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, first as assistant and then as rector. He was a faithful, learned, unremarkable colonial clergyman, and then the Revolution came, and it made him choose.
Inglis was a Loyalist, bound by conviction and by his ordination oath to the king, and he would not pretend otherwise even when it grew dangerous to say so. In the spring of 1776, with New York in rebel hands, word came that General Washington would attend service at Trinity and 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. No shot was 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.
The cost was heavy. That September a great fire swept New York and burned Trinity Church to the ground. When the war was lost and the new republic secure, Inglis was among the tens of thousands of Loyalists who could not stay. He gave up the country where he had spent his whole ministry and went north, to Nova Scotia, a cold and thinly settled British colony in what is now eastern Canada, swelling with refugees as broken as himself.
And there the loss became a foundation. The Anglican churches of British North America had never had a bishop of their own; for nearly two hundred years the colonies had been governed at arm's length from London, 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, the first overseas bishop of a church that would one day belong to the whole world. His diocese was almost absurdly vast, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and more, a scattering of churches across a wilderness. He spent the next thirty years building: ordaining clergy, planting parishes, founding a college at Windsor to train priests on the soil where they would serve.
He died in 1816, an old man of eighty-two, in the colony he had served for half his ministry. He had lost nearly everything once, his church burned and his country gone, and out of the losing he had laid the first stone of something larger than what had fallen. The single colonial diocese he was given has become the Anglican Church of Canada and a part of a Communion that now circles the earth; and every bishop consecrated for a distant land since stands in a line that begins, in a real way, with the Loyalist priest who would not stop praying for his king.
How we know. 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