All Things Human: Henry Codman Potter and the Social Gospel in the Episcopal Church

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© 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America c 5 4 3 2 1 ∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper. Some of the material in chapter 3 was previously published as “The Work and Well-Being of Women in American Social Christianity: The Case of Henry Codman Potter (1835–1908),” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 53, nos. 3–4 (1999): 125–51, and is used here courtesy of Union Seminary Quarterly Review. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bourgeois, Michael, 1956– All things human : Henry Codman Potter and the social gospel in the Episcopal Church / Michael Bourgeois. p. cm. — (Studies in Anglican history) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-252-02877-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Social gospel. 2. Potter, Henry Codman, 1834–1908. 3. Episcopal Church—Doctrines—History. I. Title. II. Series. bt738.b67 2004 261.8'092—dc21 2003007101 In memory of my parents, with love and gratitude peter w. williams Series Editor’s Preface Studies in Anglican History is a series of scholarly monographs sponsored by the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church and published by the University of Illinois Press. It is intended to bring the best of contemporary international scholarship on the history of the entire Anglican Communion, including the Church of England and the Episcopal church in the United States, to a broader readership. Michael Bourgeois teaches theology at Emmanuel College at the University of Toronto and has now written this first major scholarly study of Bishop Henry Codman Potter. As a priest of the Protestant Episcopal Church from 1857 and bishop of its Diocese of New York from 1883 until 1908, Potter was a proponent and exemplar of the Episcopal Broad Church movement and the American Social Gospel. All Things Human not only recovers the memory of a neglected figure in American religious history but also shows through Potter’s life and work how he and other white Protestants employed and reshaped antebellum religious and moral traditions as they engaged the evils of the American social order in the decades after the Civil War. Potter’s emphasis on practical Christian living and attention to human inequality, the work and well-being of women, corruption and reform in political life, and the relations of labor and capital helped to shape a pattern of Christian life and thought that, while not entirely successful in its aims, was vital in its engagement with the world and comprehensive in its redemptive concern for all aspects of human life. ...