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.157 And in truth, even with reference to praxis, much of the Old World ordergradually crept back in.In political terms, although the colony had been envisioned as 222 Revivalsan example of godly order and loving neighborhood held together by the InnerLight, the realities of a propriety system in the hands of William Penn and his Quakerfavorites was bound to give rise to tensions.Political freedoms, so tightly bound toreligious freedoms, were easily transgressed in a polity that was overseen by a man suchas Penn, whose providential sense of purpose prompted Algernon Sidney to say of himthat he was more absolute than the Turk.It was natural for other confessions within theQuaker-dominated colony, especially the Lutherans and the Anglicans in the lowercounties, to view the holy experiment as an exercise in religious absolutism, and theycould even use the principles of tolerance and religious freedom in their defense.Werenot the injunctions against cockfights and stage plays, the lax marriage laws, or therejection of oaths a violation of the Anglican conscience?But religion was not the only force pulling politics apart.Even among the Quakersthemselves, spurred on by merchant interests, property grievances, and politicaldiscontent, factions evolved that divided the colony ample proof, as one historianhas remarked, of the ingenuity of the Quaker mind in obstructing unwantedauthority. 158 In religious terms, as was the case in the other colonies north andsouth, growing diversity and the freedom to proselytize often resulted in the closingrather than the opening of the religious mind.After an initial phase of cooperation anddialogue, many Presbyterians and Baptists fell out over theological issues and stoppedsharing churches.Baptists in the Delaware Valley tightened up the relations betweenthe various communities, while Presbyterians founded the Synod of Philadelphia in1716, which exercised control over congregations, tested the orthodoxy of its mem-bers, controlled ordination, examined candidates, and settled local disputes.Amongthe Quakers, the quest for greater order eventually led to a schism after George Keith,the surveyor-general of East New Jersey, made calls for more doctrine and law and lessInner Light.In 1691 the Yearly Meeting rejected Keith s proposals, but this did notdeflect him from his purpose and he continued to rail against the dominant Quakerfaction, terming them hypocrites, heretics, popes, and cardinals, and condemning themfor ruling over the faith in closed sessions with their Magistratical Robes. 159But we should not confuse this turn to law and order with the Protestantism ofconfessional Europe.Too many changes had occurred for a return of that kind.Incremental steps away from established forms in the direction of heightened spiritualinwardness, individual and congregational participation, degrees of confessional rel-ativity, and affectional piety had laid the foundations for the religious culture that wouldemerge with the evangelicalism of the eighteenth century.When George Whitefieldlanded on the Delaware coast in 1739, he was able to embark on his mission of trafficking for the Lord among Protestant communities that had never existedbefore. EpilogueModern ProtestantsAt the start of the eighteenth century there was a general quickening of Protestantreligiosity as the various strands of piety and spirituality began to feed into one another.While the Puritan and Pietist impulse effected a transformation of the magisterialchurches in Europe, the radical tradition, with its stress on lived religion rather thandoctrine and its notions of a less formal, more experiential, inward, and voluntary type offaith, surfaced in the public realm and, for the first time in history, became a viablealternative to the mainstream forms of Protestantism.This did not mean that Lutherans,Calvinists, or Anglicans suddenly became Anabaptists, Hutterites, or Quakers, but it didmean that there was a much greater degree of borrowing and lending and general cross-pollination between the various traditions, with the result that the Protestants at the startof the eighteenth century were markedly different in kind from the Protestants that hadlived during the age of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin.Throughout continental Europeand the British Isles, and in the New World in particular, which became the crucible forthe new forms of Protestant community, it was now commonplace for pastors, regardlessof confession, to preach a capacious gospel in a more emotive fashion, looking to reachthe heart rather than the mind.There was a growing indifference to dogmatic distinc-tions and the constraints of the institutional church.And there was a greater stress on therole of the parishioners, the best testimony to this being the rise of the lay-led initiativesfor spiritual renewal, from Spener s collegia to the voluntary societies of ProtestantEngland.The Protestant world had been transformed.By 1740, a revivalist impulse had spread throughout Europe and America.And it wasmore than just a few isolated incidents.Joined by a network of preachers, scholars, piouslaymen and laywomen, activists, publicists, and missionaries, a global community ofevangelical Protestants emerged that, by preaching and practicing rebirth and renewal,began to transform the nature of traditional religion while escaping confessionalcontrol. 1 Across the confessions, there was a growing spirit of irenicism and eclec-ticism, and a readiness to effect what was termed a new reformation. In large partthese Protestant revivalist movements were the final, and logical, denouement of theoriginal reformations in Wittenberg, Zurich, and Geneva.But they were also condi-tioned by the age.For just as Pietists, latter-day Puritans, and emergent EvangelicalsProtestants: A History from Wittenberg to Pennsylvania 1517 1740 By C.Scott DixonÓ 2010 C.Scott Dixon 224 Epilogue: Modern Protestantswere preaching rebirth, renewal, and the need to cultivate an inner faith, Enlighten-ment thinkers were championing reason at the expense of faith and denigrating thetraditional sacral bonds of Reformation Europe.As we have seen with reference toBrandenburg-Prussia, with the increasing secularization of the public sphere and theloosening grip of confessional religion, pious Protestants were forced to take refuge inthe spaces and modalities that had been created for them by the Puritans and Pietists.2The timeframe of this revival varied from place to place: in some locations it ranparallel with developments in Halle, in others it followed on from earlier developments.In the duchies of Silesia, for instance, where the Catholic Habsburgs had beensystematically rooting out Protestants since the mid-seventeenth century, a massawakening took hold of the land in 1708 that led to preaching movements andrevivalist meetings.The reforming impulse traveled to northern Europe as well,reaching as far as Finland, where the idea of revival won over supporters and inspiredisolated parishioners to meet for group worship in houses, barns, and boats.Within theGerman-speaking lands, although Pietism began to lose momentum after the deaths ofSpener (d.1705) and Francke (d.1727), preachers and communities kept the originalvision alive.In Pomerania, there was a widespread call for repentance and conversion in1736
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