THE CHURCH IN AMERICA.*
DR. LEIGHTON COLEMAN, the Bishop of Delaware, has written the volume on the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, for the " National Churches" Series. For the fair and Christian spirit in which he has gone about his work, and for the pains at which he has evidently been to acquaint himself with very many of the numerous authorities by the study of which light might be thrown on his subject, Bishop Coleman deserves cordial commendation. From the point of view of literary art, his book might doubtless have been improved. Indeed, to tell the truth, some of its earlier chapters lack life. They are full of facts with regard to the early history of the Anglican Church in America, but those facts, though for the most part interesting and frequently of importance in themselves, are not effectively arranged. The reader is sensible of a certain flatness or want of perspective, such as is to be observed in the early Italian painters before Masaccio. Doubtless most of the leading and many subordinate events are duly recorded; many meritorious individual clergy and some influential laymen are mentioned with a few sentences descriptive of their characters and deeds ; but the materials, though most industriously collected, are not so blended and grouped as to produce in many cases as vivid a picture as we could desire of the position held and the part played by the Anglican Church in the life of the young Anglo-Saxon com- munities of the West. To convey anything like a connected view of the history of the Anglican Church in communities so widely scattered and so diverse in their composition and religions and political inspiration as those which ultimately combined in the States of the American Union, is indeed, it may readily be admitted, an extremely difficult, perhaps almost impossible task. But more, we venture to think, might have been done than Bishop Coleman has succeeded in doing to make the subsequent history of the Church in, let us say, the old Dominion of Virginia, readily comprehensible. What, for example, are the reasons to account for the very remarkable fact that Virginia, which very early had an Anglican Church establishment, which was largely settled by men of Cavalier descent, and which prominently manifested its loyalty to Church as well as King in the seventeenth century, was the first Colony to disestablish the Church, and was perhaps more ruthless in its measures of disendowment than any other American State
• The Church in America. By LeiaLton Colman, S.T.D., LL.D., Bishop of Delaware. London: Wells Gardner, Darton, and Co.
We do not say that this question is by any means a simple one to answer. Resentment on the part of the Nonconformist settlers in the inland portions of the State against the in- tolerant laws maintained in the interest of the Church by the planter aristocracy, whose great estates lay along the tidal rivers, had doubtless a good deal to do with the fierce zeal of the Virginian democracy to " dig up the roots " of the Established Church, and even, if possible, of Episcopacy. It seems probable also that the character of many of the Episcopal clergy in Virginia was not of a kind to enlist on their behalf the active defensive zeal of their flocks. But the part played by Anglicans, as Bishop Coleman notices, in the great events of the struggle against the mother-country was so prominent—although, no doubt, many of their co- religionists were "Tories" and Loyalists—that it is difficult to understand how it can have been possible, or seemed desirable, to trample on the Church of which they were, like Washington, devoted members. We should have been glad to have from Bishop Coleman some light on this subject. Again, it seems to us a serious omission that Bishop Coleman has not thought it his duty to go into the question of the attitude of the Anglican Church n the question of slavery. In the South for a very long period it would appear to have been an attitude not only of connivance, but of unhesitating acceptance of the odious institution. " Several Bishops," we are told, " owned large numbers of slaves. The Bishop of Louisiana (the Right Rev. Dr. Polk) had four hundred, and he brought them up in the Church carefully." Bishop Meade, the great reviver of the Church in Virginia at the beginning of the century, after its disasters at the hands of the Legislature of that State, "eman- cipated his slaves on condition that they would remove to Liberia in West Africa." That was a very honourable example, but we fear it was very rare, and that among the Anglican clergy of the South the movement against slavery, as the century advanced, found very little, if any, active sup- port, and not a little active opposition based ostensibly upon interpretations of passages of Scripture prophetic of the servi- tude of the race of Ham. It seems difficult to exaggerate the service which might have been rendered in promoting the peaceful and gradual removal of the great stain upon American civilisation if the Episcopal Church, which so soon after the establishment of the political independence of the colonies succeeded very honourably in achieving a united organisation for itself throughout the States of the Union, had used its power for the furtherance of negro emancipa- tion. Its failure to do so appears to us to be a subject which Bishop Coleman might have been expected both to notice and to discuss.
It is pleasant, however, to turn from the ungracious task of fault-finding to a recognition of the clear and very in- teresting account given in the volume before us of the long- continued and, as it seemed, almost hopeless efforts of American Churchmen in the seventeenth, and through more than eighty years of the eighteenth century, to obtain an Episcopal succession of their own, and of their ultimate reward. Laud is believed to have recognised the importance of planting the Episcopate in the new settlements across the Atlantic, and before 1638 he had appointed the Rev. William Morrell as his commissary to Plymouth ; but the Scotch troubles supervened, and he was not able to pursue any design he had formed in that direction. Lord Clarendon persuaded Charles II. to appoint a Bishop of Virginia with jurisdiction over the other provinces. A Dr. Alexander Murray was chosen for the post, and the patent was actually made out. But difficulties arose, partly personal, but mainly connected with a proposal to endow the Colonial Episcopate out of the Customs, and before they were adjusted, a change of Ministry took place, and the project was dropped. Nothing more was done, or apparently attempted, in that century ; but the for- mation of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in 1701 seemed to open up a new channel through which the hopes of the majority of Colonial Churchmen might be realised. Its missionaries not only came to the aid of the scanty force of Anglican clergy in America, but transmitted to the parent organisation the wishes, and urged the needs, of those among whom they were labouring. In 1712 a committee of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel pressed the matter upon Queen Anne, who was of course full of sympathy, and it was actually resolved to found immediately four
bishoprics,—two for the Continent of America, and two for the islands. A subscription list was opened, liberal gifts were made and devised, and preparations were made to endow the bishoprics from lands ceded to England by the Treaty of Utrecht. A house was even purchased in New Jersey and prepared for an Episcopal residence. All was happily in train when the good Queen died. Immediately on the accession of George L, in 1715, the Society for the Propa- gation of the Gospel "reiterated the request for Bishops, and submitted anew the proposition to establish four Sees, two of which were to be in the Colonies,—one at Burlington, New Jersey, and one at Williamsburg, Virginia. Provision was made to carry this design into effect, when political troubles again arose, and once more the hopes of American Churchmen were baffled." But, as Bishop Coleman clearly shows, the difficulties were by no means only on this side of the Atlantic.
A pamphlet war, begun, it would appear, not very judiciously on the Episcopal side, as to the validity of non-Episcopal orders, excited much hot feeling, and Puritans began to threaten that if Bishops did arrive, they would be thrown into the river. In another shape this kind of senti- ment penetrated, strangely enough, to the Judicial Bench, even in a State with the Anglican and also specially tolerant traditions of Maryland, for when the clergy there had nominated one of their number in 1727 on the invitation of the Bishop of London to be consecrated as his suffragan (the American Colonies being under the Episcopal jurisdiction of London), the Courts of the State were applied to for, and actually issued, a writ of Ne exeat, and the suffragan-designate was forced to remain in the Colony un- consecrated. The Dissenting feeling in the Colonies on this subject reacted, naturally enough, on Dissenting feeling at home (though Dr. Doddridge candidly acknowledged the hardships suffered by American Churchmen through the absence of Bishops), and the Home Government, seldom very zealous on Church matters in the earlier Georgian period, was probably influenced in its inaction by a desire to avoid losing Nonconformist votes in England and the goodwill of the Nonconformist colonists. Bishop Butler devised a very conciliatory scheme for an American Episcopate soon after 1750, and left a bequest of £500 to the fund already estab- lished for that purpose, but nothing came of his efforts nor of the endeavours in the same direction made by Archbishop Seeker, who had always been a warm advocate of the aspira- tions of American Churchmen. So the sorrowful story went on, one disappointment following another, until the revolt of the Colonies came, and must have seemed to make the idea of obtaining the Episcopal succession from Great Britain farther off than ever. Since the first planting of Virginia in 1607, five generations of the children of Churchmen must have grown up without receiving the ordinance of Confirmation, prescribed in the Book of the Common Prayer as the obligatory preliminary to the reception of the Holy Communion. That Sacrament, no doubt, was continuously celebrated, but the fact just pointed out sufficiently illustrates the irregularity by,which Church life in America was pervaded, and which could not fail to react powerfully on the tone of feeling among Churchmen even on matters of the first importance. It is partly by such considerations as these that we may explain certain remarkable facts frankly and fully recorded by Bishop Coleman in regard to the apathy of many American Churchmen and the actual opposition of some to the introduction of Bishops consecrated in England. During the same long period of one hundred and seventy years, the priesthood of the Anglican Church in the States could only be recruited by the despatch of mis- sionaries by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and by the devotion of native candidates who were willing to face two long and dangerous voyages in order to obtain valid ordination :—
" It was calculated that during the forty years preceding 1766, one out of every five candidates for Holy Orders who crossed the ocean died on the journey from sickness or shipwreck For want of regularly ordained ministers, the Church was the more glad to avail herself of the services of catechists and school- masters, many of whom were very zealous and efficient in their ecclesiastical work. It is no wonder, however, that many were deterred from incurring such risks, and that not a few of the most promising you4g men on this same account entered the ministry of other religions bodies."
The wonder is that the Anglican Church, under all these adverse circumstances, maintained the vitality which, since the separation of the Colonies has borne, notwithstanding the moral failure to which we have referred in connection with slavery, such rich and admirable fruit. Peace had hardly been signed when, under conditions that must have seemed very unfavourable, a fresh and resolute effort was made by the clergy of Connecticut to obtain consecration as bishop for one of their number, Samuel Seabury. The story of that most excellent and truly apostolic man's visit to this country in 1783.84, of his failure to obtain that for which he was sent at the hands of the English hierarchy—for whom, however, on account of the political difficulties raised by his Majesty's Government, Bishop Coleman is willing to make all excuses—and then of his successful application to the Scotch Bishops, is told concisely and with excellent temper and judgment in the volume before us. So is the story of the first general Convention of the Episcopal Church in the United States at Philadelphia in 1785, which resulted in an address to the Archbishops and Bishops of the Church of England, requesting them to consecrate as Bishops such persons as should be recommended to them by the consti- tuted authorities of the American Church. That address was favourably received, and early in 1787 Dr. Provoost of New York and Dr. White of Philadelphia were consecrated at Lambeth. Even then many difficulties remained to be sur- mounted before the American Church was fully constituted. An attitude had been taken up, most unwarrantably, and but little excused by political animosities, by some American Churchmen towards Bishop Seabury—the validity of whose consecration had, indeed, been practically denied at the General Convention of 1785—which gravely threatened a schism. Those dangers, however, and all di culties in regard to the form of the American Prayer-Book, were at last sur- mounted, " mainly," to quote a happy phrase employed by the present Bishop (Williams) of Connecticut at the Seabury Centenary, " under the overruling wisdom of the Holy Spirit, by the steadfast gentleness of Bishop White and the gentle steadfastness of Bishop Seabury," but also through the general prevalence of a genuinely Christian and judicious temper.
Space does not allow of our doing more than mentioning the very interesting sketch given by Bishop Coleman, of the educational and missionary work of the American Church, and of the valuable part it played in promoting the restora- tion of national unity after the Civil War. On this subject we read that the conciliatory temper shown at the first General Convention after the war, "and the avoidance by the clergy in general of questions purely political, gained for the Church such a measure of respect and confidence as was not possessed by any other body. Many strangers were thus led to attend her services, and afterwards to conform to her entirely. Churchmen were among the most prominent and influential citizens on either side, and there can be no doubt that the truly fraternal way in which both sections came together—the Church in this matter being quite in advance of any other organisation—very materially helped the work of national reconstruction." It seems reasonable to suppose that a public service of that magnitude and quality must have contributed to the remarkable growth of the Church recorded by Bishop Coleman. It appears that while in 1844 the ratio of the Anglican communicants to the population was as 1 is to 300, in 1894 it had risen to 1 in 108. In view of these and many other corresponding statistical facts it is not surprising that Bishop Coleman's forecast of the future mission of Episco- palianism in America Is full of hope, and that hope will be widely and cordially shared by English Churchmen,
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