In the Carolinas the attempted establishment of the English church was an absolute failure.

It was a church (with slight exceptions) without parishes, without services, without clergy, without people, but with certain pretensions in law which were hindrances in the way of other Christian work, and which tended to make itself generally odious.

In the two older colonies the Established Church was worse than a failure.

It had endowments, parsonages, glebes, salaries raised by public tax, and therefore it had a clergy--and _such_ a clergy! Transferring to America the most shameful faults of the English Establishment, it gave the sacred offices of the Christian ministry by "patronage" into the hands of debauched and corrupt adventurers, whose character in general was below the not very lofty standard of the people whom they pretended to serve in the name of Jesus Christ.

Both in Virginia and in Maryland the infliction of this rabble of simonists as a burden upon the public treasury was a nuisance under which the people grew more and more restive from year to year.