Makemie. The arrest and imprisonment of Makemie in 1706, under the
authority of Lord Cornbury, for the offense of preaching the gospel
without a license from the government, his sturdy defense and his
acquittal, make an epoch in the history of religious liberty in America,
and a perceptible step in the direction of American political liberty
and independence.

The immense volume and strength of the Scotch-Irish immigration had
hardly begun to be perceptible in New York as early as 1730. The total
strength of the Presbyterian Church in 1705 was organized in
Philadelphia into a solitary presbytery containing six ministers. In
1717, the number having grown to seventeen, the one presbytery was
divided into four, which constituted a synod; and one of the four was
the presbytery of New York and New Jersey. But it was observed, at least
it might have been observed, that the growing Presbyterianism of this
northernmost region was recruited mainly from old England and from New
England--a fact on which were to depend important consequences in later
ecclesiastical history.

The chief increment of the presbytery of New York and New Jersey was in
three parts, each of them planted from New England. The churches founded
from New Haven Colony in the neighborhood of Newark and Elizabethtown,
and the churches founded by Connecticut settlers on Long Island when
this was included in the jurisdiction of Connecticut, easily and without
serious objection conformed their organization to the Presbyterian
order. The first wave of the perennial westward migration of the New
Englanders, as it flowed over the hills from the valley of the
Housatonic into the valley of the Hudson, was observed by Domine
Selyns, away back in 1696, to be attended by many preachers educated at
Harvard College.[137:1] But the churches which they founded grew into
the type, not of Cambridge nor of Saybrook, but of Westminster.

The facility with which the New England Christians, moving westward or
southwestward from their cold northeastern corner of the country, have
commonly consented to forego their cherished usages and traditions of
church order and accept those in use in their new homes, and especially
their readiness in conforming to the Presbyterian polity, has been a
subject of undue lamentation and regret to many who have lacked the
faculty of recognizing in it one of the highest honors of the New
England church. But whether approved or condemned, a fact so un