Excerpt from The North American Review, Vol. 122: January, 1876 The Revolution which a century ago severed the connection between Great Britain and her colonies issued so directly from political disputes that its religious aspects have been obscured; yet no fact lies plainer on the page of colonial history than the intimate alliance of religious and political ideas, - a fact which the elder Adams emphasized when he cautioned the Abbe Mably not to undertake the War of Inde pendenee without first mastering the church system of New England. And it would form a singular exception to the ordi nary laws of historical development, if that which is so evident in the causes of the Revolution could not be traced in its results. Those results supplied new ecclesiastical as well as new politi cal conditions, and flowered, at the same time, in the novel experiments of a self-governed state and of a self-directing and self-supporting church. Nor should the formal separa tion of these two experiments betray us into the error of sup posing that they are essentially distinct. They have been carried on together, by the same people, and during the same period, and throughout all this period have had a connection more close and real than will be conceded by such as are ao customed to look only at the superficial causes of political and social progress. There can be no doubt that whatever circum stances tend to affect the one must ultimately afiect the other. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.