Daily Reading for November 14 • Samuel Seabury, First American Bishop, 1796
An intense earnestness and profound simplicity pervade the pages of Bishop Seabury’s Journal; and indeed, appear to have permeated his whole life. There is always evidence of his abiding consciousness that he was not his own, but that he belonged wholly to God, in whose presence, and under whose fatherly protection and guidance, he lived and moved and had his being. Such habitual devotion, and the utter simplicity of the faith and love out of which it grew, belong to a type of Christian character which the world knows little of, and which the Church, one is sometimes tempted to think, has well nigh forgotten. But it has existed, and doubtless still does exist; though to describe it now would be but describing the fashion of a kind life which some of us can well remember to have been brought up in, but which few, alas, can be conscious of having continued to keep.
From Memoir of Bishop Seabury by William Jones Seabury, D.D. (New York: Edwin S. Gorham, 1908).