"Founded on the doctrine and practice of the apostles": Confirmation in early US Episcopalianism and Canadian Anglicanism
YE are to take care that this Child be brought to the Bishop to be confirmed by him, so soon as he can say the Creed, the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments in the vulgar tongue, and be further instructed in the Church Catechism set forth for that purpose - the final exhortation to Godparents in the 1662 Ministration of Public Baptism of Infants . Connecticut's Samuel Johnson told Bishop Gibson [of London] in 1731 that his fellow Society for the Propagation of the Gospel missionaries were either omitting the exhortation entirely or else inserting the phrase "if there be opportunity". What made sense in Connecticut would seem to have been serviceable in Virginia as well. In 1724 Hugh Jones reported that Virginia parsons omitted the final injunction - John K. Nelson A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parson, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690-1776 , p.219. If the presence of Anglicanism in the North American colonies is dated from the first parish founded in...