(even if almost equally mistaken) was the original energy in the Puritan
creed. And it must be defined with a little more delicacy if we are
really to understand the attitude of G. B. S., who is the greatest of
the modern Puritans and perhaps the last.

I should roughly define the first spirit in Puritanism thus. It was a
refusal to contemplate God or goodness with anything lighter or milder
than the most fierce concentration of the intellect. A Puritan meant
originally a man whose mind had no holidays. To use his own favourite
phrase, he would let no living thing come between him and his God; an
attitude which involved eternal torture for him and a cruel contempt for
all the living things. It was better to worship in a barn than in a
cathedral for the specific and specified reason that the cathedral was
beautiful. Physical beauty was a false and sensual symbol coming in
between the intellect and the object of its intellectual worship. The
human brain ought to be at every instant a consuming fire which burns
through all conventional images until they were as transparent as glass.

This is the essential Puritan idea, that God can only be praised by
direct contemplation of Him. You must praise God only with your brain;
it is wicked to praise Him with your passions or your physical habits or
your gesture or instinct of beauty. Therefore it is wicked to worship by
singing or dancing or drinking sacramental wines or building beautiful
churches or saying prayers when you are half asleep. We must not worship
by dancing, drinking, building or singing; we can only worship by
thinking. Our heads can praise God, but never our hands and feet. That
is the true and original impulse of the Puritans. There is a great deal
to be said for it, and a great deal was said for it in Great Britain
steadily for two hundred years. It has gradually decayed in England and
Scotland, not because of the advance of modern thought (which means
nothing), but because of the slow revival of the mediaeval energy and
character in the two peoples. The English were always hearty and humane,
and they have made up their minds to be hearty and humane in spite of
the Puritans. The result is that Dickens and W. W. Jacobs have picked up
the tradition of Chaucer and Robin Hood. The Scotch were always
romantic, and they have made up their minds to be romantic in spite of
the Puritans. The result is that Scott and Stevenson have picked up the
tradition of Bruce, Blin