History was about to repeat itself with unwonted preciseness of detail. On the gathering of the Assembly of 1837 a careful count of noses revealed what had been known only once before in seven years, and what might never be again--a clear Old-School majority in the house. To the pious mind the neglecting of such an opportunity would have been to tempt Providence. Without notice, without complaint or charges or specifications, without opportunity of defense, 4 synods, including 533 churches and more than 100,000 communicants, were excommunicated by a majority vote. The victory of pure doctrine and strict church order, though perhaps not exactly glorious, was triumphant and irreversible. There was no more danger to the church from a possible New-School majority. When the four exscinded synods, three in western New York and one in Ohio, together with a great following of sympathizing congregations in all parts of the country, came together to reconstruct their shattered polity, they were found to number about four ninths of the late Presbyterian Church. For thirty years the American church was to present to Christendom the strange spectacle of two great ecclesiastical bodies claiming identically the same name, holding the same doctrinal standards, observing the same ritual and governed by the same discipline, and occupying the same great territory, and yet completely dissevered from each other and at times in relations of sharp mutual antagonism.[297:1] The theological debate which had split the Presbyterian Church from end to end was quite as earnest and copious in New England. But owing to the freer habit of theological inquiry and the looser texture of organization among the Congregationalist churches, it made no organic schism beyond the setting up of a new theological seminary in Connecticut to offset what were deemed the "dangerous tendencies" of the New Haven theology. After a few years the party lines had faded out and the two seminaries were good neighbors.