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The Emancipation of Massachusetts By: Brooks Adams (1848-1927) |
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BY
BROOKS ADAMS
PREFATORY NOTE TO FIRST EDITION.
I am under the deepest obligations to the Hon. Mellen Chamberlain and Mr.
Charles Deane. The generosity of my friend Mr. Frank Hamilton Cushing in putting at my
disposal the unpublished results of his researches among the Zuñis is in
keeping with the originality and power of his mind. Without his aid my
attempt would have been impossible. I have also to thank Prof. Henry C.
Chapman, J. A. Gordon, M. D., Prof. William James, and Alpheus Hyatt,
Esq., for the kindness with which they assisted me. I feel that any merit
this volume may possess is due to these gentlemen; its faults are all my
own. BROOKS ADAMS.
QUINCY, September 17, 1886.
CONTENTS.
PREFACE CHAPTER I. THE COMMONWEALTH CHAPTER II. THE ANTINOMIANS CHAPTER III. THE CAMBRIDGE PLATFORM CHAPTER IV. THE ANABAPTISTS CHAPTER V. THE QUAKERS CHAPTER VI. THE SCIRE FACIAS CHAPTER VII. THE WITCHCRAFT CHAPTER VIII. BRATTLE CHURCH CHAPTER IX. HARVARD COLLEGE CHAPTER X. THE LAWYERS CHAPTER XL. THE REVOLUTION
PREFACE TO NEW EDITION.
CHAPTER I
I wrote this little volume more than thirty years ago, since when I have
hardly opened it. Therefore I now read it almost as if it were written by
another man, and I find to my relief that, on the whole, I think rather
better of it than I did when I published it. Indeed, as a criticism of
what were then the accepted views of Massachusetts history, as expounded
by her most authoritative historians, I see nothing in it to retract or
even to modify. I do, however, somewhat regret the rather acrimonious tone
which I occasionally adopted when speaking of the more conservative
section of the clergy. Not that I think that the Mathers, for example, and
their like, did not deserve all, or, indeed, more than all I ever said or
thought of them, but because I conceive that equally effective strictures
might have been conveyed in urbaner language; and, as I age, I shrink from
anything akin to invective, even in what amounts to controversy. Therefore I have now nothing to alter in the Emancipation of
Massachusetts , viewed as history, though I might soften its asperities
somewhat, here and there; but when I come to consider it as philosophy, I
am startled to observe the gap which separates the present epoch from my
early middle life. The last generation was strongly Darwinian in the sense that it accepted,
almost as a tenet of religious faith, the theory that human civilization
is a progressive evolution, moving on the whole steadily toward
perfection, from a lower to a higher intellectual plane, and, as a
necessary part of its progress, developing a higher degree of mental
vigor. I need hardly observe that all belief in democracy as a final
solution of social ills, all confidence in education as a means to
attaining to universal justice, and all hope of approximating to the rule
of moral right in the administration of law, was held to hinge on this
great fundamental dogma, which, it followed, it was almost impious to
deny, or even to doubt. Thus, on the first page of my book, I observe, as
if it were axiomatic, that, at a given moment, toward the opening of the
sixteenth century, "Europe burst from her mediæval torpor into the
splendor of the Renaissance," and further on I assume, as an equally self
evident axiom, that freedom of thought was the one great permanent advance
which western civilization made by all the agony and bloodshed of the
Reformation. Apart altogether from the fact that I should doubt whether,
in the year 1919, any intelligent and educated man would be inclined to
maintain that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were, as contrasted
with the nineteenth, ages of intellectual torpor, what startles me in
these paragraphs is the self satisfied assumption of the finality of my
conclusions. I posit, as a fact not to be controverted, that our universe
is an expression of an universal law, which the nineteenth century had
discovered and could formulate... Continue reading book >>
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