That American thought before 1865 was markedly religiocentric is a scholarly commonplace. Such was especially true of New England, owing to the Puritan imprint, which Enlightenment rationalism did not erase. Indeed, since the Reformation no region of the English-speaking world has probably come closer to producing a body of writing that bears out Northrop Frye's dictum that the Bible is the master text to which all Western literature may ultimately be referred. To affirm this is not necessarily to insist that religious motives were the sole or the primary determiners of human behavior even in the most pristine era of New England's settlement. Revisionist historians have argued with some cogency that the documents on which intellectual history à la Perry Miller has based its theologically oriented reconstructions of the New England mind are a “rarefied form of cognitive speculation conducted by the members of a specially trained elite” that understate the importance of other motivating factors, social and economic, even for the elite itself. This argument, however, though valuable as a corrective, is even less satisfactory as a comprehensive formulation of Puritan thought. “Compared with Americans of the 18th or the 19th century,” Daniel Boorstin commonsensically remarks, “the Puritans surely were theologyminded.”