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.