Luce & Co.,
1911.
[33] New York, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1913.
[34] The Drift of Romanticism; Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1913.
[35] New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916.
[36] New York, Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1917.
[37] New York, The Macmillan Co., 1917.
IV
PURITANISM AS A LITERARY FORCE
Sec. 1
"Calvinism," says Dr. Leon Kellner, in his excellent little history of
American literature,[38] "is the natural theology of the disinherited;
it never flourished, therefore, anywhere as it did in the barren hills
of Scotland and in the wilds of North America." The learned doctor is
here speaking of theology in what may be called its narrow technical
sense--that is, as a theory of God. Under Calvinism, in the New World as
well as in the Old, it became no more than a luxuriant demonology; even
God himself was transformed into a superior sort of devil, ever wary and
wholly merciless. That primitive demonology still survives in the
barbaric doctrines of the Methodists and Baptists, particularly in the
South; but it has been ameliorated, even there, by a growing sense of
the divine grace, and so the old God of Plymouth Rock, as practically
conceived, is now scarcely worse than the average jail warden or
Italian padrone.
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