when they came into possession, and there confronted a Dutch church which was dedicated to St. Nicholas. In this St. George's Chapel, also called King's Chapel, the worship of the Church of England was held until the erection of Trinity Church, in 1696.

Trinity Church, and the little town about it, prospered and increased until, in 1748, the parishioners felt the need of what the wardens and vestry in their resolution called a "chapel of ease." Such a chapel was therefore built in the "Beekman pasture," on land given by Colonel Henry Beekman and Gertrude Van Cortlandt, his wife. There it stood, quite in the country, on Beekman Street, in the midst of meadow-land and orchards, on what was then called "the Cliffs," overlooking the East River. This was Trinity's first colony, and it was named St. George's, in memory of the church in the English fort.

St. George's Chapel, as the building was entitled, was consecrated in 1752. The Rector of Trinity, Dr. Barclay, his assistant, Dr. Auchmuty, with the wardens and vestry, and the charity scholars, met the mayor and other officials at the city hall in Wall Street, and marched in procession to the chapel. There, in 1787, Bishop Provost held an ordination service, the first in the city and one of the first in the country. There Washington worshipped.

In 1811, St. George's became an independent parish, losing its church by fire in 1814, but building another the next year, during the leadership of Dr. Milnor, the first rector. The first meeting of the wardens and vestry was held November 23, 1811. The wardens were Gerrit H. Van Wagenen and Harry Peters. The vestrymen were Robert Wardell, Isaac Carow, John Greene, Francis Dominick, John Onderdonk, Edward W. Laight, Isaac Lawrence, Cornelius Schermerhorn.

The new church had galleries on either side, and another for the choir and organ at the west end. Three glass chandeliers hung from the panelled ceiling. The semicircular chancel contained a desk, pulpit, and clerk's desk. These, together with the rail and the frame of the organ, were made of mahogany, contributed, it was said, by a sea-captain who lost his masts in a storm, and replaced them from a mahogany forest. All the rest of the wood-work was painted white. The marble font, showing the carved heads of saints, had been captured from a French ship during the French war. The bell in the steeple was given by the neighbors, the inhabitants of "Montgomery Ward." Ten pounds of the building fund came from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

In this church Dr. Milnor served for thirty years. When he died, in 1846, Dr. Tyng succeeded him. In that year it was resolved to move up-town, accepting a generous provision of land for that purpose by the liberality of Mr. Stuyvesant. The second rector, like the first, championed the cause of what was then called Evangelical Churchmanship. It was a time when party differences were unhappily magnified. St. George's was known as a stronghold against the Oxford Movement, which was then arousing the hopes and fears of church people.

Then, even in its new location, the church saw uptown change to down-town. Every year substantial families changed their residence and transformed their interest to new parishes, and the population which took their places was of a very different order. The St. George's plan of that period was the universal plan of all the churches of all names. It was based upon the unit of the family. It proceeded upon the theory that on Sunday morning the father and mother would lead a procession of their children to the parish church, to occupy

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the family pew. But a great many of the new people had no such tradition. Some of them were unattached persons, making their individual way in the world. An increasing number were affected by the disintegrating influences of tenement-house life, one effect of which is to remove the restraints of neighborhood opinion. These conditions made the old, orderly, domestic life difficult, if not impossible. Here and there an individual out of a family group came to church; the children often came to Sunday-school; but the family pew was not rented.

Dr. Tyng saw the beginnings of this change, but upon his successor, Dr. Williams, it came in full force. He tried in vain to meet it. It was impossible to minister to the new conditions in the old way. And that, at the moment, was the only way. The new way had not been discovered. Dr. Williams frankly acknowledged his defeat. He finally resigned, on the ground that it was impossible to hold the church together. At that time only about twenty families of the old congregation remained in the parish. The church was empty; nothing increased but the annual deficit. Even the Roman Catholics, it was said, would not take St. George's as a mission. The only thing to do, in Dr. Williams's opinion, was to move away.

Under these circumstances, Dr. Rainsford was called to be the Rector. Dr. Rainsford has himself written the ✓ history of his ministry in A Preacher's Story of his Work. We will not go again into the difficulties and successes which he has so graphically and forcibly described. There they are set down in the pages of a good book, full of interest, instruction, and inspiration. The man who made St. George's what it is to-day is in that book. The heart of the St. George's plan is his splendid personality. But our business here is with the expression of that per

sonality in organization. William Stephen Rainsford was born in 1850, in Dublin. His father was a clergyman; so was his mother's father. He was graduated with the bachelor's degree in arts at St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1872. He went naturally into the ministry, and began his work as curate at St. Giles's, in Norwich. Presently he spent two years in the United States and Canada, devoting himself to evangelical work, conducting "missions" in large cities of the East and South. He returned to England, but was soon called to be Assistant Rector of the Cathedral of Toronto. There he was found, when Dr. Williams resigned, by the vestry of St. George's.

In these ten years of ministry, Mr. Rainsford showed the personal characteristics which have since become. familiar not only to the people of his parish, but to the religious world at large. He plunged into the midst of things with an apparent superabundance of physical energy, which, however, needed such occasional recuperation as could be had only in the wilderness. He had times of deep depression of spirit, from which he escaped by the stress and peril of the hunting of big game in the deep woods or in the high mountains. He was at the same time keenly sensitive to the criticism of adverse public opinion, and no less than reckless in the absolute independence of his thought and speech. Sometimes he preached well, and the church was crowded; sometimes, for weeks he says, he preached ill, and the congregation fell away. He needed, for his own strength and inspiration, to be positively certain; and there were times when the old evangelical doctrines which he had learned from his father and the new truths which were appealing to him in the great books of his time, and in the experience of daily life, seemed sadly out of accord. That contention

he was compelled to work out for himself with pain, and in the process he gave pain to others. When he felt a thing to be true, he said it in plain words without counting the consequences. And conservative people did not like it. Moreover, he had a temperamental objection to all hindering conventionalities; tested all forms and ceremonies by their effective value; had no interest in wornout machinery; and cared only for the thing that would work. He was in quest of results. There was a big freedom about him which frightened cautious persons. This was the man who became Rector of St. George's in 1883.

The most important contribution which Dr. Rainsford made to this parish-excepting, of course, the great gift of himself, which passes all estimation-was the contribution of a new method. He found a church trying to minister in the old way to new conditions, and he changed the way so as to fit the conditions. He compared the old St. George's to "a fisherman accustomed to earn his bread at catching herrings; presently the run of herrings goes away from that section of the sea; in their place comes a tremendous run of smelts. If the fisherman could change his net he would be a richer man than before, because smelts are better fish; but he starves because he cannot change the size of the meshes." Dr. Rainsford proceeded immediately to change the size of the meshes. The old methods had been adapted to the family, the new methods were adapted to the individual. The essential principle of the Institutional Church is in that change.

Dr. Rainsford agreed to undertake the rectorship on three conditions: first, the church must be made free; secondly, all committees, except the vestry, must be abolished; thirdly, there must be an appropriation of