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Innocence Abroad: The “American Religion” in Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

William R. Hutchison
William R. Hutchison
Affiliation:
This presidential address was delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society of Church History, 28 December 1981. Mr. Hutchison is Charles Warren professor of the history of religion inAmerica in Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Extract

Americans pondering cultural relationships to Europe have always rather enjoyed quoting that splendidly splenetic outburst of rhetorical questions that the Reverend Sydney Smith posed in 1820 in the Edinburgh Review: “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons?” As Smith's catalogue continues, it becomes Job-like; or rather, by no accident, like God's questions to poor Job. Where were the Americans, Smith thunders, when we British laid the foundations of modern culture? “Where are their Foxes, their Burkes, their Sheridans?… What new substances have their chemists discovered? What new constellations have been discovered by [their] telescopes?”

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , March 1982 , pp. 71 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1982

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References

1. Edinburgh Review 65 (01 1820): 79–80.Google Scholar For aid of several kinds in the preparation of this address, the author thanks Mark Massa, George Huntston Williams, and the members of the Colloquium in American Religious History, Harvard University. The paper is dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth Williams Miller, who died 20 January 1982.

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5. Quoted in Dan, Herr and Joel, Wells, eds., Through Other Eyes (Westminster, Md., 1965), pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

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18. Ibid., pp. 62, 66–67; Ecumenical Missionary Conference, 2 vols. (New York, 1900), 1: 290–291.Google Scholar

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20. Hogg, p. 103.

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27. Author's conversation with W. A. Visser't Hooft, 17 March 1976.

28. In Rouse, and Neill, , Ecumenical Movement, pp. 554–555.Google Scholar

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