Charles Henry Brent

1862-1929. Canadian bishop and ecumenist. Born in Ontario, he was educated at Trinity College, Toronto, and ordained in 1887. After serving a parish in Boston, he was elected bishop of the missionary district of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Philippines, and while serving there was a leader in the fight against the opium traffic. He was elected bishop of Western New York in 1917 and from 1926 to 1928 was in charge of the Episcopal churches in Europe. In his later years he gave much time to conferences promoting Christian unity. On returning from the Edinburgh Conference* of 1910 he induced the general convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church to convene a “World Conference on Faith and Order.” He was elected president of the conference, held at Lausanne in 1927 (see Lausanne Conference). He held that all Christian groups belonging to such movements had something to contribute to all the others, and that such a great church would thereby become the repository of the great spiritual, intellectual, and moral wealth of the Christian centuries. His works included The Mind of Christ in the Church of the Living God (1908), Presence (1914), and The Mount of Vision (1918).