of the rights of man and the sovereignty
of the individual person. Skepticism and even atheism became a fashion
in our infant republic. It was a mark of sophistication with
many educated men to regard Christianity as not worthy of serious
consideration. College students modestly admitted that they were
infidels and with a delicious naivete assumed the names of Voltaire,
Thomas Paine and even of that notorious and notable egotist
Rousseau. It is said that in 1795, on the first Sunday of President
administration in Yale College, only three undergraduates remained
after service to take the sacrament. The reasons were partly
political, probably, but these themselves were grounded in the new
philosophical, anti-religious attitude.

Of course, this affected the churches. There was a reaction from
Protestant scholasticism within them which, later on, culminated in
Unitarianism, Universalism and Arminianism. The most significant thing
in the Unitarian movement was not its rejection of the Trinitarian
speculation, but its positive contribution to the reassertion of
Jesus' doctrine of the worth and dignity of human nature. But it
recovered that doctrine much more by the way of humanistic philosophy
than by way of the teaching of the New Testament. I suppose the
thing which has made the weakness of the Unitarian movement, its
acknowledged lack of religious warmth and feeling, is due not to the
place where it stands, but to the road by which it got there.

Yet, take it for all in all, the effect upon the preaching of the
supernatural and speculative doctrines and insights of Christianity,
was not in America as great as might be expected. Kant died in 1804,
and Goethe in 1832, but only in the last sixty years has the preaching
of the "evangelical" churches been fundamentally affected by the
prevailing intellectual currents of the day. This is due, I think,
to two causes. One was the nature of the German Reformation. It
found preaching at a low ebb. Every great force, scholastic, popular,
mystical, which had contributed to the splendor of the mediaeval
pulpit had fallen into decay, and the widespread moral laxity of the
clergy precluded spiritual insight. The Reformation, with its ethical
and political interests, revived preaching and by the nature of these
same interests fixed the limits and determined the direction within
which it should develop. It is important to remember that Luther did
not break with the old theological syste