Purée

“ The very nature, the stern, pleasure-hating and trial-glorying Puritan nature, which made our forefathers leave their English homes to come, for the love of God and the freedom of conscience, to these wild, barren, and unwelcoming shores, made them also endure with fortitude and almost with satisfaction all personal discomforts, and caused them to cling with persistent firmness to such outward symbols of austere contempt of luxury, and such narrow-minded signs of love of simplicity as the lack of comfortable warmth during the time of public worship. ”

“ PURDIE (saying good-bye to an old friend) . John Purdie, John Purdie, the fine fellow I used to think you! (When he is able to look them in the face again.) The wood has taught me one thing, at any rate.
MABEL (dismally) . What, Jack?
PURDIE. That it isn't accident that shapes our lives.
JOANNA. No, it's Fate.
PURDIE (the truth running through him, seeking for a permanent home in him, willing to give him still another chance, loth to desert him) . It's not Fate, Joanna. Fate is something outside us. What really plays the dickens with us is some thing in ourselves. ”

“ Is it irreverent to think and believe that what these simple souls witness to, as their own experience in presence of a kind of ritual new to them, though familiar of old to their fathers, and to the Church throughout the world, is but an anticipation of what our great poet, Puritan though he was, has described as among the consolations of the blessed? ”

“ Life, they sang, should be all jollity: away with care and duty; leave wisdom to the weak and old, and sanctity for fools. Watching the sport from a neighboring wood stood a band of frowning Puritans, and as the sun set they stalked forth and broke through the circle. All was dismay. The bells, the laughter, the song were silent, and some who had tasted Puritan wrath before shrewdly smelled the stocks. A Puritan of iron face—it was Endicott, who had cut the cross from the flag of England—warning aside the "priest of Baal," proceeded to hack the pole down with his sword. ”

“ The God of the Puritans was a jealous God, and many fasts were appointed to avert his wrath, as shown in blasted wheat; moulded beans, wormy pease, and mildewed corn; in drought and grasshoppers; in Indian invasions; in caterpillars and other woes of New England; in children dying by the chincough; in the "excessive raigns from the botles of Heaven"—all these evils being sent for the crying sins of wig-wearing, sheltering Quakers, not paying the ministers, etc. A fast and a feast kept close company in Puritan calendars. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But soon the big hurt will come. Oh, Prue—Prue, girl!—can’t you think what it will mean to me? Don’t you know how I shall sicken for the sight of you, and my ears will listen for you! Prudence, Prue, darling—yet I must not be womanish! I have a big work to do. I have known it with a new clearness since that radiance rested above my head last night. The truth burns in me like a fire. ”

“ The Puritan condemns the stage, the assemblies, the world's pomps and gatherings, the court's gallantry and elegance, the poetical and symbolical festivals of the country, the May-pole days, the merry feasts, bell-ringings, all the outlets by which sensuous or instinctive nature endeavored to relieve itself. He gives them up, abandons recreations and ornaments, crops his hair closely, wears a simple sombre-hued coat, speaks through his nose, walks stiffly, with his eyes turned upwards, absorbed, indifferent to visible things. ”

“ The advent of the light-hearted Cavaliers in England, flinging colour and warmth and gaiety over the land, was a sharp recoil from the drab severity of Puritan rule. The Puritans were men of strong personality: half soldiers and half preachers. They were honest without charm; strong-minded without pose ”

“ Elizabeth and the Puritans were wide as the poles asunder in their ideas of a reformed religion, though they were of precisely the same spirit in maintaining those ideas. They were determined as much as possible to have their own way. The Puritans were for the utmost simplicity in the externals of religion. They thought the Reformation had stopped half way. They would have no images, no crucifix. The ring in marriage, the observance of times and seasons, of festivals, chanting of psalms, church music, and robes and surplices for the clergy, they declared were the masks and livery of the beast. ”

“ The inconceivable austerity and solemnity with which Puritanism invested this mortal life, the awful grandeur of the themes which it made household words, the sublimity of the issues which it hung upon the commonest acts of our earthly existence, created characters of more than Roman strength and greatness; and the good men and women of Puritan training excelled the saints of the Middle Ages, as a soul fully developed intellectually, educated to closest thought, and exercised in reasoning, is superior to a soul great merely through impulse and sentiment. ”

“ With all the Puritan eagerness to push a clear, uncompromising, Scripture-based distinction of right and wrong into the affairs of every-day life, he has a thoroughly English horror of casuistry, and his clumsy canons consequently make wild work with the infinite intricacies of human nature. ”

“ In the duchess' dressing-room a little throng of ladies-in-waiting and intimate friends welcomed her warmly. Deep concern sat upon every face as they listened to the hysterical cries and moans, in which the patient in the adjoining bedroom gave expression to her sufferings, and the broken exclamations and fierce invectives by which she called upon her doctors and attendants to bear witness to the ingratitude and perfidy of the queen, and the baseness of her minions.
While Prue hesitated about intruding, the doctor and the apothecary came out. ”

“ Of what we call learning they probably had very little, and of esthetic taste still less, but of clear judgment, solid character, and fearless courage, they had a great deal. They were trained as companions and helpers of men, not as their toys, though they were always subject to them. It was a simple life they led—a life with few graces and few of our complexities. They were the Puritans of the classic world, without the Puritan conscience or moral sense, but with more than Puritan courage and fortitude. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Let him be the mirror in which we may see what our faith, our potency, and virtue ought to be. As it is, our shame is over all the earth.”
When the Council had approved these words, Prudence arose in all her beauty. [136] She discoursed upon man’s dual nature, spirit and body. Nature and her helpers may be the artificers of his mortal body, but the soul demands its heavenly Artificer, and laughs at our rude arts. God’s wisdom alone can create the soul, as Prudence shows by an exposition of its qualities. ”

“ But, of course, it is just this superstition that gives the puritan his terrific prestige. In the light of the will-to-power dogma this superstition fades. The puritan becomes just as much of a naturalistic phenomenon as the most carnal sinner. Instincts and impulses, in the puritan, are not miraculously cancelled, but have their full play. The primitive currents of life are not blocked and turned back on their sources, but turned into powerful and usually devastating channels. ”

“ While the rest of us are longing for power the puritan is enjoying his. And because the puritan is so well integrated he almost always rules. The [Pg 185] person whose satisfactions of control are more various and more refined is on the defensive against him.
The puritan gets his sense of power not in the harmless way of the artist or the philosopher or the lover or the scientist, but in a crude assault on that most vulnerable part of other people’s souls, their moral sense. ”

“ Once or twice she glanced furtively at him, noting the power and grace of his tall form, his easy, self-confident bearing and the manly frankness of his strong, swarthy face—more attractive than mere beauty to a woman so essentially feminine as Prudence. ”

“ Prudence and economy, restraint of manner, denial of the sensuous and the sensual appeal, reserve of soul, the unmoved endurance of the pricks of fortune—these became the virtues of the Puritan because they were not the virtues of the world which despised him: by these self-erected standards he justified himself and passed judgment on the society in which he felt himself an alien and a stranger. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet neither wept; the Puritans and the children of the Puritans do not weep easily; they are taught, not to utter, but to hide their emotions. The nurse perceived no signs of unusual feeling, except that the face of the strong man became suddenly as pale as that of the dying woman, and that to him this was an hour of anguish, while to her it was one of unspeakable joy. ”

“ If, as the Romish Clergy teach, even those, who die in the Lord, pass into Purgatory, where they suffer pains equal to those of Hell in intensity and inferior to them only in duration: certainly, such souls can with no truth be said henceforth to rest from their labours.
3. In reality, the very notion of a Purgatory stands irreconcileably opposed to the whole scheme and analogy of Scripture.
For the doctrine of a Purgatory holds out the speculation: that, By penal suffering, we both may be purified from our sins, and likewise may make personal meritorious satisfaction to God for them. ”

“ Yet the rest of those Thoughts which are in their own Nature good, may be so order'd as to bear a part in Pastoral. For as We may make a Shepherd false to his Mistress, if he be offended with the Levity of his Nature; so We may make a Lass Ill-natured and Satyrical, for Instance, if 'tis not in her Temper, but assumed only for a good Purpose. ”

“ For my part, I do not believe that any man can see softer skies than I see in Prue’s eyes; nor hear sweeter music than I hear in Prue’s voice; nor find a more heaven-lighted temple than I know Prue’s mind to be. ”

“ The Puritan’s relations with the Deity were not merely fatalistic, but were expressed in the legal form of a covenant in which God and the individual were the contracting parties Drama, or melodrama, was supplied only by the devil, who from that standpoint, may almost be said to have been the saving grace of the Puritan doctrine. Men become eloquent over what appeals to their interest ”

“ Another place, above this, is that which they call purgatory, that is, a place of purification for good men, as some of the disobedient who have rebelled, when they shall have there been purified, go to heaven. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus the Puritan was made up of two different men, the one all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion; the other proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in the dust before his Maker: but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his devotional retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans, and tears. ”

“ Dressed in fine linen and wrapped in a hand-woven christening blanket—a "bearing-cloth"—the unfortunate young Puritan was carried to church in the arms of the midwife, who was a person of vast importance and dignity as well as of service in early colonial days, when families of from fifteen to twenty children were quite the common quota. At the altar the baby was placed in his proud father's arms, and received his first cold and disheartening reception into the Puritan Church. ”

“ All secular tastes were suppressed, all sensual joys forbidden; the spiritual man alone remained standing upon the ruins of the past, and the heart, debarred from all its natural safety-valves, could only direct its views or aspirations towards a sinister Deity. The typical Puritan walked slowly along the streets, his eyes raised towards heaven, with elongated features, yellow and haggard, with closely cropped hair, clad in brown or black, unadorned, clothed only to cover his nakedness. If a man had round cheeks, he passed for lukewarm. ”