America would be directed by a bishop, quartered on the scene of action, possessing the ear of the Royal Governors, and backed by all the power and authority of Great Britain whenever a Ministry with Anglican proclivities was installed at Downing Street. There would be an end thenceforward to comfortable and friendly relations between neighbours and kinsmen who professed different creeds. Each colony would be divided into two hostile camps; and all other religious bodies would have to be perpetually on the watch against the assaults and inroads of a Church which could never keep herself contented and tranquil until her own faith became recognised as the State religion. In their opposition to the introduction of a bishop, the American people may be said to have anticipated the Monroe doctrine, and to have applied it to ecclesiastical affairs. John Adams,-looking back to the early Revolutionary period across a space of fifty years,-pronounced it to be a fact, as certain as any in the history of North America, that the apprehension of Episcopacy, as much as any other cause, aroused the attention, not only of the inquiring mind, but of the common people, and urged them to "close thinking on the constitutional authority of Parliament over the colonies." 1

Dislike and dread of Episcopacy intensified American opposition to the fiscal policy of Parliament; and the Non-Importation Agreement, in the all but unanimous view of its promoters, held good against bishops. as well as against all other British products. When the Stamp Act, and afterwards the tea-duty, had inflamed New England,—and when London was in a roar with rioting for Wilkes and Liberty, the Cabinet would have been pleased if religious differences in the colonies had been permitted to sleep. The bishops, (Franklin

1 Ex-President Adams to Doctor Jedediah Morse; Quincy, December 2, 1815. The letter is one of a series of seven, which together form a most interesting and instructive historical retrospect, perfectly marvellous as coming from the pen of a man of eighty. It may well be doubted whether there is any other known instance of intellectual vigour preserved, unimpaired and unmodified, to such an advanced age.

wrote,) were very desirous of effecting the enlargement of the Church of England in America, by sending one of their number thither; but the Government was prudently deaf to their solicitations.1 While, however,

What

the King and his ministers possessed the means of keeping live diocesans in order, they had no hold on the dead; and it was from the grave that their troubles came. Secker died in July 1768, after having been Primate of All England for ten years; and a twelvemonth subsequently there appeared "A Letter written January 9, 1750, by the Right Reverend Thomas Secker, Lord Bishop of Oxford, concerning Bishops in America; Printed for J. and F. Rivington at the Bible and the Crown in Saint Paul's Churchyard." ever the publication of that letter may have done for the Bible, it was a very bad stroke indeed for the Crown. It was understood that, soon after he was settled at Lambeth, the Archbishop had written in his own hand directions for printing and circulating the document as his posthumous message to the world. His proposals were extremely moderate, equitable in intention, and put forward in guarded language; but they at once excited in the colonies an acute and violent controversy, in which the memory of the departed prelate was not spared. The situation was aggravated by the clumsy wording of a Memorial which the English clergy of New York and New Jersey addressed to the Govern

1 Benjamin Franklin to John Ross; London, May 14, 1768. In July of the same year Mr. Hollis wrote from England; "There is great reason to believe that the scheme for bishoping America has been dropped, most wisely, by the civil ministers here for some months."

2 Archbishop Secker was quite sincere, if sometimes rather unhandy, in his desire to conciliate the prevalent religious opinion of America. He was an ardent Protestant, who acknowledged Protestants of all sects and churches as his allies, and who lived with prominent Nonconformists, (such as Doddridge and Chandler, Leland, Lardner, and Watts,) on terms of genial civility, and, in some cases, of steady friendship. Thomas Hollis of Dorsetshire, the antiquary and virtuoso, who was an admiring and confidential correspondent of Jonathan Mayhew, and a lifelong enemy to sacerdotal claims, gave Secker, as a testimony of esteem, "a head of Socrates engraved on green jasper, and set in gold as a seal, which cost Mr. Hollis six guineas."

ment in London, praying for a bishop, but disclaiming all wish that he should exercise any jurisdiction over "Dissenters, or abridge the ample Toleration" which those Dissenters at present enjoyed. That a denomination, whose members were in a very small minority, should tell the other fourteen-fifteenths of the population that they might continue to be tolerated, was regarded as a piece of gratuitous presumption by Presbyterians and Congregationalists. A humiliating and precarious dole of immunity from actual persecution was not the sort of religious liberty in quest of which their forefathers had crossed the ocean.

Edmund Burke, who knew his subject, warned the House of Commons that the adversaries of Episcopalianism in America were not a feeble folk. The prevalent religion, (he said,) in our Northern colonies was a refinement on the principle of Resistance; under a variety of denominations it agreed in nothing but in a communion of the spirit of liberty; it was the Dissidence of Dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion. Those words were very finely, and most appropriately, chosen. All along the Western frontier lived Irish Presbyterians of Scottish descent; skilful and truculent Indian fighters; men of warlike traditions, and with very long memories indeed. Their great-grandfathers had borne the brunt of the struggle against James the Second and Tyrconnell at Londonderry and Enniskillen; and, when the peril was over, they had, as their reward, been driven from their Ulster homes in scores of thousands by that savage and inquisitorial Test Act which the bishops of the Established Church, who disliked Nonconformists at least as much as they feared Roman Catholics, had insisted on obtaining from the Irish Parliament. The central colonies held many Huguenot families, whose ancestors, the salt and leaven of the French nation, had escaped into exile from the senile bigotry and inhumanity of Louis the Fourteenth; and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, (although great Court ladies had something to say

towards it,) was mainly attributed to Episcopal inspiration.1 Far more numerous than Huguenots or Irish Presbyterians, and to the full as well provided with reasons for an hereditary distrust of bishops,2 were the sons of the old English Puritans; most of whom, in creed, in temper, and in the usages of their daily life, might still be accounted as Puritans themselves. Their spokesman and fugleman in ecclesiastical polemics had till very lately been Jonathan Mayhew, minister of the West Church in Boston; a noble preacher and writer, whose earnestness of purpose, and lofty sweep of thought, kept in subordination, (but not always,) his flashing and scorching wit, and, vivified his abundant stores of learning.

Mayhew was no longer alive; for that sharp sword early wore through the scabbard; but public opinion in New England was more than ever imbued, and public action dictated, by his audacious spirit. The denunciations of Episcopacy and arbitrary government, which he had thundered forth from his pulpit, were still the favourite reading of a serious-minded and angry people; and his influence may be traced in Whig sermons and pamphlets during the whole period that elapsed, from the closing of Boston Port, to the firing of the volley on Lexington Common. In a celebrated discourse of the year 1763 he had bidden his congregation to reflect upon all that their forefathers suffered from bishops.

1 "Of seven men, who acted as presiding officer over the deliberations of Congress during the Revolutionary period, three were of Huguenot parentage Laurens, Boudinot, and Jay." The Homes of American Statesmen, by Elbert Hubbard; New York and London, 1898.

2 Many of the American Puritans, or most of them, had not been Nonconformists at home. John Winthrop, the first and best of Massachusetts Governors, wrote thus in a farewell letter when his ship was about to sail : "Take notice that the principals and body of our company esteem it our honour to call the Church of England, from whence wee rise, our deare mother, and cannot part from our native country, where she specially resideth, without much sadness of heart, and many tears in our eyes." Those were the sort of people hundreds of thousands of whom more than now, but for Laud and his coadjutors, would be in the Church of England to-day.

Would "the mitred, lordly successors of the fishermen of Galilee," (he asked,) "never let us rest in peace, except where all the weary are at rest? Was it not enough that they had persecuted us out of the Old World? Would they now pursue us into the New, compassing sea and land to make us proselytes? What other sanctuary from their oppressions would be left us, if once these colonies were added to their domain? Where was the Columbus to explore for us another America, and pilot us to its shores, before we are consumed by the flames, or deluged in a flood, of Episcopacy?" Mayhew traced the origin of his political and his ecclesiastical creed to the prose works of John Milton; nor was the surge of his eloquence, or the furious, and sometimes turbid, current of his invective, unworthy of the source from which his doctrine had been drawn. The vehemence of language employed by such men at such epochs, surprising, and even shocking, to a cool and impartial posterity, has a prime historical value as illustrating the inner mind of those among their contemporaries and fellow-citizens who listened to such high-pitched and scathing rhetoric with unreserved conviction and enthusiastic approval.1

The stormy aspect of politics did not intimidate the Anglican clergy of the colonies into letting their demand for a bishop drop. Doctor John Vardill of New York wrote to Lord Dartmouth that the equity and utility of such a measure seemed no longer doubtful, and that the only question now was whether an imme

1 Another of Mayhew's sermons, (which John Adams placed on a level of satire and irony with the productions of Swift and Franklin,) was the Discourse concerning Unlimited Submission, preached on the Sunday immediately after the Thirtieth of January, 1750. Mayhew there laid it down as his opinion that the commemoration of the death of Charles the First would have at least one good result, if it should "prove a standing memento that Britons will not be slaves, and a warning to all corrupt councillors and ministers not to go too far in advising arbitrary despotic measures." The time came when such a memento had its uses; but it was not needed while old George the Second was King, and still less when Chatham became his minister.