are beset by two special dangers. One of these arises from the nature of our authorities, the other from the temper in which we approach our task. The material from which we have to reconstruct the life of New England is far more abundant than in the case of the Southern colonies, but it is also from its nature far more likely to lead us astray.

In dealing with the Southern colonies we may misinterpret our authorities, but we are in little danger of being wilfully misled by them on important matters. Our knowledge of their political history is chiefly derived from those who wrote for some immediate practical purpose, and with no deliberate intention of telling a tale to posterity. The history of the Southern colonies is for the most part to be gleaned out of despatches, entry books, and the like. When the Virginian or the Marylander did deliberately sit down to describe the world in which he lived, he had no self-conscious feeling that he was writing about the infancy of a great nation. The wonders of external nature, the fertility of the soil, the abundance of strange beasts and birds, the adventurous life of the wilderness, the peculiar customs and fanciful mythology of the savage, all these absorbed the interest of the settler and excluded any speculation about the destinies of his little commonwealth. But with the New England Puritan it was different. He had an exaggerated and even a morbid sense of his responsibilities as a citizen, and an enthusiastic conviction of the greatness which awaited his new country. Steeped in scriptural learning, he never ceased to regard himself as one of a peculiar people, the chosen and predestined heirs to the new Canaan. No event in his history seemed trivial to him, since each was a step in the chain by which God was working out the great destiny of the Puritan commonwealth. At the same time, that provincial spirit of exaggeration which is almost

invariably found in a young community, led the Puritan colonist to see a Latimer or a Calvin in the occupant of every village pulpit. Thus, in gathering our information from the abundant supply of chronicles and biographies which the piety and the intellectual activity of New England have bequeathed to us, we are constantly at the mercy of self-deceiving enthusiasm. We are reading not a history but a hagiology.

An equal or even greater danger lies in the nature of the subject and our mental attitude towards it The men of the seventeenth century are so closely akin to ourselves in their political ideas and aspirations, we all of us have so direct an interest in the result of their contests, that it is scarcely possible to judge them with impartiality. And in the nature and spirit, though not always in the outer form of its political contests, New England was but the counterpart of the mother country. The issues on which the political battles of Massachusetts were fought out, the limitations which the state may for its own protection impose on individual freedom of speech and action, the right of a majority to define the conditions of citizenship, these were among the main problems which had to be solved by English statesmen in the seventeenth century; in a slightly altered form they have occupied every generation since, and occupy us still.

Even more difficult is it wholly to avoid partisanship in dealing with those theological disputes which are so strangely and inextricably blended with New England politics. The feelings and antecedents of every Englishman must in some measure incline him either to sympathize with the Puritan in his moral earnestness, his pitiless self-sacrifice, his boundless and unswerving confidence in the ever-present guidance and protection of God, or else to be repelled by his narrow aversion to all that lay beyond his own sphere of vision, the blind

self-confidence with which he interpreted the divine decrees, and the ruthless severity with which he enforced them.

Over and above the danger of being biassed by sympathy or antipathy in our estimate of Puritanism, there are other misleading influences against which we must guard ourselves. One of the chief evils against which the Puritan fought is so remote, and seems to us so impossible, that we are in danger of overlooking the reality of it. We can scarcely place ourselves in the position of men who had to deal with Popery, not as an insidious enemy, now and again making a successful raid under the cloke of obscurity and weakness, but as an open foe, militant and aggressive. It is hard to bear in mind that what are now the stock phrases of triumphant bigotry were once a daring and much needed protest on behalf of spiritual freedom.

As with the doctrinal aspect of Puritanism so is it with the moral. The reputation of a great movement often suffers by the completeness of its victory. To judge Puritanism aright we need to have before our eyes the evils against which it made war. We are apt to forget that a large portion of what was once the distinctive morality of Puritanism has been, so to speak, absorbed into the moral creed common to the whole nation. The chastity of woman, the sanctity of domestic life, our pure religion breathing household laws,' respect for these forms part of the moral code of every Englishman who has any such code at all. They were once the strongholds for which the Puritan did battle against the assaults of the courtier and the dramatist.

6

In another way, too, we must beware lest we import the ideas of the nineteenth century into our judgment of the seventeenth. In all questions of toleration, whether we are dealing with Churchman or Puritan, with Laud

or Endicott, we must remember that the whole standard of public morality is altered. To speak of the Puritan, whether in England or America, as the champion of spiritual freedom, is a proof of ignorance or worse. Toleration was abhorrent to him, even when he most needed it. He would have scorned those pleas of expediency which modern apologists have sometimes urged in his behalf. His creed on this matter was as simple as that of Saint Lewis or Torquemada. He had possession of the truth, and it was his bounden duty by whatever means to promote the extension of that truth, and to restrain and extirpate error. In this he in no wise fell short of the moral standard of his age. Here and there, indeed, might be found either a man of exceptional wisdom and liberality, such as L'Hôpital or Bacon, or a sceptical statesman like Henry of Navarre or Baltimore, who seemed in some measure to anticipate the more enlightened doctrines of a later day. But it is no reproach to men that they neither rose above the wisdom of their own generation nor fell short of its enthusiasm, and that they were not among the few who could anticipate a moral

reform.

The difficulties which thus beset the history of the Puritan colonies are not to be avoided by refusing to consider the religious aspect of the question. In New England we cannot even temporarily or in thought sever religion from the other elements of national life. The word of God, as revealed in the Bible and as taught by certain authorized interpreters, served as a standard by which every act of individual or national life must be measured. Whatever may be our judgment of the American Puritan, the pervading and ever-present character of his religious belief cannot be overrated. A New England writer did no more than justice to his commonwealth when he said, 'If any make religion as

twelve and the world as thirteen, such an one hath not the spirit of a true New England man.'1

If, then, we would enter into the spirit of New England history, we must clearly understand what is implied in the name Puritan.

One use we may disregard. In England, during the sixteenth and in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, the Puritan was often marked off from the Separatist. Identical or nearly so in doctrine, in their views about ritual, and in their moral code, they differed in their attitude towards the established Church. The Separatist was hostile to the Church, not only as corrupt, but as being in principle at variance with the right order of things as laid down in Scripture. The conforming Puritan was willing to remain within the Church if it could be purged from what he regarded as the abuses bequeathed to it by Rome. Each of these classes bore its part in the settlement of New England.

In their new home, however, the distinction which had separated them disappears. In England, the conforming Puritan unwillingly accepted the forms of the Church, from the dislike of violent change common to Englishmen, from respect for historical association, from hope of reform, and because Anglican and Puritan were divided from one another not by a gulf, but by a border-land in which the two sets of opinions insensibly blended. In America all this was changed. In England, external conditions had kept the Puritan in temporary union with a system to which in his heart he was hostile. In America he was set free from these conditions and accepted his emancipation.

For our purposes then we may disregard these accidental differences which existed in England. Time

1 Higginson's Election Sermon, 1663,' quoted in Belknap's History of New Hampshire, vol. i. p. 61.