Meanwhile the patroon Van Rensselaer, on his great manor near Albany, showed some sense of his duty to the souls of the people whom he had brought out into the wilderness. He built a church and put into the pastoral charge over his subjects one who, under his travestied name of Megapolensis, has obtained a good report as a faithful minister of Jesus Christ. It was he who saved Father Jogues, the Jesuit missionary, from imminent torture and death among the Mohawks, and befriended him, and saw him safely off for Europe. This is one honorable instance, out of not a few, of personal respect and kindness shown to members of the Roman clergy and the Jesuit society by men who held these organizations in the severest reprobation. To his Jesuit brother he was drawn by a peculiarly strong bond of fellowship, for the two were fellow-laborers in the gospel to the red men. For Domine Megapolensis is claimed[71:1] the high honor of being the first Protestant missionary to the Indians.
In 1647, to the joy of all the colonists, arrived a new governor, Peter Stuyvesant, not too late to save from utter ruin the colony that had suffered everything short of ruin from the incompetency and wickedness of Kieft. About the time that immigration into New England ceased with the triumph of the Puritan party in England, there began to be a distinct current of population setting toward the Hudson River colony. The West India Company had been among the first of the speculators in American lands to discover that a system of narrow monopoly is not the best nurse for a colony; too late to save itself from ultimate bankruptcy, it removed some of the barriers of trade, and at once population began to flow in from other colonies, Virginia and New England. Besides those who were attracted by the great business advantages of the Dutch colony, there came some from Massachusetts, driven thence by the policy of exclusiveness in religious opinion deliberately adopted there. Ordinances were set forth assuring to several such companies "liberty of conscience, according to the custom and manner of Holland." Growing prosperously in numbers, the colony grew in that cosmopolitan diversity of sects and races which went on increasing with its years. As early as 1644 Father Jogues was told by the governor that there were persons of eighteen different languages at Manhattan, including Calvinists, Catholics, English Puritans, Lutherans, Anabaptists (here called Mennonists), etc. No jealousy seems to have arisen over this multiplication of sects until, in 1652, the Dutch Lutherans, who had been attendants at the Dutch Reformed Church, presented a respectful petition that they might be permitted to have their own pastor and church. Denied by Governor Stuyvesant, the request was presented to the Company and to the States-General. The two Reformed pastors used the most strenuous endeavors through the classis of Amsterdam to defeat the petition, under the fear that the concession of this privilege would tend to the diminution of their congregation. This resistance was successfully maintained until at last the petitioners were able to obtain from the Roman Catholic Duke of York the religious freedom which Dutch Calvinism had failed to give them.