Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III The Dutch Reformed Church No provisions for religion are found in the Records of New Netherland until the arrival of the Director General Peter Minuit in 1626. For during the first two years of organized colonization under May and Ver- hulst, the small number of settlers, who were for the most part Protestant Walloons, exiles from the southern Provinces of the Spanish Netherlands, seem not to have had any kind of public worship. The public religious life of the Dutch colony, therefore, really began with the arrival of the two Comforters of the Sick, Sebastian Jansz Crol and Jan Huyck, in the company of the Director Peter Minuit.1 This office in the Church of Holland had attached to it the particular duty of admonishing and comforting the sick according to an elaborate form, The Consolation of the Sick or Instruction in the Faith and the Way of Salvation to Prepare Believers to DieWillingly, but in places destitute of an organized ministry the Comforters of the Sick conducted divine service, although they were warned under no pretext to arrogate to themselves whateverproperly belonged to the ministerial office. This divine service was very simple. It consisted of prayer. singing of psalms, the reading of some chapters of the bible and of some sermon of an orthodox Reformed minister.1 This later became the model for the public worship allowed by the provincial authorities in the new settlements, English as well as Dutch, that could not be provided with an orthodox minister.2 In all gatherings of the people, the Comforters of the Sick led in prayer according to the nature of the occasion. In the community, they were to be the watchful custodians of the faith and of the moral law, who were to instruct the ignorant, admonish sinners to repentance and amendment of …
