4. He had already
outlived Cotton and Hooker, Shepard and Winthrop, by more than thirty
years. Inevitably men began, toward the end of the century, to take
stock of the great venture of colonization, to scrutinize their own
history and present position, to ask searching questions of themselves.
"You have better food and raiment than was in former times," wrote
the aged Roger Clark, in 1676; "but have you better hearts than your
forefathers had?" Thomas Walley's "Languishing Commonwealth" maintains
that "Faith is dead, and Love is cold, and Zeal is gone." Urian Oakes's
election sermon of 1670 in Cambridge is a condemnation of the prevalent
worldliness and ostentation. This period of critical inquiry and
assessment, however, also gives grounds for just pride. History,
biography, eulogy, are flourishing. The reader is reminded of that
epoch, one hundred and fifty years later, when the deaths of John Adams
and of Thomas Jefferson, falling upon the same anniversary day, the
Fourth of July, 1826, stirred all Americans to a fresh recognition of
the services wrought by the Fathers of the Republic. So it was in the
colonies at the close of the seventeenth century. Old England, in one
final paroxysm of political disgust, cast out the last Stuart in 1688.
That Revolution marks, as we have seen, the close of a long and tragic
struggle which began in the autocratic theories of James the First
and in the absolutism of Charles. Almost every phase of that momentous
conflict had its reverberation across the Atlantic, as the history of
the granting and withdrawal of colonial charters witnesses abundantly.
The American pioneers were quite aware of what was going on in England,
and they praised God or grumbled, thriftily profited by the results or
quietly nullified them, as the case might be. But all the time, while
England was rocked to its foundations, the colonists struck steadily
forward into their own independent life.

CHAPTER III. 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, d