doctrine with Webster and Tocqueville that the beliefs
of the pilgrims inspired the Revolution, which others deem a triumph of
pelagianism; while J.Q. Adams affirms that "not one of the motives which
stimulated the puritans of 1643 had the slightest influence in actuating
the confederacy of 1774." The Dutch statesman Hogendorp, returning from
the United States in 1784, had the following dialogue with the
stadtholder: "La religion, monseigneur, a moins d'influence que jamais
sur les esprits.... Il y a toute une province de quakers?... Depuis la
revolution il semble que ces sortes de differences s'evanouissent....
Les Bostoniens ne sont-ils pas fort devots?... Ils l'etaient,
monseigneur, mais a lire les descriptions faites il y a vingt ou meme
dix ans, on ne les reconnait pas de ce cote-la." It is an old story that
the federal constitution, unlike that of Herault de Sechelles, makes no
allusion to the Deity; that there is none in the president's oath; and
that in 1796 it was stated officially that the government of the United
States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. No three
men had more to do with the new order than Franklin, Adams, and
Jefferson. Franklin's irreligious tone was such that his manuscripts,
like Bentham's, were suppressed, to the present year. Adams called the
Christian faith a horrid blasphemy. Of Jefferson we are assured that, if
not an absolute atheist, he had no belief in a future existence; and he
hoped that the French arms "would bring at length kings, nobles, and
priests to the scaffolds which they have been so long deluging with
human blood." If Calvin prompted the Revolution, it was after he had
suffered from contact with Tom Paine; and we must make room for other
influences which, in that generation, swayed the world from the rising
to the setting sun. It was an age of faith in the secular sense
described by Guizot: "C'etait un siecle ardent et sincere, un siecle
plein de foi et d'enthousiasme. Il a eu foi dans la verite, car il lui a
reconnu le droit de regner."

In point both of principle and policy, Mr. Bryce does well to load the
scale that is not his own, and to let the jurist within him sometimes
mask the philosophic politician. I have to speak of him not as a
political reasoner or as an observer of life in motion, but only in the
character which he assiduously lays aside. If he had guarded less
against his own historic faculty, and had allowed space to take up
neglecte