Religion: For Favors Received

Sitting in its green square of graveyard among Wall Street's skyscrapers, old, brown Trinity Church looks like a little missionary in the land of Mammon. Perhaps no other one church in the world has Mammon working for it so well.* Trinity collects a substantial annual income from its $32 million worth of Manhattan real estate.

Trinity got most of its land by grant from King William III in 1697 and from Queen Anne in 1705. As a London model for the New York parish to follow, King William named Wren-designed St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. Trinity's first bell was a 1704 gift from the Bishop of London.

Last week Trinity took occasion to return, at least in part, a few old British favors. Its rector, church wardens and vestrymen announced that they were sending along a check for $50,000 to be used on the reconstruction of St. Mary-le-Bow—one of the few bomb-blasted churches in the old one-mile-square City of London that can be rebuilt.

* Trinity is just as rich in tradition. Once, so the story goes, when the church needed repair, it borrowed a runner and tackle from a seafaring captain named Kidd; George Washington worshiped there; and Alexander Hamilton and the steamboat's Robert Fulton are buried in the graveyard.

Quotes of the Day »

Get & Share
ROLF-DIETER HEUER, CERN's director general, on the Large Hadron Collider smashing proton beams together for the first time
For use in rail of Articles page or Section Fronts pages. Duplicate and change name as necesssary to distinguish.

Time.com on Digg

POWERED BY digg

Quotes of the Day »

Get & Share
ROLF-DIETER HEUER, CERN's director general, on the Large Hadron Collider smashing proton beams together for the first time

Stay Connected with TIME.com