them perfectly to read the English tongue." "To the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers," in 1647 it was ordered in all the Puritan colonies "that every township, after the Lord hath increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall appoint one to teach all children to read and write; and where any town shall increase to the number of one hundred families, they shall set up a grammar school, the masters thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the university." The press began its work in 1639. "When New England was poor, and they were but few in number, there was a spirit to encourage learning." Harvard College was a favorite from its beginning; Connecticut and Plymouth, and the towns in the east, often contributed offerings to promote the success of that "school of the prophets;" the gift of the rent of a ferry was a proof of the care of the state; and once, at least, every family in each of the colonies gave to the college at Cambridge twelvepence, or a peck of corn, or its value in unadulterated wampum peag; while the magistrates and wealthier men were profuse in their liberality. The college, in return, assisted in forming the early character of the country. In these measures, especially in the laws establishing common schools, lies the secret of the success and character of New England. Every child, as it was born into the world, was lifted from the earth by the ordinance of the country, and, in the statutes of the land, received, as its birthright, a pledge of the public care for its morals and its mind.

There are some who love to enumerate the singularities of the early Puritans. They were opposed to wigs; they could preach against veils; they denounced long hair; they disliked the cross in the banner, as much as the people of Paris disliked the lilies of the Bourbons. They would not allow Christmas to be kept sacred; they called neither months, nor days, nor seasons, nor churches, nor inns, by the names common in England; they revived scripture names at christenings. The grave Romans legislated on the costume of men, and their senate could even stoop to interfere with the triumphs of the sex to which civic honors were denied; the fathers of New England prohibited frivolous fashions in their

own dress; and their austerity, checking extravagance even in woman, frowned on her hoods of silk and her scarfs of tiffany, extended her sleeve to the wrist, and limited its greatest width to half an ell. The Puritans were formal and precise in their manners; singular in the forms of their legislation. Every topic of the day found a place in their extemporaneous prayers, and infused a stirring interest into their long and frequent sermons. The courts of Massachusetts respected in practice the code of Moses; in New Haven, the members of the constituent committee were called the seven pillars, hewn out for the house of wisdom. But these are only forms, which gave to the new faith a marked exterior. If from the outside peculiarities we look to the genius of the sect itself, Puritanism had two cardinal principles: Faith in the absolute sovereignty of God, whose will is perfect right; and the Equality of all who believe that his will is to be done. It was Religion struggling in, with, and for the People; a war against tyranny and superstition. "Its absurdities,” says one of its scoffers, "were the shelter for the noble principles of liberty." It was its office to engraft the new institutions of popular energy upon the old European system of a feudal aristocracy and popular servitude; the good was permanent; the outward emblems, which were the signs of the party, were of transient duration, like the clay and ligaments which hold the graft in its place, and are brushed away as soon as the scion is firmly united.

The principles of Puritanism proclaimed the civil magistrate subordinate to the authority of religion; and its haughtiness in this respect has been compared to "the infatuated arrogance" of a Roman pontiff. In the firmness with which their conviction was held, the Puritans did not yield to the Catholics; and, if the will of God is the criterion of justice, both were, in one sense, in the right. The question arises, Who shall be the interpreter of that will? In the Roman Catholic Church, the office was claimed by the infallible pontiff, who, as the self-constituted guardian of the oppressed, insisted on the power of dethroning kings, repealing laws, and subverting dynasties. The principle thus asserted could not but become subservient to the temporal ambition of the clergy.

Puritanism conceded no such power to its spiritual guides; the church existed independent of its pastor, who owed his office to its free choice; the will of the majority was its law; and each one of the brethren possessed equal rights with the elders. The right, exercised by each congregation, of electing its own ministers was in itself a moral revolution; religion was now with the people, not over the people. Puritanism exalted the laity. Every individual who had experienced the raptures of devotion, every believer, who in moments of ecstasy had felt the assurance of the favor of God, was in his own eyes a consecrated person, chosen to do the noblest and godliest deeds. For him the wonderful counsels of the Almighty had appointed a Saviour; for him the laws of nature had been suspended and controlled, the heavens had opened, earth had quaked, the sun had veiled his face, and Christ had died and had risen again; for him prophets and apostles had revealed to the world the oracles and the will of God. Before Heaven he prostrated himself in the dust; looking out upon mankind, how could he but respect himself, whom God had chosen and redeemed? He cherished hope; he possessed faith; as he walked the earth, his heart was in the skies. Angels hovered round his path, charged to minister to his soul; spirits of darkness vainly leagued together to tempt him from his allegiance. His burning piety could use no liturgy; his penitence revealed itself to no confessor. He knew no superior in holiness. He could as little become the slave of priestcraft as of a despot. He was himself a judge of the orthodoxy of the elders; and, if he feared the invisible powers of the air, of darkness, and of hell, he feared nothing on earth. Puritanism constituted not the Christian clergy, but the Christian people, the interpreter of the divine will; and the issue of Puritanism was popular sovereignty.

The effects of Puritanism display its character still more distinctly. Ecclesiastical tyranny is of all kinds the worst; its fruits are cowardice, idleness, ignorance, and poverty: Puritanism was a life-giving spirit; activity, thrift, intelligence, followed in its train; and, as for courage, a coward and a Puritan never went together.

The history of religious persecution in New England is this:

the Puritans established a government in America such as the laws of natural justice warranted, and such as the statutes and common law of England did not warrant; and that was done by men who still acknowledged a limited allegiance to the parent state. The Episcopalians declared themselves the enemies of the party, and waged against it a war of extermination; Puritanism excluded them from its asylum. Roger Williams, the apostle of "soul-liberty," weakened civil independence by impairing its unity; and he was expelled, even though Massachusetts bore good testimony to his spotless virtues. Wheelwright and his friends, in their zeal for liberty of speech, were charged with forgetting their duty as citizens, and they also were exiled. The Anabaptist, who could not be relied upon as an ally, was watched as possibly a foe. The Quakers denounced the worship of New England as an abomination, and its government as treason; and they were excluded on pain of death. The fanatic for Calvinism was a fanatic for liberty; and, in the moral warfare for freedom, his creed was his most faithful counsellor and his never-failing support.

For "New England was a religious plantation, not a plantation for trade. The profession of the purity of doctrine, worship, and discipline was written on her forehead." "We all," says the confederacy in one of the two oldest of American written constitutions, "came into these parts of America to enjoy the liberties of the gospel in purity and peace." "He that made religion as twelve, and the world as thirteen, had not the spirit of a true New England man." Religion was the object of the emigrants, and it was their consolation. With this the wounds of the outcast were healed, and the tears of exile sweetened.

Of all contemporary sects, the Puritans were the most free from credulity, and, in their zeal for reform, pushed their regulations to what some would consider a skeptical extreme. So many superstitions had been bundled up with every venerable institution of Europe that ages have not yet dislodged them all. The Puritans at once emancipated themselves from the thraldom to observances. They established a worship purely spiritual. They stood in prayer. To them the elements remained but wine and bread, and in communing they

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would not kneel. They invoked no saints; they raised no altar; they adored no crucifix; they kissed no book; they asked no absolution; they paid no tithes; they saw in the priest nothing more sacred than a man; ordination was no more than an approbation of the officer, which might be expressed by the brethren just as well as by other ministers; the church, as a place of worship, was to them but a meetinghouse; they dug no graves in consecrated earth; unlike their posterity, they married without a minister, and buried the dead without a prayer. Witchcraft had not been made the subject of skeptical consideration; and, in the years in which Scotland sacrificed hecatombs to the delusion, there were three victims in New England. Dark crimes, that seemed without a motive, may have been pursued under that name; I find one record of a trial for witchcraft where the prisoner was proved a murderess.

On every subject but religion the mildness of Puritan legislation corresponded to the popular character of Puritan doctrines. Hardly a nation of Europe has as yet made its criminal law so humane as that of early New England. A crowd of offences was at one sweep brushed from the catalogue of capital crimes. The idea was never received that the forfeiture of life may be demanded for the protection of property; the punishment for theft, for burglary, and highway robbery was far more mild than the penalties imposed even by modern American legislation. The habits of the young promoted real chastity. The sexes lived in social intimacy, and were more pure than the recluse. Marriage was a civil contract; and under the old charter of Massachusetts all controversies respecting it were determined by the court of assistants which decreed divorces especially for adultery or desertion. The rule in Connecticut was not different. Separation from bed and board without the dissolution of the marriage, an anomaly which may punish the innocent more than the guilty, was abhorrent to every thought of that day. The sanctity of the nuptial vow was protected by the penalty of death. If in this respect the laws were more severe, in another they were more lenient than modern manners approve. The girl whom youth and affection and the promise of marriage betrayed into weak