Chapter 11

First, "thou shalt see, and flow together"; or, as it might better read, "thou shalt see and be enlightened." As the mind takes in those latest words of the Lord, "unto the uttermost part of the earth," as the eye beholds the Church spreading outward from its one centre in Jerusalem, "the vision and the faculty divine," if not created, are at least sharpened and strengthened. We learn how God "hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus; that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us through Christ Jesus." We understand, as never before, "what is the fellowship of the mystery which from the beginning of

[Footnote: Eaton's _Bampton Lectures_ 1872, p. 363] the world hath been hid in God, Who created all things by Jesus Christ."

So it fared with St. Peter, after that vision of the great sheet coming down from heaven had fully opened to him the universality of the Church of God. Then his "delusive dream of temporal deliverance became a real assurance of eternal redemption." Then his "narrow estimate of the Divine Covenant with his own nation expanded, under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, into the sublime conception of the 'Israel of God.'" [Footnote: Lee _On Inspiration_, p. 249 (American edition).]

"Thine heart shall fear and be enlarged." The fear surely is not that of shivering dread or slavish terror. But it is that subduing awe which always accompanies great joyfulness, and enters into it in such a mysterious and perplexing way; even as God says, by Jeremiah, that when all the nations of the earth shall hear of the good which He will do unto Israel, "they shall fear and tremble for all the goodness and all the prosperity that I procure unto it." So when Jacob, awaking from the sleep in which he learned of the new Covenant with God through the Incarnation of Christ, exclaimed: "How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the House of God, and this is the gate of Heaven!" And then, as the unbounded love and mercy of the Father of all spirits comes to be understood, the heart is in very deed "enlarged," as St. Paul's heart was toward his Corinthian children; and it goes along, in loving, active sympathy with the great purpose of God, "that in the dispensation of the fulness of times, He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth, even in Him."

Thus as the "Vision of peace, the blessed city Jerusalem" has dawned upon our sight; as we have watched, its ever-spreading walls and rising towers; as we have seen it builded up with living stones, which are human souls redeemed and sanctified; we have entered with a keener insight into, we have come to comprehend more truly and more fully, "the length and breadth and depth and height" of that "manifold wisdom of God" which is made "known by the Church" even to "the principalities and powers in heavenly places"; and our hearts have kindled into that constraining love of Christ, in which we rejoice, with joy unspeakable, to work together with Him in bringing men to the knowledge of the one way of salvation, while, in the same deep love, we also endeavor to "keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace."

Fathers and brethren, honored and beloved in the Lord! as I stand here, this day, with a full heart but with trembling lips, the unworthy successor of him who, in this city of old renown, received a century ago the sacred deposit which he bore to the Western world; as I look on this truly august gathering which tells, as no words can tell, how God has blessed the vine planted in early, possibly in Apostolic, days in "Britain divided from the world," enabling her "to stretch out her branches unto the sea, and her boughs unto the river"; as I think of all that has come and gone in those hundred years in the marvellous growth and the awakened inner life, acting and reacting on each other, of the mother and the daughter Churches--for we all spring from one and the same noble stock--I can find no better words in which to sum up memories, thoughts, forecastings, than those which I have endeavored somewhat to unfold: "Then thou shalt see, and be enlightened, and thine heart shall fear, and be enlarged; because the abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee, the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee."

And yet, one cannot but remember how far beyond all possible anticipations of those brave hearts that once made such a venture for Christ and His Church, are the things which our eyes look upon, and which are a part of our everyday life and experience.

When those ten presbyters, whose priesthood had not been gained without trials and perils which only the deepest convictions could have nerved them to bear, met in that secluded unknown New England town, on the Festival of the Annunciation, in 1783, and laid the burden of seeking for the Episcopate on Seabury, what could they have seen about them but the disorganized elements of an apparently decaying life? When, on the 14th of November, 1784, in that upper room in this good city, those venerable prelates (whose names are to-day household words through all the length and breadth of what has been called "The Greater Britain of the Western World") handed on the high commission they had received in trust, what could their eyes have looked upon but scattered flocks under their few shepherds, which must meet, if they met at all, in uncertainty and peril, to worship God as their fathers had worshipped before them? Still, if they saw little around them to encourage and support, theirs (we may well believe) was the eye of faith that is strengthened to pierce the future. If they heard few words of cheer from men, there came upon their ears, from a Greater than man, words of strong hope and glorious promise. In that Transatlantic gathering, small and unnoticed as it was, the ten who came together heard, in the Gospel of the Annunciation, that "with God nothing is impossible," and in the song of the Blessed Virgin they were bidden to bethink themselves how "God remembered His mercy and truth toward the House of Israel," exalting "the humble and meek," filling "the hungry with good things," and helping "His servant Israel." Here in Aberdeen, on that memorable day of November, they said in the morning Psalter: "O what great troubles and adversities hast Thou showed me! and yet didst Thou turn and refresh me; yea, and broughtest me from the deep of the earth again"; and then, as the strain of praise swelled higher, higher still, while the vision of the City of God in all its grandeur broke on the eye of faith, there came the inspiring words--how their hearts must have thrilled as they uttered them!--"He shall deliver the poor when he crieth, the needy also, and him that hath no helper... He shall be favourable to the simple and needy, and shall preserve the souls of the poor.... There shall be an heap of corn in the earth, high upon the hills; his fruit shall shake like Libanus, and shall be green in the city like grass upon the earth."

Words like these carry with them unwonted power on occasions like those of which I have been speaking. To us they come like special prophecies of what we look on as a century now closing. To those others they came freighted with hope for an indefinite and unknown future. And what an inspiration they must have given to the venture they were making; a venture so entirely one of faith, that it is not too much to say of those who made it that they take their places in that long line of faithful ones, mentioned with such distinguished honor in the Epistle to the Hebrews, who, though they only saw "the promises afar off," still "were persuaded of them and embraced them," and therefore "obtained a good report." Can we imagine, dear brethren, a more striking illustration of the different aspect which things wear to the eye of sense on the one hand, and the eye of faith on the other, than that which the election and consecration of the first bishop for America present to us? All honor, then, to those brave hearts that accomplished them! Men may have counted "their lives madness and their end to be without honor." We know, blessed be the God of all grace and power! that they are "numbered among the children of God, and their lot is among the saints."

The temptation is strong to linger on the simple but impressive scene of the consecration: to try to picture that secluded oratory in the house of the Coadjutor-Bishop of this faithful diocese; to endeavor to bring back the congregation gathered in it, and the ministering prelates; to recall the form of the youthful priest who held the book from which the awful words of ordination were recited, Alexander Jolly, afterwards the sainted Bishop of Moray; to speak of this ancient city of Aberdeen, associated for all time in the memories of Churchmen with the names of John Forbes of Corse and Henry Scougal and the remembrance of its orthodox and learned doctors; but time forbids more than this briefest mention.

We behold--and it is a sight to stir the heart with "thoughts too deep for words"--we behold a suffering and a witnessing Church, in the depth of a long and wasting depression, reaching out the hand of love to a Church suffering and witnessing also, and trembling, to human seeming, on the verge of utter extinction. Perhaps--is it too much to say it?--it was because of this patient suffering and faithful witness that God gave to this Church the distinguished privilege of sending its first Apostle to the new world beyond the ocean. I cannot refrain from quoting here the admirable words of one of your own Scottish bishops. Speaking of the act which we commemorate, he says: "Mark, my brethren, how for the accomplishment of this work--according to the full measure of the gifts of the Spirit and of Apostolic order--it pleased God, as at the first, to choose the weak things of the world, and things that were despised, yea, and things which in the eye of man had ceased to be. To our Scottish Church with its hierarchy, which had formerly consisted of two Archbishops and twelve Bishops, then reduced to four; with its pastoral charge, which had once comprehended the care of every parish in the land, then shrunk to little mere than a score or two of scattered congregations--yea, and at the very time when an act of the civil legislature had declared all ecclesiastical orders conferred by her to be null and void; at such a time, to the poor persecuted remnant of the Church in Scotland was this grace given, that she should impart to the United States, now no longer dependent upon England, the first seed of the Episcopate which England had withheld. Yes, the first bishop who set foot on the continent of North America, the first bishop who went forth to a foreign land bearing the full blessings of our reformed Church, was consecrated to his Apostolic office, not amid the solemn pomp and august ceremonial of an English minister, no, nor in the privacy of an episcopal palace, but in the obscurity of an upper chamber in a common dwelling-house in Aberdeen." [Footnote: Bishop of St. Andrews; _Mending of the Nets,_ p.17 (ed. 1884).] If, as has sometimes been generously said, this noble act of faith and charity has afforded a new and signal illustration of our Lord's own words, "It is more blessed to give than to receive," that does not make the act a whit less noble, nor diminish by one jot the obligation of undying gratitude on the part of those who received the gift it gave.

If we look at its immediate results, besides what has just been named, it assuredly gave an impulse to that action of the State in England, in consequence of which, within five years, three bishops of the English line were given to as many dioceses in the United States. It was the means, also, of joining in the American Episcopate the Scottish and the English lines of succession in a union that will endure while the world shall last. For though the prelate consecrated here ministered in only one consecration of a bishop after his return--that of the first Bishop of Maryland-- yet, since that day, there has not been (and there can never be in time to come) a bishop in our American Episcopate, who, as he traces back his lineage through the network--for I surely need not say, here and now, that the succession is a network and not a chain of single links--will not find in it the name of that Bishop of Maryland, by whom he is connected with Seabury, and then, by him, with "the Catholic remainder of the Church of Scotland." Nor need one ask, nor could he have, if he did ask it, a nobler spiritual lineage than he has received in that double succession, which indeed becomes single again if we go back for a little more than another century.

Then, again, this deed of Christian charity did, no doubt, bring out from its obscurity into the light of day, the witnessing remnant of the ancient Church of Scotland, and was, perhaps, the first step towards the removal of those civil disabilities which had pressed her into the dust. How must the iron of suffering have entered into the soul of many a faithful priest in those dark days of trial, when, we are told, the clergy had given up the hope that any successors would come after them, and on the monument of one of them were written the despairing words, "Ultime Scotorum!" [Footnote: Epitaph by the Rev. J. Skinner on the tombstone of the Rev. Mr. Keith, Presbyter at Cruden: "Ultime Scotorum in Crudenanis, Keithe, Sacerdos."]

How strangely similar were the conditions of those who sought the Episcopate and those who courageously gave it in those days of doubt and darkness! How fitting it seems that, in the ordering of God's providence, one suffering Church, stripped of its worldly honors and its earthly wealth, should give to another, "scattered and peeled" and apparently on the verge of extinction, that deposit which it had maintained in the face of dangers that might well seem worse than death itself! They who have lived together under the shadows and in the sharing of life's tragedies and woes, know full well that there is no bond of union half so strong as the bond of common suffering; know full well that they whose hearts have touched each other only in hours of joy and gladness, can never be so bound together as those who have wept beside beds of death, or clasped each other's hands over open graves. Why should it not so be with bodies of men as with individuals? Above all, why should it not so be with sister Churches, bound together in the highest of all bonds? Was it not so here a century ago? When the kindly hand was outstretched here to help, when the loving word, carrying the very life of love, went across the ocean to those who were indeed "minished and brought low," was not the channel of Christian sympathy deepened, was not its flow made fuller and more strong by the conditions of which I have just spoken? And if it has pleased God, in His great mercy, to send brighter days, greater peace, better hopes to each of us, shall not the bond, once welded by suffering, still keep its strength? God grant it may! God grant that, till the Lord shall come to give His universal Church its final triumph, these Churches, so marvellously united, "may stand fast in one spirit, with one mind striving together for the Faith of the Gospel, and in nothing terrified by adversaries."

It would be more than ungrateful, it would be inexcusable, to omit here the recognition of the agency by which, under God, it came to pass that there were in what had been the colonies of Great Britain, and were now independent States, those who sought the Episcopate as essential to the full organization of an autonomous Church. That agency is found in the Venerable Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts--a society to which American Churchmen must always look with undying gratitude, for to its noble labors they largely owe all that they were when Seabury was sent upon his mission of faith, and much of what they enjoy to-day.

It was no fault of that Society that there was not, in America, an Episcopate before the war of the Revolution. Had the godly counsels and the strong appeals of the bishops, clergy, and faithful laity who shared in its plans and operations, been listened to, American Churchmen would have had no need to seek the Apostolic office outside the limits of their own country. This is not the time nor is this the place to consider, in detail, the reasons--if reasons in any proper sense of the word there were-- why the Episcopate, so strongly desired, had not been given. But it is worthy of notice that where the labors of the Society had been the most abundant and its missionaries most numerous, there the need of the Episcopate was most deeply felt and the call for it was loudest. Indeed, the only two colonies from which any opposition to sending bishops to America before the Revolution came, were Maryland and Virginia; and to those colonies, because in them the maintenance of the clergy was otherwise provided for, the Society sent few, if any, missionaries.

No part of all the Western world received more of the Society's fostering aid than the New England colonies; and to none of them was more help extended than to the colony of Connecticut. From the day when the foundations of the Church were laid in that colony on to the outbreak of the Revolution, the benefactions that came from England were abundant and unceasing. With possibly a single exception, all the clergy in the colony were missionaries of the Society. They were also sons of the soil, who, because of convictions too strong to be resisted, went back to the Church from which their fathers had gone out, and in doing so incurred odium and reproach, scorn and contempt, the loss of much that gives earthly comfort and rejoicing, and sometimes the sundering of ties that seemed to be a part of life itself. They were taught, too, by the bitter experience of half a century, the difficulties and dangers attendant on a voyage to England to obtain Holy Orders; difficulties and dangers then so great that one in every five of all sent out for ordination perished by sickness or by shipwreck, and saw his native land no more. Theirs may be inglorious confessorships, unknown to or forgotten by men, but confessorships they are, and we cannot doubt that they find their place in the Book of God's remembrance.

It can cause no wonder that men thus trained and tried should, when the severance of the mother country and its colonies was complete, have turned their first thoughts to the means of perpetuating that stewardship "of the mysteries of God," which they had so hardly won; that they should have held that to be the first step, and refused to take another till they had taken that. For, indeed, if the Church is to be rightly perpetuated under the conditions of a normal growth, it can only be perpetuated according to the original and organic law of its existence. When He to Whom in His resurrection "all power was given in heaven and in earth," committed to the Apostolic Ministry the tradition of the Apostolic Doctrine, in that great baptismal formula which is alike the source and summary of the Catholic Faith, He joined two things together that man may never put asunder. He may try the separation if he will--he has tried it, alas! more than once--but the end, the inevitable end, has always been the loss of the Apostolic Doctrine.

Then, on the other hand, the gift of the Apostolic Ministry without the most wisely guarded guarantees that there shall be a steadfast continuance in the "doctrine of the Apostles, and in the breaking of bread, and the prayers," is a gift of more than doubtful value. Men seem to think to-day, that they can leave out what parts they please from the original and divine organism of the Church, and still work the rest at will. The attempt, believe me, is just as futile as it would be to undertake to deal in like fashion with one of those huge machines that work, all about us, with such life-like power, and attempt to make it do its work, when some portion of its complex mechanism had been removed. We cannot be too thankful for the merciful guiding that kept our fathers, a hundred years ago, from so fatal a mistake as that. For here, as well as in England, guarantees were demanded and given, so far as it was possible to give them, before the succession was communicated.

I turn to that venerable document known to us as the Concordate, one copy of which is preserved in the Episcopal archives here in Scotland, and its duplicate in America, and I read words which it is well to remember to-day: words which speak of the due maintenance "of the analogy of the common Faith once given to the Saints, and happily preserved in the Church of Christ"; which declare, in terms of unmistakable clearness, "that the spiritual authority and jurisdiction" of Christ's ministers "cannot be affected by any lay deprivation"; which provide, so far as provision could be made, for the full communion with the Church in Scotland of the newly consecrated bishop, his successors, and his diocese, a communion which, as this day's service so solemnly attests, has come to embrace not that single diocese alone, but the entire Church in the United States; words, finally, which pledge the bishop then sent forth, to endeavor, "by gentle methods of argument and persuasion," to bring about a substantial agreement between the two Churches, in "the Celebration of the Holy Eucharist--the principal bond of union among Christians, as well as the most solemn act of worship in the Christian Church." How that pledge was, under the manifest and wonderful leadings of God's providence, fulfilled, not for one diocese, but for a national Church, our American Book of Common Prayer declares and will declare in all coming time.

I have spoken, fathers and brethren, of the past, for to it our thoughts naturally and chiefly direct themselves to-day. Its grand venture of faith, the brave hearts that made it, the generous givers of the precious gift, the undaunted receiver of the gift who bore it across the ocean--for all he knew, to stormier seas than the Atlantic's billows--these fill up the foreground of the picture on which our eyes are resting. As I turn from it, and from the figures of those venerable prelates who stand foremost in it, I remember (and I repeat, speaking for generations that have passed away and for generations that are to come) the words that were sent to them from hearts that burned with grateful love: "Wherever the American Episcopal Church shall be mentioned in the world, may this good deed which they have done for us be spoken of for a memorial of them!"