Collins Denny (28 May 1854–12 May 1943), Methodist bishop, was born in Winchester and was the son of William Ritenour Denny, a merchant, and Margaret Ann Collins Denny. He enrolled at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), where he was captain of the football team and received a bachelor's degree in 1876. Denny studied law for a year at the University of Virginia, received an LL.B. in 1877, and practiced in Baltimore until November 1879. Soon, however, he answered a call to the ministry. Denny joined the Baltimore Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church South in 1880. During the next nine years he served churches in Talbot County, Maryland, in Fairfax County, in Fincastle, in Lewisburg, West Virginia, and in Salem and also toured Methodist missions in Asia and the Middle East. On 5 July 1881 he married Lucy Chase Chapman, of Baltimore. They had four daughters and two sons, one of whom died young.

In 1889 Denny returned to the University of Virginia, where he studied philosophy and served as chaplain. Two years later he became professor of moral philosophy at Vanderbilt University, a southern Methodist school, where he taught for almost twenty years. In July 1894 he declined election as president of Trinity College (later Duke University). Opposed to further liberalization of Vanderbilt's curriculum and a rigid grader, Denny was not a popular figure, yet the school offered a platform from which he could assert leadership within the denomination. Representing the Baltimore Conference at the church's General Conference in 1894, Denny was named to the book committee, which oversaw operation of a publishing house in Nashville, and he became the committee's chair four years later. Southern Methodists had long sought compensation from the federal government for damages incurred during the Civil War, when Union soldiers had seized the publishing house. In March 1898 Congress granted the claim, but controversy over the manner in which the denomination's lobbyist and book agents had represented their effort led to a Senate investigation and to widespread recriminations within the denomination. Denny took the lead in defending the book committee and its agents before Congress and successfully fended off efforts to dismantle the publishing house. He remained chair of the book committee until 1910, and his reputation continued to rise.

Denny's precise, legalistic mind worked in tandem with a deeply conservative philosophy. Well-read in history, he supported his positions through the denomination's laws and polity and appealed to tradition as the primary means by which Methodists could preserve their spiritual integrity. Denny was also engaged in modern currents of thought and in modern adaptations of American Protestantism. He embraced the mission work that encouraged a rising ecumenical spirit. His defense of traditional Protestant faith invoked modern authorities, as when he used the ideas of the agnostic political philosopher John Stuart Mill to argue against historicist critiques of the Bible. Stern and forbidding in public (he was remembered for his practice of correcting the grammar and logic of younger ministers), he was warm and friendly in private gatherings. Attempts at humor sometimes accompanied his worries over social changes. Denny once advised an audience of ministers to wear mustaches—the only badge of masculinity that women could not adopt.

In 1910 Denny was elected bishop at the Methodist Episcopal Church South's General Conference in Asheville. He settled in Richmond and remained there for the rest of his life. For most of his tenure as bishop he served as secretary of the episcopacy, and he established himself as the church's principal authority on parliamentary matters, law, and history. Denny oversaw revisions of the Manual of the Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and spent much of his time answering questions related to church governance and history. He also served on the Virginia War History Commission after World War I.

Denny was a pivotal figure in two related debates that animated the church during the first four decades of the twentieth century: the role of ministers in politics and plans to reunify with the northern branch. Believing that political advocacy diminished spiritual authority, he urged ministers to minimize their civic activities. That view brought Denny into conflict with the growing numbers of southern Methodists who believed that religious morality should provide a guiding hand to politics. It also made him an adversary of James Cannon, a leading member of the Methodists' Virginia Conference (and after 1918 also a bishop) and one of the most influential prohibitionists in the United States.

Denny and Cannon also clashed over plans to reunify the Methodist Church. Although named a fraternal delegate to the northern church's General Conference in 1908 and a frequent participant in negotiations between the two branches, Denny never lost an underlying distrust of the northern church and a resolve to maintain southern Methodists' capacity to control their own affairs. Of central concern was the question of how African American Methodists would be organized within a reunified church. Denny served on the Joint Commission on Unification between 1916 and 1920 and in 1917 submitted a minority report recommending a separate organization for Black Methodists. The commission did not adopt his report, and by 1924 Denny had become an implacable foe of reunification attempts. Objecting to a mid-1920s plan that in his view would have elevated Black bishops to a position of equality with white bishops and "legalize every invasion" of southern territory by the northern church, he rallied successful opposition in a series of well-publicized speeches.

Even after Denny accepted emeritus status in 1934, he continued to lead efforts to maintain an independent southern denomination. As opinion within the southern church shifted in favor of unification, he and his son, Collins Denny (1899–1964), a prominent Richmond attorney who later helped found and served as counsel for the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, wrote An Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion Concerning Methodist Unification (1937). Adding to an earlier legal opinion the two had written, the pamphlet rebutted the claims of unification supporters, decried the failure to discuss the plan openly, warned against the dominance that northern Methodists would exercise in the new church, and argued that provisions of the unification plan intended to maintain racial segregation would not allow individual congregations to withhold membership from African Americans.

Most of Denny's warnings were ignored, and the annual conferences and General Conference of the southern church voted by healthy margins to reunite as the Methodist Church. Denny insisted that he remained a retired bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, even past its official existence. After this last battle and the death of his wife on 31 August 1940, Denny's health grew increasingly frail. Collins Denny died at his Richmond home on 12 May 1943 and was buried in the city's Riverview Cemetery.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Nolan B. Harmon, Albea Godbold, and Louise L. Queen, eds., Encyclopedia of World Methodism (1974), 1:658–659, National Cyclopædia of American Biography (1949), 35:212–213, and Garland R. Quarles, Some Worthy Lives: Mini-Biographies, Winchester and Frederick County (1988), 81–82 (portrait); Birth Register, Winchester, Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; correspondence, sermons, sermon notes, and scrapbooks in Collins Denny and Denny Family Papers, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Denny correspondence in James Cannon Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C., and Warren A. Candler Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta; testimony in Methodist Book Concern South, 55th Cong., 2d sess., Senate Rept. 1416, serial 3627, and in Walter McElreath, Methodist Union in the Courts (1946), 65–105; publications include Denny, The Validity of Christian Experience (n.d.), Analysis of Noah K. Davis's Elements of Deductive Logic and of His Elements of Psychology (1916), and Historic and Heroic Acts of the Old Baltimore Conference (ca. 1920s); Baltimore Sun, 13 July 1881; Richmond News Leader, 1 June 1925 (quotation); Roy Preston White, "Bishop Collins Denny: Stubborn Individualist or Prophet for Our Time?" Virginia United Methodist Heritage 13 (spring 1985): 8–14; BVS Death Certificate, Richmond City; obituaries and editorial tributes in New York Times, Richmond News Leader, and Richmond Times-Dispatch, all 13 May 1943, and Virginia Conference Annual (1943), 187–188; editorial tributes in Richmond News Leader, 13 May 1943, and Richmond Times-Dispatch, 14 May 1943.

Photograph in Confederate Veteran, 25 (1917): 498.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by William Bland Whitley.

How to cite this page:
William Bland Whitley, "Collins Denny (1854–1943)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2025 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Denny_Collins_1854-1943, accessed [today's date]).

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