udices which were likewise a moving cause of
the revolt, a moving force upon the minds of the people at large. And
these were utilized and systematized most effectively by the active
malcontents and leaders of the strife.

The vast majority of the population of the Colonies were Dissenters,
subjects of the crown who disagreed with it in matters of religious
belief and who had emigrated thither to secure a haven where they might
worship their God according to the dictates of their own conscience
rather than at the dictates of a body politic. The Puritans had sought
refuge in Massachusetts and Connecticut where the white spires of their
meeting houses, projecting above the angles of the New England hills,
became indicative of Congregationalism. Roger Williams and the Baptists
found a harbor in Rhode Island. William Penn brought the Quaker colony
to Pennsylvania. Captain Thomas Webb lent active measures to the
establishment of Methodism in New York and in Maryland, while the colony
of Virginia afforded protection to the adherents of the Established
Church. The country was in the main Protestant, save for the vestiges of
Catholicity left by the Franciscan and Jesuit Missionary Fathers, who
penetrated the boundless wastes in an heroic endeavor to plant the seeds
of their faith in the rich and fertile soil of the new and unexplored
continent.

Consequently with the passage of the Quebec Act in 1774 a wave of
indignation and passionate apprehension swept the country from the
American Patriots of Boston to the English settlements on the west. That
large and influential members of the Protestant religion were being
assailed and threatened with oppression and that the fear of Popery,
recently reestablished in Canada, became an incentive for armed
resistance, proved to be motives of great concern. They even reminded
King George of these calamities and emphatically declared themselves
Protestants, faithful to the principles of 1688, faithful to the ideals
of the "Glorious Revolution" against James II, faithful to the House of
Hanover, then seated on the throne.

"Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic Church?"
asked John Adams of Thomas Jefferson. This simple question embodied in
concrete form the apprehensions of the country at large, whose
inhabitants had now become firmly convinced that King George, in
granting the Quebec Bill, had become a traitor, had broken his
coronation oath, was a Papist at heart,