emost attraction,--there is all the more reason
why we should do it justice in its original and awfully real presentment
in its single generation of veritable discipleship. What became
drivelling and cant, presumption and bigotry, pretence and hypocrisy, as
soon as a fair trial had tested it, was in the hearts, the speech, the
convictions, and the habits of a considerable number of persons in one
generation, the most thoroughly honest and earnest product of all the
influences which had trained them. We read the heart-revelations of John
Winthrop with the profoundest confidence, and even with a constraining
sympathy. We venture to say that when this book shall be consulted,
through all time to come, for the various uses of historical, religious,
or literary illustration, not even the most trifling pen will ever turn
a single sentence from its pages to purposes of levity or ridicule. Here
we have Puritanism at first-hand: the original, unimitated, and
transient resultant of influences which had been working to produce it,
and which would continue their working so as to insure modifications of
it. Winthrop notes it for a special Providence that his wife discovered
a loathsome spider in the children's porridge before they had partaken
of it. His religious philosophy stopped there. He did not put to himself
the sort of questions which open in a train to our minds from any one
observed fact, else he would have found himself asking after the special
Providence which allowed the spider to fall into the porridge. His
friend and successor in high-magistracy in New England, Governor John
Endecott, wrote him a letter years afterward which is so characteristic
of the faith of both of them that we will make free use of it. The
letter is dated Salem, July 28th, 1640, and probably refers to the
disaster by which the ship Mary Rose "was blown in pieces with her own
powder, being 21 barrels," in Charlestown harbor, the day preceding.[A]

"DEAREST SIR,--Hearing of ye remarkable stroake of Gods
hand uppon ye shippe & shippes companie of Bristoll, as also of
some Atheisticall passages & hellish profanations of ye Sabbaths
& deridings of ye people & wayes of God, I thought good to desire
a word or two of you of ye trueth of what you have heard. Such an
extraordinary judgement would be searched into, what Gods meaninge
is in it, both in respect of those whom it concernes more
especiallie in England, as also in r