CHAPTER   II.

HISTORY OF THE SCHOOL FROM ITS ESTABLISHMENT, 1633, TO THE
CAPITULATION, 1664 ; EMBRACING A PERIOD OF THIRTY-ONE
YEARS.

In the " Historical Sketch" we have seen that the Dutch
have long been distinguished for their interest in education.
" Neither the perils of war, nor the busy pursuit of gain, nor the
excitement of political strife, ever caused them to neglect the
duty of educating their offspring. Schools were eveiywhere pro¬
vided, at the public expense, with good schoolmasters, to instruct
the children of all classes in the usual branches of education ; and
the Consistories of the churches took zealous care to have their
youth thoroughly taught the Catechism and the Articles of
Religion." *

Their national prosperity must be attributed, in no small
degree, to their moral character ; and when, in the course of
Providence, they commenced the colonization of New Nether¬
lands, the settlers, noted for their sterling virtues and adherence
to the principles which they had embraced, not only brought
with them and established, as far as the circumstances of a new
colony rendered it practicable, the civil polity to which they had
been accustomed, but had secured to them, by legal enactment,
the institution of churches and schools.

The West India Company, with whom the work of coloniza¬
tion commenced, bound itself'' to maintain good and fit preachers,
schoolmasters and comforters of the sick, "f " They recognized
the authority of the Established Church of Holland over their
colonial possessions ; and the specific care of the transatlantic
churches was early intrusted by the Synod of North Holland to
the Classis of Amsterdam. By that body all the colonial clergy
were approved and commissioned. For more than a century its
ecclesiastical supremacy was affectionately acknowledged ; and
long after the capitulation of the province to England, the power
of ordination to the ministry, in the American branch of the
Reformed Dutch Church, remained in the governing Classis of
Holland, or was exercised only by its special permission." J

* Brodhead, i. 462.       f O'Call. N. N., i. 220.     \ Brodhead, i. 614.