The full list includes the Rev. Messrs. Samuel Andrews of
Wallingford, Gideon Bostwick of Great Barrington (reckoned
ecclesiastically as in Connecticut), Richard Samuel Clarke of New
Milford, Ebenezer Dibblee of Stamford, Daniel Fogg of Brooklyn,
Bela Hubbard of New Haven, Abraham Jarvis of Middletown, Richard
Mansfield of Derby, John Rutgers Marshall of Woodbury, Christopher
Newton of Ripton, James Nichols of Plymouth. James Scovill of
Waterbury, John Tyler of Norwich, and Roger Viets of Simsbury. ]
were born in the Colony of Connecticut, and all had been compelled
to cross the ocean to obtain Holy Orders--there being no bishop in
this country--though the boon had often been solicited from the
English Church and as often denied. The trammels of State alliance
and the policy of preferring political expediency to religious
right prevented the authorities from venturing upon a spiritual
act and granting the prayer of the petitioners. The clergy had
ministered to their flocks all along in the face of intolerance
and bitter opposition from the Puritan body, and the war for
independence had subjected them to peculiar trials and reduced
them to the verge of ruin. But, without thinking of themselves, or
how they should be supported in the broken and disastrous
condition of their cures, their first effort or chief anxiety was
to provide for the now entirely headless Church; and so in Mid-
Lent, on the Festival of the Annunciation, March 25th, one hundred
years ago, ten of the fourteen clergy remaining in Connecticut
quietly assembled in this place, and, after careful, and, we must
believe, the most prayerful deliberation, they selected two
persons--the Rev. Jeremiah Leaming being the first choice, and
then the Rev. Samuel Seabury--as suitable, either of them, to go
to England and obtain, if possible, Episcopal consecration. It was
a secret meeting so far as giving any public notice of it was