Shadows of a Sacred Space

[alocispepraluger102]

(aloc wonders, when is sacred no longer sacred, or was it ever?)

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Notes From Academe

From the issue dated August 3, 2007

NOTES FROM ACADEME

Shadows of a Sacred Space

By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER

Philadelphia

Perhaps only the ruin of a great man is more compelling than the ruin of a great building. And if the building is a temple — a sacred space long since abandoned by its worshipers, left to silence and dust — the ruin is all the more interesting. Its columns offer a glimpse into history, its altar a testimony to the fickleness of faith.

Temple University has just such a ruin, and it's hidden in plain sight — right on North Broad Street, beside one of the university's main entrances. It's the Baptist Temple of the Rev. Russell H. Conwell, who became the pastor of Grace Baptist Church here in 1882. Within a year, his sermons were so popular that members of the congregation had to be issued tickets so they could avoid the throngs out front and enter by a back door instead. In 1891 Conwell opened this vast new church, which seated at least 4,000. As skilled at raising money as at preaching, he started a hospital at the same time, and founded a college and constructed a building for it beside the church.

The college grew into a state-affiliated university that focused on educating the sons and daughters of the middle and working classes, and that enrolls some 34,000 students today. The hospital has grown and prospered as well. But by the early 1970s, attendance at the church had fallen, and in 1975, its congregation moved to the suburbs, having sold the Temple itself to the university. Soon the university learned that the Temple's interior needed structural work, and the building was locked tight while the university debated whether to convert it into a concert hall. In 1986 the trustees voted to tear it down, citing its poor condition, but the city refused to give permission. John Street, a city-council member who later became mayor, noted that the university had spent $60-million on new buildings during the previous 12 years without devoting anything to maintenance on the Temple.

Now, two decades later, the concert-hall project has been revived and is poised to begin this fall. But it will gut the Temple's interior. That's partly because it's so far gone now, after years of leaks and other indignities, that it cannot be saved, and partly because a first-rate contemporary concert facility could not be built any other way. The carved and paneled choir loft that rises behind the pulpit and under the ranks of organ pipes, the baptistry that was the focus of Conwell's most theatrical serv­ices, the spacious wooden balconies suspended on thin metal rods so no one's view was blocked — all that will be lost, along with the ceiling stencils, Conwell's office, and the basement kitchen, with baking pans still stacked in the oven of a huge, rusting, iron range.

And what a history to lose! Russell Conwell is hardly a household name today, but a hundred years ago he was famous as an entertaining and inspirational orator, a quintessentially American speaker whose main message was that anyone could get ahead by working hard. By today's standards of piety, his most-popular sermons are barely religious.

Conwell was born in Massachusetts in 1843 and — at least according to his own account, which is widely cited but not entirely reliable — he entered Yale College in 1861, but soon left to join the Union Army as an officer. For decades afterward he told a story, in several variations, of having had a young aide de camp named Johnny Ring who died saving Conwell's sword from the Confederates. According to an account by the Rev. Daniel A. Poling, one of Conwell's assistants at the Temple, Conwell swore beside Johnny Ring's deathbed to work 16 hours a day from then on — "eight hours for myself and eight hours for Johnny Ring, who died for me." In another account, Conwell is reported to have said that it "was through John Ring and his giving his life through devotion to me that I became a Christian."

The Conwell biography that appears in an 1891 church bulletin says he went to law school after the war and became a lawyer, but then spent several years as a journalist for the New York Tribune and other newspapers before returning to the law. In 1877 he decided to become a minister, a role in which his talent for telling suspenseful stories served him well. His most famous sermon was "Acres of Diamonds," which he claimed in 1921 to have delivered more than 6,000 times. It begins with a tale that Conwell said he had heard from an old Arab guide "when going down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers many years ago with a party of English travelers."

The gist of the story — Conwell's published version, delicious with detail, runs to 15,000 words — is that a man eager for riches sells his land so he can use the money to go seek a diamond mine, but he fails in his quest and ends up committing suicide in a strange land. Meanwhile the new owner of the man's property discovers diamonds right there. Writes Conwell: "Every acre of that old farm, yes, every shovelful, afterward revealed gems which since have decorated the crowns of monarchs."

Another oft-told story concerns a little girl who, after Conwell came to Philadelphia, wanted to attend his old church's Sunday school but found it too crowded. Conwell told her he was trying to raise the money to build a larger church, and she began saving her pennies for him. "The next that I heard about it was that Hattie was very sick," Conwell recalled in a 1912 sermon. When she died, her parents gave him the 57 cents she had saved, which — to make a very long story very short — became the down payment on the lot on which the Temple stands.

The Temple was designed by Thomas Lonsdale, a prominent Philadelphia architect. The program for the opening week's festivities says that the "main audience room" has 110 windows, including a half-rose window 30 feet in diameter, and that "the electrical apparatus is sufficient for 550 lights." The original organ had 2,133 pipes and cost $7,500, but it was replaced in about 1910 with an instrument designed by Robert Hope-Jones — the inventor of the theater organ — that was played from a console with five keyboards and constructed by Wurlitzer. In addition to the usual stops, such as clarinet, oboe, and trumpet, it included cymbals, a harp, a glockenspiel, a snare drum, and a xylophone. (The organ was removed when the congregation sold the Temple to the university; the pipes above the choir loft are — and always have been — merely decorative.)

The organ had a role in baptisms, the Temple's most important services. For these the floor of the platform in front of the choir loft was removed, revealing an arc-shaped waterway that a person about to be baptized entered from a passageway on either side. Once the black-robed worshiper was out in front of the congregation with Conwell, the preacher questioned him or her "in a strong, clever voice, heard to the remotest corner of the house," according to an article in the Temple's magazine: "'Do you love Jesus Christ, who came down to save you?'"

"All this while the organ had been giving music," wrote the magazine reporter, "and the great choir had been singing at times parts of hymns, and from up back among the banks of singers a cascade of water, a yard wide, had been falling down toward the pool. Its gleam in the light among the palms and ferns we could clearly see, and the shades of color as the water tumbled over the series of ledges."

Conwell's granddaughter, Jane Conwell Tuttle, wrote years later that the ceremony "was something no one ever forgot whether they were spectators or participants," and also that Conwell served as "his own producer and stage manager." She added: "Personally, I have always felt he was a combination of psychiatrist, magician, and hypnotist — which would probably make me a heretic."

But all that was long ago. What remains is a narrow, blue-tiled pool littered with rubble from a recent effort to reinforce the Temple's roof. The stairs in the dark tunnel leading to the pool are uncertain, and there is no strong-voiced preacher to greet someone emerging into the cavernous auditorium, only a dusty memorial plaque erected after Conwell's death in 1925. It hangs under the balcony on the south wall, between two stained-glass windows showing scenes from the life of Jesus. A broken panel in one window is covered with plywood, and a section of plaster is missing above the plaque. Mounted beneath it, on the same piece of marble, is a small metal sword.

Edited August 5, 2007 by alocispepraluger102