A parallel evolution takes place in church government. Where an organized settlement is made on political principles, congregations carry their minister with them, or rather the ministers carry their congregations. Where the colony is normally founded and grows up as the mother country grew, the first ministers, like the first preachers of Christianity itself, are often laymen. In an interior county of Virginia Morris read every Lord's day to his neighbors from the writings of Luther and Bunyan, and a meeting house was at length built for him; it is a typical instance of the beginnings of most churches. The part of laymen remains long prominent in colonies. The Anglican lay reader is everywhere a feature of colonial church life. In the more flexible churches a storekeeper or retired sea captain will read Spurgeon's sermons or preach excellent sermons of his own in an Otago village or the Australian bush. Where missionaries have been sent out to convert the heathen in a country afterward colonized, many of them remain as ministers, as did Augustin and his monks in England. The Presbyterian catechist likewise becomes a settled minister. Others arrive. Men of independent character, like Dr. Lang, of Sydney, resolve not to wait for any dead man's shoes in the kirk, but sail beyond the seas to colonies where there is no minister of their own denomination. Heretics, incompatibles, men who have failed, men whose health has given way, emigrate in increasing numbers. Still, the supply is long deficient. Clergymen were scarce in New York. A bounty was offered to immigrants in Virginia. Six years after the establishment of the Church of England in North Carolina there was only one clergyman in the country. The few there are repeat the history of the first Christian bishops and the early English monks in serving a circuit of two, three, or more churches. The state comes to the rescue by providing for their support. In England contributions were at first voluntary; by the eighth century tithes were levied, folk-land was granted, and private endowments were made. Just so was the Church of England established and endowed in New York, Virginia, and North Carolina; in Maryland a poll tax of forty pounds of tobacco was levied for its support. In Connecticut and Massachusetts a church was set up in each parish on Congregationalist principles by a vote of the people, who elected the minister and voted his salary. So uncertain was the tenure that in several States even the Anglican minister was hired from year to year; and quite lately an Anglican church in a British colony engaged its incumbent, as it might have engaged its organist, for a term. In 1791 the Church of England in Canada was partially established, and its clergy endowed with grants of land. The Australasian colonies have pursued a very various policy. By the Constitution Act of 1791 one seventh of the ungranted lands in New South Wales was set apart for the support of a Protestant clergy. An attempt to endow the Anglican Church in South Australia in the early forties was defeated by a radical governor. A recrudescence of the ecclesiastical principle permitted the church settlements of Otago and Canterbury in New Zealand to appropriate a portion of the funds derived from the sale of lands for the endowment of the Presbyterian and Anglican churches respectively. So far the colonies followed, latterly with halting steps, the history of the mother country. As in political, so in ecclesiastical government, they have anticipated that history. The American state churches did not survive the Revolution. In Canada the Presbyterians and other sects successfully asserted their claims to a share in the church endowments, which between 1840 and 1853 were distributed among the municipalities, all semblance of a connection between church and state being thus destroyed. New South Wales passed through a period of religious equality with concurrent endowment of the four most numerous denominations, and a long struggle against the principle of establishment was ended in 1879, when the reserves were devoted to the purposes of education. The practice of confiscating for the church a portion of the proceeds of the land sales was gradually dropped in Otago and Canterbury, probably more for commercial reasons than in consequence of the opposition of the democratic governor aforesaid, who spoked the wheel of the South Australians. Yielding to Nonconformist pressure, the liberal Government in 1869 enforced the principle of religious equality throughout the crown colonies, which were thus, willingly or not, made to follow the lead of the movement in Ireland. The internal organization of the colonial church is also anticipative. Fifty-two years ago Sir George Grey bestowed on the Anglican Church in New Zealand, then governed by him, a constitution modeled on that of the corresponding church in the United States, as the political constitution he drafted for the colony was modeled on the Constitution of the United States; and it has been imitated in other Australasian colonies, which have thus declared themselves independent of the mother church, while the colony is still politically dependent on the mother country. In yet another point the daughters have outstripped the parent. Three Presbyterian denominations still fissure the old home of Presbyterianism; only two have ever existed in the colonies, and for thirty years these two have been one. The four chief Methodist sects in Australia are also said to be on the point of amalgamating.
The development of doctrine runs a fourth parallel to those of buildings, cult, and organization, and in a brief space it recapitulates a long history. In early colonial communities religious dogma is found in a state of "albuminous simplicity." "A healthy man," says Thoreau, "with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for Christianity." Nor will a bush-faller, at twenty-five shillings the acre. Distant from a church and a minister, he gets out of the way of attending the rare services brought within his reach, and forgets the religion in which he was nurtured. It does not mingle with his life. He is usually married at a registrar's. His children are unbaptized. His parents die unshriven. The dull crises of his mean existence come and go, and religion stands dumb before them. The inner spiritual realities fade from his view as their outward symbols disappear, and bit by bit the whole theological vesture woven by nineteen Christian centuries drops off him like Rip Van Winkle's rotten garments when he woke from his long sleep. In the matter of religion, as in almost all else, the colonist has to begin life again poor.
As population grows and people come nearer to one another, two things happen. The churches push their skirmishers into the interior, plant stations, and have regular services. Gradually the old doctrines strike root in the new soil, and at length a creed answering to Evangelicalism is commonly held, thus repeating the first stage in the history of Christianity in Asia as in England. On the other hand, many of those whom neglect had softened into indifference or hardened into contempt assume a more decided attitude. With the spirit of independence which colonial life so readily begets, and stimulated by the skeptical literature of the day, they take ground against the renascent religion. Secularism, which denies what Evangelicalism affirms and is on a level with that, is born. It organizes itself, has halls and Sunday meetings, catechisms and children's teaching, newspapers, and a propaganda. For a while it is triumphant, openly contemptuous of the current religious mythology, and menacing toward its exponents. The Secularist leaders make their way to the bench and the legislature, the cabinet and the premiership. It is here the hitch arises. Some (by no means all) of these leaders are found to prefer power to principle, and prudently let their secularism go by the board when a wave of popular odium threatens to swamp the ship. Financial distress spreads. The movement loses éclat. As Bradlaugh's Hall of Science in London has been sold to the Salvation Army, the Freethought Hall in Sydney has been purchased by the Methodists, and in other colonial towns the cause has collapsed. But it always remains, whether patent or latent, as a needed counterpoise to the crudities of Evangelicalism, and it is the core of that increasing mass of religious indifferentism which strikes those who have been brought up in the old country. Statistics are said to prove that Australia is more addicted to church-going than England. If they prove any such thing, then statistics (as Mr. Bumble irreverently said of the British Constitution) are hasses and hidiots. You may sit down on any Sunday morning at a colonial table with a dozen highly respectable persons of both sexes and all ages, not one of whom has any thought of going to church that day. Such an experience would be impossible in England. The mistake has arisen from comparing England as a whole, which has classes below the line of church-going or indeed of civilization, with Australia as a whole, where such classes hardly exist. Compare Australia in this respect with the English middle classes, and the fallacy will be manifest.