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in Christianity

Bishop

Being the Paddock Lectures for 1901-02

By

ALFRED MAGILL RANDOLPH, D.D., LL.D.
Bishop of Southern Virginia

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Preface

THESE lectures on the relations between Reason, Faith, and Authority, were delivered before the students and professors in the chapel of the General Theological Seminary in New York in December, 1901, and February, 1902.

They are published under the conditions prescribed in the Paddock Foundation. Portions omitted for want of time when they were delivered, appear in the printed Lectures.

A few notes are appended developing some important principles compressed into sentences in the text. I have also introduced in the Lectures, and especially in the notes, extracts from masters of style and luminous thinking, to call the attention of the younger generation of the clergy to books which may be helpful, educative and inspiring. The constant pressure of the pulpit for literary production may lead to the formation of the habit of slipshod methods of expression as well as crudities of thought. For intelligent laymen, as well as for the clergy, time is too short for communion through books with any but the best minds.

While I am writing this prefatory note the intelligence reaches me of the death of Dr. Eugene Augustus Hoffmann, for twenty-two years the Dean of the Seminary. That Seminary with its noble buildings, library and equipment, is in great degree a monument to his unstinted generosity, his laborious fidelity, his practical abilities, his love of the beautiful, and above all, his consecration to Christ and to His church.

The responsibility of the generation of clergy, educated under his administration, for his example and the spiritual influence of his simplicity and godly sincerity, I can only estimate by my own experience as a guest in his home. May God bless his memory and keep it green.

THE

BISHOP PADDOCK LECTURES.

IN the summer of the year 1880, GEORGE A. JARVIS, of Brooklyn, N. Y., moved by his sense of the great good which might thereby accrue to the cause of CHRIST, and to the Church of which he was an ever-grateful member, gave to the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church certain securities, exceeding in value eleven thousand dollars, for the foundation and maintenance of a Lectureship in said seminary.

Out of love for a former pastor and enduring friend, the Right Rev. Benjamin Henry Paddock, D.D., Bishop of Massachusetts, he named the foundation "THE BISHOP PADDOCK LECTURESHIP."

The deed of trust declares that,—

"The subjects of the lectures shall be such as appertain to the defense of the religion of JESUS CHRIST, as revealed in the Holy Bible, and illustrated in the Book of Common Prayer, against the varying errors of the day, whether materialistic, rationalistic, or professedly religious, and also to its defense and confirmation in respect of such central truths as the Trinity, the Atonement, Justification, and the Inspiration of the Word of God; and of such central facts as the Church's Divine Order and Sacraments, her historical Reformation, and her rights and powers as a pure and national Church. And other subjects may be chosen if unanimously approved by the Board of Appointment as being both timely and also within the true intent of this lectureship."

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