Sermons on the Failure of Protestantism, and on Catholicity
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This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Ferdinand Cartwright Ewer was a Episcopal clergyman and a prolific author.
Background
Ferdinand Cartwright Ewer was born on May 22, 1826, on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, the son of a well-to-do Nantucket Island ship-owner, Peter Folger Ewer, by his second wife, Mary Cartwright. When he was three years old the family moved to Providence, Rhode Island, and in 1834 to New York.
Education
At the age of ten he was sent to the school of Charles G. Green at Jamaica Plain, Mass. , and two years later, to one conducted by James B. Thompson in Nantucket. Here he remained, except for a winter in Providence, until he entered Harvard in 1844.
Career
In the meantime financial reverses had befallen his father, and to gain a livelihood Ferdinand took up civil engineering. Ewer joined the California gold rush of 1849, not, he says, because he had the fever for gold, but because he desired not to starve. Finding little to do as an engineer, he drifted into journalism, and for ten years he was prominent as a pioneer editor, vigilante, member of the San Francisco board of education, and finally as a clergyman.
For a short time Ewer edited the Pacific News, said to have been the first Democratic newspaper on the coast, but he soon became part proprietor and editor of the Sacramento Transcript, the first triweekly in the interior. This failed because of a strike of the printers, who started a rival publication, and returning to San Francisco, he established a weekly paper, The Sunday Dispatch, which also failed.
An appointment in 1853 as warehouse clerk in the custom-house, together with reportorial work, insured him a comfortable living, and in 1854, with William H. Brooks, he founded The Pioneer, the earliest California literary magazine, which he edited during its short lifetime. Benjamin Congdon was among the first writers to recognize the ability and promise of Edwin Booth, then having indifferent success in California, an assistance which the latter in after years gratefully acknowledged.
In 1854 he published in The Pioneer, "The Eventful Nights of August 20th and 216t, " professing to be an account of the death of one John F. Lane, and of certain spiritual communications received from him by the writer. Although intended merely as a piece of imaginative literature, it turned out to be a grand hoax, since spiritualists all over the country, including Judge J. W. Edmonds of New York, accepted it as true and made much of it. Throughout this period his interest in the subject of religion continued, and though at first aggressively infidel, the reading of Cousin’s Psychology finally started him on a course of thought which resulted in his reconversion to Christianity.
On January 17, 1858, Ewer was ordained priest and became rector of Grace Church, San Francisco. Returning East because of. ill health in 1860, he was assistant to Dr. Gallaudet at St. Ann’s Church for deaf mutes, New York, until 1862, when he became rector of Christ Church. While preaching in the Church of St. John the Evangelist, Montreal, October 7, 1883, Ewer suffered a cerebral hemorrhage from which he died on October 10, 1883.
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Religion
From his earliest days the subject of religion was uppermost in his mind. His parents were Unitarian Quakers, but as a child the ritual of the 23 Episcopal Church appealed to him, and convinced of the validity of that church’s claims by a precocious study of theological literature, he became a communicant shortly before he entered college. There, however, his reading of German authors and the Unitarian influences of Boston destroyed his faith in the plenary inspiration of the Bible, and he became an infidel.
Views
He was zealously Anglo-Catholic, and wrote much in support of Anglo-Catholicism. A series of sermons preached in 1868 and published the following year under the title of Sermons on the Failure of Protestantism and on Catholicity, attracted much attention and aroused hostility. By “Protestantism” he meant the repudiation of the historic Church, the rejection of the divine polity and apostolic ministry, the substitution of the Bible as an authority, and the assertion of the unlimited right of private interpretation and judgment. The overthrow of Protestantism within the Episcopal Church and without he regarded as the great need of the hour, and he hoped for the ultimate reunion of the Roman, Greek, and Episcopal Churches, each purged of its errors. The Sermons, together with his introduction of certain ritualistic practises, made trouble for him in his church, and he resigned in 1871. Sympathizers then organized the Church of St. Ignatius of which he was rector until his death. In 1878 he delivered a series of discourses in Newark, New Jersey, in which his ability as a theologian and controversialist are well illustrated. They appeared in printed form the same year, Catholicity in Its Relationship to Protestantism and Romanism. In them he attempted to show the skeptic why he should be a Christian rather than an infidel or Unitarian; a Catholic rather than a Protestant; and an Anglo-Catholic rather than a Roman Catholic.
Membership
Ferdinand Cartwright Ewer was a member of the San Francisco board of education.
Personality
His oratorical powers at once drew large congregations; his varied experiences gave him ability to deal with all classes; and his engaging personal qualities made him widely popular.
Connections
On December 9, 1854, Ferdinand C. Ewer married Sophia Mandell Congdon, daughter of Benjamin Congdon of New Bedford.