of churchly care for the people of the
Southern colonies, on the part of those who professed the main
responsibility for it, the duty was undertaken, in the face of legal
hindrances, by earnest Christians of various names, whom the established
clergy vainly affected to despise. The Baptists and the Presbyterians,
soon to be so powerfully prevalent throughout the South, were
represented by a few scattered congregations. But the church of the
people of the South at this period seems to have been the Quaker
meeting, and the ministry the occasional missionary who, bearing
credentials from some yearly meeting, followed in the pioneer footsteps
of George Fox, and went from one circle of Friends to another, through
those vast expanses of thinly settled territory, to revive and confirm
and edify. The early fervors of the Society were soon spent. Its work
was strangely unstable. The proved defects of it as a working system
were grave. The criticism of George Keith seems justified by the
event--its candle needed a candlestick. But no man can truly write the
history of the church of Christ in the United States without giving
honor to the body which for so long a time and over so vast an area bore
the name and testimony of Jesus almost alone; and no man can read the
journeys and labors of John Woolman, mystic and ascetic saint, without
recognizing that he and others like-minded were nothing less than true
apostles of the Lord Jesus.

* * * * *

One impression made by this general survey of the colonies is that of
the absence of any sign of unity among the various Christian bodies in
occupation. One corner of the great domain, New England, was thickly
planted with homogeneous churches in mutual fellowship. One order of
Christians, the Quakers, had at least a framework of organization
conterminous with the country. In general there were only scattered
members of a Christian community, awaiting the inbreathing of some
quickening spiritual influence that should bring bone to its bone and
erect the whole into a living church.

Another and very gratifying impression from the story thus far is the
general fidelity of the Christian colonists in the work of the gospel
among the heathen Indians. There was none of the colonies that did not
make profession of a zealous purpose for the Christianizing of the
savages; and it is only just to say, in the face of much unjust and evil
talk, that there was none that d