dsmen of Carolina beguiled the silent moments of the
Friends' devotions by smoking their pipes; and yet he declares that he
found them "a tender people." Converts were won to the society, and a
quarterly meeting was established. Within a few months followed George
Fox, uttering his deep convictions in a voice of singular persuasiveness
and power, that reached the hearts of both high and low. And he too
declared that he had found the people "generally tender and open," and
rejoiced to have made among them "a little entrance for truth." The
church of Christ had been begun. As yet there had been neither baptism
nor sacramental supper; these outward and visible signs were absent; but
inward and spiritual grace was there, and the thing signified is greater
than the sign. The influence diffused itself like leaven. Within a
decade the society was extended through both the Carolinas and became
the principal form of organized Christianity. It was reckoned in 1710 to
include one seventh of the population of North Carolina.[65:1]

The attempt of a foreign proprietary government to establish by law the
church of an inconsiderable and not preeminently respectable minority
had little effect except to exasperate and alienate the settlers. Down
to the end of the seventeenth century the official church in North
Carolina gave no sign of life. In South Carolina almost twenty years
passed before it was represented by a single clergyman. The first
manifestation of church life seems to have been in the meetings on the
banks of the Cooper and the Santee, in which the French refugees
worshiped their fathers' God with the psalms of Marot and Beza.

But with the eighteenth century begins a better era for the English
church in the Carolinas. The story of the founding and the work of the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, taken in
connection with its antecedents and its results, belongs to this
history, not only as showing the influence of European Christianity upon
America, but also as indicating the reaction of America upon Europe.

In an important sense the organization of religious societies which is
characteristic of modern Christendom is of American origin. The labors
of John Eliot among the Indians of New England stirred so deep an
interest in the hearts of English Christians that in 1649 an ordinance
was passed by the Long Parliament creating a corporation to be called
"The President and Society for the Propagatio