“The Old Manse”
Here are some very interesting facts about the new broadcast home of “Iron Sharpens Iron” here in historic, downtown Carlisle, PA, affectionately known around here as “The Old Manse”:
“Iron Sharpens Iron” broadcasts LIVE from the 19th century parsonage of a local historic figure here in Carlisle, Rev. George Norcross, co-author/editor of The Story of a 30th Anniversary, and brother-in-law of Rev. Sheldon Jackson, a well-known minister who planted over 100 missions and churches in the western US and Alaska and is listed among the Top 10 Alaskans in TIME Magazine… Jackson spent a lot of time here in “The Old Manse”.
Another very notable member of the “extended family” in the home of “Iron Sharpens Iron” was a very closely-knit friend of Rev. Norcross’s wife Louise and their 4 daughters, renowned, Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Marianne Moore.
Moore fondly mentions the Norcross women in her 1963 essay, “Education of a Poet.” Her intellectual discussions with them were obviously quite deep, invigorating and stimulating since she laments in the essay that her time at Bryn Mawr College was a “disappointing contrast.” Mary Norcross (a Bryn Mawr graduate) tutored Moore in the 15 difficult Bryn Mawr entrance examinations (according to Bethany Hicok’s work Degrees of Freedom: American Women Poets and the Women’s College, 1905-1955).
Tribute was paid to the Pulitzer Prize poet on a Marianne Moore 25 Cent US Postage Stamp.
Below are the words of Rev. Norcross from his New Year’s Day sermon in 1899:
“The religion of the Bible is historical. It is founded on great facts and the testimony of eyewitnesses. Though enemies without and traitors within the Church are doing their best to discredit the historical basis of the Old and New Testaments, these efforts will end in defeat, because the foundation of our holy religion is historic truth…That holy religion which was taught by Christ and His apostles was certainly an historical religion…and propounded as historical verities by men who, at the risk of life itself, declared, ‘We cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.’…We must not only study the Book of Nature and the Book of Providence, but the Book of Divine Revelation, to know what God has in store for His Church. Let us be careful that we are not taken by surprise as were His people of old when the greatest glory of their race ‘suddenly came to His temple.'”
— Rev. George Norcross, D. D.,
January 1, 1899, Carlisle, PA