without trials and perils which only the deepest convictions could
have nerved them to bear, met in that secluded unknown New England
town, on the Festival of the Annunciation, in 1783, and laid the
burden of seeking for the Episcopate on Seabury, what could they
have seen about them but the disorganized elements of an
apparently decaying life? When, on the 14th of November, 1784, in
that upper room in this good city, those venerable prelates (whose
names are to-day household words through all the length and
breadth of what has been called "The Greater Britain of the
Western World") handed on the high commission they had received in
trust, what could their eyes have looked upon but scattered flocks
under their few shepherds, which must meet, if they met at all, in
uncertainty and peril, to worship God as their fathers had
worshipped before them? Still, if they saw little around them to
encourage and support, theirs (we may well believe) was the eye of
faith that is strengthened to pierce the future. If they heard few
words of cheer from men, there came upon their ears, from a
Greater than man, words of strong hope and glorious promise. In
that Transatlantic gathering, small and unnoticed as it was, the
ten who came together heard, in the Gospel of the Annunciation,
that "with God nothing is impossible," and in the song of the
Blessed Virgin they were bidden to bethink themselves how "God
remembered His mercy and truth toward the House of Israel,"
exalting "the humble and meek," filling "the hungry with good
things," and helping "His servant Israel." Here in Aberdeen, on
that memorable day of November, they said in the morning Psalter:
"O what great troubles and adversities hast Thou showed me! and
yet didst Thou turn and refresh me; yea, and broughtest me from
the deep of the earth again"; and then, as the strain of praise
swelled higher, higher still, while the vision of the City of God
in all its grandeur broke on the eye of faith, there came the
inspiring words--how their hearts must have thrilled as they
uttered them!--"He shall deliver the poor when he crieth, the
needy also, and him that hath no helper... He shall be favourable
to the simple and needy, and shall preserve the souls of the
poor.... There shall be an heap of corn in the earth, high upon
the hills; his fruit shall shake like Libanus, and shall be green
in the city like grass upon the earth."
Words like these carry with them unwonted power on occasions like
those of which I have been speaking. To us they come like special
prophecies of what we look on as a century now closing. To those
others they came freighted with hope for an indefinite and unknown
future. And what an inspiration they must have given to the
venture they were making; a venture so entirely one of faith, that
it is not too much to say of those who made it that they take
their places in that long line of faithful ones, mentioned with
such distinguished honor in the Epistle to the Hebrews, who,
though they only saw "the promises afar off," still "were
persuaded of them and embraced them," and therefore "obtained a
good report." Can we imagine, dear brethren, a more striking
illustration of the different aspect which things wear to the eye
of sense on the one hand, and the eye of faith on the other, than
that which the election and consecration of the first bishop for
America present to us? All honor, then, to those brave hearts that
accomplished them! Men may have counted "their lives madness and
their end to be without honor." We know, blessed be the God of all
grace and power! that they are "numbered among the children of
God, and their lot is among the saints."
The temptation is strong to linger on the simple but impressive
scene of the consecration: to try to picture that secluded oratory
in the house of the Coadjutor-Bishop of this faithful diocese; to
endeavor to bring back the congregation gathered in it, and the
ministering prelates; to recall the form of the youthful priest
who held the book from which the awful words of ordination were
recited, Alexander Jolly, afterwards the sainted Bishop of Moray;
to speak of this ancient city of Aberdeen, associated for all time
in the memories of Churchmen with the names of John Forbes of
Corse and Henry Scougal and the remembrance of its orthodox and
learned doctors; but time forbids more than this briefest mention.
We behold--and it is a sight to stir the heart with "thoughts too
deep for words"--we behold a suffering and a witnessing Church, in
the depth of a long and wasting depression, reaching out the hand
of love to a Church suffering and witnessing also, and trembling,
to human seeming, on the verge of utter extinction. Perhaps--is it
too much to say it?--it was because of this patient suffering and
faithful witness that God gave to this Church the distinguished
privilege of sending its first Apostle to the new world beyond the
ocean. I cannot refrain from quoting here the admirable words of
one of your own Scottish bishops. Speaking of the act which we
commemorate, he says: "Mark, my brethren, how for the accomplishment
of this work--according to the full measure of the gifts
of the Spirit and of Apostolic order--it pleased God, as at
the first, to choose the weak things of the world, and things that
were despised, yea, and things which in the eye of man had ceased
to be. To our Scottish Church with its hierarchy, which had
formerly consisted of two Archbishops and twelve Bishops, then
reduced to four; with its pastoral charge, which had once
comprehended the care of every parish in the land, then shrunk to
little mere than a score or two of scattered congregations--yea,
and at the very time when an act of the civil legislature had
declared all ecclesiastical orders conferred by her to be null and
void; at such a time, to the poor persecuted remnant of the Church
in Scotland was this grace given, that she should impart to the
United States, now no longer dependent upon England, the first
seed of the Episcopate which England had withheld. Yes, the first
bishop who set foot on the continent of North America, the first
bishop who went forth to a foreign land bearing the full blessings
of our reformed Church, was consecrated to his Apostolic office,
not amid the solemn pomp and august ceremonial of an English
minister, no, nor in the privacy of an episcopal palace, but in
the obscurity of an upper chamber in a common dwelling-house in
Aberdeen." [Footnote: Bishop of St. Andrews; _Mending of the
Nets,_ p.17 (ed. 1884).] If, as has sometimes been generously
said, this noble act of faith and charity has afforded a new and
signal illustration of our Lord's own words, "It is more blessed
to give than to receive," that does not make the act a whit less
noble, nor diminish by one jot the obligation of undying gratitude
on the part of those who received the gift it gave.
If we look at its immediate results, besides what has just been
named, it assuredly gave an impulse to that action of the State in
England, in consequence of which, within five years, three bishops
of the English line were given to as many dioceses in the United
States. It was the means, also, of joining in the American
Episcopate the Scottish and the English lines of succession in a
union that will endure while the world shall last. For though the
prelate consecrated here ministered in only one consecration of a
bishop after his return--that of the first Bishop of Maryland--
yet, since that day, there has not been (and there can never be in
time to come) a bishop in our American Episcopate, who, as he
traces back his lineage through the network--for I surely need not
say, here and now, that the succession is a network and not a
chain of single links--will not find in it the name of that Bishop
of Maryland, by whom he is connected with Seabury, and then, by
him, with "the Catholic remainder of the Church of Scotland." Nor
need one ask, nor could he have, if he did ask it, a nobler
spiritual lineage than he has received in that double succession,
which indeed becomes single again if we go back for a little more
than another century.
Then, again, this deed of Christian charity did, no doubt, bring
out from its obscurity into the light of day, the witnessing
remnant of the ancient Church of Scotland, and was, perhaps, the
first step towards the removal of those civil disabilities which
had pressed her into the dust. How must the iron of suffering have
entered into the soul of many a faithful priest in those dark days
of trial, when, we are told, the clergy had given up the hope that
any successors would come after them, and on the monument of one
of them were written the despairing words, "Ultime Scotorum!"
[Footnote: Epitaph by the Rev. J. Skinner on the tombstone
of the Rev. Mr. Keith, Presbyter at Cruden: "Ultime Scotorum
in Crudenanis, Keithe, Sacerdos."]
How strangely similar were the conditions of those who sought the
Episcopate and those who courageously gave it in those days of
doubt and darkness! How fitting it seems that, in the ordering of
God's providence, one suffering Church, stripped of its worldly
honors and its earthly wealth, should give to another, "scattered
and peeled" and apparently on the verge of extinction, that
deposit which it had maintained in the face of dangers that might
well seem worse than death itself! They who have lived together
under the shadows and in the sharing of life's tragedies and woes,
know full well that there is no bond of union half so strong as
the bond of common suffering; know full well that they whose
hearts have touched each other only in hours of joy and gladness,
can never be so bound together as those who have wept beside beds
of death, or clasped each other's hands over open graves. Why
should it not so be with bodies of men as with individuals? Above
all, why should it not so be with sister Churches, bound together
in the highest of all bonds? Was it not so here a century ago?
When the kindly hand was outstretched here to help, when the
loving word, carrying the very life of love, went across the ocean
to those who were indeed "minished and brought low," was not the
channel of Christian sympathy deepened, was not its flow made
fuller and more strong by the conditions of which I have just
spoken? And if it has pleased God, in His great mercy, to send
brighter days, greater peace, better hopes to each of us, shall
not the bond, once welded by suffering, still keep its strength?
God grant it may! God grant that, till the Lord shall come to give
His universal Church its final triumph, these Churches, so
marvellously united, "may stand fast in one spirit, with one mind
striving together for the Faith of the Gospel, and in nothing
terrified by adversaries."
It would be more than ungrateful, it would be inexcusable, to omit
here the recognition of the agency by which, under God, it came to
pass that there were in what had been the colonies of Great
Britain, and were now independent States, those who sought the
Episcopate as essential to the full organization of an autonomous
Church. That agency is found in the Venerable Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts--a society to which
American Churchmen must always look with undying gratitude, for to
its noble labors they largely owe all that they were when Seabury
was sent upon his mission of faith, and much of what they enjoy
to-day.
It was no fault of that Society that there was not, in America, an
Episcopate before the war of the Revolution. Had the godly
counsels and the strong appeals of the bishops, clergy, and
faithful laity who shared in its plans and operations, been
listened to, American Churchmen would have had no need to seek the
Apostolic office outside the limits of their own country. This is
not the time nor is this the place to consider, in detail, the
reasons--if reasons in any proper sense of the word there were--
why the Episcopate, so strongly desired, had not been given. But
it is worthy of notice that where the labors of the Society had
been the most abundant and its missionaries most numerous, there
the need of the Episcopate was most deeply felt and the call for
it was loudest. Indeed, the only two colonies from which any
opposition to sending bishops to America before the Revolution
came, were Maryland and Virginia; and to those colonies, because
in them the maintenance of the clergy was otherwise provided for,
the Society sent few, if any, missionaries.
No part of all the Western world received more of the Society's
fostering aid than the New England colonies; and to none of them
was more help extended than to the colony of Connecticut. From the
day when the foundations of the Church were laid in that colony on
to the outbreak of the Revolution, the benefactions that came from
England were abundant and unceasing. With possibly a single
exception, all the clergy in the colony were missionaries of the
Society. They were also sons of the soil, who, because of
convictions too strong to be resisted, went back to the Church
from which their fathers had gone out, and in doing so incurred
odium and reproach, scorn and contempt, the loss of much that
gives earthly comfort and rejoicing, and sometimes the sundering
of ties that seemed to be a part of life itself. They were taught,
too, by the bitter experience of half a century, the difficulties
and dangers attendant on a voyage to England to obtain Holy
Orders; difficulties and dangers then so great that one in every
five of all sent out for ordination perished by sickness or by
shipwreck, and saw his native land no more. Theirs may be
inglorious confessorships, unknown to or forgotten by men, but
confessorships they are, and we cannot doubt that they find their
place in the Book of God's remembrance.
It can cause no wonder that men thus trained and tried should,
when the severance of the mother country and its colonies was
complete, have turned their first thoughts to the means of
perpetuating that stewardship "of the mysteries of God," which
they had so hardly won; that they should have held that to be the
first step, and refused to take another till they had taken that.
For, indeed, if the Church is to be rightly perpetuated under the
conditions of a normal growth, it can only be perpetuated
according to the original and organic law of its existence. When
He to Whom in His resurrection "all power was given in heaven and
in earth," committed to the Apostolic Ministry the tradition of
the Apostolic Doctrine, in that great baptismal formula which is
alike the source and summary of the Catholic Faith, He joined two
things together that man may never put asunder. He may try the
separation if he will--he has tried it, alas! more than once--but
the end, the inevitable end, has always been the loss of the
Apostolic Doctrine.
Then, on the other hand, the gift of the Apostolic Ministry
without the most wisely guarded guarantees that there shall be a
steadfast continuance in the "doctrine of the Apostles, and in the
breaking of bread, and the prayers," is a gift of more than
doubtful value. Men seem to think to-day, that they can leave out
what parts they please from the original and divine organism of
the Church, and still work the rest at will. The attempt, believe
me, is just as futile as it would be to undertake to deal in like
fashion with one of those huge machines that work, all about us,
with such life-like power, and attempt to make it do its work,
when some portion of its complex mechanism had been removed. We
cannot be too thankful for the merciful guiding that kept our
fathers, a hundred years ago, from so fatal a mistake as that. For
here, as well as in England, guarantees were demanded and given,
so far as it was possible to give them, before the succession was
communicated.
I turn to that venerable document known to us as the Concordate,
one copy of which is preserved in the Episcopal archives here in
Scotland, and its duplicate in America, and I read words which it
is well to remember to-day: words which speak of the due
maintenance "of the analogy of the common Faith once given to the
Saints, and happily preserved in the Church of Christ"; which
declare, in terms of unmistakable clearness, "that the spiritual
authority and jurisdiction" of Christ's ministers "cannot be
affected by any lay deprivation"; which provide, so far as
provision could be made, for the full communion with the Church in
Scotland of the newly consecrated bishop, his successors, and his
diocese, a communion which, as this day's service so solemnly
attests, has come to embrace not that single diocese alone, but
the entire Church in the United States; words, finally, which
pledge the bishop then sent forth, to endeavor, "by gentle methods
of argument and persuasion," to bring about a substantial
agreement between the two Churches, in "the Celebration of the
Holy Eucharist--the principal bond of union among Christians, as
well as the most solemn act of worship in the Christian Church."
How that pledge was, under the manifest and wonderful leadings of
God's providence, fulfilled, not for one diocese, but for a
national Church, our American Book of Common Prayer declares and
will declare in all coming time.
I have spoken, fathers and brethren, of the past, for to it our
thoughts naturally and chiefly direct themselves to-day. Its grand
venture of faith, the brave hearts that made it, the generous
givers of the precious gift, the undaunted receiver of the gift
who bore it across the ocean--for all he knew, to stormier seas
than the Atlantic's billows--these fill up the foreground of the
picture on which our eyes are resting. As I turn from it, and from
the figures of those venerable prelates who stand foremost in it,
I remember (and I repeat, speaking for generations that have
passed away and for generations that are to come) the words that
were sent to them from hearts that burned with grateful love:
"Wherever the American Episcopal Church shall be mentioned in the
world, may this good deed which they have done for us be spoken of
for a memorial of them!"
If, however, there is a past for which the deepest thankfulness is
due, there is also a present which we may not forget, for in it
our thankfulness, if it is real, must culminate. What a change has
a century wrought for us! How unlike is 1884 to 1784! I do not
much believe, my brethren, in numbering the people. I am sure that
any boastful or vain-glorious numbering is but an evil thing. But
surely when "a little one" has "become a thousand, and a small one
a strong nation," we may gratefully recognize the merciful
guidance and blessing of the Lord, Who has "hastened it in his
time." In 1784, we see one single bishop of our communion, and one
only, outside the realm of Great Britain and Ireland; and him with
an unformed diocese and a future on which rested more clouds than
sunshine. In 1884 time would fail him who should undertake to read
the roll of regions occupied and churches organized. An American
statesman once said, in words that have been often quoted, that
England's drum-beat never ceased as it passed around the world. We
can say that our English Te Deum, with its "Day by day we magnify
Thee," rolls round the world as well, in unceasing and ever-
increasing volume.
Of the vast regions to which that solitary bishop went in 1785,
there is no part or portion which is not now an organized diocese
or a missionary jurisdiction, and the increase has been thirty,
sixty, yea, an hundred-fold. Here the things that seemed ready to
die have been so strengthened by Him "without Whom nothing is
strong," that a bright and blessed present points to an even
brighter and more blessed future; while, if we look to that great
Church from which our successions ultimately come, we find her
outgoings and advances limited only by the limits of the world
itself. In the name of her Lord and King she has indeed taken "the
heathen for His inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for
His possession."
Shall we dare from such a past and such a present to look forward
through the years of a coming century? Those years are in the hand
of God, and what they may bring to us it is not for us to know,
nor need we ask. But we do know this, and it is enough for us to
know, that if these Churches, holding fast "the form of sound
words," and "holding forth the word of life," shall rise to the
full measure of their opportunities and duty, in sole reliance on
the power of Him Who died and yet liveth for evermore; in services
of holy worship; in the proclamation of the remission of sins in
Jesus Christ; in the tradition of His holy sacraments; in
faithful, loving ministries to the bodies and the souls of men; if
they shall so strive, then they shall have a work given them to do
in the latter days, before the view of which the heart dies down
in awe, and the voice is hushed in unutterable thankfulness.
"Visions of glory, spare my aching sight;
Ye unborn ages, crowd not on my soul!"
One word remains to be uttered here--the word of love and
gratitude to this venerated Scottish Church, from the far-off
Western world:
"O pray for the peace of Jerusalem; they shall prosper that love
thee. Peace be within thy walls, and plenteousness within thy
palaces! For my brethren and companions' sakes, I will wish thee
prosperity! Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God, I will
seek to do thee good!"
* * * * *
A reception banquet was held on the afternoon of the same day, at
which Bishop Williams replied to the toast of "The Church in
America."
On the eighth day of October, a large congregation being assembled
in St. Andrew's Church for the opening service of the Synod of the
Bishops of the Scottish Church, at the close of the processional
hymn, the Rev. William F. Nichols presented to the Bishop of
Aberdeen the memorial Paten and Chalice, the latter bearing this
inscription: [Footnote: The Chalice stands eleven inches high, and
is of massive silver. The base is broad and heavily moulded. From
above the base mouldings spring eight arched panels. The front one
contains a crucifix, the cross and the figure of our Lord being in
full relief. In the panel to the left are the arms of the See of
Connecticut, resting on branches of oak. In the one to the right
are the arms of the Bishop of Aberdeen, encircled by branches of
the thistle. In the panel opposite that containing the crucifix
are the emblems of St. Peter and St. Paul. The remaining four
panels are filled with the emblems of the four Evangelists. From
this part of the base rises a richly moulded plinth, supporting
the lower shaft, which is worked in diaper tracery. The knop of
the shaft is encircled with eight elaborately wrought bosses,
ornamented with garnets and sapphires in gold settings. Above the
knop the shaft has simpler treatment, being worked with
quatrefoils in square panels, all in relief. From this rises the
bowl of the chalice, which shows solid gilt, enriched with an
outer cup of delicately chased silver work, divided into eight
sections, to correspond with those of the stem and of the foot.
The section above the crucifix shows the Alpha and Omega, entwined
by passion-flowers. The next one to the left contains the IHS,
entwined with the grape-vine. The next one to the right contains
the X P, with sheaves of wheat. Beginning with the panel next to
the right of this, the several ones are filled as follows:--the
Greek cross with the thistle; next, the pelican with the rose of
Sharon; next, the emblem of the Holy Trinity with the clover-leaf;
next, the emblem of the Holy Ghost with olive branches; next, the
crown of glory with palm branches. The Paten is enriched with a
golden medallion on the rim, in the form of a vesica, which shows
the _Agnus Dei_, executed in colored enamel.]
CONNECTICUT TO SCOTLAND.
A.D. 1784--A.D.1884
A GRATEFUL MEMORIAL BEFORE GOD
_OF THE EPISCOPATE AND THE EUCHARISTIC OFFICE_
TRANSMITTED BY BISHOPS KILGOUR, PETRIE, AND SKINNER
TO SEABURY AND THE CHURCH IN AMERICA.
_Think upon them, our God, for good,
according to all that they have done for this people._
In making the presentation, Mr. Nichols spoke as follows: