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Rh duration of these operations must be adjusted to the time available. If the duration of the temporary command is insufficient the operation must fail. It must fail even if the earlier steps have been taken successfully. The command of the English Channel, which Napoleon wished to obtain when maturing his invasion project, was only temporary. It is possible that a reminiscence of what had happened in Egypt caused him to falter at the last; and that, quite independently of the proceedings of Villeneuve, he hesitated to risk a second battle of the Nile and the loss of a second army. It may have been this which justified his later statement that he did not really mean to invade England. In any case, the British practice of fixing the station of their fleet wherever that of the enemy was, would have seriously shortened the duration of his command of the English Channel, even if it had allowed it to be won at all. Moreover, attempts to carry out a great operation of war against time as well as against the efforts of the enemy to prevent it are in the highest degree perilous.

In war the British navy has three prominent duties to discharge. It has to protect the maritime trade, to keep open the communications between the different parts of the empire and to prevent invasion. If Great Britain commands the sea these duties will be discharged effectually. As long as she does that, the career of cruisers sent to prey on her commerce will be precarious, because command of the sea carries with it the necessity of possessing an ample cruiser force. As longt as the condition mentioned is satisfied her ocean communications will be kept open, because an inferior enemy, who cannot obtain the command required, will be too much occupied in seeing to his own safety to be able to interfere seriously with that of any part of the British empire. This being so, it is evident that the greater operation of invasion cannot be attempted, much less carried to a successful termination, by the side which cannot make head against the opposing fleet. Command of the sea is the indispensable preliminary condition of a successful military expedition sent across the water. It enables the nation which possesses it to attack its foes where it pleases and where they seem to be most vulnerable. At the same time it gives to its possessor security against serious counter-attacks, and affords to his maritime commerce the most efficient protection that can be devised. It is, in fact, the main object of naval warfare.

Authorities for the above may be given as naval histories in general, placing in the first rank the well-known works of Captain A. T. Mahan, U.S.N. The book which must be specially referred to is Vice-Admiral P. H. Colomb’s Naval Warfare (3rd ed., London, 1900). See also the article.

SEABURY, SAMUEL (1729–1796), American Protestant Episcopal bishop, was born on the 30th of November 1729, in Ledyard, Groton, Connecticut. His father, Samuel Seabury (1706–1764), originally a Congregationalist minister in Groton, was ordained deacon and priest in the Church of England in 1731, and was a rector in New London, Conn., from 1732 to 1743, and in Hempstead, Long Island, from 1743 until his death. The son graduated at Yale in 1748; studied theology with his father; studied medicine at Edinburgh in 1752–1753; was ordained deacon by the bishop of Lincoln and priest by the bishop of Carlisle in 1753; was missionary in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1754–1757, and was rector in Jamaica, New York, in 1757–1766, and of St. Peter’s, Westchester, New York, in 1766–1775. He was one of the signers of the White Plains protest of April 1775 against “all unlawful congresses and committees,” in many other ways proved himself a devoted loyalist, and wrote the Free Thoughts on the Proceedings of the Continental Congress (1774) by “A. W. Farmer” (i.e. a Westchester farmer), which was followed by a second “Farmer’s Letter,” The Congress Canvassed (1774), answered by Alexander Hamilton in A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress, from the Calumnies of their Enemies. A third “Farmer’s Letter” replied to Hamilton’s View of the Controversy between Great Britain and her Colonies, in a broader and abler treatment than in the previous pamphlets. To this third pamphlet Hamilton replied with The Farmer Refuted (1775). These three “Farmer's Letters”—a fourth was advertised but apparently was never published—were forcible presentations of the pro-British claim, written in a plain, hard-headed style; their authorship was long in question, but it is certain that Seabury claimed them in England in 1783 when he was seeking episcopal consecration. At the same time he claimed the authorship of a letter, not signed by the Westchester farmer, which under the title An Alarm to the Legislature of the Province of New York (1775) discussed the power of this the only legal political body in the colony. He was arrested in November 1775 by a mob of lawless Whigs, and was kept in prison in Connecticut for six weeks; his parochial labours were broken up, and after some time in Long Island he took refuge in New York City, where he was appointed in 1778 chaplain to the king’s American regiment. On the 25th of March 1783 he was chosen their bishop by ten episcopal clergymen of Connecticut, meeting in Woodbury; as he could not take the British oath of allegiance, Seabury was shut out from consecration by the English bishops, and he was consecrated by Scotch bishops at Aberdeen on the 14th of November 1784. He returned to Connecticut in 1785 and made New Haven his home, becoming rector of St James’s Church there. The validity of his consecration was at first questioned by many, but was recognized by the General Convention of his church in 1789, In 1790 he took charge of the diocese of Rhode Island also. In 1792 he joined with Bishops William White and Samuel Provoost, who had received English consecration in 1787, and James Madison (1749–1812), who had received English consecration in 1790, in the consecration of Bishop Thomas J. Claggett of Maryland in 1792, thus uniting the Scotch and the English successions. He died in New London on the 25th of February 1796. He was a great organizer and a strict churchman: it is noteworthy that after his consecration he used the signature “ Samuel Bp. Connect.” Seabury’s “Farrner’s Letters” rank him as the most vigorous American loyalist controversialist and as one of the greatest masters of style of his period.

His son Charles (1770–1844) was rector in various Long Island churches; and Charles’s son Samuel (1801–1872), who graduated at Columbia in 1823, was rector of the Church of the Annunciation in New York in 1838–1868, and from 1862 professor of Biblical learning and the Interpretation of, Scriptures in the General Theological Seminary. William Jones Seabury (b. 1837), son of the last named, was rector of the Church of the Annunciation from 1868 to 1898, professor of ecclesiastical polity and law in the General Theological Seminary from 1873, and published a Manual for Choristers (1878), Lectures on Apostolic Succession (1893) and An Introduction to the Study of Ecclesiastical Polity (1894).

See E. Edwards Beardsley, ''Life and Correspondence of the Rt. Rev. Samuel Seabury'' (Boston, 1881).

SEADIAH (or ; in Arabic Saʽid) BEN JOSEPH (892–942) was born in 892 at Dilaz in the Fayyum, whence he is often called al-Fayyurni. Although he is justly regarded as the greatest figure in the literary and political history of medieval Judaism, nothing certain is known of his father or of his early life. Even the names of his teachers, generally recorded in the case of Jewish scholars, are unknown, with the exception of a certain Abū Kathir, who is himself obscure, and left no writings. Saadia’s literary work is in fact the more remarkable since it suddenly appears at a time when learning seemed to be dead both in East and West. Since the completion of the Talmud very little of any literary importance, if we except certain midrashim, had been produced among the orthodox (Rabbanite) Jews, although the Babylonian schools at Sura and Pumbeditha continued to enjoy a somewhat intermittent prosperity. On the other hand, learning was cultivated among the (q.v.); see also ), a sect of Jews who rejected the oral tradition, restricting their practice to the ordinances of scripture (miqra). It even seemed for a time as if conservative heresy would prevail against progressive orthodoxy. In Saadia, however, the Rabbanites found a powerful champion. Almost his first work, written at the age of twenty-three, was an attack on the teaching of 'Anan, the founder of Qaraism, who lived in the 8th century. This, like most of Saadia’s polemical writings, is no longer extant,