The Church of England became in name the official church of the colony, but two parties so remotely unlike as the Catholics and the Quakers combined successfully to defeat more serious encroachments on religious liberty.
The attempt to maintain the church of a small minority by taxes extorted by a foreign government from the whole people had the same effect in Maryland as in Ireland: it tended to make both church and government odious.

The efforts of Dr.Thomas Bray, commissary of the Bishop of London, a man of true apostolic fervor, accomplished little in withstanding the downward tendency of the provincial establishment.

The demoralized and undisciplined clergy resisted the attempt of the provincial government to abate the scandal of their lives, and the people resisted the attempt to introduce a bishop.

The body thus set before the people as the official representative of the religion of Christ "was perhaps as contemptible an ecclesiastical organization as history can show," having "all the vices of the Virginian church, without one of its safeguards or redeeming qualities."[62:1] The most hopeful sign in the morning sky of the eighteenth century was to be found in the growth of the Society of Friends and the swelling of the current of the Scotch-Irish immigration.

And yet we shall have proof that the life-work of Commissary Bray, although he went back discouraged from his labors in Maryland and although this colony took little direct benefit from his efforts in England, was destined to have great results in the advancement of the kingdom of Christ in America; for he was the founder of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.
The Carolinas, North and South, had been the scene of the earliest attempts at Protestant colonization in America.