The Bishop, Clergy, and Laity of the Diocese of Connecticut, in Convention assembled, send to you, by the hands of faithful brethren, these presents, in glad remembrance that your predecessors in office were moved, a hundred years ago, to raise and consecrate to the Order of Bishops the Reverend Samuel Seabury, Doctor in Divinity. We do honor to their fidelity to the Church of Christ and to the purity of their motives when they declared that they had "no other object in view but the interest of the Mediator's Kingdom, no higher ambition than to do their duty as messengers of the Prince of Peace." By their act we received "the blessings of a free, valid, and purely ecclesiastical Episcopacy," and our hitherto "inorganized Church" became duly equipped for the work it has since done and the witness it has borne. The language of the clergy of Connecticut, when they acknowledged on the sixteenth day of September, Anno Domini 1785, with "the warmest sentiments of gratitude and esteem," the pastoral letter addressed to them as a sequel to the consecration of their Bishop and the Concordate, may well be called to mind once more: "Greatly are we indebted to the venerable fathers for their kind and Christian interposition, and we heartily thank God that He did, of His mercy, put it into their hearts to consider and relieve our necessity. Our utmost exertions shall be joined with those of our Bishop to preserve the unity of faith, doctrine, discipline, and uniformity of worship with the Church from which we derived our Episcopacy, and with which it will be our praise and happiness to keep up the most intimate intercourse and communion." At that time the Catholic remainder of the ancient Church of Scotland and the Church in this new world were in the dust. The one was suffering from public disabilities, and the other lay prostrate from the effects of war; its churches were dismantled, its congregations scattered, and but a remnant of its clergy and people could be found to build up again the broken walls. To-day all things wear a new look. You are working with better and brighter hopes than your predecessors could possibly have; and we can assure you that the expectations of our honored forefathers in the faith have been wonderfully fulfilled, so that the Church in Connecticut has become "a fair and fruitful branch of the Church universal." Our clergy have increased tenfold, and our parishes have acquired both strength and public influence, and we stand to- day upon the old foundations and perpetuate the love of our early clergy and people for primitive truth and Apostolic order. The generations after us will never forget the debt of gratitude due to the Bishops of the Scottish Episcopal Church for their helping hands in the day of our weakness and need; the bond of Christian fellowship sealed in the Concordate by your predecessors and our first Bishop will continue to be recognized and cherished, as it has been by our fathers.