While this restrictive action may be subjected to criticism, it was quite in accord with the spirit of the age. Most of the influential men of East Jersey had experienced the wave of religious enthusiasm which had swept over England and Scotland, upon the coming of Cromwell, and which flooded New England with high resolve and concomitant austerity. It had been a time of religious controversy, and of the establishment of new forms of religious belief. Nor was the spirit less noticeable in West Jersey, where the Society of Friends did not outwardly declare the union of church and State, but where the power of the meeting to make the careers of men was equally potent. The English speaking colonists of East Jersey, in the main, were of yeoman stock.
Various motives underlay the action of the settlers.
Others from New England hoped to find in East Jersey a land more hospitable, where the power of the church might be further extended. But over all and under all ran the spirit of theocracy, which entered into the daily acts of the entire body of emigration. The rigidity of the local laws, the strictness of church discipline, the slowness of assimilation with the Dutch, who, in creed, were with them but not of them, the intense striving for a theocratic commonwealth, gave a harshness to life, but it likewise gave a stability to East Jersey that has been permanent throughout all the modifications of government and the later injection of cosmopolitan social elements. But one instance need be cited to show the distinctively Calvinistic type of early East Jersey life. It is in the matter of personal nomenclature.