The first Synod of New York, formed two hundred years and a month ago, was the outcome of a religious revival, the Great Awakening, which on a great scale transformed and regenerated organized Christianity in the American colonies. The life of the Synod is a brilliant example of this transforming and regenerating work, so that its history is of much more than Presbyterian significance. Among its permanent effects was the stámping upon American Presbyterianism of a lofty character derived from the great revival.

Modern psychoanalysis tells us that disease is the touchstone of the healthy mind. What is true in the realm of psychology is not less true in the realm of ethics. The most terrible disease in the realm of human relations is war and so we can say that war is the touchstone of a healthy ethical system. In its attitude toward war the weakness of an ethical system is revealed. In the war situation an ethical system is revealed as basically unrealistic if it proves unwilling to face the actual situation and therefore uses the escape of absolute pacifism. It is revealed as basically immoral if it condones any war to such an extent that it loses sight of sin and injustice and makes of that war a holy war or a crusade.

As is well known, Puritanism, as well as social, economic, and constitutional issues, were involved in the struggle against the Crown in the reigns of the first two Stuarts. Like the other groups which comprised the opposition—the lawyers, the merchants, and the country gentry—the Puritans came to focus their attention on Parliament as the agency for the articulation of their grievances against the policy of the government. But unlike the other groups, the ties which bound the Puritans to Parliament were somewhat weak, and to a certain extent indirect. In the first place, the primary concern of the Puritans was with religious reformation, and it was only after they had been repulsed by the Crown and disowned by Convocation that they came to regard Parliament as the only avenue of protest against the conservative Anglicanism of James and the more extreme high church propensities of his son. Moreover, it was impossible for the natural leaders of the religiously disaffected—the Puritan preachers—to champion their cause in Parliament, since the lower clergy had been excluded from that assembly after the fourteenth century on the grounds that they were represented in Convocation.