ABSTRACT
Robert Baird (1798-1863) was a Presbyterian minister and historian of American churches with particular interest in the evangelical Protestant denominations. His own career as general agent of the American Sunday School Union, advocate of temperance and proselytiser for the spread of Protestan-tism in Europe on the American model, disposed him to see the voluntary principle as both universally applicable and, at the same time, arising out of peculiarly American conditions and virtues. Despite this implicit tension in his views, Baird exhibited no doubt as to the exemplary character of the American religious pattern.
