nd blood, they had met and acted, and their candidate for
consecration was in London urging his claims, before the ministers in
the Middle States had any knowledge of what was doing. After a year of
costly and vexatious delay in London, finding no progress made and no
hope of any, he proceeded to Aberdeen and was consecrated bishop
November 14, 1784. It was more than two years longer before the English
bishops succeeded in finding a way to do what their unrecognized Scotch
brethren had done with small demur. But they did find it. So long as the
Americans seemed dependent on English consecration they could not get
it. When at last it was made quite plain that they could and would do
without it if necessary, they were more than welcome to it. Dr. White
for Pennsylvania, and Dr. Provoost for New York, were consecrated by the
Archbishop of Canterbury at the chapel of Lambeth Palace, February 4,
1787. Dr. Griffith, elected for Virginia, failed to be present; in all
that great diocese there was not interest enough felt in the matter to
raise the money to pay his passage to England and back.

The American Episcopal Church was at last in a condition to live. Some
formidable dangers of division arising from the double derivation of the
episcopate were happily averted by the tact and statesmanship of Bishop
White, and liturgical changes incidental to the reconstitution of the
church were made, on the whole with cautious judgment and good taste,
and successfully introduced. But for many years the church lived only a
languishing life. Bishop Provoost of New York, after fourteen years of
service, demitted his functions in 1801, discouraged about the
continuance of the church. He "thought it would die out with the old
colonial families."[213:1] The large prosperity of this church dates
only from the second decade of this century. It is the more notable for
the brief time in which so much has been accomplished.

* * * * *

The difficulties in the way of the organization of the Catholic Church
for the United States were not less serious, and were overcome with
equal success, but not without a prolonged struggle against opposition
from within. It is not easy for us, in view either of the antecedent or
of the subsequent history, to realize the extreme feebleness of American
Catholicism at the birth of our nation. According to an official
"Relation on the State of Religion in the United States," presented b