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Rum, Romanism, and Evangelism: Protestants and Catholics in Late-Nineteenth-Century Boston

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Margaret Bendroth
Margaret Bendroth
Affiliation:
professor of history at Calvin College.
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Extract

On the morning of Wednesday, May 20,1885, Boston police arrested three Protestant clergymen for preaching on the Common. News of the outrage traveled quickly, and within hours the city's evangelical Protestants were in an uproar. When the preachers—A. J. Gordon, pastor of the Clarendon Street Baptist church; H. L. Hastings, editor of a locally popular evangelical periodical, the Christian; and W. H. Davis, superintendent of a mission in the North End—appeared at the Municipal Criminal Courthouse on Thursday morning, a crowd reported to be between four thousand and five thousand, “principally of the middle-class, well-dressed and well behaved,” thronged the steps of the building. “[I]t was clearly evident,” Hastings later wrote, “that something unusual was going on in the police court of the city of Boston.”

Type
Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 68 , Issue 3 , September 1999 , pp. 627 - 647
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1999

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References

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