olitico-religious party
in England were attracted to a country in which they were still to be
regarded before the law as of the "only true and orthodox" church; and
religious dissenters gladly accepted the offer of toleration and
freedom, even without the assurance of equality. One of the most notable
contributions to the new colony was a company of dissenters from
Somersetshire, led by Joseph Blake, brother to Cromwell's illustrious
admiral. Among these were some of the earliest American Baptists; and
there is clear evidence of connection between their arrival and the
coming, in 1684, of a Baptist church from the Massachusetts Colony,
under the pastorate of William Screven. This planting was destined to
have an important influence both on the religious and on the civil
history of the colony. Very early there came two ship-loads of Dutch
Calvinists from New York, dissatisfied with the domineering of their
English victors. But more important than the rest was that sudden
outflow of French Huguenots, representing not only religious fidelity
and devotion, but all those personal and social virtues that most
strengthen the foundations of a state, which set westward upon the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. This, with the later influx
of the Scotch-Irish, profoundly marked the character of South Carolina.
The great names in her history are generally either French or Scotch.

It ought to have been plain to the proprietors, in their monstrous
conceit of political wisdom, that communities so constituted should have
been the last on which to impose the uniformity of an established
church. John Locke did see this, but was overruled. The Church of
England was established in name, but for long years had only this shadow
of existence. We need not, however, infer from the absence of organized
church and official clergy among the rude and turbulent pioneers of
North Carolina that the kingdom of God was not among them, even from the
beginning. But not until the year 1672 do we find manifestation of it
such as history can recognize. In that year came William Edmundson, "the
voice of one crying in the wilderness," bringing his testimony of the
light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. The honest
man, who had not thought it reasonable in the Christians of
Massachusetts to be offended at one's sitting in the steeple-house with
his hat on, found it an evidence that "they had little or no religion"
when the rough woo