We Americans have been inclined to over-idealize the frontier period of our history, and have been perhaps too ready to resent any implication of unwonted moral laxity among the pioneers. It is now universally known that the great majority of the people who colonized the Atlantic seaboard came from the lower stratum of European society, and only a comparatively few represented the best in education and culture. Throughout the entire colonial period, at least until the colonial Awakenings, the great mass of the lower classes were little influenced by organized religion, and only a very small proportion of the total population of the thirteen colonies were members of the colonial churches. At the end of the colonial period there were undoubtedly more unchurched people in North America, in proportion to the population, than were to be found in any other land in Christendom.

Apart from the democratized Catholicism of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 12, 1790) the French Revolution occasioned four phenomena of novel significance: (a) The so-called “Cult of Reason” established in effect though not in name by decree of the Convention in November, 1793; (b) The nationalist Decadal fêtes, provided for that same autumn, when the church calendar was replaced by the republican; (c) the “Cult of the Supreme Being” originating in legislation of May 1794 and culminating in the Fête of the Supreme Being on June 8 following; (d) the Cult of Theophilanthropism whose prayerbook, called a Manuel at first, was composed in the summer of 1796, printed in the fall, adapted to the needs of public worship as well as domestic in December, and actually used in the former way for the first time on January 15, 1797. Following the precedent of the Abbé Grégoire, whose great History of the Sects of the Revolution appeared in 1814, these four phenomena have been classed together, with the obvious implication that all were tarred with the same stick, the ingredients of the tar consisting of infidel fatuity and political chicanery. Such indeed was the general impression that had already been conveyed by the hostile comments of conservative critics outside France. Consequently it became almost a tradition for decades to consider the four phenomena together as brilliant illustrations of the Deistic philosophy of religion, with the overt or implicit suggestion that they stand as incontrovertible proof of the infatuation of radical doctrinaires and of their folly in supposing that the religious impulse could be suffocated, or that its forms of expression nonchalantly improvised, or its nature changed from that of faith, mystery and revelation to that of reason and morality. Only recently have the researches of Aulard, Mathiez and others served to set before us accurate pictures of the actual ceremonies of these novel cults, as well as careful analyses of the sources and motives of their inception. These researches and revaluations justify a review of the traditional conceptions. Omitting the nationalistic Decadal fêtes as purely secular, our study will be devoted to the Cults of Reason, of the Supreme Being and of Theophilanthropism.

Cardinal Bellarmine, the chief controversialist who has written against Protestantism, has within less than fifteen months been elevated to the two highest ecclesiastical dignities conferred within the Roman communion upon the dead. He was declared to be a saint on June 29, 1930, and a Doctor of the Church—doctor ecclesiae—on September 17, 1931. Five years before, the same dignities had been conferred on Peter Canisius, likewise a member of the Society of Jesus and in the latter half of the sixteenth century next to Bellarmine the leading literary opponent of the “Lutheran rebellion”,—words used by Pius XI in his bulls of canonization.