ce its genesis and development.

At bottom, of course, it rests upon the inherent Puritanism of the
people; it could not survive a year if they were opposed to the
principle visible in it. That deep-seated and uncorrupted Puritanism,
that conviction of the pervasiveness of sin, of the supreme importance
of moral correctness, of the need of savage and inquisitorial laws, has
been a dominating force in American life since the very beginning. There
has never been any question before the nation, whether political or
economic, religious or military, diplomatic or sociological, which did
not resolve itself, soon or late, into a purely moral question. Nor has
there ever been any surcease of the spiritual eagerness which lay at the
bottom of the original Puritan's moral obsession: the American has been,
from the very start, a man genuinely interested in the eternal
mysteries, and fearful of missing their correct solution. The frank
theocracy of the New England colonies had scarcely succumbed to the
libertarianism of a godless Crown before there came the Great Awakening
of 1734, with its orgies of homiletics and its restoration of talmudism
to the first place among polite sciences. The Revolution, of course,
brought a set-back: the colonists faced so urgent a need of unity in
politics that they declared a sort of _Treuga Dei_ in religion, and that
truce, armed though it was, left its imprint upon the First Amendment to
the Constitution. But immediately the young Republic emerged from the
stresses of adolescence, a missionary army took to the field again, and
before long the Asbury revival was paling that of Whitefield, Wesley and
Jonathan Edwards, not only in its hortatory violence but also in the
length of its lists of slain.

Thereafter, down to the outbreak of the Civil War, the country was
rocked again and again by furious attacks upon the devil. On the one
hand, this great campaign took a purely theological form, with a
hundred new and fantastic creeds as its fruits; on the other hand, it
crystallized into the hysterical temperance movement of the 30's and
40's, which penetrated to the very floor of Congress and put "dry" laws
upon the statute-books of ten States; and on the third hand, as it were,
it established a prudery in speech and thought from which we are yet but
half delivered. Such ancient and innocent words as "bitch" and "bastard"
disappeared from the American language; Bartlett tells us, indeed, in
his "Diction