Kinsman's Resignation As Bishop

A visitor found this brief note in the New York Times from May 1919 referring to news that was apparently generally known at the Episcopal Church annual meeting that Kinsman was planning to retire. (He was 50.) The most visible reason he gave for his wish to retire at that time was that he seemed unhappy with his role as bishop, but he also noted that there were "deeper reasons". It also appears that his father's health, which we may speculate based on remarks in Reveries of a Hermit must have been paralysis following a fairly recent stroke, was a secondary factor.

I have a sense that oral history of how this event played out in the Episcopal Church at the time has been passed down, and I would be most interested to hear of any such accounts.

The report suggests much of this was fairly well known and understood by Kinsman's colleagues at the time. However, Kinsman seems to have kept his main motivation for resigning confidential until his formal letter of resignation, dated July 1, 1919, to the presiding bishop. This was published as a brief pamphlet in the UK in 1929 as The Failure of Anglicanism and is available on line here. In general, he summarizes positions in the 1919 letter that in later years he explains in much greater detail in Salve Mater and Reveries of a Hermit.

To the Right Reverend Daniel Sylvester Tuttle, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D., Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church.:

MY DEAR PRESIDING BISHOP

I hereby present through you to the House of Bishops the resignation of my jurisdiction as Bishop of the Diocese of Delaware.

RESIGNATION OF OFFICE

1 take this step with utmost regret, both as relinquishing a post assigned me by the Church to which 1 owe the greatest blessings of my life, and as sever ing my connection with the State of Delaware and its warm-hearted people, for whom during eleven years I have come to have an ever- deepening affection. The only post I could wish for myself is that of Bishop of Delaware. I resign it because I can no longer hold any post of authority in the Protestant Episcopal Church. Fuller experience which has come to me as Bishop and more thorough study of the history of our communion have forced me to abandon the interpretation of the Church's position which I held at the time of my consecration ; and 1 can adopt no other which would warrant mv continuance in office.

. . . The view of the Church's position which I have held, certainly the prevailing view in the House of . Bishops, is simply that the Episcopal Church, strong in its " appeal to antiquity," stands firmly for the doctrine of the Incarnation as contained in the Scriptures and the Creeds, and, by emphasis on its sacramental character, perpetuates the life of the Catholic Church. But I have ceased to believe and here I part company with the Bishops, and contradict my convictions and teaching in past years -that the actual facts bear out this contention. In spite of the greatest unwillingness, I have come to feel that the interpretation of the Anglican position which connects it chiefly with the Protestant Reformation is the one more consistent with its history viewed as a whole ; and that its dominant tendencies are increasingly identified with those currents of thought and development which are making away from the definiteness of the ancient Faith towards Unitarian vagueness. This would seem to me to be due not merely to local or temporary conditions but to certain informing principles always more or less apparent in Anglican history. To preserve balance and proportion of the truth, the Episcopal Churches have aimed at comprehension by compromise. I have come to believe that this habit of compromise involves increasing surrenders of truth, in spite of religious revivals aiming at stronger insistence on the ancient Faith.

But Kinsman also remarks in Reveries of a Hermit that he found his life as a bishop "wearing", and other remarks in Salve Mater suggest to me that a feature of the job he disliked was the need to reconcile the permanent divisions within Anglicanism as they manifested themselves in his diocese. The need to surrender truth to compromise, something I began to perceive as soon as I was confirmed as an Episcopalian, must have been an ever-increasing irritation. Certainly his writing after his retirement suggests he was happiest as a scholar of Church history and quite content to spend the rest of his life in seclusion.