knowledging the spiritual validity and himself a member of the struggling Virvalue of sacraments administered by ginian company, had at one time thought Congregationalists, and half imploring the of devoting his life to the New World. civil power to force this rival Church to Ferrar accordingly strove hard for their allow them to participate in its commun-retention. The vice-chancellor at last per ion. Although from time to time the intention arose of sending a bishop from England to administer and consolidate the English Church in those parts, the project was never seriously entertained, and it was in the absence of such an element that John Wesley felt constrained to authorize the irregular episcopate of the Methodists. One splendid name-the greatest of deans was suggested for this position -Jonathan Swift. Happily-or unhappily for America the project came to naught. But it is impossible not to reflect on the different fate of the English Church in America had its first bishop been that most wonderful genius, that most unhappy man, of his age.* The American clergy also narrowly escaped the misfortune of a succession of nonjuring bishops.t sons The wranglings of the Virginian and Maryland clergy with their vestries never mount to the dignity of history, till on that fatal day when the dispute with the "paron the tithe and tobacco duty suddenly called forth the most eloquent orator of the Revolution - the rustic Patrick Henry Whose thunder shook the Philip of the Seas; whose speech on that day passed into a proverb for a successful oratorical effort "He is almost equal to Patrick Henry when he pleaded against the parsons." + The forest-born Demosthenes There were, however, from time to time flashes of interest shown by the English Church for its American children. Two are so remarkable as to deserve special notice. When Nicholas Ferrar, the monastic recluse of Gidding, sent a friend to minister to the dying pastor of Bemerton, George Herbert presented to Ferrar the manuscript of his poems. When Ferrar undertook to procure from the vice-chancellor of Cambridge the necessary license for printing them it was found that two lines were not allowed to pass without remonstrance. They were these, — Religion stands on tiptoe in our land, It is believed that they were suggested to Anderson, iii. 222, 287. + Wilberforce, 161. Anderson, iii. 236–241. mitted their appearance, adding his hope, however, that the world would not take Herbert for an inspired prophet.* They remain to show if not the prophetic at least the poetic and religious interest which the small germ of the Church of England in America had for the Keble of that age. Another still more memorable example occurs in the next century. The romantic scheme of Berkeley for the civilization of Bermuda and the evangelization of the Indians, led him to settle for two years at Newport in Rhode Island. He was the first dean † (for he was not yet bishop) who ever set foot on the American shores. His wooden house ("Whitehall ") still remains. The churches of Rhode Island still retain the various parts of his organ. The cave in the rock overhanging the beach the same beach that "formed the mind" of Channing is pointed out where he composed "The Minute Philosopher." Yale College is proud to exhibit his portrait and his bequest of books. His chair is the chair of state in the college of Hartford. And the University of California, in grateful memory of the most illustrious Churchman who ever visited the New World, has adopted his name, and has inscribed over its portal those famous lines in which he expressed, with even larger scope than Herbert, his confidence in the Westward the course of empire holds its way; progress of America A fifth shall close the drama with the dayThe first four acts already past, Time's noblest offspring is the last. This blessing has been often applied to the American States some portion of it may perhaps descend to the American Churches, especially that in which Berkeley himself took most interest. But these brilliant incidents are exceptions. The vestiges of the English Church in America previous to the separation have chiefly now for us but an antiquarian charm. In the cities which fringe the eastern coasts there exist churches few and far between, built at this period. Some of them were built of bricks brought out from England. They are most of them copied from the model of our St. Martin's in the Fields. They retain the internal arrangements-the high reading-desk, the | astronomy which had been taught there towering pulpit, the high pews, the Creed till 1717. He became the friend of Berkeand Ten Commandments, which now, alas! ley, and ultimately the first president of have almost disappeared from every church King's College, now Columbia College, at in London. In the next century, if Amer- New York, the first Episcopal college in ica is wise enough to preserve these ven- America. This movement, which took erable antiquities, they will be visited by place long before the Revolution, formed English archæologists as the rare sur- a soil on which Anglican tendencies might vivals of a form of architecture and of naturally fructify. Accordingly it was from ecclesiological arrangement which in En- Connecticut, when the crisis of the Revogland will have become entirely extinct. lution was accomplished, that a bold spirit The solid communion plate, the huge folio first conceived the notion of obtaining for Prayer-books presented by Queen Anne himself, and through himself for his counand George I., still adorn their altars ; and try, episcopal consecration. It was Samthe prayers for the royal family may be uel Seabury. He came over to England identified by peering through the leaves with the resolve of seeking this consecrawhich were pasted together at the time tion, if possible, from the English bishops when the Revolution rendered it impossible for the words any more to be used. Naturally when the war broke out between the colonies and the mother country these scattered congregations of English Churchmen, with their pastors, in many instances adhered to the cause of the monarchy, and when the separation was at last accomplished many of them fled from their posts and took refuge in the nearest English port, at Halifax. But then arose the question by what means the "episcopal government" could be preserved when the connection with the English crown and Church had been so completely severed. From two separate centres arose the determination, if possible, to reunite the severed link. At the time when Presbyterian ism and Congregationalism in Boston were gradually developing into Unitarianism, a movement, originating partly from the same sentiment of reaction against the Calvinistic teachers of New Haven, manifested itself in Connecticut. The two teachers in the college of Yale, its "rector" and its "tutor," Cutler and Johnson by name, being convinced of the superiority of the Anglican system to that in which they had been nurtured, with a resolute firmness which overcame all difficulties, crossed the ocean and sought ordination at the hands of the bishops of the English Church. They were welcomed by Dean Stanhope in the deanery of Canterbury, and they were ordained by Bishop Robinson in St. Martin's Church. They were perhaps the first native colonists who had received ordination in England, and it may be that this connection with St. Martin's led to that reproduction of it as the ideal of church architecture, which I have already noticed. Johnson at Yale College had been held in high estimation, and had been the first to introduce the Copernican in the place of the Ptolemaic system of - and if, owing to obvious difficulties they were unable to grant it, to seek it from the Episcopal communion in Scotland. This last alternative was the one which he adopted. It has often been said that when repulsed by the English bishops, he was on his way to receive the episcopal succession from Denmark, but was diverted from his intention by the counsel of Dr. Routh of Oxford, then a young man, who advised him to claim it from Scotland. Whatever Dr. Routh may have said, it is an error to suppose that this was what influenced Seabury's determination. A letter † still extant shows beyond question that it was part of his original instructions when he crossed the Atlantic. If any English clergyman confirmed him in his resolution to cross the Tweed it was the eccentric though amiable George Berkeley, the bishop's son. From the Scottish bishops accordingly, in a small chamber of the humble dwelling of the Scottish "primus" in Aberdeen, Seabury received his consecration. A facsimile of the agreement which those bishops made with him is kept in the Episcopal College of Hartford in Connecticut. The original is in the possession of Dr. Seabury of New York. It contains, amongst other provisions, three conditions, characteristic of the narrow local views of that small, insignificant, suffering body. The first was, that Seabury should use his utmost endeavors to prevent the American clergy or bishops from showing any countenance to those clergy in Scotland who had received ordination at the hands of * The question of going to Denmark was afterwards White, but never followed up. White, 20, 27. suggested in reference to the consecration of Bishop This letter of Mr. Fogg is published in "Church Documents," vol. ii. 212, 213. Since this address was delivered much useful information, of which I have availed myself, has been given me by the Rev. Samuel Hart, of Hartford, Connecticut. their dreaded rivals, the English bishops. It was in fact an anticipation of the modern protest against Bishop Beccles. The second was that he should endeavor as far as possible to retain in America that one shred of the old English liturgy to which, through good and evil fortune, and amidst all other accommodations to Presbyterian usages, the Scottish Episcopal Church still adhered, namely the arrangement of the communion office in the first book of King Edward, retained in the Laudian Liturgy.* The third was, that the civil authorities should only be mentioned in general terms, a proposal evidently intended to cover the Scottish omission (from Jacobite scruples) of the names of the royal family in Great Britain. Another point that he endeavored to carry out, at the solicitation of the Scottish Jacobites, was the exclusion of laymen † from ecclesias tical assemblies; but in this he failed, though gaining the point that bishops should not be tried by the laity. Under these conditions, and with the high ecclesiastical spirit natural to himself, and fortified by his connection with these nonjuring divines, Seabury returned. Long afterwards he maintained a dignity which must be regarded as altogether exceptional, not only by Americans, but by Englishmen. There remains in the college at Hartford a huge black mitre, the only genuine Protestant mitre on which the eyes of any English Churchman have ever rested. It was borne by Bishop Seabury, not merely as an heraldic badge or in state ceremonial, but in the high solemnities of his own church in Connecticut. To his influence also must be attributed that singular office in the American Prayer-book, happily not obligatory, the one exception to its general tone, on which we shall presently enlarge the office of Institution of the Clergy, containing every phrase relating to ministerial functions, which both from the English and American Prayerbooks had been carefully excluded "altar," "sacerdotal," "apostolic succession." This office, although now hardly ever used in the American Episcopal Church, yet remains, we will not say as a "dead fly causing the ointment to stink," but at any rate as a mark of the influence which Seabury's spirit continued to exercise after his death. * There are differences in detail between the First Prayer-book of Edward VI., the Laudian Liturgy and the Scottish Office. But these are beside our present purpose. ↑ White's Memoirs, pp. 200, 290. The office was published in 1804. Seabury's death But it was felt then, as it has been felt since, that any American Church conducted upon these principles was certain to fail,* and happily for the continuance of anything like Anglican principles on the other side of the Atlantic, others were found at that trying time of a totally different stamp, who were able to secure and transmit a nobler and larger view of the system of the Church of England. Amongst the clergy of Philadelphia, there was one who had sided with the colonists in their struggle against the English crown. William White, the rector of Christ Church, was the bosom friend of Washington, and Washington, who was one of the old Virginian gentry himself, was an adherent, if not (which is much disputed) a communicant, of the old Church of England. White was the chaplain of the first congress held in Philadelphia; and, when the separation was finally accomplished, he and others like-minded with him, undertook to frame a scheme for the reconstitution of the English Church in America. The same liberal tendency which pervaded the Church of England itself at that period was not unknown to these, its American children. According to the slang of the time, White and his colleagues were denounced by the extreme Churchmen of the day as " Socinians; "† and if we regard the partisan usage, which included under that name Tillotson and Burnet, and all advocates of toleration and enlightened learning, they had no reason to repudiate a title so given. They perceived that if an independent Church, deriving its existence from the Church of England, was to arise in America, it must adapt itself not only to the changed political circumstances, but also to the newer and better modes of feeling which had sprung up since the last revision of the Prayer-book at the restoration of Charles II. They took for a model the main alterations (so far as they knew them) proposed in the time of William III., by the latitudinarian divines of that period, which in England were unfortunately baffled by the opposition of, the High Church and Jacobite clergy in the Lower House of the Southern Convocation. These modifications were almost all in (see a striking account of it in Beardsley's "History of the Church in Connecticut," i. p. 435) was in 1796. Even Bishop Wilberforce felt this- History of the American Church, 261. † Wilberforce, 216. These alterations were at that time known either through tradition or the records of Collier and Burnet. The exact details were not printed in England till 1854. descent into hell which once constituted the chief element in the primitive conception of redemption. The so-called Nicene Creed, possibly from the conviction that a document in parts so strangely mistranslated and interpolated as that in the En their regard, they proposed to omit altogether, as also the so-called Athanasian Creed. When they began their negotiations with the English primates on the conditions of consecration, one at least of the English bishops hesitated to give a sanction to these sweeping changes. The American clergy consented so far to replace the Nicene Creed, as to allow it to be used as an alternative to the Apostles' Creed, but even then, without any compulsory obligation to use it. The disputed clause in the Apostles' Creed they restored, but with the permission to omit it or to use an alternative expression.* The Athanasian Creed, with the feeling which no doubt faithfully represented all the more enlightened and Christian thought at that time, they positively refused to re-admit under any terms whatsoever. Accordingly, with the full acquiescence of the English hierarchy, that document has vanished never to return, not only from the prayer-book, but even from the articles of the American Episcopal Church. The forms of subscription which in England had operated so fatally in the exclusion of some of the best and wisest clergy of the Church at the time of the Restoration; which weighed so heavily on the consciences of many of the English clergy in the eighteenth century; and which fifteen years ago were at last happily altered in England, owing to the pressure of liberal statesmen, who had not at that time abandoned the wholesome task of reforming the Church of England, never existed in the American Episcopal Church, which thus remained an instructive example of a Church enabled to maintain itself by conformity † to its book of devotions, without the stumbling-blocks which, as Bishop Burnet foresaw long ago, are inherent in almost any form of subscription to elaborate formularies of faith.‡ the same good direction. A few verbal alterations were occasioned by the fastidiousness which belonged partly to the phraseology of the eighteenth century, and partly to the false delicacy said to be one of the characteristics of American society. But the larger changes were almost english Prayer-book, had no special claim to tirely inspired by the liberal thought of that age. White and his colleagues felt the incongruity of still continuing in the services for ordination and visitation, words of ambiguous meaning, derived from the darkest period of the Middle Ages, unknown to the ancient or Eastern Church, which our English divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had either not the knowledge or the courage to reject. In the ordination service an alternative expression to the objectionable formula was offered, to which Seabury appears to have reluctantly consented. In the visitation service it was omitted altogether. They brought out in the Catechism the spiritual character of the Eucharist. They modified the questionable passages of the marriage and the burial services. They swept away from the commination service all the prefatory portion, containing the incongruous wish for the restoration of primitive discipline and the curses on impenitent sinners, leaving only the few collects at the end. They allowed an alternative in the selection of the Psalms which avoids the more vindictive and exclusively Judaic elements of the Psalter. They permitted the explanation of the Ten Commandments in the spirit of the two great commandments of the gospel. They introduced the liberty of abridging the services, and thus of avoiding the constant repetitions which still to many minds form a stumbling-block in the English Liturgy. They relaxed the obligation of immersion and of the sign of the cross in baptism. They gave permission either to omit altogether any special eucharistic formula on Trinity Sunday, or to use a biblical alternative for the excessive scholasticism of that in the English Prayer-book. They anticipated, though not in the same form, but still with the same intention, the improvements in the calendar of lessons which have been adopted by the English Church within the present year. They foresaw the difficulty of maintaining in the public services the use of phraseology So doubtful, and with difficulties so obvious, to large classes of their countrymen, as some of the expressions contained within the old confessions. In the so-called Apostles' Creed, they proposed to omit the clause containing the belief of the "And any Churches may omit the words HE the words, HE WENT INTO THE PLACE OF DEPARTED DESCENDED INTO HELL, or may, instead of them, use SPIRITS, which are considered as words of the same meaning in this Creed." t White, 320, 362. The form of subscription is as follows: "I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation, and I do solemnly engage to conform to the doctrines and worship of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States." numbers against the overwhelming proportions in which the other Churches of America had propagated themselves, it maintained with some difficulty its hold even on the Eastern States of the republic. Gradually, however, as the sentiment against England, under the genial influence of Washington Irving and the American poets, faded from view, the attractions of the revised English Liturgy won their way. From seven bishoprics it has now increased to sixty, and it has attained a place amongst the cultivated portions of American society, at least equal, and in many places superior, to that which was formerly in the exclusive possession of the Unitarian Congregationalists. Such are the conditions under which | England has itself retained. With these the American episcopate was obtained liberal sentiments, the American Episcofrom the English prelates under an act of pal Church started upon its arduous Parliament framed for that express pur- career. Discredited by its connection pose, which whilst allowing full freedom to with England at a time when the very propagate English Episcopacy in the sep-name of England was hateful - small in arated colonies, carefully guarded the English constitution in Church and State in a spirit, the vigor of which had at that time not been enfeebled. Such were the characteristic elements of the English latitudinarianism of the eighteenth century, which a Church regarded by some High Churchmen as the model of ecclesiastical perfection did not hesitate to adopt. Such were the improvements in which it had the honor of forestalling, not indeed the nobler aspirations of British theology, but the tardy and reluctant steps of recent British Anglicanism and of recent British Nonconformity. Such are the proofs of the long advance which the American Episcopal Church, as well as the English authorities in sanctioning its foundation on these conditions, had made in spiritual discernment and ecclesiastical learning beyond the prevailing prejudice which in our own day has hitherto retarded most of these obvious improvements. What may be the future fortunes of the American Épiscopal Church it would be rash to predict. When we consider the vast numerical superiority of the Presby terians and Congregationalists, and still more of the Methodists and Baptists, it is The incorporation of Bishop Seabury, difficult to suppose that it can ever reach with his Scottish antecedents, was not such a position as to entitle it to be reaccomplished without a struggle. Al-garded as the representative Church of though he and Bishop White acted on the the United States. But a sojourn in whole cordially together, there were those America somewhat disinclines a spectator amongst the founders of the American to attach too much importance to vast Church who felt the danger of associating numbers whether in the statistics of poputhemselves with a communion so one-lation, or money, or distance. "Size," sided as the small nonjuring sect in Scot- said Professor Huxley, in addressing an land.* But this was overruled. One intelligent and sympathetic audience at permanent trace only of the Scottish consecration was left, the Scottish communion office. This last, however, although by ignorance and passion it has been often regarded as an approach to the mediæval views of the Eucharist, in point of fact is more Protestant, because more spiritual,† than that which the Church of Granville Sharpe in England protested against the Scottish consecration (White, 312), and in America the Convention of 1786 refused to acknowledge the validity of his ordinations (Anderson, iii. 400). †The prominence given to the spiritual sacrifice of "themselves, their souls and bodies," offered by the laity, and which in the present English Prayer-book is relegated to a subordinate place in the communion office, is, in the Liturgy of the Scottish Church, as in the First Prayer-book of King Edward, incorporated in the very heart of the Consecration Prayer, and thus gives a deathblow to the superficial, mechanical, and material ideas of sacrifice which belong to the ancient or medieval notions of the Eucharist. The importance ascribed to the invocation of the Holy Spirit as borrowed from the Eastern Church, is less liable to superand English Churches attribute to the repetition of the formula of institution. stitious abuse than the value which both the Roman Baltimore, "is not grandeur." We are rather led to hope that there, as in the older countries of Europe, the future will be ultimately in the hands, not of the least educated, but of the most educated portions of the community, and in that portion the Episcopal Church of America will have a considerable part to play if it only remains faithful to the liberal principles on which it first started. the English Church in America that all the Berkeley, even in his day, observed of other Churches considered it the second best; and when, in order to relieve themselves of the duty of paying their contribu tion to the dominant Church of each State, American citizens had to certify that they belonged to some other communion, the common expression was, "We have left the Christian Church, and joined the Episcopals." That.residuary, secular, comprehensive aspect which is so excellent a characteristic of the National Church of |