missionary churches and missionary priests throughout the colonies. Candidates for this priesthood were required to submit to a thorough examination as to their fitness. Before sailing, they were required to report to the Bishop of London as their Diocesan and to the Archbishop of Canterbury as their Metropolitan. They were required to send full semi-annual reports of their work and to include in them any other information that promised to be of interest or advantage to the Society. John Talbot and George Keith were two of these missionaries. Talbot's appeal for the American episcopate was seconded in 1705 by fourteen clergymen from the middle colonies who convened at Burlington, N. J., to frame a petition to the English archbishop and bishops. In it they set forth the necessity in America of a bishop to ordain and to supply other ecclesiastical needs. The petitioners added that a bishop was also necessary to counteract "the inconveniences which the church labors under by the influence which seditious men's counsels have upon the public administration and the opposition which they make to the good inclinations of well-affected persons." [77] In this appeal for a bishop stress was laid upon the cost and dangers of a trip to England for ordination, [78] and also to the frequent loss of converts from the independent ministry because of the lack of ordination privileges in America. These references, and also that to the "counsel of seditious men," could not be agreeable to large numbers of dissenting colonists. They would not be viewed with favor in Connecticut, where, by 1705, Episcopalians had become so numerous that a wealthy New Yorker, Colonel Heathcote by name, and a man thoroughly acquainted with his New England neighbor, undertook to look after the Church-of-England men as unfortunate brethren of a common faith. He appealed to the English Society for the Propagating[k] of the Gospel in Foreign Parts to extend its missions into Connecticut. He asked that Rector Muirson be stationed at Rye, New York. Colonel Heathcote's idea was:-- to first plant the church securely in Westchester on the border of Connecticut; and secondly, from that point to act upon Connecticut, which was wholly Puritan and withal not a little bigoted and uncharitable.