BOTH BEFORE and after the Revolution, European visitors came to the colonies to observe the American experiment. They were intrigued by the separation of church and state, and by the idea of a voluntary church supported wholly by its members.
One of these visitors was Harriet Martineau, the author of Illustrations of Political Economy (1834). At one point during her two years in America, she noted: ". . . nothing gave me so much delight as what was said by a young physician to a young clergyman, on their entering a new building prepared as a place of worship for children, and also as a kind of school: as a place where religion might have its free course among young and free minds. 'Now,' said the young physician, 'here we are, with these children dependent upon us. Never let us defile this place with the smallest act of spiritual tyranny. Watch me, and I will watch you, that we may not lay the weight of a hair upon these little minds. If we impose one single opinion upon them, we bring a curse upon our work. Here, in this one place, let minds be absolutely free.'" Milton Powell, ed., The Voluntary Church: American Religious Life (1740-1865) Seen Through the Eyes of European Visitors (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 115 .
This freedom of thought was expressed in various ways. One was in the increasing effort on the part of some denominations to work together. On January 11, 1791, for example, the first Interdenominational Sunday School Association was organized in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And in the 1800s, the Sunday School Union published materials designed to spread the gospel in a way that avoided denominational, political, and regional biases.
