Rev. George Hodges was born in Rome, New York, on October 6, 1856. He graduated from Hamilton College in 1877 and with the degree of A. M., artium magister—master of the arts, in 1882. He received a D.D. from Brown in 1914 and in 1916 a D.D. from Harvard.
He served at Calvary Episcopal Church in East Liberty from 1881 to 1894, first as an assistant to Rev. Boyd Vincent and then as the rector. Rev. Vincent assigned him to St. Stephen's, a congregation then meeting in the basement of the burned out Hamilton Hotel just over the boundary line from Wilkinsburg in Pittsburgh. It would become a church in Wilkinsburg.
He took to walking considerable distances to visit his parishioners and gradually the congregation grew. A newspaper reporter, looking back over Rev. Hodges’s work at St. Stephen’s, called him “a pioneer in relating religion to community life.” This is a theme running through his life.
While at Calvary,The Reverend George Hodges . . . founded the Kingsley Association along with businessman H. D. W. English. The Reverend Hodges was committed to the Social Gospel and the teachings of Charles Kingsley. He believed that part of that commitment was a concern for “ sanitation and the administration of the city, and politics, and rent, and wages, and the conditions generally under which men work and live between Sundays. . . .“ English was the son of an abolitionist Baptist minister and rose from . . . printing jobs to head the Berkshire Insurance Company in Pittsburgh. He was a noted civic leader from the 1890s to his death in 1916, and was instrumental in bringing the questions of housing and sanitation to the attention of the chamber of commerce. It was the first time the chamber became actively involved in such issues.
The Kingsley House at Penn Avenue and 17th Street in the Strip District opened on Christmas Day 1893. Wikipedia tells,
The purpose for the creation of the Kingsley House was not much different from that of any other settlement house. Hodges had simply repeated what Jane Addams had done with Hull House in Chicago and what many other settlement houses across the nation had done to benefit the communities they were located in. The real purpose of the Kingsley House and these other settlement houses was to provide social and educational opportunities for working class families that otherwise would not be able to afford it. Hodges, himself, described the Kingsley House as existing “for the purpose of being a friend to everybody in the neighborhood who needs a friend.”
The Kingsley House became an advocate for the reform of housing conditions. Roy Lubove writes, “No voluntary institution was more active than Kingsley House in goading, rousing, and educating public opinion on housing.” The Kingsley House is now the Kingsley Association in East Liberty.
In late 1893 the trustees of Episcopal Theological School at Cambridge, Massachusetts, chose Rev. Hodges to be the dean. He was a president South End House Association and a president of the Cambridge Associated Charities. He wrote a book called Faith and Social Service: Eight Lectures Delivered Before the Lowell Institute. While in Pittsburgh and in Cambridge, he was active with the Christian Social Union founded in 1891 and related to the Christian Social Union in Great Britain.
One of his published sermons is “The Cattle of Ninevah” delivered for Lent in 1892 at Calvary Church.
The lesson that I want to emphasize is that God cares for cattle. . . . God has regard for all the cattle, for the horses and the cows, for the cats and the dogs, for the birds, for all the living creatures he has made. God is present not only in the house of prayer, but next door in the stockyards. . . . God cares for all the horses. Not a horse is over burdened, or overdriven, or ill treated, without God&s notice.
In his first book, Christianity between Sundays published in 1892, he wrote,
Whoever is himself in doubt about the Christian faith will find more help in charity than in theology. Let him not rely so much upon the reading of many Christian books, as upon the doing of many Christian works. Let him simply try day after day to live like a Christian and he will presently find himself believing like a Christian.
His books often deal with moral issues. In The Year of Grace, Trinity to Advent, he wrote,
For the courage of the commonplace is more difficult than the courage of the crisis.
It is more difficult because it is not attended by the rewards of appreciation and applause. . . . Also, the courage of the commonplace is more difficult than the courage of the crisis because it has no clear limitation on time.
His writing found a substantial degree of circulation. Houghton Mifflin and Company, Harper & Bros., The Macmillan Company, H. Holt, Appleton, and T. Whittaker are among the companies that published his work. His book William Penn in 1901 was published as an edition of the Riverside Biographical Series. Many of his books can be found at the Internet Archive.
The Hodges family lived in Cambridge on Mason Street next to the St. John’s Chapel of the Episcopal Theological School. Rev. Hodges died in 1919 at the family summer home in Holderness, New Hampshire.
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“George Hodges (theologian),” Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hodges_(theologian)
“Congregation Of St. Stephen’s Once Worshipped In Laundry, Early History Interesting.” Perspective based on Frances Stewart Hall’s “St. Stephen’s Protestant Episcopal Church,” in the Annuals. Quote about Rev. Hodges being a pioneer.
Ronald J. Butera, “A Settlement House and the Urban Challenge: Kingsley House in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1893–1920,” in January 1, 1983, Western Pennsylvania History, January 1983.
“Kingsley Association (Pittsburgh, PA),“ Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsley_Association_(Pittsburgh,_PA)
Roy Lubove, Twentieth Century Pittsburgh: Government, Business and Environmental Change. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1969, p. 29.
“The Bull Lectures,” Friends’ Intelligencer First month 2, 1904, p. 12 on Christian Social Union.
George Hodges, “The Cattle of Ninevah, A Sermon Preached in Calvary Church, Pittsburg, in Lent, 1892, at the Request of the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society,“ Pittsburgh: Published for the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society, 1892.
http://anglicanhistory.org/usa/misc/hodges_humane1892.html
George Hodges, Christianity Between Sundays. New York: Thomas Whittaker, Inc., 2 and 3 Bible House, 1892, p. 10.
George Hodges, The Year of Grace, Trinity to Advent. New York: Thomas Whittaker, Inc., 2 and 3 Bible House, 1910, pp. 4–5.
“Author: George Hodges,” Wikisource. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:George_Hodges