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RICHARD HOOKER WILMER

[1816-1900]

WALTER C. WHITAKER

RICHARD HOOKER WILMER, second bishop of Alabama, was

of the Maryland Wilmers, who came over in the Cavalier emigration of 1649-1659, and who lived on the Eastern Shore for more than one hundred and fifty years. Six generations bring the family down to Richard Hooker. The original head of the American branch and three of his descendants were named Simon; the other two were Lambert, the son of the first Simon, and William Holland, father of the Bishop.

William Holland Wilmer was the fifth son of Simon and Ann Ringgold Wilmer, and was born in 1782. He was ordained in 1808 by Bishop Claggett of Maryland, and sprang at once into prominence as a man of tireless energy, unusual intellectual attainments, and remarkable spirituality. Besides his efficiency as a rector, he was instrumental in restoring the professorship of theology in William and Mary College and in founding the Theological Seminary near Alexandria, Virginia.

In 1826 he became president of William and Mary College and rector of Bruton Parish, Williamsburg, did a marvelous work in a twelvemonth, and died. His ministry covered less than twenty years; he was young even at the end; yet he had been three times President of the House of Clerical and Lay Deputies of the General Convention, and had rehabilitated the Protestant Episcopal Church in Virginia.

Richard Hooker Wilmer was his third child by Marian Hannah Cox, his second wife. He was born March 15, 1816, and was left motherless at the age of five. His father soon married Anne Brice Fitzhugh, between whom and Richard the closest ties grew up. A few years later the father died, and at the age of twelve Richard was the oldest boy in a family of nine, with much of the family support dependent upon him.

In 1831, Mrs. Wilmer moved out from Alexandria to Seminary Hill and opened a high school on the present site of the Episcopal High School. Richard attended this school one year, and then, with the proceeds of a timely sale of land in Ohio, granted to a maternal ancestor by the Continental Congress, he went to Yale College, where he was graduated in 1836 at the age of twenty.

Returning from Yale to Virginia, he immediately entered the

Theological Seminary and began his three years' course of preparation for holy orders-a career which, when his clerical antecedents are considered, was very natural. During his course of theological training, he lived with his stepmother, who had meanwhile closed her school and removed to Lebanon, a few miles distant; and his farmer-life interfered not a little with his student-life.

He had no difficulty, however, in passing his examinations, and on Easter Day, 1839, in Monumental Church, Richmond, he was made deacon by Bishop Moore, and the next day was advanced to the priesthood. Broad-shouldered and thick-chested from both inheritance and out-of-door life, he read the service in a voice that captivated his hearers with its mellowness and richness; and his elocution, always without the slightest artificiality, was even then well-nigh perfect.

His first charge was St. Paul's, Goochland County, and St. John's, Fluvanna County. His parishioners lived for fifty miles along the James River: all of them were hereditary members of the Protestant Episcopal Church, but there was not one male communicant in the entire flock. To be a Christian was to be "unmanly;" to abjure Christianity was to be "emancipated." Yet Wilmer took hold of the men of this region, and by his unaffected, red-blooded, uneviscerated manliness, won their respect, first for himself and then for his cause; and within the few years of his incumbency he had revolutionized social and religious conditions in that neighborhood. Shortly after assuming this work he married Margaret Brown at her father's estate, "Belmont," Nelson County, Virginia, October 6, 1840. On her mother's side, Mrs. Wilmer was of old Virginia stock, being a granddaughter of Robert Rives and Margaret Jordan Cabell. Her father was Alexander Brown, who came from Perth, Scotland, in 1811. Her gentle and retiring nature was an offset to her husband's masterfulness, and they were a well-matched pair. Much of his subsequent success was due to her quiet helpfulness and gentle care.

After a short rectorship in Wilmington, North Carolina, Wilmer accepted the rectorship of Grace Church, Berryville and Wickliffe Parish, in Clarke County, Virginia, and remained there from 1844 to 1849, as long a pastorate as he ever exercised in any one place. Here his effectiveness and reputation as a preacher grew steadily. Sermon work was favored by the bracing climate and encouraged by the good listening of his Scotch-Irish hearers. One sermon a week was all he would undertake, and in preparing this sermon he was thorough and definite. The first draft took the shape of a letter to one of his parishioners. From this draft he secured the tone of personal appeal that ever remained a chief charm of his preaching.

Then he developed his subject, carefully eschewing abstractions, but ever pressing on to drive home the chief thought of his discourse. His sermons defied conventional analysis; they were not put together of different independent pieces of thought, as is a wagon or an engine, but grew as an oak tree grows, and were spiritually massive, strong, and umbrageous. No little of his attractiveness in the pulpit was due to his freedom from cant and from Pharisaic stringency as to non-essentials. He was a masculine man, and he insisted on the weightier matters of the law. Often he gave offence because he did insist on urging the necessity of judgment, mercy, and truth, honesty, sobriety, and virtue—but he accepted with equanimity the outcome of fidelity to his commission. Alluding to his reputation as a preacher, Bishop Meade asked playfully, on one of his visitations, "Well, Brother Wilmer, how many have you preached into the Church this year?"

"I haven't preached anybody into the Church," was Wilmer's answer, "but I have preached one man out of it."

Then came a breakdown in his nervous structure which com

pelled him to drop all work for one year. When but partly restored, he went to Loudoun and Fauquier counties, where he spent an uneventful ministry of three years (1850-1853). In 1853 he removed to Forest, in Bedford County, and here he remained till 1858, when, in response to urgent solicitation from John Stewart, he took the country work at Brook Hill, near Richmond. Here he founded a parish that was soon lifting the practical heathenism of the surrounding poor into intelligent Christianity. John Stewart and his brother, Daniel, paid the expenses of the work and prayed for its prosperity, and to their prayers, more than to his own labors, did Wilmer attribute the fruit that came in such large measure. His life as rector of Emmanuel Church was that of a suburban pastor, having the advantages of proximity to a thriving city, yet with all the benefits of country freedom.

The success of his work and the attractiveness of his personality made him a prominent figure, and he was a deputy from Virginia to the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, which met in Richmond in 1859. In the same year William and Mary College conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Divinity.

In 1861, as the war of the secession became imminent, Wilmer was swept off his feet by his patriotism and conception of duty as a Virginian, and he became captain and drill-master of the homeguard raised in the neighborhood. He cooled off after a little, resigned his captaincy, and contented himself with ministering to the sick and wounded-save that, throughout the conflict, which he ever regarded as a war of defence by the South, he publicly and

strenuously urged men to the tented field, taking as his warranty the command of the Lord to the priests of Israel to blow the silver trumpet summoning the tribes of the Lord to arms when the land was invaded.

On November 21, 1861, he was unanimously, and on the first ballot, elected Bishop of Alabama. The consecration took place in St. Paul's Church, Richmond, March 6, 1862, Bishop Meade presiding, and Bishops Johns and Elliott joining in the "laying on of hands." Ten days later the Bishop was at work in his new field.

An unsuccessful war and increasing impoverishment do not conduce to the building up of church organizations, and the first years of Wilmer's episcopate were confined to the work of holding the diocesan forces together so far as they could be held, to ministering to the women, children, and old men who remained at home, and to caring for the spiritual condition of the soldiers. Toward the close of the war an orphanage was undertaken on the Bishop's personal responsibility, and by his self-sacrifice was maintained without interruption, first at Tuskaloosa, then at Mobile. He attempted to establish a publishing house for the distribution of religious literature in the army; but, while many hundreds of prayer-books were distributed, the breaking of lines of communication by the Federal soldiers soon brought the scheme to naught.

About this time friends in Mobile presented to him a house and lot at Spring Hill, seven miles from the city, and, removing thither from his war-time residence in Greensboro, he began the development of a rural home whose restfulness and hospitality became known far and wide. Here he spent his leisure hours between visitations, till his death.

Of leisure there was at first but little, but the Bishop's work was confined chiefly in its administrative functions to the slowly developing work in the larger towns and cities, Mobile, Montgomery, Selma, and Huntsville (there was no Birmingham), and in its prophetic functions to the laying of doctrinal foundation and the determining of the theological tone of the diocese.

The Bishop's pulpit power was now at its height, and the sermons which he preached from 1868 to 1880 have seldom been excelled in theoretical excellence, in charm of style, spiritual depth, and immediate, far-reaching effect. Chief among these discourses were the sermon preached in Savannah at the consecration of Bishop Beckwith of Georgia, and his sermons on "Manliness" and "Covetousness." On ritual questions, which divided men into parties within the Church, and on doctrinal differences between his own Church and other Christian bodies, he had clear-cut views, and he let others know his position, but was rather eirenic than controversial in his preaching. His three pastoral letters on "Christian

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