n with some other imported church systems, from depending on a
transatlantic hierarchy for the succession of its ministry. The supply
of imported ministers continued to be miserably inadequate to the need.
In the first four decades of the century the number of its congregations
more than doubled, rising to a total of sixty-five in New York and New
Jersey; and for these sixty-five congregations there were nineteen
ministers, almost all of them from Europe. This body of churches, so
inadequately manned, was still further limited in its activities by the
continually contracting barrier of the Dutch language.

The English church, enjoying "the prestige of royal favor and princely
munificence," suffered also the drawbacks incidental to these
advantages--the odium attending the unjust and despotic measures
resorted to for its advancement, the vile character of royal officials,
who condoned their private vices by a more ostentatious zeal for their
official church, and the well-founded popular suspicion of its pervading
disloyalty to the interests and the liberties of the colonies in their
antagonism to the encroachments of the British government. It was
represented by one congregation in the city of New York, and perhaps a
dozen others throughout the colony.[135:1] It is to the honor of the
ministers of this church that it succeeded in so good a measure in
triumphing over its "advantages." The early pastors of Trinity Church
adorned their doctrine and their confession, and one such example as
that of the Rev. Thoroughgood Moor did much to redeem the character of
the church from the disgrace cast upon it by the lives of its patrons.
This faithful missionary had the signal honor of being imprisoned by the
dirty but zealous Lord Cornbury (own cousin to her Majesty the Queen,
and afterward Earl of Clarendon), of whom he had said, what everybody
knew, that he "deserved to be excommunicated"; and he had further
offended by refusing the communion to the lieutenant-governor, "upon the
account of some debauch and abominable swearing."[135:2] There was
surely some vigorous spiritual vitality in a religious body which could
survive the patronizing of a succession of such creatures as Cornbury
and his crew of extortioners and profligates.

A third element in the early Christianity of New York was the
Presbyterians. These were represented, at the opening of the eighteenth
century, by that forerunner of the Scotch-Irish immigration, Francis