century religious ideals of the Calvinistic type ruled in Great Britain north of the Tweed" with stern and unmitigated severity". In England the masses of the Evangelicals in the Church of England and practically all the Non-comformist bodies were Calvinists. Methodism was in its infancy. In New England Calvinism was firmly entrenched and the coming of the aggressive Scotch-Irish during the eighteenth century had extended Calvinism's influence west and south. Civilization in America was in the making. The absence of the rich and many-sided life of England of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made it impossible for Americans to emancipate themselves from religious dogma. The New England of Cotton Mather was perhaps more Calvinistic than that of John Cotton. Even as late as the Revolution the forces of liberalism, aroused by the struggle for independence and expressed in such spirits as Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine, were met by Timothy Dwight in New England and by the stern creed of the Scotch-Irish of the South and West. The publication of Butler's Hudibras in England during the last quarter of the seventeenth century registered the decay of the hold of Calvinism upon the conscience of England, but it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that Holmes wrote his satire on Calvinism, The Deacon's Wonderful OneHoss Shay.

From the early decades of the eighteenth century, however, it is possible to note the working of a leaven in the heart of New England Puritanism destined to free the consciences of men from its iron rule. It was about 1734 that Arminianism began to disturb Johnathan Edwards. Against this theological liberalism he levelled the artillery of his logical dialectic in his famous work on the Freedom of the Will. This rise of Arminianism was but the natural psychological reaction against a creed that starved the emotions and deprived the moral life of all spontaneity and responsibility. Edwards welcomed Whitfield the evangelist to combat the heresy. But under the fire of Whitfield's eloquence the long suppressed and starved emotions of men burst into flame and gave rise to the excesses

of the Great Awakening. “It was one thing to preach irresistible grace; it was another to lack the restraining grace of common sense". Religious leaders now saw that they must apply more of "sweet reasonableness" to their harsh theology. Deism with its insistence upon God's benevolence and the inherent goodness of men gained a foothold in New England through such men as Chauncy and Mayhew. Thus was the way paved for the evolution of New England thought that finally culminated in Channing's sermon of 1819, the manifesto of Unitarianism, to be followed several decades later by Emerson and the Transcendentalists.

Other forces, outside New England and more cosmopolitan in character, were working toward the secularization of the moral sentiments of men. The great doctrines of the French Revolution, liberty, equality and fraternity, with their emphasis upon the inherent dignity and worth of man were fundamentally opposed to a theology that made God arbitrarily elect some to be the objects of his love while allowing the rest of mankind to perish like flies in autumn. This humanitarianism, especially as it came from the pen of Rousseau, spread throughout Europe, tinging the thought of Wordsworth and Coleridge and even finding a voice in the stronghold of Calvinism in the poet Burns. Nothing could be more fundamentally antagonistic to the stern spirit of Calvinism than Burns' famous line, "The man's the gowd for a' that ". And certainly humanitarianism, not to mention the theology of John Calvin, is stretched to the limit in the closing lines of his Address to the De'il ":

"But fare you well, auld Nickie-ben!

Oh, wad ye tak a thought on men!

Ye aiblins might, I dinna ken,

Still hae a stake;

I'm wae to think upo' yon den,
E'en for your sake."

But Calvinism was doomed because, in spite of the noble rôle it had played in the cause of freedom, it was fundamentally aristocratic rather than democratic. It was the scholarly,

courteous, and pious John Cotton who said, "Democracy I do not conceive that ever did God ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors who shall be governed? As for monarchy and aristocracy they are both of them clearly approved and directed in Scripture". The political ideal of the New England Brahmins, as the clergy have been called, was well expressed in the lines, "The upper world shall rule,

While stars shall run their race;
The nether world obey,

While people keep their place."

Calvinistic New England long resisted the rising tide of democracy that accompanied the struggle for independence. It was not until 1833 that Massachusetts finally set aside the aristocratic ecclesiastical régime and thus made possible a real democracy. Writers have even found traces of the aristocratic tradition, based upon the Calvinistic doctrine of election, in the tendency to glorify the pecuniary aristocracy, the captains of industry", that arose after the industrial revolution in lands with Calvinistic traditions.

Finally, it should be remembered that with the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species and the general acceptance of the principle of evolution, not only in the world of science but in the thought of the average man, a mental atmosphere has been created inhospitable to all forms of theological apriorism. The theory of evolution has forced us to modify all forms of absolutism in our thinking. But "a moderate Calvinism " is a practical repudiation of Calvinism. We might just as well talk of a moderate absolutism or a partial necessity. As the source of Calvinism's moral grandeur and its power over the imaginations and loyalties of men lay in its indefectible claims, so any toning down of these claims brought it speedily into general disrepute.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Books: ADENEY, W. F.: A Century of Progress in Literature and Thought, Ch. VII, “The Decline of Calvinism"; BAXTER, RICHARD: The Christian Directory, 1673; BROOKS, V. W.: America's Coming-of-Age, 1915; CAMPBELL, D.: The Puritan in Holland, England and America, 2 vols., 1892; The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, Chs. 3, 4, 5; CHOISY, E.: L'État chrétien Calviniste à Genève aux temps de Béze, 1902; DOWDEN, E.: Puritan and Anglican, 1900; DOUMERGUE, E.: Jean Calvin, 5 vols, 1899 ff.; FORD, P. L.: The New England Primer, Introduction, 1897; HANNA, C. A.: Scotch-Irish, 2 vols., 1902, Vol. I; HANSCOM, E. D.: The Heart of the Puritan, 1917; HART, A. B.: American History Told by Contemporaries, Vol. I, pp. 324-340; KUYPER, A.: Calvinism, 1898, Chs. 1-3; LEVY, H.: Economic Liberalism, 1913, Chs. 2, 3, 5; Low, A. MAURICE: The American People, 1909, Vol. I; MEILY, C.: Puritanism, 1911; RILEY, W. I.: American Philosophy: The Earlier Schools, 1907; RITCHIE, D. G.: Natural Rights, 1895, Ch. I; TROELTSCH, E.: Die Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, 1912; TRUMBULL, J. H.: Blue Laws True and False, 1876; WALKER, W.: John Calvin, Chs. 14, 15.

2. Articles: TROELTSCH: "Calvin and Calvinism." Hibbert Journal, Vol. 8, pp. 102 ff.; WALLIS: "The New England Conscience." American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 19, pp. 48 ff.; WEBER, MAX: "Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Capitalismus." Archiv fuer Sozialwissenchaft, Bde., XX, XXI.

CHAPTER III

THE TRIUMPH OF INDIVIDUALISM

It is a curious fact that with the growth of national consciousness and the substitution of a thoroughly secularized social conscience for earlier religious sanctions American life became more and more individualistic. The New England of the days of Emerson and Margaret Fuller was far more individualistic than the New England of the days of John Cotton and the Mathers. The democratic individualism of Jefferson was a great advance upon the ideas of the Virginia of earlier days. How are we to explain the paradox that hand in hand with the adoption of a federal constitution and the closer approximation of the thirteen colonies in the acknowledgment of common loyalties there went an increasing emphasis upon the rights of groups and of individuals? The problem of the rights of the individual state that finally resulted in a disastrous war was but one phase of a particularistic ethic that extended down to the most insignificant individual. This triumphant individualism found expression in the Jacksonian democracy analyzed with such brilliant insight by DeTocqueville.

The forces that created the individualism that dominated American life for the best part of the last century were complex and varied. In part they were religious, growing out of the particularism inherent in Protestantism from the very beginning and constantly manifesting itself in the multiplication of sects. In part it was the product of the eighteenth century doctrine of natural rights which tended to endow the individual with a God-given heritage of privileges and immunities that survive even after the state has been destroyed. In part American individualism was the result of the psychological training gained by a people living a pio