ngly little. In the South the established churches were
practically dead before the laws establishing them were repealed and the
endowments disposed of. In New York the Episcopalian churches were
indeed depressed and discouraged by the ceasing of State support and
official patronage; and inasmuch as these, with the subsidies of the "S.
P. G.," had been their main reliance, it was inevitable that they should
pass through a period of prostration until the appreciation of their
large endowments, and the progress of immigration and of conversion from
other sects, and especially the awakening of religious earnestness and
of sectarian ambition.

In New England the transition to the voluntary system was more gradual.
Not till 1818 in Connecticut, and in Massachusetts not till 1834, was
the last strand of connection severed between the churches of the
standing order and the state, and the churches left solely to their own
resources. The exaltation and divine inspiration that had come to these
churches with the revivals which from the end of the eighteenth century
were never for a long time intermitted, and the example of the
dissenting congregations, Baptist, Episcopalian, and Methodist,
successfully self-supported among them, made it easy for them,
notwithstanding the misgivings of many good men, not only to assume the
entire burden of their own expenses, but with this to undertake and
carry forward great and costly enterprises of charity reaching to the
bounds of the country and of the inhabited earth. It is idle to claim
that the American system is at no disadvantage in comparison with that
which elsewhere prevails almost throughout Christendom; but it may be
safely asserted that the danger that has been most emphasized as a
warning against the voluntary system has not attended this system in
America. The fear that a clergy supported by the free gifts of the
people would prove subservient and truckling to the hand by which it is
fed has been proved groundless. Of course there have been time-servers
in the American ministry, as in every other; but flagrant instances of
the abasement of a whole body of clergy before the power that holds the
purse and controls promotion are to be sought in the old countries
rather than the new. Even selfish motives would operate against this
temptation, since it has often been demonstrated that the people will
not sustain a ministry which it suspects of the vice of subserviency.
The annals of n