influences from abroad upon American Christianity.

* * * * *

The Scotch-Irish immigration kept gathering volume and force. The great
stream of immigrants entering at the port of Philadelphia and flowing
westward and southwestward was joined by a tributary stream entering at
Charleston. Not only the numbers of this people, occupying in force the
hill-country from Pennsylvania to Georgia, but still more its
extraordinary qualities and the discipline of its history, made it a
factor of prime importance in the events of the times just before and
just after the achievement of the national independence. For generations
it had been schooled to the apprehension and acceptance of an
elaborately articulated system of theology and church order as of divine
authority. Its prejudices and animosities were quite as potent as its
principles. Its fixed hereditary aversion to the English government and
the English church was the natural fruit of long memories and traditions
of outrages inflicted by both these; its influence was now about to be
powerfully manifested in the overthrow of the English power and its
feeble church establishments in the colonies. At the opening of the War
of Independence the Presbyterian Church, reunited since the schism of
1741, numbered one hundred and seventy ministers in seventeen
presbyteries; but its weight of influence was out of all proportion to
its numbers, and this entire force, not altogether at unity with itself
on ecclesiastical questions, was united as one man in the maintenance of
American rights.

The great German immigration begins to flow in earnest in this period.
Three successive tides of migration have set from Germany to America.
The first was the movement of the petty sects under the invitation and
patronage of William Penn, quartering themselves in the eastern parts of
Pennsylvania. The second was the transportation of "the Palatines,"
expatriated by stress of persecution and war, not from the Rhenish
Palatinate only, but from the archduchy of Salzburg and from other parts
of Germany and Switzerland, gathered up and removed to America, some of
them directly, some by way of England, as an act of political charity by
Queen Anne's government, with the idea of strengthening the colonies by
planting Protestant settlers for a safeguard against Spanish or French
aggressions. The third tide continues flowing, with variable volume, to
this day. It is the volunt