Yet, take it for all in all, the effect upon the preaching of the supernatural and speculative doctrines and insights of Christianity, was not in America as great as might be expected.  Kant died in 1804, and Goethe in 1832, but only in the last sixty years has the preaching of the “evangelical” churches been fundamentally affected by the prevailing intellectual currents of the day.  This is due, I think, to two causes.  One was the nature of the German Reformation.  It found preaching at a low ebb.  Every great force, scholastic, popular, mystical, which had contributed to the splendor of the mediaeval pulpit had fallen into decay, and the widespread moral laxity of the clergy precluded spiritual insight.  The Reformation, with its ethical and political interests, revived preaching and by the nature of these same interests fixed the limits and determined the direction within which it should develop.  It is important to remember that Luther did not break with the old theological system.  He continued his belief in an authority and revelation anterior, exterior and superior to man, merely shifting the locus of that authority from the Church to the Book.  Thus he paved the way for Zwingli and the Protestant scholasticism which became more rigid and sterile than the Catholic which it succeeded.  We usually regard the Reformation as a part of the Renaissance and hence included in the humanistic movement.  Politically and religiously, it undoubtedly should be so regarded, for it was a chief factor in the renewal of German nationalism and its central doctrines of justification by faith, and the right of each separate believer to an unmediated access to the Highest, exalted the integrity and dignity of the individual.  Inconsistently, however, it continued the old theological tradition.  In the Lutheran system, says Paul de Lagarde, we see the Catholic scholastic structure standing untouched with the exception of a few loci.  And Harnack, in the Dogmengeschichte calls it “a miserable duplication of the Catholic Church.”

Now, New England preaching, it is true, found its chief roots in Calvinism; Calvin, rather than Luther, was the religious leader of the Reformation outside Germany.  But his system, also, is only the continuation of the ancient philosophy of the Christian faith originating with Augustine.  He reduced it to order, expounded it with energy and consistency, but one has only to recall its major doctrines of the depravity of man, the atonement for sin, the irresistible grace of the Holy Spirit, to see how untouched it was by the characteristic postulates of the new humanism.  And it was on his theology that New England preaching was founded.  It was Calvin who, through Jonathan Edwards, the elder and the younger, Joseph Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins, Nathaniel Emmons, Nathaniel N. Taylor, determined the course of the New England pulpit.

The other reason for our relative immunity from humanistic influence is accidental and complementary merely.  It is the mere fact of our physical isolation, which, until the last seventy-five years, quite largely shut off thinkers here from continental and English currents of thought and contributed to the brilliant, if sterile, provincialism of the New England theology.