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

they thought it necessary to take action at as early a day
as possible. And they instructed their candidate that if he should fail to
obtain consecration in England, he should seek it at the hands of the
bishops of the disestablished church of Scotland.
Men had very real thoughts about Holy Orders then, when they were
obliged to 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