The crypt that lies under the Chapel at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. contains the body of John Paul Jones but the Chapel that stands above it serves not only as a memorial to the great leader of the early Navy, but in addition as a shrine for the memory of a captain who never commanded a ship, an officer who never issued an order. The dome of the Chapel rises above the trees by the side of the Severn largely because of the dream and hope of the man who was Chaplain of the Naval Academy from 1890 until 1911, Henry Howard Clark, Captain, Corps of Chaplains, United States Navy. By his indefatigable energy and farsighted statesmanship, he was able to win such support from men prominent in both naval and political life that appropriations were secured from Congress for the erection of the Chapel in which he ministered during the later years of his life. It was in Annapolis that he brought to its close a long, distinguished, and useful life, and the memory of his slight but erect form seems yet to linger along the streets of the old town and about the chancel of the Naval Academy Chapel.
Chaplain Clark was born at Calais, Maine, on the sixth of March 1845. He came of forebears who had worn their country's uniform on more than one field of battle, for his father, Amos Clark, was the grandson of two grandfathers who had been officers in the Revolutionary War, while his mother, Mary Cheney Clark, was the daughter of a lieutenant who served in the American Army during the War of 1812. Chaplain Clark was also of good Methodist stock, and the memory of his early training in the class-meeting lingered with him during all his eventful life.
After attending the public schools of Calais, Maine, the future chaplain, already feeling an irresistible impulse toward the ministry, spent six years at various schools and academies, completing the course of the East Maine Conference Seminary. In 1872 he entered both the College of Liberal Arts and the School of Theology of Boston University, but events compelled him to change his plans and he withdrew from the College of Liberal Arts, receiving his degree of Theology in 1875. He had become a member of the East Maine Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, in 1872, and was ordained a Deacon in that year by Bishop E. G. Andrews, and an Elder in 1875 by Bishop Gilbert Haven. A few churches in Maine were the scene of his early labors.
In 1873 friends interested him in applying for an appointment as a Chaplain in the United States Navy, and he submitted an application for the position. His letter of application ends with a sentence which was characteristic of his entire lifetime of self-forgetful service and modesty. With discriminating choice of words, and mature feeling for balance of phrasing and thrust of meaning, the young clergyman wrote, "If appointed I shall seek to discharge my duties as creditably as my abilities will allow." He was appointed by President Grant, and on the twenty-seventh of January, 1873, he took up the work that was to lead him into high places of honor and to extend his personality and influence until he was known and loved wherever the uniform of the Navy could be found.
Chaplain Clark's first cruise was on board the old U.S.S. Ohio, which did most of her cruising in Boston Harbor. Here he remained until early in 1877, when he was assigned to the U.S.S. Trenton, which made her first cruise to the European Station, visiting the ports of the Mediterranean as well as the British Isles and Denmark. During this cruise Chaplain Clark traveled widely over the continent of Europe, an experience of which his keen, analytical mind and tenacious memory made the most lasting use. After this experience in the ports of Europe, he returned to the United States, where he served as guide and counselor for the new recruits on board several of the training ships. This was duty of the greatest importance, for the influence of a capable Chaplain on the minds of the young boys who were in those days apprenticed to the Navy was a deter-mining factor in the lives of many of these boys. In 1884 he was ordered to the Navy Yard at Washington, D.C., where he followed in the footsteps of the distinguished Chaplain Ryland of earlier fame. After this duty he cruised on board the Lancaster to the ports of South America and to the European Station. At the completion of this duty he had served 17 years in the Navy, and had become known as a kindly, modest, unselfish, tactful, friendly Chaplain, but the work that was to make him one of the great Chaplains of the Navy was yet to be done.
This work he entered upon on the eighteenth of July, 1890, when he reported for duty at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. From that time until his retirement, in 1907, and for four years after, with only an occasional break of a year or so, he was the Chaplain of the Naval Academy, the friend and confidant of many classes of midshipmen. During. the 19 years he served there, he became almost a part of the tradition of the Academy, and was frequently referred to in good-humored jest by his fellow Chaplains in the Navy as "the Angel of the Church that is at Annapolis." As class after class of midshipmen entered the institution and took up their studies there, they came to know and love the slender, diffident man in the long coat of a clergyman, who came quietly into their rooms when they were most homesick, and who gave them out of the fullness of his own experience the wise counsels that would help to make them officers worthy of the trust and confidence of the nation as well as of the men who were to be under their command. He had the genius for friendship, and men were instinctively drawn to him, from the Superintendent of the Academy to the youngest "Plebe." Men who have the instinct of the guidance of youth are rare, but here was one who combined the mellow kindness of friendship with the inspiring quality of authoritative leadership, and the midshipmen who sur rounded him at Annapolis knew that both friendliness and leadership were real and vital. It is said that Chaplain Clark knew by name every graduate of the Naval
Academy during the entire period of his duty there, and it is sure that no person in the naval service wielded a greater power than did he for the building of character and the development of high ideals. During his entire life Chaplain Clark retained his ecclesiastical affiliations with the Methodist Church, and was a member of the Baltimore Conference of the Church from 1891 until he received his final orders from the Great Commander. He was a progressive in theology, seeing the problems of life from the standpoint of a dweller in the modern world a decade before that attitude was popularized by the universities. His love of the stately liturgies of the older churches set him aside at times from the more conservative members of his own denomination; but at the same time his appreciation of the beauty and dignity of the Episcopal service made him select that as the common ground upon which all creeds might unite in worship. Through nearly 20 years he set the standard of Divine Worship at the Naval Academy by using within the historic precincts of the great Chapel the ritual of Morning Prayer according to the forms of the Protestant Episcopal church. The dignity of the service, coupled with the dignity of the venerable Chaplain, left an impression upon class after class of midshipmen that the years have never succeeded in eradicating. The kindness and gentleness of his manner, the sheer lovable sweetness of his disposition, and the calm and clear-eyed uprightness of his character gave the things that he said a weight and worth that influenced many an officer and enlisted man for good.
During the days he spent in Annapolis his virile pen was constantly busy. For several years he wrote sermons for the editorial page of the Baltimore Sun, and many of his occasional sermons were published by the Navy Department. The life of the young officers of the Navy impressed him deeply, and he turned to good account his long experience afloat and ashore. Some of the best stories of Navy life in print are those which were written by Chaplain Clark. "The Admiral's Aide," "Boy Life in the United States Navy," "Joe Bently, Naval Cadet," "Lost in Pompeii," are but a few of the titles of his works of fiction. As he neared the last days of his tour of duty at the Naval Academy, so great was the demand for a volume of his sermons that he consented to allow a publisher to present a group of the sermons which had been preached at the Naval Academy under the title The Sword of the Nation. The Chaplain was a master in the use of the English language, and his prose style was vigorous, stately, and strong. It was polished and direct, with a rare choice of words, instinctive feeling for rhythm, and was at the same time both vivid and graceful.
As a preacher, Chaplain Clark was quiet and calm, and his sermons gained their impressiveness not only from the matchless style and splendid sequence of their language, but even more from the earnestness of their delivery. At times he would rise to passages of real eloquence, but always with restraint and control. This man possessed the ability to make his own personality live in his message, until his auditors accepted his teaching not for the manner in which it was delivered, but because of the transparent sincerity of the man who gave it. He was an indefatigable toiler through all the long years of his ministry; through hard, painstaking labor he won his way to success and distinction, and the measure of his success may be estimated by the reputation that has gone abroad in the Navy concerning him, that he was the most unselfish Chaplain ever known. In all the history of the Navy, no Chaplain has ever been able to exert the influence over officers that Chaplain Clark was able to wield without effort.
I have two very vivid memories. One takes me back many years to the narrow passageways between the high bookstacks of the Congressional Library, with shelves of books about me, and the dim light from the December twilight stealing in through the darkened panes. How long I had been standing, I do not know, but with my arms laden with books I held awkwardly open a thin volume and by the fading light my eyes raced over its pages. And the printed pages wove a spell for me, for I was making my first acquaintance with one of Chaplain Clark's little volumes, The Sword of the Nation. Down all the ages we adventured together, the catholic-minded Navy Chaplain and the boy bibliophile. Across far seas we ranged, and into distant ports. By vivid imagery and forceful simile the author bound history and religion, politics and statecraft, science and letters all in one grandly interrelated whole, and with flawless language, in unswerving sentences he drove straight home to "the instant heart of things." Here was keen penetrative insight, warm human sympathy, the scintillating flash of intellect, and the stately beauty of the masterly use of straightforward Anglo-Saxon speech. And above all, here was the dazzling light of spiritual illumination. So I stood, absorbed, while the winter twilight faded into darkness, and had opened. to me the depth of understanding and the reaches of inspiration of the mind of the "Angel of the Church that is at Annapolis."
The other memory is even more vivid. It is of one of the closing scenes of Chaplain Clark's long life of service. An open fireplace this time, in an afternoon during the spring of 1924, with a crackling fire that drove away the last of the lingering frost in the April air and flung a cheery glow through the room, waking an answering gleam from ruddy brass bowl or lacquer vase. And in a low chair, facing the warmth of the fire, reclined a mere wisp of a man, with a blanket over his knees and a shawl about his narrow shoulders. Two pale, almost transparent hands lay along the arms of the chair, and so fragile did he seem that one could not have been surprised had a scurrying blast of the breeze that was rattling the windows carried him away. When I lifted my eyes to his face, it was a thin, kindly face, with long straight nose and firm lips, and with an old-fashioned patch of whiskers on each cheek, and in the eyes a light that gave color and vigor to the whole countenance. He smiled with the most engaging gentleness and as he told me of his early days in the Naval Service the modesty and reticence that had characterized his entire life made him stress the work of his contemporaries and minimize his own. He talked quietly, almost bashfully, with a gleam of quizzical humor playing about the corners of his eyes, and a winsome wistfulness in his voice. I sensed somehow a feeling of mountain tops and great white marching piles of cumulus clouds, and the fresh fragrance of the spring winds, for this man's soul was breathing the air of an eternal Spring. We talked long, I with my notebook on my knee, he with his mind busied with reminiscences of the past. At last he struggled to his feet, in spite of my protests, to come to the door with me, to see me on my way. As I reached the pavement I turned and saw him framed there in the door, and my last sight of him showed me a kindly, gallant gentleman, straight and finely modeled, with the radiance of the sunset a halo around his head. The farewell wave of the hand seemed almost a benediction. And I went away and left him, but I carried with me the never-to-be-forgotten impress of his personality.
Chaplain Clark was retired from the active list of the Navy in 1907 but remained on duty at the Naval Academy for four years longer. After he had relinquished his duties to his successor, he made his home in Annapolis, where he could be seen until nearly the last week of his life, a gentle, gracious figure, resting in the love and honors won during a long and eventful life. Colleges delighted to honor him with the bestowal of their degrees and demanded his voice again and again at their Baccalaureate Services.
The time and place of the venerable Chaplain's lifework was decided by the orders of the Navy Department, but the manner and quality of that service was in obedience to the orders of a Greater than any earthly ruler. At last the orders came that relieved him from all earthly duty and bade him proceed to his Eternal Home. And with the same trusting obedience, with the same light of joy on his face, the beloved old Chaplain laid aside his tasks, said last farewells to dear ones, and set his face towards the glory of the sunrise. There this winsome mail shall stand up and salute the winsome Christ, "his Captain in the well fought fight." Chaplain Clark's body was laid to rest with the honors of the country he had so long served. He was borne to his last resting place from the Naval Academy Chapel where he had so long ministered, and which is itself a monument to his Christian statesmanship. Loving words recalled his services to Church and Country. The rattle of the musketry died away and the bugle sobbed the notes of the Last Taps over his grave, and a gallant Christian gentleman lay at rest.