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The first English missionary priest in America of whose services we have
record was Master Wolfall, who celebrated the Holy Communion in 1578 for
the crews of Martin Forbisher on the shores of Hudson Bay, amid whose
solitudes Bishop Horden has won whole heathen tribes to Jesus Christ.
At about the same time the Rev. Martin Fletcher, the chaplain of Sir
Francis Drake, celebrated the Holy Communion in the bay of San
Francisco, a prophecy that these distant shores should become our
inheritance. A few years later (1583), divine service was held in the
bay of St. John's, Newfoundland, for Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and when his
ill-fated ship foundered at sea, the last words of the hero-admiral
were, "We are as near heaven by sea as by land." The mantle of Gilbert
fell on Sir Walter Raleigh, who was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth to
bear the evangel of God's love to the New World. The faith behind the
adventures of these men is seen in a woodcut of Raleigh's vessels at
anchor; a pinnace, with a man at the mast-head bearing a cross,
approaching the shore with the message of the Gospel. To some of us
whose hearts have been touched with pity for the red men, its is a
beautiful incident that the first baptism on these shores was that of an
Indian chief, Mateo, on the banks of the Roanoke. In May, 1607, the
first services on the shore of New England were held by the Rev. Richard
Seymour. Missionary services in the wilderness were not unlike those of
our pioneer bishops. "We did hang an awning to the trees to shield us
from the sun, our walls were rails of wood, our seats unhewed trees, our
pulpit a bar of wood--this was our 'church.'" It was in this church that
the Rev. Robert Hunt celebrated the first communion in Virginia, June
21, 1607. The missionary spirit of the times is seen when Lord De la
Warr and his companions went in procession to the Temple Church in