About The Christian Herald

The Christian Herald

The Christian Herald was an American evangelical weekly newspaper published in New York City. It was started in 1878 as the American edition of a London paper of the same name, and it ceased publication in 1992. Under its proprietor Louis Klopsch and its editor Thomas De Witt Talmage, it became one of the most widely read religious weeklies in America, reporting on evangelical Christianity with an emphasis on humanitarian causes at home and abroad. Unusually for a religious paper, it also ran a major charitable operation of its own, sponsoring the Bowery Mission and a children's camp, and raising millions of dollars for famine and disaster relief around the world.

An American Edition from London, 1878

The American Herald was started in 1878 in New York City by business manager Joseph Spurgeon, a cousin of the London Baptist preacher Charles H. Spurgeon, and editor Dr. B. J. Fernie, after they conceived the idea with the Rev. Michael P. Baxter, founder of the original London-based paper. In its fuller early title it was The Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times. The scholarly journal Religions, in a study of the paper's first decades, describes its launch at the Bible House in Lower Manhattan, timed to coincide with an 1878 prophecy conference at the Church of the Holy Trinity, and notes that the new paper promised to make known the way of salvation and to keep alive the expectation of the Lord's return. It appeared as a sixteen-page weekly with a florid masthead, its logo an angel blowing a trumpet sheltered within the letter C of its title. Alongside the newspaper, Joseph Spurgeon also ran a charity under the same auspices, devoted to poor relief and evangelising — the seed of the charitable empire the paper later built.

The Paper's Contents: Sermons, Prophecy and the World

The Herald's standard fare included articles on prophecy, biographical sketches and religious news, but sermons from Charles Haddon Spurgeon and from the New York Presbyterian preacher Thomas DeWitt Talmage, the two great pulpit orators of their day, formed its central pillars. Each week it carried a prophetic article touching on some facet of dispensational premillennialism, the system that read history as a succession of dispensations and expected an imminent return of Christ; it recorded predictions of the rapture at least ten times in its first fifteen years. Evangelism was a second cornerstone, and virtually every major name in Anglo-American evangelism appeared in its spotlight, among them Dwight Moody, J. Hudson Taylor and Sam Jones. Faith healing, biblical exposition, camp meetings and conferences were also covered, and the paper ranged far beyond church news: it reported political and economic developments, major world events and high society, escorted readers through the world's fairs from Paris in 1878 onward, and filled its pages with the royalty and celebrities of the age. On the strength of its content and connections it quickly gained a circulation equal to that of the largest secular papers, and within scarcely a decade it had become, in the assessment of the Religions study, America's leading religious periodical and the flagship organ of American evangelicalism.

Louis Klopsch Takes Over

In 1889 the publisher Louis Klopsch arranged to take over the American edition of the paper, and he soon put Talmage in charge as editor; Talmage served as editor from 1890 to 1902. Klopsch, a close Talmage associate, had made his name in newspaper syndication, through which he had made Talmage's sermons available to numerous newspapers across the United States. Under Klopsch the paper took on a distinctly American and decidedly entrepreneurial character. Its visual appeal steadily increased, as Klopsch filled the columns with lithographs and florid calligraphy until virtually every page was decorated, while the basic menu of sermons, prophecy, evangelism and religious news remained surprisingly consistent. Circulation increased to over 200,000 by the time of Klopsch's death in 1910. Klopsch was named one of Talmage's literary executors on the preacher's death in 1902, and he also published books of his own, including a volume of daily prayers in 1906 and collections of Christmas tales and quotations in the 1890s.

A Newspaper That Ran Relief Campaigns

What set the Christian Herald apart from every other religious weekly was the scale of its giving. Klopsch conducted charitable fundraising drives through the Herald that raised over four million dollars for relief efforts worldwide. Major campaigns were run for relief of Russian famine victims in 1892, for the Indian famine of 1896 to 1897, and again for India in 1900, when Klopsch travelled to India to distribute relief funds in person. On May 10, 1900, the Navy steamship Quito sailed from Brooklyn carrying 5,000 tons of corn and seeds to the starving people of India, a rescue effort driven by the Herald's appeals to its readers. His relief efforts for victims of the 1908 Messina earthquake were recognised by King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy; he received a gold Kaisar-i-Hind Medal from Edward VII for his work in India and the Order of the Rising Sun from the Emperor Meiji of Japan. The historian Heather D. Curtis, in her book Holy Humanitarians, argues that these evangelical media campaigns transformed how Americans responded to domestic crises and foreign disasters, fostering a popular movement of faith-based aid that rivalled the achievements of agencies such as the American Red Cross.

The Bowery Mission

At home, the Herald's best-known ministry was the Bowery Mission in New York City, which provided food and shelter for the hungry and homeless of the Lower East Side. In 1895 Klopsch purchased the financially distressed Bowery Mission and its building and became its president, saving it from economic hardship and possible closure; the mission was formally incorporated in 1897 and settled at 227 Bowery in 1909. The Herald publicised the mission relentlessly — a February 1904 cover depicted the breadline at the mission — and its support drew criticism from professional philanthropists who charged that breadlines and soup kitchens attracted vagrants who refused honest work. Klopsch answered that what pauperised people was not an occasional helping hand but low sweatshop wages, exorbitant rents, high food prices and enforced idleness. After the Herald ceased publication in 1992, the Bowery Mission continued, and the paper's continued impact on the mission has been cited as one of its most significant and enduring effects.

Mont Lawn Camp and the Children's Home

In 1894, with money left over from a food fundraising drive for the mission, Klopsch founded a summer camp and children's home at Mont Lawn in Upper Nyack, New York, for poor children from New York City, many of them children of immigrant families living on the Lower East Side. It remained at Nyack-on-the-Hudson for 69 years before it moved to the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania in 1961. After the Herald ceased publication in 1992, Mont Lawn Camp continued under the ownership and operation of the Bowery Mission, so that a venture begun with a newspaper's surplus relief money outlived the newspaper itself by decades. Together, the mission and the camp embodied the Herald's conviction that a religious paper should not only report Christian charity but organise it, enlisting hundreds of thousands of ordinary readers as donors — a message the paper pressed home by insisting that philanthropy was not only for the elite but a duty for everyday citizens.

The Poling Years and the Family Bookshelf

In 1927 the Rev. Daniel A. Poling became editor of the Christian Herald, a post he held until 1966 — a tenure of nearly forty years that carried the paper through the Depression, the Second World War and the postwar revival of American evangelicalism. In 1948 the Herald started the Family Bookshelf, a book subscription group offering Christian-friendly literature to its readers, extending the paper's role from news and sermons into the religious book trade. Contributors over the years included Sara Jane Crafts, who served as a contributor and editor for the paper. The Herald of the Poling era remained a national evangelical institution, though the religious press around it was changing, as denominational papers, magazines and eventually broadcast media competed for the audience the Herald had once commanded almost alone.

Decline, Chappaqua and the End in 1992

Declining circulation eventually forced the Herald to relocate from Manhattan to Chappaqua, New York, in 1971. The move from the city where it had been founded ninety-three years earlier marked the contraction of a paper that had once rivalled the largest secular newspapers in circulation. By 1992 the newspaper ceased publication. The charitable outreach arm, however, still existed: it relocated back to Manhattan in 1998. In the early months of 2006, the Christian Herald, having ceased all publications, was dissolved. The organisation's life thus ended in two stages — the newspaper first, in 1992, and the corporate charity fourteen years later — while its principal works, above all the Bowery Mission, carried on under other governance.

Place in American Evangelicalism

The Christian Herald documents a kind of evangelicalism that later generations largely forgot. The Religions study of its early decades argues that the paper played the millenarian tune in a different key, merging Higher Life perspectives with a cultural style bordering on the genteel, presuming a readership of worldly-wise Victorians who were curious about the world they hoped to save and who treated world news as their news. Its political coverage remained issue-oriented and nonpartisan, encouraging involvement while leaving particular votes to conscience and prayer. For historians, the paper is therefore evidence on two fronts at once: for the history of evangelical belief, in its sermons, prophecy articles and healing reports; and for the history of American humanitarianism, in campaigns that moved ships of corn to India and kept a Bowery breadline open. Few newspapers of any kind have left a charitable institution still operating more than a century after the paper itself was founded; the Christian Herald did, and that is the core of its legacy.

The Surviving Record

The paper's issues survive in archives and in digitised form — its December 1900 self-portrait and its illustrated covers are reproduced from the Internet Archive's holdings, sponsored by Tisch Library at Tufts University with the Christian Herald Association as contributing library — and its history has attracted sustained scholarly attention, including Curtis's Holy Humanitarians, which studies the Herald from 1890 into the 1920s as the central case of evangelical global aid. A modern reader opening an issue from 1901 finds a complete specimen of the Klopsch-era paper: sermons by Talmage, reports of revival work in the Kentucky and Tennessee mountains, missionary news from China, and famine reporting from abroad — the mixture of pulpit, prophecy and philanthropy that made the Christian Herald, for roughly half a century, the most influential religious newspaper in the United States.