Abstract
HE closing years of the eighteenth century seemed gloomy and foreboding enough to serious observers on both sides of the Atlantic. The reign of Terror and the rise of Bonaparte following the overthrow of the Old French Monarchy threatened the foundations of social order throughout Christendom. Some of the effects of the revolutionary philosophy of Europeans were being sensibly felt by members of the Federalist aristocracy in America-engaged as its protagonists were in a hopeless effort to stem the rising tide of Jeffersonian republicanism. The popularity of deism was evident in the avidity with which Paine's Age of Reason was being received. Wars and rumors of wars, Jacobin intrigues, and the assaults of infidel philosophy were topics sufficiently sensational for the most flamboyant of the orthodox clergymen, while recurrent visits of the yellow fever scourge served as final proof to the defenders of the faith that divine wrath had at last taken notice of
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