here practically in a state of slavery through
their ignorance of the country and its language. There were few to care
for their souls. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was
promptly in the field, with its diligent missionaries and its ignoble
policy of doing the work of Christ and humanity with a shrewd eye to the
main chance of making proselytes to its party.[140:1] With a tardiness
which it is difficult not to speak of as characteristic, after the lapse
of twenty-one years the classis of Amsterdam recognized its
responsibility for this multitude of wandering sheep; and at last, in
1793, the German Reformed Church had so far emancipated itself from its
bondage to the old-country hierarchy as to assume, almost a century too
late, the cure of these poor souls. But this migration added little to
the religious life of the New York Colony, except a new element of
diversity to a people already sufficiently heterogeneous. The greater
part of these few thousands gladly found their way to the more
hospitable colony of Pennsylvania, leaving traces of themselves in
family names scattered here and there, and in certain local names, like
that of Palatine Bridge.

The general impression left on the mind by this survey of the Christian
people of New York in 1730 is of a mass of almost hopelessly
incongruous materials, out of which the brooding Spirit of God shall by
and by bring forth the unity of a new creation.

* * * * *

The population of the two Jerseys continued to bear the character
impressed on it by the original colonization. West Jersey was
predominantly Quaker; East Jersey showed in its institutions of church
and school the marks made upon it by the mingling of Scotch and Yankee.
But there was one point at which influences had centered which were to
make New Jersey the seed-plot of a new growth of church life for the
continent.

The intolerable tyranny of Lord Cornbury in New York, at the beginning
of the century, had driven many of the Dutch Christians of that colony
across the Hudson. The languishing vine throve by transplanting. In the
congenial neighborhood of the Calvinists of Scotland and New England the
cluster of churches in the region of New Brunswick came to be known as
"the garden of the Dutch church." To this region, bearing a name
destined to great honor in American church history, came from Holland,
in 1720, Domine Theodore J. Frelinghuysen. The fervor and earne