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participate in attaining their own salvation by using the “means”:
The sure and general rule for all who groan for the salvation of God is this—Whenever opportunity serves, use all the means which God has ordained; for who knows in which God will meet thee with the grace that bringeth salvation? 8
    Wesley’s charismatic sermons, heard through the cities, towns, and villages of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and in the American colonies, and the efficiency of the organizations he set up to keep the converted from backsliding made Methodism a strong and popular religion. Free will now entered popular consciousness. Ordinary people no longer saw themselves as passive vessels waiting to be filled with grace. Ordinary human life could be improved. Ordinary people could act to better themselves. Even the insane, formerly thought hopeless, were now unshackled from their prison walls. In 1792, Philippe Pinel, newly appointed chief physician of La Bicetre asylum in Paris, boldly struck the chains from his patients in the presence of the leaders of the French Revolution.
    S O BY THE BEGINNING of the nineteenth century, the three cracks in the dogma of human implasticity had grown into irreparable fissures. The American and French revolutions had been fought and won; many had attained a large measure of political liberty. It was widely believed that science could change nature, that humans need not sit passively by and let nature grind them down, that human beings have free will. It followed that human beings could change and better themselves. The dogma of human implasticity that had lasted almost two thousand years and had paralyzed human progress was at last overthrown.
    The Dogma of Human Plasticity
    There was no better soil than that of nineteenth-century America for this new dogma. Rugged individualism was America’s answer to the unraveling European mind-set of human implasticity. All of these fed the faith:
     
the democratic idea that all men are created equal
an endless frontier for the poor to find riches
waves of immigrants, subsistence laborers who were soon clamoring for power
the gold rush
the motto “Rags to Riches”
universal schooling
the notion of criminal rehabilitation
public libraries
the freeing of the slaves
the drive toward women’s suffrage
a new religious liberalism that emphasized free will and good works as the road to heaven
the idealization of the entrepreneur—ambition and initiative incarnate
    The Federalists, skeptical that the people could govern themselves wisely (“Your people, sir—your people is a great beast!” declared Alexander Hamilton), soon lost their hold on power to the Democrats. Few now advocated human implasticity. The first half of the nineteenth century became a great age of social reform. The evangelical religious movement of the American frontier was intensely individualistic, the meetings climaxing with the drama of the choice of Christ. Utopian communities sprang up to achieve human perfection.
    It was commonly accepted that humans could change and improve. Andrew Jackson, when he was president-elect, gave voice to it:
I believe man can be elevated; man can become more and more endowed with divinity; and as he does he becomes more God-like in his character and capable of governing himself. Let us go on elevating our people, perfecting our institutions, until democracy shall reach such a point of perfection that we can acclaim with truth that the voice of the people is the voice of God. 9
    There were two dominant opinions in this era as to who can be the agent of change; both are still very much with us as we enter the next millennium.
    The booters and the bootstrappers . The hooters believed that people can improve, but that the agent of change must be someone else . For some of the booters, the means of change was the therapist who guides the patient into change. Freud, the founder of the therapeutic movement, tried self-analysis and gave up.
My self-analysis