Book manuscript- (c) 2009 by William Sims Bainbridge

Three other organizations shared the building rent-free with the Mission Society: the Charity Organization Society, the Association for the Improving of the Condition of the Poor, and the Children’s Aid Society.⁵³³ They were able to rent extra space out, and the Mission Society received about two thousand dollars each year in the 1890s.⁵³⁴ The owner was a special United Charities corporation, directed by a board of nine managers consisting of Kennedy plus two representatives from each of the four organizations. To preserve the corporation’s non-sectarian charter, a further provision stipulated that a majority of its managers should never belong to the same religious denomination.

The Mission Society’s new offices were on the fourth floor. Schauffler rejoiced, “what a blessing the new rooms are. In the old rooms we had no place for privacy, and when pastors and directors and contributors came to see us, we had to receive them in the common office. Now we have a quiet room where we can speak in peace with all who come to the office on various business.”⁵³⁵

Lucy agreed: “The rooms of the Woman’s Branch in the Bible House were becoming far too narrow for the growing work of the Society. It was a busy place, and some days very much crowded. The worthy poor and distressed, the women who only wanted a little sewing to do, the half drunken who asked alms, the missionary who needed advice, and the friends who came with bundles of clothing or a welcome check, were sometimes very closely packed together. There was really no quiet corner for a confidential chat between officer and patron, minister and missionary. Yet the ‘104’ office teems with pleasant remembrances of cordial greetings and kindly faces and incidents of life which have strengthened faith in God.”⁵³⁶

Lucy’s new office on the fourth floor of the United Charities building was spacious, yet warm. The fireplace opposite the entrance boasted embossed iron lining, tiles like miniature bricks, ionic columns the breadth of a hand, tiers of ogive molding, two panels reminiscent of those on her desk, and an inset mirror. The mantel supported four small vases, two of Oriental design, plus a clock. Above it, a picture rail supported two glazed frames containing prints. To the right stood a two-level wooden cabinet and a short, square bookcase that rotated to reveal leather-bound volumes on all four sides. Beyond them, windows opening on the inside of the building could be opened for ventilation, or closed for privacy.⁵³⁷

To the left of the fireplace, set at an angle across the corner of the room, was Lucy’s roll-top desk with ten drawers, thirty cubby-holes, and two pull-out elbow extensions. Immediately to the left was a window looking out on the street, giving Lucy a marvelous vantage from which to watch the New York throngs and casting good light across the desk as she wrote her many letters. Pressed between the desk and the window was a wicker wastebasket that filled swiftly with spent envelopes. As she worked, Lucy sat with her back to the door, but her swivel chair could quickly turn when someone entered the room. Near it was a fine, wicker-backed rocker where a client or fellow Mission Society worker could rest while they conversed. Beneath all this furniture was a wide Persian carpet in rich floral design. At times, there would be living plants in the room, such as a pair of small, potted palms. Although comfortable for all her guests and hardly ostentatious, the room hinted that its occupant was not only a person of substance but a citizen of the world.

Incurable Obsession
Meanwhile, back in Wilmington, Lucy’s estranged husband pursued his scholarship, drawing gradually farther from the world of money, social status, and family relationships. The Delaware Avenue Baptist Church seemed content to have him work half-time for little pay as its temporary “supply” and never invited him to become its regular minister. He often took the train eighty miles to Baltimore to consult obscure volumes in the library of Johns Hopkins University.

At first he boarded at 405 West 10th Street in the home of W. S. Carswell, a morocco shaver for one of the many leather-goods factories in the city.⁵³⁸ Wilmington was world-famous for its leather industry, notably the fine morocco employed in book bindings, and the hides came all the way from Asia and South America.⁵³⁹ After some months he moved a short distance to 1123 West Street, near the church which was on the corner of West Street and Delaware Avenue. There he boarded with John Evans, a machinist for the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad.⁵⁴⁰

Several Sunday afternoons in 1893, William lectured once again about the Holy Land, injecting a strong dose of linguistics. The first talk was about the Tower of Babel, and he advised those planning to attend to study the tenth through thirteenth chapters of Genesis beforehand: “The tenth chapter of Genesis, generally considered uninteresting, is full of geographical information. Thus Elam was Assyrian for ‘high,’ meaning the highlands on the east of Babylonia. Arphaxad was Chaldea, and Aram signifies the Aramaeans whose language supplanted the Assyrian and Hebrew, in turn giving place to the Arabic. Ca-dimira, ‘the gate of God,’ the old Sumerian name of Babel from probably the local temple gate of justice, around which the city expanded, subsequently became wonderfully true to history throughout the world, but to the Hebrew and Assyrian translations there attached another meaning ‘confusion,’ as the common Shemite word had or acquired a double etymology. Cuneiform evidence is increasing that this was the ‘Tower of Tongues.’ It tells of ‘a mound’ built by those who ‘were evil,’ and who were ‘confounded in their speech.’

“In a recently found inscription Nebuchadnezzar speaks of repairing and completing this ‘most ancient monument,’ adding an unmistakable reference to the confusion of tongues, ‘Since a remote time people had abandoned it, without order expressing their words.’”⁵⁴¹

In his second talk, William recounted his visits to the Dead Sea and the Cave of Machpeleh, incidentally offering his listeners a strange observation on the modern languages of the area: “We are reminded every day that the language of Oriental courtesy is very profuse with complimentary terms and religious references. To western ears it sounds very profane and blasphemous. It is well that the ordinary traveler is entirely unacquainted with Arabic, Turkish and Persian, for thus he escapes an almost incredible amount of profanity and obscenity.”

In the destruction of the cities of the plain,⁵⁴² William found scientific truth. The Lord rained fire and brimstone down upon Sodom and Gomorrah; brimstone is sulfur, and the word means burning stone. Truly, the sands around the Dead Sea burn, and the sea itself is the thickest brine. When Lot’s wife looked back, she became a pillar of salt, and William commented, “It is easy to believe that in this neighborhood the lingering wife of Lot could have been suffocated, and then quickly so incrusted as to be ‘a pillar of salt.’”⁵⁴³

This series of well-publicized lectures, augmented by Sunday-morning travelogue sermons like “From Eden to Patmos,” marked the end of William’s service at Delaware Avenue. As his son would later explain, “He had an overpowering ambition to write a book which would trace the use of all the terms used in the Bible not only back to their derivation but also in their ramification in various languages and in their various shades of meaning; one element of his preparation for this monumental work was the ability to read eleven languages.”⁵⁴⁴

At the close of services one Sunday in November, he read a letter to the congregation that began, “God has graciously enabled me to lead you out of a heavy debt of $20,000, but he does not appear to me to require that I should accompany you again into debt.” Six months earlier, the New York stock market had crashed, ushering in the Panic of 1893 that was to stretch into a severe, four-year economic depression.⁵⁴⁵ By now, major railroads had failed, employment had soared while industrial production plummeted.. William said his scholarship was “very pressing work upon my hands,” and he did not want to be a burden. “May these trying financial times brighten with all of you soon, and then may God give you a pastor, whose time can all be devoted to your service, and whose support you may be able to provide with a reasonable amount of the always needed and best self-sacrifice.”⁵⁴⁶ Just five months later when the depression was at its greatest depth, the church did hire one.

Ironically, just as William was about to abandon his only means of financial support, he told the congregation to remember the motto, “Never any more church debt.” He noted that he had never been officially called to the pastorship, so there was no need for a formal resignation. But he had been connected to the church for more than three years, rather a long time for a mere “supply.”

The Wilmington afternoon newspaper, Every Evening, sarcastically titled its article about his departure, “So Pastoral Supply and Delaware Avenue Baptist Church Part Company, But Are Still the Best of Friends.” When its reporter interviewed an anonymous church official, however, it could find no dirt and was blandly told, “We are very sorry to lose Dr. Bainbridge. We all appreciate him. You know that it is through his instrumentality the tremendous debt of Delaware Avenue Baptist Church has been wiped out.” The other daily paper, The Morning News, tried to find scandal in the church’s debts, but the treasurer quickly squelched that story, proclaiming that the outstanding debt was only $400, and church subscriptions not only covered that small sum easily but permitted prompt payment of all bills in the future.⁵⁴⁷ So far as Wilmington knew, William departed on perfect terms with the church, to assume unspecified similar duties elsewhere.

Two weeks after announcing his intentions, and one week before his resignation was to take effect, William represented Delaware Avenue at the Delaware Baptist Union held in the chapel at Wilmington’s Second Baptist Church. He lectured for the thousandth time on Bible lands, explaining that such a tour could teach religious principles. Professor M. G. Evans was not impressed, ridiculing the “inductive method” of teaching Sunday schools, which employed examples to make points indirectly. The right way to teach Sunday school was to make the students memorize passages from scripture.

William rose in anger, saying, “I desire to enter here my protest against the mere caricature of the inductive method presented this afternoon. The inductive method is the judgment of our best educators.” Proving he had done some memorizing of his own, William cited several biblical passages about being born again, asking if they did not teach the new birth inductively. But several other clergy came to Evans’ defense, and none supported William.

He left Wilmington and returned to 160 Prospect Place in Brooklyn, which remained his base of operations for the rest of the decade. Abandoning pastoral work altogether, he wandered from one great library to another collecting information on the names of places and tribes in the Bible. His books of the 1880s receded ever further into the past, and with her monthly magazine column Lucy was rapidly outpublishing her estranged husband. Already in 1891 when John Foster Kirk complied a list of American authors, Lucy had earned a secure place in literature, but William’s writings escaped notice.⁵⁴⁸
Analysis
It is widely assumed that religion not only comforts sufferers but also upholds morality and transforms converts. These assumptions are theoretically important, because social control and religious conversion raise the fundamental issues of how human desires are channelled into particular patterns of behavior and how that behavior may be influenced to change. A person who abides by the moral rules of his or her culture is a good exchange partner within the context of the surrounding society, who provides rewards to other people and does not inflict unfair costs on them. If religion can actually save people, on this mundane plane of existence as well as in the supernatural realm, then it not only comforts people for the costs they must endure, but also improves individuals and communities so that they are able to sustain a much higher level of exchange of rewards. However, systematic research on these issues is hard to find.

In 1928, sociologists Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May reported a staistical analysis suggesting that Sunday school attenders were no less likely than other children to be delinquent. In 1969, Travis Hirschi and Rodney Stark, applying more modern techniques to a massive survey of school children, failed to find the expected negative correlation between juvenile delinquency and a variety of measures of religiosity. However, a number of studies published beginning in the 1960s showed inconsistent results. Using datasets from several regions of the United States, Stark subsequently discovered that religion can deter some kinds of delinquency, but only in communities where church attendance is high and faith can combine with social forces to discourage deviant behavior. Several studies indicate that religion has no capacity to prevent homicide or other violent outbursts, but even without the support of a religious community it can guide people away from personally dangerous hedonistic acts such as alcohol drinking, illegal drug use, and unrestrained sex. Other studies suggest that religion had real power to deter suicide decades ago, but there is some evidence this power has eroded recently.⁵⁴⁹

Research about religious conversion indicates that people join a new religious organization chiefly under the influence of friends, relatives or other exchange partners, rather than doing so because of a deep, emotional experience of spiritual transformation. Such experiences do occur, chiefly because they are expected of members of many high-tension religious movements, but they may not correlate with significant changes in a person's pattern of behavior. Naturally, people often want religion to give them new personalities and patterns of behavior, but religious regeneration may often be a compensator of illusory change rather than the reward of personal transformation itself.⁵⁵⁰

More research is needed, but apparently the power of religion to uphold morality and transform people depends upon social factors that vary across communities and across categories of behavior. There is little evidence that individuals who call upon the Lord to help them live moral lives are in fact more likely to succeed than those who do not call upon His aid. An atheist might take this as evidence that God does not exist. We do not need to go that far. Rather, the admittedly limited research evidence helps us make sense of the Mission Society's priorities over a century ago. In their work, the missionaries had learned the hard lesson that reform of degenerates hardly ever occurred. From a religious perspective, salvation is a miracle that mere humans cannot make happen.

One reason that David Ranney was so famous was that his case was practically unique. The extensive records of the Mission Society from this period reveal no other case of spectacular character reform. Undoubtedly some individuals abandoned marginally criminal lifestyles for respectability when conventional employment and stable membership in the community were offered them. One standard success story, as revealed by Lucy's casebook, is of a respectable person who is betrayed by wicked people or beaten down by fate, but who then regains stable economic and social status after receiving practical help from the Mission Society. The other standard success story is of a respectable person who thankfully receives comfort from the Mission Soiety as he or she dies or otherwise succombs to bitter fate.⁵⁵¹

There is good reason to believe that the hope and comfort provided by Lucy's missionaries helped immigrants endure their poverty until acculturation, good luck, and hard work allowed them to construct rewarding lives. Medical care provided by Lucy's nurses, augmented by some food and instruction on how to prepare nutritious meals on meager budgets, undoubtedly saved lives and provided many people the strength to work. In a few cases, the Mission Society found foster homes for children and jobs or spouces for adults. David Ranney gained the unusual career of inspirational ex-criminal. We know the backgrounds of some of Lucy's missionaries, and they were respectable middle-class ladies before joining the Mission Society.⁵⁵² Some were widows and most were unmarried, so they valued their jobs for the pay they provided as well as for the spiritual fulfillment.

For Lucy, the Mission Society provided the only alternative to poverty, in the early 1890s before her son was ready to support her. The constant stream of writing that flowed from her pen in the 1880s and 1890s reveal no hint of a personal transformation. She gained confidence from success in the first paid job of her life, and the great respect she received from clients and co-workers assuaged the shame of her broken marriage, but the income from her employment allowed her to continue her lifestyle rather than revolutionize it.

Her husband seems to have been a man ruined by religion rather than saved by it, although his family was extremely loathe to accept this interpretation. In the middle of the nineteenth century, psychiatry believed that intense religion could cause madness, and six percent of American mental patients in 1860 were diagnosed as suffering from "religious insanity."⁵⁵³ By the 1890s, however, the dominent theory held that insanity was a neurological weakness, often inherited, that might manifest itself in abnormal religious interests or in maifold other ways. Thus, psychiatry of the 1890s absolved religion altogether of responsibility for madness, whereas the psychiatry of three decades earlier held that madness was caused only by deviant forms of religion, such as spiritualism or emotionally intense revival movements.

The brand of religion that stresses mass revival and personal regeneration is relatively high in tension with the surrounding socio-cultural environment — sects and sect-like denominations serving relatively low-status congregations like Lucy's own Baptists. For such people, salvation from sin equates with upward social mobility. The Mission Society was extremely low in tension, supported by a few rich families and a collection of prosperous churches. They offered the poor immigrants of Lower New York the hope of climbing up into the middle class. Since many of the immigrants were well-disciplined, intelligent people, this promise was often fulfilled.

Chapter 8:

Her Strong Staff
In the summers, the wealthy patrons of the Mission Society left the steaming city, and Lucy herself continued to visit Chautauqua. The 1892 session centered on a great National Pageant to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the Voyage of Columbus. Six thousand people crowded the amphitheater to hear chorus and orchestra perform national airs and to see ten historical tableaus. As if to express his vast ambitions, her son took the role of Columbus. Will's costume was a mass of robes, an irregular ruffled collar that flowed down the front of his herringbone vest, and a huge wig. Underneath he wore his Pilgrim costume for a later tableau, consisting of a black coat with a more regular white collar and a vast square belt buckle with matching buckled shoes.⁵⁵⁴

Chautauqua was rich in physical exercise programs through which Will could develop iron determination. Two hundred and fifty persons entered the cycling school, the corpulent ones to lose weight and the scrawny ones to gain it. Women fenced and rowed boats, men hurled the shot and the hammer, both sexes did gymnastics, and Alonzo Stagg organized a baseball team. One hundred and sixty, including Will, took a course to become trainers of physical exercise. All thousand participants underwent physical exams by Dr. Mosher and Dr. Seaver, to make sure they were prepared for the strenuous workouts and to detect any deformities that might need special attention. Will studied the equipment in Seaver’s anthropometry laboratory: calipers, scales, dynamometers, and templates to trace the contours of spines.⁵⁵⁵ Lucy needed Will to be her strong staff, and he strained to measure up. He was tall, developed an enormous chest, and learned to thrust it up and out, as he pulled his shoulders back into the most imposing posture.

In 1893, Will earned his M.D. degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia. The setback from typhoid was well behind him, and he tied for first place in a competitive examination of eighty-nine candidates from eight colleges seeking hospital internships. For two and a half years he interned at Presbyterian Hospital, then briefly interned at Sloane Maternity Hospital where he studied gynecology. He studied physical diagnosis at Roosevelt Hospital, and did a year of post-graduate study in pathology and bacteriology at Columbia.⁵⁵⁶ Will worked to the absolute limits of his endurance, and this became the habit of his professional lifetime.

Lucy moved to 787 Park Avenue in Manhattan, while her son lived practically around the corner at 41 East 70th Street.⁵⁵⁷ Separated from her husband, she was very sensitive about being considered a respectable married lady. Whenever her photograph was taken, she carefully posed so her wedding ring would show clearly.⁵⁵⁸ She signed her articles in the monthly magazine, “Mrs. Lucy S. Bainbridge, editor.” But in her private accounts book she wrote simply “L. S. Bainbridge,” while always writing “Miss” or “Mrs.” before the names of other ladies.

The Woman's Branch
In an age when infection killed many in the prime of life, the Woman’s Branch was bound to experience death within its own ranks every few months. In 1893, Miss Adelia A. Hitchcock was third most senior of the missionaries and nurses. A college graduate, she had taught Greek at the college level and for several years had been superintendent of the high school in Warsaw, Indiana. She came to New York for missionary work in 1878, and her faith was so strong that “as she talked of her Lord, the very image of the Divine shone from her face.”⁵⁵⁹ Suddenly, she felt a sharp pain in her side. After resting a few days she said, “I have been working perhaps a little too fast, and God saw I needed to take time for more thought and trust in Him. After next Sunday I will be ready to do all my work.”⁵⁶⁰ But she descended deeper into exhaustion, coughing, fever. In delirium she begged to return to missionary work, and then she was gone.⁵⁶¹

In the same year, Lucy announced that Miss Libbie MacLean was expecting to die shortly. “We do miss her face and fellowship, and the poor and suffering miss her sympathy and help, but we rejoice that she is daily nearing the bounds of this life, and will soon meet her Savior face to face, and hear His own voice say, ‘Well done.’”⁵⁶²

Two months later, Libbie’s sister wrote Lucy: “She looked up with a smile a few hours before her death, saying, ‘I have no fear, not even of the passage,’ and when I whispered as the eyes grew dim, ‘Underneath are the everlasting arms,’ her face lit up as she replied, ‘O yes, I feel them, I am resting in them.’”⁵⁶³

Later, Lucy was “in great sorrow over the illness of one of our youngest workers, Miss Carrie A. Butler.” Critically ill with pneumonia, Miss Butler was rushed to Presbyterian Hospital, where fellow worker E. F. Mollan was already languishing with an apparently incurable illness.⁵⁶⁴ A few days later, Lucy wrote, “After only two weeks of sickness, a brief struggle with pneumonia, and our bright, busy, young missionary, Miss Carrie A. Butler, was welcomed into the presence of Him to whom she had been trying to lead hundreds of little children.”⁵⁶⁵ Lucy treasured a handsome photographic portrait of the young woman, later publishing it both in the monthly magazine and the annual report. The funeral services were held at DeWitt Memorial Church, with the coffin open, and Lucy again gazed into the face of death.