Their very existence
depended on the powerful and unremitted assertion of that claim. All
Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the
religion most prevalent in our Northern Colonies is a refinement on the
principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism
of the Protestant religion. This religion, under a variety of denominations
agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty, is
predominant in most of the Northern Provinces, where the Church of England,
notwithstanding its legal rights, is in reality no more than a sort of private
sect, not composing most probably the tenth of the people. The Colonists left
England when this spirit was high, and in the emigrants was the highest of all;
and even that stream of foreigners which has been constantly flowing into these
Colonies has, for the greatest part, been composed of dissenters from the
establishments of their several countries, who have brought with them a temper
and character far from alien to that of the people with whom they mixed.
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