Reminiscences of Edgar P. Wadhams; First Bishop of Ogdensburg (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1893 edition. Excerpt: ...with that of our friend, for he had taken to himself a wife. Children had begun to grow around his hearth. These needed providing for, and his parishioners of Brandon owed back salary to their last pastor, and under these embarrassing circumstances they judged it to be imprudent to pay their present pastor any at all. The Vermont hills afforded " a fine prospect, but poor eating." The letter contains other things of a more spiritual character, but no attempt is made to advise Wadhams or administer interior comfort. Among the letters belonging to this period and preserved by Wadhams is one of peculiar interest. This interest is derived not merely from the fact that the writer was a fellow-seminarian, and deeply involved in the new Oxford movement, but because in it he delineates so fYilly and clearly his own position of doubt, anxiety, and distress, and gives also the motives which drew him towards the Catholic Church and those which held him back. His position was very much the same as that of Wadhams, although, unlike Wad-hams, he did not become a Catholic. We omit the writer's name, because he is still living, and may have the same or similar prudential reasons for reticence which, as he himself intimates, existed atthe time of writing. The letter is dated March 3d, 1846. After some preliminary excuses for not writing sooner, it says: " How great--how very great changes have taken place since we met how many friends have gone from us how many among us have shrunk back I must confess that when the 'secession ' first took place, I felt very miserable, very desolate and unhappy; and still at times I find myself giving way to such feelings, but I have become, as a general thing, more reconciled to it; and, believing as I do most firmly that God...