In his now classic “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” read before the American Historical Association in 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner quoted from A New Guide for Emigrants to the West (second edition; Boston, 1837), written by the pioneer Baptist missionary and founder of seminaries, John Mason Peck, who died just a century ago. Peck had distinguished three types of Westerners: the pioneers, the settlers, and “the men of capital and enterprise.” Turner found this typology useful and adapted it in his succession of studies that have helped to shape our understanding of American history.

The current revival of interest in both Jonathan Edwards and eschatology points up the fact that there has been no deliberate effort to bring these two subjects together. The only previous attempt to treat Edwards' doctrine of the last things is that by Frank Hugh Foster, in a series of articles on “The Eschatology of the New England Divines.”1 Unfortunately, the title promises more than the discussions afford; because Foster's interest is confined almost entirely to the problem of Universalism, his section on Edwards treats only of the doctrine of eternal punishment and serves to perpetuate the common notion that the great Puritan was little more than a preacher of damnation.

Modern studies of church and state in America have begun to modify some older conclusions. Much attention has been given to the Constitutional “solution” of separation and its contradictions and problems in practice. Similarly, church historians, qualifying an older assumption that conservative churches ultimately shed the forms of “classic Protestantism” and permitted American religion to be shaped by the sectarian heritage of the radical Reformation, have begun to re-examine the background of ideas. This re-examination is urgently needed in treating America's last disestablishment contest, the struggle over the state churches in New England which raged until the 1820's. For this struggle had unusual significance.

In The History and Character of Calvinism, John T. McNeill dismisses the story of English Presbyterianism in the eighteenth century with the following statement: Here we may return for a brief reference to Calvinism in England, where the Presbyterian … nonconformity carried its banners but weakly in the eighteenth century… After the death of Matthew Henry (1714) … Presbyterian leadership was undistinguished. A tincture of rationalism and Socinianism entered the nonconformist academies, and many of the Presbyterian ministers rejected the Westminster standards and doctrines … Those who remained orthodox were in general dull and ineffective ministers. The result was a decline in numbers and significance. This decayed Presbyterianism was restored, or more accurately replaced by the activity of Scots in England, including both those of the Kirk and those of the secessions1.