[p. 29] Miss Mary King, and others, gave me patient and ready help in the Sunday-school under Mr. Gardiner P. Gates, our efficient superintendent. Those were the early years of the war, anxious years for us all, and for many of the people in Medford, as elsewhere through the land, overclouded with doubts about the outcome of the conflict, doubts which I never shared. I remember preaching persistently my faith in the final success of our cause, as the only service I was permitted to render; rather feeble service, indeed, but hotly sincere. Phillips Brooks, at home from his first Philadelphia parish for a vacation visit in Boston, sat in a pew in our church on one of the Sundays, and privately criticized the sermon as “bloodthirsty.”The Episcopal, or, as it is sometimes called, the English Church, was at that period rather conservative in its pulpit utterances relating to the leading questions of the day, but Mr. Strong seems to have been a courageous radical.
‘After leaving Medford in 1863, officiated two and one-half years in Calvary Church, Germantown, Penn.; twelve years as professor of English literature in Kenyon College; ten years as rector of Grace Church, New Bedford, and ten more as a resident of Cambridge, where my home now is.’
Mr. Strong was succeeded by the Rev. Charles Henry Learoyd, who entered upon his duties September 6, 1863.
Mr. Learoyd was born in Danvers. He entered Harvard College in 1854; was a member of the Institute Society, the Hasty Pudding Club and the Phi Beta Kappa; formed the Harvard Glee Club, and was its first leader; graduated in 1858; entered the Andover Theological Seminary in 1859; became rector of Grace Church, Medford, in 1863. October 14, married Susan Ellen Perley of Danvers.
On the sixth of September, 1865, Mr. Learoyd went to Europe, and the Rev. C. Ingalls Chapin acted as supply until his return on the twenty-third of the following September.
