more to do with causing an American Revolution than did the idealistic
principles later enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. And
there was a broad economic basis for the differences in crops,
transportation and the organization of labor which expressed themselves
in a sectionalism which finally assumed the political aspect that
caused the Civil War. Yet the student who would forget the spiritual
element in our life, who would overlook the fact that man is a human
being and not a mere animal, will wander far astray into unreal bypaths
of crass materialism.

On the other hand, it would be hard to find an economic explanation for
the emigration of the Pilgrim Fathers to Plymouth, for the Quaker
agitation that supported John Woolman in his war upon slavery or for
most of the Christian missionary enterprises of the present day. Also it
would take a mental microscope to find the economic cause for the
extermination of the Moriscos in Spain by Philip III. or the expulsion
by Louis XIV. of the Huguenots from France. These two great crimes of
history had important economic consequences, but the cause behind them
was religious prejudice. Prof. James Franklin Jameson, of the Carnegie
Institution at Washington, rightly has stressed a study of the religious
denominations in the United States, of the Baptist, Methodist and other
"circuit riders" of the old Middle West, as one of the most fruitful
sources for a fuller knowledge and understanding of the history and
development of the American nation. Neither George Whitefield, Peter
Cartwright, nor Phillips Brooks of a later day, can be explained in
terms of economic interpretation.

This false and entirely materialistic conception of the development of
society and civilization is a mistake not only of the learned, but of
the pseudo-learned, of the men and women of more or less education whose