"he hopes eventually to write a biography of Dr. Halsey"

c. 1962

“The saint in overalls”

-->

25 May 1912 | Brooklyn Daily Eagle

-->

The Rev. Jesse Halsey of St. Anthony’s, Labrador, one of Dr. W. T. Grenfell’s right-hand men, is just now on a visit to New York in the interests of the Grenfell mission. After a ten days run with the dogs he reached the coast and sailed for Boston in a small sailing craft, arriving there three weeks ago. He departs again in a few days for Labrador. Mr. Halsey, after two years in Princeton, graduated from Union Theological Seminary in 1910. He distinguished himself in his theological course and had excellent opportunities for work in the States, many influential Presbyterian pulpits being open to him. He elected, however, to go to Labrador. Here he has done “a man’s work,” not only doing the usual duties of pastor and preacher, but donning his overalls and working whenever occasion required as carpenter, plumber, and odd-jobber. “The saint in overalls” is the name bywhich he is known by his Labrador colleagues. Mr. Halsey is married and has one child. He will preach on Sunday for the Rev. Gwilym O. Griffith of the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church, who was a fellow student of his at Princeton. On Sunday evening he will give an illustrated address on the work of the Grenfell mission.

Christian Reunion: Modern denomination is the light of the Christian ideal

16 April 1910 | Brooklyn Daily Eagle

"Mr. Halsey will enter Princeton University in the fall"

24 June 1902 | Brooklyn Daily Eagle

"My father used to sit and read the dictionary by the hour."

My father used to sit and read the dictionary by the hour. As a boy I could never understand it, but I do now. He was one of the original subscribers of the Standard Dictionary, paying five dollars in advance and when it was impossible to publish at that price sending in the second five. As I say, he used to read it by the hour. I never learned the dia-critical marking, new style, and have always stuck to a Webster. In college days my roommate talked me into buying a Standard. This I did, floundered around with the pronunciation and wished I had a Webster. At the same time the president of our college, Woodrow Wilson, had bought a Webster. This he did not like, wanting a Standard. He mentioned the fact one day in a preceptorial division and I offered to exchange. We made an even trade, as I remember. This was in 1908. I have often wondered if his war speeches were abetted by my dictionary. His, I used, up ‘til 1918 when it was stolen out of my study. I hope the appropriator found Mr. Wilson’s name in it, ‘though I doubt if that was the reason it was taken. For a long time I have coveted the Oxford Dictionary, the big one, but the price was prohibitive. When in came down to within my reach I happened to read Billy Phelps who says it’s pedantic for an individual to want it so I have up my ambition and not very long ago became the proud possessor of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, known in England as the S.O.E.D. I am sure that if my father had had this he would have read nothing else, for the history of each word is traced, and dated. So many many words came into the language, I find in the decade following 1600. This, however, is more or less of a teaser. Someday I am going to have the big one. This just starts you off on a hunt, and then you go to the library to look up the full genealogy of your word. Today, I wrote an appreciative review of a friend’s book, saying something like this—“He weighs with a just balance. It is in the main however, Troy rather than avoirdupois,” thinking that I had paid him a fine compliment indicating the scrupulous discerning quality of his observation. I turned up Troy, however, in the Oxford and found to my consternation, having mailed my manuscript, something like this—B. fig. In allusion to the pound Troy being less than the pound avoirdupois 1599, “There was Cresid and Nell was avoirdupois 1599.” My friend wrote back in high dudgeon that I had done despite to his volume. Why the magazine editor didn’t catch it I do not know, apparently he was no wiser than I.

--Jesse Halsey

Letter from Charles Erdman to Jesse Halsey

1938

Dr. Grenfell's Schooner | July 4, 1912

The Montreal Gazette

Letter from Frederick D. Niedermeyer to Jesse Halsey 1916

Frederick D. Niedermeyer | Princeton Seminary '09

With thanks to: The Jesse Halsey Manuscript Collection. Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library.

Gwilym O. Griffith | Reminiscences

Princeton Theological Seminary '09
The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, 1965

"Beware of becoming too adjectival in your style. Adjectives can give color to what you say, but it is your verbs that give it strength." --Dr. Henry Van Dyke

from "Down North" | c1941

One day in the late spring of 1907, I was riding to the University on one of those (then) novel double-decker trams that ran in Glasgow. (The paper, this very day as I write, shows a picture of two bombed and gutted standing inert on the car-track) when I noticed a meager item on an inside page of an evening paper of how a mission doctor in Labrador had been carried off shore on an ice flow and had lived to tell the story. That was the first I ever heard of Grenfell. Two years later, I was on his staff—not as preacher but as plumber.

It happened like this. He came to Princeton Seminary to speak for a week at Chapel. Chapel was a dreary performance held at the end of the afternoon with a handful present and a cut and dried professorial performance in exegesis as diet. I seldom went. But hearing that Grenfell was coming that day, I went and took several other fellows along. The place was filled the second day; and before the week was out the crowd jammed the largest hall on the University campus.

In one of his talks he told the story of that ice pan experience (of which I had read on the Glasgow bus), in another he intimated that students sometimes would “down” with him in the summer to do odd jobs. I made an appointment at the house of the professor where he was staying. “Yes,” he took students along to help; “What was I going to be?” “A preacher!” “No, he didn’t need a preacher, they had too many on the shore already. “Well,” I ventured, “What do you need?” “A plumber,” he snapped back, “a plumber for our new hospital.” I signed up, then and there, knowing that water runs down hill and inheriting from my practical builder-mason-grandfather, a manual knack for doing things, and knowing how to solder and wipe a joint, and a few other things, from a Yankee blacksmith who had a shop on the back street where I used to stop in to blow the bellows and fuss around on the way home from school.

In May (Divinity Schools have a short term), I started out for Labrador. It took nearly a month to get there, for it was a late season and the ice hugged the land so that schooners and mail boats couldn’t get “down along” shore. When we reached St. Anthony all set “to plumb” the hospital, I found that the hospital wasn’t even built. The Chief was like that: ambition always running ahead of any possible performance on the part of his helpers.

Not only was the hospital unbuilt, not even a foundation was in, no excavating done either. So after putting a new window in the log bunk house for light and air (terribly dull tools they had and my new plumber’s kit didn’t fit the wood working job, all their tools were dull except the axes; a Newfoundlander can build a ship with his ax and after I had fussed for half a day with brace and bit (dull in spite of my file) and key hold saw pecking at the logs, Old Skipper Joe Souley came along and in ten minutes with his ax cut the hole in the side of the bunk house where I installed my window.

There being no one more capable available, I set about excavating for the new hospital cellar. We struck solid rock. I knew nothing about blasting—except that one did it before building. (The Doctor having finished his first hospital realizing that it needed a cellar, undertook to blast one and blew off his roof.) Skipper Joe (my friend of the ax) had worked in a mine; he knew how to blast! But he didn’t know how to sharpen drills. Here my Yankee blacksmith came to my aid; (by quasi proxy). I had watched him and had a dim notion of how it was done and after considerable experimenting—just the right heat “cherry red” dipped at the right moment in oil, the drill was just the right temper, not too hard to be brittle and break under the sledge as it bit its way into the rock and not too soft—not cutting at all but just further blunting itself.

I would hold the drill; Joe would strike it with the big sledge, strike with an unerring accuracy; when my turn came to strike and he to hold, like the brave man he was, he held the drill while I swung the sledge, fortunately for him I never missed—my old grandfather coming to the rescue. (I am a great believer in ativism—or whatever it may be called. Cap’n Harry, my grandfather, was a skilled mason (he built most of Greenwich Village in New York, over a hundred years ago.) He once was known to have cut the center out of a millstone to convert it into a well curb, cut it—on a bet—in thirty minutes. He knew how to swing a maul; I’m sure he was there fifty years later, for my help. (What’s fifty years among Yankees?)

When the holes were drilled we began to blast. It was cold; dynamite will not explode when it is “frozen.” Joe would build a fire in the forge and put me to blowing the bellows, with a pail of water on the coals. When it began to boil he would pile sticks of dynamite cob-house fashion on the pail there to “thaw.” “Let out a reef, Skipper,” Joe would say. I would accelerate and the sparks would fly all round the pail and all over the dynamite. “No harm, Skipper, she can’t bust abroad without the cap.” When the sticks were sufficiently softened, Joe would cut a length of fuse and fasten on a cap (detonator) to the end of the fuse. The cap is a hollow tube an inch long made of soft, malleable copper. Joe would take the thing between his teeth (he had two that met) and craunch the cap on to the fuse. (When it became my turn (under his tutelage) I used the pliers (as Dupont suggested). Not so Skipper Joe Souley—“Teeth’s quicker.” Then we would insert the cap and fuse in a stick of dynamite, put it down in the drilled hole in the rock on top of one, two, or three other sticks of dynamite and then with a stick, tamp dirt into top of the hold. Then we’d pile a lot of logs on top with a few lengths of old anchor chain to (hold her down), light the fuse and run. At least I would run, Joe was too old, or too fat, or to lazy, or too proud to run. He would amble along and maybe get behind the forge house before the blast brought down its concomitant shower of small rocks and gravel.

It took all summer to build the hospital cellar and frame up the hospital. In the fall, I came back to Seminary in New York, bringing an esquimoux boy to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to learn lathe work and other things that I didn’t know much about. Theology played second fiddle, I fear, that winter. I got hold of an old friend who was a master plumber and heating engineer and learned to figure radiation, etc., etc., ad infinitum (to use theological language). By the next spring I had collected in Boston a schooner load of radiators, boilers, pipe fittings, tools, tile, linoleum, and what-not enough to plumb and heat the new hospital and the old hospital and several other hospitals and mission buildings at various stations along the shore.

In May (this is 1910), I graduated as a Bachelor of Divinity, was married, and in June set out for Labrador on a honeymoon.

There we stayed three summers, two winters. There our two older boys were born. There I would still be if I had been a doctor instead of a preacher. When the plumbing work was done, I became business manager for the mission. When the expert accountant, Price, Waterhouse recommended that the business office be put in St. John’s Newfoundland, rather than on the field, I lost interest in the business job, even though they had been interested in me. I had been buying thousands of dollars worth of supplies of all kinds, running a big schooner on several voyages back and forth as her skipper and how I ever kept out of jail with my accounts, I don’t quite know (or off the rocks with the schooner). It always puzzled me to make up a set of books that would balance and no wonder Price, Waterhouse wanted an accountant and not a preacher.

--Reverend Jesse Halsey

from "Among the Deep Sea Fishers" | October 1909

Dr. Grenfell’s Log

Labrador, Aug. 17

. . . Some students from the universities of Williams and Princeton were also here busily engaged in painting the house and in finishing up some parts of the building that had been unfinished during the winter. One was also acting as a lay reader, and another as an anti-tuberculosis lecturer.

from "Among the Deep Sea Fishers" | July 1910

Items from the Grenfell Association of America

Mr. Jesse Halsey, who was a volunteer last year, will go again this year, taking his bride with him. Mr. Halsey has recently been ordained to the ministry in the Presbyterian Church and will preach on Sundays and do plumbing on week days! Mrs. Halsey is expected to have charge of the Guest House.

Dr. Ethan Flagg Butler, who has just been made and M.D. by Johns Hopkins, will accompany Dr. Grenfell on the Strathacona this summer, taking the place that has been so ably filled by Dr. John Mason Little, Jr., who is to have charge of the hospital at St. Anthony.

***
Items from the New England Grenfell Association

The Lorna Doone sailed on the 26^th of May with a full cargo, most of which of necessity had to be crated, as it consisted of hospital fittings and furniture which could be sent in no other way in safety. This required much more space than usual, consequently a number of boxes were left for a later voyage, which we hope may be early in July, when the heating and plumbing apparatus will be sent under charge of Mr. Jesse Halsey of Southampton, Long Island. Mr. Halsey is to give his summer in installing the water supply and heating apparatus in both hospitals and the orphanage.

***

From St. Anthony Items

3^rd May 1910

Dear Mr. Editor,--

Meanwhile it is snowing hard; the ground is white all over. We hope to get a mail any day, as the Arctic ice is a long way off shore. Through Mr. Jesse Halsey, who was here last year as a volunteer worker for Princeton, we have been given the old pipes and plumbing of the Union Seminary in New York. Any money specially given toward the installation of a drain and water supply for the new hospital and orphanage will be administered under his very able hands. With his young wife he is going to join our staff for a year. All these two new splendid buildings want now are these installations. It will mean a great permanent saving in labour and expense.

. . . The human being consists of body, soul, and spirit, and a sin against either of these is a sin which brings its punishment inevitably. Therefore, it is, we feel that God will equally honour him who doctors the body, or teaches the mind, as him who proclaims the verbal message of the Gospel. It is this faith that actuates workers such as we have here, who for no monetary return whatever, are willing to freely donate their services and endure the privations of this far off coast.

W. T. Grenfell

from "Among the Deep Sea Fishers" | July 1911

Dr. Grenfell’s Letter

Boston, Mass.

May 19^th, 1911

…It has been delightful to hear from Mr. Halsey, the Princetonian in charge of our mechanical work, of the splendid results accomplished by the aid of the boys who were sent to New York for one year’s mechanical training,--heating apparatus installed, water supplies laid on, machinery ably handled. To two of these young men he most earnestly desires that we should give another winter’s opportunity, and he has promised to remain during the coming year that he may do their work, if some friends are willing to defray the expense of sending them once more to the Pratt Institute next winter.

from Down North

Reverend Jesse Halsey c1941

 

One day in the late spring of 1907, I was riding to the University on one of those (then) novel double-decker trams that ran in Glasgow. (The paper, this very day as I write, shows a picture of two bombed and gutted standing inert on the car-track) when I noticed a meager item on an inside page of an evening paper of how a mission doctor in Labrador had been carried off shore on an ice flow and had lived to tell the story. That was the first I ever heard of Grenfell. Two years later, I was on his staff—not as preacher but as plumber.

It happened like this. He came to Princeton Seminary to speak for a week at Chapel. Chapel was a dreary performance held at the end of the afternoon with a handful present and a cut and dried professorial performance in exegesis as diet. I seldom went. But hearing that Grenfell was coming that day, I went and took several other fellows along. The place was filled the second day; and before the week was out the crowd jammed the largest hall on the University campus.

In one of his talks he told the story of that ice pan experience (of which I had read on the Glasgow bus), in another he intimated that students sometimes would “down” with him in the summer to do odd jobs. I made an appointment at the house of the professor where he was staying. “Yes,” he took students along to help; “What was I going to be?” “A preacher!” “No, he didn’t need a preacher, they had too many on the shore already. “Well,” I ventured, “What do you need?” “A plumber,” he snapped back, “a plumber for our new hospital.” I signed up, then and there, knowing that water runs down hill and inheriting from my practical builder-mason-grandfather, a manual knack for doing things, and knowing how to solder and wipe a joint, and a few other things, from a Yankee blacksmith who had a shop on the back street where I used to stop in to blow the bellows and fuss around on the way home from school.

In May (Divinity Schools have a short term), I started out for Labrador. It took nearly a month to get there, for it was a late season and the ice hugged the land so that schooners and mail boats couldn’t get “down along” shore. When we reached St. Anthony all set “to plumb” the hospital, I found that the hospital wasn’t even built. The Chief was like that: ambition always running ahead of any possible performance on the part of his helpers.

Not only was the hospital unbuilt, not even a foundation was in, no excavating done either. So after putting a new window in the log bunk house for light and air (terribly dull tools they had and my new plumber’s kit didn’t fit the wood working job, all their tools were dull except the axes; a Newfoundlander can build a ship with his ax and after I had fussed for half a day with brace and bit (dull in spite of my file) and key hold saw pecking at the logs, Old Skipper Joe Souley came along and in ten minutes with his ax cut the hole in the side of the bunk house where I installed my window.

There being no one more capable available, I set about excavating for the new hospital cellar. We struck solid rock. I knew nothing about blasting—except that one did itbefore building. (The Doctor having finished his first hospital realizing that it needed a cellar, undertook to blast one and blew off his roof.) Skipper Joe (my friend of the ax) had worked in a mine; he knew how to blast! But he didn’t know how to sharpen drills. Here my Yankee blacksmith came to my aid; (by quasi proxy). I had watched him and had a dim notion of how it was done and after considerable experimenting—just the right heat “cherry red” dipped at the right moment in oil, the drill was just the right temper, not too hard to be brittle and break under the sledge as it bit its way into the rock and not too soft—not cutting at all but just further blunting itself.

I would hold the drill; Joe would strike it with the big sledge, strike with an unerring accuracy; when my turn came to strike and he to hold, like the brave man he was, he held the drill while I swung the sledge, fortunately for him I never missed—my old grandfather coming to the rescue. (I am a great believer in ativism—or whatever it may be called. Cap’n Harry, my grandfather, was a skilled mason (he built most of Greenwich Village in New York, over a hundred years ago.) He once was known to have cut the center out of a millstone to convert it into a well curb, cut it—on a bet—in thirty minutes. He knew how to swing a maul; I’m sure he was there fifty years later, for my help. (What’s fifty years among Yankees?)

When the holes were drilled we began to blast. It was cold; dynamite will not explode when it is “frozen.” Joe would build a fire in the forge and put me to blowing the bellows, with a pail of water on the coals. When it began to boil he would pile sticks of dynamite cob-house fashion on the pail there to “thaw.” “Let out a reef, Skipper,” Joe would say. I would accelerate and the sparks would fly all round the pail and all over the dynamite. “No harm, Skipper, she can’t bust abroad without the cap.” When the sticks were sufficiently softened, Joe would cut a length of fuse and fasten on a cap (detonator) to the end of the fuse. The cap is a hollow tube an inch long made of soft, malleable copper. Joe would take the thing between his teeth (he had two that met) and craunch the cap on to the fuse. (When it became my turn (under his tutelage) I used the pliers (as Dupont suggested). Not so Skipper Joe Souley—“Teeth’s quicker.” Then we would insert the cap and fuse in a stick of dynamite, put it down in the drilled hole in the rock on top of one, two, or three other sticks of dynamite and then with a stick, tamp dirt into top of the hold. Then we’d pile a lot of logs on top with a few lengths of old anchor chain to (hold her down), light the fuse and run. At least I would run, Joe was too old, or too fat, or to lazy, or too proud to run. He would amble along and maybe get behind the forge house before the blast brought down its concomitant shower of small rocks and gravel.

It took all summer to build the hospital cellar and frame up the hospital. In the fall, I came back to Seminary in New York, bringing an esquimoux boy to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to learn lathe work and other things that I didn’t know much about. Theology played second fiddle, I fear, that winter. I got hold of an old friend who was a master plumber and heating engineer and learned to figure radiation, etc., etc., ad infinitum (to use theological language). By the next spring I had collected in Boston a schooner load of radiators, boilers, pipe fittings, tools, tile, linoleum, and what-not enough to plumb and heat the new hospital and the old hospital and several other hospitals and mission buildings at various stations along the shore.

Daily Princetonian, Volume 38, Number 29, 4 April 1913

WORK OF DR. WILFRED T. GRENFELL IN LABRADOR

Dr. Jesse Halsey of the Mission's Medical Staff Explains its Nature

REMARKABLE RESULTS

In Spite of Hardships, Well-Regulated and Sanitary Community Has Been Developed

Dr. Jesse Halsey, a member of the medical staff of the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen at Labrador addressed the regular midweek meeting of the Philadelphian Society last night. His subject was "The Work of Dr. Wilfred T. Grenfell in Labrador." Dr. Grenfell's Heroic Work

Passing briefly over the life of Dr. Grenfell, the speaker bent every effort to make clear to all the intensely interesting, as well as heroic, work which is being done under Dr. Grenfell's inspiration among the deep sea fishermen along the barren coasts north of the St. Lawrence. His entire talk was profusely illustrated by lantern slides depicting the surroundings of these people and the mission work which is being done among them.

The purpose of this work is to help these people to help themselves and in order to accomplish this purpose it is essential that sanitary and economic conditions be improved. The average home of the fishermen is no more than a hut and during the long winter months their diet consists of the supply of dried fish which they have collected during the summer. In fact the fish are the most important factor in the life of the native. If his luck deserts him in the fishing season, the winter is one of dire necessity and this is one of the many times at which the mission lends a helping hand to the suffering Dr. Grenfell has built up a community among these people, which is well-regulated and sanitary in every way possible.

His attention has been given to the erection of hospitals, cooperative stores and orphans homes as well as saw mills, and other laborsaving institutions. The various phases of the work are combined under the religious influence exerted by the mission staff. Dr. Grenfell, as his own skipper travels along the coast each, year personally coming in touch with the needs of the fishermen.

The Spirit of the Mission

Dr. Halsey closed with an explanation that the term, mission, should be applied to this work in its larger sense. The workers in this great field are seeking in every possible way to make life easier and more livable for these rough and simple people. The whole spirit is expressed in the motto painted on the Mission hospital. "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me." *

"Jesse revolted violently."

McCormick Speaking | April 1952 | Vol. V,  No. 7

JESSE HALSEY

*Having reached the age of retirement, Jesse Halsey, Professor of Pastoral Theology and Liturgics, will terminate his active service to the Seminary with the present academic year. His life-long friend, Rev. Henry Sloane Coffin, D.D., has prepared this statement in which faculty, students, and friends will heartily concur.

Jesse Halsey comes of the Puritan stock which settled on Long Island in 1640. His family’s property has never been bought or sold, but is held under the original grant. In that stable Presbyterian community he was reared and he bears its stamp in his steadfastness to conviction, his shrewdness, his kindly humor, and his level head. He was brought up in its First Presbyterian Church where a conservative faith was taught and firmly believed. He took his B. A. at Princeton University and then entered Princeton Seminary. It was a period when that institution was under the intellectual dominance of Dr. Benjamin Warfield, was rigidly dogmatic and controverted all more recent movements in scientific and historical thinking. Jesse revolted violently.

He left the Seminary and enlisted under the genial and devoted Dr. Grenfell in the mission on the Labrador. There he recovered mental equilibrium and inward calm. Returning he enrolled at Union Seminary in New York and found himself at home in its open-minded devotion to truth and inclusive sympathies. Ever since he has been a liberal in outlook.

After a brief pastorate in a small town he was called to the Seventh Church of Cincinnati. It was a time of theological controversy, and the Cincinnati Presbytery was ruled by a group of die-hards. Halsey and two or three kindred spirits tactfully set themselves to alter that situation and they succeeded. Jesse has always been an outgoing friend who won his people’s confidence and gained the respect and affection of those who worked at his side. He soon became a foremost citizen of Cincinnati and a leading churchman held in esteem by Christians of all communities. He read widely and kept his preaching interesting. He took great pains with public worship and acquired skill in his preparations for common prayer. His good taste and his rich personal life with God are evident in the prayers with which he has enriched the Church.

McCormick wisely elected him in full maturity to the chair from which he has counseled students in their early ministry and taught pastoral theology and the conduct of pubic worship. His ideals are evident in the renovated and restored chapel where his own hands did much of the manual labor. He is a skilled workman in carpentry and painting, as well as in printing—a Bezalel in the artistic arrangement  of the house of worship.

Everyone finds him approachable. He is genuinely interested in people—people of all sorts—and becomes their inspiring friend. His wisdom, his faith, his patience, his loyalty render him a notable adviser. He understands human relations—their frailties and their vast possibilities. He has courage in situations where few, even among Christian leaders, are willing to speak out. And always he had the “sweet reasonableness” which avoids needless clashes. His students known how much they owe him and acknowledge it with warm affection. His fellow-churchmen admire and love him for his stalwart fidelity to conviction, his willingness to shoulder heavy responsibilities, and the bigness of heart which takes on their loads and carries them with untiring perseverance. In his retirement the Seminary parts with a most useful member of its faculty, but his students and fellow-churchmen will continue to possess in him a life-long friend in God.

--Henry Sloane Coffin

Note Book: Dr. Francis Landey Patton

Dr. Francis Landey Patton

Note Book

November 26, 1932

Jesse Halsey

Dr. Patton died today in Bermuda, nearly ninety. It brings back old times. I remember when first I saw him; at Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration as president (of Princeton, 1902). He had a cadaverous figure and face; sideburns that made him ‘look like a monkey’ (I thought to myself and have never breathed before). He had a biting wit, was keen as a brier in repartee, and could preach for an hour—and interest freshmen—by his eccentricities of manner and lapses into slang and homely and cogent illustration, and then keep the faculty going thru the sermon by his comprehensive knowledge of philosophy and unusual thought forms. He was a great preacher—and a lazy man. He delivered and sold some lectures at Lake Forest twenty odd years ago—and they have never been finished.

My admiration for him as a keen minded heresy hunter changed after I saw him in action in Princeton. Partly because my point of view changed and David Swing the heretic, whom Dr. Patton had prosecuted, became one of my heroes, and Dr. Patton’s star declined in my young mind. I had more admiration for the old colored janitor—Charles—in Miller Chapel at the Seminary and when he brought in with great ceremony the glass of water just before service and handed it to Dr. Patton, Charles and not Prexy pronounced the benediction—on me.

Dr. Patton would come to class about half the time—this was in Theism, at the Seminary; often late, and would mumble over his notes and yellow MS written thirty years before. Unless you sat in the front seat you couldn’t hear. Some of the boys used to complain, but he never would speak louder. There is a legend (true in the case of Dr. McQueen of Pittsburgh) that a

***

[Ed note: The text is missing the next page! In my text, the following inexplicably appears instead.]

Five to sixteen letters every week there is a vacancy in our Presbytery. We have nearly seventy churches and ordinarily there are one to two vacant. As soon as this church is listed by Dr. Mudge’s Office—sometimes before—the letters begin to come. There are a lot of repeaters. These are briefly and courteously answered, but receive slight consideration. A letter from a friend is better than one from a candidate himself; though sometimes a man who writes a direct application without rationalization as to why he wants to move, will receive favorable consideration. This chairman then checks on a man by every available reference, and when meeting with the session of a vacant church talks over with them the qualifications of two or three of the most likely candidates.

We then decide on the preferential order and the pulpit committee undertakes to hear the prospective candidate, preferably without his knowledge, a committee visits his church and community and gets their impression, this is reported back and after conference the man may be invited to preach, preferably not unless the committee is practically unanimous as to his desirability.

***

[Ed note: Thanks, however, to the generous assistance of the archivist at Princeton's Theological Seminary this summer, I now have the missing part of the story.]

Dr. Patton would come to class about half the time—this was in Theism, at the Seminary; often late, and would mumble over his notes and yellow MS written thirty years before. Unless you sat in the front seat you couldn’t hear. Some of the boys used to complain, but he never would speak louder. There is a legend (true in the case of Dr. McQueen of Pittsburgh) that a student went to him and asked him to read louder. “You wouldn’t understand it if I did,” came the answer.

But there were mornings, not a few, when, after ten minutes with the MS., he would throw them aside and sit and talk. Sometimes it was concerning the news of the day, sometimes some problem of philosophy, but most often, something about St. Paul, who was his hero. His sketches of the Pauline Epistles, given off-hand in these hours, stand out as among the most inspiring of my experience.

One day in class Dr. Patton thought he was being horsed (to use the Princeton term for roughhouse). He could deal with any situation, as one day when he heard students leaving the back seats during his lectures (he was very nearsighted) he was heard to say, (this time so all could hear), in his cracked falsetto voice, “our blessings brighten as they take their flight.” This particular morning he slammed his book, took up his coat and strode out and went home. The noise was from the hall, made by another class going to its recitation room. Sensing that he knew none of this, our class got quickly together and delegated me to take their explanation, and apology, to Prexy.

 ***

With fear and trembling I was ushered into his study. The colored servant announced my name. Dr. Patton was storming up and down, puffing a black cheroot. “Halsey? Halsey? You belong to that class that just insulted me?” “Yes. Sir.” “Well, explain—never had such outrageous treatment from any class in the thirty years I’ve been in Princeton!” And much more. At last, when he was exhausted, I simply told the fact. His face changed. He came over and put his hand on my shoulder. “Young man. Sit down.” He talked for thirty minutes—one of the most surprising, and in a manner, pathetic things I’ve ever heard, or read. He said, in substance, that he’d never had a friend in college days, didn’t know what it was to be hailed as an equal and fraternized with as an undergraduate. “I was an Ishmaelite—always have been.” His poor eyesight was one reason, he said.

Then he told how his reputation was made as a heresy hunter; how he came to Princeton on the reputation, and intimated that it was a bad thing to have a reputation to live up to. And, as I gathered, that many times he would have taken a more liberal slant in public utterance if he hadn’t felt charged with the responsibility of orthodoxy, and the urge toward consistency. He talked a long time, as to an equal, an overflowing of the soul.

I left, hardly knowing what had happened; went back to my class and reported that we were absolved and non one else was implicated—but never told the rest of the story. From that day I had a unique place in my memory, and sympathy, for Dr. Patton.

Some of the most brilliant discourses I ever listened to, or expect to, fell from his lips.

One item more. The day after Mr. Wilson’s inauguration was Sunday. Dr. Patton preached to a crowded chapel. I sat, as it happened, just in front of Nicholas Murray Butler. As Dr. Patton went on scoring one philosophy after another in his sermon, Dr. Butler would whisper to Mrs. Butler, “That’s Spencer; Kant, now; Spinoza.” Once I heard her ask, “Who’s that?” He answered, “I don’t make out.”

I ought now, while the iron is hot, to add that Dr. Patton was more or less forced to resign at the College. At the very meeting when he did resign, he had that influence with the trustees, that, before they had adjourned after his resignation, they had, under his influence, elected Woodrow Wilson.

FRIDAY, APRIL 4, 1913 | The Daily Princetonian

WORK OF DR. WILFRED T. GRENFELL IN LABRADOR
Dr. Jesse Halsey of the Mission's Medical Staff Explains its Nature

REMARKABLE RESULTS
In Spite of Hardships, Well-Regulated and Sanitary Community Has Been Developed

Dr. Jesse Halsey, a member of the medical staff of the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen at Labrador addressed the regular midweek meeting of the Philadelphian Society last night. His subject was "The Work of Dr. Wilfred T. Grenfell in Labrador."

Dr. Grenfell's Heroic Work
Passing briefly over the life of Dr. Grenfell, the speaker bent every effort to make clear to all the intensely interesting, as well as heroic, work which is being done under Dr. Grenfell's inspiration among the deep sea fishermen along the barren coasts north of the St. Lawrence. His entire talk was profusely illustrated by lantern slides depicting the surroundings of these people and the mission work which is being done among them. The purpose of this work is to help these people to help themselves and in order to accomplish this purpose it is essential that sanitary and economic conditions be improved. The average home of the fishermen is no more than a hut and during the long winter months their diet consists of the supply of dried fish which they have collected during the summer. In fact the fish are the most important factor in the life of the native. If his luck deserts him in the fishing season, the winter is one of dire necessity and this is one of the many times at which the mission lends a helping hand to the suffering.

Dr. Grenfell has built up a community among these people, which is well-regulated and sanitary in every way possible. His attention has been given to the erection of hospitals, cooperative stores and orphans homes as well as saw mills, and other laborsaving institutions. The various phases of the work are combined under the religious influence exerted by the mission staff. Dr. Grenfell, as his own skipper travels along the coast each year personally coming in touch with the needs of the fishehmen.

The Spirit of the Mission
Dr. Halsey closed with an explanation that the term, mission, should be applied to this work in its larger sense. The workers in this great field are seeking in every possible way to make life easier and more livable for these rough and simple people. The whole spirit is expressed in the motto painted on the Mission hospital. "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

The Daily Princetonian, April 3, 1913

DR. HALSEY TO ADDRESS PHILADELPHIAN SOCIETY
"The Work of Dr. Grenfell in Labrador" to be Described at Meeting Tonight

The regular Thursday evening meeting of the Philadelphian Society will have this evening as its speaker Dr. Jesse Halsey, who is a member of the medical staff of the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen at Labrador. The subject of Dr. Halsey's address will be "The Work of Dr. Wilfred T. Grenfell in Labrador." The lecture will be illustrated by lantern slides showing the nature of the physical obstacles to be overcome in such a severe climate and the condition of the fishermen to whom Dr. Grenfell's mission has been a Godsend.

Dr. Grenfell's Career
Wilfred Thomason Grenfell is Superintendent of the Labrador Medical Mission of the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen. He was born at Chester, England in 1865, went to Oxford University and took a course in medicine at the London Hospital, where he later held the post of House Surgeon. In May of 1907 he was granted the degree of M.D. by the University of Oxford the first man upon whom that degree was conferred, in the whole history of the University. He successively received the Hon. LL.D. degree from Williams College, and an Hon. M.A. degree from Harvard in 1909. In 191 1 he received the Hon. M.D. degree from Toronto University.

His Work in Labrador
In 1892, Dr. Grenfell seeking for an opportunity for service accepted the call of the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen to found a mission on the bleak Labrador coast, which had been hitherto neglected. His field of work comprised six hundred miles of almost barren
rock along the Labrador coast where a small population of fiishermen lived a hard and neglected existence, without means of education, without medical assistance and at the mercy of
local traders. The story of the founding and development of the Labrador Deep Sea Mission is a story of heroism and sacrifice which has won for Dr. Grenfell the admiration of everyone; especially has he won the suport of college men wherever he has come in contact with them. Yale University fitted out and manned a hospital boat for his use, as did Princeton in 1909.

At present the mission, through Dr. Grenfell's untiring efforts and unusual personalty has an equipment of four hospitals and a despensary, provides house visitation by dog sledges, conducts schools, runs fisherman's cooperative stores and other business enterprises, and administers to the spiritual life and to the uplift of the whole Labrador coast.

The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, May 1908

Jesse Halsey will also be in the land of heather, but expects to spend most of the summer traveling.