V
THE ORIGINS OF LIBERAL THOUGHT IN AMERICA[17]
In approaching the subject of the origins of liberal thought in America, one cannot help remembering that the discovery of the new continent was itself such a stimulus to free thinking as the world had never before witnessed. From time immemorial, the trade between Europe and the remote parts of Asia had followed certain customary routes. From ancient days, long before Olympiads were heard of, when Assyrian kings with curly beards commemorated their victories in arrow-headed inscriptions, men had used those same routes. Up the Red Sea, in the early prime of hundred-gated Thebes, came ships from the Indian Ocean, with gems and spices to exchange for Egyptian fine linens and amulets of amber from the Baltic; and five thousand years later Venetian argosies at Alexandria were laden with just such gems and spices to distribute to the merchants of Augsburg, the royal household at Paris, the lords and ladies of Haddon Hall. Empires rose and fell, creeds and pantheons came and went, stately temples reared their heads for centuries and slowly crumbled in ruins, and still amid all the secular change the world's great stream of trade flowed through the same unshifting channels, and there was nothing to show that this state of things, to which men's ideas and habits had always been adjusted, was not to endure forever. So it was in that recent time when Henry V. of England was smiting the French chivalry at Agincourt, and his cousin Prince Henry of Portugal was beginning the search for an ocean route to the Indies. Never did the human mind get such a wrench out of its ancient grooves, never were such vistas of new possibilities laid open, never was beheld such glorious hardihood, such startling romance, as in the time when Columbus sailed westward to find the East, and Cortes met warriors of the Stone Age face to face. The men of Europe suddenly found themselves placed in new and unsuspected relations to the planet on which they lived; worlds of barbarism and savagery, unheard of and unspeakably bizarre, were brought to their notice; strange constellations arose in the firmament; strange beasts and birds were encountered amid outlandish trees and shrubs in new climates beyond unknown seas. The old familiarity with nature's aspects received an abrupt shock. On every side loomed up new questions to be answered, new practical problems to be solved. All man's inventive faculty, all his patient inquisitiveness, all the courage he could summon, were forthwith called into play. The dreams of boundless riches, the eager thirst for new knowledge, the superhuman bravery, which characterized the epoch of maritime discovery, are symptoms that reveal to us the highly wrought condition of the European mind at the time. A study of contemporary chronicles and letters cannot fail to bring home to us the singular intensity with which the thrill of venturesome romance was felt in every fibre of man's being.
The impulse thus given to free thinking must have been extremely powerful. It is customary to attribute the brilliant efflorescence of the human mind in the sixteenth century to the revival of Greek learning. Without seeking to diminish the respect due to that mighty cause, it may be contended that the influence of maritime discovery was equally important. While the Greek renaissance brought men into wholesome and stimulating intercourse with the highest achievements of literature, art, and philosophy, the discovery of the New World impressed upon them, as nothing had ever done before, the feasibleness of doing things in novel ways. With the wholesale displacement of commercial relations, the European mind burst the bounds of the snug little world to which its habits and theories, its politics civil and ecclesiastical, its science and its theology, had been adapted. The sudden and unprecedented widening of the environment soon set up a general fermentation of ideas. There was nothing accidental in Martin Luther's coming in the next generation after Columbus. Nor was it strange that in the following age the English mind, wrought to its highest tension under the combined influences of Renaissance, Reformation, and maritime adventure, should have put forth a literature the boldest and grandest that had ever appeared; that the era of Raleigh and Frobisher and the early Puritans should have seen even the highest mark of Greek achievement surpassed by Shakespeare. The gigantic revolution set on foot by Copernicus was already in full progress, the era of Descartes was just arriving, and the next century was to see modern scientific method receive its supreme illustration at the hands of Newton, while the principles of freedom in thought and speech were to find invincible champions in Milton and Locke.
Such was the age in which the work of English colonization in America was beginning. In looking for the origins of liberal thought in America, it is chiefly with English-speaking America that we are concerned. The Spanish mind, indeed, felt strongly the stimulus of the maritime discoveries and the contact with strange races of men, until an age of chivalrous enterprise bloomed forth in the literature of Calderon and Lope de Vega and Cervantes; but the new spirit was not strong enough to prevail over an ecclesiastical organization that had been growing in power since the Visigothic times. The higher intellectual life of Spain perished in the fires of the Inquisition, and art and song failed to lead the way to science and free thought; no Spanish Locke or Newton followed in the train of a Lope and a Murillo, but so lately as the year 1771 the University of Salamanca prohibited the teaching of the law of gravitation as discordant with revealed religion.[18] With such a state of things in the mother country, liberal thought in the Spanish colonies was a plant of very slow growth. As for France at the end of the sixteenth century, there was a sturdy intellectual life there which no efforts of tyranny could more than partially repress; but circumstances threw the work of colonization into the hands of the Jesuits, and accordingly the history of New France, while eminent for devoted bravery and heroic endurance, shows scarcely a trace of liberal thinking either in politics or in matters pertaining to religion. Not with the French and Spanish portions of America, therefore, but with the colonies that developed into the United States, is our inquiry concerned.
The first and most obvious consideration which strikes us is that while the two centuries following the discovery of America witnessed an unprecedented awakening of the European mind, yet it was only with those nations that had retained self-government that this intellectual awakening was to come to prompt and full fruition. From the British islands and the Netherlands came the kind of public policy that allowed free thinking to take deep root and send up a thrifty tree of liberty. The planting of such seed in the spacious virgin soil of the New World was doubtless the greatest of all the manifold unforeseen results for which Columbus opened the way. It made political freedom the strongest power on earth, and thus favoured the attainment of that equable flexibility of mind which allows the thought to play freely about the facts which are laid before it. Not in a moment was such a grand result achieved; its complete realization has not yet come, and none of us may live to see it, yet toward that goal the whole impetus of men's civilizing work is tending, and there is no power that can prevent the consummation. Year by year, no matter how grave the questions with which we have to deal, we are becoming more and more able to let our minds play freely with them, to turn them hither and thither till all sides be seen and all aspects duly considered.
Not all in a moment, I say, has such a desirable result been achieved. So far is it, moreover, from having been brought about by conscious human effort that mankind have in general struggled desperately against it. Compared with the mass of men, it is only a few minds that have learned to regard absolute freedom of thought as something to be desired. Though the colonization of America came at a time when men's minds were stirred by novel ideas as never before, though the men of that generation were moving irrepressibly toward liberality of thought, yet there were very few who had any liking for liberal thought, or any good word to bestow upon it. There were few who doubted that absolute truth was attainable concerning the most abstruse questions of philosophy and religion, and an exactly true belief on minute points of theology was deemed necessary for one's personal salvation. Changes in opinion simply wrought a transfer of allegiance from one orthodoxy to another, and the new orthodoxy felt bound as much as the old one to persecute all who refused such allegiance. From this point of view the history of the progress of liberal thought becomes curiously interesting, for it shows how one of the most momentous revolutions in human life has steadily gone on in spite of the inveterate antagonism of the very men concerned in bringing it about! To a considerable extent, the history has been the same over a large part of the globe. The causes which have been at work in America have also been at work in Europe, and even beyond; and the liberal thought with which we are familiar is characteristic not so much of America as of the latter part of the nineteenth century. But along with the general causes there have been local causes which have especially concerned the New World, and a clear account of the matter requires us to indicate both the one and the other.
From the revolt of Henry VIII. against the Papacy down to the Revolution of 1688, there was in England a progressive movement toward liberal thought. It was at first a crude unconscious movement in the direction of toleration, which is a necessary condition for the development of free thinking. When we have arrived at a truly cordial toleration of opinions, allowing to all free play to stand or fall, just as hypotheses in science are suffered to stand or fall, then is men's thought for the first time really untrammelled. Whatever, therefore, tended toward toleration of diverse forms of creed or worship was a step in the path that led to free thinking; and whatever tended to democratize the church and relieve it from state control was a step toward toleration. The revolt of Henry VIII. at first but realized what the prœmunire statutes of Edward I. and Edward III. had threatened. But by breaking up the religious orders, expelling abbots from Parliament, and making the headship of the church a subject of fierce dispute, it contributed immensely to weaken and relax the bonds of conservatism, and it afforded a rare opportunity for the thoughts of laymen and small preachers to assert themselves. Thus the Lollardism which had been partially suppressed for more than a century now reared its head again defiantly, and, after learning lessons in democracy from Calvin, came forth as Puritanism, clad in full panoply for one of the world's most fateful contests.
In the course of Elizabeth's reign we find this Puritanism taking three different shapes. There were the moderate reformers, whose wish was simply to trim and prune the tree of Episcopacy; and secondly, those who were afterward known as "root and branch" men, whose name is descriptive enough. Instead of pruning they would uproot the tree and cast it away. To these Presbyterians the royal supremacy was no more than the papal a part of the living growth of Christ's church; it was but stubble fit for burning. Kings looked with horror upon such views, which threatened political danger no less than ecclesiastical. "A Scottish presbytery," cried James I., "agreeth as well with a monarchy as God and the Devil. Then Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at their pleasures censure me and my council and all our proceedings." The case could not have been more pithily stated, yet even Presbyterianism stopped short of full-fledged democracy. For Jack and his friends, by means of synods and general assemblies, could create a governing body with power of enforcing conformity upon unwilling congregations. In protest against this somewhat oligarchical method, Puritanism assumed its third form, that of Independency. The beginnings of Independency are to be sought among the Brownists of Elizabeth's reign, though their day of glory first came with the Civil War. In the theory of the Independents, as fully developed, any group of persons wishing to worship God in common might come together and organize themselves into a Congregational church, existing by as good a warrant as any other church, and entirely free from the control of any bishop, or synod, or council. No outside power could prescribe its creed or interfere with its ceremonial. Each church became, therefore, a little self-governing republic, as completely autonomous as an ancient Greek city, and the union of such churches was based solely upon the spirit of spontaneous Christian fellowship. Such was the theory of Independency.
In these successive stages of Protestantism we may see the preliminary steps toward general toleration and toward liberal thought. In each stage the strength of the coercive power that could be exercised over men's opinions and expressions of opinion was sensibly diminished. From the coercive power of the universal Church, which had once been able to direct a crusade against the Albigenses, it was a long step downward to the coercive power of Queen Elizabeth, whose will to suppress Puritanism was perpetually held in check by motives of public policy. It was a yet further step downward from the coercive power of a sovereign to that of a synod, and thence again to that of a congregation. So striking is the progress that one who knew nothing of history might easily mistake the theory of Independency as providing practically for something like complete toleration. History tells us that this was far from being the case. Heresy, or dissent from the commonly accepted orthodoxy, has been no more tolerated in Independent churches than elsewhere; and even in the absence of serious differences in dogma, persecution has been visited upon divergences from the customary ritual, as for example in the treatment long accorded to Baptists. In their militant days, neither Presbyterianism nor Independency ever professed to be tolerant. The gravest reproach they could imagine was to be charged with encouraging free thinking. The eminent Scottish divine Rutherford gave expression to the prevailing sentiment when he declared, "We regard toleration of all religions as not far removed from blasphemy." Nevertheless, the movement which gave rise to Presbyterianism and to Independency was sure to advance to the announcement of the principle of universal toleration. That movement was itself the expression of a vast amount of free thinking, and it was not to stop short of recognizing the claims of free thought. The century that witnessed the beginnings of an English-speaking America saw also the genuine principles of toleration laid down by Roger Williams and William Penn, and demonstrated with resistless wealth of learning and logic by Milton and Locke.
In an account of the origins of liberal thought in America this English development is all-important, but it does not cover the whole field. America's inheritance from Europe comes chiefly, but not entirely, from the British islands. In the early days of the Protestant Reformation, there were European countries in which religious toleration had advanced practically much further than in England. The England of Henry VIII. as compared with the Netherlands was in a crude and backward condition. The contrast might be likened to that between rural life with its narrow mental horizon and the varied cosmopolitan life of the city. England politically was a land of unrivalled promise, but she was not quite abreast with the most advanced culture of the time. Her government was mainly in the hands of country gentlemen, who lacked some valuable elements of experience that were possessed by the burghers of commercial Antwerp and Ghent. A careful survey of the Middle Ages shows plainly an abiding antagonism between commerce and the ecclesiastical spirit. A general connection between the predominance of international trade and the secularization of public life is distinctly traceable. On the map of mediæval Europe one may point out peculiar spots where the Papacy never gained complete sway. In some of these, as in Bohemia and southern Gaul, the resistance was due to Manichæan heresies brought in from the Eastern Empire, giving rise to a kind of mediæval Puritanism; in these we do not find a spirit of liberal thought developed, but rather an anti-Catholic fanaticism. The other peculiar spots lie in the great pathway of commerce between the Levant and the northern seas. In the free cities of northern Italy and southern Germany, in the Hansa towns, and in the Netherlands, priestcraft had less sway than elsewhere, and the general tone of thought was more liberal and modern. No city came so completely under the secularizing influences of maritime commerce as Venice; and it is significant that the Papacy, at the very pinnacle of its power and arrogance in the thirteenth century, utterly failed in its attempt to force the Inquisition upon that republic of merchants.
In similar wise, we find the commercial Netherlands in the sixteenth century exhibiting practically such toleration in matters of religion as the British islands attained only much later, and after prolonged and distressing struggle. From the time of Edward III. commercial intercourse with the great Dutch and Flemish cities was one of the most potent civilizing influences at work in England. It was a liberalizing influence in religion and in politics, and must be named among the causes which made the eastern counties preëminent for heresy. In later days, when the Dutch provinces had saved their Protestantism and recovered political freedom, they adopted a policy of toleration so broad as to seem to most contemporaries very eccentric. Their noble country was stigmatized as "the common harbour of all heresies" and a "cage of unclean birds." How it harboured heretics escaping from England is something that no American is ever likely to forget.
If, after this glance at European conditions, we cross the Atlantic and observe the group of twelve colonies that were planted during the seventeenth century, we find that five of them were especially notable for pursuing from the outset a policy of toleration,—a policy favourable to liberal thought. These five, naming them in order of seniority, were New Netherland, Maryland, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, with Delaware. In New Netherland the Dutch simply maintained their traditional secularized policy. On the hospitable island of Manhattan all the varieties of European religion met on terms of equality,—Lutherans and Catholics, Quakers[19] and Puritans, Moravians and Jews. After the English conquest this liberal policy was continued by the bigoted Duke of York, for reasons similar to those which made toleration a necessity in the province of the liberal and sagacious Calverts. The Catholic proprietors of Maryland wished to make their province a desirable home for Catholics who were inclined to leave England, and the only possible way of accomplishing this, without interference from the British government, was to pursue a policy broad enough to include Catholics along with all other kinds of Christians in its benefits. A similar necessity confronted Charles II. and James II. In order to secure as much protection as possible for Catholics without interference from Parliament, it was necessary to pursue a policy broad enough to include Quakers along with Catholics. For such reasons James refrained from disturbing the liberal Dutch policy in New York. For such reasons both Stuart kings supported the schemes of William Penn, in whose proprietary colonies of Pennsylvania and Delaware the principles of toleration were carried out, on the whole, more completely than anywhere else in English-speaking America. It is interesting in this connection to observe that the mother of William Penn was a Dutch lady, though perhaps it is possible to make too much of such a fact. The Quakers, who formed the strength of the colony, represented a phase of Puritanism more liberal than Independency. As contrasted with Independency, Quakerism was a notable advance in the direction of Individualism; it had outgrown the set of notions according to which a civic community ought to consist of a united body of believers. Pennsylvania, therefore, and its appendage Delaware, profited by the late date at which they were founded; they represented a more advanced stage of opinion than the colonies which started in the time of James I. Their proprietary government remained undisturbed until the Declaration of Independence, and in 1776 these two states were the only ones in which all Christians, whether Protestant or Catholic, stood socially and politically on an equal footing. For after the accession of William and Mary had made the Episcopal Church supreme in New York and Maryland, the Catholic inhabitants of those colonies were disfranchised and made the subject of various oppressive enactments. Even the laws of Rhode Island, as first printed, early in the eighteenth century, expressly prohibit Roman Catholics from voting. The date of this statute is not accurately known, but it was certainly between 1688 and 1705,[20] and may be due to the strong antagonism aroused by the conduct of James II. and his Jacobites. However that may be, the statute was not repealed until 1784.
The disfranchisement of Catholics was contrary to the spirit of the Rhode Island charter and to the views of Roger Williams, who certainly understood the rational grounds for religious toleration better than any other man of his time, save perhaps Milton and Vane. He represents the Protestant principle of the sacred right of private judgment carried out with unflinching logical consistency. In him the transition from Independency to Individualism is completed. The contrast between the two is illustrated in the controversy between Williams and Cotton which was called forth by the publication in 1644 of Williams's book entitled "The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution." John Cotton was a typical Independent, and by no means a man of persecuting temperament, but his view of the matter is extremely one-sided. He admits that it is wrong for error to persecute truth, but he holds it to be the sacred duty of truth to persecute error! Williams, on the other hand, sees that truth stands in no need of violent or artificial support, and that error contains within itself the seeds of death. He feels, too, that when I venture to persecute what I call error in others, I virtually assume my own infallibility. Thus not until pure Individualism is reached is the fundamental fallacy of Catholicism escaped. In order to protect this sacred Individualism, Williams would have a complete separation between church and state. Under no pretext whatever should the civil government interfere with religious matters. There should be no more statutes against heresy or heretics, no enforced attendance upon public worship, no support of churches by taxation. Roger Williams not only proclaimed such doctrines, but he lived up to them. He never took pains to conceal his dislike of Quaker doctrines; in his seventy-third year he once rowed himself in a boat the whole length of Narragansett Bay, in order to conduct a dispute against three valiant Quaker champions; yet, in spite of vehement pressure from the neighbouring colonies, he resolutely refused to allow the civil power of Rhode Island to be used against Quakers. Massachusetts in fury threatened to cut off the trade of the weaker colony, but nothing could intimidate Williams into what he termed "exercising a civil power over men's consciences." Among the public men of the seventeenth century Roger Williams deserves a preëminent place; he was the first to conceive thoroughly and carry out consistently, in the face of strong opposition, a theory of religious liberty broad enough to win assent and approval from advanced thinkers of the present day.
The separation of church from state, which was effected with such remarkable success in the founding of Rhode Island, did not become general in the United States until after the winning of independence. On this issue the eighteenth century had its memorable struggle, in which the protagonist was Virginia, and the victory was achieved under the leadership of Jefferson and Madison. The early policy of Virginia was to drive out dissentients, or subject them to civil disabilities; and of the Puritans who went thither for a while the greater part left the colony, many of them retreating into tolerant Maryland. After 1660, for three generations the Episcopal folk had it all their own way. But about 1720 began the wholesale immigration of Presbyterians and Lutherans into the Shenandoah Valley, and after the middle of the century trouble began when the tide-water Cavaliers tried to impose taxes upon these people for the support of the Established Church. The most numerous and powerful opponents of this narrow policy were the Presbyterians; and inasmuch as these had come, not from Scotland where their own church was established, but from Ireland where it was persecuted, their experience had led them to approve the separation of church from state. Their political notions were also strongly democratic, and with the aid of their votes Jefferson's party not only abolished primogeniture and entail and other old English customs, but also carried the disestablishment of the Episcopal Church in Virginia. Madison's Religious Freedom Act of 1785, which not only effected this, but likewise did away with all religious tests, is a very important event in the history of the United States. The statute, which declared that "opinion in matters of religion shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect civil capacities," attracted attention far and wide; it was translated into several European languages, and published with admiring comments; and in the course of the next forty years it was imitated by one state after another, until all over the land religious freedom came to be almost as complete as legislation could make it. The qualifying adverb is still needed; for, by the constitutions of Pennsylvania and Tennessee, no man can hold office unless he believes in God and a future state of rewards and punishments; in Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, the two Carolinas, and Maryland, belief in God is required; and in Arkansas and Maryland a man who does not believe in God and a future state of retribution is deemed incompetent as a witness or juror.[21] Such curiosities of law-making—survivals from a lower state, like the caudal vertebra in man and the higher apes—are common enough in history.
The various stages here mentioned in the progress toward religious toleration, and toward the separation of church and state, are important symptoms of the progress of liberal thought. Of course Madison's Religious Freedom Act could not have been proposed by an Endicott, or sustained by a community that would not endure the presence of Baptists or Quakers. The sketch here given shows an enormous advance in liberal thought in the course of two centuries and a half. But such a survey is far from telling us the whole story. A further inquiry into causal agencies is needed, and the best field for it is furnished by that theocratic Puritanism which cast out Roger Williams,—the Puritanism of the four confederated New England colonies, and especially of Massachusetts. No one can deny that in Massachusetts, during the nineteenth century, liberal thought has advanced further and has permeated the community more thoroughly than in any other state of the American Union. For at least three generations the intellectual ferment upon which liberal thought in the United States has thriven has come chiefly from Massachusetts. Yet among our colonies which attained social maturity during the seventeenth century there was none which made such emphatic exhibitions of intolerance and bigotry as Massachusetts. She was as clearly and avowedly founded upon an illiberal principle as Rhode Island was founded upon a principle of liberality. The Endicott type of mind is the very antipodes of the Roger Williams type; yet it was in the land of Endicott, and in a congenial soil, that Theodore Parker lately flourished. Whence came so great a change? The answer will remind us that there are two sources from which liberal thought is nourished. The one is the secularized Gallio spirit that deems it folly to interpose obstacles in the way of the natural working of reason and common sense; the other is the intense devotion to spiritual ideals which, in spite of all inherited encumbrances of bigotry and superstition, never casts off its allegiance to reason as the final arbiter. The former spirit is of vast use in the world, although its tendency is to deaden into mere worldliness as typified in a Franklin; the latter spirit may commit many an error, but its drift is toward light and stimulus and exaltation of life as typified in an Emerson. In the darkest days of New England Puritanism the paramount allegiance to reason was never lost sight of; and out of this fact came the triumph of free thinking, although no such result was ever intended.
The aims of the Puritans who settled in New England were not all alike, but one dominant aim with many was the founding of a commonwealth in which church and state should be identified, somewhat after the pattern of the old Hebrew theocracy. To this end the suffrage in Massachusetts and New Haven was limited to persons qualified to receive the sacrament in Congregational churches. This Massachusetts idea was never adopted by Plymouth, and the founding of Connecticut was at least in part a liberal protest against it. In New Haven it was soon suppressed by the act of Charles II. which put an end to the separate existence of the colony. In Massachusetts, where this theocratic policy prevailed for half a century, the result was the growth of an unenfranchised class which came to include four fifths of the community. During the first generation, when the policy was administered by broad-minded, sagacious men like Winthrop and Cotton, its evils were not flagrant. But after 1650, with such fanatics as Norton and the aged Endicott at the helm, it soon became evident that the rulers were at variance on many points with the mass of the people. This was shown with glaring force in the Quaker persecution, when the violence of Endicott's party produced a popular reaction of feeling, which enabled the Quakers to carry their point and remain in the colony in defiance of statutes. It was further shown in the Half-way Covenant and the founding of the Old South Church in 1669, as parts of a movement toward extending the suffrage; and again in the rise of the Tory party under the lead of Joseph Dudley, opposed to the pretensions of the clergy. The magnificent work of the Massachusetts theocracy in resisting the crown throughout the whole reign of Charles II. can never be forgotten. Nothing was ever done in America that contributed more toward the maintenance of political freedom. But in spite of its merits, the faults of the theocracy were such that we cannot regret its speedy overthrow. When that overthrow was effected, by the charter of 1692, there were a great many people in Massachusetts more or less hostile to the kind of Puritanism entertained by their grandfathers, and thus prepared for a more liberal mental habit. There was also a marked secularization of thought, a diminution of interest in theological problems, and a deadening of religious zeal. A wonderful series of changes was set on foot by the writings and preaching of Jonathan Edwards, and the group of revivals between 1735 and 1750 known as "the Great Awakening." Few figures in history are more pathetic or more sublime than that of Jonathan Edwards in the lonely woodlands of Northampton and Stockbridge, a thinker for depth and acuteness surpassed by not many that have lived, a man with the soul of a poet and prophet, wrestling with the most terrible problems that humanity has ever encountered, with more than the courage and candour of Augustine or Calvin, with all the lofty inspiration of Fichte or Novalis. An interesting historical essay might be devoted to tracing the effects wrought upon New England by this giant personality. The Great Awakening, in which he took part, and to which his preaching powerfully contributed, revived the popular interest in theological questions, disencumbered of the ever present political implications of the previous century. In many ways his theories acted as a disintegrating solvent upon the beliefs of the time. For example, the prominence which he gave to spiritual conversion, or what was called "change of heart," brought about the overthrow of the doctrine of the Half-way Covenant. It also weakened the logical basis of infant baptism, and led to the winning of hosts of converts by the Baptists. Moreover, the uses to which Edwards put his doctrine of the will produced a reaction toward Arminianism, which not only affected the teachings of the Baptists, but predisposed many persons to join in the wave of Methodism which was just about to sweep over the country. A similar reaction against Edwards's views of divine justice, reinforced by some first faint inklings of Biblical criticism, pointed the way toward Universalism. Still more, the discussions aroused by Edwards's speculations on original sin and the atonement began to undermine the doctrine of the Trinity and prepare men's minds for the Unitarian movement. No such results would have been possible save in a country where education was universal and the Sunday sermon a favourite theme of discussion. Sooner or later, the perpetual appeal to reason, with the familiar use of metaphysical arguments and citations of Scripture, must lead to novelties of doctrine and to negative criticism; while for the education of the popular intelligence nothing could be more effective. In seventeenth-century Puritanism, therefore, in spite of its rigid narrowness, there were latent the speculations of an Edwards, the further conclusions to which some of them were pushed, the reactions against them, the keen edge of the critical faculty in New England, and much of the free thinking of a later age.
In the course of the eighteenth century some influence was doubtless exercised in America by the English deists, and at the very end of the century by Thomas Paine. There is no reason to suppose that any appreciable effect was produced by the atheism of the French encyclopædists, which was mainly a reaction, largely emotional and aided by the shallowest of metaphysics, against the effete ecclesiastical system in France. It was too remote from American ideas to exert much influence here. The deism of Voltaire found a few scattered admirers. A quiet religion of humanity, which set little store by miracles, or abstruse doctrines, or the divine authority of Scripture, was held by a number of eminent persons of strong prosaic common sense and feeble spirituality, among whom may be named Franklin and Jefferson and John Adams. This phase of free thought was of considerable importance, but the dominant influence in New England down to the rise of the transcendental movement was that which could be traced back to Edwards.
In the early part of the present century, the most advanced phase of liberal thought, represented by the Unitarians in Massachusetts, was trying to hold an utterly untenable position, halfway between narrow orthodoxy and untrammelled free thinking, when the ground began to be cut from under it by the transcendentalists, whose native temperaments, not wanting in kinship with that of Edwards, were stimulated by a brief contact with Kantian and post-Kantian speculation in Germany. In Emerson's poetic soul the result was a seminal influence upon high thinking, in America and in the Old World, the power of which we cannot but feel, but which it is as yet too soon to estimate. In the middle of the century some wholesome destructive work still needed to be done, and it was well done. When German criticism, with the other weapons in the powerful hands of Theodore Parker, freed us from the spectre of bibliolatry, it might indeed be said that the promise of the Protestant Reformation was at length fulfilled. The change wrought in the Unitarian church since Parker began his preaching has been to some extent followed by analogous changes in other churches. On every side, the last quarter of the nineteenth century has been preëminently the age of the decomposition of orthodoxies. Here and there and everywhere they are crumbling into ruins; and as the world has long since left behind the age of trilobites and the age of dinosaurs, so in the world to which we are coming there will be neither a place nor a use for orthodoxies.
For, as I must observe in conclusion, there is all about us a resistless and world-wide influence at work, to which all the temporary and local causes I have mentioned have been but the ministering servants. From age to age, our knowledge is growing from more to more. From the discovery of America, from the astronomy of Copernicus and the physics of Galileo, down to the universal doctrine of evolution in our own time, there has been one grand coherent and consecutive tale of ever enlarging, ever more organized knowledge of the world in which we live. By this enlarged experience our minds are affected, from day to day and from year to year, in more ways than we can detect or enumerate. It opens our minds to some notions, and makes them incurably hostile to others; so that, for example, new truths well-nigh beyond comprehension, like some of those connected with the luminiferous ether, are accepted, and old beliefs once universal, like witchcraft, are scornfully rejected. Vast changes in mental attitude are thus wrought before it is generally realized. Into the new scheme of things old beliefs no longer fit, and are therefore thrown aside and forgotten. Now our orthodoxies are of older date than the goodly fabric of modern knowledge. They are the outcome of more primitive and childlike thinking, they have ceased to fit the world as we know it, and therefore they fade and fall away from us, in spite of all our efforts to retain undisturbed the venerable and hallowed associations. In this inevitable struggle there has always been more or less pain, and hence free thought has not usually been popular. It has come to our life feast as a guest unbidden and unwelcome; but it has come to stay with us, and already proves more genial than was expected. Deadening, cramping finality has lost its charm for him who has tasted of the ripe fruit of the tree of knowledge. In this broad universe of God's wisdom and love, not leashes to restrain us are needed, but wings to sustain our flight. Let bold but reverent thought go on and probe creation's mysteries, till faith and knowledge "make one music as before, but vaster."
October, 1895.