The conference in Yale College library, September 13, 1722, rather than the planting of a system of exotic missions, marks the true epoch from which to date the progress of a genuinely American Episcopal Church.[134:1] Crossing the recently settled boundary line into New York, not yet risen to rank with the foremost colonies, we find in 1730 a deepening of the early character, which had marked that colony, of wide diversity among the Christian people in point of race, language, doctrinal opinion, and ecclesiastical connection.
The ancient Dutch church, rallying from its almost asphyxia, had begun not only to receive new life, but, under the fervid spiritual influence of Domine Frelinghuysen, to "have it more abundantly" and to become a means of quickening to other communions.

It was bearing fruit, but its fruit had not seed within itself after its kind.

It continued to suffer, in common with some other imported church systems, from depending on a transatlantic hierarchy for the succession of its ministry.

The supply of imported ministers continued to be miserably inadequate to the need.
In the first four decades of the century the number of its congregations more than doubled, rising to a total of sixty-five in New York and New Jersey; and for these sixty-five congregations there were nineteen ministers, almost all of them from Europe.

This body of churches, so inadequately manned, was still further limited in its activities by the continually contracting barrier of the Dutch language.
The English church, enjoying "the prestige of royal favor and princely munificence," suffered also the drawbacks incidental to these advantages--the odium attending the unjust and despotic measures resorted to for its advancement, the vile character of royal officials, who condoned their private vices by a more ostentatious zeal for their official church, and the well-founded popular suspicion of its pervading disloyalty to the interests and the liberties of the colonies in their antagonism to the encroachments of the British government.