erest. "Lucy Hutchinson," says Mr. Goldwin Smith, "is
painting what she thought a perfect Puritan would be; and her picture
presents to us not a coarse, crop-eared, and snuffling fanatic, but a
highly accomplished, refined, gallant, and most amiable, though
religious and seriously minded, gentleman." Let us, I say, in this
example of Mr. Goldwin Smith's own choosing, lay our finger upon the
points where this type deflects from the truly humane ideal.

Mrs. Hutchinson relates a story which gives us a good notion of what the
amiable and accomplished social intercourse, even of a picked Puritan
family, was. Her husband was governor of Nottingham. He had occasion,
she said, "to go and break up a private meeting in the cannoneer's
chamber"; and in the cannoneer's chamber "were found some notes
concerning paedobaptism,[476] which, being brought into the governor's
lodgings, his wife having perused them and compared them with the
Scriptures, found not what to say against the truths they asserted
concerning the mis-application of that ordinance to infants." Soon
afterwards she expects her confinement, and communicates the cannoneer's
doubts about paedobaptism to her husband. The fatal cannoneer makes a
breach in him too. "Then he bought and read all the eminent treatises on
both sides, which at that time came thick from the presses, and still
was cleared in the error of the paedobaptists." Finally, Mrs. Hutchinson
is confined. Then the governor "invited all the ministers to dinner, and
propounded his doubt and the ground thereof to them. None of them could
defend their practice with any satisfactory reason, but the tradition of
the Church from the primitive times, and their main buckler of federal
holiness, which Tombs and Denne had excellently overthrown. He and his
wife then, professing themselves unsatisfied, desired their opinions."
With the opinions I will not trouble you, but hasten to the result:
"Whereupon that infant was not baptised."

No doubt to a large division of English society at this very day, that
sort of dinner and discussion, and indeed, the whole manner of life and
conversation here suggested by Mrs. Hutchinson's narrative, will seem
both natural and amiable, and such as to meet the needs of man as a
religious and social creature. You know the conversation which reigns in
thousands of middle-class families at this hour, about nunneries,
teetotalism, the confessional, eternal punishment, ritualism,
disestab