CHAPTER IX. THE MIDDLE COLONIES: THE JERSEYS, DELAWARE, AND PENNSYLVANIA--THE QUAKER COLONIZATION--GEORGIA. The bargainings and conveyancings, the confirmations and reclamations, the setting up and overturning, which, after the conquest of the New Netherlands, had the effect to detach the peninsula of New Jersey from the jurisdiction of New York, and to divide it for a time into two governments, belong to political history; but they had, of course, an important influence on the planting of the church in that territory. One result of them was a wide diversity of materials in the early growth of the church. Toward the end of the Dutch occupation, one lonely congregation had been planted in that region which, at a later time, when the Dutch church in America had awaked from its lethargy, was to become known as "the garden of the Dutch church."[109:1] After the extinction of the high theocracy of the New Haven Colony by the merger of it in Connecticut, a whole church and town, headed by the pastor, having secured such guaranty of their political liberty as the unstable government of New Jersey was able to give, left the homes endeared to them by thirty years of toil and thrift, and lifting the ark of the covenant by the staves, set themselves down beside the Passaic, calling their plantation the New-Ark, and reinstituted their fundamental principle of restricting the franchise to members of the church. Thus "with one heart they resolved to carry on their spiritual and town affairs according to godly government." The Puritan migration, of which this was the nucleus, had an influence on the legislation and the later history of New Jersey out of all proportion to its numbers. Twenty years later the ferocious persecution of the Scottish Covenanters, which was incited by the fears or the bloody vindictiveness of James II. after the futile insurrection of Monmouth, furnished a motive for emigration to the best people in North Britain, which was quickly seized and exploited by the operators in Jersey lands. Assurances of religious liberty were freely given; men of influence were encouraged to bring over large companies; and in 1686 the brother of the martyred Duke of Argyle was made governor of East Jersey. The considerable settlements of Scotchmen found congenial neighbors in the New Englanders of Newark. A system of free schools, early established by a law of the commonwealth, is naturally referred to their common influence. Meanwhile a series of events of the highest consequence to the future of the American church had been in progress in the western half of the province. Passing from hand to hand, the ownership and lordship of West Jersey had become vested in a land company dominated by Quakers. For the