Henry Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883) opens with the sentence: “Natural law is a new word.” But the term may claim a respectable antiquity: it goes back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. In Drummond's time it was merely being put to a new use. To him it meant the body of principles learned in the laboratories of physical science. In the long tradition of ethical, legal, and political thought from Hippias to Kant it implied a body of principles which, resting upon a divinely implanted endowment of human nature, underlie all acceptable ethical precepts, just laws, and sound political institutions.

I confine myself largely to the period between 1830 and 1850 and to the movement for additional religious instruction of slaves which flourished during those years, though it did not end in 1850. The sources on which the analysis is based represent conditions in South Carolina and Georgia, with a moderate sampling of Alabama and Mississippi, and not a great deal for the border states.

A number of factors have combined to obscure the Puritan mind from contemporary view. Until about a century ago, Puritan history both in England and America was written mostly from anti-Puritan, post-Restoration sources. Thomas Carlyle's Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell marked a turning point in this practice, and the works of Samuel Rawson Gardiner and of Sir Charles Firth gave seventeenth century English Puritanism a narrowly interpreted, but fairer, hearing. The New England Puritan, however, received little real benefit. The political historian and the economic determinist despised theology and, accordingly, lacked the chief instrument whereby to probe the Puritan mind. Moreover, the American historian, steeped in nineteenth century liberalist notions and mightily affected by the English Whig tradition in history writing, usually made the historical error of reading into the New England mind ideas which are the results of nineteenth and twentieth century experience. Accordingly, they read backward into colonial history merely to emphasize the Puritans as forerunners of religious toleration, democracy, and capitalism (all of which, in the contemporary sense, the Puritan would have abhorred from1 the bottom of his soul!). These writers refused to believe any people could be as religious as the Puritans pretended and they concluded either that Puritans were all hypocrites or that a hypocritical Puritan clergy tyrannized a defenseless people until the latter, in righteous desperation, overthrew the bigoted priests and let in the pure air of eighteenth century rationalism.

The notion of a synthesis in medieval philosophy and theology is itself the resultant of a given attitude toward the study of broadly cultural and philosophical movements. Now modern historical research, by employing as one of its main concepts the principle of continuity, has been of great service in tracing the line of connection between historical individuals and events which would otherwise have appeared as isolated separated points without any significant connection. Insofar, however, as the aspect of continuity in history has been emphasized, there has been a proportionate danger that the unique differences of the individuals which are united by a single thread are disregarded. As a result, analysis of the specific problems faced by individual philosophers and of the methods which they devised to deal with the problem as conceived by them, has yielded in order of emphasis to a wider and looser manner of characterizing philosophic positions, as e. g., realistic, idealistic, pragmatic, etc., often unaccompanied by a knowledge of the method actually employed by the philosophy in question.