It was the difference in character between the adventurer, the rover, the soldier of fortune, the man with the insatiable Wanderlust, who, with childish credulity, despite his experience of the world, always believes in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and the austere man of narrow conscience, who is compensated for his lack of imagination by the gift of steadfastness that produces results because he cannot be swerved from his purpose. It is often said that men are ruled by their imagination; but it would be truer to say that they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.' But, curiously enough, the foundation of the American character-the love of gain and the acquisition of wealth in commerce — was laid by the men whose outlook on life was narrow and dwarfed by the barriers of over-refined intellectual development rather than the wider imagination of the adventurer whose one thought was the pursuit of fortune. Later I shall subject these qualities to more kind and the Christian faith, is our royal intention, and the principal end of this plantation."

Always this extreme solicitude for the spiritual welfare of the Indian. It is touching. "If we were once the masters of their Countrey and they stood in fears of us (which might with few hands imployed about nothing else, be in short time to passe) it were an easie matter to make them willingly to forsake the divell, to embrace the faith of Jesus Christ, and to be baptized. Besides, you cannot easilie judge how much they would be availeable to us in our discoveries of the Countrey, in our buildings and plantings, and quiet provisions for ourselves, when we may peaceably passe from place to place without neede of arms or guarde." - Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia, 1613. Cf. Brown: Genesis of the United States, vol. ii, p. 585.

1 Bagehot: The English Constitution, p. 101.

minute analysis and explain the reasons for this seeming contradiction; for the present it is necessary only to state the fact and to ask the reader to bear in mind that, from the very first, civilization in America was composed of two elements almost antagonistic, which like two chemical elements can only be fused in combination with a third. That agent was found in the flux of common resistance to oppression, and the States, which Rufus Choate compared "to primordial particles of matter, whose natural condition is to repel each other, or, at least, to exist in their own independent identity," became homogeneous.

These considerations, I hope, will make it sufficiently clear why the writer has found it necessary to begin this investigation in New England rather than in Virginia.

CHAPTER VII

THE PURITAN

It is impossible to have a proper comprehension of the character of the American people, or intelligently to examine into the causes that have produced this race and made them what they are in mind and spirit, unless at the outset we have a clear conception of the men from whom the race sprang. The psychological student of America must study the Puritan and subject him to as minute analysis as the student of anthropology gives to his study of the caves of a prehistoric age, or the physiologist to learn the vital relation of the heart to the body. The Puritan is the heart of American civilization.

In attempting to bring back to life the figures of the dead, in revisualizing lineaments that are shadowed by the haze of time, in putting a historical character upon the modern scene, there is always the danger of interpreting motives and the play of forces by the light of the present instead of the obscurity in which men then moved.

Excellent indeed is the perspective of history; it has made many things clear that at the time they happened were vague; but the farther we are removed from a great event the more it is softened

and often distorted by distance; just as the majestic fane viewed by the traveler from afar impresses him with its bulk; but to appreciate the soul of the artist who created it, to be touched by that spirit of religious devotion, it must be seen close at hand. Correctly to understand the seventeenth century, it must be read not through the eyes of the twentieth century, but the focus must be readjusted; the mind must throw off all the progress and humanizing influences that are the gifts of each century to the next and reincarnate itself. Unless that is done, unless we approach the subject with that intrinsic detachment, we bring on the stage not men but puppets, lay figures properly proportioned, perhaps, but clothed in anachronism.

In the first place we are to remember that in the seventeenth century life and religion were one. They were so inseparably interwoven that they could not be dissociated. Religion was a part of the conduct of life, of all life, of all society; the respect and obedience that were given to constituted authority were founded on the acceptance of religious belief and practice. In the twentieth century life and religion are apart; powerful though the influence of religion is to-day, it does not control life or society. Unless we clearly bear this in mind it will be impossible justly to estimate the Puritan character or to find an adequate explanation for the many seemingly inexplicable things done by the Puritan.

The Puritan, idealized, sublimated, painted in monochromes against a colorless background, emblem of passionless existence and dead to human emotions, his character distorted by injudicious and over-zealous admirers and defenders, his motives misunderstood, it is this figure that obscures the founders of the race; and we have been made to think of the Puritan as slow of speech, perpetually sunk in the gloom of his own conscience, too solemn to see that life is ever a farce even when tragedy, lingering on earth but longing for heaven. Now as a matter of fact these progenitors of a lion's breed, these pioneers who fought for the right as they fought against Nature, to whom life was something more than the antechamber to hope, were a practical people not without a sense of rational pleasure.

It is not necessary to trace the causes that produced Puritanism in England; they are known to every schoolboy who has studied in even an elementary form the history of England or the United States, but it is necessary for an intelligent comprehension of one of the greatest social movements in the world's history to clear away some of the misapprehensions, the false impressions, the romance that in the course of three centuries have grown up around the majestic figure of the Puritan, which, like the weeds about a temple, dwarf its beauty and distort its proportions.

To begin with, we must destroy the very common idea that the Pilgrims and the Puritans were intel