neer life and constantly engaged in an arduous struggle with the elementary forces of nature. And finally the very structure and intent of American political institutions, carefully planned so as to prevent by means of a system of "checks and balances" the undue centralization of power in the hands of any one phase of the government, tended to throw the individual and the group upon their own resources and to minimize all forms of central authority.

§ 1. THE RELIGIOUS ANTECEDENTS OF INDIVIDUALISM

The antecedents of American individualism, so far as religion is concerned, date immediately from the Puritan Revolution of the seventeenth century, in which we find the logical implications of the individualism of the Reformation and of early Christianity fully realized. The characteristic of Protestantism is that it returned to the early Christian teaching of the immediate responsibility of the individual to God. The setting for the resulting intensification of the individual and his responsibilities was provided by the sense of solidarity in a sublimated spiritual order binding God and the redeemed sons of men together in most intimate fellowship. Stripped of theological terminology, the essence of this solidarity was intimate, immediate, and eternal contact with the supreme source of moral and spiritual values. "Puritanism ", remarks Dowden, "maintained, as far as possible, that the relation between the invisible spirit of man and the invisible God was immediate rather than mediate. It set little store by tradition because God had spoken to man directly in the words of revelation. It distrusted human ceremonies, because they stood between the creature and his Creator; the glory of the Christian temple is the holiness of the living temple which rises in the heart of the child of God. The pretensions of an ecclesiastical hierarchy are an estrangement of an adopted son of the Father; every lay Christian is himself a royal priest. The Calvinistic doctrines on which Matthew Arnold laid such extreme and exclusive stress were maintained because they were held to be Scriptural, and also because they seemed to

bring the divine agency immediately into every part of human life; predestination meant the presence of God's foreknowledge and God's will in every act and thought that pulsates on the globe; imputed righteousness meant that Christ and his faithful follower were regarded by the Father as one; and through faith, which justifies the believer, that union is effected "1

It is hardly possible to overestimate the influence of this religious individualism upon American thought and life. Its secret is to be found in its emphasis of personality. Not merely humility and loving submission to the will of God but likewise a militant self-assertion and coöperation in the working out of a divine plan characterized the Puritan. The inspiring sense of a noble mission on earth, the feeling of dignity kindled by the belief that God has preferred the individual to tens of thousands of his fellows, and the gratitude and confidence born of this undeserved grace all combined to intensify in unparalleled fashion the sense of personal worth.

Most significant was the tendency of Puritanism to throw the individual back upon his own resources. In Bunyan's masterpiece there are but three actors, God, the Devil, and one anxious human heart. To Christian alone came the summons to begin the fateful journey; other lonely travelers greeted him occasionally and each went his way on the "great personal adventure"; enemies rose in his path, even the arch enemy Apollyon, all of whom the pilgrim met single-handed; down into the river of death and finally through the gates into the celestial city he passed, alone. For the Puritan "the deepest community is found not in institutions, or corporations, or churches, but in the secrets of the solitary heart". The Puritan took his punishments as he did his salvation, alone. No preacher could help him for only the elect receive God's message of grace; no sacrament availed for the means of grace are contingent upon the divine will; no church was indispensable for while it was true extra ecclesiam nulla salus it was also true that the election of the individual antedated

1 Puritan and Anglican, p. II.

the church and made the church necessary; not even God himself could reverse the decree that the divine sacrifice in Christ was for the elect only. Thus did the Puritan theology tend to cultivate an individualism that was tragic in the isolation and the intensity of its ethical inwardness. Friendship in the ancient sense became almost a forgotten virtue in Puritan communities; it had no place in such a militant and selfsufficient individualism. Puritan literature warns again and again against the snares of human help and sympathy. Even the gentle Baxter advises against intimate friendships and the virile Thomas Adams writes, "The knowing man is behind in no man's cause, but best sightest in his own. He confines himself to the circles of his own affairs, and thrusts his fingers not in needless fires. . . . He sees the falseness of it (the world) and therefore learns to trust himself ever, others so far as not to be damaged by their disappointment ".

The psychological effect of this throwing of the individual back upon his own emotional life was far-reaching in its influence upon social life, economic development, and political ideals. To-day when we are faced with the problems of our complex and interdependent social order, we begin to realize what a serious handicap the persistent traditions of Puritan individualism may be in the effort for social readjustment. The institutional life of Calvinistic communities took on a singularly impersonal and coldly logical character. Men shared their ideas but not their feelings. The individual never entered whole-heartedly into the social and institutional life of the community or of the state. There was always a part of him, and that the most intimate and personal, which others did not share; this most intimate and real self was reserved for God. The phase of human nature that gives us values, that suffuses the hard and ugly reality with the softening touch of human interest and sympathy, was reserved for the closet; men dealt with each other primarily as logical rather than feeling beings who were duty bound to preserve the preordained structure of the universe. Thought rather than sentiment, therefore, controlled even in purely personal con

tacts. Hence Baxter observes in characteristic fashion, "It is not fit for a rational creature to love anyone further than reason will allow us". And if we ask the reason the reply is, "It very often taketh up men's minds so as to hinder their love of God". Calvinistic theology became " a ballet of bloodless logical categories". The deeper human impulses and sentiments which will ever defy complete logical formulation were sacrificed in the attempt to secure clarity and consistency. Even the Calvinist's God must be logical at the peril of becoming thoroughly unlovely and even immoral. In communities with Calvinistic traditions the tyranny exercised over the imaginations of men by glittering abstractions in business or politics together with a singular moral indifference towards the glaring injustices of the immediate social situation is a fact only too familiar to the social reformer.

Do we not have here the explanation for many of those curious paradoxes of character met with in communities that have long enjoyed the discipline of Calvinistic traditions? We often find, for example, a cool, calculating utilitarianism joined in unholy wedlock with an entirely other-worldly measure of human values. Men who have accumulated millions through methods that have impoverished and brutalized the community often give of this wealth to the support of foreign missions or to the endowing of religious institutions without any feeling of moral inconsistency. We find a careful and systematic effort after the accumulation of this world's goods sometimes united with almost ascetic indifference as to the enjoyment of the creature comforts they bring. Frequently we have a formal acknowledgment of political obligations, even intensity of sentiment organized about the abstract notions of liberty or equal rights before the law, together with a surprising lack of interest in the purity of city or state politics. We find great pride shown in the successful organization and extension of the individual's own business joined with little regard for the effect of that business upon social conditions in general.

This stark individualism is due to the fact that habits of

thrift, of self-sufficiency, and of independence, inherited from previous generations, are stripped of the larger moral and religious sanctions that once made these qualities socially valuable. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that God's will is no longer the guide of the consciences of most of the descendants of the Puritans and Scotch-Irish. The situation is not improved by the fact that no effective substitutes have been found for these outworn religious sanctions. Thrift, initiative, a keen sense of personal rights, and economic self-assertion may be a genuine menace where prompted by a selfish and unenlightened individualism. It then becomes very difficult for men to distinguish between rights and legalized selfishness. Only through the moral and spiritual perspective of a noble ideal are men enabled to see that often what they contend for so earnestly as their right is little more than an unearned privilege that happens to enjoy the sanction of law or of social convention.

§ 2. THE POLITICAL ANTECEDENTS OF INDIVIDUALISM

There is a close affiliation between the individualism of Protestant theology and political individualism in American life. As we have seen, two ideas in Puritanism made for individualism. The first was the sense of the immediate responsibility to God. This lifted the individual out of his social setting. The ties of family, community, state were negated by a higher and more compelling loyalty. This served to liberate the individual. The second element which provided the liberated individual with spiritual dynamic for action was the notion of predestination. The idea of being God's chosen instrument and co-worker in the execution of an infinite plan inspired to heroic effort and heightened the feeling of individual worth and responsibility.

It is a far cry from the Puritan conception of individuality rooted in the idea of predestination to the individualism of modern American democracy and yet there is a very real connection. It has been claimed that the notion of natural rights, embodied in Virginia's famous bill of rights of June