Indeed, the key State in the formation of the union, Pennsylvan ia, was also the most diverse in FAligions. Philadelphia, its ‘City of Brotherly Love’, saw the last great flowering of Purita n political innovation. It was the city of the Quakers, a Presbyterian stronghold, the headquarters of the Baptists, an Anglican centre, and the home of a number of German pietistic groups, and of Moravians, Memmonites and other sects, as well as a place where Catholicism was tolerated and flourished. What mattered were not doctrinal differences but the fact that all were able to live there in harmony, alongside the seat of the Americ an Philosophical Society and at the centre of America's system of communications and economic traffic. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were thus framed in a highly appropriate and prophetic setting. What is tremendously significant and new about the American Revolution is that its victory for religiou s freedom and the separation of Church and State was won not so much by left-wing millenarian sects revoltin g against magisterial churchmen, but by the denominational leaders and statesmen themselves, who saw that pluralism was the only form consonant with the ideals and necessities of the country. Thus for the first time since the Dark Ages, a society came into existence in which institutional Christianity was associated with progress and freedom, rather than against them. The United States was Erasmian in its tolerance, Erasmian in its anti-doctrinal animus, above all Erasmian in its desire to explore, within a Christian context, the uttermost limits of human possibilities. It was Christianity presented not as a total society, but as an unlimited society. De Tocqueville, in Democracy in America (1835), says the attitude of and towards the churches was the first thing that struck him in the United States: 'In France | had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other: but in America | found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the Same country. He concluded: ‘Religion. . . must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions.’ And Americans, he added, held religion 'to be indispensible to the maintenance of republican institutions’. some of them saw it as much more than this. In the period 1750-1820, Presbyterianism and Congregationalism, the two formative sects of American Protestantism, ceased to be dominant, and, in numbers at any rate, the Baptists and Wesleyans took over. In New England, as indeed in England itself, many well-educated Presbyterians, under the impact of the Enlightenment, became Unitarians: and it was the New England Unitarians who created the so-called American Renaissance, centered round the North American Review (1815) and the Christian Examiner (1824), papers whose editors included William Emerson, the father of the poet, Edward Everett, George Ticknor, Jared Sparks, Richard Henry Dana, Henry Adams, James Russell Lowell and Edward Everett Hale. Harvard, whose staff included John Quincy Adams, Longfellow, Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, was largely Unitarian. Unitarianism was, to a great extent, the religion of the elite - critics joked that its preaching was limited to 'the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man and the neighborhood of Boston’. In fact it had its ultimate roots in Armenians and the third force. and could trace its pedigree not so much to the Founding Fathers as to Erasmus himself, who saw true Christianity in full alliance with the Renaissance. One could even push it back further, for the idea of human rebirth, the ‘new man’ was the central point of St Paul's moral theology. ‘Christianity’, wrote William Ellery Channing, '. . . should come forth from the darkness and corruption of the past in its own celestial splendor and in its divine simplicity. It should be comprehended as having but one purpose, the perfection of human nature, the elevation of men into nobler beings.’ The declaration of the American Unitarian Association (1853) spoke of God ‘forever sweeping the nations with regenerating gales from heaven, and visiting the hearts of men with celestial solicitations’. The prime instrument in this progressive process was the American Republic itself. Jonathan Edwards had predicted in 1740: ‘It is not unlikely that this work of God's spirit, that is so extraordinary and wondertul, is the dawning, or at least the prelude, of that glorious work of God so often foretold in scripture, which in the progress and issue of it shall renew the world of mankind. .. . And there are many things that 112