James DeKoven

James DeKoven was born at Middletown, Connecticut, on the nineteenth of September, 1831, into a family whose father's line came out of Germany and whose mother's grandmother, Elizabeth Winthrop, was descended from the Governor John Winthrop who led the first settlers into Massachusetts Bay. He was the sort of child who is noticed early. At about twelve he wrote a hymn for the Epiphany, and it was sung at Grace Church in Brooklyn Heights; at about fifteen he published a book of poems. He read at Columbia College, and at his graduation on the thirtieth of July, 1851, he stood and delivered a poem of his own, called "The Inner Life." Then he went to the General Theological Seminary in New York, where several of the young men beside him would afterwards be made bishops. He himself never would be, and that is the whole shape of the story.

He was ordained deacon at Middletown on the sixth of August, 1854, by John Williams, Bishop of Connecticut, and within six weeks he had gone west. On the fifteenth of September he arrived at Nashotah House in Wisconsin to take the Chair of Ecclesiastical History. Nashotah had been founded twelve years earlier by three young deacons, James Lloyd Breck and two companions, sent out by Jackson Kemper, the missionary bishop of the Northwest; Breck had already left for the Minnesota missions four years before DeKoven came, so the two men never worked there together. It was Kemper who ordained DeKoven priest in 1855, and so the same bishop who had planted the house also laid hands on the man it formed. While he taught, DeKoven served the parish of St. John Chrysostom at Delafield and founded a preparatory school there, St. John's Hall. In 1859 Roswell Park, who had founded Racine College and was its first president, died, and DeKoven was elected to succeed him. He did not build Racine. He inherited it, and he kept it for the rest of his life.

What made him famous was not the school but a question about the altar. DeKoven held, and said so in public, that Christ is really and actually present in the bread and the wine of the Eucharist, and that a Christian may rightly adore him there. In the General Convention of 1871 he stood up and said it in the plainest words he could find, and told the house in the same breath that the words would be printed the next morning and that he would write them out for anyone who wanted to use them. He had chosen them carefully: they were words an English ecclesiastical court had already examined and let stand, so that a man could not easily be tried for them. He asked the Convention not to rush to a settlement on a doctrine it had not finished thinking about. "Let it study. Let it read. Let it pray. Let it think."

Then the church began to hand him back his hat. In 1873 he was nominated to the bishopric of Massachusetts and defeated by a small majority. On Thursday the twelfth of February, 1874, a special convention of the Diocese of Wisconsin met at Milwaukee; the clergy chose him and the laity refused him, and when it met again in June he would not let his name go forward. On the eighth of January, 1875, at the first convention of the new Diocese of Fond du Lac, the clergy gave him the seventh ballot and the laity would not follow. And on the fourth of February, 1875, the Diocese of Illinois elected him bishop outright, clergy and laity both. That should have been the end of it. Under the canons a diocesan election must still be consented to by the standing committees of the other dioceses, and the consents did not come. Five laymen of Trinity Parish in Chicago printed a Memorial against him and dozens of names joined theirs; it charged that the adoration of Christ in the elements was no doctrine of the church, and it warned that to place such a man upon the walls was to open the citadel to the enemy. There was no single opponent to name. What defeated him was a procedure, worked by many hands at a distance.

Between the two Wisconsin refusals he had made his answer, on the twenty-sixth of October, 1874, on the floor of the General Convention, with a canon pending that was aimed at men like him. He gave everything away first, one item at a time: the altars and super-altars, the lights, the incense, the vestments, the eastward position, every ceremony they could name. Let the church command it and he would obey, and take the barest observance they cared to give him. And then he stopped and named the one thing he would not surrender, that "to adore Christ's person in His Sacrament, is the inalienable privilege of every Christian and Catholic heart." The ceremonies, he said, were utterly indifferent; the thing itself was what he pleaded for. He ended by asking the men who were refusing him not for narrow-hearted legislation but for broad, tolerant charity.

He was never consecrated, and he never took anything back. He stayed at Racine, where he had said he would. "I shall never leave Racine. My duty is here." He declined Trinity Church, New York, and on the eighteenth of March, 1879, he declined St. Mark's, Philadelphia. Late in that winter he had gone to Milwaukee for a diocesan meeting and slipped on the icy sidewalk and broken his leg, and he did not leave his rooms again. On the fourteenth of March he spoke to his boys for the last time, and what he said to them was this: "My dear boys, for the first time that I can recall, I have no reports against any of you."

On the morning of the nineteenth he asked his coachman, Charles, to bring his wheeled chair, and called it his chariot; he was preparing Charles for Confirmation. Later, talking with a Mr. Du Pont Parker in the library, he threw back his head and lost consciousness, revived a moment, laid his hand over his heart, and was gone within twenty minutes. He was forty-seven. Three days later they buried him with three celebrations of the Eucharist, eight bishops present and the Mayor and City Council of Racine attending in a body, and they laid him on the south side of the chapel as near as they could to the stall he had occupied all his life. The church that would not make him a bishop kept him, in the end, exactly where he had asked to be: in his own place in choir, among his boys, close to the altar he would not stop defending.