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By J. Robert Wright. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company; New York: Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, 2001. xiv + 313 pp. $65.00 (cloth).
In his epilogue to this handsome book, Andrew Mead, the twelfth and current rector of Saint Thomas, rightly describes the volume as "not only the best parish church history I have read [but] . . . a first-rate resource for the use of Episcopal and Anglican church historians and a significant contribution to the history of New York City." Replete with illustrations of the four Saint Thomas church buildings and their furnishings, the twelve rectors, the famous Choir School and its choirboys, and much else, Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue is a superb counterpart in words and picture to the parish and buildings it describes: a combination of the beauty of holiness and outreach to others. Meticulously researched and presented in great detail, this history is written in a commendably limpid style-modern English prose at its best-and tells a fascinating story of a parish that, starting in a room on Broome Street and Broadway in 1823, now is housed in a magnificent Gothic edifice on Fifth Avenue. This story, as Wright says, is one of "the interaction of silent building-stones with living, human stones, as God's breath, God's spirit, has given them life."
The first rector, Cornelius Roosevelt Duffie, a "Hobart" High Churchman after Bishop John Henry Hobart of New York, made a bold move both in constructing the church building in the Gothic style-"an unprecedented step"-and in locating further north on Manhattan Island in the still-rural area of Broadway and Houston Streets. The first "golden age" of Saint Thomas Church began under the third rector, Francis Lister Hawks (18311843). Known as "the Peerless preacher of the day" and "the Chrysostom of the American Church," one of whose sermons was called by Daniel Webster "the greatest" he had ever heard, Hawks built up the Sunday School to an amazing 1400 children and eighty teachers by 1836 and was named the second historiographer of the Protestant Episcopal Church. The first American edition of Tracts for the Times (1839), with the subsequent tension between Hobartian and...