results of scientific investigations but also Anglican defenses of revealed religion served to accelerate a belief in progress. In answer to the atheists and deists who indicted revealed religion because revelation was given so late in the growth of the human family and hence was not eternal, universal, and immutable, the Anglican apologists were forced into the position of asserting that man enjoyed a progressive ascent, that the religious education of mankind is like that of the individual. If, as the deists charged, Christ appeared rather belatedly, the apologists countered that he was sent only when the race was prepared to profit by his coming. God's revelations thus were adjusted to progressive needs and capacities.[i-16]

Carl Becker has suggestively dissected the Enlightenment in a series of antitheses between its credulity and its skepticism. If the eighteenth-century philosopher renounced Eden, he discovered Arcadia in distant isles and America. Rejecting the authority of the Bible and church, he accepted the authority of "nature," natural law, and reason. Although scorning metaphysics, he desired to be considered philosophical. If he denied miracles, he yet had a fond faith in the perfectibility of the species.[i-17]

Even as Voltaire had his liberal tendencies stoutly reinforced by contact with English rationalism and deism,[i-18] so were the other French philosophes, united in their common hatred of the Roman Catholic church, also united in their indebtedness to exponents of English liberalism, dominated by Locke and Newton. If, as Madame de Lambert wrote in 1715, Bayle more than others of his age shook "the Yoke of authority and opinion," English free thought powerfully reinforced the native French revolt against authoritarianism. After 1730 English was the model for French thought.[i-19] Nearly all of Locke's works had been translated in France before 1700. Voltaire's affinity for the English mind has already been touched on. D'Alembert comments, "When we measure the interval between a Scotus and a Newton, or rather between the works of Scotus and those of Newton, we must cry out with Terence, Homo homini quid præstat."[i-20]

Any doctrine was intensely welcome which would allow the Frenchman to regain his natural rights curtailed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, by the inequalities of a state vitiated by privileges, by an economic structure tottering because of bankruptcy attending unsuccessful wars and the upkeep of a Versailles with its dazzling ornaments, and by a religious program dominated by a Jesuit rather than a Gallican church.[i-21] Economic, political, and religious abuses were inextricably united; the spirit of revolt did not feel obliged to discriminate between the authority of the crown and nobles and the authority of the altar. Graphic is Diderot's vulgar vituperation: he would draw out the entrails of a priest to strangle a king!

Let us now turn to the American backgrounds. The bibliolatry of colonial New England is expressed in William Bradford's resolve to study languages so that he could "see with his own eyes the ancient oracles of God in all their native beauty."[i-22] In addition to furnishing the new Canaan with ecclesiastical and political precedent, Scripture provided "not a partiall, but a perfect rule of Faith, and manners." Any dogma contravening the "ancient oracle" was a weed sown by Satan and fit only to be uprooted and thrown in the fire. The colonial seventeenth century was one which, like John Cotton, regularly sweetened its mouth "with a piece of Calvin." One need not be reminded that Calvinism was inveterately and completely antithetical to the dogma of the Enlightenment.[i-23] Calvinistic bibliolatry contended with "the sacred book of nature." Its wrathful though just Deity was unlike the compassionate, virtually depersonalized Deity heralded in the eighteenth century, in which the Trinity was dissolved. The redemptive Christ became the amiable philosopher. Adam's universally contagious guilt was transferred to social institutions, especially the tyrannical forms of kings and priests. Calvin's forlorn and depraved man became a creature naturally compassionate. If once man worshipped the Deity through seeking to parallel the divine laws scripturally revealed, in the eighteenth century he honored his benevolent God, who was above demanding worship, through kindnesses shown God's other children. The individual was lost in society, self-perfection gave way to humanitarianism, God to Man, theology to morality, and faith to reason. The colonial seventeenth century was politically oligarchical: when Thomas Hooker heckled Winthrop on the lack of suffrage, Winthrop with no compromise asserted that "the best part is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser."[i-24] If the seventeenth-century college was a cloister for clerical education, the Enlightenment sought to train the layman for citizenship.

With the turn of the seventeenth century several forces came into prominence, undermining New England's Puritan heritage. Among those relevant for our study are: the ubiquitous frontier, and the rise of Quakerism, deism, Methodism, and science. The impact of the frontier was neglected until Professor Turner called attention to its existence; he writes that "the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe.... It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control.... The frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution...."[i-25] In the period included in our survey the frontier receded from the coast to the fall line to the Alleghenies: at each stage it "did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the