Report of Commemorative Services with the Sermons and Addresses at the Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885 | Page 3

cross the ocean for what they believed to be valid ordination, and when one man out of every five who sought ordination in England lost his life from shipwreck or disease. The results of their faithfulness have been far greater and more wide- reaching than they could have imagined. They would not have believed it possible that at the end of a century there would be in Connecticut nearly two hundred clergymen and twenty-two thousand communicants, the Book of Common Prayer being used by devout congregations throughout the limits of the State; and that not only would this Diocese bear witness to God's blessing on their faithfulness, but that there would be a united and prosperous Church throughout the land, owing to them much of its unity and prosperity. The lesson which we learn from them is that Christ's work is to be done in Christ's own way, and that, thus done, it will certainly abide.
The Rev. Dr. Beardsley, after a brief introduction, added substantially as follows:
It is very evident that the clergy who met here on the Festival of the Annunciation, 1783, were full of earnestness and the spirit of self-sacrifice in their efforts to organize the Episcopal Church in Connecticut and provide for her completeness and continuance under a changed form of civil government. The seven years' struggle of the Thirteen Colonies for independence of the power of Great Britain was ended, and the poor people exhausted on every side, were at a loss to know what methods should be adopted to rise from their depression and recover in any degree their former prosperity. The Missionaries of the Church of England--of whom fourteen were left in Connecticut at the close of the Revolutionary War--- had been aided by stipends from the Venerable Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, but these stipends, by the Constitution of the Society, ceased when the separation finally took place. Of the fourteen Missionaries, all save two [Footnote: The Rev. John Rutgers Marshall was born in the city of New York, 1743, was an alumnus of Columbia College, ordained 1771, and died 1789. The Rev. Daniel Fogg was a native of New Hampshire, a graduate of Harvard College, ordained 1770, and died 1815.]
The full list includes the Rev. Messrs. Samuel Andrews of Wallingford, Gideon Bostwick of Great Barrington (reckoned ecclesiastically as in Connecticut), Richard Samuel Clarke of New Milford, Ebenezer Dibblee of Stamford, Daniel Fogg of Brooklyn, Bela Hubbard of New Haven, Abraham Jarvis of Middletown, Richard Mansfield of Derby, John Rutgers Marshall of Woodbury, Christopher Newton of Ripton, James Nichols of Plymouth. James Scovill of Waterbury, John Tyler of Norwich, and Roger Viets of Simsbury. ] were born in the Colony of Connecticut, and all had been compelled to cross the ocean to obtain Holy Orders--there being no bishop in this country--though the boon had often been solicited from the English Church and as often denied. The trammels of State alliance and the policy of preferring political expediency to religious right prevented the authorities from venturing upon a spiritual act and granting the prayer of the petitioners. The clergy had ministered to their flocks all along in the face of intolerance and bitter opposition from the Puritan body, and the war for independence had subjected them to peculiar trials and reduced them to the verge of ruin. But, without thinking of themselves, or how they should be supported in the broken and disastrous condition of their cures, their first effort or chief anxiety was to provide for the now entirely headless Church; and so in Mid- Lent, on the Festival of the Annunciation, March 25th, one hundred years ago, ten of the fourteen clergy remaining in Connecticut quietly assembled in this place, and, after careful, and, we must believe, the most prayerful deliberation, they selected two persons--the Rev. Jeremiah Leaming being the first choice, and then the Rev. Samuel Seabury--as suitable, either of them, to go to England and obtain, if possible, Episcopal consecration. It was a secret meeting so far as giving any public notice of it was concerned, and it was confined to the clergy, perhaps, among other reasons, for fear of reviving the former opposition on this side to an American Episcopate, and thus of defeating their plan to complete the organization of the Church and secure its inherent perpetuity in this country. The times were troubled, and the establishment of peace with a foreign power did not necessarily produce tranquillity and happiness at home. Mischiefs and jealousies still lingered with those who had contended for liberty, and the chief Protestant sects, which have all erected their banners and had their camping-ground in the Church of England, were ready to welcome her weakness and overthrow because her priests and her people, for the most part, had