| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Nina Reid-Maroney. Philadelphia's Enlightenment, 1740–1800: Kingdom of Christ, Empire of Reason. (Contributions to the Study of World History, number 81.) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. 2001. Pp. xv, 199. $62.50.

Could Christianity and Enlightenment science mix without one falling prey to the other? Studies of eighteenth-century Anglo-American thought have been inclined to think not. A hearty embrace of Enlightenment principles, so the argument goes, brought with it either a descent into deism and eventual secularism or a "reasonable Christianity" that unwittingly sowed the seeds of its own destruction. But was the story always so bleak for those wanting to uphold the faith? Nina Reid-Maroney answers with an emphatic no in her study of Philadelphia's Enlightenment. That city's intellectual elite, typified in her account much more by Benjamin Rush than by Benjamin Franklin, constructed and cultivated a Christian Enlightenment that for two generations offered its adherents "intellectual flexibility and spiritual repose" (pp. 178–79). As these men engaged with the latest learning of their day, they sought to "sanctify things rational" rather than to "'rationalize' things spiritual" (p. xii). If mostly political events conspired to marginalize the ideas of this Philadelphia circle after 1800, their achievement should not be overlooked as one important manifestation of what the Enlightenment meant in early America. . . .

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