- master—Carel de Beauvois—a cultured French
Protestant from Leyden, who was appointed in Breuckelen in 1661. Besides his duties, in the church, of precentor and Scripture reader, it was stipulated that:
"He shall properly, diligently, and industriously attend
to the school, instill in the minds of the young the
fear of the Lord, and set them a good example; to open
the school with prayer and close with a Psalm, also to
exercise the scholars in the questions in the groat regulen
of the Rev. pious and learned father Do. Johannes Megapolensis,
Minister of the gospel in N. Amsterdam."
Here was a hamlet of but thirty-one families
who were not satisfied until they could listen
to the ablest preaching of the day, and were
also favored with superior educational facilities.
Meanwhile the Dutch order was changing. The neighboring village of Gravesend was being settled by the English. From Connecticut came Quakers, who sowed the seeds of non-*conformity and inculcated a new and strange doctrine, that taxes should not be levied to maintain the clergy, a principle especially attractive to those whose tithes were paid with a grudging hand.
At the end of the Dutch régime there were
