The German element in the religious life of New York, at the period under consideration, was of even less historical importance. The political philanthropy of Queen Anne's government, with a distinct understanding between the right hand and the left, took active measure to promote the migration of Protestant refugees from all parts of Germany to the English colonies in America. In the year 1709 a great company of these unhappy exiles, commonly called "poor Palatines" from the desolated region whence many of them had been driven out, were dropped, helpless and friendless, in the wilderness of Schoharie County, and found themselves there 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 earnestness of his preaching, unwonted in that age, wakened a religious feeling in his own congregation, which overflowed the limits of a single parish and became as one of the streams that make glad the city of God.
In the year 1718 there arrived at the port of Philadelphia an Irishman, William Tennent, with his four sons, the eldest a boy of fifteen. He was not a Scotch-Irishman, but an English-Irishman—a clergyman of the established Protestant Episcopal Church of Ireland. He lost no time in connecting himself with the Presbyterian synod of Philadelphia, and after a few years of pastoral service in the colony of New York became pastor of the Presbyterian church at Neshaminy, in Pennsylvania, twenty miles north of Philadelphia. Here his zeal for Christian education moved him to begin a school, which, called from the humble building in which it was held, became famous in American Presbyterian history as the Log College. Here were educated many men who became eminent in the ministry of the gospel, and among them the four boys who had come with their father from Ireland. Gilbert, the eldest and most distinguished of them, came in 1727, from his temporary position as tutor in the Log College, to be pastor to the Presbyterian church in New Brunswick, where Frelinghuysen, in the face of opposition from his own brethren in the ministry, had for seven years pursued his deeply spiritual and fruitful work as pastor to the Dutch church. Whatever debate there may be over the question of an official and tactual succession in the church, the existence of a vital and spiritual succession, binding "the generations each to each," need not be disputed by any. Sometimes, as here, the succession is distinctly traceable. Gilbert Tennent was own son in the ministry to Theodore Frelinghuysen as truly as Timothy to Paul, but he became spiritual father to a great multitude.
In the year 1730 the total population of Pennsylvania was estimated by Governor Gordon at forty-nine thousand. In the less than fifty years since the colony was settled it had outstripped all the older colonies, and Philadelphia, its chief town, continued to be by far the most important port for the landing of immigrants. The original Quaker influence was still dominant in the colony, but the very large majority of the population was German; and presently the Quakers were to find their political supremacy departing, and were to acquiesce in the change by abdicating political preferment.[143:1] The religious influence of the Society of Friends continued to be potent and in many respects most salutary. But the exceptional growth and prosperity of the colony was attended with a vast "unearned increment" of wealth to the first settlers, and the maxim, "Religio peperit divitias, et mater devorata est a prole,"[143:2] received one of the most striking illustrations in all history. So speedily the Society had entered on its Middle Age;[143:3] the most violent of protests against formalism had begun to congeal into a precise and sometimes frivolous system of formalities. But the lasting impress made on the legislation of the colony by Penn and his contemporaries is a monument of their wise and Christian statesmanship. Up to their time the most humane penal codes in Christendom were those of New England, founded on the Mosaic law. But even in these, and still more in the application of them, there were traces of that widely prevalent feeling that punishment is society's bitter and malignant revenge on the criminal. The penal code and the prison discipline of Pennsylvania became an object of admiring study for social reformers the world over, and marked a long stage in the advancement of the kingdom of God. The city of Philadelphia early took the lead of American towns, not only in size, but in its public charities and its cultivation of humane arts.
Notwithstanding these eminent honors, there is much in the later history of the great commonwealth in which Quakerism held dominion for the greater part of a century to reflect doubt on the fitness of that form of Christianity for conducting the affairs, either civil or religious, of a great community.