Friday, August 13, 2010

essay: Charles Chapman Grafton, Second Bishop of Fond du Lac


From The Living Church-

Charles Chapman Grafton was born on April 12, 1830, in Boston, Mass. He was an 1843 graduate of the Boston Latin School and earned a bachelor of laws degree from Harvard in 1853. During his adolescent and undergraduate years, Grafton was associated closely with the Tractarian beginnings of the Church of the Advent in its several earliest Boston locations. Persistent tradition says that the future bishop walked the nearly eight-mile roundtrip circuit to the Advent from his Harvard lodgings with great regularity.

After finishing his legal studies (and turning his back on a promising legal career) Grafton sought ordination under William Rollinson Whittingham (1805–79), an overlooked and gentle scholar who served as Bishop of Maryland for nearly four decades from 1840 to 1879. Whittingham ordained Grafton deacon in 1855 and priest in 1858; the young priest served in this Tractarian-friendly diocese at St. Paul’s Church, Baltimore, throughout the Civil War.

After his Maryland curacy, Grafton traveled to England to observe firsthand the changes taking place there in the wake of the Oxford Movement. His extended stay from 1865 to 1870 brought him into contact with a large number of Oxford Movement and Ritualist leaders, including E.B. Pusey, Alexander Penrose Forbes (“the Scottish Pusey”), T.T. Carter, H.P. Liddon, Richard Meux Benson, and John Mason Neale. He was also part of the beginnings of the Society of St. John the Evangelist — known more familiarly as the Cowley Fathers or SSJE — whose community life began in 1865 at Oxford.

More here-

http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2010/8/6/essay-charles-chapman-grafton-second-bishop-of-fond-du-lac

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