Liberal Thought in America 149 



a country where education was universal and the 

 Sunday sermon a favourite theme of discussion. 

 Sooner or later, the perpetual appeal to reason, 

 with the familiar use of metaphysical arguments 

 and citations of Scripture, must lead to novelties 

 of doctrine and to negative criticism ; while for the 

 education of the popular intelligence nothing could 

 be more effective. In seventeenth-century Puri- 

 tanism, therefore, in spite of its rigid narrowness, 

 there were latent the speculations of an Edwards, 

 the further conclusions to which some of them 

 were pushed, the reactions against them, the keen 

 edge of the critical faculty in New England, and 

 much of the free thinking of a later age. 



In the course of the eighteenth century some in- 

 fluence was doubtless exercised in America by the 

 English deists, and at the very end of the century 

 by Thomas Paine. There is no reason to suppose 

 that any appreciable effect was produced by the 

 atheism of the French encyclopaedists, which was 

 mainly a reaction, largely emotional and aided by 

 the shallowest of metaphysics, against the effete 

 ecclesiastical system in France. It was too remote 

 from American ideas to exert much influence here. 

 The deism of Voltaire found a few scattered 

 admirers. A quiet religion of humanity, which 

 set little store by miracles, or abstruse doctrines, 



