On the Feast of the Annunciation, 1783, ten of the clergy of Connecticut met in the glebe house at Woodbury to elect a bishop. They met privately, for the Church was under the ban of civil authority, and they feared the revival of bitter opposition to an American episcopate which might alarm the English bishops and defeat their efforts. They did not come to make a creed, or frame a liturgy, or found a Church. They met to secure that which was lacking for the complete organization of the Church, and thus perpetuate for their country that ministry whose continuity was witnessed through all the ages in a living body, which is the body of Christ. I know of no greater heroism than that which sent Samuel Seabury to ask of the bishops of the Church of England the episcopate for the scattered flock of Christ. You remember the fourteen months' weary waiting, and when his prayer was refused in England, God led him to the persecuted Church of Scotland. Now go with me to Aberdeen; it is an upper room, a congregation of clergy and laity are present. The bishops and Robert Kilgour, Bishop of Aberdeen, Arthur Petrie, Bishop of Moray, and John Skinner, Coadjutor Bishop of Aberdeen, who preached the sermon. The prayers were ended; Samuel Seabury, a kingly man, kneels for the imposition of apostolic hands, and, according to the godly usage of the Catholic Church, is consecrated bishop, and made the first apostle for the New World. None can tell what, under God, we owe to those venerable men. They signed a concordat binding themselves and successors to use the Prayer of Invocation in the Scottish Communion Office, which sets forth that truth which is inwrought in all the teachings of our blessed Lord and His apostles, that the communion of the Body and Blood of Christ is limited to the worthy receiver of this blessed sacrament. The consecration of Seabury touched the heart of the English Church. In 1783 the Church of England did not have one bishop beyond its shores. There are to-day fifteen bishops in Africa, six in China and Japan, and twenty-three in Australia and the Pacific Islands, ten in India, seven in the West Indies, and eighty-five in British North America and the United States. Every colony of the British Empire and every State and Territory of the United States has its own bishop, except the Territory of Alaska.