Page:A Century of Endeavor.pdf/19

"The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America" is a cumbersome title, but descriptive. This Society keeps its hundredth anniversary in 1921, and the story of those hundred years, must be full of interest to every student of missions. Yet every missionary student must realize at once that such a story requires a background to illumine and explain it, and will think it no waste of time to make a brief review of antecedent history, and to scan the life of the Church in this country, first in colonial days from 1607 to 1784, and then in the beginning of its independent life, from 1784 to 1821 when the Missionary Society was formed.

How had it been with us since the days when sons and daughters of the Church of England first landed on these shores? Royal charters accompanied colonists, whether loyal adherents to Church and king, as in Virginia, or faithful to king but eager for freedom from Church control and doctrine, as in Massachusetts. These charters bespoke kindness, consideration and religious care towards the native people of the new land. Hunt and Whitaker bear apostolic names in the