Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/769

 1620-1776] Religion and philosophy ; principle and practice. 737 near making the government of New England a legalised hierarchy, their deepest influence proves to have been theological. They not only preached orthodox Calvinism ; they reasoned it out to logical extremes hitherto unsuspected. They accepted its implications as unreservedly as they accepted its dogmas ; and they never admitted, even to themselves, that while the dogmas were originally based on observation of human life in corrupt old Europe, the conclusions which those dogmas involved bore little relation to the facts of human life in the comparatively simple and innocent society of provincial America. Medicean Europe, which Calvin contemplated, like the decadent Roman Empire of Saint Augus- tine's day, justified the conviction that human nature is totally depraved. The colonies which bred Franklin, with all his honestly admitted errors, revealed human nature in a far less deplorable aspect. All this the Puritan preachers ignored. Their wits, to the days of Edwards and beyond, were busy with the assumed realities which transcend phenomena. They lived their spiritual lives in regions beyond human ken. For them, more than for most men known to history, faith was truly the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. How susceptible Americans remained to the influence of ideal philosophy was evident in what is called " the Great Awakening " the religious revival, associated with the name of Whitefield, which swept over the colonies about the year 1740. English Methodism never blazed so fiercely. A generation later came the newer influence of the full Revolutionary spirit. There can be no question that beneath this spirit, which has declared itself throughout the European world, there rests a dogma concerning human nature precisely contradictory to that on which orthodox Christianity has been based. The Church has every- where assumed that human beings are fallen into a state so perilous that they can be saved only through the miraculous intercession of Christ. The Revolution, in France and everywhere, proclaimed that human nature is essentially good; and that its errors and deformities have resulted only from the distorting presence of artificial institutions Church and State. The logical conclusion from such a premise would be anarchy ; just as that which should logically follow from ecclesiastical dogma is despotism. What has averted anarchy in the America which eagerly accepted Revolutionary doctrine, is the ancestral habit of the nation to trouble itself far less than it supposes about the harmony between honestly accepted precept and assuredly prudent practice. At the same time, such divergence cannot extend endlessly. And as the American mind began to accustom itself to the new conception of human nature which alone could justify its tendency toward republican institutions, many good men, saturated with the ideal habit of ancestral Calvinism, became aware that human nature, as observable in their comparatively simple country, was not so evil as their fully developed dogmas would have made them believe. The moment this perception C. M. H. VII. CH. XXIII. 47