test for power and the expansive tendency
furnished to the various sects by the existence of a moving frontier
must have had important results on the character of religious
organization in the United States. The multiplication of rival churches
in the little frontier towns had deep and lasting social effects. The
religious aspects of the frontier make a chapter in our history which
needs study.

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of
profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from
colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits
have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of
their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The
result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking
characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness
and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to
find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the
artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous
energy;[37:1] that dominant individualism, working for good and for
evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with
freedom--these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out
elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when
the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America
has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United
States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not
only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash
prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life
has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and,
unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy
will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again
will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the
frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant.
There is not _tabula rasa_. The stubborn American environment is there
with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways
of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in
spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of
opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and
freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society