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.
As a native Nova Scotian now living and working in Minnesota, I return home at least twice a year. No visit to my old home port of Halifax is complete without a pilgrimage day. I need to pay homage to the Anglican heritage in which I now serve as a priest of the Church. My pilgrimage begins with a visit to St. Paul’s, Canada’s first Anglican Church, then with a visit to the King’s College Chapel, the “Mother Church” of Prayer Book Anglicanism in North America. Without the former we would not have the latter, and we have this all because of the Bishop we honour today, the Rt. Rev. Charles Inglis, first Bishop of the Church of England in British North America.
My pilgrimage is a celebration of Canadian Church history, but it is also a homage to my own spiritual journey. It begins with a walk from my childhood home in Dartmouth to Halifax Harbour where I take the Ferry across the “Big Harbour,” my daily commute while a student at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. It was as a student at NSCAD that I had a crisis of faith, as church-going college students often do. A product of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, I found my childhood faith sadly too thin as I faced the challenges of a radically secular Art School faculty and student body. Punk rock anarchism had exploded on the scene, blowing up everything in its wake, including my faith. I recall walking into a local bookstore, desperate to find something to bolster what was left of it. There I found a book by British broadcaster and journalist Malcolm Muggeridge called Jesus Rediscovered. It contained articles he had written examining his growing attraction to Christ firstly as an atheist but later as an agnostic increasingly more open to Jesus. In that book, I discovered those he described as “God’s spies,” a line from King Lear Muggeridge used to describe those God leaves behind in every generation to point their fellow creatures home to God. From great saints of the 20th century like Simone Weil and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he traced a lineage of God’s spies back to St Augustine. For the first time, I discovered the Communion of Saints, and a history of the Church that predated the early 20th century origins of my own Pentecostal denomination. I became curious about historic Christianity, the Saints, and how they worshipped. This is when I discovered St. Paul’s Anglican Church, just two blocks from my Art School studio.
I had walked by St. Paul’s on an almost daily basis during my four years at NSCAD. Finally, inside the Georgian Church built in 1750, it was like entering a time portal to not only Halifax’ past, but—like Muggeridge described it—the Church’s past. Here I discovered ancient worship according to the Prayer Book tradition, liturgy and preaching both Catholic and Reformed, with beauty of architecture and music that transported me upward. Worshipping in this historic space was one of many steps on my own walk down the Canterbury Trail. When one enters St. Paul’s, one also discovers interior walls covered with the memorial plaques of Halifax’s founding generation, with several notables buried beneath the Church in its crypt. Memorialized by a plaque and buried beneath the Church is the first Bishop of Nova Scotia and founder of King’s College, Charles Inglis. A future article in the Red Tory Standard will explore Bishop Inglis at length, but for the purpose of my pilgrimage travelogue, it is sufficient to say that Charles Inglis was one of the essential men who secured a homeland for the High Tory tradition in British North America, shaping it for later generations.
It is shocking that Inglis’s story is not better known in the country whose foundations he helped lay. There are two things I am reminded of on my pilgrimage: the first was Inglis’s own courage and the second is his legacy. Inglis was a courageous man. As the republic to the south celebrates its 250th Anniversary, the Dominion of the north honours Loyalists like Inglis who offered another vision for the colonies. Inglis’s The True Interest of America Impartially Stated (1776) cast a vision for what could become of British North America. But the violence of the American Revolution birthed, as it were, two nations: one nation seized irregularly through war, and the other over time upholding what George Grant called “the principle of my ancestors.” This is a reminder to us that Tories like Inglis and the Loyalists like him who settled in the 14th colony of Nova Scotia—the one that did not revolt against the Crown—were the children of the Glorious Revolution and could speak of the great victory of that gloriously bloodless revolution that ended a civil war, restored the monarchy, and reinvigorated the institutions of government. A priest of the Church of Ireland known online as Laudable Practice has highlighted from Inglis’s The True Interest of America Impartially Stated: “The constitution of England, as it now stands, was fixed at the Revolution, in 1688—an era ever memorable in the fair annals of Liberty… the principles on which the glorious Revolution in 1688 was brought about, constitute the articles of my political creed.” This is a reminder that the Canadian High Tory tradition was birthed in liberty and won without bloodshed.
It was against a peaceable and ordered Glorious Revolution that Inglis saw the so-called American “Patriots” revolt violently. One can only imagine the courage it took for Inglis and all loyal priests of the Church of England to pray for the King in the Great Litany as their ordination vows required, but had been demanded stricken by George Washington and these Patriots. Inglis even did so with Washington physically present in the Church! As a missionary priest of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Inglis first served in Delaware and later Manhattan where he served as Rector of Trinity Church. From that base he continued to serve the Church and the loyalist cause courageously in running pamphlet battles with Alexander Hamilton and others, all the while serving his loyalist parishioners in royalist Manhattan.
Then there is Inglis’s legacy. After finally being forced to leave New York, he returned to England first in 1783, and then made his way to Nova Scotia where most of his former Trinity Church parishioners had fled. He was consecrated the first Bishop of British North America, which then included all of Canada and Bermuda. With the Diocesan boundary shrinking to something of the manageable size of the current Maritime provinces, he made St. Paul’s his see, serving as his Cathedral. From there he would go to build over 40 Anglican Churches throughout his Diocese. While in Manhattan, he had also taught at the original King’s College, which would become Columbia University after the British defeat. Once the Loyalists were forced to leave Manhattan in 1779 and made their way to Nova Scotia, Bishop Inglis reestablished King’s College in Windsor, NS, for the formation of future clergy. While a fire would destroy the historic seminary in the 1920’s, it would be rebuilt at its current location on the Dalhousie University campus in Halifax. It is King’s College Chapel that has faithfully upheld the Inglis legacy, providing Canadian Anglicanism robust Prayer Book worship, and giving global Anglicanism one of its great divines in the Rev. Robert Crouse.
My pilgrimage continues. I leave St. Paul’s after kneeling in prayer behind the pew reserved for the Royal Family the next time they are in town. But as I leave, I recall with some amusement how things come full circle in life. While a student at NSCAD, I became friends with a lad from Yarmouth County who would go on become a well-known illustrator. While I was studying theology at Regent College, my friend Kevin Sollows illustrated a stamp designed by graphic designer Stephen Slipp honouring Bishop Inglis. The Stamp fittingly depicts Inglis against a stained-glass window framing a Nova Scotia landscape, a Church and school—his great legacy—for all to see.
