History of the Protestant Episcopal church in Alabama, 1763-1891

Preface

THE author has no apology to make for writing and publishing this history. He feels that an excuse must, from its very nature, be either in vain or unnecessary. The book itself must be his justification or his condemnation.

He has of course written, as every man must write, from his own point of view. While claiming that it is his right to do this, he is not unaware that there are other points of view, and to their occupants he cheerfully concedes the right to criticise his sense of proportion.

It should be borne in mind that this is a history, not of bishops, priests, or parishes, but of a diocesan Church. Hence only those personal and parochial records appear that set forward the author's purpose. Matters of detail have been unhesitatingly sacrificed to comprehensiveness of statement.

To those who have furnished much interesting information and many valuable documents, especially

CHURCH IN ALABAMA.

to Bishop Wiumer and the Rkv. R. H. Cobbs, D. D., the author thus publicly expresses his appreciation of their kindness.

Tuskaix>osa, Ala.,

Easter Monday, 1898.

Part First. The Acephalous Church

CHAP. . PAGE.

I. Potest Tolerari n

II. Organization 17

III. A Headless Body 24

Part Second. The Episcopate Oe Bishop Cobbs

I. Bishop Cobbs' Early Life 43

II. Missionary Character of the Diocese 49

III. Missionary Sowings 53

IV. Difficulties and Discouragements 57

V. With Loins Begirt 64

VI. The Church Building Era 70

VII. Congregational Growth 75

VIII. The Church's Slave Children 80

IX. Endowment of the Episcopate 84

X. The Diocesan Missionary Society 93

XI. The Relief of the Clergy 99

XII. Church Schools 105

XIII. Personnel of the Clergy 113

CHAP. PAGE.

XIV. The Theological Tone 123

XV. Parish Life 132

XVI. Last Days of Bishop Cobbs 141

Part Third. The Episcopate Of Bishop Wii.mer

I. A Confederate Diocese 153

II. Bishop Wilmer's Early Life 158

III. War Times 164

IV. The Bishop and General Orders 171

V. The Bishop and the General Convention 188

VI. Decay of the Negro Work 195

VII. Ethiopia's Uplifted Hands 206

VIII. The Orphans' Home 213

IX. The Case of Hamner Hall 219

X. Edification and Demolition 233

XI. The Revolution of Boom Times 248

XII. The Diocesan Missionary Society 257

XIII. The Golden Age 270

XIV. Looking Backward .. ._ _ 284

XV. Aaron's Sons and Hur's 294

XVI. Prospective 303

PART FiRST. The Acephalous Church

HISTORY

OF THE

CHURCH IN ALABAMA.

CHAPTER I. POTEST TOIvKRARI

THE beginning of the record carries us down to the waters of the Gulf and back to the sixth decade of the last century.

The French and Indian War had just ceased, and in the ensuing division of territory France had ceded to England the fort and village of Mobile. The settlement here was sixty years old. Except the garrison few Englishmen ever came to the village, and they that did come fell under the dominant French influence.

The Governor, Robert Farmer, a man whose range of reading was so great that he could compare Pontiac with Mithridates, and refresh himself in hours of weariness with Montesquieu, and who, in his correspondence with the French governor of New Orleans, evinced thorough familiarity with both the Salic Law and Magna Charta, was withal a notoriously dissolute man. His strong mentality and weak morality yielded their accustomed fruits in his subordinates, and the few villagers and more numerous soldier}*, copying the weaker * traits of their commander, were strangers to virtue and familiars of dissipation and debauchery.

A person calling himself a clergyman of the Church of England lounged about the place and occasionally held public services. The people seriously questioned his ordination, of which he gave no proof. His character, however, they did not question. As a good priest is the best of men, so a bad priest is the worst of men; and this reputed clergyman, drifting among the outposts of civilization, was so horribly ungodly and lascivious that even the hardened soldiers and campfollowers of Mobile held him in detestation.

It was to this morally desolate place that the Rev. Samuel Hart, of Charleston, S. C, received license to minister in 1764. The missionary spirit was none too active in those days, even among the missionaries themselves, and Mr. Hart's zeal was not kindled when he found the field so sterile and the society so uncongenial. He soon determined to return to more civilized regions.

But before his departure he took occasion, at a general congress held with the Indians, to preach them a lengthy and quite dogmatic sermon, which the interpreter explained sentence by sentence. The Indian chief was very attentive. After dinner he asked Mr. Hart whereabouts lived the Great Warrior, God Almighty, of whom he talked so much, and desired to know if He were a friend of " Brother George ' ' across the water. This question started Mr.

Hart into another long discourse, wherein he expatiated on God's being and attributes, and sought to enlighten the dusky warrior on the divine transcendence and immanence; but he was utterly unable to impart any idea of his subject-matter to his hearer. Finally his verbosity wearied the chief, who solemnly took him by the hand, and, filling a glass with rum, concluded the interview much to his own satisfaction, by saying: " Beloved man, I will always think well of this friend of ours, God Almighty, of whom you tell me so much; and so let us drink his health." Then he drank the rum and went back to his native forests.

After a sojourn in Mobile of about a year Mr. Hart saw the growth of the village seriously retarded and its very existence rendered problematic by a fearful scourge introduced from Jamaica by a British regiment, and nourished by the dissolute habits of the population; and, in 1765, he returned to Charleston.

After this no attempt was made to plant the Church in Alabama until 1826; a single service held -in Florence two years before by the Rev. William Wall not being followed up by either the clergyman or the people.

In the intervening sixty years Alabama's population had grown to three hundred thousand. The dignity of statehood had been conferred on the territory. Material prosperity had greatly increased. Manners and morals, subject to new influences, showed marked improvement. But nowhere was the Church visible in diocese, parish, or mission. Methodist and Baptist houses of worship appeared, and here and there Presbyterian, but the Church of Apostolic Succession was without a single minister or congregation in the entire state.

It would be idle to say that no blame attaches to the Bishops, clergy and laity in the established dioceses of the older states; and yet these do not deserve the entire burden of censure heaped upon them even by the Churchfolk of today. The bulk of population in the Tennessee Valley came down from Tennessee and Kentucky wherein Churchmen were few and far between. In Middle Alabama a considerable proportion were Churchmen; and so in Mobile. But for thirty years (1783-18 13) South Alabama was in the hands of the Spanish, who allowed no public religious exercises other than those of the Holy Roman Church. In this district Anglican Christianity was not permitted to show its head. Then, when in 18 13 the territory passed back into the hands of English-speaking people and was for the first time incorporated in the United States, the Church had to contend, not only in Alabama, but all through the Union, with an unfavorable popular prejudice, of which not sufficient account is ordinarily taken by those who comment on her present numerical weakness in this country.

Down to the Revolutionary War the Church in the colonies was distinctly Anglican in its customs and in its constitution. Every American clergyman was ordained in England, and the majority were born there; so that, though living in America, their sympathies were naturally with the mother in her disputes with the daughter. Although their sense of justice caused many of them to side with the rebelling colonies in the struggle for independence and induced well-nigh all to cast in their fortunes with the new-born nation when the war was over, yet they were regarded with suspicion. It was well known that the Protestant Episcopal Church was an offshoot of the Church of England. Practically the Church of England was the English people and the English Government. An organic body in this country that derived its authority from England, and that had been, through its chief official representatives in England, in hostility towards a national uprising, was entirely out of touch with American ideals and institutions, and deserved to be cast out and trodden under foot. It is true that some of the leading patriots were members of this despised body — George Washington, Patrick Henry, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Peyton Randolph, Robert Morris, Alexander Hamilton, Madison, Monroe, and Francis Scott Key, not to mention hundreds of others — but their membership was held to be an idiosyncracy for which, in the light of their many virtues, they should not be too severely censured.

This prejudice, ignorant as is all prejudice, arose and nourished long before the open hostilities of the War of the Revolution began. By the end of the ensuing thirty years of peace with England it had begun to diminish, but the second conflict, the War of 1812, fanned it into brighter flame than ever. The utmost that zealous Americanism would grant the Church was ' ' Potest Tolerari. ' ' Those men were our grandfathers. Their bitter prejudice still washes at our feet after two generations.

So the Church had to await her time and opportunity. Here and there, throughout the territory of Alabama, a few Church families, emigrants from the states, were thrown together, and irregularly held lay-services, supplemented at long intervals by the chance visit of some clerical relative, friend, or itinerant. Many of these early Churchmen became discouraged at the apparent forgetfulness of their Mother and united themselves with sectarian bodies, chiefly Methodist and Baptist, whose noble, self-sacrificing preachers kept in the vanguard of civilization, alongside, and sometimes ahead of, the gambling-den and the whisky-hell. But here and there were forming nuclei of the large congregations that are now found in Mobile, Montgomery, Selma, Birmingham, and Huntsville, and of parishes elsewhere that are only awaiting an uncrystalized material on which to work.

Chapter II. Organization

SUCH was the condition of affairs when in November, 1826, the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Church, then five years old, directed the Rev. Robert Davis ' ' to visit the State of Alabama and advance the interests of the Society and religion ' ' there. Shortly after his appointment Mr. Davis set out on what was then a long and tedious journey; but being detained on his way by illness he did not reach Tuskaloosa, his objective point, till the winter of 1827.

Tuskaloosa was then a small village, eight years of age, and with a population of not more than five or six hundred souls. But within the past year it had been made the State capital, and a considerable population was certain in the near future. At any rate, Mr. Davis thought that with the capital as his center of operations he could the better extend the influence and ministrations of the Church into other villages and hamlets of the interior. Here, therefore, he remained several months, ministering constantly to the half-dozen Church families that had moved in, but apparently making no missionary excursions. On January 7, 1828, Christ Church parish was organized, and the building of a parish church undertaken.

Whether Mr. Davis had any idea of remaining in 17

Tuskaloosa is doubtful. He was not sent out to do missionary work, but was simpl) T a collecting agent of the Missionary Society, working on a commission of ten per cent, of his gross collections. He left Tuskaloosa on March 25th of this } r ear, 1828 ; and his subsequent demand on the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society for his commission on the seventeen hundred dollars subscribed towards the parish church explains in part the zeal that he manifested for the erection of a house of worship.

Mr. Davis' departure was followed by cessation of effort on the part of the newly-organized parish; but in February, 1829, a newly-appointed missionary, the Rev. William H. Judd, arrived from New York, and infused new life into the project. Mr. Judd lived only six months after he came to Alabama, but his success was marked, the church building being almost completed at the time of his death. He left the congregation in a nourishing condition, and not only flourishing but united — a fact worthy of note, for there were not thirty communicants in the parish.

Meanwhile another clergyman was working in Alabama. Three weeks before Mr. Davis had reached Tuskaloosa, the Rev. Henry A. Shaw had taken charge of the church families in Mobile. Here in 1822 a few Churchmen had built the first non-Romanist place of worship in the entire district wrested from the Spanish nine years before. For three years union services were held in this building, ministers being engaged without reference to denomination. In 1825 this arrangement ceased, and the Churchmen organized Christ Church parish. A Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Murdoch Murphy, continued to officiate as the parish minister until Mr. Shaw's arrival in December, 1827. The original Christ Church must have been a very small, cheap, and unsubstantial structure, for in 1834 the rector complained that it was "too small and very old," although the parish numbered only twenty- eight communicants, and the building had been used only twelve years.

In 1830 the Church in Alabama, and especially the parish of Mobile, received some encouragement from a visit of the Rt. Rev. Thomas C. Brownell, Bishop of Connecticut. Dr. Brownell had been requested by the Domestic Missionary Board to make a visitation to all the Southern States not then organized into dioceses, and in pursuance of this request he visited Mobile in January, 1830.

On the 25th da}- of that month he presided over the Primary Convention, at which the diocese was organized. According to Bishop Brownell 's report the convention was composed of "the principal Episcopalians of the city and from other parts of the state. ' ' But the delegates from outside the place of meeting were few. The state was very deficient in transportation facilities. More than a month was required to make the journey by water from Demopolis or Montgomery to Mobile and return, and so miserable were the few rough country roads that penetrated the vast stretches of pine forests and the dangerous morasses of the Mobile river and its tributaries that few cared to use them. Therefore the Primary Convention was slimly attended. Besides the Bishop, the local minister (the Rev. Henry Shaw), and the Rev. William Richmond, a New York clergyman, the only other cleric present was the Rev. Albert A. Muller, who had recently been transferred from Mississippi and was stationed at Tuskaloosa. Ten or twelve laymen were in attendance, the majority from Mobile. The parishes of Mobile and Tuskaloosa, and the congregation at Greensboro, which had just been organized by Mr. Muller, were represented. A constitution was adopted, a Standing Committee was appointed, and steps were taken to secure a union with the diocese of Mississippi and the congregations of Louisiana. The Convention then adjourned to meet again in Mobile on May 12 of the same year.

At the time set lay delegates appeared from the same three congregations as before, but Mr. Shaw was the only clergyman present, Mr. Muller apparently not caring to spend two months of the same year on the Warrior and Tombigbee rivers. The Convention, without transacting any business, adjourned to meet at Tuskaloosa on January 3, 1831, hopeful that the accessibility of that place would allow a full attendance.

The hope was not disappointed. Although Mr. Muller sat in solitary clerical state, Mr. Shaw this time absenting himself, delegates from Mobile were present. Deputations attended also from Greensboro, and from Huntsville, whither a few Churchmen had removed. Ten souls constituted this Convention — a small number absolutely, but relatively six times larger than any Diocesan Council of the last decade.

CHURCH IN A LABAMA. 2_I

A communication was received from the diocese of Mississippi asking the appointment of a committee of six, to meet the same number each from Mississippi and Louisiana, with a view to the formation out of the three bodies of " The Southwestern Diocese." As this request was the outcome of a resolution adopted at the Primary Convention of Alabama the year before, it was granted. The committee appointed consisted of the two clergy resident in the state, Chief Justice Abner S. Lipscomb and Mr. John Eliott of Mobile, and Messrs. J. M. Davenport and A. P. Baldwin of Tuskaloosa. Bishop Brownell was requested to continue in charge of the Church in Alabama, and to render such Episcopal service as might be required. A set of four canons was adopted by this Convention — probably the shortest code of laws ever in force in an American diocese.

We have seen that at this time parishes were established and organized in Mobile and Tuskaloosa, the metropolis and the capital, and that congregations had been gathered at Greensboro and Huntsville. A year or two later, Bishop Brownell made a journey of inspection through the state, and held services at Selma, Montgomery and Florence. These places were all small villages, but the Bishop deemed them favorable missionary soil.

No other congregations than these existed in Alabama' when the General Convention of 1832 recognized Alabama as an autonomous diocese, and the weakness of the Church was so great that many deemed it idle that such action should have been taken.

There was little or no community of interest between the two clergymen. The Rev. Xorman Pinney had succeeded the Rev. Mr. Shaw as rector of Chris: Church. Mobile, but he was so much engrossed with his own parochial affairs that he did not appear at a Convention of the diocese till more than three years later.

Only Mr. Midler and nine laymen composed the Convention of 1832, one-half of whose membership was from Tuskaloosa. where the Convention was held. It was not an over-cheerful Convention. Earnest appeals to the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society were not heeded, though the Society was meanwhile supporting missionaries in Greece, where an orthodox branch of the Holy Catholic Church was already established. Pecuniar}- reasons influenced Mr. Muller. after two years of faithful sendee, to discontinue his monthly visits to Greensboro — a serious discouragement to this congregation, which had secured a lot and raised a considerable sum of money towards the erection of a church building. Huntsville was despondent at her failure to secure outside aid in building a house of worship. Liberality towards the Church did not keep pace with the increase of Churchmen's bank accounts.

Spiritual parsimony was most marked in the Tennessee Valley, which was now making great industrial progress. Here, in 1S32, money enough was found to build, in Madison County. Alabama's first cotton factory, and to construct from Tuscumbia to Decatur the state's first railroad. Churchmen built for themselves houses of cedar, while yet not even a tabernacle was erected to the glory of God.

In 1833 the Church's most faithful children were so disheartened that they did not even attempt to hold the Convention, which was to have met at Tuskaloosa. Mr. Muller had left this place because of very scandalous lapses from religion and morality that subsequently resulted in his deposition from the sacred ministry, and the congregation which he left behind him was gradually and surely melting away. Only at Mobile, throughout this dark biennium, did any vigor remain, and even there the communicants were a mere handful.

Chapter III. A Hkadi.ess Body

THE General Convention of 1832, which admitted the diocese of Alabama into union with itself, took other action which served to arouse Alabama Churchmen from their apathy by giving them something to do, to think of, and to hope for. A special canon was enacted allowing the dioceses of Alabama and Mississippi and the churches in Louisiana to proceed to the formation of that "Southwestern Diocese,' ' which the Churchmen of the three states deemed the only practicable scheme for ensuring constant Episcopal oversight.

Then the general Board of Missions determined to send a missionary to Alabama. The selection of the Rev. Caleb S. Ives was providential. He knew where to take hold, and how to inspire hope and enthusiasm. His first work was to gather together the congregational fragments in what are now Greene, Hale, and Marengo counties. At Greensboro the congregation, which had been organized by Mr. Muller on March 14, 1830, and had scattered, sheep without a shepherd, now numbered six families. But as the mighty influence of Bethlehem Ephrata depended not on its numerical strength, so again, on Christmas Eve, this time in Alabama, w r as born a Christ-spirit; and on December 24, 1833, the little congregation, stirred by Mr. Ives' zeal, aroused itself from sleep, formed the parish of "St. Paul's," and went to work in the Master's vineyard. The missionary seed dropped that Christmas Eve has borne fruit a hundred-fold, and today Greensboro is a chief center of missionary activity in the diocese.

But not even in Greensboro was it plain sailing for the Church in those days. If Mr. Ives encouraged others he often faced difficulties and met with disappointments. "The doctrines and services of the Church," he wrote from Greensboro, in 1835, "so far as can be ascertained, are favorably received; and the prospects for building up the Church here are as flattering as could be expected under existing circumstances. The place has been too long neglected, which, together with the abortive attempt once made to establish the Church here, requires much labor, fidelity, and perseverance to place her even on an equal footing with the other denominations."

On Sunday, December 15, 1833, a week after the first service that he had held at Greensboro, Mr. Ives officiated at Demopolis, where he found a few Church families. This was the first Church service ever held at Demopolis. In the following month Mr. Ives returned to Demopolis, and on January 31, 1834, organized Trinity parish. In this month also he gathered a congregation at a point nine miles southwest of Greensboro and on the road to Demopolis, and here, on April 19, 1834, organized the parish of "St. John's in the Prairies."*

*This parish has been defunct since 1865, when the remnant

of the congregation connected itself with St. Paul's, Greens- — 3

In the following September, at Prairieville* he established a congregation. Constantly did his field of labor broaden. Thoroughly did he cultivate all his rich territory. Abundantly did it respond to his endeavors.

The outlook was now becoming brighter for the whole diocese — what there was of it — and at the Convention w T hich met in Mobile in January, 1835, Bishop Brownell, all three of the diocesan clergy, and delegates from Mobile, Tuskaloosa, Greensboro, and Demopolis, were in attendance. This Convention recommended to the next annual Convention a revised constitution, somewhat fuller and more explicit than its predecessor, and adopted a body of canons providing for the composition and guidance of subsequent Conventions and for the reception of clergymen into canonical residence in a parish. Through a fatal defect in the third canon it became possible for unbaptized men to sit in the diocesan Convention, and it was not necessary that a delegate to the General Convention, the highest deliberative and legislative body in the Church, should have received the Laying on of Hands. The clergy and six laymen were appointed deputies to the Convention soon to meet in New Orleans for the purpose of organizing the Southwestern Diocese.

boro. The church building, a memorial of its first rector, the Rev. John Avery, D. D., who served the parish in 1836, was, in 1878, given to the congregation at Forkland, a neighboring village lying between the Tombigbee and Warrior rivers. * After wards Macon, and now Gallion.

We may here very properly conclude all reference to this scheme, fruitless so far as Alabama was immediately concerned.

The three states interested sent deputies to the Convention, which sat in New Orleans on March 4 and 5, 1835. Fifteen persons were present. The Convention put forth a declaration to the effect that it understood from the special canon of the General Convention, under which it was acting, that the new body, which they were about to organize, was not to be merely a confederation of three organisms, enjoying the benefits of the same Bishop and holding intercommunion only through him, but was to form one organic diocese. With this declaration as a basis the Southwestern Diocese was organized, a constitution was adopted, and a Bishop was elected. The choice fell upon Dr. Francis L. Hawks, rector of St. Thomas' Church, New York, and, with the possible exception of Stephen H. Tyng, the most powerful preacher of his generation. Dr. Hawks declined the office, and, while his declination caused much disappointment^ it was doubtless well for the churches that he did not become their Bishop; for when, nine years later, Mississippi, acting for herself, called him to be her Bishop, and subsequently iterated the election, charges made against him at that time of being given to ungovernable bursts of temper and to financial irregularities appear to have been not without some foundation. At any rate his declination ended Alabama's connection with the new diocese, for the Church grew so rapidly in the next few months that the Diocesan Convention, held ill Mobile in 1836, passed resolutions affirming Alabama's withdrawal from the Southwestern Diocese and her intention to preserve her autonomy as an independent diocese.

The first clerical perversion in the diocese belongs to this period. The Rev. Norman Pinney, rector of Christ Church, Mobile, was the pervert. Even while at heart a Unitarian, he had taken the sacred vows of priesthood in a Church whose prescribed daily services required the minister to declare explicitly his belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ at least nineteen times in one day. For some time the Churchmen of Mobile had deemed his teaching unsound in its expressed or implied contravention of Creed and Articles, and rumor of this unsoundness finally reached Bishop Brownell's ears. As the ecclesiastical authority of the diocese of Alabama, the Bishop, in 1835, summoned Mr. Pinney to appear before him. He received from that minister's own lips a definite denial of belief in Christ as God. No hesitation was possible, and Mr, Pinney was promptly deposed from the sacred ministry. Mr. Pinney was an accomplished scholar, but he was not of magnetic mind, his personal following was not great, and his defection from the faith, followed by twenty years of school-teaching in Mobile, does not appear to have produced any evil effect either on the parish or on any individuals.

Mr. Pinney was succeeded as rector of Christ Church, Mobile, by the Rev. Samuel S. Lewis, who, removing thither from Tuskaloosa, shortly reported that his new parish numbered 114 communicants.

CHURCH IN ALABAMA. 2Q.

Mr. Lewis was succeeded at Tuskaloosa by the Rev. Andrew Matthews. The Rev. William Johnson took charge of the shepherdless little congregation at Montgomery, in December, 1835, and, after leading their devotions first in a Baptist and then in a Universalist place of worship, succeeded in building a neat brick church, the first St. John's Church of the town, and had it ready for consecration by Bishop Kemper on occasion of his visit to Montgomery in 1837. Wetumpka, then hopeful of being the chief city of the interior, soon owned a brick house of worship, built by the energetic efforts of the Rev. Robert G. Hays, who had come from Tennessee. Florence began to give evidence of that Church life which Bishop Brownell had predicted five years before, and shortly after the arrival of the Rev. Thomas A. Cook, from South Carolina, had, though with only eight communicants on the parish register, raised fifteen hundred dollars for a church building. Mr. Jacob Lorillard, of New York, transferred to the diocese six hundred and forty acres of land in Baldwin county for the support of the future Bishop, and to this gift were added subscriptions to the amount of $4,050, raised by Mr. Ives, who had been compelled by pecuniary necessities to retire temporarily from parish work and devote himself to the more lucrative pursuit of school-teaching in Mobile, and who, while traveling in the interest of his school, found opportunity to solicit subscriptions to the Bishop's Fund. The Baldwin county land was sold ten years later for five hundred dollars. That nothing whatever was realized from the subscriptions made to Mr. Ives, was due to a decade of financial stringency upon which the country was just entering.

The whole nation had given itself over to speculation, and values had become greatly inflated. In Alabama the appearances of prosperity were so flattering as to beguile tradesmen into an extension of purchases and credits, and planters into extravagant investments in lands and slaves. These delusive anticipations were not realized, and the people became deeply involved. The magnitude of this disaster is perceptible when we recall that before the first day of May, 1837, the failures of the year in New York City alone aggregated $100,000,000, and in New Orleans, Alabama's chief market place, amounted to $27,000,- 000. A run was made on the banks. Specie payment was suspended. The rapid depreciation of values to their normal size reduced many to poverty.

Although eight clergymen were now at work in the diocese, the general distress forbade all thought of the election of a Bishop. The few established parishes were pushed to the utmost to support their own ministers, without attempting, even by united effort, to support a Bishop. Bishop Brownell could not be expected to come from Connecticut as frequently as he was needed, for in those days the journey required nearer forty-eight days than forty-eight hours; and when he came he could not undertake the long journeys of exploration that are among the chief duties of a pioneer Bishop. Feeling that it was out of question for him longer to exercise Episcopal oversight of