nverts among a people who think
themselves very much injured." The pious efforts of Governor Fletcher,
the most zealous of these official propagandists, are even more severely
characterized in a dispatch of his successor, the Earl of Bellomont:
"The late governor, ... under the notion of a Church of England to be
put in opposition to the Dutch and French churches established here,
supported a few rascally English, who are a scandal to their nation and
the Protestant religion."[79:1] Evidently such support would have for
its main effect to make the pretended establishment odious to the
people. Colonel Morris sharply points out the impolicy as well as the
injustice of the course adopted, claiming that his church would have
been in a much better position without this political aid, and citing
the case of the Jerseys and Pennsylvania, where nothing of the kind had
been attempted, and where, nevertheless, "there are four times the
number of churchmen that there are in this province of New York; and
they are so, most of them, upon principle, whereas nine parts in ten of
ours will add no great credit to whatever church they are of."[80:1]

It need not be denied that government patronage, even when dispensed by
the dirty hands of such scurvy nursing fathers as Fletcher and Lord
Cornbury, may give strength of a certain sort to a religious
organization. Whatever could be done in the way of endowment or of
social preferment in behalf of the English church was done eagerly. But
happily this church had a better resource than royal governors in the
well-equipped and sustained, and generally well-chosen, army of
missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Not fewer
than fifty-eight of them were placed by the society in this single
province. And if among them there were those who seemed to "preach
Christ of envy and strife," as if the great aim of the preacher of the
gospel were to get a man out of one Christian sect into another, there
were others who showed a more Pauline and more Christian conception of
their work, taking their full share of the task of bringing the
knowledge of Christ to the unevangelized, whether white, red, or
black.[80:2]

The diversity of organization which was destined to characterize the
church in the province of New York was increased by the inflow of
population from New England. The settlement of Long Island was from the
beginning Puritan English. The Hudson Valley began early to be occu