“In hope that sends a shining ray/far down the future's broadening way…” Quoting these lines from a well-known hymn by the Social Gospel pioneer Washington Gladden, Clarence Reidenbach, a Congregationalist minister in Holyoke, Massachusetts, addressed himself late in 1930 to the question of the meaning of the New Year: “Was Dr. Gladden right? Is life really a broadening way” Or, to put the matter in the language of a classic of intellectual history, is “the idea of progress”—in Professor Bury's words the idea “that civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction”—a valid description of social reality? Reidenbach had no doubt that it was. that it was. “I have at least two great reasons for optimism” that the future is in fact a broadening way, he continued. “One is my confidence in God … the other is that history shows progress.”

Recently Millenarianism has received increasing attention in Puritan Studies. The heretical character of Millenarianism (as well as the apparent failure of all past prophecies concerning that age) has contributed to the essential neglect of the phenomenon by historians who have stood in denominational traditions which were shaped by that revolutionary age. The new interest in Puritan Millenarianism is linked to an awareness of the role of the Spirit in Puritan thought. It is also part of a broader appreciation of the apocalytic ideological ingredient which is present in revolutionary periods. Thus Mr. Cohen's discussion is timely as a contribution to a developing analysis both of Puritan Millenarianism and also revolutionary apocalypticism more generally. In my comments on the paper I would like to distinguish between the thesis itself and several assumptions which are implicit in Mr. Cohen's application of it. I will suggest that if other assumptions were to be substituted it would be necessary to find a different significance in the thesis, but that in that process the thesis would be sustantiated.

Cannibals - mountebanks - charlatans - pious and whining hypocrites - necromancers - pseudo-Christians - mystery mongers. These are among the epithets which Thomas Jefferson applied to the clergy of the Protestant denominations and of the Roman Catholic Church as well. It was they who “perverted” the principles of Jesus “into an engine for enslaving mankind”; it was the Christian “priesthood” who had turned organized religion into a “mere contrivance to filch wealth and power” for themselves; they were the ones who throughout history had persecuted rational men for refusing to swallow “their impious heresies.”

Neither a theologian nor a church historian, I approach my task as a discussant of a paper on “The Idea of Progress in Most Recent Protestant Thought” with a great deal of hesitation. Nevertheless, there are parallels between the development of thought about history among Protestant theologians and American historians since the early nineteen-thirties.