The one-hundredth anniversary of the election of Bishop Seabury fell on Easter-Day (being also the Festival of the Annunciation), 1883. In accordance with the request of the Diocesan Convention, the Bishop set forth the following special Thanksgiving to be used throughout the Diocese, immediately after the General Thanksgiving at Morning and Evening Prayer on that day:
ALMIGHTY GOD, Who by Thy Holy Spirit hast appointed divers orders of ministers in Thy Church, we give unto Thee high praise and hearty thanks, that Thou didst put it into the hearts of our fathers and brethren to elect, on this day, to the work and ministry of a Bishop in Thy Church, Thy servant, to whom the charge of this Diocese was first committed; and that Thou didst so replenish him with the truth of Thy doctrine and endue him with innocency of life, that he was enabled, both by word and deed, faithfully to serve Thee in this office, to the glory of Thy name, and the edifying and well-governing of Thy Church. For this so great mercy, and for ail the blessings which, in Thy good Providence, it brought to this portion of the flock of Christ, we offer unto Thee our unfeigned thanks, through Jesus Christ our Lord, to Whom, with Thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.
On Tuesday in Easter-Week, March 27th (the day of the week on which the Festival of the Annunciation fell in 1783), a commemorative service was held in St. Paul's Church, Woodbury, at 11 o'clock A.M. The Bishop began the Communion-service, the Rev. S. O. Seymour of Litchfield reading the Epistle, and the Rev. E. E. Beardsley, D.D., LL.D., of New Haven reading the Gospel. After the Nicene Creed, a part of the 99th hymn in the old Prayer-Book collection was sung; and the Bishop then made an address based on the closing words of the Epistle: "I work a work in your days, a work which ye shall in no wise believe, though a man declare it unto you."
The Bishop spoke of the faith and the courage which inspired the clergymen who met a hundred years ago in that quiet village to elect the first bishop of Connecticut. They felt that they owed a sacred duty to God; and, not stopping to speculate upon the needs of some imaginary Church of the future, they did what was specially needed for the welfare of the Church in their own day. At the beginning of the war of independence there had been twenty missionaries of the mother Church of England laboring in the colony. They were in great part supported by the Venerable Society in England, and they were under oaths of loyalty to the Crown; it was not strange, therefore, that their sympathies were not on the popular side. They were obliged to suffer great hardships; and the end of the war found the Church in Connecticut in a very depressed condition, with the clergy and people scattered and some of the parishes quite broken up. Fourteen clergymen were left, and of these ten met in the study of the Rev. John Rutgers Marshall on the Festival of the Annunciation in 1783, to take counsel as to what was to be done. Peace had not been proclaimed, but it was known that the war was at an end; and the circumstances of the times were such that they thought it necessary to take action at as early a day as possible. And they instructed their candidate that if he should fail to obtain consecration in England, he should seek it at the hands of the bishops of the disestablished church of Scotland.
Men had very real thoughts about Holy Orders then, when they were obliged to cross the ocean for what they believed to be valid ordination, and when one man out of every five who sought ordination in England lost his life from shipwreck or disease. The results of their faithfulness have been far greater and more wide- reaching than they could have imagined. They would not have believed it possible that at the end of a century there would be in Connecticut nearly two hundred clergymen and twenty-two thousand communicants, the Book of Common Prayer being used by devout congregations throughout the limits of the State; and that not only would this Diocese bear witness to God's blessing on their faithfulness, but that there would be a united and prosperous Church throughout the land, owing to them much of its unity and prosperity. The lesson which we learn from them is that Christ's work is to be done in Christ's own way, and that, thus done, it will certainly abide.
The Rev. Dr. Beardsley, after a brief introduction, added substantially as follows:
It is very evident that the clergy who met here on the Festival of the Annunciation, 1783, were full of earnestness and the spirit of self-sacrifice in their efforts to organize the Episcopal Church in Connecticut and provide for her completeness and continuance under a changed form of civil government. The seven years' struggle of the Thirteen Colonies for independence of the power of Great Britain was ended, and the poor people exhausted on every side, were at a loss to know what methods should be adopted to rise from their depression and recover in any degree their former prosperity. The Missionaries of the Church of England—of whom fourteen were left in Connecticut at the close of the Revolutionary War—- had been aided by stipends from the Venerable Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, but these stipends, by the Constitution of the Society, ceased when the separation finally took place. Of the fourteen Missionaries, all save two [Footnote: The Rev. John Rutgers Marshall was born in the city of New York, 1743, was an alumnus of Columbia College, ordained 1771, and died 1789. The Rev. Daniel Fogg was a native of New Hampshire, a graduate of Harvard College, ordained 1770, and died 1815.]
The full list includes the Rev. Messrs. Samuel Andrews of Wallingford, Gideon Bostwick of Great Barrington (reckoned ecclesiastically as in Connecticut), Richard Samuel Clarke of New Milford, Ebenezer Dibblee of Stamford, Daniel Fogg of Brooklyn, Bela Hubbard of New Haven, Abraham Jarvis of Middletown, Richard Mansfield of Derby, John Rutgers Marshall of Woodbury, Christopher Newton of Ripton, James Nichols of Plymouth. James Scovill of Waterbury, John Tyler of Norwich, and Roger Viets of Simsbury. ] were born in the Colony of Connecticut, and all had been compelled to cross the ocean to obtain Holy Orders—there being no bishop in this country—though the boon had often been solicited from the English Church and as often denied. The trammels of State alliance and the policy of preferring political expediency to religious right prevented the authorities from venturing upon a spiritual act and granting the prayer of the petitioners. The clergy had ministered to their flocks all along in the face of intolerance and bitter opposition from the Puritan body, and the war for independence had subjected them to peculiar trials and reduced them to the verge of ruin. But, without thinking of themselves, or how they should be supported in the broken and disastrous condition of their cures, their first effort or chief anxiety was to provide for the now entirely headless Church; and so in Mid- Lent, on the Festival of the Annunciation, March 25th, one hundred years ago, ten of the fourteen clergy remaining in Connecticut quietly assembled in this place, and, after careful, and, we must believe, the most prayerful deliberation, they selected two persons—the Rev. Jeremiah Leaming being the first choice, and then the Rev. Samuel Seabury—as suitable, either of them, to go to England and obtain, if possible, Episcopal consecration. It was a secret meeting so far as giving any public notice of it was concerned, and it was confined to the clergy, perhaps, among other reasons, for fear of reviving the former opposition on this side to an American Episcopate, and thus of defeating their plan to complete the organization of the Church and secure its inherent perpetuity in this country. The times were troubled, and the establishment of peace with a foreign power did not necessarily produce tranquillity and happiness at home. Mischiefs and jealousies still lingered with those who had contended for liberty, and the chief Protestant sects, which have all erected their banners and had their camping-ground in the Church of England, were ready to welcome her weakness and overthrow because her priests and her people, for the most part, had been on the side of the Crown during the long struggle for independence. But it is not possible to destroy what God holds in His hand. The passions of men work vast evil till, in calmer moments, they subside and a better light shines through their principles and their actions.
The outcome of the meeting at Woodbury, after many hindrances and perplexities, was the consecration by the non-juring Bishops of the Church of Scotland of the Rev. SAMUEL SEABURY as the first Bishop of Connecticut and of the Episcopal Church in the United States. We owe to this consecration some of the best features of our Book of Common Prayer. We owe to it the compactness and unity of our great American Communion, and surely it was well to have what we used on Sunday last—a form of thanksgiving for this our hundredth anniversary of the election of Bishop Seabury that God did "so replenish him with the truth of His doctrine and endue him with innocency of life that he was enabled, both by word and deed, faithfully to serve Him in the office of a bishop to the glory of His name and the edifying and well-governing of His Church."
The Bishop then proceeded with the office of the Holy Communion, being assisted in the service by the Rev. Professor Hart of Trinity College, and in the administration to the clergy and a large number of the laity by the Rev. Dr. Beardsley, the Rev. T. B. Fogg of Brooklyn, and the Rev. J. F. George, rector of the parish. Before the benediction, the Bishop read the special thanksgiving set forth for Easter-Day.