The first English missionary priest in America of whose services we have record was Master Wolfall, who celebrated the Holy Communion in 1578 for the crews of Martin Forbisher on the shores of Hudson Bay, amid whose solitudes Bishop Horden has won whole heathen tribes to Jesus Christ. At about the same time the Rev. Martin Fletcher, the chaplain of Sir Francis Drake, celebrated the Holy Communion in the bay of San Francisco, a prophecy that these distant shores should become our inheritance. A few years later (1583), divine service was held in the bay of St. John's, Newfoundland, for Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and when his ill-fated ship foundered at sea, the last words of the hero-admiral were, "We are as near heaven by sea as by land." The mantle of Gilbert fell on Sir Walter Raleigh, who was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth to bear the evangel of God's love to the New World. The faith behind the adventures of these men is seen in a woodcut of Raleigh's vessels at anchor; a pinnace, with a man at the mast-head bearing a cross, approaching the shore with the message of the Gospel. To some of us whose hearts have been touched with pity for the red men, its is a beautiful incident that the first baptism on these shores was that of an Indian chief, Mateo, on the banks of the Roanoke. In May, 1607, the first services on the shore of New England were held by the Rev. Richard Seymour. Missionary services in the wilderness were not unlike those of our pioneer bishops. "We did hang an awning to the trees to shield us from the sun, our walls were rails of wood, our seats unhewed trees, our pulpit a bar of wood--this was our 'church.'" It was in this church that the Rev. Robert Hunt celebrated the first communion in Virginia, June 21, 1607. The missionary spirit of the times is seen when Lord De la Warr and his companions went in procession to the Temple Church in London to receive the Holy Communion. The Rev. Richard Crashaw said in his sermon: "Go forward in the strength of the Lord, look not for wealth, look only for the things of the kingdom of God--you go to win the heathen to the Gospel. Practise it yourselves. Make the name of Christ honorable. What blessings any nation has had by Christ must be given to all the nations of the earth." The first act of Governor De la Warr, on landing in Virginia, was to kneel in silent prayer, and then, with the whole people, they went to church, where the services were conducted by the Rev. Richard Burke. In 1611 the saintly Alexander Whittaker baptized Pocahontas. Disease and death often blighted the colonies, and yet the old battle cry rang out--"God will found the State and build the Church." The work was marred by immoral adventurers, and it was not until these were repressed with a strong hand by Sir Thomas Dale that a new life dawned in Virginia.