ited States, it was necessary that some new bond of
union should be adopted; and renewed efforts were made to procure an
Episcopate.

The clergy of the Church in Connecticut, at a meeting held in March, 1783,
elected the Rev. Samuel Seabury, D. D., their Bishop, and sent him to
England, with an application to the Archbishop of Canterbury for his
consecration to that holy office. The English Bishops were unable to
consecrate him, till an Act of Parliament, authorizing them so to do,
could be passed; and he then made application to the Bishops of the Church
in Scotland, who readily assented to the request, and he was consecrated
by them, in Aberdeen, on the 14th of November, 1784. The Prelates, who
were thus the instruments of first communicating the Episcopate to this
Country, were, the Right Reverend Robert Kilgour, D. D., Bishop of
Aberdeen, the Right Reverend Arthur Petrie, D. D., Bishop of Ross and
Moray, and the Right Reverend John Skinner, D. D., Coadjutor Bishop of
Aberdeen. Bishop Seabury returned to this Country, immediately after his
consecration, and commenced his Episcopal duties without delay.

A few clergymen of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, having held a
meeting at Brunswick, N. J., on the 13th and 14th of May, 1784, for the
purpose of consulting in what way to renew a Society for the support of
widows and children of deceased clergymen, determined to procure a larger
meeting on the 5th of the ensuing October, not only for the purpose of
completing the object for which they had then assembled, but also to
confer and agree on some general principles of a union of the Church
throughout the States. At this latter meeting, a plan of ecclesiastical
union was agreed upon, with great unanimity; and a recommendation to the
several States, to send delegates to a general meeting, at Philadelphia,
in September, 1785, was adopted.

At the meeting, in Philadelphia, in September and October, 1785, there
were present, deputies from seven of the thirteen States. This Convention
framed an Ecclesiastical Constitution, recommended sundry alterations in
the Book of Common Prayer, to adapt it to the local circumstances of the
Country, now severed from the parent State, and also took some measures
towards procuring the Episcopate from England. An Address was forwarded to
the English Bishops, through his Excellency John Adams, then Minister to
England, and afterwards President of the United States who zealously used