nation. Little indeed could the remnant guess that, few as they were, they would exercise an incalculable influence upon the future. For it was in an upper room in a back street in Aberdeen on November the 14th, 1784 that three Scottish bishops did what the English bishops had never had the courage to do, consecrating Samuel Seabury a bishop for the Church in America. And it was in sight of

the distant Cheviots blue

that Sir Walter Scott, loving the Church 'whose system of government and discipline he believed to be the fairest copy of the primitive polity',1 enlarged the minds of thousands to understand the past and to discover the reality that is latent in romance. Thus he prepared the way for the Oxford movement. No one can ignore what Seabury and Scott were able to contribute to the future; but behind both those men were others, obscure and forgotten, who 'against hope, believed in hope', the men who could bear to seem to fail, but could not bear to be disloyal to the truth.

Bishop Seabury arrived in America at a critical moment. Let us try to survey the situation. The Church of England had been established from the first in Virginia and in other parts of the south, where the white population was very scanty. It was also established in New York when New York became an English colony. No doubt the old Anglican churches in New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, admirable specimens of the art of the Georgian period,2 had large and generous congregations. But the whole work of the Church was crippled, and crippled deliberately, by the refusal of the British Government to send any bishops

1 J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, vol. vii, p. 414 (Robert Cadell, Edinburgh, 1838).

For the architecture of these and other American churches, see app. note 20, p. 274.

to America in spite of the rapid increase in population and the entreaties of some of the best men in the Church of England. If it had not been for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel the Church could hardly have survived. Farther east than New York, in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, the Puritan colonists had erected Congregationalism as the established religion. It was completely in the ascendant, its connexion with the State was peculiarly close and was not severed till the nineteenth century had far advanced. In Connecticut especially the Church of England was non-existent until 1722, when Dr. Cutler the rector of Yale College and several of his colleagues became convinced that Congregationalist orders are invalid and the position of the Church of England scriptural. In order to be ordained, Cutler and two others sailed to England, which then involved a journey of about six weeks. Cutler and one of his friends caught the smallpox. The latter died. The two survivors went back to America, Cutler settling in Boston, and Johnson in Connecticut, the one and only clergyman in the colony. A few years later Mr. Beach, another devout Congregationalist minister educated at Yale, also became convinced that his ordination was invalid, and that the Church of England is, in his own words, 'Apostolic in her ministry and discipline, orthodox in her doctrine and primitive in her worship'. He too went to England, was ordained, and returned to America.

Johnson and Beach exercised a deep influence upon the religion of their country. They met with strong opposition, measures being taken even to hinder Beach's missionary work among the Indians. But the Church was joined by numbers of serious people who were wearied by Calvinist and Antinomian controversies, new English missionaries arrived, and at the time of the Revolution the Church of England in Connecticut was in a healthier condition than

in any other part of America. During the Revolution it suffered far less than the Church farther south. In the south many church buildings were wrecked, especially in Virginia where also some years later the property of the Church was mercilessly confiscated, and a righteous judge who intended to restore it died the very night before his judgement was to be pronounced.1 But more serious than these material losses was the spirit of frigid scepticism and rationalism which was affecting the better educated classes in America, a spirit which is the reverse of the wild revivalism of the camp meetings which came to be a feature of American frontier life.

This rationalistic spirit, hostile to the Christian doctrines concerning God and the sacraments, had infected the Church in certain districts and found expression in a now almost forgotten abridgement of the Prayer Book published in 1773. It omitted the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, mutilated the Te Deum, and entirely erased the prayer of consecration in the communion service. This book undoubtedly influenced a 'proposed' Arianizing and antisacramental Prayer Book which was published with ecclesiastical authority in 1786 soon after Seabury reached America. The gravity of the danger can only be understood when it is remembered that only a few days before his arrival in Connecticut an anti-Trinitarian liturgy had been adopted by the most important church in New England,2 the congregation of King's Chapel, Boston, a fine classical building which still keeps the altar plate given by the generosity of English monarchs. Seabury was unable to prevent some

1 For the Church in Virginia at this period, see S. Wilberforce, History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, pp. 177 ff. and 274 ff. (James Burns, London, 1844). The Baptists seem to have displayed a peculiar hatred for the Church, and it was largely owing to their action that in 1802 the glebes, churches, and even the altar plate of the churches, were confiscated.

2 The new liturgy was adopted June the 19th, 1785. Seabury was in Connecticut by the 'latter end of June'.

needless alterations in the Prayer Book,1 but he took the lead in rescuing the Church from a position which two generations later was seen to be logically impossible and theologically profane. He died in 1796, but he had done his part in defending his brethren from what was soon to be known as 'the Boston religion'.

By 1800 the religion of Boston was in the hands of a group of so-called 'Liberal' Christians, in reality somewhat aggressive Arians.2 They were Congregationalists who had deserted Calvinism. And so far as these men protested that God is beneficent, that Christ is imitable, and that men should be reminded of their dignity rather than of their depravity, they certainly deserve our sympathy. Their success was rapid. In a few years they had on their side wealth and fashion, culture, and legislation. They captured the University of Harvard, and whereas not a single Anglican congregation followed the example of King's Chapel, belief in the Holy Trinity was abandoned definitely in no less than one hundred and twenty-six Congregationalist churches. It has been truly said that no religious denomination ever started with such advantages as American Unitarianism. Yet it failed, and even the simplicity, earnestness, and lofty eloquence of its great advocate, Dr. Channing, could not prevent its decline. The Unitarians failed spiritually, because the Christian life is a product of the Incarnation and is not the acceptance of good rules. No Unitarian can say with St. Paul, 'I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me'. They failed morally, because while claiming to be liberal, they were intolerant, using their social and even their political power to ostracize their former co-religionists. They failed intellectually, because they began by claiming to be intensely scriptural, like the English Unitarians who

1 On the other hand, Seabury insisted upon and secured a form for the consecration of the Eucharist more in harmony with antiquity and with the First Prayer Book of Edward VI and the Scottish Communion Office. 2 See app. note 21, p. 275.

published a careful mistranslation of the New Testament to support their claim.1 And then one of themselves, a prophet of their own, Theodore Parker, turned upon them saying that 'if the Athanasian Creed could be proved the work of an apostle, Unitarianism would deny it taught the doctrine of the Trinity'.

The controversy raised by Theodore Parker left the older Unitarianism under sentence of death. Arianism was no longer possible, Socinianism was no longer possible. It only remained to be determined whether our Lord should be considered as a perfect or as an imperfect man, and then to choose the latter alternative and to support it with rationalistic German criticism.

In the meantime the Church, first in Connecticut and then beyond it, served as a refuge for Christians who desired a religion both reasonable and devout. Its influence extended even to those who remained separated from its unity. It is a remarkable fact that the two kindred antiTrinitarian sects, the Unitarian and the Universalist, that wrought havoc in Massachusetts, almost totally failed to gain a footing in Connecticut. In New York, where the Church was well represented, Unitarianism had no better success. As we look back upon these movements we cannot fail to notice how the divine providence made the Church's doctrine as to the necessity of episcopal ordinations a means of preserving and reviving the Christian faith. In the Church of ancient times the Fathers regarded the apostolical succession of their bishops both as a channel by which there is transmitted under the power of the Holy Spirit the grace appropriate for the divers orders in the Church, and also as a means of preserving the apostolic faith. This doctrine is ancient, primitive, and linked in no obscure fashion with the teaching of St. Paul, and in the first four

1 The New Testament in an improved version, published by the Unitarian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Practice of Virtue (R. & A. Taylor, London, 1808; fourth edition, 'with corrections', 1817).