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This scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series. In the interest of creating a more extensive selection of rare historical book reprints, we have chosen to reproduce this title even though it may possibly have occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues beyond our control. Because this work is culturally important, we have made it available as a part of our commitment to protecting, preserving and promoting the world's literature.

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger PublishingAcentsa -a centss Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for e

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone

This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages.

Religion In Colonial America by William Warren Sweet New York Charles Scribners Sons 1942 To our three sons PAUL ROBINSON SWEET WILLIAM WARREN SWEET, JR. RICHARD WILLIAMS SWEET Preface r Pi HE PURPOSE of this volume is to place religion in its proper perspective in American colonial history. Religion has been JJL the most neglected phase of American history. The average college student could pass a better examination in Greek mythol ogy than on American Church history, and is better informed on the Mediaeval popes than he is on the religious leaders of America. It is hoped that this volume and the others that are to follow will help to remedy this lamentable situation-The present volume tells the story of the beginnings of organized religion in America of the struggle for survival of the transplanted religious bodies of their gradual growth and expansion, and of their increasingly important part in the developing life of the American people. A knowledge of this story is essential if the soul and spirit of America is to be understood, The early chapters of the volume deal with the transplanting to the colonies of a cross-section of western European religion as it existed in the seventeenth century. To 1660 the dominant reli gious groups in America were the offshoots of the dominant reli gious bodies of Protestant Europe, representing the conservative wing of the Protestant Reformation. This resulted in the bringing over of the European tradition of Church-State relationship, and it was put into operation in all the colonies established up to that time, except in Rhode Island and Maryland. After 1660, however, a whole new set of liberalizing influences began to operate, which by the endof the colonial period had completely changed the entire situation. From this time forward the right wing bodies became less and less important while the left wing religious groups, finding in Anglo-America for the first time a chance to develop, waxed stronger and stronger. In the seventeenth century there was little in the way of religion that could be called dis tinctively American in the eighteenth century America began to viii Preface turn its back more and more upon European influence, with the result that a distinctively American religious scene began to appear. In the last two chapters the principal theme is the American ization of Christianity. The eighteenth century saw American religion more and more democratized and, in the Great Colonial Revivals, for the first time religion reached down to the masses. In the process the old European Church-State relationship was gradually changed, and with independence came the opportunity to bring to a successful completion the century-and-a-half struggle for religious freedom and the separation of Church and State. How this, the greatest of all of American contributions both in the realm of religion and politics, was achieved cannot be under stood unless the course of colonial religious development is care fully followed-The growing interest in American cultural history renders a larger understanding of the religious development of America a necessity. The attempt to appraise American culture apart from religion is a contradiction in itself, for culture has to do with the moral and religious as well as the intellectual life of a society. Until recent years this phase of American history, outside New England, was not only neglected, itwas minimized and even despised by some who liked to think of themselves as trained his torians. For the last generation and more a majority of our histor ians have been economic determinists, and consequently stressed our materialistic development to the neglect of those matters which have to do with the mincl and the spirit. No nation of the world has had its political, and economic life so fully analyzed as has ours on the other hand, no great people of modern times have been so neglectful of the spiritual and idealistic phase of their development...

REVIVALISM AND SOCIAL REFORM American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War baRpenf coRcbuooks A reference-list of Harper Torchbooks, classified by subjects, is printed at the end of this volume. REVIVALISM AND SOCIAL REFORM American Protestantism on the Em of the Civil War TIMOTHY L. SMITH HARPER TORCHBOOKS f The Academy Library Harper Row, Publishers, New York PREFACE Could Thomas Paine, tlie free-thinking pamphleteer of the American and French revolutions, have visited Broadway in 1865, he would have been amazed to find that the nation conceived in rational liberty was at last fulfilling its democratic promise in the power of evangelical faith. The emancipating glory of the great awakenings had made Christian liberty, Christian equality and Christian fraternity the passion of the land. The treasured gospel of the elect few passed into the hands of the baptized many. Common grace, not common sense, was the keynote of the age. The Calvinist idea of foreordination, rejected as far as it concerned individuals, was now transferred to a grander object the manifest destiny of a Christianized America. Men in all walks of life believed that the sovereign Holy Spirit was endowing the nation with resources sufficient to convert and civilize the globe, to purge human society of all its evils, and to usher in Christs reign on earth. Religious doctrines which Paine, in his book The Age of Reason, had discarded as the tattered vestment of an outworn aristocracy, became the wedding garb of a democratized church, bent on preparing men and institutions for a kind of proletarian marriage supper of the Lamb. This is not the place, of course, to measure the vast gap between these hopes and theirfulfillment. Historians acquainted with the scandalous conduct of good churchmen like Jay Gould and Daniel Drew will be understandably skeptical. Instead of a marriage supper after the Civil War we had what Vernon Louis Parrington called the Great Barbecue. And only men of privilege were invited. Those who lived through the twenty-five years before 1865, however, thought the hopes were grounded in reality. What has made the preparation of this book exciting has been the dawn ing discovery that revivalistic religion and the quest of Christian perfection lay at the fountainhead of our nations heritage of hope. My original purpose was simply to trace the extent and significance after 1850 of what I thought REVIVALISM AND SOCIAL REFORM was by then the declining influence of these two spiritual traditions in America. The simplest justification for such a study was that ignorance of these matters hindered understanding of the exact way in which other worldly faith had nurtured the impulse to social reform. Another was the guess that the persistence of popular religious ideas had been too much overlooked, leaving even theologians no alternative but to attribute the rise of small sects and the recurrent sweep of revivals in the twentieth century to economic and social tensions. The stanchest adherents of modern holiness and evangelistic movements, I knew, were the children and grand children of shouting Methodists and praying Presbyterians. And most of them took literally the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. As the work progressed, so many unsuspected but obviously interrelated facts came to light that a general revaluation of mid-nineteenth-centuryProtestantism seemed necessary. The manuscript which was finally pre sented for a graduate degree set forth a new interpretation of that era. It seems advisable, therefore, to state the major thesis clearly at the begin ning of this published version, so as to let the reader know where he is going. Relevant facets are repeated at the beginning or toward the close of each chapter. The gist of it is simply that revival measures and perfectionist aspiration flourished increasingly between 1840 and 1865 in all the major denomina tions particularly in the cities...

This scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series. In the interest of creating a more extensive selection of rare historical book reprints, we have chosen to reproduce this title even though it may possibly have occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues beyond our control. Because this work is culturally important, we have made it available as a part of our commitment to protecting, preserving and promoting the world's literature.

This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages.

This scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series. In the interest of creating a more extensive selection of rare historical book reprints, we have chosen to reproduce this title even though it may possibly have occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues beyond our control. Because this work is culturally important, we have made it available as a part of our commitment to protecting, preserving and promoting the world's literature.