1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Meade, William

MEADE, WILLIAM (1789–1862), American Protestant Episcopal bishop, the son of Richard Kidder Meade (1746–1805), one of General Washington’s aides during the War of Independence, was born on the 11th of November 1789, near Millwood, in that part of Frederick county which is now Clarke county, Virginia. He graduated as valedictorian in 1808 at the college of New Jersey (Princeton); studied theology under the Rev. Walter Addison of Maryland, and in Princeton; was ordained deacon in 1811 and priest in 1814; and preached both in the Stone Chapel, Millwood, and in Christ Church, Alexandria, for some time. He became assistant bishop of Virginia in 1829; was pastor of Christ Church, Norfolk, in 1834–1836; in 1841 became bishop of Virginia; and in 1842–1862 was president of the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia, near Alexandria, delivering an annual course of lectures on pastoral theology. In 1819 he had acted as the agent of the American Colonization Society to purchase slaves, illegally brought into Georgia, which had become the property of that state and were sold publicly at Milledgeville. He had been prominent in the work of the Education Society, which was organized in 1818 to advance funds to needy students for the ministry of the American Episcopal Church, and in the establishment of the Theological Seminary near Alexandria, as he was afterwards in the work of the American Tract Society, and the Bible Society. He was a founder and president of the Evangelical Knowledge Society (1847), which, opposing what it considered the heterodoxy of many of the books published by the Sunday School Union, attempted to displace them by issuing works of a more evangelical type. A low Churchman, he strongly opposed Tractarianism. He was active in the case against Bishop Henry Ustick Onderdonk (1789–1858) of Pennsylvania, who because of intemperance was forced to resign and was suspended from the ministry in 1844; in that against Bishop Benjamin Tredwell Onderdonk (1791–1861) of New York, who in 1845 was suspended from the ministry on the charge of intoxication and improper conduct; and in that against Bishop G. W. Doane of New Jersey. He fought against the threatening secession of Virginia, but acquiesced in the decision of the state and became presiding bishop of the Southern Church. He died in Richmond, Virginia, on the 14th of March 1862.

Among his publications, besides many sermons, were A Brief Review of the Episcopal Church in Virginia (1845); Wilberforce, Cranmer, Jewett and the Prayer Book on the Incarnation (1850); Reasons for Loving the Episcopal Church (1852); and Old Churches, Ministers and Families of Virginia (1857); a storehouse of material on the ecclesiastical history of the state.

See the Life by John Johns (Baltimore, 1867).