and State was the disposition to apply a common test to public and
private conduct. Rousseau voiced one of the strongest convictions of his
age when he said that "those who would treat politics and morality apart
will never understand anything about either one or the other." With the
decay of creeds, true religion was thought by many to be inseparable
from civic virtue, while political philosophy, preaching the
regeneration of an "artificial" society by returning to the simple life
of nature, was often conceived with an emotional fervor which raised
civic duties to the level of religious rites. In America, long before
Rousseau startled the world with his paradoxes, men who could not agree
on creeds or forms of government found common ground in thinking that
the test of true religion was that it made good citizens, the test of
rightly ordered society that it made good men. In the early letters of
John Adams we may note how one man's mind was won to this new ideal.
"There is a story about town," he writes to Charles Cushing, "that I am
an Arminian." Time was when such a rumor would have been too serious to
be reported, without comment, in the postscript of a long letter. In
1756, even this young candidate for the ministry felt that such issues
were becoming remote and unreal. He but voiced the growing discontent
when he asked, "where do we find a precept in the gospel requiring
ecclesiastical synods, councils, creeds, oaths, subscriptions, and whole
cart-loads of other trumpery that we find religion encumbered with in
these days?" Independent thinking, fortified by the authority of Locke
and Sidney, Bacon and Tillotson, and the author of Cato's Letters,
enabled him to announce, in the very spirit and all but the very words
of Diderot and Rousseau, of whom he had never heard, that "the design of
Christianity was not to make good riddle-solvers or good
mystery-mongers, but good men, good magistrates, and good subjects." And
so he renounced the ministry in favor of "that science by which mankind
raise themselves from the forlorn, helpless state, in which nature
leaves them, to the full enjoyment of all the inestimable blessings of
social union."

It is but an evidence of the force of this new ideal that Benjamin
Franklin, in whose life and writings it finds best expression, became
the most influential American of his time and won in two continents the
veneration that men accord to saints and prophets. At the age of sixteen
s