The lawyer who would become the first Bishop of Georgia came to faith through a revival held at St. Helena’s Episcopal Church in Beaufort, South Carolina. Stephen Elliott Jr. was a local attorney when in 1831 he heard the Presbyterian evangelist Daniel Baker was coming to Beaufort and would be preaching in the Episcopal Church Elliott attended.
Baker wrote of the event, “I received a pressing invitation to visit Beaufort. I went; and there being no Presbyterian church in the place, I preached alternately in the Baptist and Episcopal churches. The Episcopal minister, the Rev. Mr. Walker, was very cordial, and offered me the use of his pulpit. Knowing the peculiar views of our Episcopal brethren, I proposed standing below; but he insisted upon it that I should go into his pulpit.”
The Editor of the Beaufort Gazette, William John Grayson, published his account of the revival:
“The effect no one can conceive, who was not present. Politics were forgotten; business stood still; the shops and stores were shut; the schools closed; one subject only appeared to occupy all minds, and engross all hearts. The church was filled to overflowing; seats, galleries, aisles, exhibited a dense mass of human beings, from hoary age to childhood. In this multitude of all ages and conditions, there were occasional pauses, when a pin dropping might have been distinctly heard. When the solemn stillness was broken by the voice of the preacher, citing the impenitent to appear before the judgment-seat of heaven; reproving, persuading, imploring, by the most thrilling appeals to every principle of his nature; and when crowds moved forward and fell prostrate at the foot of the altar, and the rich music of hundreds of voices, and the solemn accents of prayer rose over the kneeling multitude, it was not in human hearts to resist the influence that awoke its sympathies, and spoke its purest and most elevated feeling.”
Of the eighty persons who experienced a conversion experience at St. Helena’s during that revival were eight men who became ministers. Among these was Elliott, who would a decade later become the first bishop of Georgia. Born in Beaufort, South Carolina, to one of the Low Country’s most powerful slaveholding families, Elliott attended his father’s alma mater, Harvard, for one year before coming back to study closer to home. He graduated from South Carolina College in 1825 and practiced law until his conversion experience when Elliott began to study for holy orders. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1836, having been ordained a deacon the previous year. He taught religion at South Carolina College from 1835-1841.
Elliott was described in a biography as “A tall, commanding and majestic figure—the very impersonation of the Priests and Prophets of the past” with a “a clear, solemn and finely modulated voice.” He was not quite 35-years old when he was consecrated Bishop of Georgia in 1841. At that time, the diocese was composed of eight clergy serving five churches and two missions.
Pictured above: Daniel Baker (above) and the Rt. Rev. Stephen Elliott, Jr. (below).
