PAGE 272:
CHAPTER VII

practicable, and advantageous? I am too much a friend to the College at Brunswick to take up any argument against it, but if another door should be opened, which will answer every purpose sooner and better, I would desire to be such a friend to truth and providence as not to refuse an accepttance."

[To explain this extract, it may be proper to observe, that the hope of ever seeing Queen's College in a flourishing state, seems to have been now a forlorn one. The funds of the institution had become much reduced, and the number of students was only fifteen. The Trustees had shortly before given a call to the presidency, to the Rev. Dr. T. Romeyn, but the acceptance of it was very doubtful; and under these discouraging prospects of the Seminary, the expectation appears to have been cherished, that King's,(now Columbia) College, in the city of New-York, would be so divested of its Episcopal character, and so new modelled, as to afford speedily all the advantages desired for the education of the youth of the Dutch Church.

The Rev. Dr. Hardenbergh, one of the warmest friends of Queen's College, acknowledges in a letter written about this time to Dr. L., that "being totally unacquainted with the intentions of civil government, as to the important matters of education," he was utterly at a loss what to say upon the subject of educating youth for the supply of the Church.]

Further on, he says, "The repeated mention you have made about the necessity of forming a Classical meeting of the Southern district,

PAGE 273:
CHAPTER VII

notwithstanding the smallness of the body, has induced me to try if I can bring such a measure about. I have not yet seen Mr. Schoonmaker of Gravesend, and whether Father Van Sinderen can attend, I do not know; but I shall endeavour to form the poor suffering congregations again into a body, and get our ecclesiastical judicatories once more established."

This letter shows that, in the midst of numerous and weighty parochial duties, he was employed about matters of great importance, either to the community, or to the interests of the Dutch Church at large.

It was stated in the last chapter, that the Convention which had assembled in May, 1775, to act upon the letter from the Classis of Amsterdam, relative to a professor, owing to the alarm then prevalent, dissolved itself without attending to the business.

In October, 1784, another Convention assembled, and this was the first, it is believed, that met after the conclusion of peace. This body proceeded at once to the election of a Professor of Theology, and unanimously bestowed the honourable office upon the person, whom the Theological Faculty of Utrecht and the Classis had concurred in recommending, as fully qualified to perform it