"So beneficently had God planned the world, that by giving full rein to his acquisitive appetites the individual was, in fact, adding his maximum quota to the sum of human happiness. Thus, instead of Dante ascending to Paradise under the guidance of Reason and Grace, instead of Spenser's Arthur, fashioned in noble and gentle discipline, instead of Bunyan's Pilgrim setting forth with his load of sin to escape from the wrath to come, the new world offers us as its symbolical figure Robinson Crusoe, the isolated economic man, pitting his lonely strength successfully against Nature in a remote part of the earth, and carrying on a little missionary activity as a side-line."
-- The Eighteenth-Century Background, Basil Willey, 1940, p. 24-25.
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