry; his name was added to a table of lesser feasts by legislative act of the Episcopal General Convention, and separately by the Anglican Church of Canada and the North American Lutheran Church, each of which keeps 27 March.
The order of events is worth noticing, because his words entered the Church's worship before his name entered its calendar. He composed the Prayer for Mission that stands in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer at Morning Prayer, in both rites, and it has been prayed daily ever since. He is meanwhile absent from Lesser Feasts and Fasts of 1963, where late March runs from James De Koven on the twenty-second to John Keble on the twenty-ninth with nothing on the twenty-seventh; by the 2006 edition he is there at pages 214 to 215, with collects in both rites, the Preface of Pentecost, and the historian James Thayer Addison's description of him as a saint of disciplined mental vigour who was everywhere an ambassador of Christ. In which edition between those two he entered is not established.
There is no shrine. The grave at Bois-de-Vaux in Lausanne, in the plot the city keeps for distinguished foreigners, draws no recorded pilgrimage. The devotion that has grown up around him runs instead toward the village of his birth: in 2014 about two hundred alumni of St. Mary's School, Sagada, travelled from the Philippines to St. George's, Newcastle, Ontario, for a service concelebrated by Archbishop Terence Finlay, Bishop Michael Bedford-Jones, and Bishop Benjamin Botengan of Central Philippines, after a year of planning.
The quotation on sympathy is from the fourth of Brent's addresses on the seven last words, "The Consolation of the Atonement," preached at St. Stephen's Church, Boston, on Good Friday 1902 and printed in The Consolations of the Cross (Longmans, Green and Co., 1904); the text is available at anglicanhistory.org, which anchors each address separately. The words on duty and on prayer as the universal art come from chapter I, "The Universal Art," of With God in the World: A Series of Papers (Longmans, Green & Co., 1899), available in full from Project Gutenberg (e-book 34706) and at archive.org. Both quotations on courage and on death are from chapter IX, "The Last Great Adventure," of The Mount of Vision: Being a Study of Life in Terms of the Whole (New York and London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1918), also at anglicanhistory.org and chaptered there. The passage on death is quoted here without its clause about the legions of young men dying before their time, which is what marks it as a text of 1918.
The Lausanne sermon, preached at the opening service in the cathedral on Wednesday 3 August 1927 on John 17:20 to 23, is printed at page 4 of Faith and Order: Proceedings of the World Conference, Lausanne, August 3-21, 1927 (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1927), scanned in full at the Internet Archive; it was separately published the same year as The Call to Unity. Brent's 1926 reflection on his beginnings is quoted from Alexander C. Zabriskie, Bishop Brent: Crusader for Christian Unity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1948), pages 15 to 16.
For the archive, see the Library of Congress finding aid to the Charles Henry Brent Papers, Manuscript Division. Addison's description and the two collects are from The Proper for the Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2006 (Church Publishing), pages 214 to 215; the absence is verifiable in The Collects, Epistles, and Gospels for the Lesser Feasts and Fasts (Church Pension Fund, 1963). The Ontario Heritage Trust plaque stands at Newcastle, Ontario, at the corner of Mill Street South and Edward Street West. The critical reading of the opium project is Daniel J. P. Wertz, "Idealism, Imperialism, and Internationalism: Opium Politics in the Colonial Philippines, 1898-1925," Modern Asian Studies 47:2 (2013). The account of the private life is Mark D. Norbeck, "The Legacy of Charles Henry Brent," International Bulletin of Missionary Research 20:4 (1996), pages 167 to 168.
The colonial question is not a modern imposition on him but is legible in the record itself. His diocese existed because of the American colonial administration, in a colony taken by a war just ended, and the assimilationist premise is stated in the period language of his own institutions: a school for Igorot boys who showed signs of superior intelligence and capacity for leadership. Wertz argues that the 1903 opium committee's measures were justified partly on racialised claims about Filipino susceptibility, and that the policy is a documented precedent for later American patterns of drug enforcement; his portrait is not of a cynic but of a man sincerely alarmed who worked inside an imperial structure and reinforced it. Set against this, and not cancelling it, is a November 1910 address at Howard University in which Brent argued the equality of manhood across races, and the survival of the Igorot foundation as Easter College, Baguio, carried on by the people it was built for after the empire that housed it was gone. Both readings sit in the same evidence, sometimes in the same act.
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Charles Henry Brent to preach the Gospel to the people of the Philippines: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11