Religion: Something for God

“It used to be my habit to go to Calvary Church, New York City, at noon, to pray for guidance to find Christian work, as I felt I had to do something for God. This I had done for some months, when it was as though someone said to me: ‘Why don’t you stop this praying and go and do something?’ So I rose from my knees and went back to my employer [Lord & Taylor], giving my notice that I was leaving, and I walked out into the streets of New York with absolutely not a dollar in my pocket and with no Christian work to do.”

For Governeur P. Hance there was plenty of Christian work to do. Last week in Gibsonia, Pa. some 2,000 Episcopal churchmen and laymen, including Bishop Austin Pardue of Pittsburgh and Canon Bernard Iddings Bell of Chicago, gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of St. Barnabas’ Free Home which during the last year fed, advised and housed 151 young boys and old men who were poor and ill.

Answer to Prayer. At 80, short, bright-eyed Brother Hance, founder of the home and the St. Barnabas’ Brotherhood, an Episcopal order, still seems as active as he was that day in 1896 when he quit his office job. In his history of the brotherhood he tells some of the things that happened next.

He went to see the Episcopal bishop of New York but the bishop’s staff merely smiled at the young man who had nothing more concrete in mind than “doing something for God.” So he joined the Church Army. Assigned to a mission in Pittsburgh where he depended for his livelihood on ‘offerings,” he came close to starving. One lay a dollar appeared in the plate and Hance decided to treat himself to a steak.

‘I was cooking my meals in the cellar of the building where there were rats like cats. There would be anywhere from 25 to 50 rats watch every meal I ate, and as I went out to get the salt I heard a rustle, and looking back I saw my steak going through the partition. The rats had grabbed it and run off with it. I grabbed one end of it and the rats the other; so I got a piece and they got a piece.”

In 1900 Hance started his own mission in rooms that were donated rent-free on condition that he paint and paper them. He and a young man he had converted begged some wallpaper but found they did not know how to put it up. “I suggested that we go over in the corner and ask God to send us a paperhanger and while we were praying a man came into the mission. It was a storefront, and seeing we were doing repair work he thought we might need someone, as he was a paper-hanger.” In lieu of payment for the paperhanging job, Hance worked out a reconciliation between the paperhanger and his estranged wife.

An Ordinary Soul. Hance made it a rule of his brotherhood never to beg for money, though they had to beg for all the food and clothing distributed to the sick old men who flocked in. Once a butcher to whom they appealed asked: “Why don’t you go to work for your living instead of coming around begging?” The question, says Brother Hance, “quite upset and embarrassed us, so we ventured to say that we would cut meat for an hour if he would beg for an hour and see which one worked the hardest. This brought a very quick response . . . with a roast of beef.”

As Brother Hance’s reputation grew, he moved into successively larger quarters. The present St. Barnabas’ Free Home at Gibsonia is an ivy-grown stone house of about 50 rooms in the midst of 147 acres, on which the home’s milk and meat is raised. Another house at North East, Pa. has 37 patients. St. Barnabas’ Brotherhood, founded as a religious order in 1913, now numbers five cowled and cassocked brothers. “One is an engineer,” Hance explained last week, “a draftsman and all that. Me, I’ve got no brains at all. I’m just an ordinary soul.”