Puritans

“ Now, there was a great deal that was very fine about many of the Puritans, which is almost entirely missed by the modern admirers of the Puritans. They are praised for things which they either regarded with indifference or more often detested with frenzy—such as religious liberty. And yet they are quite insufficiently understood, and are even under-valued, in their logical case for the things they really did care about—such as Calvinism. We make the Puritans picturesque in a way they would violently repudiate, in novels and plays they would have publicly burnt. ”

“ Doctrines of the Puritans. The Puritans were too earnest to live in harmony with those who differed from them on great religious questions; and a difference of views must have been expected among men so intellectual, so acute, and so fearless in speculation. How could dissenters from prevailing opinions fail to arise?—mystics, fanatics, and heretics? The idea of special divine illumination—ever the prevailing source of fanaticism, in all ages and countries—led astray some; and the desire for greater spiritual liberty animated others. ”

“ If our ancestors were the children of light, as they trusted, they were darkened by the forest, into which they plunged, to certain reasons which the children of darkness, as the Puritans believed the non-Puritans to be, saw by the uncertain glimmers from the world about them. There is no denying that with certain great gains, the American Puritans became, in a worldly sense, provincialized, and that if they lived in the spirit, they lived in it narrowly, while the others, who lived in the body, lived in it liberally, or at any rate handsomely. ”

“ In no age or land, among no sect or people, has she been without her priesthood, her altar, her ritual, her heart worship. Nor is she to blame for the wrongs and atrocities committed in her name. The ideas and principles the Puritans were ordained to carry out and embody in a great political structure were of the noblest, rarest, most enduring and beneficent; the faults that marred the beauty and consistency of their own character, were the exaggerations of their virtues, and arose from the frailty and instability of the human heart, even when most governed and inspired by the highest motives. ”

“ Their Sabbath was like themselves, austere, inflexible as their "divine decrees;" not human and of man, but Hebrew and of the Jews, stern, cold, and sad.
The Puritans were possessed with the sentiment of fear before God; they had ideas analogous to that sentiment, and wrought out actions akin to those ideas. They brought to America their ideas and sentiments. Behold the effect of their actions. Let us walk reverently backward, with averted eyes, to cover up their folly, their shame, and their sin, as they could not walk to conceal the folly of their progenitors. ”

“ And New England was the first home of the Puritans—the focus from which have radiated the myriad beams of the light of which they were the repositories to the remotest corners of the land. Let no one be alarmed at the mention of the word Puritan. There are some people who have no other notion of a Puritan than that of a close-cropped, saturnine personage, having a nasal twang, who is forevermore indulging an [245] insane propensity to sing psalms, quote Scripture, or burn witches. ”

“ The Puritans, with all their faults, and it must be admitted that their faults were many, had a regard for sound Christian principles; and the prevailing lack of reverence for virtue, morality, and piety, was most distasteful to them, and caused them to try to put an end to the follies and vices of the age.
Various Acts of Parliament were passed to check work and amusement on the Lords Day. We get from the Puritans our present manner of observing Sunday. ”

“ The Puritan rule was hard, coldy and joyless. Innocent, as well as harmful, amusements were suppressed. Cock-fighting and bear-baiting, to the Puritans, were no worse than dancing round the Maypole, and eating mince pies. ”

“ Many a poor devil of a sincerely conforming parish priest, struggling along on two or three pounds a year, must have wondered whether it were not worldly-wise to turn Puritan; and a Separatist had to console himself with a logical position and a comfortable conscience.
Advocates of the Puritans, in an effort to prove that their minds were not absorbed by squabbles over petty details of should allow itself to be turned out of control by a small minority, whose attitude it considered detrimental, not only to itself, but to religion and the State. ”

“ Naturally such a collection is of a very miscellaneous character, but there is abundant evidence of the aims of the Puritans, of the attempts made to realize those wishes in practice, and of the resistance encountered from the ecclesiastical authorities. Much light is thrown on the extent and localities of the Puritan movement among the clergy, and on the relatively scanty participation of the laity in it, in contrast to the seventeenth century. ”

“ Admitting their extravagances and their austere sectarianism, the impartial pen will record of the Puritans of 1645, that they exhibited many of the fruits of a sincere piety, and fostered the germ of that toleration which blends the dignity of free thought with the humility of Christian charity. Their descendants have exhibited all the heroic virtues of their fathers, tempered with the liberalizing influences of succeeding generations. ”

“ The Puritans were men whose minds had derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests. Not content with acknowledging, in general terms, an overruling Providence, they habitually ascribed every event to the will of the Great Being for whose power nothing was too vast, for whose inspection nothing was too minute. ”

“ His favourite vices were precisely those to which the Puritans were least indulgent. He could not get through one day without the help of diversions which the Puritans regarded as sinful. As a man eminently well bred, and keenly sensible of the ridiculous, he was moved to contemptuous mirth by the Puritan oddities. He had indeed some reason to dislike the rigid sect. He had, at the age when the passions are most impetuous and when levity is most pardonable, spent some months in Scotland, a King in name, but in fact a state prisoner in the hands of austere Presbyterians. ”

“ Their brooding and raving can be forgiven, can in truth be loved and reverenced, for it is humanity on fire; hatred can be genial, madness can be homely. The Puritans fell, not because they were fanatics, but because they were rationalists.
When we consider these things, when we remember that Puritanism, which means in our day a moral and almost temperamental attitude, meant in that day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a little more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality of the Restoration. ”

“ The Puritans, in despair, Puritans in Exile. fled to Holland, and from thence to New England, to establish, amid its barren hills and desolate forests, that worship which alone they thought would be acceptable to God. Persecution elevated them, and none can deny that they were characterized by moral virtues and a spirit of liberty which no people ever before or since exhibited. Almost their only fault was intolerance respecting the opinions and pleasures of many good people who did not join their ranks. ”

“ We know them by the name of Puritans, a nickname obtained by their affecting superior sanctity; but I find them often distinguished by the more humble appellative of Precisians. As men do not leap up, but climb on rocks, it is probable they were only precise before they were pure. A satirist of their day, in “Rythmes against Martin Marre-Prelate,” melts their attributes into one verse:—
A more laughing satirist, “Pasquill of England to Martin Junior,” persists in calling them Puritans, a pruritu! for their perpetual itching, or a desire to do something. ”

“ They are, in fact, old-fashioned Puritans in dogmatic beliefs and social usages, and, as in the case of the more extreme Puritans of the seventeenth century, this theological stringency is accompanied by a firmness of character which has given them a power disproportionate to their numbers. ”

“ A courageous stand against the Puritans might have inspired them with some respect for their enemy; yielding to them from fear only made them more formidable. Sometimes the High Church party would still score a victory here and there. A Puritan holding forth one day in Westminster Abbey, with the usual flow of epithets, on the difference between the Catholic religion and that of the Puritans, the Bishop of Lincoln rose, and declared that his language was unbecoming in a pulpit, put an end to the sermon, and forced the preacher to come down. ”

“ On the other hand, again, as tending unduly to swell the estimated number of Puritans, it must be remembered that the great landlords possessed the gift of many livings, and if one of them, from any motive whatever, turned Puritan, all of his livings could be bestowed upon Puritan clergy, and the congregations would be nominally counted as Puritan. ”

“ Such we believe to have been the character of the Puritans. We perceive the absurdity of their manners. We dislike the sullen gloom of their domestic habits. We acknowledge that the tone of their minds was often injured by straining after things too high for mortal reach; and we know that, in spite of their hatred of popery, they too often fell into the worst vices of that bad system, intolerance and extravagant austerity, that they had their anchorites and their crusades, their Dunstans and their De Montforts, their Dominics and their Escobars. ”

“ Many such men are. We doubt not but many of the Puritans were sincere, and slit the ears of the Quakers with the serenity of good men engaged in the performance of a virtuous action. But let us put the question squarely to reasonable men: Will it be a matter of surprise if this man’s children, when they grow up, loathe and abhor all religion, thinking it all of a piece with that in which they were brought up—if they turn out, in short, what the descendants of the Puritans have become? ”

“ Our whole country feels yet the impulse and movement given it by those stern preachers of righteousness, who had Abrahamic eyes under their foreheads and the stuff of Elijah in their souls. [Applause.] I know it's the fashion now to poke fun at the Puritans, to use the "Blue Laws" as a weapon against them, to sneer at them as hard, narrow, and intolerant. Yes, alas! we do not breathe through their lungs any more. The wheel has gone round, and we have come back to the very things the Puritans fled from in hatred and in horror. ”

“ Baptismal nomenclature to-day in the United States, especially in the old settlements, bears stronger impressions of the Puritan epoch than the English. Their ancestors were Puritans, who had fled England for conscience’ sake. Their life, too, in the West was for generations primitive, almost patriarchal, in its simplicity. There was no bantering scorn of a wicked world to face; there was no deliberate effort made by any part of the community to restore the old names. ”

“ With all the faults and weaknesses of the Puritans, there never lived a better class of men,—men of more elevated piety, more enlarged views, or greater disinterestedness, patriotism, and moral worth. They made sacrifices which our age can scarcely appreciate, and had difficulties to contend with which were unparalleled in the history of reform. They made blunders which approximated to crimes, but they made them in their inexperience (p. 167) and zeal to promote the cause of religion and liberty. ”

“ More prudent men would have avoided the perils of an unknown navigation; but, by such men, a great experiment for humanity would not have been tried. It may have failed, but the world has learned immortal wisdom from the failure. But the Puritans were not mere adventurers or martyrs. They have done something of lasting benefit to mankind, and they have done this by the power of faith, and by loyalty to their consciences, perverted as they were in some respects. The Puritans were not agreeable companions to the idle, luxurious, or frivolous ”

“ We may feel ourselves tempted to agree with those who have at all times made it the bitterest reproach of the Puritans, that they opposed these intentions, and even frustrated them. But in the struggles between different tendencies, which give the tone to an age, the question in dispute cannot be settled by the encouragement which they afford to this or that branch of culture. ”

“ Many who cared less for religious ideas, came for the sake of a great moral idea, for the sake of obtaining a greater degree of civil freedom than they had at home. Now the Pilgrims and the Puritans are only a little ways behind us. The stiff ruff, the peaked beard, the "Prophesying book" are only six or seven generations behind the youngest of us. The character of the Puritans has given to New England much of its present character and condition. They founded schools and colleges; they trained up their children in a stem discipline which we shall not forget for two centuries to come. ”

“ The Puritans also differed from the standpoint of the Church of England in their view of Holy Scripture. They considered that all men were capable of interpreting it for themselves, and that they had sufficient learning for such a task. The result of this principle was that men drew very different conclusions from the same passages of Scripture, and these differences became so marked as time went on, that the Puritans split up into different parties, each holding dissimilar conceptions of the teaching of our Lord, and they formed separate sects. ”