The bicentennial commemoration has accelerated the already abundant recent output of literature on the American "civil religion." One common definition of that concept—and the one used in this article—is that in which the United States is seen as a chosen, "redeemer nation," God's "new Israel," with a mission, a "manifest destiny,'' to usher in the climactic stage of world history. This conviction of America's eschatological role is rooted, inter alia, in the doctrine of providence, in the expectancy awakened by the Reformation, in England's sense of a national religious vocation (note John Foxe's Book of Martyrs), and in the prevalent American colonial belief of being on an "errand into the wilderness." Before the Revolution, America's presumed divine calling was most plainly articulated by the New England Puritans, but not only by them. Jonathan Edwards even suggested that the millennium was about to dawn in New England, while his grandson, Timothy Dwight, joined Ezra Stiles and others in the Revolutionary period in celebrating, with poetry and prose, the glorious prospect of America. By around 1800, America was generally seen to have both a passive and an active (expansionist) role to play, as "a light to the nations" and as "the liberator of the oppressed."