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Originally published in 1939
Some of this information may no longer be current and in that case is presented for historical interest only.
Edited by GET NJ, COPYRIGHT 2002
The English settlements in New Jersey, following the fall of the Dutch,
were largely made by Puritans from New England and Long Island, who
quickly thwarted the Catholic hopes of James, Duke of York, and the Proprietors' plans to establish the Church of England in the Colony. Connecticut Congregationalists founded Newark in 1666 as a theocracy, where
voting privilege necessitated membership in the church. While the foundation for two centuries of Calvinist domination was being laid in northern
New Jersey, Baptists pushed down from Rhode Island in 1668 to establish
the first Baptist church south of that State at Middletown.
The Colony's spirited wrangles with the Crown brought disfavor upon
the proponents of the Church of England. The church was finally founded
at Perth Amboy in 1698, but was almost immediately made the scapegoat
in continued disputes with royal authority. It soon disappeared as the official church and was later re-established as the Episcopal Church.
In 1675 Quakers began to settle West New Jersey and established there
the oldest Friends' colony in America. Adopting the southern plantation
way of life, the Quakers practiced the tolerance they preached. They op-
posed war, argued against slavery (although their wealth depended upon
the continuance of the system), and set other Colonials an example by
keeping their treaties with the Indians.
New Jersey's tolerance did not extend to Roman Catholics. The Colony
legislated in 1700 against priests, instructing that they be "deemed incendiary and disturbers of the public peace and safety, enemies of the true
Christian religion, and adjudged to suffer perpetual imprisonment." Under
determined missionaries such as Father Ferdinand Farmer and Theodore
Schneider, Catholicism stubbornly grew, but as late as 1785 probably no
more than 1,00o Roman Catholics were in the State. Not until 1814 was
the State's first parish established in Trenton.
The Lutherans did not become an important group until 1732 when
church members from the Palatinate in Germany settled in the Mahwah
district of northern New Jersey, Oldwick, Long Valley and New Brunswick. In 1750 the northern Palatine Lutherans united their forces and
built the present stone church in Oldwick.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the Colony was geographically
divided into four religious units. The Dutch Reformed members were pre-
dominant along the Hudson River; heirs of the Puritan tradition ruled
Newark and its environs; Perth Amboy and the central section harbored
the greatest mixture of creeds; and south and west, with the exceptions
of small groups of Baptists and Presbyterians, the land was controlled by
Quakers.
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