The status of religion in America has been as peculiar as the status of politics. Our religious attitudes have been profoundly affected and from early periods by the separation of church and state. Struggle against a vested institution, dissent from traditional power, conciliation with sacred authority, have been burning points in the modern history of Europe. They have made great literature in England from Shelley through Tennyson and Arnold and Swinburne. Our first battle against the tyrannical in tradition wherever found was won in the Revolution; our second, in the defeat of the Federalist party in 1800. In those contests we were freed, perhaps too early and too easily, from the menace of the church as a function of government. Since then we have been, and we still are, freer than the European to seek religion wherever it may be found. Our great religious literature is creative, not protestant. Woolman of the Quakers was a seeker; Emerson, in greater measure, was a seeker, seeking spirituality for Americans, and, like Woolman, fanning their moral enthusiasms. Hawthorne and Thoreau were searchers for a new morality; Whitman and William James, in their fashion, searchers also. Emerson in his religious attitude belongs a century later than Matthew Arnold. Fed from almost identical intellectual sources, he is the liberated mind seeking new allegiances, Arnold, the rebel not yet free. And in general American religion, without reference to its quality, has had, like American politics, a status some generations ahead of the rest of the world. Hamilton and Jefferson and Lincoln were prophets for Europe. The independent sects of America, none established, all respectable, and the free seekers after new truth which sprang from them, seem to have prefigured a condition that is common in a world growing democratic. In truth, we old Americans, who with all our faults still best represent America, gained freedom of conscience at the expense of shattering the ideal of a church universal. Religion for us came in general to be a personal matter because the church, separated from the state, lost the visible authority that made it easy--or necessary--to trust to an institution the responsibility for one’s soul. We felt, as was to be expected, the need of new authority, new sanctions for our religion. And we were free, freer than others, to seek and to find a religion for democracy. What has been the result?