10 APRIL 1909, Page 27

3 . 1 cmoir of Bishop Seabury. By William Jones Seabury, D.D. (Ri vingtons.

10s. 6d.)—Samuel Seabury was born at Groton, in Connecticut, on November 30th, 1729. He graduated at Yale, ,slira4 appointed Catechist by the Society for the Propagation of 1,5oe Gospel—sit is interesting to know that his salary was 410 and that he was able to live on it—and after a year in Edinburgh,

wisely spent in medical study, was ordained deacon on Decem- ber 21st, 1753, and priest two clays afterwards. Shortly after be returned to America. His life there, though it is not without interest, we need not follow. The thing that makes him a notable personage in ecclesiastical history is that he became the first Bishop of the Church of the United States. Nothing seems to us more natural, in the light of what has happened here during the last fifty years, than that the American colonies should have Bishops of their own. But difficulties occurred, or were invented, with the result that the English Bishops could not or would not act, and that Samuel Seabury received episcopal consecration from the hands of Scottish Bishops. This was done at Aberdeen by Bishops Skinner, Kilgour, and Petrie. A fourth Scottish Bishop, Ross of Dunblane, pleaded his health and the distance as reasons for his absence. He did not, as a matter of fact, approve, for he objected that the "American Doctor had got, his Orders from the Sohismatical Church of England." The Scottish Bishops were nonjurors, and the biographer of Bishop Seabury thinks, it would seem, that they were in the right. If they were, then Bishop Ross and his " Sohiematical Church" were in the right also, and the validity of Dr. Seabury's own Orders is seriously imperilled. The volume may be read with advantage, but we are not greatly impressed either with the narrative itself or with the way in which it is told.