THE CHRISTIAN HEEITAGE 1J
regarded as good in so far as the true and the divine entered into a given regenerate individual; and in the early eighteenth century several New England clergymen, under the influence of the rationalistic element in Puritanism and the rising deism, looked on human nature with some measure of optimism. It will be remembered that Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and the Quakers, while admitting that the flesh is weak, nevertheless regarded it as the vehicle through which the Holy Spirit moves. Anglicans, notwithstanding their emphasis on piety and morals, seem in practice to have viewed human nature more charitably than the Calvinists, in any case they were less concerned with private morals if the forms of the church were decently observed. Catholic doctrine also emphasized the divine spark in every human being. Nor was the grim Calvinistic conception of child nature shared by all religious men. A Lutheran synod in 1760 took a realistic and humane view of child nature in declaring that the Bible must be so presented in religious instruction that children "may feel in their youthful sensuousness as if a box of sugar or something of that sort had been opened for distribution." The German Mennonite schoolmaster, Christopher Dock, observed in his Schulordnung (1750) that because of the humanitarian sentiments prevailing in America, schoolmasters could not treat children as strictly as custom in the Old World prescribed. Dock's conception of child nature was revealed in his insistence that the cause of moral infractions on the part of some children must be patiently and intelligently inquired into, and in his emphasis on the principle of loving understanding as the basis of all discipline.
Esthetics in Christian Thought and Expression
The subordinate role that Americans have frequently given to beauty has often been attributed to the horror with which Quakers and Calvinists regarded any appeal to the senses in worship and to their tendency to deprecate sensuous beauty in everyday life. It is indeed true that seventeenth-century Puritans limited music in church to a dismal and unmelodious psalmody, and that Quakers justified their exclusion of it altogether on the score that, in Penn's words, "to bewitch the heart with temporal delight by playing upon the instruments and singing, was to forget God." Nor can it be denied that both Calvinists and Quakers