Abstract
The religion that the British and the French brought to the New World was not a natural monotheism, like the Algonquin worship of a Great Spirit, nor an imperial monotheism like that of the Stoics, but a revolutionary monotheism, with a God who took an active part and partisan role in history; and like all revolutionary movements, including Marxism in our time, it equipped itself with a canon of Sacred books and a dialectical habit of mind, a mental attitude in which the neighbouring heresy is much more bitterly hated than the total rejection of faith. The dialectical habit of mind produced the conception of the false god, a conception hardly intelligible to an educated pagan.... The revolutionary aspect of white settlement extended from religion into economics as entrepreneurial capitalism developed.
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