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Was the Puritan really as austere as he has been represented, or does he merely appear so when seen through the softened light of to-day? In comparison with the men of his own time he was an uncomfortable person with a fixed idea, and all men of fixed ideas are uncomfortable to the great mass, which never rises above mediocrity because of its constitutional inability to concentrate; because it scatters what few thoughts it has and dissipates its energies instead of bringing all its force to bear on the particular work in hand. Ability is pertinacity.

In England, after the Restoration, there was a very natural tendency not only to reverse everything that Puritanism had accomplished politically, but socially to seek revenge for the rigid morality that Puritanism had imposed; to do everything that Puritanism frowned on was to show the contempt in which Puritanism was held. It was this reaction that, to a large extent, was responsible for the vice and profligacy of the court and the low moral tone of politics for the next hundred and fifty years succeeding the death of the Protector. In America the same causes operated. With the downfall of the theocratic state, with the beginning of the end of colonial isolation and the bringing of the colonies into a quasi-political entity which sowed the seminal principle of political union, with the great impetus given to expansion, there was a rebound from the weight which Puritanism had laid on men and a temptation to scoff at the things which had been

held sacred. It is a singular fact that most of the American historians have been anti-Puritan, and even those historical writers who are descended from the Puritans have been influenced by the prevailing popular opinion and, as if to show their superiority to their ancestors and make parade of their “liberality," either sneer at those qualities of the Puritan that made them a race apart or else seek to extenuate the virtues of an age that are vices when seen through the eyes of a more advanced and refined civilization.

CHAPTER XIII

THE FOUNDATION ON WHICH THE AMERICAN CHARACTER RESTS

THIS is a convenient point to recapitulate briefly what has been said in the last six chapters. My aim has been to show the solid foundation on which the American character has been slowly built. These things are to be remembered:

First. That it was the Puritan and not the Pilgrim who founded American institutions.

Second. That Pilgrim and Puritan are not synonymous terms, and that Pilgrim and Puritan had little if anything in common.

Third. That while the Pilgrim was a separatist from the Church of England and conceded the right of every man to worship God in his own way, the Puritan was a Church of England man and tolerated no other form of worship.

Fourth. That the Puritan was in all things an Englishman. He brought with him to America English institutions, English morals, the English mental attitude. He was an Englishman in America as he had always been an Englishman in England.

Fifth. That the Bible was the Constitution of the

Puritan state. It was a civil no less than a religious and a moral code.

Sixth. That Puritanism, beginning as a religious movement, soon became political, and was the force that made the English people assert their rights against the oppression of the Crown and those set in authority over them, both spiritual and temporal. It made the Puritan always ready to resist constituted authority when his conscience demanded it. It sowed the seeds of democracy. It was not only religious and political, but it was also economic. It was, summing up everything in one word, one of the greatest Social movements the world has ever known.

Seventh. That the Puritan, while austere and fanatical and much given to morbid introspection, was neither without natural human affections, nor a sense of humor, nor averse to rational amusement.

Eighth. That the Puritan lived neither in squalor nor in abject poverty. For his day and generation he was well found; in many respects better clothed and fed and housed than the mass of the English people living in England.

Ninth. That the English Puritan who emigrated to America, by the force of circumstances, by his environment and climatic influences, by his social, moral and political code, diverged from the parent stock, and in less than a century after his migration produced a new race.

And tenth, and finally. The Puritan was a human Englishman and not a miraculous or a mythical creation.

With these facts established it becomes easier to understand how it came about that in the fullness of time there was to be born a new race in America.

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