The American Spirit in Literature

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER in THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION When the eighteenth century opened, many signs of change were in the air. The third generation of native-born Americans was becoming secularized. The theocracy of New England had failed. In the height of the tragic folly over the supposed "witchcraft" in Salem, Increase Mather and his son Cotton had held up the hands of the judges in their implacable work. But before five years had passed, Judge Sewall does public penance in church for his share of the awful blunder, desiring "to take the shame and blame of it." Robert Calef's cool pamphlet exposing the weakness of the prosecutors' case is indeed burned by Increase Mather in the Harvard Yard, but the liberal party are soon to force Mather from the Presidency and to refuse that office to his son. In the town of Boston, once hermetically sealed against heresy, there are Baptist and Episcopal churches ? and a dancingmaster. Young Benjamin Franklin, born in 1706, professes a high respect for the Mathers, but he does not go to church, "Sunday being my studying day," and neither the clerical nor the secular arm of Boston is long enough and strong enough to compel that industrious apprentice into piety. If such was the state of New England, the laxity of New York and Virginia needs little evidence. Contemporary travelers found the New Yorkers singularly attached to the things of this present world. Philadelphia was prosperous and therewith content. Virginia was a paradise with no forbidden fruit. Hugh Jones, writing of it in 1724, considers North Carolina "the refuge of runaways," and South Carolina "the delight of buccaneers and pirates," but Virginia "the happy retreat of true Britons and true Churchmen." Unluckily these Virginians, well nourished "by the plenty of the country," have "co...