BCP Reference · Comparative Study

The Concordat of 1784

What the Scottish bishops asked of Bishop Seabury — and what the American Church did with it

I.Why Scotland, and not England

Samuel Seabury was chosen by the clergy of Connecticut in March 1783 and went first, as anyone would have, to England. He was refused, and the refusal was not a matter of English coldness toward the new republic. It was a matter of statute.

An English bishop could not consecrate without administering the oath of allegiance and the oath of supremacy to the man being consecrated. Seabury, a citizen of an independent state, could not swear allegiance to George III; and Parliament had passed no Act permitting consecration for a see outside the King’s dominions. The Archbishop of Canterbury was not exercising discretion. He had none. The relief Seabury needed arrived only in 1786, in the Act that made possible the consecration of White and Provoost the following year — two years too late for Connecticut, which had been without a bishop since the founding of the colony.

The Scottish bishops laboured under no such disability, for the opposite reason. They were Non-Jurors: a body that had refused the oaths to William and Mary in 1688 and had been penalised for it ever since, disestablished, harassed under the Penal Laws after the Forty-Five, and possessed of no civil standing whatever. Having no establishment to protect, they had nothing to lose by consecrating an American. Seabury was consecrated at Aberdeen on 14 November 1784 — the Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity — by Robert Kilgour, Primus and Bishop of Aberdeen, Arthur Petrie of Ross and Moray, and John Skinner, Coadjutor of Aberdeen, in the chapel above Bishop Skinner’s house in Long Acre.

The Concordat was signed the following day.

II.The Seven Articles

The document is usually described as having five articles. It has seven. Drawn up by Skinner, it establishes what would now be called a relation of full communion between the Scottish Episcopal Church and what the text itself calls the rising Church in Connecticut. In brief:

1. The two Churches agree in holding the one Catholic and Apostolic faith, and in maintaining the doctrine, discipline and worship of the ancient Church.
2. They agree in believing the Church to be the mystical body of Christ, governed by bishops as successors of the Apostles, and independent of all lay power in things purely spiritual.
3. They agree to hold no communion with any who reject that constitution, or who intrude into the sacred ministry without episcopal ordination.
4. They agree in maintaining the doctrine of the Eucharist as the commemorative sacrifice of Christ, and in the necessity of a due form of consecration.
5. The Scottish bishops commend their own Communion Office to Seabury’s consideration, in the terms set out below.
6. The two Churches shall maintain a friendly intercourse and mutual regard, each praying for the other.
7. The agreement shall be an unfailing bond of union, and may be enlarged or amended by mutual consent.

Articles I through IV are doctrinal. Article VI and Article VII are the machinery of the relationship. Everything the story turns on is in Article V, and Article V does not say what it is generally reported to say.

III.The Fifth Article, in its own words

The operative sentence is worth having exactly, because its grammar is the whole point. The Scottish bishops write that they are

Three things follow from that wording, and they are worth stating plainly because so much of the received account depends on ignoring them.

First, it is a wish and not a condition. It is expressed in the language of persuasion, and it explicitly disclaims the language of prescription. Nothing in the Concordat makes the consecration contingent on the liturgy; the consecration had, in any case, already happened the day before.

Second, the standard invoked is not the Scottish Office as such but “the most primitive doctrine and practice” — the ancient rites, of which the Scots believed their own Office to be the nearer copy. The argument is antiquarian, not partisan.

Third, what Seabury undertook was to study the Office and, if he found it agreeable to antiquity, to promote it by gentle persuasion — without compulsion, and consistently with peace and prudence. He kept that undertaking to the letter, and the qualifications in it turned out to matter a great deal when he reached the General Convention.

IV.The Four Rites Compared

The differences between these rites are chiefly differences of order, not of text. Almost every prayer in the Scottish Office is a prayer an English churchman would have recognised; what had moved was where each stood. The table below traces twelve elements of the Communion Office through the four rites. The number in each cell gives that element’s position in the sequence of that rite, counting from the Offertory.

The English Book of 1662 · The Scottish Communion Office of 1764 · Bishop Seabury’s Connecticut Office of 1786 · The American Book of 1789

The table scrolls sideways on narrow screens.

Read down the columns rather than across the rows and the shape of the thing appears at once. Scotland gathered Institution, Oblation and Invocation into a single unbroken canon, and then moved everything penitential — Invitation, Confession, Absolution, Comfortable Words, Humble Access — down out of the way, so that the approach to Communion comes after the consecration rather than before it. Seabury reproduced that arrangement almost exactly. And 1789 took the canon and left the rest behind.

V.The Invocation: the clause that mattered

The single most consequential difference between the Scottish Office and the American Book is not structural at all. It is one clause, in the Invocation, and the two versions ask for different things.

The position is Scottish. The wording is not. Where the Scots ask that the elements become something, the Americans ask that the communicants receive something — the petition is turned from the gifts toward the people. It is the difference between a consecratory epiclesis and a receptionist one, and it was not an accident of drafting. The American revisers took the shape of the Scottish canon and declined its most characteristic sentence.

Whether that was a loss or a prudent reticence is a question on which serious Anglicans have differed for two centuries, and the Prayer Book itself does not settle it. What can be said without controversy is that the rite America adopted was, at this point, neither the Scottish Office nor the English one.

VI.Seabury’s Own Office of 1786

Seabury kept his side of the bargain first at home. In 1786 he printed at New London The Communion-Office, or Order for the Administration of the Holy Eucharist or Supper of the Lord. With Private Devotions, recommending it to the congregations of Connecticut, where it was used for some years.

It is the Scottish Office of 1764 almost throughout — so nearly so that, like the Scottish “wee bookies” on which it is modelled, it begins abruptly at the Exhortation and simply assumes that the Commandments, the lessons, the sermon and the Creed have already been said from another book. The departures are few and all of them are small:

That last change is the one to notice. It is the same collision that had kept Seabury out of Lambeth, met from the other side: the English could not consecrate a man who would not pray for the King, and the man they would not consecrate went home and struck the King from the prayers.

VII.What 1789 Actually Did

When the General Convention settled the American Book in 1789, it did not adopt the Scottish Office and it did not simply reprint 1662. It kept the English skeleton and inserted the Scottish canon into it.

What came over from Scotland was the consecration prayer — Institution, Oblation and Invocation joined in one continuous action, which is the Scottish contribution and a real one. What did not come over was everything else the Scots had rearranged: the Prayer for the Church went back to its English place before the penitential order, the Invitation and Confession and Comfortable Words went back with it, Humble Access returned to its position before the Consecration, and the Lord’s Prayer returned to its place after Communion.

Parsons and Jones put the point exactly, and their sentence is on this site: in 1789 the Scottish transfer of the Intercession and the Preparation for Communion to follow the Consecration being rejected. Rejected is the right word. The transfer was considered and declined.

So the familiar claim that the American Church adopted the Scottish Liturgy is about a quarter true, and true of the quarter that matters most. Of twelve elements in the table above, 1789 follows the Scottish placement in three — the Institution, the Oblation and the Invocation, which is to say the canon — and the English placement in the rest. Seabury got the heart of what he had promised to promote by gentle persuasion, and he did not get the body around it.

VIII.And Afterward: 1892 and 1928

The arrangement of 1789 stood, in this respect substantially unaltered, through the revision of 1892. The 1928 Book made two changes that move the American rite a step back toward the Scottish shape without adopting it.

The Lord’s Prayer was brought up from after the Communion to immediately after the Prayer of Consecration, where it stands as the conclusion of the canon — which is where the Scots had put it in 1764. And the Prayer of Humble Access was moved down from before the Consecration to immediately before the Communion — which is likewise where 1764 had it. The order in the book on the altar today is therefore Consecration, Lord’s Prayer, Humble Access, Communion.

The Invocation was not touched. The 1928 Book keeps the 1789 wording, and asks still that we, receiving them, may be partakers. A hundred and forty-four years after Aberdeen, two of the Scottish bishops’ rearrangements had quietly arrived; the sentence they cared most about had not.