It was December 1943. The war in Europe and the Pacific was being waged with ferocity. The fate of civilization hung in the balance. Totalitarianism had shocked the world, with its cruel pagan ideologies and its brutal policies. I was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, not yet in the Army or Navy only because I was just 17.

At Christmas, a high school classmate and friend, who lived at St Francis' House, the Episcopal Center for students at the university, gave me a small red book titled Beyond Agnosticism. It was by Bernard Iddings Bell. Fr. Bell, I learned, was something of a public figure in the Episcopal and Anglican churches, well known as a writer and preacher on both sides of the Atlantic.

Later that year, before I went into the service, I got to see and hear Fr. Bell, when he came to St. Francis' House to preach a mission. In appearance he was a formidable man, with what some reporters called a bulldog look. Others described him as owlish. He was clearly a man of powerful intellect and strong convictions. At St. Francis' House, he spoke gravely of the world crisis of our time, placing it in the historical perspective of a cosmic struggle between good and evil that had ranged for centuries in people's hearts and in the universe. He brought alive the age-old Christian message of man's sinfulness and redemption by God, through his Son and the Holy Spirit, the hope that this offered in the midst of our present trials.

Five years later, my military service completed, I entered the University of Chicago to continue my studies. There, to my surprise and delight, I found that Fr. Bell, now Canon Bell, was pastor to Episcopal students at the university, and advisor to Brent House, a residence house for foreign and American students named for the great Missionary Bishop to the Philippines, Charles Henry Brent. During the next six years, it was my good fortune to know and work closely with Fr. Bell. During those years, he brought many distinguished clergy and lay persons to our services and meetings, including Bishop Stephen Bayne, Bishop James Pike, and T.S. Eliot, a personal friend of B.I.

As I did my graduate studies in history, Fr. Bell was my mentor, my confessor, and my friend. He and his wife, Betty, were kind to me and to my wife. He presented us for confirmation and reception into the Episcopal Church, he performed our marriage, and he baptized our first child. In 1954, we left Chicago and the Bells, for my first teaching job. By then Fr. Bell was suffering from rapidly advancing glaucoma, and soon thereafter lost his eyesight completely. He seemed to have a presentiment of his death. One of the last times we saw him, he said, "I will see you in heaven." He died in 1958.

Who was this man, Bernard Iddings Bell? What impact and role did he have in the church and in his times? What made him well known, in England and in the United States? He was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1886. In 1907, he graduated from the University of Chicago, a school once described as, "A Baptist institution, where Jewish professors teach Catholic doctrines to atheistic students."

After a brief stint as a newspaper reporter, he entered Western (now Seabury-Western) Theological Seminary, and was ordained deacon and priest in 1910. In 1913 he became dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, Fond du Lac, Wis. In 1919 he was called to be warden of St Stephen's College on the Hudson, an adjunct of Columbia University. He remained there until 1933, serving also as professor of religion at Columbia, 1930-1935. In 1946, Fr. Bell was named canon and consultant on religion and education at St. James' Cathedral, Chicago.

As early as 1918, the young priest and educator published his first book, Right and Wrong After the War. The next book was Post-Modernism and Other Essays (1925), and Common Sense in Education (1928). These were succeeded by 15 more books, including perhaps his best known, A Catholic Looks at His World (1936), The Church in Disrepute (1943), The Altar and the World (1944), and God Is Not Dead (1945). These books made B.I. widely known, and much in demand as a preacher and lecturer.

In England, where he was known as Iddings-Bell, he spoke and preached at the great universities and cathedrals from the leading pulpits. During England's darkest hours, when bombs rained down on London, he preached at St. Paul's, London, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and Westminster Abbey. What was his message and his appeal? He grew up in what were late Victorian times, in America the Gilded Age, a time of great fortunes and abject poverty. Workers and farmers felt cheated and exploited. Political and social unrest mounted. There were other signs that an orderly society was in danger of breaking down. Darwin, Marx and Freud cast doubt on the established views of the nature of man and the meaning of life itself.

In Beyond Agnosticism, Fr. Bell described spiritual and intellectual crises he experienced when he arrived at college: "By the time I was through my freshman year, my evangelical, fundamentalist religion had been demolished. I searched about for a sane theory of life. At one time I rested content with scientific mechanism for a few weeks. But even my adolescent mind was able to see that the inevitable end of that is despair."

He was in near despair intellectually. He hit bottom. Then an unexpected thing happened.

"About that time I came to know a quiet priest of God in a parish near my university. He was an Anglo-Catholic. He wore clothes strange to me, did things I failed to understand. But he had a winsomeness about him that came from inner peace. He did not argue with me. He understood that my legalistic protestantism had to go. He himself had listened to the patter of the mechanists, and was not afraid. He loved, and understood, and said his prayers. He was a humble man. I do not think he ever knew how much he helped me."

Through the humble Anglo-Catholic priest, B.I. Bell recovered, or discovered, his faith. But no sooner had he completed seminary and been ordained, than all the societal tensions he had grown up with exploded, in rapid succession. First, the Great War, with its terrible carnage and disillusionment. Then, bloody revolution and counterrevolution in Russia, and a worldwide economic breakdown, the Great Depression.

Fr. Bell did not shrink from these disasters, but met them head on. Widening his fundamental commitment as a priest at the altar and a man of God, from World War I through World War II, Bernard Iddings Bell became a leader and a voice in the church at large and in our society. Exhorting men and women to stand fast, through all the calamities and uncertainties of the time, he was quoted regularly in the press, and he appeared on the cover of Time.

Through all of this he was a strong and unwavering voice for social and economic justice. He was a strong advocate of a Christian way of life rooted in sacramentalism and moral theology, committed to the social good. In doing so he built on the ideas and labors of church leaders who had gone before him. In the Anglican Communion, a succession of churchmen, mostly Anglo-Catholic, some calling themselves Christian Socialists — from William Morris and Charles Gore to Archbishop William Temple — called Anglicans to re-examine early Christian social and economic practices that sought to apply the gospel.

The first Christians lived as one large extended family, having all things in common. In Medieval Christendom, manors, monasteries, communal cities, and guilds all lived and worked communally, putting the needs and good of the community ahead of the individual. We too, said these Anglican leaders, must invent or reinvent a more cooperative way of ordering our lives, instead of the self-centered competitive way that leads to cutthroat economic rivalry, political conflict and terrible wars, and social-economic injustice.

No Anglican or Episcopalian embraced these ideas more strongly and outspokenly than Bernard Iddings Bell. This can be seen abundantly in his 1944 book, The Altar and the World. In the first chapter, he wrote, "The Liturgy has social implications. Worship is corporate. This has been forgotten by modern Christians, who tend to lay exclusive emphasis on the individual. 'We who are many are one,' says St. Paul. 'We are one body in Christ, and members of one another.' This applies to our economic and political lives as well. They are all social acts. Corporateness must again be proclaimed."

This was the passion and the message of Bernard Iddings Bell, voice of courage, responsibility and love. He was a public figure most of his life. Between world calamities, in his years at St. Stephen's College and Columbia, he led a fight against Deweyism, secularism, and the absence of moral instruction in American schools, colleges and universities. He was an uncompromising commentator, sometimes scourge, on public and social issues. He could thunder, and he could bring you to listen to that still small voice within.

In the uncertain, apocalyptic times from World War I through World War II, B.I. Bell was as much a champion of survival and a symbol of courage as any British bulldog. He was as great an advocate and a witness for the sacramental life, and the brotherhood of man, as any of the saints. God is not dead, and neither is B.I. Bell.

Erwin Kitzrow is an educator who lives in Ballston Lake, N.Y.