a to Georgia, the new preachers, entering into the
labors of the annoyed and persecuted pioneers of their communion, won
multitudes of converts to the Christian faith, from the neglected
populations, both black and white, and gave to the Baptist churches a
lasting preeminence in numbers among the churches of the South.

Throughout the country the effect of this vigorous propagation of rival
sects openly, in the face of whatever there was of church establishment,
settled this point: that the law of American States, by whomsoever
administered, must sooner or later be the law of liberty and equality
among the various religious communions. In the southern colonies, the
empty shell of a church establishment had crumbled on contact with the
serious earnestness of the young congregations gathered by the
Presbyterian and Baptist evangelists. In New England, where
establishment was in the form of an attempt by the people of the
commonwealth to confirm the people of each town in the maintenance of
common worship according to their conscience and judgment, the "standing
order" had solid strength; but when it was attempted by public authority
to curb the liberty of a considerable minority conscientiously intent on
secession, the reins were ready to break. It soon came to be recognized
that the only preeminence the parish churches could permanently hold was
that of being "servants of all."

With equal and unlimited liberty, was to follow, as a prevailing
characteristic of American Christianity, a large diversity of
organization. Not only that men disagreeing in their convictions of
truth would be enrolled in different bodies, but that men holding the
same views, in the same statement of them, would feel free to go apart
from one another, and stay apart. There was not even to be any one
generally predominating organization from which minor ones should be
reckoned as dissenting. One after another the organizations which should
be tempted by some period of exceptional growth and prosperity to
pretend to a hegemony among the churches--Catholic, Episcopalian,
Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist--would meet with some set-back as
inexorable as "the law of nature that prevents the trees from growing up
into the sky."

By a curious paradox, the same spiritual agitation which deepened the
divisions of the American church aroused in the colonies the
consciousness of a national religious unity. We have already seen that
in the period before the