ABSTRACT
The moralism of England and New England has often become hypocrisy. The characteristic of much English mysticism, especially the Protestant, is moralistic, rather than religious in the sense of any experience of immediate divine union. John Henry Newman, like the poets Vaughan and Traherne, represents a minor tone contributing to, but unrepresentative of, the whole, filled with the religious consciousness rather than the sternness of the moral consciousness. In the case of Benjamin Franklin, philosophe and somewhat odd Presbyterian, the morality as well as the features of Jeremy Bentham were anticipated and portrayed. Morality is eternal and final, even if the comprehension of it is necessarily incomplete. Quite simply, the suppositions of the Anglo-Saxon Tradition are individualistic—even if the qualified individualism of a Hooker—and the springs of individualism are moralistic. The Society of Friends seems to indicate more clearly than may be seen elsewhere how the Anglo-Saxon mind can effect for itself a reconciliation between moralism and religion.
