another, the Middle colonies were thus early characterized by diversity
rather than uniformity of opinion. Dutch Protestants, Huguenots,
Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, New Lights, Moravians, Lutherans,
Catholics, and other denominations became too strongly intrenched and
too widely scattered to permit any one of them to rule, if it had
desired to do so. There were communities and indeed whole sections where
one or another church prevailed, but in no colony was a legislature
steadily controlled by a single group. Toleration encouraged diversity,
and diversity, in turn, worked for greater toleration.

The government and faith of the dissenting denominations conspired with
economic and political tendencies to draw America away from the English
state. Presbyterians, Quakers, Baptists, and Puritans had no hierarchy
of bishops and archbishops to bind them to the seat of power in London.
Neither did they look to that metropolis for guidance in interpreting
articles of faith. Local self-government in matters ecclesiastical
helped to train them for local self-government in matters political. The
spirit of independence which led Dissenters to revolt in the Old World,
nourished as it was amid favorable circumstances in the New World, made
them all the more zealous in the defense of every right against
authority imposed from without.


SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES

=Religion and Local Schools.=--One of the first cares of each Protestant
denomination was the education of the children in the faith. In this
work the Bible became the center of interest. The English version was
indeed the one book of the people. Farmers, shopkeepers, and artisans,
whose life had once been bounded by the daily routine of labor, found in