Samuel Seabury, Anglican

THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL THE COLLECTION OF NORTH CAROLINIANA PRESENTED BY Duke University Library Cp378 UMp523.1 Samuel Seabury, Anglican By Richard W. Pfaff Professor of History, University of North Carolina and Priest of the Diocese of North Carolina Published on the 200th anniversary of the consecration of Samuel Seabury as first Bishop of Connecticut and of the Episcopal Church in the United States by the Communica- tions Office of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina The Rt. Rev. Robert W. Estill, Bishop August 1984 Design: Michelle Stone Printing: PBM Graphics Inc., Raleigh Illustrations: Courtesy of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut Foreword This small pamphlet is offered towards the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the consecration of Samuel Seabury as bishop: an event which brought episcopacy to Anglicans in the newly-independent United States of America. Its primary aim (in relation specifically to Bishop Estill's instruction that the propers for Sunday, November 18, 1984 may be those for Seabury's Consecration as on p. 377 of Lesser Feasts and Fasts) is to provide some assistance to the clergy of the Diocese of North Carolina in preparing for this observance and especially in preaching on that Sunday. It therefore does not pretend, even within its extremely modest scope, to be chiefly biographical in approach, and is certainly no substitute for the substantial lives of Seabury which exist. Richard W. Pfaff Chapel Hill December 1983 The Right Reverend Samuel Seabury Page three » 'A n li y *4 •? ? ) S'C/rotttn OL */. i J ^ ^ ^ \ ^JJ Pi t Stir / • u 4 .• - * i h'nr'ul.l 0 ittlt i i j l» I CoililC r t . •i ' , En ' P. or J 1 Gzo m, o jc *s Jantana Nantucket ait J/Atntrhen A few facts will provide the necessary biographical minimum about Seabury. He was born in 1729 at North Groton, Conn., the son of a Congregational minister who the next year received Anglican orders in the wake of an Anglican revival which threatened the mono- lithic Puritanism of the region. The young Samuel, having graduated from Yale, was sent to Britain to seek ordination; and, with a year's medical training under his belt, was ordained deacon and (two days later) priest in 1753, in London. After stints in New Jersey and Long Island, he found himself as rector of St. Peter's, Westchester (N.Y.) when the unhappiness of many of his fellow colonists was crystallizing into a determination to separate from the control of the British Crown. Seabury opposed this determination with vigor and some eloquence, and his Letters of a Westchester Farmer form one of the most extensive expressions of the loyalist position. Despite his outspoken Toryism and indeed his service as a chaplain to the British forces, he retained the respect of his fellow clergymen to the extent that, shortly after the war ended, the presbyters of Connecticut elected him as one of two possible candidates for bishop (with Jeremiah Learning, who declined), provided that a satisfactory consecration could be arranged. The subsequent story is widely known: how Seabury was unable to work out a way by which English bishops could confer succession in the face of the new political situation; how (partly through the suggestion of Dr. Martin Routh, the precociously venerable president of Magdalen College, Oxford) the Scottish Episcopalian bishops were approached; and how, Seabury having been consecrated by three of their number on November 14, 1784, he returned to New England under the promise that he would try to lead the American Episcopal Church in the liturgical direction of its Scottish older sister. Page five Seabury's actual episcopate lasted just over ten years. The problems he it is the act of the consecration of Samuel Seabury that our calendar faced as the first Anglican bishop in the United States were basically commemorates on November 14th every year, we need to feel some threefold: to build up the church in the area where his specific congruity about this observance: that is, that the man who was so jurisdiction was recognized (primarily Connecticut, and later Rhode consecrated was himself a not unworthy recipient of that particular Island and other parts of New England as well); to work with grace—indeed, that in our hazy Anglican way we would sense an Anglican leaders elsewhere in the 13 states to try to bring about appropriateness about regarding him as among our particular, if something like a national Episcopal Church; and to carry out the modest, saints. liturgical strategy he brought with him from Scotland. Again, the extent of his success is fairly well known. By the time of his death in Not that this pamphlet is meant as a preliminary dossier for 1796 there was a thriving diocesan organization in many parts of canonization (the obviousness of Seabury's shortcomings would make (southern) New England; there were five American bishops, and the the job of Devil's Advocate in his case almost too easy). Rather, it certainty of a purely American succession was established; and there attempts to extract some of the flavor of Seabury's spirituality through was a Prayer Book for the American church which, in spirit if not a laying-out of a few main emphases of his, as expressed in his own always in letter, reflected clear Scottish (and behind that, Non-juring) words. To this end, the materials used have been not his better-known influence. works like the political Letters of a Westchester Farmer or the correspondence about securing (or, later, maintaining) the episcopacy, In, admittedly, a comparison of small things with great, Seabury may but rather his collected sermons, published in 1793 as Discourses on 1 be seen as Peter to William White's Paul— if one limits the comparison Several Subjects; together with the excerpts from his journal from 1791 to the struggle between the two apostles over the ground rules of the to 1795 edited by Anne W. Rowthorn as Miles Before 1 Go to Sleep nascent church. Without undue strain on credulity, we may affirm (Hartford, 1982), and miscellaneous works collected in photo-reprint by that Seabury's singlemindedness, perhaps at its most attractive in his Kenneth W. Cameron as Samuel Seabury's Ungathered Imprints 2 determination not to leave Great Britain without having secured (Hartford, 1978). The Discourses consist of 15 sermons in the first episcopal orders and at its least attractive in his dealings with White, volume and 22 in the second. Though they never rise to the heights of made him (under God, as he would have been the first to say) the the most impassioned or eloquent preaching, these sermons can be petra on which Anglicanism in the newborn United States was taken to represent Seabury's spiritual teaching, and put him into the established. tradition of the nobler sort of 18th-century Anglican piety. But the views for which Seabury is chiefly remembered—concerning episcopacy (for it) and American independence from Britain (originally against it)— are not really to our purpose now. Our independence from the characteristics most clearly discernible in Seabury's the mother country is scarcely a live issue; and, though the place of Among preaching we may distinguish the following: an appeal to reason episcopacy in Christ's church is a question of great import in ecu- and common sense (in contrast to the intellectual authoritarianism of menical conversations, its value as preaching material to the ordinary the Puritan orthodoxy and the anti-intellectual tendencies of the Anglican faithful may be questioned. Besides, what we commemorate Seabury for— the achievement by which he would be most readily 'Page references are to the Hudson (N.Y.) 1815 edition, but I have also consulted the identified in, say, ordination exam questions—does not necessarily New York 1793 edition in the Bodleian Library at Oxford: this belonged to William supply us with any idea of the man. It is only by letting him speak for Van Mildert (1765-1836), successively Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford and bishop himself that we can get some sense as to the fittingness of our of Llandaff and Durham. remembering that man as anything more than the possessor of the Especially A Discourse on U Tim. Hi. 6 (originally preached 1773), pp. 7-14 in Cameron; head on which the Scottish bishops laid their hands. In brief, though cited as // Tim. Page six "enthusiastic" revival movements of his time); an ecclesiology rooted in provided even a partial exception). In 1784, likewise, the Book of an awareness of the church's extension in time and space; a stress on Common Prayer known to Anglicans in America—the English 1662 both sacramental and preaching elements in worship; a moral book—was usable only in the context of an established church; and approach more generally accepting of than rejecting of the social order beyond that had a liturgical tone (especially the theological spareness and suggestive rather than prescriptive; and a subsuming of moral of the Communion service) which seemed to many thoughtful and considerations into finally ascetic ends. None of these characteristics is scholarly Anglicans of the 18th century to require correcting, sup- at all surprising; it is almost a commonplace that all are distinctively plementing, and enriching. Given, then, the impossibility of Anglican. Anglicanism's becoming the established church of the new nation, and the perceived undesirability of using the English 1662 Prayer Book If this attempt to identify some of the principal themes of Seabury's even with the offending political references removed, one conclusion preaching turns up nothing unexpected, it does lead to an historico- emerges clearly: that the survival and vigor of Anglicanism in the post- theological point of some importance.

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