Review Article: “American Religious Thought of the 18th and 19th Centuries”

Extract

Perry Miller, with characteristic lése majesté, told readers of his New England Mind that, if they wanted to see his footnotes, they would have to make a pilgrimage to the Harvard College Library (The Seventeenth Century [New York, 1939], p. ix). Times have changed, and at least some scholars have become more accommodating. Bruce Kuklick, for example, not only provided notes for his “New England Mind”—the superb recent study Churchmen and Philosophers from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, 1985)—but now, through the good offices of Garland Publishing, has made available many of the sources to which those notes refer in American Religious Thought of the 18th and 19th Centuries: A Thirty-two Volume Set Reprinting the Works of Leading American Theologians from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey and including Recent Dissertations (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988), $2,290. Kuklick and Garland deserve highest commendation for rescuing from unwarranted obscurity the authors and works reprinted here. The set's title may be inaccurate, and one may quibble about the exact lineup of books and articles included, but these volumes remain a magnificent achievement.