date, though an extreme recalcitrant like Henry Thoreau might still object, there was virtually no voice in the Republic that would publicly object to so frank a prescription for working upon its religious emotionalism. Which in itself is a comment of resounding overtones when one thinks that it was made with casualness a little more than three generations after the Declaration of Independence.
“Ye optimates of the land,” asked The Christian Spectator in 1825, naming specifically lawyers, legislators, and professors, do you suppose that religion is any longer a controversy of metaphysics? On the contrary, “it is a question of utility, and if any religion is necessary, it must be of the diffusive, controlling, energetic kind.”
Where then was a Protestant culture, in an expanding economy, to find admonitions out of the historic past which might still control it? The fact was certain to The Biblical Repository of 1830 that “in this speculative age,” more importance was attached to fashions, “and more temporizing policy in social intercourse and commercial transactions, than was common with our pious forefathers.” Where was the formula for explanation to be found? Surely, no longer in the Puritan conception of a particular people in a specific covenant with Jehovah, for that could no longer fit the sprawling states of the Union. The answer arose not out of the traditions of theology, not even out of Calvinism, but out of the key words of the romantic movement. “Christians,” concluded The Biblical Repository, “may employ their intellect as much on subjects of religion, but there is less of the heart put in requisition.”
In the early days of Unitarianism, at a time when the “liberal” preachers were working their revolution not by denouncing Calvinism but by observing discreet silence upon its doctrines, they liked to argue, as did Jeremy Belknap in 1784, that talking about controverted points was not edifying, that “that preaching is generally the most successful, which is the most spiritual, the most practical,” and so “we should aim directly at the heart.” They evidently derived much instruction from their perusal of Dr. Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, which was widely reprinted in America and in the 1780’s became the standard text at Harvard. Blair advised strenuously against introducing abstruse questions into the pulpit and found the great secret of successful preaching “in bringing home all that is spoken to the hearts of Hearers.” But as the Revival continued to sweep the country, and the hostility of Unitarianism to it was resented, evangelicals found themselves insisting that the undoctrinal methods of Boston were very far from addressing the heart. Though few of
them spent much thought on the matter, what they instinctively realized was that Belknap’s and Blair’s conception of the heart was entirely of the eighteenth century, and that what they meant was the infinitely more palpitating organ being currently celebrated in romances and gift-book fiction. “A production which originates in the head is, as such,” wrote Calvin Pease in 1853, “artificial and arbitrary; while one which originates in the heart, is spontaneous and vital.” In theology, as at Princeton, the heart has become absorbed and hardened into abstract propositions “which suit the purposes of science,” but the glory of American Protestantism, as he saw it, was that out of a half-century of experience, in our preaching “the brain ... is held in ‘solution’ by the heart, and thus made strictly subordinate and tributary to the end of influencing the conduct and controlling the will.” By the 1850’s the change in conception was so complete that Stevens, in describing what was required by the times, brought the key words into revealing conjunction: “Methodism is compatible with large minds, as well as large hearts, and can employ them on the sublimest scale of their powers.”
The Sublime and the Heart! That they should, so to speak, find each other out and become, in the passions of the Revival, partners— this is a basic condition of the mass civilization of the nation. That the religious, dedicated to the immediate tasks before them, did not see all the implications in this union, which the Hudson River painters. Cooper, Melville, and Whitman later explored, simply underscores the truism that these artists were as much children of the age as Charles Finney. But what was apparent to revivalists, and what they constantly talked about, was the happy consequence of this break with the eighteenth century for the underlying unity of the denominations. Speculative systems produce only dissension, said Eleazar Lord in 1835, but the true evangelical method “addresses itself to the heart”:
It aims to produce spiritual and practical religion. It is homogeneous wherever applied. With instruction it combines example and influence; and with doctrine, mutual fellowship, prayers and good works; and lays the foundations of union in the affections, sympathies, and hopes.
Within, the Revival, where the new power of the words “sublime” and “heart” could work with a vengeance, the character of the American intellect was emerging rapidly, showing the qualities it would retain despite immense changes in technology and despite the strain of criticism from civilized Europeans. For, as The Spirit of the Pilgrims roundly stated in 1831: “The cultivation of intellect has failed. Ages
the most distinguished for intellectual culture have been alike distinguished for voluptuousness, and all the elements of moral dissolution.” Thomas Jefferson had died only five years before.