The Stammering Century Read online

  Libertarianism was a religion appropriate to the early days of the Republic when people believed that a perfect government had been discovered for a perfect race; it succumbed to harsh reality, and the stricter code of Protestantism conquered. This was natural in a commercial civilization because that code provides balance sheets of right and wrong, rigid book-keeping of errors and atonements, and prizes for self-improvement. In the early Protestant way of salvation there was room for liberty of conscience, but in the application of morals to politics, liberty vanished. Out of the wreckage of Calvinism, the dominant churches saved the drama of salvation, casting out the desperate doctrine of the few elect. Grace was no longer entirely a divine gift. The government of Heaven, too, was put on a business basis. Eternal happiness had to be earned.

  Presently self-improvement turned into uplift and uplift into prohibition. It is a complicated process and, in a sense, this whole book is a sketch, a preliminary study, of the psychological turn which has affected our customs, manners, habits of mind, and ideals. I have summarized the process in the last chapter and do not want to anticipate the evidence here. We know that the typical zealot of 1800 was a man fanatically busy about salvation; in the 1840’s, he was as fanatically busy about improving himself; later he turned to uplifting his fellowmen and, later still, to interfering with their pleasures. I suggest the breakdown of Calvinism as a partial explanation of these changes. Another is the revival system.

  For a hundred years there had been revivals but, beginning with the year 1800, revivalism began to be considered as proof of a living spirit in the churches. As one by one the bars between man and his salvation were thrown down, it began to be important to God’s ministers that they should be honored by numbers. Truth was demonstrated in proportion to its popularity, and doctrine shown to be sound by the number of people on whom it had been imposed. Revivalists boasted of the number they had “slain” and openly proclaimed their indifference to the means chosen for salvation and to the permanence of the reformations they effected. They were selling salvation, at bargain prices; they were “selling” it also, in the modern use of the word. The institution of the anxious seat—translated in our time as the “sawdust trail”—the giving of testimony in public, the vast propagandas of the revivalists, all tended to make a man’s religion no longer a thing between himself and his God, but a matter of public concern. Morals promptly became corporate, not personal. It became the duty of each man to convert his neighbor. If he could not convert men, the atmosphere of revivalism encouraged him to pass laws, to establish guardians for morality, to dictate, and limit, and deny.

  The Christian and the infidel have cooperated to create the modern type of reformer. The zealot often believed that before Christ could come again, all men had to receive grace. It was one of the promises of revivalism that every soul brought to Christ hastened the Second Advent. Hence to perfect the world—by force if need be—became a Christian duty. The infidel, too often accused of deserting the church in order to indulge his licentious passions, remained as austere as the Puritan. Hugo Münsterberg has noted the identity of morals in the Puritan and the Unitarian (who in 1830 was considered worse than an infidel). Neither Deists nor disbelievers threw over the strict moral code. On the contrary, dissenters, since they were unorthodox in religion, had to exalt morality, and say, as no Christian said, that morality alone was sufficient for salvation. The Transcendentalists reinforced this worship of ethics and their descendants, the uplifters and New Thoughters of our own time, have given it an almost sinister significance. They conceived the moral law as an emanation from all good men. They clung to the belief that injurious mental action was possible so that it became their duty to fight off the evil thoughts of evil men, lest evil corrupt the Universal Good. The belief that all men could be good was soon changed into the doctrine that those who were not good were dangerous to Goodness itself. Thus it became a moral duty to destroy evil, so that the circle of goodness would not be jeopardized. Our actual censors and prohibitionists have come from the Protestant churches; but the absence of an enlightened opposition is probably due as much to the flabbiness of unorthodox thought as to the psychological identity of the altruist, the uplifter, and the puritanical prohibitionist.

  Particularly, all are alike in their intense desire for an assured salvation. In the débâcle of Calvinism, theology suffered; the way to achieve salvation was broadened and made pleasant; but the value placed on salvation remained undiminished. The stammering century was made an era of exploration by the work of those who looked for grace in unaccustomed places. There were materialists (they had an odd habit of turning spiritualist in their later days), who believed that Paradise could be found on earth as soon as man was emancipated from the wage system and who founded colonies on the model of Owen, or Fourier. There were monomaniacs who held that all men would be saved if they gave up holding slaves, or smoking cigarettes, or eating meat, and that women would be relieved of all ills if they wore sensible clothing. There were mystics who thought that raising and using cattle was the great sin against the spirit. There were reformers of the sexual relation who went through every variety of doctrine. There were believers in the sacredness of manual labor and disbelievers in sound currency. There were those who made salvation of doubtful value by proving that there is no death and others who hoped that life could be created by spiritual communion. Some of these stammerers proclaimed to Americans that life was all evil and some that success in business was the all-good. A number of them implied that they were divinely appointed and that salvation was only to be had from them.

  They were eccentrics, fanatics, fools, faddists, and madmen; but they were all concerned with the same thing: salvation. They looked for some end to earthly sorrows, to some perfection which could atone for our imperfect life on earth. The disaster to Calvinism was already understood when the new Republic was founded; although the revivals kept a modified form of it alive, men turned to political experiment. Religion still assured the somewhat froward American that he was a worm and must abase himself before God. The political experiments suggested to him that he could escape economic misery only by associating himself with others as miserable as himself. And all the time the greatest experiment of all, the experiment of America, was prospering, proving pragmatically that man was the master of all things and that he who labored ruthlessly, tirelessly, and alone, could make a million dollars. The prosperity of America was the one thing which neither orthodox religion nor radical economics could overcome; religion gave ground and radicalism broke entirely. Progress in America went in one direction, reform in another and, at the end of the century, new religions, without shrines, or relics, or authority, or penalties, assured men that, by concentrating on two phrases for ten minutes a day, they could become rich and beatified.

  These cults were the more successful because a third form of salvation had supervened when religious and economic grace were both found to be so difficult to achieve. This was salvation by personal effort. Like nearly everything else of importance in the American mind of the nineteenth century, this also has its source in Jonathan Edwards. It received a dignified and modern rendering in the self-reliance of Emerson. To the hermit, Thoreau, it meant independence. The mystic, Alcott, knew that no reform was worth anything unless it began with a reform of the human heart. All of these, and all the other Transcendentalists, knew that there could be no salvation for humanity until man became aware of the moral law of Nature and could identify himself with it. Oneness with this great Law lifted man from the irritations and disappointments of common life. He had compensations. He could live with the over-soul. To each man then came the “revelation of nature . . . that the highest dwells with him.” At the very moment when Science was speaking in terms of struggle, when it became certain that Nature was utterly indifferent to the morals and ambitions of men, the Transcendentalists held out this great promise. To Emerson, preoccupation with sin was an adolescent disease. He and his disciples exalted the indepen
dent man. And, presently, the religion of success managed to draw from these teachings the cult of Personality and the worship of the Omnipotent Good which turned, oddly enough, into salvation by mail and cures by absent treatment.

  The last phase is to be found in Christian Science and in Oriental mysticism. The degree of their relationship is hard to determine; but both are close kin to New Thought, and both are religions of death. Like New Thought, in one of its many phases, they are religions evolved to console those whom the successful materialism of American life no longer attracts and satisfies.

  To understand them, it is necessary to follow the long revolt against the theology of the eighteenth century—the revolt of which Christian Science and New Thought and the religion of apathy are the culmination. In order to do that, one must pass behind the stammering century, must go back to Jonathan Edwards, the great figure of Colonial New England, the expressed essence of the Puritan’s attitude toward life which was based on his attitude toward God.

  †“The effect of Mr. Treat’s preaching was that his hearers were several times in the course of his ministry awakened and alarmed. On one occasion a comparatively innocent young man was frightened nearly out of his wits, and Mr. Treat had to exert himself to make hell seem somewhat cooler to him.” †In Connecticut no person whose estate was less than two hundred pounds was permitted to wear “gold or silver lace or any lace above two shillings a yard.” † In 1748, copies of Bulls and Indulgences of Pope Urban the eighth were sold in the colonies, “by single Bull, Quire or Ream,” to be used as writing paper. † In 1752, Franklin was a director of the Philadelphia Contributionship, for insurance against fire. † The preaching of Whitefield caused disunion between liberal and conservative churchmen. † Dutch and German struggled hopelessly against the supremacy of the English language. † “From mansions that were castles, the Johnsons ruled the upper Mohawk Valley with a sway that was half feudal and half barbaric.” † At Harvard and Yale, students were listed not alphabetically but in accordance with the social rank of their families. † The Quaker, John Woolman, protested against Negro slavery, and white teachers were “sold” by the indenture system. † The Puritans made liberal divorce laws and insisted on the civil status of marriage. † Franklin invented an improved stove. † The title of mister was reserved for gentlemen—mechanics and farmers being known as goodman. † The gentry wore claret or peach-blossom coats, ruffled shirts, lace cravats, knee-breeches, and shoes with showy buckles; a caricature of the times shows a woman in heavy ruffles, tight long skirts and hoops and a monstrous “craped” head-dress—combed over a “rat” of artificial hair with broad ribbons—feathers three feet long, and imitation fruit and vegetables. A barber stands on a step-ladder and his assistant takes the elevation with a quadrant. The usual time for a perfect coiffure was two hours. † Horse races were frequent in Virginia. † Philadelphia led the colonies in prison reform, Franklin established a circulating library and, in 1789, the American Philosophical Society. † New Jersey and Pennsylvania developed exceptional pottery and glass works. † Benjamin West succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as president of the Royal Academy. † In 1765, the first medical school was founded. † The works of Rousseau, Montesquieu, and the French Encyclopedists were promptly translated and published. † The Union Society of Carpenters at Philadelphia struck for a ten-hour day.

  II. A Stormer of Heaven.[1]

  ON the eighth of July, 1741, a lecture was delivered in the little town of Enfield, Connecticut. The lecturer was a young, already respected divine; but the Enfieldians had not invited him. His coming, in fact, was an intrusion. For many months the inhabitants of neighboring villages, duly exercised and in great distress about the salvation of their souls, had been dismayed by the backslidden state of Enfield where the villagers remained “secure, loose, and vain”; so much so that the neighbors feared lest God pass them by, and many of them “were prostrate before Him . . . supplicating the mercy of Heaven” in behalf of the irreligious. It was at the instance of these neighbors that a lecturer had been appointed by the clergy, a man of proved power. Ten years earlier, he had descended upon the liberal clergy of Boston and warned them against preaching the soft doctrine that the grace of God extended to all men. A few years later, in his own parish of some two hundred families, he had savingly brought three hundred souls home to Christ. His name was Jonathan Edwards. As he stood in the pulpit, a tall, slender man, with a gentle, slightly feminine cast of features, he was not exceptionally impressive. He was not a great orator. But his logic was like a dagger of cold steel and his imagination was on fire. He was thirty-eight years old.

  “And when the time appointed for the lecture came, a number of the surrounding ministers were present, as well as some from a distance—a proof of the prayerful interest felt on behalf of the town. When they went into the meeting-house, the appearance of the assembly was thoughtless and vain; the people scarcely conducted themselves with common decency. But as the sermon proceeded, the audience became so overwhelmed with distress and weeping, that the preacher was obliged to speak to the people and desire silence, that he might be heard. The excitement soon became intense. Many of the hearers were seen unconsciously clinging by their hands to the posts, and the sides of the pews, as though they already felt themselves sliding into the pit.”

  The words he uttered were not to be forgotten for a century. Whenever men spoke of the anger or the power of God, or of the cruelty of Calvinism, they cited this sermon of Jonathan Edwards. He had heard that the men of Enfield were assured of their safety, considered themselves among the elect, fancied themselves free from temptation, and destined to Paradise in the hereafter. The text he chose was a threat: “Their feet shall slide in due time.” The title of his discourse was Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God:

  “So that thus it is that natural men are held in the hand of God over the pit of hell; they have deserved the fiery pit, and are already sentenced to it; and God is dreadfully provoked: his anger is as great towards them as to those that are actually suffering the execution of the fierceness of his wrath in hell; and they have done nothing in the least to appease or abate that anger, neither is God in the least bound by any promise to hold them up one moment. The devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them, and swallow them up; the fire pent up in their own hearts is struggling to break out; and they have no interest in any Mediator, there are no means within reach that can be any security to them. In short they have no refuge, nothing to take hold of; all that preserves them every moment is the mere arbitrary will, and uncovenanted unobliged forbearance of an incensed God.”

  As a child he had observed the field-spider and written a remarkably accurate and vivid description of its habits. The memory of it supplied him now with his most terrible image:

  “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much in the same way as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince: and yet, it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep; and there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand held you up. There is no reason to be given . . . but his mercy; yea, no other reason can be given why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.”

  A fellow minister, sitting beside the preacher, was so overcome that he caught him by the skirt of his dress and cried out, “Mr. Edwards! Mr. Edwards! is not God a God of Mercy?�
�� Mr. Edwards knew how to answer such appeals. Under ten heads, he could prove that nothing but the mere pleasure of God keeps the wicked for one moment out of hell; since they are worms and deserve the universal, extreme, intolerable punishment, which only an infinite God, infinitely enraged, can devise. Divine Justice only encourages the exercise of Divine Power, and God has made no promise, contracted no obligation, to keep any natural man out of hell. Does God ever save a soul? Then it is to his own glory for “the work of God in the conversion of one soul, considered with the source, foundation, and purchase of it, and also the benefit, end, and issue of it, is a more glorious work of God than the creation of the whole material universe.”

  Damned to eternal torture, the congregation at Enfield could only ask how to achieve salvation; was there a chance for every man to escape? The remorseless voice of the preacher answered coldly that the greater chance was for every man to be damned, since nothing he could do could alter his destiny. Even as he exhorted them to be violent in storming the gates of Heaven, to press into the Kingdom, the cold honesty of his logic made him add that for ninety-nine out of a hundred the effort was foredoomed. What free will could they have, since only God was free, since their freedom could only diminish the Divine Power and belittle the Divine Indulgence which might spare them? Only the possibility remained that, if they were diligent in the fulfillment of every duty, God, out of his goodness and power, but by no compulsion, might give them grace. If grace were given, they might lean on the bar of Heaven and “lost in adoring wonder at the mystery of love which elected and redeemed them” look down upon fathers, husbands, wives, and children in the torments of hell, and rejoice in the operations of Divine Justice!