That our colonial literature seems to many readers meager and uninteresting, that it is commonly squeezed into the skimpiest of chapters in our handbooks of American literature, is due, I think, to an exaggerated regard for esthetic values. Our literary historians have labored under too heavy a handicap of the genteel tradition--to borrow Professor Santayana’s happy phrase--to enter sympathetically into a world of masculine intellects and material struggles. They have sought daintier fare than polemics, and in consequence mediocre verse has obscured political speculation, and poetasters have shouldered aside vigorous creative thinkers. The colonial period is meager and lean only to those whose “disedged appetites” find no savor in old-fashioned beef and puddings. The seventeenth century in America as well as in England was a _saeculum theologicum_, and the eighteenth century was a _saeculum politicum_. No other path leads so directly and intimately into the heart of those old days as the thorny path of their theological and political controversies; and if one will resolutely pick his way amongst the thorns, he will have his reward in coming close to the men who debated earnestly over the plans and specifications of the Utopia that was to be erected in the free spaces of America, and who however wanting they may have been in the lesser arts, were no mean architects and craftsmen for the business at hand. The foundations of a later America were laid in vigorous polemics, and the rough stone was plentifully mortared with idealism. To enter once more into the spirit of those fine old idealisms, and to learn that the promise of the future has lain always in the keeping of liberal minds that were never discouraged from their dreams, is scarcely a profitless undertaking, nor without meaning to those who like Merlin pursue the light of their hopes where it flickers above the treacherous marshlands. Contents [Volume One] Introduction: The theme stated; part played by European intellectual movements; influence in colonial America of old-world liberalisms--English Independency, French romantic theory; incoming of a diverse philosophy--English _laissez faire_; significance of theology and politics in colonial America iii Book I: Liberalism and Puritanism New England a product of old-world custom and institutions, modified by new-world environment. Emergence of two classes: yeomanry, gentry; and two ideals: Puritan and Yankee 3 Part I The Puritan Heritage--1620-1660 I. English Backgrounds