In 1682, seventy-five years after its first permanent settlement was planted at Jamestown, England's empire on the North American mainland consisted of thirteen colonies with some 160,000 inhabitants. The vast majority of that population lived in New England and the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland. Carolina was barely ten years old, the territory of New Jersey was being split by its investors into two parts, and William Penn was newly arrived to found Philadelphia. Great changes in rule and demography were in the offing, but at the moment the colonies were more English and less entrammeled by English rule than they would ever be again. The slave-labor system and the African American population were just beginning their course of rapid growth. Gender ratios in the Chesapeake were only then coming into close enough balance to make the majority of the white population there native-born for the first time, opening the prospect of sustained institutional development. Only in New England were institutions old enough to be threatened – in some people's perception – with the prospect of atrophy. All this is to say that the study of religion in the English colonies over the first eighty years of the seventeenth century is in most instances a study in small numbers, embattled beginnings, and fitful development – but also in bold experimentation and what proved to be some definitive shaping of the future.