The largest denominations were the Congregational, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist. There were also important bodies of Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, French Huguenots, Lutherans, Quakers, and Roman Catholics, and such smaller groups as the Moravians, Mennonites, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders, and the Ephrata Society. The original settlement of the first Atlantic Seaboard colonies, especially Virginia and New England, combined the religious with the economic motive. Even the nationalistic impulse to extend British power was as much religious as political, for it included zeal for the extension of Protestantism on a scale to match and check the Spanish Roman Catholic empire which already included Florida, the West Indies, Mexico, and most of South America. Virginia was Anglican by intention, but from the start the Puritan element in both the company and the colony was strong. When the first settlement was made, and for a good while after, the Puritans were still a party in the Church of England. Episcopacy remained established in Virginia until the Revolution, though there was a strong influx of Scotch-Irish (Presbyterian, of course) and of Baptists in the eighteenth century. Since there was no Anglican bishop in America during all these years, there could be no confirmations. As always with established churches, nominal adherents greatly outnumbered communicants, and many were content with a “gentlemanly conformity.” Episcopacy was established also in North and South Carolina, though it never had a majority in either colony, and in New York after the British took it from the Dutch in 1667. The great Puritan migration to New England had for its religious purpose the founding of a Puritan state somewhat on the pattern of Calvin’s Geneva. The developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced, instead, a group of colonies—states in the American union by 1800—in which Congregationalism was the “standing order,” or established church, and one state, Rhode Island, in which, thanks to Roger Williams and the Baptists, complete religious liberty, deliberately adopted as a matter of conviction, got its first fair trial as a principle of government. But Congregationalism, though clinging to some of its legal advantages, had also grown tolerant, partly because dissenters and noncommunicants had become so very numerous. As early as 1760, the president of Yale estimated that 12 per cent in the four New England colonies were dissenters, and that not more than one-fifth of the others were communicant members of Congregational churches.