The first minister of the Gospel who came to this country from Holland was the Rev. Jonas Michaelius, a graduate of the University of Leyden, and afterwards a missionary in San Salvador and Guinea. He preached in New Amsterdam from 1628 to 1G33, and then re- turned to Holland. See .M h iiAKi.it s. In the spring of the same year his successor, the Rev. Everardus Bo- gardus, arrived, bringing with him the first schoolmas- ter, Vi.-nn Roelandsen, who organized the parochial
sol i of the Collegiate Reformed Dutch Church. This
school is still in existence, without a break in its suc- cession of nearly two hundred and fifty years. It is sustained by the Collegiate Church, and has always boon "an instrument of much good to the Church and to the community." A history of it has been published in a small volume by its present principal, Mr. Dun- shee. I his intimate connection of the Church and the school was characteristic of the early Reformed church- es, and it antedates the claim of priority made for the New England Puritans by several years. The upper room in. Francis Molemaker's horse -mill was relin- qnished as a place of worship upon the arrival of domi- nie Bogardusin 1633, and a plain, frail w leu church- building and a parsonage were erected near what is now Old Slip, on the East River. In 1642, at the suggestion ot i he famous navigator David Petersen de Yrios. funds were raised for the erection of a stone edifice within 'he fort (now the Battery i, where the people worshipped until the church was finished in Garden Street in 1693. A church was planted in i be colony of Rensellaerswyck I Ubany i under the patronage of Kilian van Rensellaer, a pearl-merchant from Amsterdam, who founded a col- ony upon the large tract of laud of which he was the first patron. In 1642 he secured the ser\ ices of the
l.'c v. Johannes Megapolensis, whose call Btatea that " By tie Btate of navigation in the Bast and West [ndies a
door is opened through the special pro\ id. nee ,,l God,
also iii the New Netherlands, tor the preaching of the
( lospel of Jesus < Ihrist for the salvation of men. as g i
fruits have been already witnessed then1 through God's
mercy."' lb- was also t he firsl I 'n. test. ant missionary to
the Indians in this country, preceding the labors c.l
John Idiot near lie-ton by three or four years. See
Megapolensis. Hit uccessors Dellius and Lydius did
the same good work.
2. First Period. ■•The Dutch rule in Manhattan la-t- ed fifty years from the establishment of the first trading-
station. The Church had been organized about thirty years. The city of New Amsterdam, at the dale of [tie surrender, contained only 1500 inhabitants: and there were but live Reformed churches in the whole province
New York. Albany. Flatbusb and Flatlands, Esopus (or Kingston), and Breuckelen (Brooklyn). There were six ministers — the two Megapolenses, Drisius, Schaats, Polhemus. and Blom." They were men of thorough education, and. as far a- we can learn, diligent in the ministry. There were also a church at Bergi n, which was the first of an} denomination in New Jersey, organized in 1660, and one at New Amstel, Del., which subsequently dropped out of the connection. Tin- Hol- landers numbered, at the time of the surrender, about l". souls. This first period of the Church was nec- essarily one of very small beginnings. The churches were planted in the wilderness. They encountered all the difficulties of new colonies -surrounded by savage tribes, separated by long distances from each other, and dependent entirely upon Holland for their clergy and school-teachers. Civil affairs were sometimes unhap- pily mixed up with religious interests, and the growth was slow indeed.
3. The second period covers nearly three (piarters of a century (1664 to L737), during which about fifty churches were added to the denomination, (if these fourteen were in New . Jersey, about twenty on the banks of the Hudson River, about half as many in the valleys of Schoharie, Orange, and Ulster, and a half-dozen on Long Island and Statin Island, forty-two ministers began their labors, some of them only remaining a short time, among these churches; and at the close of the period there were sixty churches, and seventeen minis- ters of Hollandish extraction in America. When the English rule began in New York, emigration from Hol- land almost ceased. Frequent collisions occurred with the British governors of the province. Governor An- dros sent a minister of the Church of England [ see Van Ranslaer, Nicholas] to Albany to take posses- sion of the Dutch church there: and governor Fletcher, failing to impose the use of the English language by law upon the Hollanders, procured the passage of a bill by the Assembly settling a maintenance for ministers, which was so worded that, while it might apply to dis- senters, ii practically subserved the Church of England, and made it substantially the Established Church in the counties of New York. Kings, Queens, Richmond, and Westchester. Church-rates were exacted by the government for the support of these Episcopalian min- isters. The line of separation between the Dutch and English gradually became more distinct. Many of the Hollanders, to escape English oppression, removed to New Jersey, and settled principally in Middlesex, Som- erset. Monmouth, and Bergen counties, where they laid the foundations of churches that have long been great