(Excerpt from The Bible and Life
Inasmuch as future lectu...)
Excerpt from The Bible and Life
Inasmuch as future lecturers on the Men denhall Foundation may not have had the privilege of personal acquaintance with the founder, it is doubtless good that this first volume may record the outlines of his life and character. Marmaduke H. Mendenhall was born at Guilford, North Carolina, May 13, 1836. He died at Union City, Indiana, October 9, 1905. He was the son of Himelius and Priscilla Mendenhall, who, when their son was about one year old, came northward and settled near Peru, Indiana. Doctor Men denhall did not suggest in manner or bear ing that he was Southern born. Had one chosen to judge of his birthplace by the man himself, one would have said that he was a typical son of New England. His deeper self was typified by his personal ap pearance. He was tall, stately, dignified, serious, earnest.
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(Excerpt from A Boy's Religion
The reader will please bea...)
Excerpt from A Boy's Religion
The reader will please bear in mind that the writer has not sought to produce a scholarly and scientific treatise. That side of the general subject has stimulated much recent writing; and just now there is small need that additions be made either.
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(Excerpt from Thanksgiving Sermons
The author is aware th...)
Excerpt from Thanksgiving Sermons
The author is aware that Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday. In some form it has existed in the nation almost from the beginning. In 1621 Governor Bradford made provision for a day Of rejoicing after the gathering Of the first harvest by the New England colonists. In 1623 a drought prevailed, and a day of fasting was ap pointed. The rain came while prayers were rising, and the day was promptly changed to one of thanksgiving. The governors of the colonies fixed the custom for our people. During the Revolutionary War, Congress annually recommended a day Of thanksgiv ing. In 1864 President Lincoln sent forth a proclamation for a national thanksgiving, and the example of the Great Commoner has been followed by all of his successors in the Presidency.
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Edwin Holt Hughes was a Methodist Episcopal bishop.
Background
Edwin was born in Moundsville, West Virginia, in 1866. He the third son and third of six children of Thomas Bayless Hughes and Louisa (Holt) Hughes. His father's forebears were Welshmen who had farmed in the Great Valley of Virginia since the eighteenth century; the Holts descended from English settlers of Virginia's Northern Neck. Reflecting the divided sentiments of western Virginia before the Civil War, the Hughes family generally defended slavery and advocated secession, while the Holts supported abolition and union. Thomas Hughes (1836 - 1918) broke family traditions: he favored freedom for the slaves, and at the age of twenty-one he forsook farming to enter the Methodist ministry. Because of the Methodist itinerant system, the family moved often.
Education
Edwin received only sporadic elementary schooling, although he did have two years in the "prep department" of West Virginia University. In 1883 he was sent to Ohio Wesleyan College; but in 1885 his family removed to Iowa and he transferred to Grinnell College, where he was admitted as a sophomore. By 1886 Hughes had become convinced that he too should become a minister. He left college that year to serve as supply pastor for a small Methodist church at Madison, Iowa, but returned in 1887 to Ohio Wesleyan, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and from which he graduated in 1889. Since his chief extracurricular activity had long been "declamation, " in May 1889 he easily won an interstate oratorical contest, prompting an Ohio banker and Wesleyan trustee, Morris Sharp, to offer him financial support for seminary study. After serving a summer pastorate at Marengo, Iowa, Hughes enrolled in the School of Theology at Boston University and, upon his graduation in 1892, was ordained into the Methodist ministry.
Bishop Holt was honored with such degrees by Ohio Wesleyan, Wesleyan University, Norwich University, Boston University, the University of Rochester, Florida Southern College, Dickinson College, the University of Southern California, and DePauw University.
Career
He settled into the parsonage of the Methodist church in Newton Centre, Massachussets, where Hughes served from 1892 to 1896. Then he was appointed to the strongest Methodist church in New England, in Malden, Massachussets, for what became a ministry of seven years. In 1903 he was elected to the presidency of DePauw University, in Greencastle, Ind. The school was then bordering on bankruptcy. Refusing to accept any more salary than he had received in the pastorate, Hughes worked so hard to save DePauw that his weight dropped from 151 to 120 pounds in the first year. But save the school he did – and in the process earned appointment to the State Board of Education and the board of trustees of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. As president of the Indiana State Teachers' Association in 1904 he helped secure a state minimum-wage law for teachers.
In 1908 the Methodist Episcopal Church elected Hughes as one of its bishops. For the remainder of his active ministry he exercised his considerable administrative talents in four diverse and widely separated areas: San Francisco, 1908-1916; Boston, 1916-1924; Chicago, 1924-1932; and Washington, D. C. , 1932-1940. Responding to many calls, he preached on more than fifty college campuses; held lectureships at six colleges and universities; ministered in war camps (1917 - 1919); served as trustee for four colleges; as acting president for Boston University (1923); as acting chancellor for American University (1933); and traveled as fraternal delegate to Methodist conferences in Ireland, England, Norway, and Finland. As chairman of the Conference Courses of Study Commission (1916 - 1940), he helped provide educational opportunities for thousands of Methodist ministers who lacked seminary training.
Fulfilling a total abstinence pledge made at age eleven, he worked with several state antisaloon groups and served as president of the Methodist Board of Temperance (1932 - 1940). He played a leading role in producing The Methodist Hymnal (1935), which included a revised ritual and new responsive readings for public worship. The climax of Hughes's career came when as senior bishop (since 1936) of his denomination he saw the Methodist Protestant Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, reunited with the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1939. The Methodist Protestants had separated in 1828 in a dispute over lay representation in General Conference, and the Southerners in 1844 because of the unresolved issue of slavery. Long years of war, Reconstruction, and recrimination had left a legacy of bitterness that tentative efforts toward reconciliation had failed to overcome. Hughes remembered with sorrow the antebellum divisions that had reached into his own family, and in his mature years the healing of Methodist rifts became an overpowering concern.
From 1922 onward he served almost continuously on various commissions seeking unification and spoke with increasing urgency on the need to bring Methodists back together. He won the confidence of all three branches, so that a fellow bishop wrote, "The Hughes oratory was the largest single personal force from the northern church in creating the sentiment for the unification movement in Methodism" (McConnell, pp. 247-248). With Hughes as prime mover, a Plan of Union was formulated, which the Northern church approved in 1936. Two years later Hughes went as fraternal delegate, along with President James H. Straughn of the Methodist Protestant Church, to the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, meeting under the leadership of its senior bishop, John H. Moore. After the Southerners had approved the plan, Hughes, Straughn, and Moore clasped hands and posed for a photograph that quickly became one of the most famous symbols of American Methodism. When the formal Uniting Conference was held in Kansas City in April 1939, Hughes presided and closed the historic session with a moving address on the theme "Methodists are one people. "
Hughes retired in 1940 but remained active. He was recalled to become temporary bishop of the Washington (D. C. ) Area in 1943 and of the Wisconsin Area in 1947. While lecturing in Muncie, Ind. , in January 1950, he became ill with viral pneumonia. Returning to Washington, D. C. , he entered Sibley Hospital, where he died two weeks later. Memorial services were conducted at Foundry Methodist Church, and afterward his body was carried to Greencastle, Ind. , for interment on the campus of DePauw University alongside that of his wife, who had died in 1938.
Achievements
He is remembered as an American Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, elected in 1908. Among his literary works are Letters on Evangelism (New York, 1906), Thanksgiving Sermons (1909), The Teaching of Citizenship (1909), A Boy's Religion (1914), The Bible and Life (1914).
