[1] An Anglo-French law term meaning a "scroll" or strip of parchment, cognate with the English "shred." The modern French _écroue_ is used for the entry of a name on a prison register.
DEEMS, CHARLES (ALEXANDER) FORCE (1820-1893), American clergyman, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on the 4th of December 1820. He was a precocious child and delivered lectures on temperance and on Sunday schools before he was fourteen years old. He graduated at Dickinson College in 1839, taught and preached in New York city for a few months, in 1840 took charge of the Methodist Episcopal church at Asbury, New Jersey, and removed in the next year to North Carolina, where he was general agent for the American Bible Society. He was professor of logic and rhetoric at the University of North Carolina in 1842-1847, and professor of natural sciences at Randolph-Macon College (then at Boydton, Virginia) in 1847-1848, and after two years of preaching at Newbern, N.C., he held for four years (1850-1854) the presidency of Greensboro (N.C.) Female College. He continued as a Methodist Episcopal clergyman at various pastorates in North Carolina from 1854 to 1865, for the last seven years being a presiding elder and in 1859 to 1863 being the proprietor of St Austin's Institute, Wilson. In 1865 he settled in New York City, where in 1866 he began preaching in the chapel of New York University, and in 1868 he established and became the pastor of the undenominational Church of the Strangers, which in 1870 occupied the former Mercer Street Presbyterian church, purchased and given to Dr Deems by Cornelius Vanderbilt; there he remained until his death in New York city on the 18th of November 1893. He was one of the founders (1881) and president of the American Institute of Christian Philosophy and for ten years was editor of its organ, _Christian Thought_. Dr Deems was an earnest temperance advocate, as early as 1852 worked (unsuccessfully) for a general prohibition law in North Carolina, and in his later years allied himself with the Prohibition party. He was influential in securing from Cornelius Vanderbilt the endowment of Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a man of rare personal and literary charm; he edited _The Southern Methodist Episcopal Pulpit_ (1846-1852) and _The Annals of Southern Methodism_ (1855-1857); he compiled _Devotional Melodies_ (1842), and, with the assistance of Phoebe Cary, one of his parishioners, _Hymns for all Christians_ (1869; revised, 1881); and he published many books, among which were: _The Life of Dr Adam Clarke_ (1840); _The Triumph of Peace and other Poems_ (1840); _The Home Altar_ (1850); _Jesus_ (1872), which ran through many editions and several revisions, the title being changed in 1880 to _The Light of the Nations_; _Sermons_ (1885); _The Gospel of Common Sense_ (1888); _The Gospel of Spiritual Insight_ (1891) and _My Septuagint_ (1892). The Charles F. Deems Lectureship in Philosophy was founded in his honour in 1895 at New York University by the American Institute of Christian Philosophy.