3. ALARMS DUE TO THE SPREAD OF RELIGIOUS RADICALISM AND SCEPTICISM
During the eighteenth century the progress of religious thought in New England in the direction of liberal positions was marked. Near the beginning of the century, in his Ratio Disciplines, Cotton Mather was able to speak confidently of the solid and compact character of religious opinion in his generation, and felt free to dispose of the subject with a few general statements regarding the universal adherence of the churches of New England to the orthodox standards of the mother country. He made the added comment: "I can not learn, That among all the Pastors of Two Hundred Churches, there is one Arminian: much less Arian, or a Gentilist." * At the end of the century, it is very certain that no such all-inclusive generalization, by the widest stretch of the imagination, would have been possible. Indeed, when a noted Philadelphia minister of the day, the Reverend Ashbel Green, visited New England in 1791, he found an aptitude for polemical discussion on the part of the clergy which impressed him as most extraordinary. Through his contact with the Boston Ministerial Association he encountered "Calvinists, Universalists, Arminians, Arians," and at least one "Socinian," all participating in pleasant social intercourse, despite their radical differences of religious opinion. To the mind of the visiting Philadelphia clergyman the situation was explicable only on the basis of an extreme laxness in the matter of religious sentiments and doctrines, a judgment which obviously requires some modification in view of the predilection for doctrinal controversy which he himself remarked. 2
From the days of the Great Awakening, the lines of doc
- 1 Quoted by Walker, in his History of the Congregational Churches in the United States, p. 216.
- 2 Green, Life, pp. 224, 225.
