In 1833, through the activities of Governor Hall and others, a parish was organized at Monrovia under the auspices of the American Episcopal Church whose interest in the well-being of the colony had early been enlisted. Two years later, Mr. James M. Thompson, a negro layman who, as lay-reader, had been holding the flock together, accepted the appointment as missionary on the part of the Church in America. A small appropriation was made, and a school was built at Mount Vaughan and opened, in 1836, with five boys and two girls as the beginning of an educational work which has been a feature of supreme importance to the development of the Liberian Church and to the Republic. On Christmas Day of that year, the Rev. Thomas S. Savage, M. D., arrived from Connecticut, the first white missionary sent by our Church to a foreign field. In 1837, the Rev. and Mrs. John Payne and the Rev. Lancelot B. Minor, of Virginia, arrived, followed by others in fairly quick succession. For fifteen years these devoted servants of our Lord, battling with an unhealthy tropical climate, labored to establish the faith of the Colonists and to spread the Gospel among the neighboring natives. In 1851, the Rev. John Payne was called home to be consecrated and sent back as “Bishop of Cape Palmas and Parts Adjacent”; and, until 1869, he skillfully guided the enterprises of the Church. It is probably true to say that nowhere and at no time since the first three centuries of the Christian Era, has there been so much of heroism, and of tragedy, bravely and quietly and naturally endured, as in this mission of Liberia during the period of eighteen years which Bishop Payne’s Episcopate covered and in the thirteen preceding it. It is rightly called the “Period of Establishment,” when, at the cost of quite one-fourth of the splendid lives devoted to the cause, the foundation of the now native Church was firmly laid both to resist every shock of heathen attack and to offer its strength to the superstructure of the native living Temple of God. And the call upon faith and zeal, so peremptory in Bishop Payne’s life, was echoed to the Church at home. The answer came in the persons of both white and negro volunteers; among them, the Rev. Eli W. Stokes, and the Rev. Thomas A. Pinckney, both of them negro priests.