THE SEC. 5. Sundering of Ecclesiastical Ties. 6. The Churches After the War. 7. Revivals of Religion Rare. HE colonial planting and training had its natural consummation in the American Revolution. Wise European statesmen had foreseen it. The colonies of Jamestown and Massachusetts possessed the genius and daring which ushered in the tedious ordeal, and sustained it from Lexington to Yorktown. In the Colonial, the Revolutionary, and the National eras the American people bear the same impress and exhibit an essential unity of drift and character. The problems of free conscience and free citizenship have struggled for solution, with improving phases, from the first settlements until now. What an arena for working out these high aspirations of humanity! Struggles which had convulsed the conservative institutions of the Old World were renewed amid the semiconservative conditions of the New World. But, even here, only by the throes of a mighty revolution could the better conditions intended by Providence for humanity be attained. Section 1.—Union Through Suffering. A union of the colonies was a condition precedent to American nationality. The seed-thought germinated in the mind of Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, D.D., of, Boston, and was by him first cast into the mind of Samuel Adams. In Dr. Mayhew's church there had been a communion of the churches. The next day, on the streets. of Boston, Mayhew met Adams, and, placing his hand upon his shoulder, exclaimed, "We have just had a communion of the churches, now let us have a union of States." Such was the genesis, first, of the Colonial, and, later, of the Federal Union. One nationality was essential to constitutional liberty in North America. The alternative was petty divisions, waste, and wars-the story of continental Europe repeated. France and England had competed for the possession of the North American Continent-the former the champion of intellectual and political subserviency to the papacy, and the latter the asserter of enlightened freedom. The contest of these two great powers ended in 1763, when France ceded her Canadian possessions to England, abandoned her long military cordon along the northern and western frontiers, and thus left the Atlantic colonies in assured fealty to the English crown. A great impulse was at once given to emigration, and the country rapidly filled. But no sooner were the colonies relieved from the harassing presence of the French-Indian hostilities than they became restless under the restraints of dependency and sighed for relief from foreign taxation and dominion. Disputes arose, the most prominent, in reference to "The Stamp Act," continuing eighteen years. England's right to regulate the foreign commerce was not questioned, but "The Stamp Act" violated domestic independence. Claiming that Parliament had no jurisdiction within their territory, the colonies refused to submit. Common interests impelled them to a league of domestic amity and fraternal resistance to foreign dictation. Gradually they became fused and united; but time was required. The organization of the scattered and disjointed American colonies under a general government was brought about by a long series of agitations, struggles, and triumphs, extending through a period of about forty years-from the French and Indian wars to the adoption of the Federal Constitution. The central event of this period was the war of the Revolution, a movement, which, considered either in respect to its immediate or its more remote consequences, Americans have proudly regarded as the greatest event of modern times. When it occurred it attracted universal attention, taxing the sagacity and the energies of the greatest English statesmen. In the colonies resources unknown before were developed, surprising even the most sanguine and determined champions of independence, and resulting in the establishment of a new Western Empire on the principles of freedom and progress. In both hemispheres it inaugurated a long series of progressive movements and revolutions, emancipating and elevating society, establishing law and authority on a new basis, and investing it with an ever-increasing importance. |