The Great Awakening pointed ahead to an America marked by religious pluralism; by the 1740s many colonists were rejecting not only the stern Calvinism of Edwards but even the easy Arminianism of Solomon Stoddard in favor of a far less forbidding theology, one more in keeping with the ideas of the European Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment, whose proponents enshrined reason and scientific inquiry, had an enormous impact in America. The founders of the colonies were contemporaries of the astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), the philosopher-mathematician Rene Descartes (1596-1650), and Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the genius who revealed to the world the workings of gravity and other laws of motion. American society developed amid the excitement generated by these great discoverers, who provided both a new understanding of the natural world and a mode of thought that implied that impersonal, scientific laws governed the behavior of all matter, animate and inanimate. Earth and the heavens, and human beings and the lower animals all seemed parts of an immense, intricate machine. God had set it all in motion and remained the master technician (the divine watchmaker) overseeing it, but he took fewer and fewer occasions to interfere with its immutable operation. If human reasoning powers and direct observation of natural phenomena rather than God’s revelations provided the key to knowledge, it followed that knowledge of the laws of nature, by enabling people to understand the workings of the universe, would
Medicinal leeches on a patient's neck. Today leeches are sometimes used in microsurgery to prevent blood from pooling or coagulating. Leeches fasten onto the skin and tap into blood vessels. Prior to the 19th century, leeches were used to draw off "excess blood,” a concept that makes little medical sense.
Enable them to control their earthly destinies and to have at least a voice in their eternal destinies.
Most creative thinkers of the European Enlightenment realized that human beings were not entirely rational and that a complete understanding of the physical world was beyond their grasp. They did, however, believe that human beings were becoming more rational and would be able, by using their rational powers, to discover the laws governing the physical world. Their faith in these ideas produced the so-called Age of Reason. And while their confidence in human rationality now seems naive and the “laws” they formulated no longer appear so mechanically perfect (the universe is far less orderly than they imagined) they added immensely to knowledge.
Many churchgoing colonists, especially better educated ones, accepted the assumptions of the Age of Reason wholeheartedly. Some repudiated the doctrine of original sin and asserted the benevolence of God. Others came to doubt the divinity of Christ and eventually declared themselves Unitarians. Still others, among them Benjamin Franklin, embraced Deism, a faith that revered God for the marvels of his universe rather than for his power over humankind.
The impact of Enlightenment ideas went far beyond religion. The writings of John Locke and other political theorists found a receptive audience. Of special relevance to American political thinking was Locke’s insistence that a person’s property was a bulwark of his freedom; if a government could deprive a person of his property, it could enslave him. Also important was the work of the Scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, and the French philosophes Montesquieu and Voltaire. Ideas generated in Europe often reached America with startling speed. No colonial political controversy really heated up in America until all involved had published pamphlets citing half a dozen European authorities. Radical ideas that in Europe were discussed only by an intellectual elite became almost commonplace in the colonies.
As the topics of learned discourse expanded, ministers lost their monopoly on intellectual life. By the 1750s, only a minority of Harvard and Yale graduates were becoming ministers. The College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania), founded in 1751, and King’s College (later Columbia), founded in New York in 1754, added two institutions to the growing ranks of American colleges, which were never primarily training grounds for clergymen.
Lawyers, who first appeared in any number in colonial towns in the 1740s, swiftly asserted their intellectual authority in public affairs. Physicians and the handful of professors of natural history declared themselves better able to make sense of the new scientific discoveries than clergymen. Yet because fields Of knowledge were far less specialized than in modern times, self-educated amateurs could also make useful contributions.
The most famous instances of popular participation occurred in Philadelphia. It was there, in 1727, that twenty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin founded the Junto, a club at which he and other young artisans gathered on Friday evenings to discuss “any point of morals, politics, or natural philosophy.” In 1743 Franklin established an expanded version of the Junto, the American Philosophical Society, which he hoped would “cultivate the finer arts and improve the common stock of knowledge.”
•••-[Read the Document Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God at myhistorylab. com
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