George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

[157] God is his own chief end in creation. But as he

chap. VI.} 1754.

includes all being, his glory includes the glory and the perfecting of the universe. The whole human race, throughout its entire career of existence, hath oneness and identity, and ‘constitutes one complex person,’ ‘one moral whole.’¹ The glory of God includes the redemption and glory of humanity. From the moment of creation to the final judgment, it is all one work. Every event which has swayed ‘the state of the world of mankind,’ ‘all its revolutions,’ proceed as it was determined, towards ‘the glorious time that shall be in the latter days,’ when the new shall be more excellent than the old.

God is the absolute sovereign, doing according to his will in the armies of heaven, and among the inhabitants on earth. Scorning the thought of free agency as breaking the universe of action into countless fragments, the greatest number in New England held that every volition, even of the humblest of the people, is obedient to the fixed decrees of Providence, and participates in eternity.

Yet while the common mind of New England was inspired by the great thought of the sole sovereignty of God, it did not lose personality and human freedom in pantheistic fatalism. Like Augustin, who made war both on Manicheans and Pelagians,—like the Stoics, whose morals it most nearly adopted, it asserted by just dialectics, or, as some would say, by a sublime inconsistency, the power of the individual will. In every action it beheld the union of the motive and volition. The action, it saw, was according to the strongest motive, and it knew that what proves