ABSTRACT
Robert Baird, who was a missionary agent in France for the Presbyterian Church, published his massive Religion in America in 1843. Churches tended to be instruments in the state and its ruling classes, inclusive and ascriptive in their membership, endowed with the mana of grace and salvation. But to the degree that religion served its vocation of redeeming human beings in a transpolitical context, it went beyond the sober behavior of checks and balances to preach a new covenant of grace in the youngest of the nations, stressing the abjection of sin, the miracle of conversion, and the majesty of providence. The great Arminian sects—Methodism and Baptism—led one back always to a fundamentally Calvinistic psychology of sin and grace. In the Calvinist city, distinct from the city of heavenly grace, there is a gripping tension between what is licit and what is moral.
