It was no fault of that Society that there was not, in America, an Episcopate before the war of the Revolution. Had the godly counsels and the strong appeals of the bishops, clergy, and faithful laity who shared in its plans and operations, been listened to, American Churchmen would have had no need to seek the Apostolic office outside the limits of their own country. This is not the time nor is this the place to consider, in detail, the reasons--if reasons in any proper sense of the word there were-- why the Episcopate, so strongly desired, had not been given. But it is worthy of notice that where the labors of the Society had been the most abundant and its missionaries most numerous, there the need of the Episcopate was most deeply felt and the call for it was loudest. Indeed, the only two colonies from which any opposition to sending bishops to America before the Revolution came, were Maryland and Virginia; and to those colonies, because in them the maintenance of the clergy was otherwise provided for, the Society sent few, if any, missionaries. No part of all the Western world received more of the Society's fostering aid than the New England colonies; and to none of them was more help extended than to the colony of Connecticut. From the day when the foundations of the Church were laid in that colony on to the outbreak of the Revolution, the benefactions that came from England were abundant and unceasing. With possibly a single exception, all the clergy in the colony were missionaries of the Society. They were also sons of the soil, who, because of convictions too strong to be resisted, went back to the Church from which their fathers had gone out, and in doing so incurred odium and reproach, scorn and contempt, the loss of much that gives earthly comfort and rejoicing, and sometimes the sundering of ties that seemed to be a part of life itself. They were taught, too, by the bitter experience of half a century, the difficulties and dangers attendant on a voyage to England to obtain Holy Orders; difficulties and dangers then so great that one in every five of all sent out for ordination perished by sickness or by shipwreck, and saw his native land no more. Theirs may be inglorious confessorships, unknown to or forgotten by men, but confessorships they are, and we cannot doubt that they find their place in the Book of God's remembrance.