one chaplain was dismissed simply because he did not please the people; another who endeavoured to make reforms was summarily cashiered in the same way, and though supported by the late Bishop of London, he was, after many ineffectual attempts to maintain his position, turned out of office. The Congress was not a place for proposing motions, but he was sure, in a body of men composed of ordained ministers and supporters of the Church of England, he had only to corroborate the statement of Dr. Bayford; for it would be admitted that this was a state of things that required immediate and thorough reform. (Applause.)

THE SUPPLY OF MINISTERS,

AND ESPECIALLY OF NATIVE MINISTERS,

FOR THE COLONIAL & MISSIONARY CHURCH.

BY THE REV. FRANCIS HESSEY, D.C.L.

IN no country perhaps except our own, would the Colonial and Missionary Church naturally form an important subject of consideration at a Church Congress such as is gathered here. But it has pleased God to allow the British Empire so wide an expansion, and to bring about that expansion so much more by colonisation than by conquest, that the development of the Church, in our colonies and dependencies, demands the earnest consideration of all faithful members of the Church at home.

The generation that immediately succeeded the reformation of religion in this country laid the foundations of our colonial empire; and a great part of North America was early peopled with men of Anglo-Saxon race. But neither in the formation of colonies, nor in providing them, when formed, with the means of grace, was any system regularly carried out. It is true that the more prosperous colonies, which were established under royal or noble patronage, were generally provided on their foundation with chaplains. But in too many cases these chaplains confined their ministrations to the few emigrants, who were especially commended to their charge, and took but little notice of the labouring population sent out to assist those emigrants, and consisting for the most part either of men transported in punishment for some offence, or of unfortunate persons who had been decoyed from their own country, with the hope of freedom and prosperity, but had, on their arrival in the colony, been degraded by those who had imported them, into a condition little above that of slavery. One generation, often less, was sufficient to give such unhappy men their liberty. But their descendants seldom felt much attachment to the land that sent them forth. The chaplains appointed from the mother country were not always men of good character; and even when they were really zealous, had but little tie of feeling, to unite them with the mixed colonial population among whom they laboured. Even in the best cases, on the death of an active chaplain, the flock that he had gathered was often scattered to the winds before a successor could arrive from England to fill his place; and he, again, either died, or was recalled to an English parish, before any churchfeeling had grown up among those in the midst of whom he ministered. Rare instances occurred in which a colonial family found the means of educating a son in Europe, and of recalling him, when ordained, to

take charge of a parish in his native colony. For the most part, the chaplain's home and heart were in England, while his field of labour and his source of income were in the colony.

Meanwhile Protestant Dissent, in every form, flourished in North America. Episcopal ordination had never been put before the colonists as a necessity for the appointment of their ministers, but rather, so to speak, a kind of luxury. They therefore, who were either uninterested in the chaplains sent from England, or distant from the circle of their influence, selected teachers from among themselves, either dispensing altogether with the form of ordination, or seeking the semblance of it at the hands of assemblies of Presbyterian teachers, who were already settled in their vicinity.

The flocks assembled under such imperfectly educated and insufficiently authorised teachers increased in riches and education, and soon found the want of a more regular ministry. The want was not long felt without the application of a supposed remedy. Earnest members of various Protestant sects made use of their increasing wealth in the foundation of colleges, in connexion with the denominations of dissent existing at the time in Europe, for the education of those who were to be teachers of religion among their colonial brethren.

Thus time went on. The estrangement between the mother country and the colonies increased daily, as the colonies grew in power and education, until political circumstances led to an entire separation, effected not without bloodshed, yet overruled for the eventual benefit of the Church. For the revolution in North America is now seen, not only to have produced an unprecedented growth on the part of the separated colonies, but also to have read a very important lesson to the mother country as to the way in which its remaining or future colonies should be treated.

Had the colonies, as they were successively formed, been organised as portions of the Church, blessed with the parochial system, and with that without which no sound parochial system can exist, an episcopate, we cannot indeed venture to think that the revolution would not have some day taken place; but it would have occurred under much less painful circumstances, and would have left the separated colonies in a much more satisfactory position in relation to the mother country. As it was, the influence of the clergy in America was exerted to a certain extent against separation; but it was not felt in the way it might have been, had they been in any proper sense colonists themselves. The voice of dissenting teachers, who were chiefly natives of the colonies, was in almost all instances raised strongly in favour of separation; and it has been said, that the first shot fired against the king's troops proceeded from the window of a dissenting chapel.

One result of the revolution was, that a large number of the episcopally-ordained ministers felt it their duty to leave the newly formed United States, and to cross the great lakes into the younger colonies which were there growing up under the protection of the British Crown. The important section of them, however, who held themselves at liberty to remain with their flocks, and to submit to the new constitution of the United States, found their position especially difficult. They were not numerous enough to supply the places of their brethren who had emigrated; they had no authority to ordain coadjutors for

themselves; and they could not expect the episcopate in England, bound as it was to the allegiance of the British Throne, to ordain pastors for what was now an independent, and, in feeling at least, a hostile country. They, under these trying circumstances, resisted the temptation, which had been too strong for the churches of Germany and Switzerland 200 years before, to throw aside episcopal ordination altogether, and to adopt the Presbyterian form of Church government. They had the same excuse as those churches had; they had no member of the episcopal order among them; they saw flocks left by circumstances without pastors; and they had the opportunity, if they would, of securing to themselves a great influence, and perhaps of hindering a large number of persons from throwing themselves into the arms of Independency, and heaping to themselves unlicensed teachers. Such a step, however, they would not take; they preferred rather to incur the suspicion of many of the fiercer patriots among their countrymen, by entering into correspondence with the hierarchy of the old country; and entreating them to grant episcopal consecration to certain properly qualified presbyters, that they might thus have authority to ordain native pastors for the vacant congregations in America.

Political and legal difficulties hindered at first the granting of this request, and they were then obliged to turn to the Episcopal Church in Scotland, which, as unendowed and to a certain extent unrecognised by the State, possessed a greater degree of freedom than the Church in England. The Scottish bishops looked upon the matter solely in an ecclesiastical point of view, and granted the petition. Bishop Seabury was thus consecrated in Edinburgh (1783), and shortly afterwards (1787), the political difficulties being overruled, Bishops White and Provoost were consecrated at Lambeth. Thus the Church in America became, not merely in name, but, in reality also, an Episcopal Church; that is, not merely parochially administered by episcopally ordained priests, but governed also, and supplied with priests and deacons, by actual bishops.

It is not necessary for our present subject that we should trace further the growth of this Church, the way in which its dioceses have continually increased in number, its parochial system has been developed, and its colleges have been founded for the training of an educated clergy. This, though an interesting subject, does not concern us at present. But I must rather shew how the lesson learned in the American revolution led the Church of England gradually to deal in a different manner with her remaining colonies, and with those very numerous and important ones which have since been formed.

The heads of that important lesson were briefly these :

That, if the recurrence of such a calamity in some other quarter is to be avoided, there must be an adequate supply of ministers for the instruction of the inhabitants of the colonies and dependencies of the British Empire.

That means must be taken to interest these ministers in the welfare both of the mother country and of the country in which they labour.

That the three orders of ministry, which are essential to the existence of a Christian Church, must be maintained in each colony.

It is not here asserted that these principles were at once actually carried out, either in the few colonies remaining to the British Crown

after the American Revolution, or in the many that have since been formed (would that such had been the case!); but that there has been a tendency, met, indeed, with much opposition in a variety of ways, to carry them out; and that hitherto the efforts made in this direction have been accompanied with great success.

The first of these principles which demands an adequate supply of ministers for service in the colonies and dependencies of this country, has been to a certain extent illustrated by the increased activity of the one great society which existed at the time of the American Revolution--the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts-and long afterwards by the founding and supporting of other societies, such as the Church Missionary Society, and the Colonial and Continental Church Society. And here it will be observed that the great extension of the British dependencies, as well as of her actual colonies, since the time of the American Revolution, necessarily gave a more directly missionary aim to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and called into existence the Church Missionary Society. All that had been done by the Church of England before the American Revolution had been supplementary to her parochial or semi-parochial work in the colonies. But since that time direct missionary exertion became a part of the Church's acknowledged work.

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel confined its mission work for the most part to those heathen tribes, which, being in the neighbourhood of British colonies, must become either the better or the worse for their contact with civilisation; but the Church Missionary Society set no such limit to its operations. By each, however, the principle was recognised that a supply of ministers must be provided for the British colonies and dependencies. Such a supply they laboured to bring about, partly by the selection of proper candidates for mission work, who had already been ordained and were employed at home; partly by the choice of candidates to be recommended for ordination; partly by the establishment of colleges for the training of such candidates; and in every case by offering either an entire or a partial maintenance to the missionaries whom they sent forth.

The second principle, that of giving the clergy who are to minister in the colonies and dependencies a greater interest both in the mother country and in the colonies in which they are called to serve, has been attained by the second of the methods named above, namely, the establishment in the colonies themselves, as well as in the mother country, of proper colleges for the training of candidates born in each colony, for a ministry to be exercised in that colony. Such candidates, thus trained, it was conceived would be more suited in habits to their flocks than men sent from the old country, and also more likely to remain attached to the particular field in which they might be called to labour. And where language, as well as manners (as in many of our dependencies) separate the subjects abroad from those at home, such persons, being accustomed from infancy to the language in which they were to minister, were con、 sidered far more likely to be useful than those who had to study the language as a foreign one, however great might be the proficiency that they were able to attain.

The third principle, which the calamities of the North American colonies compelled the Church at home to recognise, is one we may

well wonder did not obtain general acknowledgment far earliernamely, that the ministry of an Episcopal Church should be complete in each colony or dependency; in other words, that there should be not only priests and deacons, sent out from the mother country, and anxious some day to return thither; but that there should be a bishop in every colony, who should have the the power of maintaining order among the missionaries or chaplains, of appointing them their field of labour, and of supplying vancancies among them, by the selection, training, and ordination of proper candidates.

It must not, however, be supposed that these principles were new discoveries in the Church. They were new perhaps to a particular generation of men, who professed themselves members of the Church of England as reformed; but they were by no means new to the ancient Church with which the English claims to be in perfect union. From the very first we find the Apostles endeavouring to procure an adequate number of labourers for the harvest-field which their Master sent them to reap. We read in their own epistles, and in the inspired book of the Acts of the Apostles, of the efforts which they made to interest the Church in Antioch, in Jerusalem, and in other places from which they had themselves been sent, in the spiritual welfare of the congregations that they had been permitted to gather in distant cities. Nor less, at the same time. did they strive to lead their newly planted Christian congregations to look back to the mother Church, from which they had been planted out, with affection and respect. Farther, they ordained elders in all such congregations, and in due time set bishops also over them, taking care, where it was possible, to find their candidates for the office in the cities where the congregations had grown up.

And such as was the practice of the apostles and their immediate successors was also that of the eminent evangelists who planted Christianity among those barbarian nations who had broken up the fabric of the Roman Empire, such as Ulphilas on the Danube, St. Patrick in Ireland, St. Aidan in Northumbria, St. Boniface in Germany, and many others. These men were rarely natives of the country they evangelised, but they sought to encompass themselves as soon as possible with those who were so.

And if it be asked how the English Church came to have departed from the ancient practice in these important particulars, we must remember that the stormy period of the Reformation was most unfavourable to that quiet action of the Church which leads to missionary exertion; that the connexion of Church and State, however valuable in many points of view, impeded to a certain extent the free action of the Church, and postponed for many years the extension of the episcopate; and that the century intervening between the English Revolution and the American war, during which most of our colonies were formed, was a peculiarly dead time as to religious energy, not only in England, but throughout the world. So soon, however, as the eventful struggle to which I have so often alluded was over, our colonies themselves began to ask of the mother country the completion of their Church system in the grant of the episcopate, the first request of the kind being made by the colony of Nova Scotia.

He

The Bishop of Nova Scotia is at the present time a native of the colony itself, though educated at the University of Oxford. reports that King's College, in his diocese, is in a very flourishing