“I Am Not Worthy”

“He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, He lifteth up the needy from the dunghill, To make them sit with princes, And inherit the throne of glory: For the pillars of the earth are Jehovah’s, And he hath set the world upon them.”

— 1 Samuel 2:8, ASV

Venn’s Plan

By 1864 the Niger Mission had African clergy and catechists at several stations, and more were needed. But the only bishop who could ordain them, confirm converts, and consecrate churches was the Bishop of Sierra Leone, far away on the coast, who could rarely come. The Niger lay outside any British territory, so no colonial bishop had authority there. And it was plain after 1841 that a European bishop would be unlikely to survive the climate for long.

Henry Venn saw the answer. The mission should have a bishop of its own, and he should be an African. The society’s magazine set out the case in May 1864. The African church in Sierra Leone was already largely self-supporting. The Niger converts needed a chief pastor who could live among them. And “to delay any longer the native episcopate would be unduly to retard the development of the native Church.” The obvious man was Samuel Crowther.

Not everyone agreed. Some of the European missionaries in West Africa had grave doubts about an African bishop, and said so. Whether their objections were practical or something more, they would echo later. Venn pressed on. The government, through the Foreign Secretary, and the Archbishop of Canterbury were consulted, and a royal licence was prepared.

“I Am Not Worthy”

The one person who most strongly opposed the plan was Crowther himself. Many years later his son Dandeson told Jesse Page the story, which Crowther could never tell without emotion. He came to the society’s committee in London in a heavy old pilot’s coat with brass buttons, and some of the members laughed at his appearance. When Venn told him what they proposed, he refused. “I am not worthy,” he said. “No, sir, I am their servant in the field; I cannot accept it.”

Venn prayed with him and sent him away for two days to stay with his old friend J. F. Schön, to think it over. When he came back, he refused again. Then, the family remembered, Venn made one last appeal. “Samuel Adjai, my son, will you deny me my last wish asked of you before I die?” Crowther answered in the words of old Eli when Samuel brought him hard news: “It is the Lord; let Him do what seemeth Him good.” The two men knelt together, Venn weeping.

We should hold this story a little lightly. It comes from the family, decades later, and it has the shape of a story that has been told many times. But it fits everything else we know of Crowther. He had a genuine horror of self-importance. Afterwards he asked, through his son, to be addressed as “Right Reverend Bishop, and never as My Lord.” And before he left England he told the committee that he knew his new position made him “a kind of landmark,” and that “any false step taken by me will be injurious to all the Native Churches.”

Oxford

Before the consecration Venn wanted him to have a doctorate, as English bishops usually did. The Archbishop wrote to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford. Crowther’s Yoruba grammar, his dictionary, and his translations of the Scriptures were submitted as evidence of his learning. One leading member of the university opposed the degree. The rest voted for it almost unanimously, and the Regius Professor of Divinity composed the Latin speech presenting him. Samuel Crowther, who, the family remembered, had been taught his letters by a missionary’s wife in exchange for keeping her pantry clean, became a Doctor of Divinity of the University of Oxford.

Canterbury, 1864

He was consecrated in Canterbury Cathedral on St. Peter’s Day, 29 June 1864, by Archbishop Charles Longley. Two English clergymen were consecrated with him, as Bishops of Peterborough and Tasmania. Special trains ran from London. The sermon was preached by H. L. Mansel of Oxford, on the words of Peter to the elders of the church: “Tend the flock of God which is among you, exercising the oversight, not of constraint, but willingly … neither as lording it over the charge allotted to you, but making yourselves ensamples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:2-3, ASV). Two colonial bishops were meant to present Crowther to the Archbishop, but the Bishop of Winchester, it was said, stepped in to take the place of one of them, so that the African should receive, as Page put it, “a double honour.”

Two people had a special claim to be there. According to Page, one was Admiral Sir Henry Leeke, who forty-two years earlier, as captain of HMS Myrmidon, had taken the boy Ajayi from the slave ship off Lagos. The other, whose presence Henry Venn himself recorded, was an elderly lady. Page tells a story that she arrived to find her seat reserved for someone else, and refused to move. “I think I have a right equally to this seat,” she said, “because that black minister to be consecrated Bishop this morning was taught the alphabet by me.” She was Mrs. Weeks, widow of the Bishop of Sierra Leone, who, as Mrs. Davey, had taught him in her house at Bathurst. The Dean, Page says, let her stay. When Crowther returned to London afterwards, his first two calls were on Mrs. Weeks and on Admiral Leeke.

The Book of Samuel preserves the song of Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, after she had given her son to God. It is the verse at the head of this chapter. “He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, He lifteth up the needy from the dunghill, To make them sit with princes.” Hannah Crowther was still alive. Her son, the slave she had lost in 1821, now sat among the bishops of the Church of England.

What the Newspapers Said

The event was widely reported. The evangelical newspaper The Record called the consecration a “practical refutation … to the taunts of certain professors who maintain that the cerebral development of the negro shows that he is disqualified for intellectual pursuits.” It is a revealing sentence. In 1864 there were respected scientists in Britain who argued that Africans were a lesser branch of humanity, incapable of higher learning. The consecration of an African bishop was, for some, a public rebuttal of that belief. But the sentence also shows how deeply the idea had taken hold. Even Crowther’s supporters felt it necessary to argue that an African could think.

There were limits, too, to what the Church was prepared to do. The royal licence made Crowther bishop “in the said countries of Western Africa beyond the limits of our dominions.” His diocese lay entirely outside British territory. He was not given authority over the European missionaries in the British colonies of Sierra Leone or Lagos. Andrew Walls notes that this limit was deliberate. An African bishop over African clergy in an African land was acceptable. An African bishop over Englishmen in a British colony was not yet contemplated. The question would return.

“Can This Be Real?”

He sailed from England on 24 July and reached Freetown on 10 August 1864, where crowds turned out to welcome him. In his reply to the addresses of welcome, he used his favourite phrase: “Here we pause and raise our Ebenezer to God’s praise. Hitherto the Lord has helped us.” He told them that the weapon which prevailed most in the ministry was “the habit of prayer for help from above,” and that “we are better fitted when we feel our incompetency to change a sinner’s heart.” He reminded the students of Fourah Bay that in 1841 his friends had called him “a fool for joining the expedition without any guarantee of good pay like the Europeans.” And when a friend asked whether he meant to rest, he said: “I shall only rest when I have no more work to do.”

At Lagos on 22 August he held his first ordination. Then he went up the Niger. At Onitsha he held another ordination. That an African bishop should be ordaining African clergy on the banks of the Niger seemed to him almost beyond belief. “Can this be real?” he wrote.

At the same time, in the same town, a prince had died, and there were human sacrifices at his funeral, among them a girl of eight who was buried alive. The bishop’s consecration had changed his title. It had not changed the Niger.