The Carolina clergy at first formed a superior class, as nearly all the early ministers were men carefully selected and sent out from England by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Here there was special interest in the religious welfare of the slaves. All Over the South the Church ministers owed much to competition with those of sects, especially those of the Presbyterians, to which body belonged many of the Scotch and Irish immigrants after 1700. Dissent was dominant everywhere at the North. A vast majority of the people even in New York were dissenters, though the Episcopal clergy there successfully resisted all efforts against the Church tax, notwithstanding the fact that the same injustice in Massachusetts and Connecticut oppressed their brethren in those colonies. The New York clergy also fought every sort of liberal law, as to enable dissenting bodies of Christians to hold property. It was in good degree this attitude of theirs that filled the country, Virginia too, with such hatred of bishops. But this spirit was fully matched by that of the Independent ministers in New England. Their dissent was aggressive, persecuting, puritanical. Meeting-houses were cold, sermons long and dry, music vocal only. Religious teaching and the laws it procured, foolishly assumed to regulate all the acts of life. Extravagance was denounced and fined. In 1750, the Massachusetts Assembly forbade theatres as "likely to encourage immorality and impiety." Rhode Island took similar action in 1762. [Illustration: Costume about the Middle of the Seventeenth Century.] The ministers of Boston viewed bishops almost as emissaries of the devil. Herein in fact lay the primary, some have thought the deepest and most potent cause of the Revolution, since kings and the bishops of London incessantly sought to establish Anglicanism in Massachusetts, and English politicians deemed it outrageous that conformists should be denied any of that colony's privileges. For some time, under William and Mary's charter, in this province where Congregationalism had till now had everything its own way, only Church clergymen could celebrate marriage. In New York and Maryland, too, hostility to the establishment greatly stimulated disloyalty. This was true even in Anglican Virginia, where the Church found it no easier to keep power than it was in Massachusetts to get power, and where the clergy were unpopular, concerned more for tithes than for souls. [Illustration: Costume about the Middle of the Seventeenth Century.]