n. Its rehabilitated relics do
not produce their best influence in any attempt to attract our
admiration,--which they cannot do,--but in engaging our hearts' tolerant
respect and confidence towards those who actually developed its
principles at first-hand, its original disciples, who brought it into
discredit afterwards by the very fidelity of their loyalty to it.
Puritanism is an engaging and not offensive object to use, when regarded
as the characteristic of only one single generation of men and women and
children. It could not pass from that one generation into another
without losing much of what grace it had, and acquiring most odious and
mischievous elements. Entailed Puritanism being an actual impossibility,
all attempts to realize it, all assumptions of success in it, have the
worst features of sham and hypocrisy. The diligent students of the
history and the social life of our own colonial days know very well what
an unspeakable difference there was, in all that makes and manifests
characters and dispositions, between the first comers here and the first
native-born generation, and how painfully that difference tells to the
discredit of the latter. The tap-roots of Puritanism struck very deep,
and drew the sap of life vigorously. They dried very soon; they are now
cut; and whatever owed its life exclusively to them has withered and
must perish. A philosophy of Nature and existence now wholly discredited
underlay the fundamental views and principles of Puritanism. The early
records of our General Court are thickly strown with appointments of
Fast-Days that the people might discover the especial occasion of God's
anger toward them, manifested in the blight of some expected harvest, or
in a scourge upon the cattle in the field. Some among us who claim to
hold unreduced or softened the old ancestral faith have been twice in
late years convened in our State-House, by especial call, to legislate
upon the potato-disease and the pleuro-pneumonia among our herds. Their
joint wisdom resulted in money-appropriations to discover causes and
cures. The debates held on these two occasions would have grievously
shocked our ancestors. But are there any among us who could in full
sincerity, with logic and faith, have stood for the old devout theory of
such visitations?

But if it would be equally vain and unjust to attempt to make Puritanism
lovely to ourselves,--a quality which its noblest disciples did not
presume to make its for