Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/770

738 Sectarianism. Charming. becomes distinct to any man, or to any body of men, a revision of creed becomes necessary, as a matter of honesty. From some such necessities have arisen the multiplicity of sects and the tendency to devout free thought which have been characteristic of America during the nineteenth century. Sectarianism has pervaded the country. As each older faith has grown rigid, tending toward dogma and formalism, it has given rise to new heresies. The varieties of American Methodism, for example, are numerous ; and a particular form of it has even produced the remarkable phenomena of Mormonism. In most cases this kind of sectarianism has hardly attained such intellectual dignity as to make it conspicuous in the history of philosophic thought. As was the case with the earlier theology, the most pregnant expression of the more cheerful philosophy which replaced it found voice in New England. The precise forms of philosophy and religion which flourished there have not, it is true, been generally accepted; but the utterances which accompanied them have had far more influence than some of those who have most deeply felt it have been willing to admit. During the eighteenth century the intellectual history of New England was comparatively insignificant ; it was, in the main, a story of stiffening tradition. With the nineteenth there came to that region a general reawakening which has been justly called a Renaissance. The bias of New England towards theology naturally gave this, in the beginning, a religious aspect. The first conspicuous evidence of it was the rapid conquest of Yankee pulpits by the buoyant heresies of the Unitarians. Of these the most memorable was William Ellery Channing. Of Calvinism he wrote, so early as 1809, in these terms : u Whoever will consult the famous Assembly's Catechisms and Confession will see the peculiarities of the system in all their length and breadth of deformity. A man of plain sense, whose spirit has not been broken to this creed by education or terror, will think that it is not necessary for us to travel to heathen countries to learn how mournfully the human mind may misrepresent the Deity." The means by which he believed that this mis- representation could be corrected he subsequently summarised as follows. " We must start in religion from our own souls. In these is the fountain of all divine truth.... Here is our primitive teacher and light.... The soul is the spring of our knowledge of God."" What Channing supposed the soul to be is not quite clear ; but there can be no doubt that he found its manifestation in something analogous to the voice of conscience and to the inner light of the Quakers. Nor can there be any doubt that the result of his teachings, or rather of the religious movement to which those teachings gave rise, was to substitute, in the chief minds of his time, the habit of seeking the truth for oneself, regardless of outward authority, in place of the older habit, which required submission to the arbitrary will of dogmatic divinity. In other words, the Yankee