They form a perpetual attrition, working silently and
ceaselessly day and night, wearing away the distinctively religious
conceptions of the community. Much of the vagueness and sentimentalism
of present preaching, its uncritical impressionism, is due to the
influence of the non-religious or, at least, the insufficiently
religious character of the ruling ideas and motives outside the church
which are impinging upon it, and upon the rest of the thinking of the
moment.
Now, this _abstract_ humanism of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries had a considerable influence upon early American preaching.
The latter part of the eighteenth century marked a breaking away from
the Protestant scholasticism of the Reformation theology. The French
Revolution accented and made operative, even across the Atlantic, the
typical humanistic concepts 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.
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