VOL. LXXIV.

No. 11

A

William Hobart Hare

FTER thirty-seven years of conspicuous service in the episcopate the late Bishop of South Dakota was called to his reward on Saturday, October 23d. Simplicity, sincerity and sympathy were the qualities which made him a man truly beloved. To these were added a noble example of cheerful courage under weakness and suffering, and a fine faith, which made men feel that in looking upon his life they had seen a goodly and gracious revelation of power and peace.

William Hobart Hare was born in Princeton, N. J., in 1838, and was educated at the University of Pennsylvania. Ordained deacon in 1859 at the earliest age possible, he was compelled to wait three years before he reached the requisite age for admission to the priesthood. He was assistant at St. Luke's Church, Philadelphia, and afterward rector of St. Paul's, Chestnut Hill, and for six years was in charge of the Church of the Ascension, Philadelphia.

In 1870 he was chosen as the General Agent of the Foreign Committee of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society. At that time the work now carried on by the various secretaries was discharged by two men, one being secretary of the Domestic, and the other of the Foreign, Committee. Bishop Hare

held this position for three years, during which time he was elected Missionary Bishop of Cape Palmas. Confirmation of this election was refused by the House of Deputies on the ground that he could render more effective service to the Church as a missionary secretary than as a bishop in Africa.

however,

In 1872, Bishop of it having been deNiobrara termined to provide in a more adequate way for the Santee Indians and the Sioux, who had been driven out of Minnesota after the disturbances of 1863 and who largely settled in what is now the State of South Dakota, the House of Bishops elected as the first Bishop of Niobrara the young secretary of the Foreign Committee. He was consecrated on January 9th, 1873, and thus became the only bishop ever elected by this Church to have oversight of Indians alone.

Great was the regret among his friends when Bishop Hare went to his distant and difficult post. He was distinctly a man of fineness and cultivation, one who seemed peculiarly fitted to meet the demands of an intricate and highly organized civilization. Of scholarly tastes, and in the best sense a man of the world-because also a man of another world-many of his friends felt

that he had been sacrificed in being thus chosen. Indeed, there is record of one who, in coming out from the session where his nomination had been made, exclaimed, "This is the mistake which the Church is always making! She sets her finest men to her commonest work. She is continually using a razor to split kindling!"

There was some excuse, doubtless, for this feeling. Both in physique and in training Bishop Hare seemed scarcely equipped for the hardships of frontier life among a wandering and alien people. Yet how his record of work confuted the predictions of his sad-hearted friends! From the beginning he became, indeed, the father in God of his red children, and the history of his service to them is one of the great pages in the record of the Church's missionary achievement.

On arriving at his jurisdiction the new bishop found that in the area of 80,000 square miles which his field included there were in all nine stations and two sub-stations. These he set out to visit, travelling in frontier fashion over the broad expanse of the prairies. Sitting on a roll of shawls by the side of his little tent, as his Indians were making a camp for the night, he wrote to some friends in the East: "There is not a human being except our own little party within forty miles. The sun has just gone down. The twilight is fast creeping on. There is no sound except the howling of a pack of prairie wolves. It is a time to think, and thinking, my thoughts turn to you, and it occurs to me that you will want to hear of the Indian schools which you are helping to support."

the things that make for comfort and happiness in a home. Therefore he immediately opened a school where girls might learn to be the sort of women who make happy Christian homes. Other schools followed as the work enlarged. He tried to make the atmosphere of these schools that of a Christian home, and in every way by precept and example to increase the happiness and guard the sanctity of home life. From these schools have come hundreds of young Indian women, now mothers in homes whose life is sanctified by the knowledge and presence of the Christ. From them, too, have come most of the Indian clergy and lay helpers, whose earnest ministry to their own people is one of the most convincing evidences of the power of the Gospel to transform, inspire and make faithful in service the men of even a pagan people.

The same wise instinct led him to establish All Saints' School, Sioux Falls, in the part of his diocese where the white people lived. Here scores of young women from all the surrounding country have been trained in the graces of Christian womanhood. Daughters of brave pioneer clergy, of army officers and of the hardy men who have made South Dakota a great and prosperous state have been fitted as they could not otherwise have been for service in the home, the commonwealth and the Church. They have been elevating moral forces in many a place. They have carried the Church into new communities. They have been a blessing to the life of the state. A builder of homes for others, Bishop Hare, because of the early death of his wife, knew but little of home life himself. Since 1884 a small apartment in All Saints' has been the place, and the school the family, to which he returned for rest from his journeys by wagon over the prairies or by rail to the smaller towns. It was this same conviction of the supreme importance of the home, not only to the Church, but to the nation, that inspired his fight against the divorce evil so strongly entrenched in the state.