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Puritanism was not a garment to be hastily slipped into on Sunday and to be forgotten for the other six days of the week. The Puritan wore his religion at all times as he wore his leather-lined doublet, for without it he would have stood ashamed in his own nakedness; and one was as necessary to him as the other. Whether he worked or played, whether he sat in meeting-house or in the general court, whether he tilled his fields or snatched up his musket at the sound of an Indian alarm, wherever he went or whatever he did, he took his creed with him, for it was the criterion of right living, the benison of divine grace.

never ceased to question. The difference between Puritan and Catholic was that while both believed, the Catholic never questioned, and the Puritan was always tortured by doubt. The Catholic believed with faith sublime, which brought peace; the Puritan believed, but was never at peace with himself. "I cannot imagine why the Holy Ghost should give Timothy the solemnest charge, was ever given Mortal man, to observe the rules he had given, till the coming of Christ; if new things must be expected." - The Simple Cobler of Aggawam (Force, vol. iii, 8). And Mather and Johnson and other Puritan theologues show how this fear, this doubt, this longing to believe, and yet always this eternal questioning, had possession of the Puritan mind; which was at once its weakness no less than its strength.

CHAPTER XI

THE BIBLE THE PURITAN CONSTITUTION

To the Puritan the ideal concept of society was a form of government in which the Word of God, as exemplified in the Bible, was the law of man. Grasping this basic truth, we see at once where it led him.

The Bible was the Constitution of the Puritan State.

All society, civilized or uncivilized, rests upon a body of laws. Among an uncivilized people, in a primitive or rudimentary state, those laws are the customs of the tribe or the traditions of the clan. As society escapes from barbarism and its intellectual faculties develop, customs and traditions are codified into fundamental constitutions and statutes, which are either precisely defined or, by the sanction of usage, become the unwritten law. In the New World, in his new environment, the Puritan began his social and political existence with a written constitution — the Bible. I make no apologies for reiteration. It is necessary that this should be emphasized if its significance is to be appreciated and its consequences understood.1

1 "It was then requested of Mr. Cotton, that he would, from the laws wherewith God governed his ancient people, form an abstract of such as were

Every nomadic tribe, every clan, every people from whom has sprung a race, is not less influenced by its laws or customs than those laws or customs reflect the physical and mental state of their creators; and it is impossible to comprehend their view of life unless we have knowledge of the code to which they rendered obedience. The laws of Draco and the laws of Solon typify two stages in the life of Athens. You cannot enter into the Athenian mind if you are unable to see why those codes were enacted; with that understanding the Athenian social and moral philosophy is its own interpretation.

No writer with whom I am familiar has brought the Bible in this exact relation to the Puritan. And yet it is fundamental. It is because of his Biblical constitution that the Puritan was what he was. It is one of the chief explanations of the difference in character between the Pilgrim and the Puritan. It is the reason why the Puritan made America and the Pilgrim was merely an episode in historical evolution.1

of a moral and a lasting equity: which he performed as acceptably as judiciously. . . . Mr. Cotton effectually recommended it unto them, that none should be electors, nor elected therein, except such as were visible subjects of our Lord Jesus Christ, personally confederated in our churches. In these, and many other ways, he propounded unto them, an endeavour after a theocracy, as near as might be, to that which was the glory of Israel, the peculiar people." - Magnalia, vol. i, p. 243.

1 An Abstract of the Lawes of New England as they are now Established (Force, vol. iii, 9), chapter i. Of Magistrates. First, All Magistrates are to be chosen, First, By the free Burgesses (Deut. i, 13). Secondly, Out of the free Burgesses (Deut. xvii, 15), and so on throughout, the warrant for the law being found in Scripture.

A writer usually so careful as Pierre LeroyBeaulieu falls into the common error of regarding Pilgrim and Puritan as synonymous and interchangeable terms. "From the days of the Pilgrim fathers,” he says, "who expatriated themselves in order that they might establish on the rude shores of Massachusetts a government resting on the principles derived from the Bible." But this the Pilgrim did not do. He had no purpose to found a theocratic state. That was the self-appointed mission of the Puritan.

"And the elder Saints and Sages laid their pious framework right By a theocratic instinct covered from the people's sight." Agreed as men may be on principles, on details there will always be a wide divergence of opinion, and the greater their intellection the greater that divergence will be. Nothing is more enticing to flexible and subtle minds than to discuss the meaning of words capable of more than one construction by ingenious argument or adroit sophistication, and to convince themselves by their arguments of the correctness of their position and the weakness of that of their opponents. The Constitution of the United States has been in existence for one hundred and twenty-five years, and in that time it has been passed upon and interpreted by some of the clearest and most acute minds the world has known; it has been written on and expounded and discussed by men of great learning, great honesty, and great abil

1 Leroy-Beaulieu: The United States in the Twentieth Century, p. xvii.

ity at perhaps greater length than any other manmade code, and yet to-day we are as far from the last word having been said as we were almost at the beginning. What do a few simple words mean that are in every-day use, words so simple that the ordinary public-school boy in the lower grades has no difficulty in understanding them? But great lawyers, great jurists, great statesmen, great writers spend long hours in patient research endeavoring to give these simple words an interpretation that shall square with their own views, or what they believe to be the intent of their writers, or the purpose for which they were designed; which by that construction shall be for the good of the state or the benefit of the people. In the forum, in the courts, in the press, there is constant discussion of the Constitution of the United States. That is not merely an intellectual diversion, the luxury of idle minds, to whom academic, hair-splitting argument is an amusement as keen as it was to the Greeks and Romans, who, at the height of their intellectual development, sat enraptured under the spell of their great orators; nor does it bear any resemblance to "the subtilities and quiddities of medieval theologians, who seriously discussed such silly questions as the digestibility of the consecrated elements in the eucharist." This discussion of the American Constitution has a deeper and more ennobling purpose. The Constitution of the United States is to the American people a code political as well as a

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