constitution whereby the natural posterity of Adam, proceeding from him, much as the buds or branches from the stock or root of a tree, should be treated as one with him.’ It was against this eschatological background that the Great Awakening ‘took off, being reanimated whenever it showed signs of flagging by the advent of new and spectacular orators, such as Wesley's friend George Whitefield, the ‘Grand Itinerant'. A German immigrant woman who heard Whitefield in New England said that though she understood no English, she had never been so ‘edified in her life. He preached, as he put it, 'with much Flame, Clearness and Power. . . Dagon falls daily before the Ark' ; and when he left Boston he handed over to a native evangelist, Gilbert Tennent. ‘People wallowed in snow, night and day’, wrote a jealous Anglican, ‘for the benefit of his beastly braying'. Another 'awakener’ who served to ‘blow up the divine fire lately kindled’ was John Davenport from Yale, at one point arrested and judged mentally disturbed when he called for wigs, cloaks, rings and many works on religion to be burned. It was the beginning of American personal evangelism. Not everyone liked it. Its roots were in the country areas, where it helped to democratize society and arouse opposition to the restrictions of royal government, but it took fire in the towns, where hearers fainted, wept, shrieked and generally gave vent to their ‘affections’. Charles Chauncey, who might be termed an Erasmian or an Arminian, and who reflected the eighteenth-century rationalist spirit in his Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (1743), disapproved of these antics; he considered even Edwards a ‘visionary enthusiast’, and warned: ‘There is the Religion of the Understanding and Judgment, and Will, as well as of the Affections; and if little account is made of the former, while great Stress is laid on the latter, it can't be but People should run into Disorders.’ In fact, it was the marriage between the rationalism of people like Chauncey, and the Great Awakening spirit, which enabled the potential 'Disorders' to be channeled into the political aims of the Revolution, which was soon plainly identified as the coming eschatological event. Neither force could have succeeded without the other. Nor is the Revolution conceivable without this religious background. As John Adams was to put it afterwards (1818): 'The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; and change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations. We must remember that until the 1740s America was a collection of disparate colonies with little contact with each other and often (as with all Latin America) more powerful links with cities and economic interests in Europe than with other colonies. Religious evangelism was the first continental force, an all-American phenomenon which transcended colonial differences, introduced national figures and made state boundaries seem unimportant. Whitefield was the first ‘American’ public figure to be well-known from New Hampshire to Georgia, and his death in 1770 evoked comment from the entire colonial press. Thus ecumenicalism preceded, and shaped, political unity. And by crossing in many ways the sectarian religious barriers, just as it crossed the colonial-state ones, it helped to bring into being the real ethic of the American Revolution, which might be termed the Protestant consensus, the beliefs and standards and attitudes which the American majority had in common. If it was no longer possible, or necessary, to imagine the American people making a binding covenant with God for their Church-State, the Protestant consensus nevertheless had a definite utilitarian and civic purpose. As John Adams, who had lost his original religious faith, put it in his diary: ‘One great advantage of the Christian religion is that it brings the great principle of the law of nature and nations, love your neighbor as yourself, and do to others as you would that others should do to you - to the knowledge, belief and veneration of the whole people. Children, servants, women and men are all professors in the science of public as well as private morality. . . . the duties and rights of the man and the citizen are thus taught from early infancy.’ The diversity of American religion thus seemed no barrier to its social and political unity since it rested on a Christian ethic which was infinitely more important than the dogmatic variations of the sects. 111