They had delightful schemes for making it a strong Church of
England colony like Virginia. One of them suggested that, as the
title to the Three Lower Counties, as Delaware was called, was in
dispute, it should be taken by the Crown and given to the Church
as a manor to support a bishop. Such an ecclesiastic certainly
could have lived in princely state from the rents of its fertile
farms, with a palace, retinue, chamberlains, chancellors, feudal
courts, and all the appendages of earthly glory. For the sake of
the picturesqueness of colonial history it is perhaps a pity that
this pious plan was never carried out.
As it was, however, the Churchmen established themselves with not
a little glamour and romance round two institutions, Christ
Church for the first fifty years, and after that round the old
College of Philadelphia. The Reverend William Smith, a pugnacious
and eloquent Scotchman, led them in many a gallant onset against
the "haughty tribe" of Quakers, and he even suffered imprisonment
in the cause. He had a country seat on the Schuylkill and was in
his way a fine character, devoted to the establishment of
ecclesiasticism and higher learning as a bulwark against the
menace of Quaker fanaticism; and but for the coming on of the
Revolution he might have become the first colonial bishop with
all the palaces, pomp, and glory appertaining thereunto.
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