Forms of church worship, rites, and ceremonies usually flourish best in warm latitudes, where the passive swing on ecclesiastical ropes, suspended between time-crusted pillars, requires less exertion than climbing the tree, Zaccheus-like for one’s self. The vines which, all along down the well-sunned slopes, from the Chesapeake Bay southwards, lean lovingly upon the magnolia and cottonwood, shaping themselves often into verdant gothic arches, grasped with no tighter fingers the supports which safely steadied their trusting confidence, than did their sunny-hearted cultivators curl securely the tendrils of their religious faith around the Episcopal oaks, whose acorns, dropped from rook-nested boughs in England, and gathered and planted here, soon sprang up and spread their cool shades for an easy, luxurious faith. The dominant morality of New York early borrowed its ingredients, as its capital, from whomsoever would lend it anything. Although all these contributions came to it through the Narrows, they soon broadened, on being landed. Thither came the sturdy, broad-breeched, meadow-bottomed Dutch, bringing the well-pounded creed of Dort, hardened and tempered, like blistered steel, upon the anvil of war, through the preceding century. The mace of iron-glaived Alva had again and again struck it; but the sturdy strokes had sent more fire into than they had ever brought from it. There, too, came Protestants from the Rhine, who had gone through the flames of St. Bartholomew’s day, and escaping first from France to Old Netherlands, and thence to New Netherlands, had carried with them, more carefully than their old delft, the sharp Articles of Calvinism. From Bohemia came the scholars of Huss; from Piedmont, the hunted Waldenses; from France, the men who turned their faces to centripetal Rome as their Mecca,—their religious creeds mixing and mingling in the wide-armed Bay of New York, which ever welcomed all religions that built houses on its shores or belted its waist with commercial girdles. The Baptists were early washed over to our coasts, and finding ample rivers for their aquatic rite, spread with every new wave of emigration. Congregational and Independent churches grew like young bullocks in almost every New England valley,—even putting their stiff necks through the Connecticut natural Ox-Bow at Hadley,—the only yoke they ever would submit to. We speak of churches and sects as propagators of morality, and as the yardsticks which measured the colonial morals; for as yet wicked men had not learned to use the church as covers, whence to spread nets for simpletons that lighted, like pigeons, on or near the adjacent grounds. In general, it may be said, that in spite of Puritan rites in New England showing the forbidding and cold side of the warm-hearted Gospel, in spite of the hedged Episcopal orchards of Virginia, where the blossoming odors were sought to be kept wholly inside the very high walls, in spite of the fermenting influences