problems which were Germany's despair.

[Illustration: Costume about the Middle of the Seventeenth Century.]

[Illustration: Costume about the Middle of the Seventeenth Century.]

In all the southern colonies the English Church was established, a
majority of the people its members, its clergy supported by tithes and
glebe. William and Mary secured it a sort of establishment also in New
York and Maryland. Yet at no moment of the colonial period was there a
bishop in America. No church building was consecrated with episcopal
rites, no resident of America taken into orders without going to London.
[footnote: See, for these facts, The Century for May, 1888.] Even in
Virginia, till a very late colonial period, the clergy retained many
Puritan forms. Some would not read the Common Prayer. For more than a
hundred years the surplice was apparently unknown there, sacraments
administered without the proper ornaments and vessels, parts of the
liturgy omitted, marriages, baptisms, churchings, and funerals
solemnized in private houses. In some parishes, so late as 1724, the
communion was partaken sitting. Excellent as were many of the clergymen,
there were some who never preached, and not a few even bore an ill name.
It was worst in Maryland, and "bad as a Maryland parson" became a
proverb. The yearly salary in the best Virginia parishes was tobacco of
about 100 pounds value.

The Carolina clergy at first formed a superior class, as nearly all the
early ministers were men carefully selected and sent out from England by
the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Here there was special
interest in the religious welfare of the slaves. All Over the South the
Church ministers owed much to competition with those of sects,
especially those of the Presbyterians, to which body belonged many of
the Scotch and Irish immigrants after 1700. Dissent was dominant
everywhere at the North. A vast majority of the people even in New York
were dissenters, though the Episcopal clergy there successfully resisted
all efforts against the Church tax, notwithstanding the fact that the
same injustice in Massachusetts and Connecticut oppressed their brethren
in those colonies. The New York clergy also fought every sort of liberal
law, as to enable dissenting bodies of Christians to hold property. It
was in good degree this attitude of theirs that filled the country,
Virginia too, with such hatred of bishops.

But this spirit was fully matched by that