ot been fulfilled. There were still
poverty, disease, and a longing for something that earth had not
given. The English, naturally a religious race, reflected much on
this. Those who concluded that life could never yield the pleasure
which man anticipates, who determines by purity of living to win a
perfect land beyond the shores of mortality, who made the New World of
earlier dreams a term synonymous with the New Jerusalem, were called
Puritans.

Their guide to this land was the _Bible_. Our _Authorized Version_
(1611), the one which is in most common use to-day, was made in the
reign of James I. From this time became much easier to get a copy of
the _Scriptures_, and their influence was now more potent than ever to
shape the ideals of the Puritans. In fact, it is impossible to
estimate the influence which this _Authorized Version_ has had on the
ideals and the literature of the English race. Had it not been for
this _Version_, current English speech and literature would be vastly
different. Such words and expressions as "scapegoat," "a labor of
love," "the eleventh hour," "to cast pearls before swine," and "a
howling wilderness" are in constant use because the language of this
translation of the _Bible_ has become incorporated in our daily
speech, as well as in our best literature.

The Puritan was so called because he wished to purify the established
church from what seemed to him great abuses. He accepted the faith of
John Calvin, who died in 1564. Calvinism taught that no earthly power
should intervene between a human soul and God, that life was an
individual moral struggle, the outcome of which would land the soul in
heaven or hell for all eternity, that beauty and art and all the
pleasures of the flesh were dangerous because they tended to wean the
soul from God.

The Puritan was an individualist. The saving of the soul was to him an
individual, not a social, affair. Bunyan's Pilgrim flees alone from
the wrath to come. The twentieth century, on the other hand, believes
that the regeneration of a human being is both a social and an
individual affair,--that the individual, surrounded by the forces of
evil, often has little opportunity unless society comes to his aid.
The individualism of the Puritan accomplished a great task in
preparing the way for democracy, for fuller liberty in church and
state, in both England and America.

Our study of the Puritan ideals embodied in literature takes us beyond
1660, the