Anglican Commemoration
First Bishop of Nova Scotia
August 12 · d. 1816
also known as Charles Inglis the First Bishop of Nova Scotia, Charles Inglis of Acadia
Charles Inglis (1734-1816) was the first bishop the Church of England ever consecrated for a colony, the first Bishop of Nova Scotia. A Loyalist rector in New York who kept praying for the king under the guns of Continental soldiers, he lost his church and his country in the Revolution and went north a refugee. Out of that loss he built the first overseas diocese of the Anglican church, and so opened the way for the worldwide Communion that followed.
Charles Inglis was born in Ireland in 1734, a clergyman's son, and was ordained in the Church of Ireland before he crossed the ocean as a young missionary to the American colonies. He served parishes in Delaware and Pennsylvania and then came to Trinity Church in New York, the chief Anglican church of the city. He served first as an assistant and then as rector. He was a faithful, learned, but otherwise unremarkable colonial clergyman. Then shots were heard 'round the world, and he had to choose. He chose to be faithful to his word and vows and his convictions even though it put him on the losing side of the American Revolution. Romans 13 is the lectionary reading for tomorrow August 13th, appropriate to these themes of Charles's life as he lived it out in his convictions.
Inglis was bound by conviction and by his ordination oath to the king, and he was conscience-bound not pretend otherwise even when it grew dangerous to be faithful to that oath. In the spring of 1776, with New York in colonial hands, word came that General Washington would attend service at Trinity. It was also communicated that Washington would be glad if the prayers for King George were left out. Inglis, by his own account, paid no regard to it. One Sunday a company of armed Continental soldiers marched into the church during the service, rifles and bayonets in their hands, and made it known that they would shoot if he prayed for the king. Inglis prayed for the king, and no shots were fired. When at last it became impossible to go on, the vestry chose to close the doors of Trinity altogether rather than, as Inglis put it, omit the prayers for the king and so give that mark of disaffection to their sovereign.
In September 1776 a great fire swept New York, both armies blamed the other for burning the city down, and Trinity Church burned along with it. When the war was lost and the new republic was secured, Inglis was among thousands of Tories who could not stay. He felt that as a Christian unjust taxes and the like were nor a morally defensible ground to justify a revolt instead of trusting God's appointed governors. He gave up the country where he had spent his whole ministry and went north, to the island of Nova Scotia, a cold and thinly settled British colony in eastern Canada. Nova Scotia swelled with refugees as broken as himself in the wake of the war.
In America, the Revolution is often romanticized, but it was a war like any other, displacing thousands, leaving tens of thousands of orphans and widows in its wake. And there even in the wreckage and loss, God used Charles' faithfulness in the loss as a foundation. The Anglican churches of British North America had never had a bishop of their own; they had always had to look across the sea back to Britain for their bishop and like the colonies had not ruled themselves locally. For nearly two hundred years the colonies had been governed at arm's length from London, at best with a long distance touch and at worst as an afterthought, with no one nearer than the far side of the Atlantic to ordain a priest or confirm a child. In 1787 Charles Inglis was consecrated Bishop of Nova Scotia, the first bishop the Church of England ever sent to a colony. He became the first overseas bishop of a church that would spark the beginning of a wave of missionary bishops that would one day bring the Gospel through the Anglican Communion to much of the rest of the whole world. His diocese was almost comically vast, consisting of what is now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and beyond to a scattering of churches across a wilderness. Perhaps a bit like Florida claiming the whole continent, before people knew how vast North America was it was difficult to set workable diocesan boundaries. He spent the next thirty years building: ordaining the first home-grown North American clergy, planting parishes, founding a college at Windsor to train priests on the same soil where they would serve.
He died in 1816, an old man of eighty-two, exiled from his home but serving faithfully where God had relocated him. He had lost nearly everything once, his church burned and his country gone, and out of that loss as God often does, He laid the first stone of something larger from what had fallen. The single colonial diocese he founded has become the Anglican Church of Canada and a part of a Communion that now circles the earth. Every bishop consecrated for a distant land since stands in a line that begins, in a real way, with a faithful priest who would not compromise his convictions to pray faithfully for his king even when it became dangerously unpopular to do so.
Charles Inglis made his promises when they were easy to keep, an ordination oath sworn in peacetime; he kept them when armed soldiers stood in his church and let it be known they would shoot if he prayed for the king. He prayed for the king. The promise cost him his church, his country, and nearly everything he had built, and God laid the foundation of a worldwide Communion on that faithfulness in loss. You have made promises too, most of them in easy seasons. Which vow, now that keeping it has begun to cost you something, are you tempted to quietly set aside?
Charles Inglis is a thoroughly documented figure of the eighteenth-century church, attested by his own large body of letters, journals, and published writings, by the records of Trinity Church and of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel that he served, and by the colonial and diocesan archives of Nova Scotia. He was born in Glencolumbkille, in County Donegal, Ireland, in 1734, educated in Ireland, and ordained for the Church of England. He went to the colonies as a schoolmaster and then a missionary, served at Dover in Delaware, and from 1765 was assistant minister and later rector of Trinity Church, New York. A convinced Loyalist, he answered Thomas Paine's Common Sense in a 1776 pamphlet, The True Interest of America Impartially Stated, and held to the royal cause through the war; Trinity Church burned in the great New York fire of September 1776, and Inglis was eventually attainted and his property forfeited.
In 1783 he removed to Nova Scotia with the Loyalist migration, and on 12 August 1787 he was consecrated at Lambeth as Bishop of Nova Scotia, the first colonial bishop of the Church of England; the date is the one the church keeps as his commemoration. As bishop he organized a diocese of enormous extent, founded King's College at Windsor in 1789, and labored to settle the Anglican church amid the refugee society of the Maritimes until his death on 24 February 1816. The significance of his consecration is the durable point: it established that the Church of England could plant full episcopal life beyond the British Isles, the precedent on which the global expansion of Anglicanism in the nineteenth century was built.
Charles Inglis is commemorated on 12 August, the anniversary of his consecration in 1787 as the first colonial bishop of the Church of England; his liturgical color is white. He is honored above all in the Anglican Church of Canada, which counts him among its founders, and his memory is kept at St. Paul's Church in Halifax, the oldest Protestant church in Canada, where he is buried, and at the University of King's College, the college he founded at Windsor and which later moved to Halifax.
He is remembered less for any wonder than for a precedent. Before Inglis, an Anglican in the colonies who wished to be confirmed, or a man who wished to be ordained, had to cross the ocean to England to find a bishop; many never could. His consecration ended that, and the line of colonial and missionary bishops that followed, in Canada, in India, in Africa, in the Pacific, runs back to the Loyalist refugee consecrated at Lambeth in 1787. In Canadian Anglican memory he stands for a particular temper as well: serious, traditional, loyal, and dogged in the work of building a church where there had been almost none.
Further reading. The standard modern life is Brian Cuthbertson's The First Bishop: A Biography of Charles Inglis (Waegwoltic Press, 1987), which follows Inglis as missionary, Loyalist, college founder, and bishop.
Online resources. The fullest free account is the Dictionary of Canadian Biography article on Inglis. His own report of the closing of Trinity Church rather than omit the prayers for the king, in a 1776 letter to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, is online at Teaching American History.
O God, our heavenly Father, you raised up your faithful servant Charles Inglis to be a Bishop and pastor in your Church and to feed your flock: Give abundantly to all pastors the gifts of your Holy Spirit, that they may minister in your household as true servants of Christ and stewards of your divine mysteries; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Pastor
Isaiah 6:1–8Psalm 71:16–23v1 Peter 5:1–11 or Acts 20:24–35Matthew 24:42–50