hat pride of colony which made the Bostonian critical of the
New Yorker, or gave to the true Virginian a feeling of superiority to
the "zealots" of New, England. To the Scotch-Irish or German dweller in
the Shenandoah Valley it mattered little whether he lived north or south
of an imaginary and disputed line that divided Maryland from
Pennsylvania. Political subjection to Virginia could not remove the Blue
Ridge Mountains which isolated him far more effectively from
Williamsburg than from Baltimore, or the racial and religious prejudice
that disposed him to give more credit to ministers trained at Princeton
than to clergymen ordained by the Bishop of London. In the back country,
lines of communication ran north and south, and men moved up and down
the valleys from Pennsylvania to Georgia, whether in search of homes or
in pursuit of trade or to spread the gospel, scarcely conscious of the
political boundaries which they crossed, and in crossing helped to
obliterate.

If the physiography of the back country cut across provincial
boundaries, the mingling of diverse races, in an environment which
constrained men to act along similar lines while leaving them free to
think much as they liked, could not but wear away the sharp edges of
warring creeds and divergent customs. The many Protestant sects,
differing widely in externals, were not far apart in fundamentals; and
as in leaving their European homes the chief causes of difference
disappeared, so life in America brought all the similarities into strong
relief. In this new country, where schools were few and great
universities inaccessible, the Presbyterian ideal of an educated clergy
could not be always maintained, while sects which in Europe had
professed to despise learning came to regard it more highly in a land
where the effects of ignorance were more apparent than the evils of
pedantry. No man could afford to be fastidious in any minor point of
religious practice when a good day's journey would no more than bring
him to the nearest church. Mr. Samuel Davies, one of the early
presidents of Princeton, and for some years a missionary on the Virginia
frontier, said that people in the up-country came twenty, thirty, and
even forty miles to hear him preach. In a letter to Mr. Bellamy, of
Bethlehem, he describes his labors, and asks for ministers to help him,
from "New England or elsewhere." So true is it, as Colonel Byrd had
observed in North Carolina, that "people uninstruc