In the general dereliction of churchly care for the people of the Southern colonies, on the part of those who professed the main responsibility for it, the duty was undertaken, in the face of legal hindrances, by earnest Christians of various names, whom the established clergy vainly affected to despise. The Baptists and the Presbyterians, soon to be so powerfully prevalent throughout the South, were represented by a few scattered congregations. But the church of the people of the South at this period seems to have been the Quaker meeting, and the ministry the occasional missionary who, bearing credentials from some yearly meeting, followed in the pioneer footsteps of George Fox, and went from one circle of Friends to another, through those vast expanses of thinly settled territory, to revive and confirm and edify. The early fervors of the Society were soon spent. Its work was strangely unstable. The proved defects of it as a working system were grave. The criticism of George Keith seems justified by the event--its candle needed a candlestick. But no man can truly write the history of the church of Christ in the United States without giving honor to the body which for so long a time and over so vast an area bore the name and testimony of Jesus almost alone; and no man can read the journeys and labors of John Woolman, mystic and ascetic saint, without recognizing that he and others like-minded were nothing less than true apostles of the Lord Jesus. * * * * * One impression made by this general survey of the colonies is that of the absence of any sign of unity among the various Christian bodies in occupation. One corner of the great domain, New England, was thickly planted with homogeneous churches in mutual fellowship. One order of Christians, the Quakers, had at least a framework of organization conterminous with the country. In general there were only scattered members of a Christian community, awaiting the inbreathing of some quickening spiritual influence that should bring bone to its bone and erect the whole into a living church.