THE BREAKING DOWN OF PURITANISM
Neither Franklin nor Woolman would have been at home among the makers of the literature which is most significant of America before their time. The latter as a Quaker, the former as a person whose general attitude may be indicated by his casually uttered remark〖H. C., i, 16, 17.〗 that he was usually too busy to go to church, would have been either punished or cast out (if not both) by most New England communities, who acquiesced in the banishment of some and the whipping or execution of others, in order that by uniform obedience to the theocratic ideal the purpose of the founders might be fulfilled.
But in the eighteenth century there began to be a change. The growing interest in science, the influence of such writers as John Locke, the rise of other learned professions than the ministry, the advance of the merchant class, the increasing concern about political relations with the mother country, the founding of other churches than the Congregational ones which hitherto had virtually constituted an Establishment—all of these influences make American life and letters in the eighteenth century radically different from the century of colonization. Strikingly unlike each other as Franklin and Woolman are in most respects, they agree in representing aspects of the American mind that could hardly flourish in American literature until in the eighteenth century that literature began to move out of New England and its intolerant church.