The Revolution of 1689 put matters on a different basis. James II had been New England’s unambiguous foe, an enemy to provincial autonomy and a Roman Catholic. Pardonably, the clergy could not resist the temptation to regard the Glorious Revolution as a “special providence”–which gave a certain legitimacy to the doctrines of the victorious party, in which individualism, property rights, secularism in the state, and toleration in religion all played a part, and the state was conceived as a contract between discrete individuals for the purpose of utility. The liberalism of John Locke found much of its way cleared in America by the doctrine of “special providence.”
Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America, 156.