not prosper when his servants are over-earnest in rooting up tares.
The course of the Society of Friends in the eighteenth century was
suicidal. It held a noble opportunity of acting as pastor to a great
commonwealth. It missed this great opportunity, for which it was perhaps
constitutionally disqualified, and devoted itself to edifying its own
members and guarding its own purity. So it was that, saving its soul, it
lost it. The vineyard must be taken away from it.

And there were no other husbandmen to take the vineyard. The petty
German sects, representing so large a part of the population, were
isolated by their language and habits. The Lutherans and the Reformed,
trained in established churches to the methods and responsibilities of
parish work, were not yet represented by any organization. The
Scotch-Irish Presbyterian immigration was pouring in at Philadelphia
like a flood, sometimes whole parishes at once, each bringing its own
pastor; and it left large traces of itself in the eastern counties of
Pennsylvania, while it rushed to the western frontier and poured itself
like a freshet southwesterly through the valleys of the Blue Ridge and
the Alleghanies. But the Presbyterian churches of eastern Pennsylvania,
even as reinforced from England and New England, were neither many nor
strong; the Baptists were feebler yet, although both these bodies were
giving signs of the strength they were both about to develop.[147:1]
The Episcopalians had one strong and rapidly growing church in
Philadelphia, and a few languishing missions in country towns sustained
by gifts from England. There were as yet no Methodists.

* * * * *

Crossing the boundary line from Pennsylvania into Maryland--the line
destined to become famous in political history as Mason and Dixon's--we
come to the four Southern colonies, Maryland, Virginia, and the two
Carolinas. Georgia in 1730 has not yet begun to be. All these have
strongly marked characteristics in common, which determine in advance
the character of their religious history. They are not peculiar in being
slave colonies; there is no colony North or South in which slaves are
not held under sanction of law. Georgia, in its early years, is to have
the solitary honor of being an antislavery and prohibitionist colony.
But the four earlier Southern colonies are unlike their Northern
neighbors in this, that the institution of slavery dominates their whole
social life.