FAN. 
 
 SEAN. 
 
 
 MISSIONS 
 
 AND 
 
 MISSIONARY BISHOPRICS 
 
 IN TIIE 
 
 AMERICAN CHURCH 
 
 A REARER, 
 
 READ BEFORE THE CHURCH CONGRESS, HEED A T S TONE- ETON- IREN /', ENG.. 
 
 OCTOBER, 1875, 
 
 WILLIAM STEVENS PERRY, D. D. 
 
 
 * 
 
 PRIVATELY PRINTED: 
 
 1877. 
 
The Church in America is the offspring 
 of the missionary zeal of the Church of 
 England. Coeval with the earliest at- 
 tempts to colonise the western world were 
 earnest efforts both to bring to the savage 
 inhabitants of the soil a knowledge of 
 Christ and His salvation, and to secure to , 
 those who were leaving their homes to 
 found a new empire for England in the 
 West, the priestly ministrations and re- 
 ligious privileges which were theirs in 
 their native land. No one can read the 
 touching chronicles of these voyages of 
 discovery and efforts for settlement in 
 Virginia, and elsewhere along the Atlantic 
 coast, from the close of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, when the period of colonisation ac- 
 tually began, down to the middle of the 
 last century, which witnessed the noble 
 spectacle of a Church and nation uniting 
 in zealous efforts to found the colony of 
 Georgia, as a refuge for the virtuous poor 
 of England and the persecuted Lutherans 
 of Germany, without an admiration of 
 the long continuance in well-doing on the 
 part of the members of the Church of 
 England, so far as mission work was con- 
 cerned. Most gratefully does the Church 
 in America record in the preface to her 
 “Book of Common Prayer” that she “is 
 indebted, under God, for her first founda- 
 tion and a long continuance of nursing 
 care and protection” to the mother 
 Church; and the fact that, prior to the 
 beginning of this century, there laboured 
 on American soil, for a longer or shorter 
 term of years, and many of them till 
 death, nearly two thousand priests of 
 English orders, is ample proof that in 
 those years preceding that great revival 
 of missionary zeal which we are so apt 
 to date from the beginning of the present 
 century, the English Church, whether in 
 
 her prosperous or adverse days, was faith- 
 ful to her Master’s bidding, — “ Go ye into 
 all the world and preach the gospel to 
 every creature.” The century of active 
 labour rendered by the Venerable Society 
 for the Propagation of the Gospel in For- 
 eign Parts, formed part of this great work 
 for Christ and His Church in the West, 
 and there are no missionary letters more 
 edifying, no missionary labors more apos- 
 tolic and primitive, than those whose 
 only written record may be found in the 
 old folios dating back for a century and 
 three-quarters at the Venerable Society’s 
 House, in London, now in process of rev- 
 erent and loving publication by the au- 
 thority of the American Church, and 
 seen in even brighter characters in par- 
 ishes, colleges, dioceses even, rfll over the 
 American continent, now active centres 
 of Church life and zeal, which these faith- 
 ful men gave their lives and labours to 
 found. 
 
 But one thing was lacking in this noble 
 work. Priests and deacons were given 
 us, faithful labourers abounded, Bibles, 
 prayer-books, homilies, tracts, were freely 
 bestowed ; admirable works, specially 
 adapted to the needs of the Church in 
 America, were prepared and published — 
 all furnished with a lavish, loving hand, 
 but no bishop, in response to a cry for 
 the episcopate that never ceased for over a 
 century, was supplied. I know full well 
 that the fault of all this lay not at the 
 Church’s door. The Bishops of London, 
 the diocesans of the whole American pos- 
 sessions, confessed again and again their 
 inability to administer a jurisdiction three 
 thousand miles and more away. They 
 prayed the Crown again and again for 
 relief. The Venerable Society, as both 
 its printed and its MS. records attest, re- 
 
MISSIONS AND MISSIONAKY BISHOPRICS. 
 
 newed with tireless importunity the plea 
 for the consecration of bishops for Amer- 
 ica. But political complications prevent- 
 ed the successful issue of these efforts, the 
 propriety of which none but factious dis- 
 senters or lukewarm Churchmen could 
 deny. And it was not till, with the sepa- 
 ration of the Colonies from the mother- 
 land, their ecclesiastical independence 
 was necessarily assured, that Seabury in 
 Scotland, in 1784, and White and Provoost 
 at Lambeth, in 1787, received the apos- 
 tolical commission, and the American 
 Church had its College of bishops with 
 which to begin its life and work for 
 Christ fully two centuries after the mis- 
 sion work of the English Church had 
 been entered upon within the limits of 
 the United States. 
 
 Nearly a century has passed since the 
 first American bishop— himself a mission- 
 ary of the Venerable Society from his 
 earliest ministry — began the labour of 
 founding in its completeness the Church 
 in the West; and the record of the long 
 and painful journeyings of the apostolic 
 Seabury, \frhose episcopate was gradually 
 extended beyond the limits of Connecti- 
 cut, his original see, till it embraced prac- 
 tically the whole of New England, is a 
 most interesting chapter of the history of 
 the mission work of the American Church. 
 Nor was he alone either in labours or suc- 
 cess. The amiable and devoted White, 
 whose life was spared till the little one 
 had become a strong people, was not a 
 whit behind in zealous and acceptable 
 labour for the spread of the Church. 
 From the first it was a settled principle 
 that the Church in each State, when it 
 was practicable, should have at its head, 
 its bishop. Seabury of Connecticut, 
 White of Pennsylvania, Provoost of New 
 York, and subsequently Madison of Vir- 
 ginia, received consecration abroad; the 
 first, as we have said, in Scotland, the oth- 
 ers in England. The four united in the 
 consecration of Claggett for Maryland, and 
 ere the close of the century which had so 
 late witnessed the introduction of the epis- 
 copate into America, the Church was 
 
 quietly settled under its chosen bishops, 
 from Massachusetts and New Hampshire 
 at the north, to South Carolina at the 
 south. 
 
 Prior even to this, and at the meeting of 
 the very first General Convention, subse- 
 quent to the union of the Churches 
 throughout the land in one organization, 
 — in the year 1792, we have the first mis- 
 sionary action of the American Church. 
 It was “ An Act of the General Conven- 
 tion for Supporting Missionaries to preach 
 the Gospel on the frontiers of the United 
 States.” This scheme, which it is not 
 necessary to give in full, recommends 
 the preaching of an annual missionary 
 sermon by every parochial clergyman 
 throughout the land, and the collection of 
 an offertory for mission work. An ad- 
 dress to the Church from the presiding 
 bishop, advocating the cause of missions, 
 was also ordered to be read to the people 
 by their respective clergymen, while the 
 disposal of the moneys thus collected, and 
 the appointment of the missonaries, was 
 committed by the Church to the presiding 
 Bishop White, and the “ Standing Com- 
 mittee” of the Convention, which at that 
 time represented the General Convention 
 of the Church during the recess of that 
 body. In this churchly mode was the 
 earliest missionary scheme of the Ameri- 
 can Church conceived. I need not pause 
 to detail the hindrances to the successful 
 accomplishment of this plan, growing out 
 of the peculiar circumstances of an im- 
 poverished country, a scattered popula- 
 tion, and a wide-spread indifference to 
 religious claims prevailing at the time. 
 The next Convention, feeling, possibly, 
 that the scheme they had entered upon 
 was premature, relegated the conduct and 
 control of the missionary work to the 
 diocesan Conventions which, with their 
 bishops, entered zealously upon the work. 
 Particularly was this the case in the dio- 
 cese of New York, where there still re- 
 mained some of the endowments for 
 religious uses given previous to the War 
 of Independence. Here under the faith- 
 ful administration of Bishop Benjamin 
 
MISSIONS AND MISSIONARY BISHOPRICS. 
 
 5 
 
 Moore, anil afterwards under the oversight 
 of the devoted Hobart, whose praise was 
 in all the Churches, the Church was firm- 
 ly planted throughout the large and im- 
 portant State of New York, the western 
 portions of which were then for the first 
 time occupied by settlers. More slowly, 
 but with no less zeal, was the work carried 
 on under the oversight of Bishop White, 
 in Pennsylvania, while in New England, 
 all of which, save Connecticut, was, so 
 far as the Church was concerned, mission- 
 ary ground, the truly apostolic zeal and 
 prudence of Griswold, who, at a later 
 date, succeeded White as presiding bishop, 
 gave an impetus to the Church’s growth 
 which resulted in the rapid subdivision of 
 his see into five separate bishoprics. At 
 the south there was a slower movement, 
 and it required all the energies of Bishop 
 Channing Moore to effect, as, under God, 
 he finally did, the revival of the oldest 
 portion of the American Church. While 
 at the west, where States were being born 
 in a day, Ohio, conscious of the apostolic 
 mode of Church aggression, claimed at 
 the hands of the General Convention the 
 consecration of the well-known Philander 
 Chase as its bishop, elected by the few 
 clergy his own missionary zeal and exam- 
 ple had drawn to this distant and uninvit- 
 ing field. Thus in every direction, each 
 one, as in the days of the rebuilding of 
 Jerusalem, erecting the wall over against 
 his own house, without other machinery 
 than the bishop and his official advisers 
 to direct, and with, save in few instances 
 only, the offerings of the faithful as the 
 means for carrying on the work, was the 
 Church extended throughout the length 
 and breadth of the land. 
 
 All this preceded the organization of 
 any general missionary society in the 
 American Church. The first attempt to 
 inaugurate such a society was in 1820, and 
 at the special meeting of the General 
 Convention of 1S21, the “Domestic and 
 Foreign Missionary Society” of the 
 Church was formally organised, it being 
 from the first, the creation, and under the 
 control of the General Convention, which 
 
 is itself the Church, meeting by its chosen 
 representatives, in its legislative, execu- 
 tive, and judicial capacity. Up to this 
 time, the missonary operations of the 
 American Church had been confined to 
 the revival of decayed or distinct parishes, 
 the continuance of the work among the 
 Indians begun, and for years carried on 
 by the Venerable Society, and the spirit- 
 ual care of the settlers on the frontiers. 
 Now, missions were established in rapid 
 succession in Africa, in Greece, in China, 
 in the republic of Texas, and among the 
 Indians at the west. Nor did the work at 
 home languish. The new States at the 
 west and south-west rapidly became sees, 
 and with their bishops at the head made 
 rapid advances in number and influence. 
 
 At the General Convention of 1835, the 
 constitution of the Domestic and Foreign 
 Missionary Society was changed, and the 
 work of missions, in place of being dele- 
 gated to a society under the control of the 
 Church, was made the work of the Church 
 itself. Every baptized member of the 
 Church was declared to be a member of 
 its missionary organisation. The execu- 
 tive body chosen triennially by the General 
 Convention was styled the Board of Mis- 
 sions. Of this governing body the bish- 
 ops were ex-officio members, together with 
 certain clergymen and laymen chosen by 
 the General Convention, each diocese 
 being proportionally represented. Can- 
 onical provision was now made for the con- 
 secration of missionary bishops. Here- 
 tofore, the few clergy in a new State or 
 territory, organised a convention and 
 elected a bishop, subject to the ratification 
 of the General Convention ; now, in 
 addition to this provision, it was deter- 
 mined to provide episcopal supervision 
 for those portions of the country where as 
 yet there were no missionary labourers. 
 It was thought that the bishop should be 
 the pioneer, as well as the chief missiona- 
 ry. He was to go forth as the apostles 
 went forth, and find his helpers among 
 the converts he made or from the com- 
 panions of his travels. A bishop for the 
 north-west, the truly apostolic Jackson 
 
6 
 
 MISSIONS AND MISSIONARY BISHOPRICS. 
 
 Kemper, was elected and consecrated ; 
 and the years of faithful and successful 
 labour that followed, attested the wisdom 
 of this plan of missionary operations. 
 Bishop Kemper lived to see the territory 
 committed to his charge, divided and sub- 
 divided into strong and zealous dioceses. 
 The few clergy who came to his aid, in 
 response to the appeals he made for help 
 when he had once surveyed the needs of 
 his charge, were multiplied by hundreds 
 ere he died ; and throughout the Ameri- 
 can Church no name is held in deeper 
 reverence to-day, than that of the hard- 
 working, faithful Kemper, our first mis- 
 sionary bishop. Following this auspicious 
 choice, efforts were made to supply the 
 south-west and the foreign mission-fields 
 each with a missionary bishop. After sev- 
 eral failures these efforts resulted in the se- 
 lection of the Right Rev. Dr. Freeman^or 
 the former, and the Right Rev. Drs. Payne 
 and Boone for Africa and China. Thus 
 was the mission work of the American 
 Church fully organised. In 1853, the 
 growing communities of California and 
 Oregon were supplied with missionary 
 bishops, and in 1859, * : * ie episcopate of 
 the American Church was made co-exten- 
 sive with the bounds of the United States, 
 by the erection of those portions of the 
 country which had hitherto been without 
 episcopal supervision, into missionary 
 sees. At the accomplishment of this act 
 by the General Convention, giving evi- 
 dence as it did that God had been with 
 His Church till she had filled the land 
 from shore to shore, the vast assembly of 
 bishops, deputies, and spectators sought 
 expression of their thankfulness in the 
 spontaneous burst of song in the Gloria 
 in Excelsis Deo . It was at this Conven- 
 tion that the venerable Kemper, now full 
 of years and labours, resigned his mission- 
 ary episcopate, retaining the see of Wis- 
 consin, and received, as was his due, the 
 expression of the Church’s grateful recog- 
 nition of his life-long devotion and 
 service. 
 
 That step, which filled the hearts of 
 Churchmen in America with devout grat- 
 
 itude to God, in the extension of the 
 episcopate all over the limits of the land, 
 has proved in the rapid increase of clergy 
 and dioceses the true policy of the Amer- 
 can Church. With us the missionary 
 bishop is found to be the best, and, in 
 fact, the most profitable missionary. So 
 thoroughly is this conviction impressed 
 upon the minds of the Executive Com- 
 mittees of our Board of Missions, that 
 although the jurisdiction of the north- 
 west has been subdivided a score of times 
 since the see was first established, the 
 Home Committee, with the full concur- 
 rence of the Board of Missions itself, 
 urged upon the General Convention of 1874 
 the immediate duty of appointing a mis- 
 sionary bishop for every State and terri- 
 tory not already separately provided with 
 one, thus subdividing the sees which were 
 themselves but fragments of the vast jur- 
 isdiction, that, but fifteen years before, 
 had been committed to the supervision of 
 a single bishop. The Convention, though 
 not granting this request in full, created 
 four additional missionary sees at home, 
 and two in the foreign field; while at the 
 Convention of 1877 there is little doubt but 
 that the desired increase of chief pastors 
 in the various departments of the mission 
 field will be fully met. 
 
 The question may be asked, in what 
 respects is this policy found of advantage? 
 The answer is briefly this, we believe it to 
 be the apostolic mode of conducting the 
 aggressive work of the Church. It is his- 
 torically the more successful mode of 
 Church evangelisation. It is, besides, of 
 no little advantage in a popular point of 
 view, to have in the newly settled portions 
 of our vast territory towards which the 
 the stream of immigration is turning, a 
 man chosen for his piety, his zeal, and 
 his abilities, who becomes at once a cen- 
 tre, not alone of churchly life and effort, 
 but of all the religious feeling of the new 
 community. The missionary bishop with 
 us does not wait for an endowment, nor 
 even for a staff of clergy to accompany 
 him to his appointed field. His moderate 
 stipend — it is $3,000, with a certain allow- 
 
MISSIONS AND MISSIONAKY KISHOI'KICS. 
 
 7 
 
 ancc lor actual travelling expenses — is 
 provided by the Church through the Board 
 of Missions, and it is an interesting fact, 
 in connection with this whole question of 
 the importance of missionary bishoprics, 
 that the stipends of all the American mis- 
 sionary bishops are nearly, if not wholly, 
 provided from the offerings through mite- 
 chests of the children of the Church 
 The bishop, thus entering upon his work 
 often single-handed, becomes at once and 
 of necessity the pioneer missionary of his 
 jurisdiction. lie visits a new settlement. 
 The fact that he is a bishop will secure 
 him hearers in the rude court-room, or it 
 may be the coflee-room of the inn, when 
 a service is announced. That he is a 
 bishop will encourage those who desire to 
 secure the privileges of the Church in the 
 community, to confer with him as to their 
 needs and wishes. He judges of those 
 needs, secures the pledges of the people for 
 the support of a Missionary priest and 
 the erection of a church. He gives assur- 
 ances of aid from abroad contingent upon 
 these promises. He remains a few days or 
 weeks, and nurses the feeble beginnings 
 of a parish, into actual life, and then, in 
 giving over the place to the missionary 
 priest he has called, and to whom he has 
 personally pledged support, he passes on 
 his way to repeat under other though but 
 little varied circumstances, and in other 
 localities of the vast territory committed 
 to his charge, the same general plan of 
 operations. Where the priest alone, un- 
 known and lacking the moral support of 
 the whole Church which the bishop has, 
 would inevitably fail, the bishop is suc- 
 cessful, and the rapid growth of the 
 Church in the Western States, and the 
 encouraging fact that even before Meth- 
 odism, even before Romanism, the Amer- 
 ican Church has found its way into sev- 
 al of these remote fields of Western labour, 
 attests the wisdom of the system in its 
 practical working, by which the bishop of 
 the see becomes its organiser, and moulds 
 it from its very inception in the Church’s 
 way. 
 
 Besides, there is another side to the 
 
 question : the bishop has been taken, it 
 may be, from the more populous and more 
 wealthy East; he leaves a wide sphere of 
 influence, indeed, for one, at the first sight, 
 narrow and of comparative less impor- 
 tance, but, in this self-denying exchange, 
 he is able to make these early connections, 
 of service in his work. From his former 
 friends and parishioners he is able to com- 
 mand a constant supply of means. From 
 his old associates and helpers of various 
 grades, he can command men. The East 
 is ever thus giving to the West, and the 
 Church is being built up and cemented at 
 the same time, by this reciprocal inter- 
 change of service and grateful love. It is 
 thus that the missionary bishops of the 
 American Church have in their respective 
 fields of labour done service not for the 
 present only, but for all time. Among 
 the Mormon settlements in Utah, Bishop 
 Tuttle has founded his Church-schools, 
 filled now to overflowing, built his beauti- 
 ful cathedral, and planted in every direc- 
 tion the seeds of a harvest near at hand. 
 In the far north-west, in Oregon and 
 Washington, Bishop Morris has built 
 noble educational institutions for the 
 young men and young women of his 
 jurisdiction, and within his brief episco- 
 pate has seen his church double its num- 
 ber of parishes, and add to its strength 
 tenfold. In Colorado the Church college 
 and its schools have preocupied every 
 prominent position in the territory, and 
 give ample assurance of the addition of 
 the missionary jurisdiction to the number 
 of our organised dioceses at the coming 
 General Convention. In Nebraska, ca- 
 thedral, college, schools, and numerous 
 churches prove the successful working of 
 this plan. And thus I might proceed to 
 give instances, well known in our own 
 land, of similar successes in the Indian 
 work under the zealous and devoted Bish- 
 op Hare, and in short in every department 
 of this ever-widening mission field — while 
 abroad, I am confident, that even in Eng- 
 land there is memory of the labours of 
 that faithful American missionary bishop 
 of Japan, who in a score of years of mis- 
 
8 
 
 MISSIONS AND MISSIONARY BISHOPRICS. 
 
 sion work had never revisited his native 
 land, save at the call of the Church to re- 
 ceive his episcopal commission— and who 
 was_ found not long ago by an English 
 traveller, in his solitary apartment, with 
 but a single blanket on hisbed and another 
 for his covering — seated on the floor by a 
 pan of coals translating the Word of God 
 into Japanese for the use of his converts. 
 And I might add a reference to the recent- 
 ly consecrated bishop of the “ Independ- 
 ent Church of II ay ti ’’—the Right Rev. 
 
 l)r. Holly, a bishop of the African race, 
 whose piety, learning, and elocpience has 
 been universally recognised in America, 
 and whose future success in his interest- 
 ing field is not dimly shadowed-forth 
 already. 
 
 To such single-hearted labourers and to 
 such untiring devotion,— there is but a 
 single retired American bishop among all 
 our sixty chief pastors, — God has given, 
 God will yet give — abundant blessings. 
 To him alone the praise. 
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 APR 1 1 ’i 
 
 2 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 GAYLORD 
 
 
 
 PRINTED IN U • A. P