Anglican
Theological Review LXXIV:3
Samuel Seabury:
Virtue and Christian Community
In Late Eighteenth Century America
FRANK G.
KIRKPATRICK*
Samuel Seabury's moral theology reflects
an organic communal vision common to many religious and political writers in
America at the end of the 18th century. He used this vision, ironically, to
oppose the patriots' cause during the Revolution, the Lockean view of
individualism after it, and the evangelical zeal for non‑hierarchical
egalitarianism throughout the period.
The moral theology of
Samuel Seabury, first Episcopal bishop in the United States, has been little
studied and even less appreciated. He has been best known for his role in the
establishment of the Episcopal Church in America in the late 1780s, and, before
that, for his obstinate support of the Tories during the revolutionary war.
Each of these activities grew out of Seabury's commitment to a notion of
community, both civil and ecclesiastical, which had much in common with New
England congregationalism, especially its evangelical New Light reformers, as
well as with many of the more radical revolutionaries, even though he pushed
that notion in a hierarchical direction which neither of these groups would
have accepted. At the heart of Seabury's moral theology is an organic vision of
community which underlay not only his hierarchical notion of the Church but
also his understanding of the necessity for all parts of the political order to
work together for the common good.
As a result of the Great Awakening in the 1740s, many
evangelical groups tried to resurrect the old Puritan ideal of a community knit
together in love through the power of the conversion experience. Their
communities sought to provide an alternative to what they considered the
growing encrustation of power in the clerical leadership of the Old Light
churches and the extinguishing of pietistic zeal. Seabury's moral theology
seems to echo much of their concern for love or benevolence, even though it
gives much greater weight to the need for order and hierarchical leadership. At
the same time, Seabury shared some of the central concerns which had been
voiced by his war‑time adversaries, the revolution-
____________________________
* Frank G.
Kirkpatrick is Professor of Religion at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.
He is the author of Community: A Trinity of Models (Washington:
Georgetown University Press, 1980).
317
aries,
about maintaining in the face of growing selfishness a moral community in the
new nation that was emerging at the end of the bloody conflict.
A fresh reading of Seabury's sermons from the late 1770s
through the mid‑1790s, many of which have never been published, reveals a
vision of civil and ecclesiastical community embedded in a moral theology which
seems to be addressing the potential dangers of disorder in the evangelical
churches and individualism in the political realm. Most of Seabury's
unpublished sermons have no date on them, but it can reasonably be deduced that
they were preached after he became Bishop of Connecticut in 1784, although some
appear as early as 1782. Most of Seabury's sermons fall during the first years
of the American experiment in republicanism. He must, therefore, have been
conscious of the political debate between the Federalists, who generally felt
the need to make realistic concessions to human self‑interest, and the
Republicans, who continued to espouse the communitarian ideal of the Revolution
that individuals should sacrifice their private interests to the greater good
of the political whole. In the religious realm, Seabury lived in an area which
felt the continuing influence of the New Light evangelicals (even though the
initial red‑hot fervor of the Great Awakening had considerably dampened
by the 1780s), and the more sedate, order‑oriented Old Light
Congregationalists.
The vision of community
in his political writings in the mid‑ to late 1770s is shaped by the same
organic metaphor as his later notion of the church community knit in love. It
seems to be the case that Seabury's moral theology underwent very little, if
any, change from the mid‑1770s through his last sermons in the mid‑1790s.
There is a remarkable consistency, both of substance and of emphasis, through
the sequence of preaching. The organic community informed by charity, whether
political or religious, serves for him as mediator between individualistic
anarchy and despotic tyranny.
In writing of a number of 18th century clergy, Nathan
Hatch has commented that they wrestled "with the herculean task of
eradicating selfishness, ‘the fountain of wicked actions,’ . . . Convinced that
the only basis of a free republic was benevolence, a man's solid conviction
that ‘he was born, not for himself alone, but for others, for society, for his
country’, the clergy found little cause for joy in their moral examination of
the body politic."1
While not specifically referring to Seabury, Hatch's ob-
__________________________
1
Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty (New Haven & London:
Yale University Press, 1977), 112‑113. The quote in the passage is from
Henry Comings, "A Sermon Preached Before His Honor Thomas Cushing,"
Boston, 1783, p. 8. Two good biographical studies that place Seabury in his
historical context are E. Edwards Beardsley, The Life and Correspondence of
the Right Reverend Samuel Seabury D.D. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin
servation
does, I believe, represent Seabury's convictions as well. John Adams had put
his finger on the problem: there was "Such Selfishness and Littleness even
in New England", "so much Rascallity, so much Venality and
Corruption, so much Avarice and Ambition such a Rage for Profit and Commerce
among all Ranks and Degrees of Men," that the virtue which was essential
to new republic was imperilled. Self‑interest threatened to destroy the
common good.2 Unless public virtue could be restored, the republic
was doomed to die.
Like other religious thinkers of his time, Seabury relied
upon an organic vision of community to provide the necessary foundation for the
restoration of public virtue. This vision provided him with an understanding of
both the civil and the ecclesiastical communities of which he was a part. It
was the organizing image which underlay his moral theology and which connected,
as well as distinguished, his understanding of church and of society.
One possible source for that organic image could have
been the experience and self‑understanding of the New England village
during the 17th and 18th centuries. As numerous studies on the New England town
and village have made clear, a strong sense of the peace, unity, and order of
these small communities had pervaded 17th century thinking and experience. The
work of Michael Zuckerman, Kenneth Lockridge, Richard Bushman, and others has
shown that the ideal of the early New England town was essentially that of a
single, ordered whole, characterized by peace, unity, consensus, and love. The
notion that gave "a coherent, connected meaning" to the New England
town was "the ideal of the homogeneous communal unit. Achievement of such
unity was the ultimate aim of the New England town, and expectation of it
underwrote a consolidated control of social functions unequaled in any other
public body in English America."3 Lockridge has referred to
this notion of the town as a "Christian Utopian Closed Corporate
Community."4 Lockridge has made the point that this vision of
the town as community, defined through the ideals of peace, unity, and order,
did not simply die out at the end of 17th century, but persisted well into the
19th. In this sense, much
___________________________
and Company, 1881), and Bruce E. Steiner, Samuel
Seabury 1729‑1796: A Study In The High Church Tradition (Athens, OH:
Ohio University Press, 1971).
2 Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic
1776‑1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969,
570.
3 Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England
Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Knopf, 1970), 118.
4 Kenneth Lockridge, A New England Town: The First
Hundred Years (New York: Norton, 1970), 16.
320
Anglican Theological Review
of late 18th century thought
about community was, despite or perhaps as exemplified in the ideals of the Revolution,
essentially conservative: “that in a world inclined to chaos the most men could
hope for was a stable life within a small community . . . In the depths of the
American experience lies a craving for
peace, unity, and order within the confines of a simple society.”5
This
conservative strain toward order through community helps to place Seabury's
understanding of community in its proper context. It also helps to explain his fear of selfishness,
pluralism, and factionalism, and of his acceptance of a hierarchical order as
the antidote to this fear. The major
challenge to post‑Revolutionary thinkers, of both political and religious
bent, was the breakdown in what many of them had regarded (perhaps erroneously)
as the consensus that had characterized American communities up to that point
and the emergence of a direct attack on the subordination of individual self‑interest
to the common or public good.
There were
clergy, among them Samuel Seabury, who attempted to resolve the tension between
the desire for wealth, atomistic individualism, and communitarian consensus by
reformulating in post‑Revolutionary terms, the notion of the
hierarchically ordered community which had been present in the 17th century New
England town. Such a reformulation provided for the aristocratic, hierarchical
structure which would protect property and privilege, but would also provide
an essential place for the moral principle of responsibility to the community
as a whole. It would avoid both social ‘leveling’ (the 18th century analog to
the 20th century bogey of communism) and the worst excesses of
atomistic individualism, in which the bonds of community simply drop away in
the factionalism among competing centers of self‑interest which characterizes
rampant, entre-preneurial
individualism.
At the heart of this reformulation,
especially among men such as Seabury, was the re‑affirmation of the
essential outlines of a medieval notion of community as an organic body. Such
an organic notion of community is conceptually distinct from the notion of
society that underlies the atomistic, contract‑based association
coincident with self‑ interest and individualism.
In the 18th
century the organic view of community, which Gordon
________________________
5 Ibid., 169. That
this idea of the community was not always (and probably never perfectly)
realized in practice, should go without saying. See especially Robert Gross, The
Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), and Richard L. Bushman,
From Puritan to Yankee (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967) for
discussions of the 'declension' of the ideal of community in colonial America.
VIRTUE AND CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY 321
Wood
believes was typical of the Whigs, but which I believe can also be found in
Seabury, a Tory, held that ‘the people’ "were a homogeneous body whose
‘interests when candidly considered are one.’ Since everyone in the community
was linked organically to everyone else, what was good for the whole community
was ultimately good for all the parts. The people were in fact a single organic
piece (‘for God hath so tempered the body that there should be no Schism in
the body, but that the Members should have the same care for one another’)
with a unitary concern that was the only legitimate objective of governmental
policy. This common interest was . . . an entity in itself, prior to and
distinct from the various private interests of groups and individuals. "6
Ultimately, Seabury's moral theology can be seen as an
attempt to preserve something of the earlier organic/hierarchical view and to
register a protest, not primarily at the political but at the eccelesiastical
level, against the atomistic/contractarian view of society that was emerging as
he was taking on the mantle of the most explicitly hierarchical and tradition‑bound
religious community in America outside of the Roman Catholic Church.
At the heart of Samuel
Seabury's moral theology, which is pervasive throughout his sermons, is the
strong sense of the love that binds together the particular community of
Christians. His doctrine of charity, which was the cornerstone of his moral
theology, and to which he alluded in sermon after sermon, was drawn directly
from his notion of this Christian fellowship. His understanding of social
responsibility to all persons, including non‑Christians, is built upon
this primary Christian experience of community.
A desire for brotherly love, he believes, is divinely
created in all persons. We have been created as a “common brotherhood‑the
children of the same parent."7 Because of our common creation
we are to live not in "wars and fightings, but in unity and concord, in
love and friendship, and in the mutual exchange of all the offices of
affection.”8
Seabury's view of love
or benevolence is a very high one: close in fact to many of the New Light
evangelical groups which had emerged during the Great Awakening in the 1740s.
While Seabury echoes much of the
___________________________
6
Wood, 58
7 Samuel Seabury, "Sermon Preached Before the Grand
Lodge," 1782, in Kenneth Cameron, ed. Samuel Seabury's Ungathered
Imprints (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1978), 12.
8 Samuel Seabury, "Charity," in Twelve
Sermons, #X, Vol. 3, handwritten, in the Archives of the Episcopal Diocesan
House, Hartford, CT., 157. Most of the sermons found in this collection have
neither a publisher nor publication date indicated.
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Anglican Theological Review
New
Light rhetoric of love, he was clearly less dependent than they on the personal
experience of a new birth of the Spirit and more reliant on a created human
nature which, even under conditions of depravity, still retains the capacity to
love because it is grounded in the nature of God himself. God has “implanted in
us the disposition of love and good‑will to others, commanded us to
exercise it on every occasion, and enforced the command with the most pleasing
promises and awful threatenings, that we might imitate his goodness, and be
made partakers of his happiness.”9
The obligation to love does not, however, blur for
Seabury the necessary distinction between civil society and religious
community. Throughout his writings, Seabury gives civil government, as did the
Federalists and the Lockeans, the obligation to protect "every one in the
Enjoyment of his just Rights and Privileges,"10 which means
primarily providing security to one's property and freedom. In this sense, the
task of the civil government is essentially negative: to protect, to restrain,
and to curtail. Seabury here draws out the more conservative implication of the
organic model for the political order, but it is clear that it is still based
more on a sense of the common good than on individual self‑interest.
The task of the Christian community, on the other hand,
is more positive, namely, to distribute and promote the means of a fulfilling
life, through love, to those in need. While love or benevolence in a very
general sense seems to underlie both forms of human association, justice is
given the dominant note in civil society and agape (selfless love) in
ecclesiastical community. Seabury says he has "a violent aversion" to
the view of man in a state of nature, free from the restraints of law and
government, where weak must submit to strong. He even declares the form of
government he has lately enjoyed under the Crown to be "a much more
eligible state to live in."11 The civil magistrates along with
civil government itself are the servants and institution of God and have a
right to our obedience (which, for Seabury, was a stronger right than the
patriots and rebels would allow).
Seabury's view of civil
government would not have put him at odds with the mainstream of American
religious and political thinking of his time, and certainly none within the
Calvinist tradition. His commitment
____________________________
9 Samuel Seabury, "Sermons and Discourses," Vol.
6, preached on John X111.34, 1791, Episcopal Diocesan House, Hartford, 2.
10 Samuel Seabury, "Free Thoughts on the Proceedings
of the Continental Congress," 1774, in Letters of a Westchester Farmer
(1774‑1775). Edited with an introductory Essay by Clarence H. Vance.
(White Plains: Westchester County Historical Society, 1930), 61.
11 Samuel Seabury, "A View of the Controversy Between
Great‑Britain and Her Colonies," 1774, in Vance, Letters of a
Westchester Farmer, p. 109.
VIRTUE AND
CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY 323
to the Tory position is explained simply by the fact that
he chose to interpret obedience to the civil magistrate in broader terms than
did his Whig opponents. In fact, it can be argued that his Toryism devolves
from his enlarged conception of what constitutes the civil community. If organic
unity is a characteristic of the civil community, then, Seabury suggests,
there is no justification for one part setting itself against another. And as
long as the colonies are parts of a larger organic whole, their rebellion is
contrary to the essential principles of morality and organic sociality. Seabury ironically plays the organic card
more boldly and perhaps more consistently than do his patriotic opponents who
rely just as heavily as he does on a vision of organic social unity and the
subordination of private to public good.
Seabury's notion of the relation of the colonies to Great
Britain is of children having been "planted" and "nursed with
the greatest parental Tenderness, and protected and defended with her choicest
Blood and Treasure ‑ They had grown up under her fostering Care and they
had securely flourished under the Shadow of Her Wings."12 This
image clearly connotes one of the meanings of the organic model of community: a
close, almost biological relationship between subordinate, dependent parts and
the controlling, but nurturing head of a single organism. A colony, he says, is
necessarily dependent on the body of which it is a part; and therefore, there
is no such thing as an independent colony. But lack of independence presupposes
a "supreme authority" in every government, which he identifies with
King and Parliament.13 This authority, he claims in a continuation
of the organic metaphor, will knit all colonies together in "ONE GRAND,
FIRM, AND COMPACT BODY."14 The patriots, he believes, are
threatening to violate the bands of civil society, to deprive persons of their
liberty, their property, and even their lives, and thus are destroying the very
foundation of civil government itself. In so doing, they are undermining the
law and order which hold the organic civil society together. The result is
"Anarchy and Confusion, Violence and Oppression,"15 the
very things the Whigs claim Parliament and King are producing in the colonies
by their intransigency. The Continental Congress has no legal standing and
therefore no right to our obedience as long
__________________________
12 Seabury, "A Discourse Addressed to His Majesty's
Provincial Troops," in Cameron, Ungathered Imprints, 20.
13 Seabury, "A View of the Controversy . . . ."
in Vance, Letters of a Westchester Farmer, 110.
14 ibid., 126.
15 Seabury, "Free Thoughts on the Proceedings of the
Continental Congress," in Vance, Letters of a Westchester Farmer,
65.
324
Anglican Theological Review
as
we remain in filial, organic relation to our nurturing parent, Great Britain.
Seabury's opposition to the rebellion against Great
Britain (which he rhetorically described as "breaking through all the
Bonds of civil Society, effacing all the Principles of Morality from among Men,
treading under Foot the Dictates of Humanity and the Rights of their Fellow
Subjects, subverting the most mild and equitable System of Laws, introducing
the most horrid Oppression and Tyranny, and filling the Country with Confusion,
Rapine, Destruction, Slaughter and Blood, "16) was rooted in
the same conception of the organic, homogeneous communal unit to which many
Whigs also appealed in their opposition to the factional, atomistic,
contractarian view of society they believed was threatening the ideals of the
Revolution. As John Diggins has observed,
“it is curious that in a colonial society
so . . . inspired by a social theory that made the whole organic community
greater than its discrete parts, there existed no sense of obligation to
support the greater good of the British imperial system . . .
Reacting to
fear of ‘power,’ ‘tyranny,’ and ’conspiracy’ is perfectly compatible with the
traditional pattern of interest politics and self‑preservation in the
Hobbesian and Lockean sense. But to act for reasons of ‘virtue’ implies, in the
classical sense, the capacity to subordinate immediate personal interests to
the ‘General Welfare.’ In this case one wonders how it would be possible to
establish the true causes of the colonists' rebellion when their own particular
interests came into conflict with the interest and greater good of the mother
country . . . Indeed, the logic of [the Whig's argument] could as easily
embrace Loyalist conclusions as it could stimulate revolutionary convictions.”17
Seabury, I believe, perfectly exemplifies Diggins' point
and does so precisely on the basis of carrying to its logical conclusion the
principles of his larger organic view of human society. Seabury even suggests
that the real reason for the rebels' commotion was “the selfishness of those
merchants who had engrossed the tea‑trade with Holland,”18 not
patriotism or a real commitment to the common good, patriot rhetoric not
withstanding.
Seabury's understanding of civil government, as broadly
organic as it was, never was reduced to or substituted for his understanding of
the
__________________________
16 Seabury, "Discourse Addressed to His Majesty's
Provincial Troops," in Cameron, Ungathered Imprints, 19.
17 John Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics
(New York: Basic Books, 1984), 38, 22.
18 Seabury, "A View of the Controversy . . . ."
in Vance, Letters of a Westchester Farmer, 124.
Christian
community. At one level, as we have seen, the purpose of civil government is
essentially negative, to protect and restrain. At another level, Seabury alleges
that society can never go beyond the achievement of justice, which, while a
thing not to be despised, was not sufficient for a Christian community.
Justice, Seabury declares, "would fulfil the laws of civil society, and
make this world a much better place to live in than it is at present. As far as
it goes it is good; and as far as it is good it is acceptable to God. "19
But he admonishes Christians not to “comfort yourselves in your
compliance with all publick Institutions," unless the highly improbable
should occur, namely that "you find, that all carnal ‘Affections die in
you, and that all things belonging to the Spirit do live and grow in you.’”20
Even divine justice, let alone civil justice, is never fully realized in this
world, and the public virtue on which social justice rests "cannot be
permanent or entire," short of heaven.21 Until that time human
society will remain under the sway of selfishness and factionalism, which will
keep it from fully realizing the divine command of love. Justice itself,
according to Seabury, "may be selfish, it is often cruel; it makes no
allowance for human infirmity . . . "22 Justice must,
therefore, be countered by something higher, namely love in the proper, or
Christian sense. And love can be realized in this sense only in Christian
community (and even there, never completely).
The Church, for Seabury, was instituted by Christ
"to be a holy society," consisting of those who "live in
obedience to the laws and conditions of the new covenant of grace and mercy . .
."23 The common receipt of the covenant gives all Christians
"one common interest, and ought to unite them all in love and
affection."24 Fellowship and mutual love, focussed on the
Eucharist, are the key notes of the Christian community. And they are, in a
continuation of Seabury's organizing organic model, knit into an organic body.
The imagery of the Church as a body, with limbs ordered by a common head, fills
the pages of Seabury's sermons. He speaks in a charge to his clergy, of the
church now being "completely organized in all its parts" and of its
head, Jesus, "from whom
_________________________________
19 Seabury, "The Just and Good Man," in Twelve
Sermons, 48.
20 Samuel Seabury, "A Sermon Preached at New
London," Sunday 21st of Feb., 1791, Episcopal Diocesan Archives, 2.
21 Samuel Seabury, "Discourse II: The Steadfastness of
Job," in Discourses on Several Subjects, Vol. II, (Hudson: William
E. Norman, 1815), 36.
22 Seabury, "The Just and Good Man," in Twelve Sermons,
43‑44.
23 Seabury, "A Sermon Preached at New London,"
1791, 7‑8.
24 Samuel Seabury, "Sermon," on 2 Peter 1:4,
1791, and 7 more times. (Diocesan Archives, Hartford, CT), 25‑6.
the
whole body fitly joined together, and compacted by that which every joint
supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part
[which church] will make increase of the body, unto the edifying of itself in
love."25 "These expressions," Seabury candidly
admits, "being metaphorically taken from the natural body, imply, that the
church is directed and governed by Christ its head, even as that is directed
and governed by the natural head."26
The Episcopate, of course, is the human implementation of
Christ's headship of the Church. Seabury refers, in 1785, to the need for a
"common centre of union or principle to animate the whole" of the
churches, which, at the moment "resemble the scattered limbs of the
body."27 What distinguished Seabury's view of the Church from
that of the New Light evangelicals was his belief that the unity of the
community required adherence to a fixed ecclesiastical government, "fixed
and settled" at the time of the primitive church, and that that government
demanded hierarchical authority, symbolized by the episcopate and the clericus.
"Since the holy apostles did, in obedience to Christ, and under the
direction of the Holy Ghost, transmit to others the powers they received from
him, constituting bishops, presbyters and deacons . . . It is the duty of all
christians to submit to that government which they, the apostles, have
instituted . . . "28 This view was, not surprisingly, given the
logic of the organic model, as critical of individualistic rational contract
forms of association as it was of the freer, less tradition bound forms that
constituted the evangelical communities.
In such a view of the
Church, the fatal sin would be factionalism -division over issues of doctrine
and authority. What Seabury implicitly recalled was the single homogeneous unit
which characterized the 17th century New England town in which democracy, or
non‑hierarchical authority, was irrelevant since the unity, peace, and
security of the community was provided by the silent consensus of the members
and obedience to those who acted in their best interests. The infirmity of
human nature, Seabury concedes, will lead to `parties', which then produce ‘an
______________________________
25 Samuel Seabury, quoted in E. Edwards Beardsley, The
Life and Correspondence of the Right Reverend Samuel Seabury, D.D.,
(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1881), 216.
26 Seabury, "Discourse 11: The Apostolical
Commission," in Discourses on Several Subjects, Vol. 1, 59. Seabury, quoted in Beardsley, 199.
27 Seabury, quoted in Beardsley, 199.
28 Seabury, "Discourse 11: The Apostolical
Commission," in Discourses on Several Subjects, Vol. 1, 88.
imosity
and discord.’ This must not, he warns, occur in the Church.29
"I do most earnestly wish to have our Church in all the States so settled
that it may be one Church, united in government, doctrine, and discipline -
that there be no divisions among us‑no opposition of interests – no
clashing of opinions."30 Building yet again on the organic
metaphor of the body, Seabury claims that ". . . [N]o one can be united to
Christ, but through the medium of Christ's church; and his church is but one,
called in the text one body. On the oneness, or unity of Christ's church,
stands the necessity of Christian unity . . . it is against nature for the same
head to have more than one body; and, it is equally against nature, for the
body belonging to that head to be divided into distinct and contending
portions. "31
Seabury was convinced that the Holy Spirit will enable
Christians to live up to the ideal of consensus and unifying love. The Church,
as a ‘regular society founded by . . . divine authority’ is designed to unite
persons to Christ, "and to one another, by a new birth from the Holy
Spirit of God."32 Persons who have become new creatures
"acquire a new heart, new tempers, new desires, a new nature. "33
But the radical implications of this new birth, which evangelicals developed
in the first and second great awakenings, generally lie dormant in Seabury.
Nevertheless, his belief in the necessity of the new birth for the
establishment of community simply keeps his understanding of the church, as an
ordered and hierarchical fellowship, from becoming one more contractual association
in an atomistic society and distinguishes it from even the most just political
order.
As was true in the
society at large, the most obvious and dangerous manifestation of the selfish
tendencies which the good person must always combat with the aid of the Spirit,
was the accumulation of wealth and the neglect of responsibility for the poor.
It is to the issue of poverty that much of his moral theology is directed, on
the basis of the principles developed above. What he has to say about poverty
and riches is understandable, I believe, only within the context of his notion
of community as a hierarchically ordered but loving homogenous organic unit,
and the debate in the larger society over the ideals of the Revolution
regarding
_____________________________
29 Ibid., 233.
30 Ibid., 235.
31 Seabury, "Discourse VIII: Of Christian Unity,"
in Discourses on Several Subjects, Vol. I, 183‑4.
32 Ibid., 186.
33 Seabury, "Discourse XII: The Circumcision of our
Lord, or New‑Year's Day," in Discourse on Several Subjects,
Vol. II, 170.
328 Anglican Theological Review
private
interest and public good. Seabury's commitment to hierarchy allowed him to accept
without much qualification the social rankings within community. Every man is
to consider himself as the servant of God, "bound to fulfil the duties of
the station in which he is placed. "34 Even in his more
forceful injunctions to the wealthy to relieve the needs of the poor, Seabury
can counsel the poor to "remember that it is their duty to be content with
the station which God's providence has allotted them . . . . to be humble, and
meek, and patient and resigned; . . . "35 Seabury never
suggests that the distinction between rich and poor will disappear in earthly
life. "The condition of the human race in the world necessarily implies
inequality in their circumstances" which can be traced penultimately to
such things as ignorance, carelessness, imprudence, and from the state of civil
society "where property is the most precisely marked and guarded."36
Seabury's continuing fear of radical republicanism is evident here because it
is based, he believes, on a false ideal of social equality, false precisely
because it is out of touch with human nature in its fallen state.
"The present rage of
politics .... which so enthusiastically labours to reduce all men to a state of
equality is incongruous to the condition of our nature, and to the distinction
which the providence of God hath made among men. While some are careful, and
diligent, and prudent, and frugal; and others negligent, and idle, and profuse,
and extravagent, wealth will be amassed and possessed in different degrees.
Manage as we will, superior wealth will be superior power: Nor will there be
any way to preserve equality, was it in being, but by frequently recurring to
violence, and bloodshed, and murder.37
Seabury
is obviously unwilling to draw out the more radical implications of an organic
model which many of the revolutionaries were proposing and which made the
revolution, according to scholars like Gordon Wood one of the great utopian
movements of American history.38 Or perhaps it might be more
accurate to say that Seabury drew out more consistently the hierarchical logic
which is implicit in any organic model of community. Ultimately the distinction
between rich and poor is laid to God's providential ordering of the world for
the purpose of helping all
___________________________
34 Seabury, "Sermon on Charity," in Ungathered
Imprints, 3.
35 Samuel Seabury, "The Rich Man and the Beggar,"
Sermon III in Nine Sermons, Vol. 2 (Diocesan Archives, Hartford, CT),
54.
36 Samuel Seabury, "A Sermon Preached In Christ Church,
Philadelphia Before the Corporation For the Relief of the Widows and Children
of Clergymen," 1789, in Cameron, ed., Ungathered Imprints, 3.
37 Samuel Seabury,
"Sermon the First, Fasting and Alms," 1795 in Sermons and
Discourses, Vol. 6 (Diocesan Archives, Hartford, CT), 34‑5.
38 Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic
1776-1800, 47‑48.
VIRTUE AND CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY 329
persons
exercise their capacity for moral virtue. Providence, he says, "hath made
the distinction of rich and poor in the world, . . . [so] that the one, by the
works of benevolence, mercy and alms, the other by humility, patience and
gratitude, might acquire and perfect those tempers of mind and dispositions of
heart, which will fit them for heavenly happiness. "39 It is
God who "giveth men ability to get wealth, and . . . the superfluous
wealth that some possess is a talent committed by him to their management, and
is intended to be, as it were, a store for the relief of those various distresses
into which their necessitous brethren may fall."40
The problem with wealth is what it does to the heart and
affections of the one who possesses it. Riches are apt to "swell the heart
with pride and confidence"41 and nothing in scripture is more often
or harshly condemned than the tempers which "spring from worldly and
selfish enjoyment of wealth. "42 Even those who have acquired
their wealth justly fall into the sin of high‑mindedness ("In the
confidence of their wealth, they forgot God who made them. ")43
But fortunately, divine providence has "induced the human heart with the
quickest emotions of tenderness and pity upon the sight of distress, so that,
till the habits of selfishness render it callous, the cries of human misery
will ever call forth the readiest exertions of benevolence."44 Seabury
counsels that a person "may smooth his own road to heaven, by exercising a
humane and benevolent disposition towards the poor . . . "45
In this life, however, no reward can be expected for
generous giving to the poor. We must give "on the most disinterested
motives . . . not for our own sakes, to relieve the feelings of our hearts; nor
merely for the poors [sic] sake, because they are men of the same nature with
ourselves," but for God's sake, "from a principle of duty and
gratitude to him" who made the distinction between rich and poor in the
first place.46 Seabury appears to be walking a narrow line between
the view, associated with Cotton Mather's "Essays to To Do Good",
that we give to others because it makes us feel good, and a view which would
ground giving to the poor on the demands of justice. Seabury believes in
natural dispositions to tenderness, mildness and love, but also that love in
action requires divine command and, ultimately, heavenly reward. There is
virtue in doing good
_____________________________
39 Seabury, "Sermon the First, Fasting and Alms,"
33‑34.
40 Seabury, "A Sermon Preached . . . Before the
Corporation," in Ungathered Imprints, 4.
41 "Sermon on Charity," in Ungathered Imprints, 4.
42 Ibid.
43
Ibid., 6..
44 Seabury, "A Sermon Preached . . . Before the
Corporation," in Ungathered Imprints, 4.
45 Samuel Seabury, "Liberality to the Poor," 1798
(Diocesan Archives, Hartford, CT), 207.
46 Seabury "Sermon the First, Fasting and Alms,"
32‑3.
330
Anglican Theological Review
to others but it is God's
grace, not our own capabilities, which ultimately empowers and determines the
virtue of charitable giving.
The notion of charity in Seabury is not simply an urge
within the human heart to which our nature compels us to attend. It is also an
obligation to God and, therefore, it puts the use of wealth within clear moral
boundaries. On the one hand, without wealth and poverty there is no occasion to
exercise benevolence. On the other hand, these occasions demand that wealth be
exercised as a form of stewardship and that it not be seen "properly as
our own" to do with as we wish.47 Seabury's great fear of
social equality is based, in large part, on his conviction that social
inequality is a necessary precondition for charity or benevolence. "Were
it possible to bring all men to a state of equality, so that all might have
enough of the necessaries of life, and no one be dependent on another, then
none would want. The exercise of benevolence, and charity, and alms, would soon
vanish from among men; and with their exercise benevolence, and kindness, and
alms would soon cease and be no more seen. Deprived of these qualities, man
would be the most ferocious, vindictive and bloody animal in nature. "48
Within Seabury's tightly constructed communal vision of
charity, the notion of wealth as a resource for aiding the poor is clearly laid
out and gives little support to the emerging individualism which held that
persons should pursue only their own self‑interest because the invisible
hand has providentially ordered the good of the whole to be achieved in this
way. Wealth will certainly be acquired by some (sometimes justly but almost
always covetously), but its use will be the concern of the moral disposition.
"Beyond providing the necessaries and decencies of life, according to the
station in which God's providence hath placed us, our wealth is not properly
our own; but is a treasure which God bath placed in our hands for the relief of
the necessitous, and ought to be expended in works of benevolence and mercy.
"49 Unless charity should reduce us to exactly the same state
as the one in need, we should give "everything our poor brother wants for
his subsistence."50 We must not erect the barrier of
‘worthiness’ in the recipient of our charity. We love others because of their
common nature with us, and because Christ loved us when we were not worthy.
"Unworthiness in the object is therefore no bar to the operation of this
precept" of benevolence.51 "A person's bringing his
necessity on himself by his vices, and immoralities, and carelessness, will not
there-
________________________________
47 Samuel Seabury, "Discourse XVI: The Christian
Race," Discourses on Several Subjects, Vol. II, 218.
48 Seabury, "Sermon the First, Fasting and Aims,"
34‑5.
49Seabury, "Discourse XVI: The Christian Race," Discourses
on Several Subjects, Vol. 11, 218.
50 Seabury, "Liberality to the Poor," 200.
51 Seabury, "Liberality to the Poor," 201.
VIRTUE AND CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY 331
fore
take off the obligations we are under to relieve him. "52
Nevertheless, while Seabury can claim that "charity must be cold indeed,
which will give no relief but to worthy objects,"53 he limits
relief to poverty caused by vice (it should be "occasional and in moderate
portions"), and where it is caused
by idleness “it has no claim upon Charity, further than the present emergency.”55
Relief should be liberal, speedy, and free, a duty
performed cheerfully, and on the basis of the "fundamental law" of
religion, namely love. (Seabury is so taken with this notion that in the
Charity sermon he even permits himself to say that we are under obligation to
alleviate, and, "as much as we can, remove [my emphasis] the
painful distinctions of human life, which are made by the unequal possession of
wealth."56 If carried too far, of course, this sentiment would
contradict Seabury's other clearly stated belief in the permanent division
between rich and poor and the neccessity of that division for the exercise of
charity itself).
Seabury is aware that individual charity is not enough to
relieve the needs of all who require it. He therefore supports public law for
such relief and, especially, "the usefulness and propriety of charitable
Institutions and Societies."57 "When it is considered that
however great the ability of individuals may be, however warm their benevolence
and diffusive their charity, their efforts must be limited, ‑ their
liberality cannot relieve every one,‑the propriety and necessity of
charitable institutions for particular purposes will be evident . . . [They]
resemble great rivers, which, by collecting and uniting rivulets and brooks,
but open communications and sources of wealth which could have been obtained in
no other way."58 Seabury here anticipates the broad appeal
American churchpeople would make after the Second Great Awakening to voluntary
societies to do the work of organized benevolence. These societies tap the
moral virtue of benevolence which resides in individuals, but they organize and
manage it so as to reach those who need it more effectively. In this way, they
form a sort of hierarchical power analogous to that of the acknowledged moral
and social elites within the smaller organic communities of an earlier time in
New England. They are, therefore, consistent with Seabury's own hierarchical
views of Christian community, but now extended to the larger society.
______________________________
52 Ibid.
53 Seabury, "A Charity Sermon," Ungathered Imprints,
14.
54Ibid., 15.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., 17.
58
Seabury, "A Sermon Preached . . . Before the Corporation," Ungathered
Imprints, 5.
332 Anglican Theological
Review
Seabury never seriously considered the possibility that
the communities of Christians might have had even a higher reason for being,
namely, to live in each other's presence with mutual delight and enjoyment, as an
end in itself. His essentially organic/functional model kept his understanding
of community within the framework of a body of persons united to serve a common
purpose, to which end each member had a designated role. In this organic view
of community, the relations between the members are essentially ones of service
to others: functions of moral virtue and duty. Such a vision of community
tends to ignore those dimensions of communal life which, sharing all things in
common, celebrate and take delight in the sheer joy of just being in
relation to others, quite apart from (or at least transcending) forms of
relationship based primarily on cooperation for a common end or mutual service.
These dimensions of community were glimpsed more often by the dissenting,
evangelical sectarians than by either the liberals or the traditionalists such
as Seabury. He believed too strongly in an ordained, hierarchically structured
community to be won over to the more evangelical understanding of a community
of equals trying to live out the vision of the communal Church depicted in the
Book of Acts. He might have gone along with the first part of Alan Heimert's
description of the evangelical view of charity: "the man of true charity,
according to the post‑Awakening Calvinist definition, was ‘so divested of
self’ that he could ‘readily part with any worldly good’ and could not,
therefore, in any sense call what he had his own." He could not, however,
have accepted Heimert's conclusion because it would have destroyed the very
rationale for there being a disposition to charity in the first place:
"were the evangelical law of charity enforced, mankind would be restored
in fact as well as in name to a full and absolute equality."59
Seabury, therefore, remains somewhere between the individualistic
ethos of the Lockeans and the egalitarian mutuality of the evangelicals. His
hierarchical notion, rooted firmly in an organic conception of community as a
homogeneous unit composed of persons with divinely given dispositions to love,
provided him with an alternative to the Madisonian view of society as a set of
legal contracts between self‑seeking, acquisitive individuals. In this
sense, he retained something of the republican ideals of the Revolution (as
Gordon Wood, for example, has outlined them), even while he was extending them
in defense of obedience to the King. But his republicanism was clearly limited
by an organic notion of community more at home in the New England village of
the 17th century,
__________________________
59 Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1966), 306.
VIRTUE AND CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY 333
which
still had a place for an enlightened hierarchical leadership. Perhaps the
problem with Seabury's moral theology is that it shared too much in common with
those republicans arguing against the King and for a new republic while not
accepting their egalitarianism and too little with those realists of the
Constitutional era arguing for unlimited human freedom while not conceding to
them that the imperatives of Christian love are too utopian for a federalist
society.