opportunity to act as a unifying, national force. Moreover, the establishment of the voluntary principle led to an identification, in the minds of all relgious groups, of Christian enthusiasm with political liberty. As John Adams put it in 1765, in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law’ ‘Under the execrable race of the Stuarts, the Struggle between the people and the confederacy of temporal and spiritual tyranny became formidable, violent and bloody. It was this great struggle that peopled America. It was not religion alone, as was commonly suppo sed, but it was a love of universal liberty, and a hatred, a dread, a horror of the internal confederacy of ecclesiastical, hierarchical and despotic rulers that projected, conducted and accomplished the settlement of America.’ That being so, revivalism tended to precede political action; and it was the so called Great Awakening of the 1730s and after which prepared the American Revolution. The Awakening was a much more complicated phenomenon than Wesley's revival in England, since it combined rumbustious and unsophisticated mass evangelism with the ideas of the eighteenth-cen tury Enlightenment. Both shared a distrust of doctrinal ideas, a stress on morality and ethics, an ecumenical spirit. The Awakeners would agree with Wesley: 'l. . . refuse to be distinguished from other men by any but the common principles of Christianity... . Dost thou love and fear God? It is enough! | give thee the right hand of fellowship.’ But Jonathan Edwards, who first preached the revival in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1733, was also in the mainstream of the Erasmian intellectual tradition. He was the pupil, at New Haven, of Samuel Johnson, whose work reflected the liberation from the ancient theological system as it was still taught in the seventeenth century - 'a curious cobweb of distributions and definitions’, as he termed it. Johnson traced his own intellectual birth to the reading of Bacon's Advancement of Learning, which he says left him ‘like one at once emerging out of a glimmer of twilight into the full sunshine of open day’. He read and admired Bishop Berkeley's attempt to reconcile idealism, reason and Christian belief, and he defended natural’ law, holding morality to be ‘the same thing as the religion of Nature’, not indeed discoverable without revelation but ‘founded on the first principles of reason and nature’. Edwards says he himself read Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding with more pleasure ‘than the most greedy miser finds when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from some newly-discovered treasure’. But he brought to Locke's methods of reasoning the warmth and the emotionalism they lacked. This might be termed providential: Locke was writing after a successful revolution, Edwards before one, at a time when unifying and energizing emotions were necessary to create a popular will for change. Much of his writing is capable of a political, as well as a theological interpretation. He sought in his preaching to arouse what he called ‘affections’, which he defined as ‘that which moves a person from neutrality or mere assent and inclines his heart to possess or reject something’. In his very widely read Treatise Concerning Human Affections (1746) he quoted from the Cambridge Platonist John Smith a passage which should be read in the light of subsequent political history: 'A true celestial warmth is of an immortal nature; and being once seated vitally in the souls of man, it will regulate and order all the motions in a due manner: as the natural head. eradicated in the hearts of living creatures, hath the dominion and economy of the whole body under it... . It iS a new nature, informing the souls of man.' Edwards argued -strongly that the deeds of men were caused by God's will. There was thus no essential difference between a religious and a political emotion, both of which were God-directed. Within Edwards's rational theology there was a strident millenarian struggling to get out. In human history, he wrote, ‘all the changes are brought to pass. . . to prepare the way for that glorious issue of things that shall be when truth and righteousness shall finally prevail.’ Men must know the hour when God 'shall take the kingdom’ and he looked towards 'the dawn of that glorious day’. In his last work, on original sin (1758), he prophesied: ‘And | am persuaded, no solid reason can be given, why God, who constitutes all other created union or oneness, according to his pleasure . . . may not establish a 110