This is a study of religious thought and life in America in the generation before the Civil War. It focuses on Nevin and Schaff, who pioneered in America the theological reinterpretations stimulated by German idealism in philosophy and the new theories of historical development. They were also spokesmen of the romantic interest in Christian traditions, community, and sacraments and in this interest opposed the antihistorical individualism predominant in American religion. Charles Hodge, Orestes Brownson, Horace Bushnell, R. J. Wilberforce, and the American Lutherans all debated with them. Nevin and Schaff were the chief nineteenth-century American prophets of the contemporary ecumenical movement.
