1702. Muirson had organized the few churchmen at Stratford into a
parish in 1707. Different clergymen had, from time to time,
through the watchful care of Caleb Heathcote--a name that we ought
never to forget--ministered to that little band in their sore
trials and vexations. One, Francis Phillips, had come to them and,
after six months of neglect and carelessness, departed, leaving
only confusion behind him. But long before anything like permanent
ministration was begun at Stratford by George Pigot on Trinity
Sunday in 1722, Samuel Johnson at Guilford had been diligently
studying the Book of Common Prayer put into his hands by Smithson--
another name never to be forgotten--and in those studies we
find, it seems to me, the true beginnings of what was to become
the Diocese of Connecticut. The old Faith enshrined in the
historic creeds of the Prayer-Book; the law and life of worship
embodied in its formularies, all leading up to and centering in
the highest act of Christian worship, the Holy Eucharist; its
ideal of the Christian life taught in its Catechism and carried
out in all its offices from baptism to burial; on these
foundations, no broader and no narrower, was our Church here built
up. God grant that on these foundations it may stand till time
shall end!

I protest against the narrow and unhistoric idea that Johnson and
those who labored with and after him conformed to the Church of
England only because of their convictions touching Holy Orders. No
doubt those convictions were a factor, a most important factor, in
the change they made. But there was a great deal more involved
than that one question. Men who had gone from the dry bones of
Ames's Medulla and Wollebius to the "fresh springs" of Hooker and
Bull and Pearson, must have found how utterly unlike to the