We do it wrong, being so majestical
To offer it the show of violence.
In the mysticism of Bunyan and Fox, in the brooding melancholy and glowing energy of Cromwell, in the victorious tranquillity of Milton, “unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,” amid a world of self-seekers and apostates, there are depths of light and darkness which posterity can observe with reverence or with horror, but which its small fathom-line cannot plumb.
There are types of character which are like a prism, whose various and brilliant colors are but broken reflections of a single ray of concentrated light. If the inward and spiritual grace of Puritanism eludes the historian, its outward and visible signs meet him at every turn, and not less in marketplace and countinghouse and camp than in the student’s chamber and the gathering of the elect for prayer. For to the Puritan, a contemner of the vain shows of sacramentalism, mundane toil becomes itself a kind of sacrament. Like a man who strives by unresting activity to exorcise a haunting demon, the Puritan, in the effort to save his own soul, sets in motion every force in heaven above or in the earth beneath. By the mere energy of his expanding spirit, he remakes, not only his own character and habits and way of life, but family and church, industry and city, political institutions and social order. Conscious that he is but a stranger and pilgrim, hurrying from this transitory life to a life to come, he turns with almost physical horror from the vanities which lull into an awful indifference souls dwelling on the borders of eternity, to pore with anguish of spirit on the grand facts, God, the soul, salvation and damnation. “It made the world seem to me,” said a Puritan of his conversion, “as a carkass that had neither life nor loveliness. And it destroyed those ambitious desires after literate fame, which was the sin of my childhood. … It set me upon that method of my studies which since then I have found the benefit of. … It caused me first to seek God’s Kingdom and his Righteousness, and most to mind the One thing needful, and to determine first of my Ultimate End.”296
Overwhelmed by a sense of his “Ultimate End,” the Puritan cannot rest, nevertheless, in reflection upon it. The contemplation of God, which the greatest of the Schoolmen described as the supreme blessedness, is a blessedness too great for sinners, who must not only contemplate God, but glorify him by their work in a world given over to the powers of darkness. “The way to the Celestial City lies just through this town, where this lusty fair is kept; and he that will go to the City, and yet not go through this town, must needs go out of the world.”297 For that awful journey, girt with precipices and beset with fiends, he sheds every encumbrance, and arms himself with every weapon. Amusements, books, even intercourse with friends, must, if need be, be cast aside; for it is better to enter into eternal life halt and maimed than having two eyes to be cast into eternal fire. He scours the country, like Baxter and Fox, to find one who may speak the word of life to his soul. He seeks from his ministers, not absolution, but instruction, exhortation and warning. Prophesyings—that most revealing episode in early Puritanism—were the cry of a famished generation for enlightenment, for education, for a religion of the intellect; and it was because much “preaching breeds faction, but much praying causes devotion”298 that the powers of this world raised their parchment shutters to stem the gale that blew from the Puritan pulpit. He disciplines, rationalizes, systematizes, his life; “method” was a Puritan catchword a century before the world had heard of Methodists. He makes his very business a travail of the spirit, for that too is the Lord’s vineyard, in which he is called to labor.
Feeling in him that which “maketh him more fearful of displeasing God than all the world,”299 he is a natural republican, for there is none on earth that he can own as master. If powers and principalities will hear and obey, well; if not, they must be ground into dust, that on their ruins the elect may build the Kingdom of Christ. And, in the end, all these—prayer, and toil, and discipline, mastery of self and mastery of others, wounds, and death—may be too little for the salvation of a single soul. “Then I saw that there was a way to Hell even from the Gates of Heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction”300—those dreadful words haunt him as he nears his end. Sometimes they break his heart. More often, for grace abounds even to the chief of sinners, they nerve his will. For it is will—will organized and disciplined and inspired, will quiescent in rapt adoration or straining in violent energy, but always will—which is the essence of Puritanism, and for the intensification and organization of will every instrument in that tremendous arsenal of religious fervour is mobilized. The Puritan is like a steel spring compressed by an inner force, which shatters every obstacle by its rebound. Sometimes the strain is too tense, and, when its imprisoned energy is released, it shatters itself.
The spirit bloweth where it listeth, and men of every social grade had felt their hearts lifted by its breath, from aristocrats and country gentlemen to weavers who, “as they stand in their loom, can set a book before them or edifie one another.”301 But, if religious zeal and moral enthusiasm are not straitened by the vulgar categories of class and income,
