colony; but that all . . . may from time to time, and at all times hereafter, freely and fully have and enjoy his and their own judgments and consciences, in matters of religious concernments.' This was the first commonwealth in modern history to make religious freedom, as opposed to a mere degree of toleration, the principle of its existence, and to make this a reason for separating Church and State. Its existence, of course, opened the door to the Quakers and the Baptists, and indeed to missionaries from the Congregationalists of the north and the Anglicans of the south. In fact, once this decisive breach had been made, it was inevitable that America, with its lay predominance, should move steadily towards religious liberty and the separation of Church and State, and that the vision should cease to be Augustinian and become Erasmian. Economic factors pushed strongly in this direction. The later waves of emigrants had not, for the most part, experienced ‘conversion’ and ‘saving grace’; they tended, increasingly, to be a mere cross-section of Englishmen (and later of Northern Irish and scottish Presbyterians). A New England synod of 1662 declared that baptism was sufficient for church membership, but not for full communion. This ‘halfway Covenant’ was the beginning of the end of a pure Church, which went into a period of what was woefully termed ‘declension’; calamitous events, such as Indian attacks, were seen as divine punishments. In 1679 it was decided to make ‘a full inquiry. . . into the cause and state of God's controversy with us’. Thus a ‘Reforming Synod’ was called and reported: ‘That God hath a controversy with his New England people is undeniable, the Lord having written his displeasure in dismal characters against us.’ A new covenant and confession of faith were produced, but everything, it seemed, conspired to frustrate the elect. James |I'S attempt to reintroduce Catholicism, the Glorious Revolution, and the subsequent settlement, imposed toleration, an Anglican element, and a franchise based on property rather than church membership. Church leadership was discredited by the witchcraft mania at Salem in 1692, and weakened by the powerful backlash of public remorse which followed it. And the merchant element of Boston, who loathed the strict interpretation of the scriptures, especially the commercial restrictions derived from the Pentateuch, published a ‘manifesto’ in 1699 for a new Church ‘on broad and catholic’ lines, which accorded full status to any who professed Christian belief. The liberal elements captured Harvard College in 1707, and founded Yale at New Haven nine years later. To the Calvinist elite, these hammer blows threatened to destroy their theory that they had been appointed a chosen people to do divine work in America. In 1702 Cotton Mather published his Magnalia Christi Americana, documenting ‘Christ's great deeds in America’ and was forced to conclude: ‘Religion brought forth prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother. .. . There is danger lest the enchantments of this world make them forget their errand into the wilderness.’ But by this time the original Calvinist monopoly in New England had gone for good. The South, too, which had had an Anglican confession but a Puritan ethic and Church-State assumptions, had surrendered to diversity and economics. Tobacco and negro labour, rather than biblical institutionalism, became the determining factors. In 1667 Virginia laid down that ‘Baptism doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage and freedom.' In 1731 George Berkeley said that American slaveholders held blacks in ‘an irrational contempt. . . as creatures of another species, which had no right to be instructed or admitted to the sacraments’. Religious belief had to be adjusted to fit social and economic realities, rather than vice versa. As Commissary James Blair reported in 1743: ‘From being an instrument of wealth, [slavery] has become a molding power, leaving it a vexed question which controlled society most, the African slave or his master.’ Yet the collapse of the total Christian society did not lead to a growth of secularism. In America as a whole, religion continued to be the dynamic of society and history. The difference was that Christianity now became a voluntary movement, or series of movements, rather than a compulsory framework. And it was these movements which determined the shape of America's constitutional and social development. The multiplicity of America’s religious structure, and the continuance of the millenarian ideal, gave revivalism the 109