[3] The historian and Episcopal minister Frederick Ward Kates characterised him as a "gallant, daring, and consecrated soldier and servant of Christ" who was "one of modern Christendom's foremost leaders, prophets, and seers.

[20] The Cowley Fathers placed Brent in charge of St. Augustine's chapel which had been built to minister to African-Americans living in the West End of Boston.

Meditating on "the love of Jesus Christ, the application to modern life of principles by which He lived, and the overwhelming importance of the unseen, were instilled into my being in a manner and to a degree from which there is, thirty-five years later, no escape.

During his Boston days, he made friends with American Christian Socialists William Dwight Porter Bliss and Vida Dutton Scudder and with leaders of the settlement movement.

"[29] While all these opportunities were in the works, on October 11, 1901, Brent was elected by the Episcopal Church's General Convention meeting in San Francisco as the first missionary bishop of the Philippines.

"[30] Because, with the exceptions of Liberia, China, and Japan, the Episcopal Church was for the most part "apathetic about foreign missions," it was only "after confiding with close friends and after many days of prayer, Brent accepted the post."

The Church had been closely linked with the unpopular Spanish Government and because the Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians together had owned "some four hundred thousand acres of land, which they held in a sort of feudal tenure.

Here he would labor for seventeen years to minister to the Christians, to build up the Episcopal church, to convert the non-Christians, and to end the opium traffic throughout Southeast Asia.

He was busy during this time doing things that included the following: Regarding the annexation of the Philippines by the United States in 1898, President William McKinley said that his decision to do so "was directly linked to his religious faith."

The Episcopal church started a settlement house out of which grew "an orphanage, numerous boys' and girls' clubs, sewing classes, and a profitable secondhand exchange."

The American colony there faced two problems: how to endure the hot and humid season and how to educate their children without sending back to the United States.

Governor Taft supported continuing the policy of the Spaniards that included issuing "narcotics addicts" licenses and "legally supplying" them with opium.

He wrote that "it was among the pagan peoples that I learned that equality before God of all men, which I count to be the chief treasure I have honestly made my own in my life time.

"[72] On the less positive side, there were significant problems:[52] In the fall of 1945, Chaplain W. Hubert Bierck visited the area where the Igorot people live to assess the damage done and the repairs that had been done by the United States Army Corps of Engineers since the Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945.

On the positive side, Bierck noted that in the whole Ingorot area, there were Christian adult women and men, some of whom had been children when Bishop Brent explored the region and started missions and schools some forty years earlier.

[74] After Brent finished his service as senior chaplain of the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I, he did not return to his missionary diocese in the Philippines.

His away activities included the following:[81] In 1925, Brent preached the sermon at the consecration of Ernest M. Stires as Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island.

It is a pressing necessity for the arousing of that passion for Christ which will be the most flaming thing in the world, that certainty of voice and touch which will quell honest doubt and perplexity, that fund of wisdom which will open up spiritual vistas such as now we only yearn for.

The other was doing what he could to overcome the separation in America "between secular education and the Christian religion" by trying to convince the Episcopal Church to give financial support to its five remaining colleges.

He described "a Church college" as one "in which there is no dodging of facts, no coloring of science, but also and even more one in which Christ's revelation about the meaning of the universe and about the nature and destiny of man is assumed in all the teaching, in the administration, in the life of the place."

"[84] In 1926, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his consecration as bishop, Brent wrote, "For three things I am deeply grateful—that I am Canadian born and bred, that I had a mother who for character and spiritual culture was the peer of the best, and that a country rectory, where my father served for forty-two years, sheltered my young days.

From my Canadian breeding I got that fine, just discipline, which held within bounds a nature that could easily have gone on the rocks; to my mother's wise and loving influence I owe all the good that is in me; and it was my father's long rectorate in the little village where I was born that burned into my soul the high value of stability.

"[90] The "last public appearance" by Brent was 'as representative of the Episcopal Church at the enthronement of Cosmo Gordon Lang as archbishop of Canterbury" on December 4, 1928.

After his death "the Christian world mourned the passing of a tall, somewhat austere, often deeply lonesome man who had grown during his lifetime into one of modern Christendom's foremost leaders, prophets, and seers.

He did not have time to write the book, but in the few weeks before he died in March, he wrote an article addressed to the laity and clergy of his diocese and called "Things that Matter."

God is ever seeking man: His ear is more sensitive to the words, His heart to the desires of men, then the aspen leaf on a summer breeze, than the compass needle to the call of the poles.

Brent concluded the article with these words:[97] My solemn conviction born of years of pain and struggle, confirmed as I skirt eternity, is that what I have said in the foregoing pages must form the main background for the truly Christian life.

If you have, in a sincere soul, as your permanent ideal, the great principles on which I have touched and if you pursue them with 'terrible meekness,' you will accomplish a work greater than that of empire builders or world statesmen.Two memorial services for Brent were held in the Diocese of Western New York.

The message from Diocese of Toronto's Clergy and Laity said in part, "by his international work on behalf of World Peace, of Christian Unity, Faith and Order, and of the restriction of the Opium traffic, Dr. Brent made his influence felt as widely as that of any living Churchman.

"[105] The historian James Thayer Addison characterized Brent as a "a saint of disciplined mental vigor, one whom soldiers were proud to salute and whom children were happy to play with, who could dominate a parliament and minister to an invalid, a priest and bishop who gloried in the heritage of his Church, yet who stood among all Christian brothers as one who served ...