On June 11, 1794, the London Times reported the arrival of the American Envoy Extraordinary aboard the Ohio at Falmouth in Cornwall. President Washington had dispatched John Jay, Chief Justice of the United States, as his point man for mending increasingly strained relations between Great Britain and the young republic of the United States. Indeed, many Americans justly feared that another Anglo-American war was imminent.
The backdrop to Jay’s mission was the political ferment in France. Paris had become a bloodbath during the “Reign of Terror” as revolutionaries killed counterrevolutionaries with sickening and efficient rapidity on Dr. Guillotine’s scaffold of death. Fifteen hundred people were tried and executed in Paris in the summer of 1794. Some victims included the personal friends of Jay from his earlier foreign service on the Paris Peace Commission. The revolutionary tumult escalated to become a world-wide war against Britain that would continue for eleven more years. Already tens of thousands of combatants had perished in sea and land battles.
At home, Britain faced internal turmoil from radicals hoping for an English sequel to the French Revolution. Prime Minister William Pitt’s government had arrested and imprisoned some agitators in sympathy with the revolutionaries. Parliament even approved suspending the right of habeas corpus as a measure to suppress political dissent. From the perspective of the President’s House in Philadelphia, the French Revolution presented a clear and present danger to the United States, and Washington’s administration was determined to avoid any entanglements that might lure the fledgling United States into the fray with France or Britain.
With the arrival of Jay and the American delegation, Pitt was eager to resolve tensions with Great Britain’s former colonies in a way advantageous to the Mother Country and disadvantageous to France, America’s former ally. Thus, the warmest hospitality and good temperament were extended to Jay and his staff. Not only was Jay formally received by the Foreign Secretary William Wyndham Lord Grenville and officially presented to King George and Queen Charlotte, but he was also often invited to dinner parties and entertainments of Britain’s governing and social elites including Lord Chancellor Loughborough, War Secretary Henry Dundas, Sir Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, William Wilberforce, and others.
In his diary entry of July 7, 1794, Wilberforce recorded the occasion of his meeting Jay at Heath House, the home of Quaker merchant-banker Samuel Hoare Jr.:
Dined at Hampstead to meet Jay (the American envoy), his son, etc.,—quite American—sensible. I fear there is little spirit of religion in America; something of French, tinctured with more than English simplicity of manners; very pleasing, well-informed men. American Abolition of Foreign Slave Trade.
A Tale of Two Friends
The meeting of Jay and Wilberforce was the first of several more and the beginning of a friendship, correspondence, and collaborative relationship that carried on for the following fifteen years.
This brief telegraphic record of Wilberforce stokes the imagination about the content of their first conversation. No doubt both men soon discovered how much they shared similar experience and outlook. One ponders a striking comparison of the background of each.
Both men were born as subjects of the British Crown. Jay (b. 1745) was fourteen years senior to Wilberforce (b. 1759). Both hailed from seaport towns and were reared in wealthy merchant families. Jay was born in New York, a town of 11,000 on the fringe of a global empire. Wilberforce was born in Yorkshire, England in the trade and shipping center of Hull, a town of 15,000.
As children, both men experienced personal loss and profound grief. Four of Jay’s siblings were handicapped by physical or emotional afflictions, and a sister did not live to see adulthood. Wilberforce lost his father at age nine and two of his sisters did not survive to adulthood.
Jay was raised in an Anglican home characterized by evangelical piety and Calvinist conviction. His mother, Mary Van Cortlandt, was born into an influential New York grandee family and raised in the Dutch Reformed Church. His father, Peter Jay, was descended from French Huguenot refugees who had become Anglicans in England and later emigrated to New York.
Wilberforce was also raised in an Anglican home, though nominally so. His aunt and uncle Hannah and William Wilberforce, however, were devout and exposed their nephew to evangelical piety while serving as his guardians for nearly three years during a prolonged illness of his mother. In these years, young Wilberforce was introduced to evangelist George Whitefield, as well as the former slave ship captain turned Anglican minister and hymn writer John Newton.
Both Jay and Wilberforce were privileged with a classical education by private tutors and college. Jay attended King’s College (today’s Columbia University) and graduated in 1764. Wilberforce entered St. John’s College, Cambridge in the eventful year of 1776.
Called to Public Service
Both Jay and Wilberforce entered politics while still in their twenties. A “hightide in the affairs of men” swept both into public office at an early age. Jay was selected to serve as one of New York’s representatives at the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in September of 1774. Jay’s politics, like his religious faith and social views, were conservative. He was a high Whig of the Burkean variety. Principled, prudential, and polite, the young Jay listened to Virginia’s famed orator and revolutionary firebrand Patrick Henry, who in that early Congress declared: “Government is at an End. All Distinctions are thrown out. All America is thrown into one Mass. . . We are in a State of Nature.”
Unintimidated by the Virginian’s revolutionary demand for a new nation, Jay rose immediately to disagree, saying, “I can’t yet think that all Government is at an End. The Measure of Arbitrary Power is not full, and I think it must run over before we undertake to frame a new Constitution.” Jay’s conservatism won the day. The Congress chose the cooler-headed and eloquent 29-yearold New York delegate to draft “An Address to the People of Great Britain,” which was enthusiastically received and approved by the Congress. Its firm but conciliatory tone appealed to the good sense of the British people in arguing that Parliament had overreached and overreacted in dealing with the American colonies. Jay’s argument invoked English history, law, and jurisprudence. His moderation helped forestall the impending war for at least a few more months.
Wilberforce too was drawn into politics by the American War for Independence. From the visitor’s gallery of the House of Commons, young Wilberforce was captivated by the spirited debates about the war. With rapt attention, he and his college chum, William Pitt, listened to Great Britain’s mighty men of affairs, including Lord North, Charles Fox, and Edmund Burke. Their stirring arguments inspired both to become part of their company. Pitt’s vehement opposition to the war influenced Wilberforce on the merits of extricating Britain from the conflict with its colonies.
Both men resolved to stand for election upon reaching the eligible age of twenty-one. Pitt was elected to represent Cambridge and Wilberforce to represent Hull in 1780. The next year, Lord Cornwallis’s humiliating surrender at Yorktown, VA in October 1781 brought significant political pressure on the North government to end the war, yet Prime Minister North was resolute to continue the conflict. In response, Wilberforce delivered a speech in the House of Commons against Lord North’s administration and its plans “to pursue the ruinous war in the former cruel, bloody, and impracticable manner.” Within weeks, North’s government was brought down by his resignation. Britain soon began peace negotiations culminating in the Treaty of Paris in 1783 with Jay as a principal negotiator. During this time, Benjamin Franklin, one of the American Peace Commissioners, warmly greeted Wilberforce as a rising member of Parliament who had opposed the war with America. Wilberforce’s statesmanship had helped to bring an end to the unhappy war.
Jay was raised in an Anglican home characterized by evangelical piety and Calvinist conviction.
The American War of Independence was the catalyst for the rise of Jay and Wilberforce as eminent statesmen. By the occasion of their first meeting in 1794, Jay had already entered the pantheon of America’s principal founders and was nearing the apex of his political career. Wilberforce, though well advanced in his career, was more than a decade away from its apex. Having undergone a “great change” in his life in the mid-1780s, Wilberforce experienced a profound religious reorientation to his life’s purpose. Although he considered entering holy orders in the Church of England, John Newton advised him otherwise, and Wilberforce decided to remain in Parliament. Politics was his calling and field of Christian service. Now guided by evangelical conviction, he resolved to dedicate his life to “two great objects”: The abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.
At the time of meeting Jay in 1794, Wilberforce had made great strides toward his life’s tasks. Already, Parliament had debated various bills for abolition of the slave trade, and though consistently defeated, there were hopeful signs of growing public and parliamentary support of the cause.
In his efforts to reform manners (or morals), Wilberforce spearheaded a cultural and social renewal movement to reinvigorate British civil society. The goal was to foster a healthy spiritual and moral climate through voluntary associations of benevolent societies dedicated to making “goodness fashionable.” Charitable organizations were established to publish and distribute Bibles, educate the blind, provide health care for ailing seamen, promote vaccination, ease the plight of the poor and those in debtor’s prison, and more.
The Spirit of Religion
Upon their first meeting at Heath House in Hampstead on July 7, 1794, both Jay and Wilberforce certainly had much in common. What can be made of Wilberforce’s diary entry describing Jay as “quite American—sensible”?
In eighteenth-century parlance, the word “sensible” often conveyed the idea of emotional responsiveness or the ability to feel compassion. To be “sensible” implied intense emotion, empathy, and refinement of taste. In this meaning, “sensible” might be an appropriate description of Wilberforce himself. With their similar background and common outlook on faith, morals, society, politics, and calling, was Wilberforce noting that Jay was like himself when he described Jay as sensible?
Wilberforce also recorded in his diary that he feared that “there is little spirit of religion in America; something of French, tinctured with more than English simplicity of manners.” Here’s another provocative entry that appears to be a commentary on American society during the early republic.
Jay’s significant efforts had contributed to the rebirth and reorganization of the oldest Protestant tradition in North America.
Wilberforce expresses concern about the state of Christianity in America. His articulated anxiety is more than academic. Not only had he experienced his own personal spiritual awakening ten years prior to this meeting, but he actively championed the revival of what he termed “real Christianity” in his own country. In 1789, Wilberforce began a writing project that would culminate in the 1797 publication of his best-selling book: A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes in This Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity.
In this work, Wilberforce argues for the cultural and social recovery of a vibrant Christian faith informed by the Bible and established Christian doctrine. He was especially critical of nominal Christianity concerned with little more than moralism. In Wilberforce’s view, moralism was insufficient to weather the intellectual and political gale forces flowing from France. He hoped and prayed for a spiritual revival and rejuvenation of the culture-forming faith that had positively influenced Great Britain’s past as in the English Reformation. Wilberforce earnestly believed that his country’s present and future prosperity demanded real Christianity. With five years already invested in research and writing, these religious, cultural, sociological, and political questions were no doubt on his mind with respect to conditions in America as well.
How might have Jay discussed the matter of American religion with Wilberforce? Clearly the philosophical ideas and political ideology emanating from France were a concern to all religious, social, and political conservatives in America at the time. Some Americans had deeply imbibed the intellectual libations of the French philosophes to an intoxicating effect. Deism, skepticism, and unbelief were on the rise in America.
Jay’s own denomination was in very dire straits. At the conclusion of the war, the Anglican Church in America had lost 131 of its 286 clergy to flight or exile. Their ministry ordination had included vows of obedience to their king and bishop. The Church of England in America had been too closely tied to the British monarchy and was not popular in the burgeoning republic. Furthermore, the Anglican Church was supposed to be “episcopal” or ruled by bishops. Prior to the war, parishes in America were under the oversight of the Bishop of London, but the war’s end had severed political and ecclesiastical ties to the mother country and church, and consequently to the Bishop of London.
The task facing the war-devastated Anglican Church in America was the reformation and reorganization of the denomination with rule by American bishops. An active layman at Trinity Church in New York, Jay was selected as a delegate to a national church convention at Christ Church in Philadelphia in 1785 to constitute the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America and resolve its need for bishops.
In his official capacity as the Foreign Secretary of the United States, Jay relayed a letter from the nascent Episcopal Church addressed to English bishops through the American minister to Great Britain, John Adams. The correspondence sought the English Bishops’ mind on their willingness to consecrate American bishops who had been nominated for office by the Episcopal convention in Philadelphia. Jay encouraged Adams to meet with the Archbishop of Canterbury on behalf of the interests of the Episcopal Church. English consecration of American bishops was eventually approved, paving the way for a formal constitution of the Episcopal Church. Jay’s significant efforts had contributed to the rebirth and reorganization of the oldest Protestant tradition in North America.
Abolition of the Slave Trade
Given Wilberforce’s life work and his Herculean accomplishment in the abolition of the slave trade, perhaps the most intriguing record in Wilberforce’s diary entry of the Jay meeting is: “American Abolition of Foreign Slave Trade.” Written as if making a mental note to himself, one wonders what Wilberforce had in mind after his conversation with Jay that evening. Perhaps it is reasonable to conjecture that Wilberforce learned of Jay’s own commitment to manumission—the voluntary act of slave owners freeing enslaved persons. Wilberforce may have envisioned future collaboration with the influential American statesman in abolition.
Jay was an early and leading advocate of manumission. Because his father, Peter Jay, was one of the largest slave owners in New York, Jay had firsthand knowledge of the institution. Early in his political career and as a member of New York State’s first constitutional convention, Jay sought the abolition of slavery in 1777. However, his effort initially failed when he was overruled by the convention.
Two years later, as President of the Continental Congress, Jay used his public office to thank Anthony Benezet, a Quaker activist in Pennsylvania, for his anti-slavery public advocacy, and he assisted Alexander Hamilton and Henry Laurens with their proposal to offer slaves freedom in exchange for military service in the Continental Army. In 1780, Jay praised a Pennsylvania law that gradually abolished slavery and commended it as model legislation for his own State of New York.
While enroute to Spain in 1779 as an American diplomat, Jay was waylaid on the Caribbean island of Martinique. During his stay, Jay was eyewitness to the horrors and evils of West Indian slavery. Even so, he purchased a 15-year-old boy, Benoit, to serve as a household servant in his mission. Five years later, Jay manumitted Benoit, writing that “the children of men are by nature equally free and cannot without injustice be either reduced to or held in slavery.” At a personal level, Jay struggled with slavery by purchasing slaves for eventual release and freedom. Writing to tax officials when later Governor of New York, Jay describes his practice: “I purchase slaves and manumit them at proper ages and when their faithful services shall have afforded a reasonable retribution.” Jay’s personal confrontation with the institution of slavery was principled, proactive, and deliberately methodical—if gradual—in freeing enslaved persons.
In 1785, while serving as the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Jay helped form a voluntary association committed to manumission. Patterned after Pennsylvania’s successful Society for the Abolition of Slavery, Jay, Hamilton, Philip Schuyler, and others organized the New York Manumission Society. As its first president, Jay was influential in lobbying New York State for legislation to introduce gradual abolition along the pattern of Pennsylvania’s model.
Early in his political career and as a member of New York State’s first constitutional convention, Jay sought the abolition of slavery in 1777.
Jay and the Manumission Society achieved incremental legislative measures, such as securing a law to prohibit the importation of slaves for sale in New York in 1788, and another to make the manumission of slaves easier for owners. Efforts were also made to prohibit slave exportation from the state. The Society also exerted its influence nationally by urging the Philadelphia constitutional convention to ensure that the new constitution would prohibit importation of slaves. Political realities forestalled their hopes, and the 1787 Constitution effectively tabled the issue of importation for twenty years.
The Manumission Society developed non-legislative strategies for applying public, economic, and legal pressure on the slave trade. Newspapers were pressured not to advertise slave sales. Economic intimidation tactics were used at auction houses and shipping companies to discourage the trade. Pro bono legal assistance was made available to slaves for filing lawsuits against owners and traders, etc.
The Manumission Society also founded New York’s African Free School in 1787 as a long-range cultural transformation strategy for combating slavery in New York. A similar school in Philadelphia had helped to convince Franklin of the racial equality of African Americans as he witnessed the scholastic successes of young learners. In Jay’s view, education was the “soul of the Republic” and the best fortification against a pernicious alliance of “the weake [ignorant] and the wicked.” He expressed his wish for illumined American education to Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia in March 1785:
I wish to see all unjust and unnecessary discriminations everywhere abolished, and that the time may soon come when all our inhabitants of every colour and denomination shall be free and equal partners in our political liberty.
Jay’s high goal of education for all was reinforced with his leadership, professional prestige, and personal funding. He regularly contributed money to the African Free School and helped in fundraising and fiduciary management. By 1834, the school was incorporated into the New York school system. It had educated more than 2,000 free blacks and groomed the future leadership of African Americans in the early republic of the United States.
Five years after meeting Wilberforce, and while serving in his last public post as the Governor of New York, Jay signed legislation to emancipate slaves in the state. This official act was the closing chapter of twenty-two years of political activism for the abolition of slavery in New York. “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” passed the legislature in 1799 with only token opposition.
In 1801, Jay was fifty-five years old and longing to retire from the affairs of state. Turning down President John Adam’s nomination for a second turn as Chief Justice of the United States, Jay retreated to his farm in Bedford, New York. There he dedicated the remainder of his life to the obligations of his faith, family, community, and citizenship. Wilberforce corresponded with Jay in his retirement to seek his counsel and support of various reform efforts, but especially to facilitate trans-Atlantic cooperation in suppressing the slave trade.
By 1808, the slave trade was prohibited in both the British Empire and in the United States. Legislative victories in Parliament and Congress had secured abolition of the slave trade in statutory law. The remaining task regarding the slave trade was to enforce the law with British and American naval power on the seas. Writing to Jay in August of 1809, Wilberforce sought Jay’s prestige and influence to advocate for an Anglo-American convention on anti-slave trade laws. He specifically suggests that “a convention could be made between our countries by which, the ships of war of each should be authorized and encouraged” to seize for forfeiture the ships employed in the unlawful trade.
Jay responded to Wilberforce’s letter about three months later and affirmed the desirability of an Anglo-American convention, agreeing to help. Having retired from public office and with the opposition party in power, Jay wrote, “I can do but little—that little shall be done.” In closing his letter, he writes:
To see things as they are—to estimate them aright and to act accordingly, is to be wise—but you know my dear sir that most men, in order to become wise, have much to unlearn as well as to learn—much to undo as well as to do. The Israelites had little comfort in Egypt, and yet they were not very anxious to go to the promised land. Figuratively speaking we are all at this Day in Egypt, and a Prince worse than Pharaoh reigns in it, although the Prophet “like unto Moses” offers to deliver from Bondage, and invites us to prepare and be ready to go with him, under divine guidance and Protection, to the promised land; yet great is the number who prefer remaining in slavery, and dying in Egypt.
Jay’s appropriation of Israel as an enslaved people, serving as an analogy of the human condition as spiritually enslaved and in need of deliverance, could not have been lost on the English abolitionist.
During his years in retirement, Jay was very reticent to publicly express his opinions or views on many political issues of the day. He led a quiet self-imposed retreat from political affairs. However, there was one exception to his customary practice of silence.
Jay wrote, “I can do but little—that little shall be done.”
In the fall of 1819, an aggressive public campaign was launched by anti-slavery advocates to prevent Missouri’s admission to the union as a slave state. Both principle and politics were at stake as Missouri’s incorporation into the union would upset the parity of power in the U.S. Senate. New Jersey’s Elias Boudinot, a signer of the Declaration and former colleague of Jay in the Continental Congress, distributed a circular letter of New Jersey anti-slavery activists that argued that permitting the expansion of slavery in new states perpetuates the institution. The letter solicited public support and organized cooperation in prohibiting slavery in Missouri and all future states to be admitted to the union. Jay supported Boudinot’s efforts to curtail slavery’s expansion with the hope of emancipating enslaved people in every state.
Jay, the former Chief Justice of the United States, believed that the national government had the constitutional authority and power to proscribe slavery in new states. He fueled further controversy in public discourse and debate with additional comments that slavery was in “discordancey with the Principles of the Revolution.” He even suggested that the framers of the 1787 Constitution were conscious of the fact that slavery was “repugnant” to the Declaration of Independence’s proposition that “all men are created equal.”
Jay wrote that “the children of men are by nature equally free and cannot without injustice be either reduced to or held in slavery.”
Jay’s letter to Boudinot was published widely in many newspapers, inciting more controversy. The incendiary debate was eventually diffused by the Missouri Compromise in 1820. This measure allowed Missouri to be admitted to the union as a slave state alongside Maine as a free state. An additional provision prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Territory in any future states north of the thirty-sixth parallel.
American Christian Benevolent Societies
In addition to Jay’s continuous efforts to end slavery, he also remained involved in various benevolent activities that directly supported and fostered the advancement of the Christian faith. In 1815, Jay became president of the West Chester Bible Society. He also supported the American Tract Society for the distribution of Christian literature and the American Sunday School Union in its inter-denominational outreach for advancing literacy through Christian education. Locally, Jay contributed funds to the construction of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church to accommodate the fledgling and growing Christian flock in his own community of Bedford.
The most prominent and well known of his Christian and charitable activities was his involvement as an organizing officer and later president of the American Bible Society. The Society was patterned after the British and Foreign Bible Society, another organization with which Wilberforce was involved. Upon the death of Boudinot, the Bible Society’s founder, Jay agreed to take leadership of the Society in 1821. His major responsibility as president was to deliver the Society’s annual address. These addresses are more like sermons and provide insight into the faith and religious commitments of Jay.
In his first address to the Bible Society, Jay surveyed the scope of salvation history as recorded in the Bible. Having done so, he then turned his remarks to contemporary commentary on world affairs in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. He was particularly concerned about efforts to propagate the knowledge of the gospel amid the devastations and desolations inflicted upon Europe by the wars. Jay hailed the achievement of British Christians as inspiration in leading the pathway to world evangelization:
The people of Great Britain formed, and nobly supported their memorable Bible Society. Their example has been followed not only by the people of this country, but by [other nations]. . . . At no former period have the people of Europe and America instituted so many associations for diffusing and impressing the knowledge and influence of the Gospel, and for various other charitable and generous purposes, as since the beginning of the present century.
Jay then excoriated the slave trade as having scandalized the faith and hindered the advancement of the gospel in Africa. Britain and the United States had removed the trade as a scandal of the Christian religion and stumbling block to the gospel. He then singled out Great Britain’s Parliament and especially William Wilberforce as examples of inspiration to the watching world:
Well-merited honor was thereby reflected on the Legislature; and particularly on that excellent and celebrated member of it, whose pious zeal and unwearied perseverance were greatly and conspicuously instrumental to the removal of that obstacle.
Inspired by these examples and conscious of the opportunities that their labors had made for the distribution of the Scriptures and the knowledge of the gospel, Jay concludes his address by directing the Society to “persevere steadfastly in distributing the Scriptures far and near” because,
[t]hey comprise the inestimable writings by which the inspired apostles, who were commanded to preach the Gospel to all people, have transmitted it, through many ages, down to our days. The Apostles were opposed in preaching the Gospel, but nevertheless persisted. We are opposed in dispensing the Scriptures which convey the knowledge of it; let us follow their example.
Jay’s Life in Retrospect
In 1829, Jay was laid to rest in the family cemetery at his ancestral home in Rye, New York. His work for the cause of emancipation and other causes was left unfinished. Just as Reinhold Niebuhr reminds us that “[n]othing worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime,” so Jay’s work would be carried on by his children and theirs. Jay’s son, William, and his grandson, John Jay II, became prominent abolitionists. His namesake was an active leader of the Free Soil Party, later organizer of the Republican Party, and served as an American diplomat.
Wilberforce died four years later in 1833 in the satisfaction that he had lived to see the emancipation of enslaved people in the British Empire. His labors for the reformation of manners would also be carried on by his children, three sons of whom became clergymen, including the future bishop of Oxford.
Is Jay an American Wilberforce? With the resurgence of Christian involvement in politics during the last half century, there has been a revived scholarly and popular interest in the life and work of Wilberforce. Biographies have been written; day schools, projects, and fellowships have been named for him; and even a Hollywood biopic was produced. Wilberforce’s life is formally commemorated not only by the Church of England but also by the Anglican Church in North America. For many Christians active in politics, his story provides a heritage of social action and reform with an inspiring success story.
For Christians wanting to stand against contemporary currents of “cancel culture” and historical erasure, Wilberforce’s story is very important to preserve. It provides meaning, sanction, inspiration, heritage, and hope to those who are readily challenged and sometimes doubtful about the legitimacy, value, and prospect of effecting religious, cultural, and political renewal in American society. Indeed, Wilberforce’s story is a great chapter in the history of the church as it has struggled with what some have called the “enduring problem”—how to be in the world but not of the world.
There are other stories to do the same. These also merit conservation and retelling. They are inspiring stories of American Christian statesmen for which people of faith may find meaning, sanction, inspiration, heritage, and hope. In this 250th year of America’s founding, it is important to discover or rediscover historical “heroes” of evangelical and Reformed interest. Jay is one of them. He stands out among the principal founders of America as arguably the most religious, social, and political conservative with a reforming impulse to make his country a more just and better place. The parallels of his life story—including faith, family, and calling—are especially intriguing when compared to William Wilberforce. The fact that they knew each other and collaborated on mutual causes of interest is especially provocative. Perhaps the question is not whether John Jay was America’s Wilberforce, but rather, was Wilberforce Great Britain’s John Jay?