The problem of Oliver Cromwell's religious beliefs and the sincerity of those beliefs is one that has bedevilled historians from the seventeenth century to the present. Ultimately it is not one that will yield a concrete solution, for it is far too dependent on subjective considerations. Nevertheless, the impossibility of its definite resolution does not permit historians the expediency of dispensing with an enquiry into Cromwell's religion; for it is certainly the most striking characteristic of the man as he is revealed in his writings and speeches.

George Herbert was a devotional poet in the early part of the seventeenth century; he was also an Anglican minister. Like his friends, John Donne and Lancelot Andrewes, he loved the Church of England, and his faith was a source of creativity. In the later part of his life Herbert had a hobby; he liked to collect simple proverbs. Herbert's sayings, which he published as Outlandish Proverbs, had little to do with religion. Compared with the themes of his poetry, in fact, they were surprisingly secular.

The question of post-Reformation Catholicism in England has received increased attention of late from historians of various creeds, with the Elizabethans and the Generation of 1829 exercising a particular fascination. Only the eighteenth century continues to suffer neglect—and this despite the monumental scholarship of an earlier day, when Edwardian ecclesiastics ventured to reconstruct the Georgian world of Bishop Challoner and the missioners of the “Penny Chapels.” Their conclusions now stand in need of fundamental revision, not only in the interests of greater impartiality, but in order to determine more precisely the condition of a religious minority, allegedly subjected to the heaviest disabilities. “Proscribed and persecuted the Catholic faith has notoriously been for the last three centuries,” so wrote the editor of Dolman's Magazine in 1847; and, some fifty years later, neither Bishop Burton nor Bishop Ward thought it necessary to demur. Indeed, for them, the period which culminated in the riots of 1780 so obviously reflected the malice of the Protestant majority as to justify the demand for“Relief”or “Emancipation.”

British travelers have swarmed along American shores in vast numbers ever since the early years of the new republic. During the nineteenth century they erected a model of the United States, resembling Tocqueville's, with which they nearly always came to understand America. It was built around two generalizations. First, Americans believe in the principle of equality, or more precisely, the belief that all men deserve equal opportunities to rise, no matter what their inherited rank in society. And, second, Americans make an heroic effort to incorporate this principle into the daily institutional fabric of their national life—into the public schools, into family relationships in the homes, into a political life which revolves around the universal ballot, into their adoring attitude towards women and children, into their respectful treatment of “help,” and into the fluid class structure itself.

Looking back upon the Puritan Holy Commonwealth from the vantage point of our Great Society, we recognize continuity, but it would be surprising if we were not more conscious of differences. Not the least of these, we might assume, would be the abandonment of a colonial ideal of theocracy in favor of a wall of separation between church and state in a thoroughly secularized world. Surely in a day when God is hidden or dead we do not look for any avenues of divine direction in mundane affairs or for some visible body of saints through whom God's continuing will for culture may be made known. Yet it has been urged that even after the Puritan theocracy collapsed “the Puritan vision of the political order subdued to God and operating under his will by his people was not lost. It persisted in American life through various transformations until thoroughly secularized.” The thesis deserves scrutiny, period by period, person by person. For our purposes we can find substantial evidence of a continuing theocratic ideal in such a suggestive period as the Great Awakening,2 when revivalist preachers and excited followers seemed to rattle and even threaten the structure of their own society, and certainly left a legacy of movements and causes to affect the body politic later. Towering over all other figures in the upheavals of the 1740's is that fascinating and enigmatic Puritan, Jonathan Edwards. The specific purpose of this paper is to inquire whether this contemporary of Davenport and Tennent—as well as Franklin and Mayhew—did what we might expect him to do: support and transmit a theocratic ideal.

In spite of the importance of Philip Melanchthon for the subsequent history of both the Lutheran and the Reformed churches, the quantity of theological literature from his pen to be had between hard covers in English is disappointingly small. The fourteen or so items translated into English that survive from the sixteenth century are relatively inaccessible. So are the four or five out of the nineteenth century.