ng Swedish Lutheran Church
in the three counties that became afterward the State of Delaware, and
heir to its venerable edifices and its good will; it was the official
and court church of the royal governors, and after the degenerate sons
of William Penn abandoned the simple worship, as well as the clean
living, in which their father delighted, it was the church promoted by
the proprietary interest; withal it proved itself, both then and
afterward, to hold a deposit of truth and of usages of worship
peculiarly adapted to supplement the defects of the Quaker system. It is
not easy to explain the ill success of the enterprise. In Philadelphia
it took strong root, and the building, in 1727, of Christ Church, which
survives to this day, a monument of architectural beauty as well as
historical interest, marks an important epoch in the progress of
Christianity in America. But in the rural districts the work languished.
Parishes, seemingly well equipped, fell into a "deplorable condition";
churches were closed and parishes dwindled away. About the year 1724
Governor Keith reported to the Bishop of London that outside the city
there were "twelve or thirteen little edifices, at times supplied by one
or other of the poor missionaries sent from the society." Nearly all
that had been gained by the Episcopal Church in Pennsylvania, where the
"Venerable Society" had maintained at times forty-seven missionaries and
twenty-four central stations, was wiped out by the Revolutionary
War.[120:1]

Another great beginning that comes within the field of vision in the
first four decades of the eighteenth century is the planting of the
great national churches of Germany. We have observed the migration of
the minor sects of Germany--so complete, in some cases, that the entire
sect was transplanted, leaving no representative in the fatherland. In
the mixed multitude of refugees from the Palatinate and other ravaged
provinces were many belonging both to the Lutheran and to the Reformed
churches, as well as some Catholics. But they were scattered as sheep
having no shepherd. The German Lutheran and Reformed immigration was
destined to attain by and by to enormous proportions; but so late was
the considerable expansion of it, and so tardy and inefficient the
attention given to this diaspora by the mother churches, that the
classical organization of the Reformed Church dates only from 1747, and
that of the Lutheran Church from 1760.[121:1] The beauti