TRINITY · 14 NOVEMBER · A PROVINCIAL FEAST IN THE CONTINUING ANGLICAN CALENDAR ✞ Bishop & Confessor
The Bestowal of the American Episcopate
The Consecration of Samuel Seabury and the Beginning of the American Succession · 14 November 1784
Aberdeen, Scotland · 14 November 1784
Every succession must begin somewhere. Before a chain can be preserved, it must first be forged — and the forging of the American episcopate took place not in America but in a small chapel above a bishop's lodging in Aberdeen, on 14 November 1784, when three Scottish hands were laid upon the head of a Connecticut priest and the American Church received, for the first time, a bishop of her own.
Samuel Seabury was chosen by the clergy of Connecticut, meeting secretly at Woodbury in March 1783 — the Revolutionary War barely concluded, the Treaty of Paris not yet signed — and sent to England to seek consecration. He was refused, and the refusal was a matter of law, not of feeling. An English bishop could not consecrate a man to the episcopate without administering to him the oaths of allegiance and supremacy to the Crown, and no Act of Parliament yet permitted a bishop to be consecrated for a see outside the King's dominions. Seabury, a citizen of a nation no longer subject to that Crown, could swear neither oath, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, however sympathetic, had no discretion to set the law aside. Relief came only with the Act of 1786 — two years too late, and for a different consecration.
Seabury turned instead to the Episcopal Church of Scotland, a communion that had itself paid dearly for its principles. Its bishops were Non-Jurors, heirs of those who in 1688 had refused the oaths to William and Mary rather than break the allegiance they had already sworn, and who had been penalized for that refusal ever since — disestablished, harassed under the Penal Laws that followed the Rising of 1745, possessed of no legal standing in their own country. Having no establishment left to lose, they had nothing to fear in consecrating an American they could not tax and did not need to protect. On 14 November 1784, in the small chapel above Bishop Skinner's house in Long Acre, Aberdeen, three Scottish bishops — Robert Kilgour, Primus of the Scottish Church and Bishop of Aberdeen; Arthur Petrie, Bishop of Ross and Moray; and John Skinner, Coadjutor of Aberdeen — laid their hands upon Samuel Seabury and made him a bishop of the Church of God. The following day the bishops and Seabury signed the Concordat of 1784, establishing full communion between the two Churches and commending the Scottish Communion Office — with its fuller prayer of consecration — to the infant American Church, a gift that would leave its mark on every American Prayer Book from 1789 to 1928.
What was given at Aberdeen was not a certificate but a succession — the ancient principle, older than any single national church, that episcopus episcopum consecrat: a bishop is made by bishops, in unbroken continuity from the Apostles themselves. The Scottish bishops gave Seabury exactly what the Church of England could not: not out of rivalry, but out of the plain conviction that valid orders are not a possession to be withheld on grounds of politics or convenience. It is a peculiar mercy of providence that the American episcopate should have been bestowed by a Church that had itself known dispossession, so that the gift given at Aberdeen carried the particular integrity of bishops who had nothing left to gain by giving it, and everything of the faith still to protect.
Seabury returned to Connecticut in 1785 to a diocese that had waited two years for its bishop, and began at once the work of ordaining clergy and organizing a Church still finding its shape as an institution independent of the Crown it had so recently opposed. He was not, in the end, the only source of the American succession — William White and Samuel Provoost were consecrated in England in 1787, once Parliament had at last removed the impediment, and James Madison followed in 1790 — but it was Seabury's line, the Scottish line, that reached America first, and it was at the consecration of Thomas John Claggett on 17 September 1792, in Trinity Church, New York, with Provoost, Seabury, White, and Madison all present and participating, that the English and Scottish lines were joined into the single succession that every American bishop has carried ever since.
The feast of the Bestowal of the American Episcopate is a feast of origins — of the single act of consecration from which an entire national Church's ministry descends, and of the particular generosity by which it was given. It stands beside the Preservation of the American Episcopate, observed on 28 January, as the first half of a single story: what was bestowed at Aberdeen in 1784 is what was preserved at Denver in 1978. The hands have changed; the succession has not.
Almighty God, who by the hands of the Scottish bishops didst bestow upon thy servant Samuel Seabury the fulness of the apostolic ministry, and through him didst give to the American Church her first bishop and the beginning of an unbroken succession: We give thee thanks for the generosity of those who gave, and for the faithfulness of him who received; and we beseech thee so to uphold thy Church in every generation, that the ministry we have received may be kept whole and transmitted entire, until the coming of thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be all honour and glory, world without end.
Amen.