The church increased in numbers and influence, and began to be noticed with respect and professions of esteem among surrounding denominations.  Some of her members had ventured to act in the capacity of citizens of the United States, by serving on juries.  This was of course managed for a time clandestinely.  At length, waxing confident by success, they began to act more openly.  This gave rise to a petition addressed to the supreme judicatory of the church.  The petitioners were answered by instructing them to apply for direction to the inferior judicatories—­thus shunning the duty of applying their own acknowledged principles.  This was in the year 1823.  This course did not satisfy the petitioners, and application was again made to Synod in 1825, to explain the import of their former Act.  The reply was—­“This Synod never understood any act of theirs, relative to their members sitting on juries, or contravening the old common law of the church on that subject;” a response obviously as equivocal as the preceding.  As early as 1823, a motion was made in the Synod to open a correspondence with the judicatories of other denominations.  This motion was resisted, and for the time proved abortive.  At next meeting of Synod, however, the measure was brought before that body, by a proposal from the General Assembly to correspond by delegation.  This proposal found many, and some of them able, advocates in the Reformed.  P. Synod.  The measure was, however, again defeated; but immediately after the failure, a number of ministers forsook the Reformation ranks and consorted with the General Assembly.  In the year 1828, the Synod gave its sanction and lent its patronage to the Colonization Society, which was continued till the year 1836, when its patronage was transferred to the cause of Abolition.  The spirit of declension became manifest at the session of Synod in 1831, when some of the most prominent and practical principles of the Reformed Church were openly thrown into debate, in the pages of a monthly periodical, under the head of “Free Discussion.”  Through the pernicious influence of that perfidious journal, sustained by the patronage of ministers of eminent standing in the church, a large proportion—­neatly one-half—­of the ministry were prepared, by the next meeting of Synod in 1833, to renounce the peculiar principles and long known usages of the Reformed Covenanted Church.  Organizing themselves as a separate body, yet claiming their former ecclesiastical name, they deliberately incorporated with the government of the United States, and some of the senior ministers, more fully to testify their loyalty, in their old age, took the oath of naturalization!—­thus breaking down the carved work which they had for many years assiduously labored to erect.