f illustration and practical
good-sense and marvellous erudition, what was obvious to his own
objective mind, and obvious also to most other enlightened people not
much interested in metaphysical disquisitions. No man more than he does
justice to the love of liberty which absolutely burned in the souls of
the Puritans,--that glorious party which produced Milton and Cromwell,
and Hampden and Bunyan, and Owen and Calamy, and Baxter and Howe.

The chief peculiarity of those Puritans--once called Nonconformists,
afterwards Presbyterians and Independents--was their reception of the
creed of John Calvin, the clearest and most logical intellect that the
Reformation produced, though not the broadest; who reigned as a
religious dictator at Geneva and in the Reformed churches of France, and
who gave to John Knox the positivism and sternness and rigidity which he
succeeded in impressing upon the churches of Scotland. And the peculiar
doctrines which marked Calvin and his disciples were those deduced from
the majesty of God and the comparative littleness of man, leading to and
bound up with the impotence of the will, human dependence, the necessity
of Divine grace,--Augustinian in spirit, but going beyond Augustine in
the subtlety of metaphysical distinctions and dissertations on
free-will election, and predestination,--unfathomable, but exceedingly
attractive subjects to the divines of the seventeenth century, creating
a metaphysical divinity, a theology of the brain rather than of the
heart, a brilliant series of logical and metaphysical deductions from
established truths, demanding to be received with the same unhesitating
obedience as the truths, or Bible declarations, from which they are
deduced. The greatness of human reason was never more forcibly shown
than in these deductions; but they were carried so far as to insult
reason itself and mock the consciousness of mankind; so that mankind
rebelled against the very force of the highest reasonings of the human
intellect, because they pushed logical sequence into absurdity, or to
dreadful conclusions: _Decretum quidem horribile fateor_, said the great
master himself.

The Puritans were trained in this theology, which developed the loftiest
virtues and the severest self-constraints; making them both heroes and
visionaries, always conscientious and sometimes repulsive; fitting them
for gigantic tasks and unworthy squabbles; driving them to the Bible,
and then to acrimonious discu