We behold--and it is a sight to stir the heart with "thoughts too deep for words"--we behold a suffering and a witnessing Church, in the depth of a long and wasting depression, reaching out the hand of love to a Church suffering and witnessing also, and trembling, to human seeming, on the verge of utter extinction. Perhaps--is it too much to say it?--it was because of this patient suffering and faithful witness that God gave to this Church the distinguished privilege of sending its first Apostle to the new world beyond the ocean. I cannot refrain from quoting here the admirable words of one of your own Scottish bishops. Speaking of the act which we commemorate, he says: "Mark, my brethren, how for the accomplishment of this work--according to the full measure of the gifts of the Spirit and of Apostolic order--it pleased God, as at the first, to choose the weak things of the world, and things that were despised, yea, and things which in the eye of man had ceased to be. To our Scottish Church with its hierarchy, which had formerly consisted of two Archbishops and twelve Bishops, then reduced to four; with its pastoral charge, which had once comprehended the care of every parish in the land, then shrunk to little mere than a score or two of scattered congregations--yea, and at the very time when an act of the civil legislature had declared all ecclesiastical orders conferred by her to be null and void; at such a time, to the poor persecuted remnant of the Church in Scotland was this grace given, that she should impart to the United States, now no longer dependent upon England, the first seed of the Episcopate which England had withheld. Yes, the first bishop who set foot on the continent of North America, the first bishop who went forth to a foreign land bearing the full blessings of our reformed Church, was consecrated to his Apostolic office, not amid the solemn pomp and august ceremonial of an English minister, no, nor in the privacy of an episcopal palace, but in the obscurity of an upper chamber in a common dwelling-house in Aberdeen." [Footnote: Bishop of St. Andrews; _Mending of the Nets,_ p.17 (ed. 1884).] If, as has sometimes been generously said, this noble act of faith and charity has afforded a new and signal illustration of our Lord's own words, "It is more blessed to give than to receive," that does not make the act a whit less noble, nor diminish by one jot the obligation of undying gratitude on the part of those who received the gift it gave.