Report of Commemorative Services with the Sermons and Addresses at the Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885 | Page 6

of its
outcomes for this Church.
It seems a narrow field--that to which I find myself limited--but, unless
I am greatly deceived, it presents to us topics which will deserve
careful consideration.
First, then, let me say something of what led up to the election of 1783.
In doing so I must go back to the primordia of the Church in this
Diocese.
It ought never to be forgotten that the first missionary--if I may so
speak--of our Church in Connecticut was the Book of Common Prayer.
Keith and Talbot had, indeed, preached at New London in 1702.
Muirson had organized the few churchmen at Stratford into a parish in
1707. Different clergymen had, from time to time, through the watchful
care of Caleb Heathcote--a name that we ought never to
forget--ministered to that little band in their sore trials and vexations.
One, Francis Phillips, had come to them and, after six months of

neglect and carelessness, departed, leaving only confusion behind him.
But long before anything like permanent ministration was begun at
Stratford by George Pigot on Trinity Sunday in 1722, Samuel Johnson
at Guilford had been diligently studying the Book of Common Prayer
put into his hands by Smithson-- another name never to be
forgotten--and in those studies we find, it seems to me, the true
beginnings of what was to become the Diocese of Connecticut. The old
Faith enshrined in the historic creeds of the Prayer-Book; the law and
life of worship embodied in its formularies, all leading up to and
centering in the highest act of Christian worship, the Holy Eucharist; its
ideal of the Christian life taught in its Catechism and carried out in all
its offices from baptism to burial; on these foundations, no broader and
no narrower, was our Church here built up. God grant that on these
foundations it may stand till time shall end!
I protest against the narrow and unhistoric idea that Johnson and those
who labored with and after him conformed to the Church of England
only because of their convictions touching Holy Orders. No doubt
those convictions were a factor, a most important factor, in the change
they made. But there was a great deal more involved than that one
question. Men who had gone from the dry bones of Ames's Medulla
and Wollebius to the "fresh springs" of Hooker and Bull and Pearson,
must have found how utterly unlike to the Catholic Faith which they
there were taught, were the "distributions and definitions" of that
"theoretical divinity" in which they had been trained. It was indeed, as
one of them said, "emerging from the glimmer of twilight into the full
sunshine of open day." Men who had unlearned their prejudices against
"pre-composed forms of prayer" by the study of such books as King's
Inventions of Men in the Worship of God and the fifth Book of
Hooker's immortal work, and above all of the Book of Common Prayer
itself, must have reached another and a loftier ideal of worship than any
they had known before. Men who had passed from the narrow, cramped,
and often conventional theories of Christian living to which they were
accustomed, to the reading of Scott's Christian Life [Footnote: I have
often been told, by the late Dr. Jarvis, that Scott's Christian Life was a
favorite book with our early clergy, especially with Johnson and Beach.]
and the works of Hammond and Ken, had, surely, found something
totally different from anything to which they were wonted. The

question, as it presented itself to them, took on no narrow shape, ran in
no single groove. It covered the Orders, the Faith, the Worship of the
Church of God, and it took in with them the ideal of the Christian Life.
It was no narrower than that; and they who assume that it was,
contradict the conclusions of reason and the testimony of history. The
pioneers of our Church were sometimes, in their own days, called by
their opponents "covenant-breakers." If, however, they withdrew from
covenants entered into by men with each other, it was only that they
might attain the fulness of the New Covenant in the Blood of the
Incarnate Son of God.
I cannot refrain from quoting here the words of the able author of the
History of the Colonial Church. Looking back to the period of which I
have been speaking, he says: "The feeling which prevails over every
other, at this present moment, and which alone I wish to leave on
record, is the feeling of deepest gratitude to those men of Connecticut,
who, not from a mere hereditary attachment to the Church of England,
or indolent acquiescence in her teachings, but from a deep abiding
conviction of the truth that she is a faithful 'Keeper and Witness of
Holy Writ,' have