Thursday, May 7, 2009

How the first Bishop of the Dakotas reacted to his election

In an address on the 15th anniversary of his consecration, William Hobart Hare said:

The news of my election was utterly unexpected, and fell upon me like a thunderbolt from a clear sky. The honor was almost too much for my small stock of virtue...

...and my conviction deepened that that department of the Church's enterprises can never be either relinquished or disparaged so long as "neighbor" means any one near or far off to whom we may do good, nor so long as the Church believes that her creation and her mission are not of man, but of God, and that her resources are not merely an aggregate of human agencies nor an aggregate of money collections only, but "the powers of the world to come."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could you imagine any of the bishop candidates saying something like this?

TLF+ said...

Nah, but that's no slam on them. Just think of the banal stuff our politicians say today, compared to Presidents up through, say, JFK. We've lost any sense of transcendent purpose and awe - we are well on the way to being "Europeans".