USA > New Jersey > Memorial of the centennial of the organization of the church in the state of New Jersey > Part 3
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As a simple question of ecclesiastical polity and strict con- formity to the order of the Church, the action of Connecticut
Bishop Perry, in the Journals of Fifty Years, etc., vol. iii., p. 8, says : " It is time the Church should know to whom the idea of this preliminary meeting was due," and he gives the letters in which Dr. Beach first makes the suggestion and afterward arranges for the meeting.
+ For the proceedings of the meeting on May 11th, 1784, in New Bruns- wick, see Journals of Fifty Years, vol. i., p. 12 ; vol. iii., p. 7. Sermon before Convention of New Jersey, by Rev. Dr. Langford, 1884. Sermon in St. Paul's, Camden, by Rev. Dr. Garrison, May 11th, 1884.
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was the more regular mode of procedure ; but the thought of Rev. Dr. Beach and the resulting movement which was thus begun in New Jersey, were far the more Catholic and states- manlike, and, under the circumstances, vastly more important to the future of the Church in the United States.
The real problem of that time was not the separate organ- ization of the churches as each existed within the limits of the several States, but to lay the foundations for the Church of a continent, to prepare for the future of a new branch of the Church Catholic for a nation. It would have been a sad day for the Church in America, and, in its wider relations, for the best interests of Christendom, had such of the States as were desirous or felt themselves able to secure a bishop proceeded each by itself to perfect its own organization, and made no provision for the mutual aid and co-operation of the whole together as one great national communion in the Church of the United States. Where would have been the vast mission- ary work whose sixteen missionary bishops and stations, now maintained on every continent, are the outgrowth of this unity ? Where the grand moral influence of its oneness of spirit, pulsating with one common life, from the wealthy and cultured cities of our seaboards to the remotest hamlet of the Indian reservations and of the last-settled Territory ? And the very assembling of her widely-scattered bishops and dio- ceses, as they gather from near and far to our National Con- vention, is it not a visible response, so far as we can answer it, . to the Lord's great yearning for His people "that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in mne and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us" ?
In presenting the question of organic unity as the matter of first importance at this time, Dr. Beach and those who acted with him felt that if the separate churches could once be united in the common life of a church of the nation, they might be safely trusted to their old Anglican training and to the principles inherent in the very essence of the Church of England to correct the perversions and misapprehensions
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which had grown out of the peculiar conditions of their colonial history, and to bring them all, at no distant period, into full conformity with all that was fundamental in its stand- ards of doctrine, or really of any moment in its ecclesiastical order ; and the course of the subsequent events has abundantly shown that they had judged aright.
The meeting in Philadelphia in September, 1785, which was the immediate outcome of the action taken in New Jersey, and from which we date the national centennial of our gathering to-day, did indeed fall very short of what was desirable. Its revision of the Liturgy, now known as " The Proposed Book," was a serious mutilation, in many important points, of the teachings of the Anglican Church, and its con- stitution would have made the office of a bishop little more than a nominal overseership, without either the duties or the responsibilities which properly belong to the Episcopal order.
But with the awakened interest in the Church that grew out of this convention, there came so wide and radical a change in most of the States, that in its next meeting, in June, 1786, at Philadelphia, all the really erroneous features of " The Proposed Book" were repudiated, the more important defects in the constitution either remedie'd or left open for future action, and upon this sounder basis two distinguished clergy- men, Rev. Dr. White, of Pennsylvania, and Rev. Dr. Provoost, of New York, were sent, with the testimonials and request of "The General Convention" of the Church in seven of the States, to England to receive consecration as bishops of the Church in the States by which they had been elected. The English prelates had been empowered by a recent act of Par- liament to perform this office, and the apostolical succession of the English Church was continued in the churches of Amer- ica by the consecration, in Lambeth Palace, London, Febru- ary 4th, 1787, of the first bishops of New York and Penn- sylvania.
The influences which had thus shaped the action of 1786 continued to extend and deepen, and in 1789, when the
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General Convention again came together, the different lines on which the General Convention and the Church in Con- necticut, with the other States of New England, had been moving, had so closely approximated, that the deputies and bishops of the General Convention were found willing to remove from their plan of organization whatever was radically objectionable to Bishop Seabury and the churches which had acted with him, and on October 2d, 1789, at a session held in Independence Hall,* Philadelphia, the two sections of churches came together, and in that room, memorable by so many events of high importance in the political history of the coun- try, the churches of all the States first agreed to their union in the one common body of " The Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States." The act thus consummated removed the last obstacle to the completion of the work begun in 1784 ; and when the General Convention of 1789 finally adjourned, on October 16th, it had established a constitution which formed the basis of the union of its several parts, and had set forth its standards of doctrine and worship ; and with these the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States hence- forward took its rightful place as a fully authorized national branch of the Catholic Church, and an inheritor of all that belongs to the history and privileges of a living member of the one universal Church of all the ages and nations.
During the period in which these larger national move- ments were thus going forward to completion, the little band of Churchmen in New Jersey, which had organized its first convention in 1785, was gradually strengthening and growing, and was desirous, at the earliest moment possible, to effect their diocesan organization by the election and settlement of a bishop of their own. The mere handful which met here in
* Life of Rev. Dr. William Smith, vol. ii., p. 285. Journals of General Convention of 1789, vol. i., p. 97. The article of union was signed, on the part of the New England clergy, by Bishop Seabury, Rev. Dr. Jarvis, and Rev. Mr. Hubbard, of Connecticut, and Rev. Dr. Parker, as Clerical Deputy of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
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that first convention-only three clergymen and eight parishes -did not feel adequate, either from ability or numbers, to propose so large an undertaking ; but in 1798, finding their clergy had increased to seven and their churches to twenty- two, they proceeded, in a special " convention * held in New Brunswick," to elect the Rev. Uzal Ogden, D.D., the rector of Trinity Church, Newark, as first bishop of the Church in New Jersey ; but the General Convention, in its action, which subsequent + events showed to have been most fortunate for the Church, declined to " consent to his consecration." After this discouragement in its endeavors to obtain a bishop, the Church in New Jersey made no effort in that direction until seventeen years had passed away. There seems to have been very little increase of the Church during all this time-indeed, we are told, in a report to the General Convention, that but six new parishes had been established in the State since the close of the Revolution. But in the Convention of 1815,} held in St. Michael's, Trenton, it was resolved to elect a bishop, there being seven clergymen and deputies from eighteen parishes present ; and on the first ballot the Rev. John Croes, then rector of Christ Church, New Brunswick, at a salary of $500 per annum, was elected as the bishop. The consecration of Dr. Croes as its first bishop completed the organization of the Church in New Jersey, and gave it. the place for which it had so long been waiting, of a church fully endowed to meet all its own needs and to carry forward its divinely-given work in the true spirit of its divine and heavenly Founder. §
* Hills' History of the Church in Burlington, p. 348.
+ Hills, p. 349.
į Journal of Convention of New Jersey, 1815. Hills' History, etc.,
p. 382. History of Christ Church, New Brunswick, by Rev. Dr. Stubbs.
§ It did not come within the range of my subject to continue the his- tory of the Church in New Jersey after its completed organization by the consecration of Bishop Croes ; but we can hardly look back over the past cen- tury of the Church in this State without recalling the memory of the two
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But while the difficulties which had so long repressed and almost paralyzed the Church, both in our State and in the nation, were now overcome, so far as concerned its internal constitution, it was still sorely hindered in its progress by the remains of the old prejudices and adverse convictions among the people. In the State of New Jersey, with a population of two hundred and fifty thousand, there were, in 1815, only eight clergymen and not over four hundred communicants. The entire United States numbered about eight million inhab- itants, and had two hundred and sixty ministers and bishops divided among thirteen dioceses. The great body of the people out of the large towns and cities knew really nothing of the Church, and if they thought of it at all it was rather as some foreign and uncongenial mode of worship which was utterly alien to the American character, and not at all in har- mony with the spirit of a free republic. The notions that the
noble men who successively held the episcopate between the death of Bishop Croes and the division of the original diocese in 1874.
Bishop Doane, from his consecration in 1832 to his death in 1859, occupied a place of marked and singular prominence in both America and England. His name was always with the foremost in the nation in all earnest work for the advancement of the Church. He was the first bishop of the Church in the United States who was permitted to preach in the pulpits of the Church of England. And with his visit to that country in 1841 began that fraternal intercourse between. these two branches of the Church which every year since then has made more beautiful and strong.
Bishop Odenheimer, who was elected in 1859 as his successor, won all hearts by his quick and loving sympathy ; and the Church in this State, directed by his ability and inspired by his spirit, grew year by year, until at the division of the original diocese in 1874, each part was well-nigh as large in numbers, and vastly stronger in all its capabilities of work, than the whole State was when he became its bishop.
On the division of the diocese, he chose as his field the northern por- tion of the State. But while the younger diocese was the home of his adoption, yet in his death he rests beside his predecessor, Bishop Doane, in the churchyard of old St. Mary's, Burlington.
He died August 14th, 1879. He was succeeded in the diocese of New Jersey by Bishop Scarborough, consecrated February 2d, 1875, and in Northern New Jersey, by Bishop Starkey, consecrated January 8th, 1880.
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bishop was possessed of almost unlimited authority, and that both minister and people were alike heartless in a formalism that could neither preach nor pray spontaneously, were almost universal. It is long within the memory of your preacher that the services of an Episcopal minister in by far the larger num- ber of the villages of this State would excite more curiosity and unfriendly criticism than the presence of a Mohammedan Mufti in the present day. The town all ran as to a show to hear a man preach in that amazing garment which, they passed around in whispers, was called a "surplice," and looked with open-mouthed wonder, largely mingled with con- tempt, as they saw him kneel when he came into the place of worship, bow at the name of Jesus in the Creed, and read prayers out of a book. And it is but a very few years ago that a presiding elder in the Methodist communion inquired of me most seriously "if it was a law in your Church that the bishop must read and approve every sermon of all his ministers before they were allowed to preach them ?"
Under conditions such as these, it is not strange that the growth of the Church in the early portion of the century was very slow-indeed, the work of the Church for the first fifty years after its completed organization was largely to remove these unfounded prejudices, and to gain a fair and candid hearing from the general community.
The turning point in the establishing of a right under- standing with the people was the revival of the original and true conception of the missionary character of the Church, which took shape and was finally consummated by the appoint- ment and sending out, in 1835, of the first missionary bishop. This movement was largely due to the zeal and ability of Bishop Doane ; he had been elected and consecrated as Bishop of New Jersey, as successor of Bishop Croes, in 1832; and although so young in the episcopate, his fervid eloquence, large acquirements, and clear appreciation of the true mission of the Church gave him at once a leading position in the House of Bishops, and made his episcopate an era in the
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Church of the nation as marked and significant as it was in the administration of his own diocese.
With the inauguration of the missionary episcopate and the corresponding change in conception of the Church as to her proper character and mission in this country, there came a vast and rapid widening of her views upon the real import and spirit of her work on this great continent. She now began to realize that she was set here to be and to represent the " Catholic and Apostolic Church" in all its high and distinctive attributes to every part and portion of all this mighty nation, not to call men to take on her name as merely a rival sect among a multitude of other sects, but to come to her as the living body of the ascended Lord, as that body had been estab- lished by His divinely-authorized apostles, and had handed down unchanged the whole substance of the faith that " once for all had been delivered to the saints."
The people, instead of their old distrust of her, now began on all sides to recognize that she had peculiar adapta- tions to the needs of this great Republic ; that she alone, of all the institutions of the age, combined a reverence and adherence to whatever was best and most vital of the past with that freedom of reason and action which was able to take all that was wise and true in the learning and life of the present ; and hence she is becoming daily more and more the Church of the people and for the people, as she has always gathered largely to her numbers of the thoughtful and the refined.
Under this same high inspiration she is also entering con- tinually more fully into the riches of her own inheritance and her own great work for the Christianity of the future. Not only does she glory in her kinship with the noble Church of England in its reformed and present state, but she feels that all its past, and the past of all the Church of Christ, equally belong to her. Hers are the builders of the old cathedrals, and hers the loving spirit of the worshippers who thronged their mighty aisles ; hers the long roll of martyrs and mission- aries who planted the Church of Christ in their own blood,
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and reared it to modern Christendom by the sacrifice of self and all that men hold dear upon the service of the Master ; hers, too, are the soaring liturgies, rich in the devotion of men whose tongues were yet glowing with the warmth of the pentecostal fire ; and hers, too, the unity of her faith and orders with their divine Source and Warrant, in the unbroken line of her ministry and bishops for well-nigh nineteen centuries.
Nor is this all ; not only does she rejoice in this grand heritage of glory and of blessing from the past. She is be- ginning more and more to feel the high responsibilities and duties that lie upon her for the future.
The world is weary of the jars and alienations of a rent and self-dwarfing Christendom. Men say, and say with bitter truth, " If you have the one same spirit of the Lord, why are ye not one in the communion and unity of Christian brother- hood ?" Sin holds wild riot upon every hand, and the nations grow more doubtful of the divineness of our whole religion, while they who claim to " bear the vessels of the Lord " stand, because of some paltry differences, with eyes coldly averted from each other, and leave untaught, unsaved, the needing millions of the world around. Good men of every name are yearning more and more to find some way by which the wounds in the body of the Church may be closed up and healed, and with us more than any other lies the duty and the possibility of searching out an answer to this call. It has been said, and with but too much truth, "The fathers of the. Church in its early ages marched before the world ; the Church of to-day lags behind it." But in this need for Christian unity we have a place, and ours is the opportunity which, if we rise to its mighty import, will show the Church again as the great leader of the peoples and the manifested presence of the life and spirit of " the Master" among men.
There is no work so urgent in the Christendom of our time as this ; the way to it may not as yet be open to our narrow vision ; the means may not be fully ready for the doing it ; but
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with the great prayer, " O Father, that they all may be one," in our hearts, with words of loving and pleading brotherhood on our tongues, with hands outstretched to touch a brother's hand wherever we may find response in our actions-that spirit will become a power and a reality, and the same Lord who by His Word and Spirit brought order into the chaos of the primal elements will by them also bring unity again into " the Church" which is the living body of His love.
The little band of three, whose meeting in this place a hundred years ago we celebrate to-day, had their hearts anxious not only with the upbuilding of the Church in their own State, but, far more than that, with the yearning thoughts how there might soon be wrought such union of the then separated fragments of the Church scattered in weakness and isolation through various portions of the land, as should inspire them with the power and efficiency of one living whole. Their prayers and efforts have been richly answered. In our State two dioceses, with two hundred ministers upon their clergy lists, now represent the outgrowth from that feeble waiting three ; and in the century of the nation more than sixty dioceses and missionary fields and thirty-six hun- dred clergy have come as the firstfruits of the unity and work together of that Church as one.
In a few short hours we shall have parted hence to our several dioceses and our distant fields of labor and of life. The volume of one century of the Church in our State and nation will be closed forever, and the pages of another opened. We shall kneel here together around the one table of the Lord, and pray together as "very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people." Shall we not make it the burden of our prayer and of our holy " offering" to-day that they who shall come here in our places at the end of another hundred years may look out on a Christendom not marred, as now, with bickering and alien " communions," not paralyzed by narrow factions and discordant interests, not uttering dire anathemas
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against their differing brethren in the Gospel, but-even more abundantly than we rejoice in the unity and loving brother- hood which binds our churches over all this land in one-they may be glad in the far larger and more blessed oneness of the " universal Church, inspired continually and in all its parts with the spirit of truth, unity, and concord," and that there may be realized in them the fulfilment and answer of the hymn-half prophecy, half prayer-sung at the consecration of Bishop Seabury.
He was about to go forth, with only the hand of fellow- ship, from the poor and despise'd Church in Scotland, as the first bishop of the little company that formed his church in the new nation just born beyond the waters ; and as he stood, with mingled joy and fear, in that humble chapel, "the upper room in a narrow lane" * of Aberdeen, where he was ordained, those who were gathered there to wish him God- speed on his uncertain mission sang with him :
" To all Thy servants, Lord, let this Thy wondrous work be known ; And to our offspring yet unborn Thy glorious power be shown."
" Let Thy bright rays upon us shine, Give Thou our work success ; The glorious work we have in hand Do Thou vouchsafe to bless."
AMEN and AMEN.
The Sermon being ended, Benedictus qui venit was sung as an Offertory Anthem, and the offerings were divided equally between the two dioceses.
After the Prayer of Consecration, the hymn " Bread of Heaven, on Thee we Feed," was sung to the tune of Clap- ham. A very large number of communicants received. Im-
* Beardsley's Life of Bishop Seabury, p. 144. The street in which the chapel stood was called Longacre Lane. The Psalm was the Ninetieth in Tate and Brady.
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mediately after the blessing, the Nunc Dimittis to Tonus Regius was sung, followed by the retrocessional, " Angel Voices ever Singing," by Sullivan.
At 2 P.M. the bishops, clergy, and laity, including many ladies, were handsomely entertained at a collation in Recre- ation Hall.
At 3:30 P.M. the three bishops took seats upon a platform at the east end of the Hall, and the concourse drew about them in a large semicircle.
The Bishop of New Jersey called the assembly to order, and spoke as follows :
" Thus far, our centenary has been a grand success. The day, the service, the sermon, have been all we could ask and more. We have just come from Christ Church where we broke bread together at the Lord's table, and now we are assembled here, bishops, clergy, and laity at the social feast and for the interchange of kindly greetings. The beautiful service of the morning was no inapt emblem of the Church's growth and progress, during her first century of organic life in New Jersey. The little band of churchmen who met here a hundred years ago, to found a diocese, had to content them- selves with very little in the way of beauty and grandeur, in things temporal and spiritual. Could they have been with us this morning, the fruits of their labor would have been, I am sure, a glad surprise to them.
" We are all deeply indebted to the Choir Guild of the diocese and its precentor, for the inspiring service, and I tender to them my sincerest thanks and congratulations. As the old- est bishop in office on the present occasion, it will be my duty and pleasure to introduce the speakers. Let us not miss the lesson of the day. We look back through a hundred years of mercies, not as though our work were finished-not that we may fold our hands in idleness-but that we may gather new inspiration and courage from the past, and begin the history of another century with high hopes and new resolves.
" We are favored in having with us to-day the Bishop of Northern New Jersey and a goodly number of the clergy and laity of his diocese. They are here, not as our guests, but of right, as sharing equally with us in the glories of New Jersey's past. We are two bands indeed, as the preacher of this morn-
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ing told us, but we are one in our rejoicings and one in our pride of spiritual ancestry. And while each diocese has its own separate interests, I trust the day is not far distant when the life and growing strength of both will be unified and cemented into the Province of New Jersey.
" The Bishop of Pittsburgh, who has crossed the Alle- ghenies to be with us and share with us in our joy, has a pre- eminent right to speak on a New Jersey day. A long line of noble ancestry binds him both to Church and State, and we feel specially honored by his presence. His diocese is my old home ; his friends are my friends. We have much in com- mon, and I take great pleasure in bidding him welcome to his old family roof-tree to-day.
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