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VIII

COLONIAL BISHOPS

One of the most interesting of questions touching the colonial Church and State was that created by the demand for an “American Episcopate.” Considered simply as a matter belonging to the constitution and order of the Episcopal Church in the colonies, it would find no proper place in this treatise. That alone is to-day the significance of the episcopate in this country, with which the civil government and other Churches have no legitimate concern. The case was far different in the colonial period, when it was impossible to conceive of the creation of an episcopate without governmental action, or of its existence without more or less dependence on the civil power. Against such aspect were arrayed all the instincts for independence, all the jealousies of other Churches, and all the fears of those colonies in which existed a religious establishment other than the Church of England. The cry for bishops began early in the period, grew more and more urgent as the years went by, caused the most furious and bitter debate in colonial history, and undoubtedly had large influence, especially in the middle colonies, in deciding the popular attitude on the question of political independence.

The demand for colonial bishops grew naturally out of the necessity of the case. Episcopacy without a bishop was an anomaly. It existed at a decided disadvantage, shorn of its proper and needed facilities for the right prosecution of its work. The jurisdiction of a bishop in England was too remote for the healthful conduct of ecclesiastical affairs. Constitution was impossible, ordination only obtainable at

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the risk and expense of an ocean voyage, and discipline destitute of any force. The complaints of the situation on these scores were abundantly justified, and the history of the Church of England in the colonies is full of proof, that this lack of episcopal authority, the essential principle of its polity, resulted in most serious damage.

There was, of course, something of a parallel in the situation of the civil government, over which the supreme jurisdiction vested in the king, to whom appeals came from the colonies, and whose order was competent to set aside colonial legislation and to correct abuses. But the resemblance was only superficial, for the king was represented by governors and other colonial officials, while all the machinery of local government and authority was ample to direct in all ordinary affairs of state. In the colonial Episcopal Church there was nothing to parallel that local government. It was destitute of all spiritual authority. Some of the governors were empowered to induct ministers and to remove for scandalous conduct, but their action in ecclesiastical affairs was not expressive of spiritual aim and power, and was too frequently dictated by personal or party motives.

A much closer likeness to this crippled condition of the Episcopal Church existed in the Reformed Church, by reason of its subjection to the classis of Amsterdam. This subjection continued for one hundred and fifty years, under a constantly increasing sense of its disadvantages, until it became an intolerable burden. So far as ordination and clerical discipline were concerned, the Reformed Church was situated precisely as was the Church of England in the colonies. In the first colonial generation the situation was but natural. The ministers coming to New Netherland were all of German or Dutch birth and education, and properly qualified and ordained before they crossed the sea. But as the colony grew and Churches multiplied, and as candidates of American birth desired to enter the ministry, the necessity of resort to Holland for ordination became a burden of no small weight.

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Nor did the conquest of New Netherlands by the English make any difference in this matter. The youth of New York or New Jersey, who would enter the Reformed ministry, must go to Holland for sacred orders. Happily for the Church, the necessity for ministerial discipline rarely arose, as there was in the colonies no ecclesiastical authority whatever to call a delinquent Reformed minister to account.

We have already narrated in our sketch of New York the demand made by Governor Andros on two Dutch ministers to ordain a candidate. To do this they organized an irregular classis, which their superior, the classis of Amsterdam, refused to recognize, though, for the sake of peace and charity, it ratified the ordination.¹

Yet with this close resemblance on ecclesiastical lines the difference between the two was radical. The question in the Reformed Church was purely one of Church order, as affecting the case of discharging its spiritual function. With this neither the government nor the general public had any concern.

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So far as society at large, or other Churches, or legislatures cared, the Reformed Church might have organized a dozen classes independent of Holland, without a single word of protest from outside. For this reason the matter finds place only in the history of the Church itself, and of it the general history of the country knows nothing whatever.

It was far otherwise with the Episcopal Church. This was not the Episcopal Church of the colonies, but an integral portion of the Church of England; a Church created by act of parliament and subject both for faith and discipline to parliament and the crown; its higher dignitaries appointed by the crown and occupying seats in the house of lords; supported by public endowments and taxes; and possessing a very considerable share in the control of political matters. What such a Church did, what was done for or in such a church, became thus a matter of public concern, and was not confined for legitimate interest to the members of the Church itself. Every Englishman, be he Churchman or Dissenter, was rightly and profoundly interested in many matters. What such a Church did, what was done for or in such a Church, became thus a matter of public concern, and was not confined for legitimate interest to the members of the Church itself. Every Englishman, be he Churchman or Dissenter, was rightly and profoundly interested in many matters affecting such a Church, for they touched not only upon his religious concerns, but also upon his rights as a citizen.

Thus it was in England. And the same necessity for public concern inevitably obtained in the colonies, where the desire and design of the English government of planting the Church of England as an establishment of state had received abundant illustrations. Without reference to the harshness of the English Church to dissenters in England, the colonists had many reasons for public comment and for dread of its encroachments presented by its course in America. They had but to call to mind the Virginia Church, banishing Puritans and persecuting Baptists; the Carolina Churchmen, driving non-conformists from the legislature; the Maryland Church, outlawing that Roman Catholicism, which had given to it a kindly welcome; and the New York Anglican clergy exulting in Cornbury's spoliation of Jamaica Presbyterians, and persisting in the fraudulent claim that the Act of 1693

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established the Church of England in their province. With such facts in mind, and every one of them occurring in colonies where the English Churchmen were less than one-fourth of the population, it would have been the sheerest folly for the people at large not to be interested, and not to express their mind about any project of that Church in all matters of its constitution and of its relation to government and the people. Much of the disputation on the part of the English Churchmen expresses surprise that people outside of their Church should consider their application for bishops as a thing with which they had any right to intermeddle. This is the most amusing thing in the entire controversy; for, while pleading — and rightly — that a bishop was essential to the polity and prosperity of their Church, they never fail to give evidence that they still retain in mind the purpose and perquisites of a state-establishment. It was this background of their plea, which made the application a matter for public interest and discussion.

The course of this discussion covered more than one hundred years, though it was not until the last decade that it aroused the interest and opposition of the people at large. Previous to that time the matter was confined to complaints from the better class of the English clergy in the colonies, appeals to the government and to bishops in England, with an occasional expression of favor or disfavor toward the appeal on the part of a colonial governor. We will find interest in noting a few illustrations.

The beginning of the demand seems to have been in the pamphlet “Virginia’s Cure,”¹ presented to the bishop of London in 1661. It pathetically set forth the “unhappy state of the Church in Virginia” due to the greatly scattered state of the population, the destitution of ministers, and the bad character of some of the few clergymen in the colony; and suggested that a bishop was greatly needed, both for the exercise of discipline and for the encouragement and furtherance of

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the Church and its work. In the same year Philip Mallory, a clergyman in Virginia, was sent to England for assistance in “building up the Church in the colony,” an important feature in whose plan was the sending of “a bishop, so soon as there should be a city for a see.”¹ These representations seem to have made such an impression on the episcopal and governmental mind of England, that the Rev. Alexander Murray was nominated for the bishopric of Virginia, but the matter was not pursued. Murray was not appointed, nor was any bishop sent.² Anderson justly says (p. 559), “The Bishops were her (the Church’s) natural and true protectors: but they were not permitted in any one colony to watch over her; and hence all her distresses.”

In view of the necessity of some Episcopal supervision, the jurisdiction over the colonial Church was lodged, first in the archbishop of Canterbury, and afterward by William III. in the bishop of London, with whom it remained to the end of the colonial period, and whose certificate was made needful for all clergy of the Church of England in those colonies where that Church was, or was supposed to be, established.

Every occupant of the see of London found the duties of his American diocese most troublesome and perplexing. “The care of it,” wrote the bishop in correspondence with Dr. Doddridge in 1751, “is supposed to be in the Bishop of London. Sure I am that the care is improperly lodged.

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For a Bishop to live at one end of the world, and his Church at the other, must make the office very uncomfortable to the Bishop, and in great measure useless to the people.¹

To meet some of the difficulties of the situation the bishop fell upon the scheme for the appointment of a special kind of agent, to be called a “Commissary.” James Blair was constituted commissary for Virginia in 1694; and, a few years after, Thomas Bray was appointed for Maryland. Vesey was also appointed to such office in New York, but the condition of affairs made the appointment of small importance. Blair and Bray were men of devoted piety and earnestness, and the former was the possessor of great force of character and executive ability. The Episcopal Church in Maryland and Virginia owed most of the good that was in them to the wise and watchful care of these two men. Especially is the debt of Virginia to Blair still great for the superb courage and resolution through which, against many obstacles, he secured the foundation of William and Mary College.

But the powers of the commissary were limited. He had no authority beyond that of moral suasion. As the agent of the bishop, inspecting and reporting, he might persuade with greater force than an ordinary minister. But he had no word of command to abate nuisances, to rebuke offenders, or to even institute a process of discipline. He could neither confirm nor ordain, neither induct nor remove ministers. He was limited to inspection, advice, and report — the merest shadow of a bishop. What the church needed was a bishop, and not a commissary.

So thought the Rev. Nicholas Morean, when writing in 1697 to the bishop of Lichford.² He commented adversely on the appointment of Blair, because he was a Scotchman, but at the same time admired the character of the man, for he continued: “An eminent Bishop of the same character being sent over here with him, will make Hell tremble and settle the Church of England in these parts forever.

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If I see a Bishop come over here, I will say, as St. Bernard said in his epistle to Eugenius Tertius, hic digitus Dei est.” Some years later, an anonymous letter-writer, discussing the same need, declared: “My Lord Bishop of London’s authority, residing there in ins Commissary, is notoriously despised and undervalued: his attempts to exercise discipline, even in the worst cases, are hindered by government (colonial), the cases being taken out of his hand and ordered to be prosecuted in civil courts, where they were so slightly handled that they escaped uncondemned.”¹

With like sense of the situation the Rev. Evan Evans wrote from Pennsylvania in 1707, that there was no help for the Church, unless a bishop should be sent, with authority of control over the quarrels and improper conduct of the clergy.² Colonel Quary, the agent of the board of trade, and Colonel Heathcote wrote in the same strain of “the great want and need.” Another letter from Heathcote to the Propagation Society, in 1705, dwells on the same subject, declares that the English clergy in the northern colonies are good men, and has an amusing fling at the Puritans. Speaking of Massachusetts, he wrote “They have an abundance of odd laws there to prevent any dissenting from their Church and endeavor to keep the people in as much blindness and unacquaintedness with any other religion as possible: But in a more particular manner the Church, looking upon her as the most dangerous enemy they have to grapple withal. I really believe that more than one half of the people in that Government think our Church to be little better than the Papist. And they fail not to improve every little thing against us. But I bless God for it, the Society have robbed them of their best argument, which was the ill lives of our clergy that came unto these parts. And the truth is, I have not seen many good men but of the Society’s sending.”

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In this letter the colonel touches upon the great cause of the almost agonizing cry for a bishop — the misconduct of the clergy. The fact of such misconduct has already been noticed as obtaining, sometimes to a scandalous degree, especially in Virginia and Maryland, and to a much smaller extent in the Carolinas. In the middle colonies and New England the English clergy were not as a class liable to any such stigma. The difference may be accounted for by the different conditions in the contrasted colonies, in the southern colonies the Church of England was established by law; in Maryland in 1693, and in the others from their beginning, and was subject in many ways to the direct control of the colonial government. The right of induction vested in the governor, who was very rarely a person possessed of regard for the spiritual interests of the Church or people. Livings were given out of favor. Adventurers, who had lost place and character in England, came over to the colonies, where half the parishes were without parsons, and by a little fawning could obtain from governor and vestry a comfortable location. After that, no degree of scandalous behavior could give to the governor a power of removal. The ill-living parson remained and held his own against all remonstrances, unless his misconduct brought him under censure by the civil law.

It was impossible for such a condition to obtain in the northern colonies, where, before the introduction of the Church of England, the sober and elevating influences of other Churches had long obtained, and where the power of the governor in ecclesiastical affairs was practically very small. In these colonies, with almost no exceptions, the clergy of the English Church were men of high character and of spiritual affection for their religious mother, men equal to sacrifice in order to build up their Church in the midst of unfriendly surroundings. It was almost impossible for a reprobate to obtain a parish, or, having obtained one, it was impossible that he should long possess it.

I find but one governor giving evidence of anything like

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interest in the spiritual and vital interests of the Church. This was Governor Hart of Maryland, “a man of earnest and devout spirit.” On his arrival in 1714 he “lost no time in convening the clergy at Annapolis that he might inform himself” about the state of the Church. Presently he reported to the bishop of London that there were many faithful ministers, and “some whose education and morals were a scandal to their profession.” “Unless I had a power to remove such as are scandalously notorious, I cannot do effectual service. I am sorry that there are many such here, and I believe nothing will reclaim some of them, until they feel the severities of ecclesiastical censures.” The governor joined with Bray and the better men among the clergy in urging the appointment of a bishop.¹

The pressure from the colonies succeeded in producing, about 1707, another slight spasm of interest in England. We find the bishop of London, willing enough to be relieved of his over-sea charge, observing that there “should be a suffragan Bishop in America. An absolute Bishop might alarm the people. But a suffragan, for whose appointment the office of commissary had in a sense prepared them, would excite no fears. It was quite “necessary to go slow” in so important a matter.²

There were hopes excited on both sides of the sea. In England the government was urged to send the famous Jonathan Swift, and the dean wrote to Governor Hunter in 1709: “All my hopes now terminate in being made Bishop of Virginia.” While one can but sympathize with the colonial Church in its deprivation of episcopal functions, it will not be deplored that the dean’s hopes were disappointed. In the colonies the spirits of the clergy were elated. Those of Pennsylvania wrote to the society of their delight in “the

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satisfactory prospect we have of the honorable Society’s successful endeavors for settling Bishops and Bishopricks in these parts.¹

But all these hopes were vain; no bishop was appointed, and the stream of complaints began again, continuing with more and more of volume, and with ever deepening sense of the need until the end of the colonial period. Perry’s Collections abound in the most strident cries from the clergy in all the colonies. Dr. Cutler writes (1723) from Massachusetts (pp. 143, 433): “There is no doubt that the interests of religion and the Church of England would flourish with us by the immediate presence and inspection of a Bishop . . . (this) is the universal desire of the Church . . . (and of) many that want hereby to be enlivened and emboldened in their entrance into her communion;” and again in 1749: “even many sober Dissenters (!) do think a resolute Bishop would be a Blessing, and not a few seem to rejoice at the news encouraging our hopes of it, though others and a still bigger number are ready according to their power to defeat it.” Mr. Inglis reports from Delaware (p. 101) the opinion of a voluntary conference of the clergy that they must have a Bishop. Otherwise the Church will languish and die.” Addison of Maryland (p. 1) writes to the bishop of London of the “expediency of establishing episcopacy, without which the Church of England must lose ground.” And Craig, writing from Pennsylvania (p. 187), laments the difficulty and expense of going to England for ordination and the consequent scarcity of ministers, and, with a charming subconsciousness that only the Church of England could dispense the pure gospel, concludes that there is “but one way left of removing such a famine of the word, and that is by sending a Bishop to America.”

One thing which the English clergy in New England promised themselves, as a consequent upon the establishment of bishops, was relief from the legal Church rates. Themselves

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non-conformists, they thought it very hard that they should be compelled to bear in New England a burden which all non-conformists in the old country had to submit to. Dr. Cutler was specially outraged by the situation, and in 1727 he joined with six others in a petition to the king against Massachusetts tithes. In a letter to John Delapp he waxed indignant, declaring that “an honest Christian is double taxed, like as a Papist or Recusant.” The subject is discussed in the already noted correspondence between the bishop of London and Dr. Doddridge,² wherein the latter broadly intimates that the Episcopalian in New England was no worse off and had no more reason to complain than the Presbyterian in England.

The bishop of London and the archbishop of Canterbury were about the only friends that the colonial Church had in England.³ The latter, Seeker, preached the anniversary sermon of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 1740,⁴ and pleaded strongly for an American episcopate. He seems to have had the same low estimate of the spiritual condition of the colonies as that expressed by Craig, painting the condition in dark colors. According to his grace there had been “no baptism for twenty years,” and no administration of the Lord’s Supper for sixty years. “Such was the state in more of the colonies than one, and where it was a little better it was however lamentably bad. . . . There are scarce any footsteps of Christianity beyond the very name” (!) In the same discourse he commented on the establishments in New England, and the hardship of tithes exacted from Episcopalians. The sermon was published in America, as well as in England, and drew from Andrew Elliott a caustic review, in which was demonstrated the excessive care of the New

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England colonies to provide religious opportunities to every community, and that the Episcopalians had suffered no hardships whatever since the enactment of the “Five-Mile Act.” The discussion had large influence in deepening the feeling of opposition to the establishment of a bishop.

As the numbers of people increased, and the English clergy felt the ever growing burdens of the situation, the representations of their need became ever more urgent, now with a touch of pathos, and again with a stroke of bitterness. The correspondence of the saintly and venerable Johnson of Stratford has many discussions of the subject.¹ He wrote to Archbishop Seeker in 1753, “Give me leave to inform you, That

. . . which makes it extremely melancholy that we cannot be favored with a good Bishop to assist us and go before us in stemming the torrent.” At other times Dr. Johnson wrote:² “The Freethinkers & Dissenters, who play into one another’s hands against the Chh. will never drop their virulence and activity, by all manner of Artifices, till they go near to raze the very Constitution to the foundation, both in Chh. and State.” “The Church asks no more than to be upon a par here with her neighbors, and having leave to enjoy the benefit of her own institutions as well as they.” “When they enjoy their Presbytery in the full vigor of its discipline, is it not a cruel thing that they should be so bitterly against the Church’s enjoying her own form of Government and discipline? She cannot provide for her own children, without their consent to it.” In 1766, Dr. Johnson, commenting on two young candidates, who were lost at sea while on a voyage to England for ordination, wrote: “These make up ten valuable lives that have now been lost for want of ordaining

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powers here, out of fifty-four that have gone for ordination . . . I consider the Church here, for want of bishops, in no other light than as being in a state of persecution on that account.” Johnson’s own son was one of the ten lost. When the news of the bereavement reached him he wrote:¹ “This is now the seventh precious life (most of them the flower of this country) that has been sacrificed to the atheistical politics of this miserable, abandoned age. . . . I confess I should scarce have thought my dear son’s life ill bestowed, if it could have been the means of awakening this stupid age to a sense of the necessity of sending bishops.” Nothing could go farther than this to illustrate the sense of extreme need entertained by the clergy of the Church of England in the colonies.

After 1760 the discussion and controversy took on a very acute phase. Dr. Mayhew of Boston, in 1763, published a pamphlet against the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, finding in its charter and conduct what he deemed “a formal design to carry on a spiritual siege of our Churches, with the hope that they will one day submit to a spiritual sovereign;” and expressed the alarm throughout New England, “that all the evils which adhered to the Church in the old world would be transplanted to this” by the appointment of bishops. Rev. Solomon Palmer of Connecticut commented: “The invidious Dr. Mayhew, of base principles and, it is to be feared, a dishonest heart, has raised a dust to blind men’s eyes and stir up a popular clamor.”

The paper of Dr. Mayhew made a great sensation, and Archbishop Seeker thought it of sufficient importance to be honored with a reply from his own pen. Writing to Mr. Duché in 1763 he tells of a new movement for sending bishops, of which he had previously written to Johnson:²

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“This I have long had at heart . . . nor shall I ever abandon the scheme as long as I live.” To Duché he said that the scheme had been explained to Lord Egremont, who promised to further it, and that Halifax was in favor of it, but the issue was doubtful; “the more for Dr. Mayhew’s late pamphlet. It is written with great virulence, but must be answered with great mildness, else no good will be done.”¹ The mild answer of the archbishop appeared in 1764, and sought to allay fears that the appointment of bishops involved anything beyond the order of the Church of England. They were to have no concern in the least with any not of the Church of England; (they were) only to ordain ministers for such as do profess that Church, confirm children, and take the oversight of the Episcopal clergy. It is not desired in the least that they should hold courts to try material or testamentary causes, or be vested with any magisterial authority, or infringe or diminish any privileges or liberties.”²

But this calm exposition of Episcopal purposes did not propitiate opponents. The Rev. W. Gillchrist wrote from Salem in 1765:³ “The Gentlemen in this Province are all in a manner professed advocates for universal toleration and liberty of conscience, and yet in direct contravention of this principle the Dissenters avowedly oppose with all their interest a Bishop’s being sent over to America. . . . They discover the most partial propensity to their own party, for they stiffly maintain that Spiritual Courts, with such jurisdiction as they have in England, would necessarily follow them, and that their maintenance would be raised by a tax upon America.” “Never,” wrote Winslow, of Connecticut, “did a malignant spirit of opposition to the Church rage with greater vehemence than of late.”⁴

The climax of the dispute came with the controversy

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between Dr. Chandler of New Jersey and Dr. Chauncey of Boston. The former published in 1767, “An Appeal to the Public,” in which he entered at great length into the situation and necessities of the Church. Its need of a properly constituted American episcopate is its great theme, cogently presented from the character of the Church polity, the need of watchful discipline, and the exercise of all episcopal functions, and “the unparalleled hardship” of resorting to England for ordination. The appeal was answered by Dr. Chauncey, and in reply to this Dr. Chandler put forth “The Appeal Defended.” To this also Dr. Chauncey replied in a pamphlet, which drew from Chandler a third treatise entitled, “The Appeal Further Defended.” With this the controversy ended, so far as these writers were concerned.

But it was not so with the public at large. The appeal was finally attacked in the newspapers, especially in the New York Gazette and the Philadelphia Sentinel, while almost the entire city of Boston was excited.¹ The difference between the parties was such that it was impossible for them to come to any composition. The very question of the episcopate was a totally different question in the mind of one party from what it was in the mind of the other. To the English clergy it was a question of Church order and discipline, and a perfectly just demand that their Church in America should be properly equipped for its own life and work. To their opponents it was entirely a political question, and matters of Church order and religion entered little into their thought concerning it.

The whole question of a State-Church was involved in it. They knew that a bishop in England was an officer of the state; that the parliament ordained his place and power and the crown had the gift of his preferment, while his maintenance was by public endowment. They remembered what bishops had been in England, and how their fathers had suffered many things at episcopal hands. They knew also that in the

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very time of this dispute the non-conformists of England were subjected to many annoyances and disabilities; and, whether rightly or wrongly, they judged that the institution of an episcopate in America, by an act of parliament and on the nomination of the king, would in the near future be followed by attempts at spiritual tyranny. “It excited,” said John Adams,¹ “a general and just apprehension that Bishops, and Dioceses, and Churches, and Priests, and Tythes were to be imposed upon us by Parliament. It was known that neither King, nor Ministry, nor Archbishop could appoint Bishops in America without an act of Parliament; and if Parliament could tax us, they could install the Church of England, with all its Creeds, Articles, Tests, Ceremonies, and Tithes, and prohibit all other Churches as Conventicles and Schism-shops.” Thus the question took place among those which brought on the war of the Revolution.

Nothing which the Episcopal party could say, or rather did say, was able to disabuse the public mind of the impression that there was an ulterior design dangerous to liberty. “We can not believe,” wrote one disputant,² “that he would be long content to be but half a Bishop, to have a nominal Office, without the Powers and Emoluments. You think it hard to be deprived of the Privileges of other Societies, but you may blame the Arbitrary Spirit of your Bishops, who have always infringed on the Estates and Consciences of the People.” The fear that bishops would necessarily assume similar relations to the government to those sustained by the English prelates was universal in the non-episcopal community, and it is specially notable that the Episcopal party in all their argument and disclaimers of political designs, evidently thought it possible that such might be the issue. Thus Dr. Chandler in his pathetic appeal, while discussing the non-episcopal objections and denying a desire to establish the Church of England as a State-Church, still finds himself unable to give

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the guarantee, which alone could have reconciled the people at large to the proposed episcopate.¹

On the matter of tithes he wrote, that the English laws could “never have any effect here, until an Act of Parliament shall be made to extend them to us.” In regard to the public maintenance of the bishops, he disclaimed any intention that such should be established, but in view of the possibility that parliament might so ordain, he continued: But should a general tax be laid . . . supposing we had three Bishops, such a Tax would not amount to more than Four Pence in One Hundred Pounds. And this would be no mighty Hardship upon the Country. He that could think much of giving the Six Thousandth Part of his Income to any Use, which the Legislature of his Country shall assign, deserves not to be considered in the Light of a good Subject or Member of Society. . . . But no such tax is intended, nor I trust will be wanted.” Again, on the subject of civil functions he said: “There is not the least Prospect at present that Bishops in this Country will acquire any Influence or Power. . . . But should the Government see fit hereafter to invest them with some degree of civil Power worthy of their Acceptance, which it is impossible to say they will not . . . yet as no new powers will be created in Favour of Bishops, it is inconceivable that any would thereby be injured.”

Here was the weak point in the appeal and the entire Episcopal argument, and one so fatal that no pleas of the Church’s need could offset this suggestive possibility. Had the Episcopal party been able to furnish a guarantee that the Episcopate would be confined strictly to ecclesiastical and spiritual functions in its own Church alone, without possibility that a public maintenance would be assessed, they might probably have disarmed the opposition. But this was not possible. They knew it to be unlikely that the English Parliament would legislate to deprive any bishops, whether at home or in the colonies, of those privileges which for

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centuries had been perquisites of their office. If the Parliament of the day should be so complaisant as to so constitute American bishops, there was no security that a succeeding Parliament might not reverse the action.

Just such an episcopate, shorn of all civil power, was the request of the English clergy of New York and New Jersey, in their address to the government in 1772.¹ They asked for “Bishops with purely Ecclesiastical Powers, without any temporal Authority, and without any Jurisdiction over Dissenters of any Denomination. We wish not to interfere with the Rights and Privileges of others, or to abridge the ample Toleration they already enjoy. With this Disposition we conceive it to be more than reasonable that we should be indulged with the same religious Privileges which are granted to them, especially considering our Relation to the national establishment.”

This was as far as the Episcopal party could go, in regard to the limitations of the desired episcopate; nor, so far as that was concerned, could their opponents justly ask more. But with that concession the terms by which it was attended were offensive. It was never fitting, north of Maryland, to speak of non-Episcopalians as dissenters. In New England the Episcopalians were themselves dissenters. In New York and New Jersey the term involved a claim to an establishment with which the Church of England had legally no connection whatever. Nor were the Churches of the northern colonies willing to admit that they were allowed a toleration. They were to the manor born, and it was the Episcopal Church that was tolerated. The plea also of the “Relation to the National establishment” was such as to prejudice the non-Episcopal mind, which was not ready to agree to anything which based itself on the fact or power of that establishment.

William Smith, the historian of New York, writing about 1770, said: “The Episcopalians are in the proportion of one

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to fifteen (in New York). . . . The body of the people are for an equal, universal toleration of protestants, and utterly averse to any kind of ecclesiastical establishment. The dissenters, though fearless of each other, are all jealous of the episcopal party, being apprehensive that the countenance they may have from home will foment a lust of dominion and enable them, in process of time, to subjugate and oppress their fellow subjects.”¹

It is notable that this great debate found its place especially in the northern colonies. The southern colonies in which the Church of England was established did not largely concern themselves about it. There had been sent from Maryland and Virginia sundry personal letters expressing a desire for bishops. In Maryland, as noted in the sketch of that colony, a clerical convention, on invitation of the Bishop of London, had nominated for suffragan a Mr. Colebatch, whom the colonial government would not permit to go to England for ordination.² But toward the end of the colonial period the southern Church ceased to be greatly agitated on the matter. In 1767³ Mr. Neill wrote of Governor Sharpe of Maryland that he “answered all the ends of a bishop, except in conferring orders and confirmation. I wish he had this part of Episcopal authority confirmed upon him. He would make as good a bishop as we could wish for.”(!)

In Virginia there was but a very small party in the established Church in favor of having a bishop. How low large a part of this indifference was due to the notorious character of many of the clergy there are no means of telling, but it is reasonable to think that men of such character would not be anxious to establish courts for their own discipline. It is clear, however, that this clerical delinquency and the reaction from the “Parson’s Cause” had pronounced a majority of the laity in disaffection toward the Church and in opposition

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to any effort for her aggrandizement. This was strongly expressed in 1771. In that year the party in favor of having a bishop called a convention to consider the question. Out of all the clergymen in Virginia only twelve came to the gathering, which, notwithstanding the absurdity of such a body venturing to represent the clergy of the colony, adopted an address to the home government asking for a bishop. But even this action was not unanimous. Out of the twelve present four ministers protested, basing their objection on the very proper ground that so small a body could not speak for the Church of Virginia. The next house of burgesses by formal vote thanked these four for resisting “the pernicious project.” It is evident that in the mind of the legislature it was rather the demand for a bishop, than the smallness of the convention, that excited opposition.¹

It is not at all difficult to sympathize with both parties to the dispute. “American Episcopacy without an American bishop was a solecism.” (Bancroft.) That the Church should be possessed of its full polity was a demand for its life. At the same time, it was impossible for the great mass of the people to regard with equanimity the appointment of an episcopate in the country, unless its relation to the civil government should be radically changed from the English model, and its relation to the Church in England should be completely severed.

The dispute also was inevitably involved in the now pressing political struggle. Both in Church and State the question was one: whether Parliament should tax the colonies. Dr. Chandler altogether missed the point, when expatiating on the smallness of the tax for Episcopal support. The tax on tea was insignificant. The colonial mind was not occupied by the amount of the tax, but the principle of taxation. It refused to pay taxes to the imperial treasury, and to permit the imperial legislature to impose a church order. Thus, “The claim of a right to establish a Bishop and Episcopal

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courts, without the consent of the colony,” was one of the “Grievances enumerated by a town-meeting of Boston, November, 1772.¹ That the opposition was entirely political and did not represent sectarianism is capable of abundant proof. The demand came chiefly from the English clergy in the northern colonies, while the great body of their own laity were not in sympathy with them. The Churchmen of Virginia and Maryland were at one with the Congregationalists of New England. No one, into whom had entered anything of the spirit of American freedom, was willing to concede that the royal prerogative extended to the colonial churches. Some things had happened in recent years which men had not forgotten. There still rankled in Massachusetts the king’s prohibition of the proposed synod of Congregational ministers in 1725, wherein the lords justices of England claimed for the crown supremacy in all ecclesiastical affairs, which, “being a branch of his prerogative, does take place in the plantations: and synods can not be held, nor is it lawful for the clergy to assemble as in synods, without authority from his Majesty.”² Nor did the people of New York forget the recent refusal of the king to allow incorporation to the Presbyterian Church, which was bidden to expect no other privileges than those conferred by the toleration act of 1689.

This refusal was singularly impolitic for the interests of the English Church in the colonies. It occurred in 1767, in the height of the Episcopal debate, and could reasonably have no other effect than to intensify opposition to an American episcopate. “That decision,” wrote Dr. Chauncey, “was an alarm to all the churches on the continent, giving them solemn notice what they might expect, should Episcopalians ever come to have supremacy in their influence.” Under such circumstances, it was impossible to persuade non-Episcopalians

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that the question about bishops was one which need not concern them, or the legitimate interest in which should be confined to the Church of England. Nor is it a strange thing that in the synods of the Presbyterians in New York and Pennsylvania, and of the Congregational churches of Connecticut in 1768 and 1775, “the great and almost the only subject, which occupied their attention, was opposition to the establishment of an American episcopate.”¹ To the same dread of an undesirable elevation and increase of Episcopal power was due the long struggle over the foundation of King’s College, which agitated the people of New York.² A minor illustration of the encroaching spirit for which the Church of England was feared, is recorded by Smith (I, 349), to the effect that the Episcopal clergy, “for enlarging the sphere of their secular business, attempted by a petition to the late Governor Clinton to engross the privilege of solemnizing all marriages. A great clamor ensued, and the attempt was abortive.” Such an attempt seems to the modern mind almost too absurd for belief, but it needs to be remembered, in justice to the clergy, that the effort was in strict accordance with English law. At that time, and for many years after, no marriage could be made in England without the official presence of a clergyman of the national Church. For this reason, the Episcopal ministers of New York, supposing the Church of England to be established in the province, might easily conclude that they should possess all the perquisites of their English brethren.

Still another and powerful factor, in the dispute about bishops, was the attitude of the Episcopal clergy on the questions at issue between the colonies and the English government. The Memoir of Rev. John Stuart, D.D., records, “No class was so uncompromising in its loyalty (to the king) as the clergy of the Church of England in this state (New York); and they in consequence did not fail to experience

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the bitter effects of their unwise resolution.”¹ From the beginning of the troubles, the English clergy as a class were stout preachers of the doctrine of passive obedience, and condemned all the colonial attempts against parliamentary oppression. In view of the growing spirit of independence, the clergy of New York went so far, in 1760, as to urge in correspondence with Archbishop Seeker the abrogation of all provincial charters.²

In the midst of the excitement about the stamp act of 1765, seven missionaries of the society in New England joined in a report that the people of the Church of England, and particularly of their own charges, were of “a contrary temper and conduct, esteeming it nothing short of rebellion to speak evil of dignitaries and to avow opposition to this last Act of Parliament.” At the same time, Dr. Learning wrote to the society: “The missionaries in this colony are very serviceable, not only in a religious but in a civil sense.” In some northern towns, “most rebellious outrages have been committed, while those towns, where the Church has got footing, have soberly submitted to the civil authority.”³

The great advocate for an American episcopate, Dr. Chandler, was very pronounced in his adhesion to the royal cause, which he made one with the interest of the Church. In his thought, both must stand or fall together. “Who can be certain,” he wrote, “that the present rebellious disposition of the colonies is not intended by Providence as a punishment for that neglect?” (to make the Church a national concern and to send bishops)⁴ In 1774, Dr. Chandler published A Friendly Address, asking the question, “What think ye of Congress now?” which so enraged his people at Elizabeth, that he was obliged to leave.⁵

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Another indication of the Episcopal attitude is furnished by a letter of Charles Inglis, assistant rector of Trinity in New York City. It discusses the “State of the Anglo American Church,” and among other things declares that “all the society’s missionaries proved themselves faithful, loyal subjects in these trying times . . . all the other clergy of our Church have observed the same line of conduct.” “An abolition of the Church of England,” he continued, “is one of the principal springs of the dissenting leaders’ conduct.”¹

The Episcopal clergy found an immediate test of their loyalty in the liturgical prayers for the king. In most of the colonies, the use of those prayers was forbidden by act of legislature, while many of the clergy refused to read the service with the prayers omitted. Inglis wrote that, to hold service and not to pray for the king was against conscience and duty; to pray for the king was to invite destruction; so they shut up their Churches as the only thing to be done. There were a few exceptions to this course out of New York City and Philadelphia. The ability to make a distinction between allegiance to the king and loyalty to the religious needs of their people seems to have been rare. Mr. Tyler of Norwich, Connecticut, was almost singular in defining that “Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, and so may exist without the civil power,” on which ground he omitted the obnoxious prayer and continued to feed his flock.²

With such intense pro-English feeling animating the colonial clergy of the Episcopal Church it would have been impossible for the people at large to look with favor on the proposition for an episcopate, and the more so as most of the laity of that Church itself were opposed to the scheme. Suspicion of ulterior motives was inevitable. Fear of the Church of England, said John Adams, “contributed as much

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as any other cause to arouse the attention, not only of the inquiring mind, but of the common people, and urged them to close thinking on the constitutional authority of parliament over the colonies.”¹

Of all the circumstances attending this long dispute over colonial bishops the most remarkable is the inaction of the authorities in England. The demand for an episcopate began more than one hundred years before the Revolution, and though repeated every year and with growing urgency, it fell upon deaf ears in England. While the government was particular in many cases that the Church should be established in the colonies, it was steadily indifferent as to its necessities. Even the higher functionaries of the English Church, except the occupants of the sees of London and Canterbury, were equally careless. Says Anderson: “The amount of inert resistance presented in the office of the Secretary for the Colonies was too great to be overcome.”² Occasionally an excess of urgency would rouse a passing interest of government, only to die out in a few days.³

Besides this indifference to religious needs, both the government and the Church of England were jealous of any movement toward colonial independence. The establishment of American bishops would have made the colonial Church practically free of the Church of England, with a subjection to the archepiscopal see hardly more than nominal. In the colonies also the royal governors were not in favor of the scheme. An American episcopate would rob them of certain

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prerogatives, sometimes valuable and always useful for power and dignity. We have noted the refusal of the governor of Maryland to allow Mr. Colebatch to go to England for ordination. So late as 1771, Lord Baltimore showed the same feeling. In that year Hugh Neill wrote of an address to the king adopted by some of the Maryland clergy, asking for a bishop, and told of Baltimore’s opposition. “His Excellency received us very coldly, and let us know, by the advice no doubt of his council, that our Livings in Maryland were Donatives, and stood in no need of the aid of Episcopacy. This cast a damp upon many.”¹

This unwillingness of the English authorities in both Church and State to accord the essential need of the Episcopal Church in America expressed itself even after the independence of the colonies was conceded. At the same time all opposition to an episcopate ceased in America, so soon as that independence made clear the fact, that all political danger from the institution was eliminated. Adams, who had heartily opposed in the past, now, as minister of the United States in London, as heartily urged that bishops should be sent, though the urgency, of course, was only in his personal capacity. The difficulty in England arose from a sulky resentment which could not reconcile itself to the separation from the colonies. For three years Seabury, White, and Prevoost waited in England till the bishops of the English Church could recover magnanimity enough to ordain them. Finally Seabury’s patience was exhausted, and he obtained ordination at the hands of the non-juring bishop of Aberdeen. This was something of an object lesson, and the archbishop of Canterbury, seeing that the American brethren could not be excluded from ordination, at last consented with an ill grace to consecrate White and Prevoost.²

On the new bishops’ return to America they found no voices of opposition. All reason for it had disappeared. The question

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of Church and State in America had been decided for all time, and the people knew that an episcopate had in it no elements to affect the civil powers or religious liberty. There was, indeed, early in 1785, a warm discussion in one of the Boston newspapers on the propriety of admitting bishops into Massachusetts, but it was an idle discussion and only served to draw upon the opponent the public ridicule.¹