At the beginning of the war of independence there had been twenty
missionaries of the mother Church of England laboring in the
colony. They were in great part supported by the Venerable Society
in England, and they were under oaths of loyalty to the Crown; it
was not strange, therefore, that their sympathies were not on the
popular side. They were obliged to suffer great hardships; and the
end of the war found the Church in Connecticut in a very depressed
condition, with the clergy and people scattered and some of the
parishes quite broken up. Fourteen clergymen were left, and of
these ten met in the study of the Rev. John Rutgers Marshall on
the Festival of the Annunciation in 1783, to take counsel as to
what was to be done. Peace had not been proclaimed, but it was
known that the war was at an end; and the circumstances of the
times were such that they thought it necessary to take action at
as early a day as possible. And they instructed their candidate
that if he should fail to obtain consecration in England, he
should seek it at the hands of the bishops of the disestablished
church of Scotland.

Men had very real thoughts about Holy Orders then, when they were
obliged to cross the ocean for what they believed to be valid
ordination, and when one man out of every five who sought
ordination in England lost his life from shipwreck or disease. The
results of their faithfulness have been far greater and more wide-
reaching than they could have imagined. They would not have
believed it possible that at the end of a century there would be
in Connecticut nearly two hundred clergymen and twenty-two
thousand communicants, the Book of Common Prayer being used by
devout congregations throughout the limits of the State; and that
not only would this Diocese bear witness to God's blessing on