code moral. It is the ark of the covenant. No impious hands may be laid upon it, for that were sacrilege; it would, if it were falsely construed, destroy political liberty and a moral standard that men regard as vital for their spiritual growth.

The Constitution of the United States is a comparatively short document and not more difficult to memorize than many other pages of prose that students have committed to heart. If, then, there is this wide difference of opinion as to the meaning of the words and purposes of the American Constitution, how inevitable that there should be even greater differences of opinion as to the meaning of that much larger and more complicated constitution of the Puritan, the Bible?

The Puritans had their constitution made for them not by man but by the inspired Word of God; but because they were men and not divinely inspired, it was necessary that they should seek its interpretation according to their own human limitations and the finite capacity of their understanding. That could not be done in a day or a month or a year. It was a matter that required the earnest devotion of serious and zealous men, who approached the study of their subject in a proper frame of mind, who must look upon it as the greatest of all duties, who, convinced of the correctness of their judgment, were like the champions of old, ready to enter the lists against all comers to defend their cause.

An effective but cumbersome weapon was the lance; much more convenient and deadly is the magazine rifle. The expounders of the Puritan constitution must needs use the means at hand. It was not a day of steam printing-presses that turned out their millions of printed words by the hour; the machinery of distribution was wanting. No man was driven by the spur of haste; society was not revolutionized between breakfast and dinner; reputations were not made or destroyed between dinner and bedtime by the facile pen of the morning newspaper leader writer. The controversialists of the Puritan constitution, the strict constructionists and the liberal expounders as we should term them today, relied on the tract and the spoken word to convince. Their tracts like their discourses were heavy, rambling, discursive, frequently involved. Nothing more strikingly marks the difference between the old and the new than our brevity, our conciseness, our horror of circumlocution or the unnecessary use of mere words. We have simplified the expression as well as the method of expression; we have substituted the typewriter for the quill pen, and thrown into the limbo of forgotten things the grandiloquent and meaningless phrases that require too much time to form into thought and too much space to shape into words.

It was a day of controversy, a day when men delighted in argument, for controversy and argument were the means by which the people were

educated, but it was not a day of little things. Men of mature years did not, like Didymus, waste their time in inquiries as to the relative ages of Hecuba and Helen, or the name of the mother of Æneas, or the character of Anacreon or Sappho.1 Argument brought home to the people in the quickest and most direct way the truths that it was essential for them to know. For knowledge they were eager. They avidly read what was written, they listened with absorbent minds to what they heard. To them that was a pleasure no less than a duty.

Much has been written of the gloom of the Puritan Sunday, of the long sermons and services at the meeting-houses, of the peculiar institution that was native to the soil of New England. Now in the first place the Puritan Sabbath was not indigenous to the soil of Massachusetts, but was one of the things that Englishmen brought with them. "And to the end the Sabbath may be celebrated in a religious manner, we appoint that all that inhabit the Plantation, both for the general and particular employment, may surcease their labor every Saturday throughout the year at three of the clock in the afternoon; and that they spend the rest of that day in catechising and preparation for the Sabbath, as the ministers shall direct," were the instructions given to Endicott and his council in 1629 by the New England Company in London.2 1 Dill: Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 300. "Young: Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, p. 163.

It is easy enough to understand how the custom originated. Warrant for it was found in the Puritan constitution, where precise injunctions were laid down for the observance of the Sabbath. Thus in Leviticus xxiii, 32, the Jews are commanded, "from even unto even, shall ye celebrate your Sabbath." Mather says that John Cotton began the Sabbath the evening before; "for which keeping of the Sabbath from evening to evening, he wrote argument before his coming to New England: and I suppose, 'twas from his reason and practice, that the Christians of New-England have generally done so too.”1 Hutchinson says it was some time before this custom was settled. Hooker, in a letter written about the year 1640, says, "The question touching the beginning of the Sabbath is now on foot among us, hath once been spoken to, and we are to give in our arguments each to the other, so that we may ripen our thoughts concerning that truth, and if the Lord will, it may more fully appear"; and in another letter, March, 1640, "Mr. Huit hath not answered our arguments against the beginning the Sabbath at Morning." 2

Through the mist of long years we look back on the Puritan Sabbath and we see nothing but darkness and gloom, a day in which the austere soul of the fanatical Puritan could sink itself in the dread of eternal punishment and rejoice in the thought 1 Mather: Magnalia, vol. i, p. 253.

Hutchinson: History of Massachusetts, vol. i, p. 428.

of everlasting damnation. Malice aided by ingenuity has heightened this mirage. Not content with imposing an all-day religious observance on these unfortunate progenitors of a race, natural emotions and sympathies were crushed out as abominable in the sight of the Lord. We know of course now that the celebrated Blue Laws had no existence in fact and were the creation of malicious imagination, but generations have believed in all sincerity that the code of the Puritans forbade a husband to kiss his wife on Sunday, that Sunday was to little children a day of torture and torment, and that the Puritan father found pleasure in making them suffer.

"Home, as we conceive it now," Green says, "was the creation of the Puritan. Wife and child rose from mere dependents on the will of husband or father, as husband and father saw in them saints like himself, souls hallowed by the touch of a divine spirit and called with a divine calling like his own. The sense of spiritual fellowship gave a new tenderness and refinement to the common family affections."1 Instead of Sunday being to the Puritan a day to be dreaded and to be approached with a feeling of repugnance, it was a day to be looked forward to with delight. Campbell has well said that "the Puritan took as keen a pleasure in his four hours' sermon from a moving preacher as ever did the most ardent admirer of the drama

1 Green: A History of the English People, vol. vi, p. 199.