social subordination of class to
class. But within these forms of the older world beat for the first time
the spirit which was to characterize the new. The meanest peasant felt
himself ennobled as a child of God. The proudest noble recognized a
spiritual equality in the poorest "saint." The great social revolution
of the Civil Wars and the Protectorate was already felt in the demeanour
of English gentlemen. "He had a loving and sweet courtesy to the
poorest," we are told of one of them, "and would often employ many spare
hours with the commonest soldiers and poorest labourers." "He never
disdained the meanest nor flattered the greatest." But it was felt even
more in the new dignity and self-respect with which the consciousness of
their "calling" invested the classes beneath the rank of the gentry.
Take such a portrait as that which a turner in Eastcheap, Nehemiah
Wallington, has left us of a London housewife, his mother. "She was very
loving," he says, "and obedient to her parents, loving and kind to her
husband, very tender-hearted to her children, loving all that were
godly, much misliking the wicked and profane. She was a pattern of
sobriety unto many, very seldom was seen abroad except at church; when
others recreated themselves at holidays and other times, she would take
her needlework and say 'here is my recreation.'... God had given her a
pregnant wit and an excellent memory. She was very ripe and perfect in
all stories of the Bible, likewise in all the stories of the Martyrs,
and could readily turn to them; she was also perfect and well seen in
the English Chronicles, and in the descents of the kings of England. She
lived in holy wedlock with her husband twenty years, wanting but four
days."

[Sidenote: Puritanism and human conduct.]

Where the new conception of life told even more powerfully than on
politics or society was in its bearing on the personal temper and
conduct of men. There was a sudden loss of the passion, the caprice, the
subtle and tender play of feeling, the breadth of sympathy, the quick
pulse of delight, which had marked the age of Elizabeth; but on the
other hand life gained in moral grandeur, in a sense of the dignity of
manhood, in orderliness and equable force. The larger geniality of the
age that had passed away was replaced by an intense tenderness within
the narrower circle of the home. Home, as we conceive it now, was the
creation of the Puritan. Wife and child rose from mere dependa