in some of the Colonies, especially New York, at times ' ineffectual murmuriugs ' against laws which forced people to pay taxes for the support of a ministry whose teachings were not in harmony with the religious sentiment of the great mass of the inhabitants,^ and in Pennsylvania there was a long, and at last a successful struggle to induce the Imperial Government to regard the affirmation of a Quaker as equivalent to the oath of another man ; but if there were any men in our Colonial history who, after the example of William Penn, and Lord Baltimore, lifted up their voices to protest, as these men had done, against the violation of the jirincipleof religious liberty here, I have not been able to discover their names. The

I IX. Penn. Mag. of History, 372.

'The laws in the New England Colonies, though not mentioned Ijy Mr. Stillfe, were still more severe than the Ministry .\ct of New York in compelling dissenters from the Puritanism of those colonies, to pay ta.\es to support their "Established Cliurch."

only subject of a quasi-ecclesiastical nature which appears to have excited general 'interest and to have met determined opposition was a scheme, at one time said to have been in contemplation of sending Bishops to this country. It was opposed not so much because it was thought to be the first step towards forming a Church Establishmentin this [whole] country, as because the Colonists had a peculiar abhorrence of the methods of enforcing the jurisdiction of the English Church as they were familiar with them in the old country. They may have forgotten many of the sufferings they had endured in England in consequence of their non-conformity and even committed themselves to a theory of. Church establishment, but there was one thing they never could forget, and that was the prelatical government of Land and the High Commission, and upon this were founded the popular notions of the authority wielded by Bishops. ...