Board of Preachers Write Memorial to the Late Bishop Brent of New York

The following article was written for the Alumni Bulletin by the undersigned members of the University Board of Preachers. This Sunday there is to be memorial service in St. Paul's Cathedral, Boston, in honor of the late minister who prior to his death held the office of Bishop of Western New York State.

Bishop Brent was a member of the Board of Preachers of Harvard University from 1922 to 1926. In many other years, he had given us a Sunday and a week of prayers. He was an Overseer from 1921 to 1927. He delivered the William Belden Noble Lectures on the subject of "Leadership" in 1907 and received the honorary degree of S.T.D. in 1913.

A valued counsellor in the affairs of the University, his characteristic influence was as he would have wished it upon the religious life of the place. His earlier residence as a clergyman in Boston had made him familiar with our situation. It was, however, his great work as bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Philippines from 1901 to 1918, and then his term as chief of the Chaplain Service of the American Expeditionary Force in France in 1918-1919, his long conflict with the opium traffic, his enthusiastic interest in international affairs, which made the students feel in him a man who had had a share in the great life of the world, who brought to them the ripe fruit of experience and sought to quicken in them devotion to the life in God and for men, the life which he himself so ardently lived.

His preaching was noteworthy. It was, however, in his personal contacts with all sorts of men that he showed his greatest strength. His hours at the Wadsworth House were never long enough. In two successive years, 1927 and 1928, he conducted the official service of the University at noon on Memorial Day, a service which military and patriotic organizations in Cambridge beside the University public attended. The service of last year will be long remembered. His experience of war made him an eloquent advocate of peace. His own self-sacrifice, with his high patriotism, pointed his appeal for our national participation in the solution of world problems. On the following morning, he was too ill to take his turn at the Chapel. He was to have preached here again on the 29th of May, 1929, so that the service just mentioned was the last at which his voice was heard.

Willard Learoyd Sperry

Edward Caldwell Moore

Theodore Gerald Soares

Charles Edward Park

Frederick May Eliot

Henry Knox Sherrill