forms became a mere question of expediency. It is remarkable that the
logical consequences of this important step have been so tardy and
hesitating.

* * * * *

It was not in the common course of church history that the period under
consideration should be a period of vigorous internal activity and
development in the old settled churches of America. The deep, often
excessive, excitements of the Awakening had not only ceased, but had
been succeeded by intense agitations of another sort. Two successive
"French and Indian" wars kept the long frontier, at a time when there
was little besides frontier to the British colonies, in continual peril
of fire and scalping-knife.[184:1] The astonishingly sudden and complete
extinction of the French politico-religious empire in Canada and the
West made possible, and at no remote time inevitable, the separation of
the British colonies from the mother country and the contentions and
debates that led into the Revolutionary War began at once.

Another consequence of the prostrating of the French power in America
has been less noticed by historians, but the course of this narrative
will not be followed far without its becoming manifest as not less
momentous in its bearing on the future history of the church. The
extinction of the French-Catholic power in America made possible the
later plantation and large and free development of the Catholic Church
in the territory of the United States. After that event the Catholic
resident or citizen was no longer subject to the suspicion of being a
sympathizer with a hostile neighboring power, and the Jesuit missionary
was no longer liable to be regarded as a political intriguer and a
conspirator with savage assassins against the lives of innocent settlers
and their families. If there are those who, reading the earlier pages of
this volume, have mourned over the disappointment and annihilation of
two magnificent schemes of Catholic domination on the North American
continent as being among the painful mysteries of divine providence,
they may find compensation for these catastrophes in later advances of
Catholicism, which without these antecedents would seem to have been
hardly possible.

Although the spiritual development of the awakened American churches,
after the Awakening until the independence of the States was established
and acknowledged, was limited by these great hindrances, this period was
one of momentous