1. “On the administrative side, the two most profound revolutions which have occurred profound revolutions which have occurred in the entire history of the church have been these: first, the fourth century, from a voluntary society…to a society conceived as nessarily eoectensive with the eivil commuity and endowed with power to enforce the adherence of all members of the civil community; second, the reversal of this change…in America.“ Garrison, W. E., Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, CCLVI (1948), 17.Google Scholar

2. Baid, Robert, Religon in America, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1845), 110–111.Google Scholar Baird argued that religious freedom in Virginia was “mainly owing to the exertions of the Presbyterians, Baptists, and Quakers” while Jefferson contributed his “famous act” not because he thouht “the great principles embodied in the measure were right” but because “it seemed to degrade Christianity.” This, he added, is what “made the arch-infidel ehuckle with satisfaction.”

3. See Bainton, Roland H., “The Strugglo for Religious Liberty,” Church History, X (06 1941), 97.Google Scholar

4. Kaufman, M., “Latitudinarianism and Pietism,” Cambridge Modern History (New York, 1908), V, 742.Google Scholar

5. Ibid., 763.

6. Mott, Frank L. & Jorgenson, Chester E.Benjamin Franklin. American Writers Series (New York. 1936), 70.Google Scholar

7. Wesley, John, Sermons on Several Occasions, (New York, 1851), I, 392.Google Scholar

8. Quoted in Sweet, William W., The American Churches, An Interpretation (Nashville, 1948), 46–47.Google Scholar

9. Morais, Herbert M., Deism in Eighteenth Century America (New York, 1934), 13.Google Scholar

10. Note for example how easily the youth ful Franklin, brought up “piously in the Dissenting way…soon became a thorough Deist” simply by reading orthodox refutations of Deism. Mott, and Jorgenson, , Benjamin Franklin, p. 55.Google Scholar

11. Ibid., 12.

12. Letter to Sarah Franklin, 12. 8, 1764, in Goodman, Nathan G. (ed.), A Benjamin Franklin Reader (New York, 1945), 237.Google Scholar

13. Mott, and Jorgenson, , Benjamin Franklin, 70.Google Scholar

14. Chinard, Gilbert, Thomas Jefferson, Apostle of Americanism (Boston, 1944), 103–104.Google Scholar

15. The phrases “right wing” and “left wing” of the Reformation have come into quite general use since the publication of the article by Bainton, Roland H., “The Left Wing of the Reformation,” in the Journal of Religion, XXI (04 1941), 124–134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar According to Bainton's definition “The left wing is composed of those who separated church and state and rejected the civil arm in matters of religion” These, he adds, were “commonly on the left also with regard io church organization, sacraments, and creeds.” A more radical social definition of the two “wings” was coming into use before publication of Bainton's article—see e.g., Bates, Ernest S., American Faith (New York, 1940)Google Scholar, chapters 2 and 3.

16. Note for example the “New Lights”, Separate Congregationalists, and Baptists in New England, the “New Side” Presbyterians in the Middle Colonies, and the Presbyterians and Baptists in the Anglican South.

17. See for example Connecticut's “Act for Regulating Abuses and Correcting Disorders in Ecclesiastical Affairs” of 1742, and the struggle for recognition of dissenters' rights under the English Toleration Act in Virginia.

18. Compare with Sweet's, W. W. “comparison … between the basic ideas of the popular religious bodies and those held by the intellectual liberals” in “Natural Religion and Religious Liberty in America,” Journal of Religion, XXV (01. 1945), 54–55.Google Scholar

19. Padover, Saul K. (ed.), The Complete Jefferson (New York, 1943), 940.Google Scholar

20. It is said that Madison and Jefferson were intrigued by the practice of de mocracy in the Baptist churches and no doubt their interest in religious freedom was stimulated by their observation of the persecution of the Baptists in Virginia.

21. Sweet, William W., Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, CCLVI (03. 1948), 45.Google Scholar The argument is more fully developed in the article noted above, note 18.

22. Compare the position of Mecklin, John M. in The Story of American Dissent (New York, 1934), 36Google Scholar: “It was the pressure of circumstances that brought the leaders of the dissenting sects into sympathetic contacts with Paine and Jefferson at the end of the eighteenth century. When the battle for religious and national liberty was finally won and the great principle of separation of church and state safely embodied in the Constitution, Paine and Jefferson speedily lost their attraction for the dissenting sects”.

23. Morais, , Deism in Eighteenth Century America, 20.Google Scholar

24. Hall, Thomas C., The Religions Background of American Culture, (Boston, 1930), 172.Google Scholar

25. Morais, , Deism in Eighteenth Century America, 121.Google Scholar

26. See Jefferson's letter to John Adams, 10 28, 1813, in Brown, Stuart G. (ed.), We Hold These Truths (New York, 1941), 114.Google Scholar

27. Morais, , Deism in Eighteenth Century America, 15.Google Scholar

28. Mott, and Jorgenson, , Benjamin Franklin, 508–509.Google Scholar

29. See Miller, John C., Crisis in Freedom; the Alien and Sedition Acts (Boston, 1951)Google Scholar, passim. E.g., p. 11, Miller notes that Hamilton regarded the Republicans from Jefferson on down as “‘Frenchmen in all their feelings and wishes.’” See also Hazen, Charles D., Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution (Baltimore, 1897), 140.Google Scholar

30. Letter to Mrs. M. Harrison Smith, 08 6, 1816, quoted in Sweet, W. W., Journal of Religion, XXV (01. 1945), 52–53.Google Scholar

31. Jefferson's, “An Act for Establishing Religious Freedom,” in Padover, The Complete Jefferson, p. 947.Google Scholar Jefferson argued consistently that where “reason and experiment have been indulged… error has fled before them. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.” (Ibid., 675). In his Second Inaugural he pointed out the salutary effects of such freedom (Ibid., 413).

32. Quoted in Koch, Adrienne, The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1943), 26.Google Scholar

33. Quoted from The Age of Reason, in Peach, Arthur W. (ed.), Selections from the Works of Thomas Paine (New York, 1928), 232.Google Scholar

34. Priestley, Joseph, An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (2d ed., Birmingham, 1793), I, v.Google Scholar

35. Ibid., xv.

36. See Foote, Henry Wilder, Thomas Jefferson; champion of religious freedom, advocate of Christian morals (Boston, 1947), 51–52.Google Scholar

37. “Always latent” because to the deistic way of thinking the orthodox view of revelation was particularistie—that is, given to a particular group at a particular time and place and hence not readily available for all mankind. See Lovejoy, Arthur O.. The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, 1936), 288–289, 292Google Scholar, for a discussion of this aspect of rationalism. Compare Paine, Age of Reason, in Peach, , Selections, 250–51.Google Scholar

38. In Peach, , Selections, 232.Google ScholarThe Age of Reason was written in France and as much to stem the trend toward atheism as to undermine the church, “lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government aad false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true.” Although widely rend in America, it seems always to have been somewhat alien to the real situation there. The incongruity was noted by Lyman Beecher, who was amazed that “Boys that dressed flax in the barn, as I used to read Tom Paine and believed him,” and that the rural youths in Yale College “called each other Voltaire, Rousseau, D'Alembert, etc., etc.” after the denizens of the sophisticated French world. Charles, Beecher (ed.), Autobiography, Correspondence, etc., of Lyman Beecher (New York, 1864), I, 43.Google Scholar

39. Morais, Compare, Deism in Eighteenth Century America, 129Google Scholar: “the deism of Paine, Volney and Palmer, presented in a popular form was designed to reach the masses in order to destroy their faith in traditional Christianity with its priesthood, dogmas and supernatural revelation. Its ultimate end was to replace the Christian religion hy the religion of nature with its three-fold creed—God, Virtue and Immortality, a creed believed in even by devout Christians.

40. In Peach, Selections, 250, 263 note.

41. The theological issues raised by Paine's Age of Reason apparently received only a very few replies on a “rational and scholarly plane.” Most of the “replies” were primarily personal attacks on Paine. See Morais, , Deism in Eighteenth Century America, 163–67.Google Scholar

42. See Stauffer, Vernon, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (New York, 1918), 229 ffGoogle Scholar; Jones, , America and French Culture, 398–99.Google Scholar

43. Stauffer, N. E.and the Bavarian Illuminati, 126–27Google Scholar; 272 ff.

44. Miller, , Crisis in Freedom. 74.Google Scholar

45. Jones, , America and French Culture, 402–403.Google Scholar

46. This ground has been made familiar by the studies of Vernon Stauffer, Charles Hazen, Herbert M. Morais, C. Adolf Koch and Howard Mumford Jones which are referred to elsewhere in this paper.

47. Beecher, , Autobiography, I, 342.Google Scholar

48. See Mead, Sidney E., Nathaniel William Taylor 1786–1858; a Conecticut Liberal (Chicago, 1942)Google Scholar, chapters iv and vi.

49. Beecher, , Autobiography, I, 543.Google Scholar

50. See Jones, , America and French Culture, chap. xiGoogle Scholar; Koch, , Republican Religion, chap. viiiGoogle Scholar; Morals, , Deism in Eighteenth Century America, chap. vi.Google Scholar The prevailing opinion of these revivals around the middle of the nineteenth century is suggested in James Gallaher's reference to “this outpouring of the Spirit of God, by which the overspreading tide of infidelity was arrested, and the west transformed into a Christian Land” (The Western Sketch-Book, 58).

51. Garrison, , The Annals, 19–20.Google Scholar For the development of revivalism during the period following the Revolution, see Sweet, W. W., Religion iv the Development of American Culture 1765–1840 (New York, 1952)Google Scholar, chapters iv and v.

52. Thompson, Robert E., A History of the Presbyterian Churches in the United States (New York, 1895). 34Google Scholar; Bacon, Leonard W.. A History of American Christianity (New York, 1900), 176.Google Scholar Both of these books are in the American Church History Series.

53. “The great Methodist movement… can appeal to no great intellectual construction explanatory of its modes of understanding. It may have chosen the better way. Its instinct may be sound. However that may be, it was a notable event in the history of ideas when the clergy of the western races began to waver in their appeal to constructive reason.” Whitehead, A. N., Adventures of Ideas, (New York, 1933), 27–28.Google Scholar

54. Barclay, Wade C., History of Methodist Missions, volume II, To Reform the Nation (New York, 1950), 8.Google Scholar

55. Compare, Morais, , Deism in Eightennth Century America, 22Google Scholar: “In New England God-fearing Baptists and Methodists wore usually Jeffersonians but at the same time were backbone of the evangelical movement which more than anything else was responsible for the decline of deism.” And see Koch, , Republican Religion, 281–82.Google Scholar

56. Compare Randall, J. H. and Randall, J. H. Jr, Religion and the Modern World (New York, 1929), 26–27Google Scholar: “Western society confronted the disruptive forces of science and the machine with a religious life strangely divided. On the side of moral and social ideals and attitudes… Christianity had already come to terms with the forces of the modern age⃜ On the side of beliefs, however, Christianity in the early 19th century had not come to terms with the intellectual currents of Western society. It found itself, in fact, involved in a profound intellectual reaction against just such an attempt at modernism.”

57. American Renaissance.

58. The Coarse of American Democratic Thought (New York, 1940)Google Scholar, Part III.

59. May, Henry F.. Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York, 1949), 263.Google Scholar

60. Quoted in Jones, , America and French Culture, 410.Google Scholar Harriet Martineau says that she expected that in America under religious freedom there would be great religious diversity and even many atheists. But she was struck by “the absence of such diversity.” There was, she found, a striking “approach to uniformity of profession” and while “there are many ways of professing Christianity in the United States there are few, very few men… who do not carefully profess Christianity in some form or another. This, as men are made, is unnatural.” Society in America (London, 1837), III, 224 ff.Google Scholar

61. That this was really the case is borne out by Post's, Albert study of Popular Freethought in America, 1850–1850 (New York, 1943).Google Scholar See my review in Journal of Religion, XX1V (10. 1944)Google Scholar,

62. Diman, J. L., “Religion in America, 1776–1876,” North American Review, CXXII (01, 1876), 42.Google Scholar This view is confirmed by Pauck, Wilhelm, “Theology in the Life of Contemporary American Protestantism,” The Shane Quarterly, XIII (04, 1952), 37–50.Google Scholar

63. See my “Church and State in the United States” a review-article dealing with Stokes, A. P.three volumes of that title, in Religion in Life, XX (Winter, 1950–1951), 41.Google Scholar

64. I have developed this idea in my review of Butts, R. Freemnn, The American Tradition in Religion and Education (Boston, 1950)Google Scholar in the Journal of Religion, XXXII (04, 1952), 141–142.Google Scholar

65. Course of American Democratic Thought, p. 38.

66. Latourette, K. S., History of the Expansion of Christianity, IV, 415.Google Scholar