A History of American ChristianityBacon, Leonard Woolsey
Religion
A History of American Christianity
Bacon, Leonard Woolsey
United States -- Church history; United States -- Religion
It was the end of the Swedish colony, but not at once of the church. The
Swedish community of some seven hundred souls, cut off from
reinforcement and support from the fatherland, cherished its language
and traditions and the mold of doctrine in which it had been shaped;
after more than forty years the reviving interest of the mother church
was manifested by the sending out of missionaries to seek and succor the
daughter long absent and neglected in the wilderness. Two venerable
buildings, the Gloria Dei Church in the southern part of Philadelphia,
and the Old Swedes' Church at Wilmington, remain as monuments of the
honorable story. The Swedish language ceased to be spoken; the people
became undistinguishably absorbed in the swiftly multiplying population
about them.
* * * * *
It was a short-lived triumph in which the Dutch colony reduced the
Swedish under its jurisdiction. It only prepared a larger domain for it
to surrender, in its turn, to superior force. With perfidy worthy of
the House of Stuart, the newly restored king of England, having granted
to his brother, the Duke of York, territory already plighted to others
and territory already occupied by a friendly power, stretching in all
from the Connecticut to the Delaware, covered his designs with friendly
demonstrations, and in a time of profound peace surprised the quiet town
of New Amsterdam with a hostile fleet and land force and a peremptory
demand for surrender. The only hindrance interposed was a few hours of
vain and angry bluster from Stuyvesant. The indifference of the Dutch
republic, which had from the beginning refused its colony any promise of
protection, and the sordid despotism of the Company, and the arrogant
contempt of popular rights manifested by its governors, seem to have
left no spark of patriotic loyalty alive in the population. With inert
indifference, if not even with satisfaction, the colony transferred its
allegiance to the British crown, henceforth sovereign from Maine to the
Carolinas. The rights of person and property, religious liberty, and
freedom of trade were stipulated in the capitulation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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