ss the
masochist than the sadist. And it is that very peculiarity which sets
off his descendant of today from the ameliorated Puritan of the era
between the Revolution and the Civil War. The new Puritanism is not
ascetic, but militant. Its aim is not to lift up saints but to knock
down sinners. Its supreme manifestation is the vice crusade, an armed
pursuit of helpless outcasts by the whole military and naval forces of
the Republic. Its supreme hero is Comstock Himself, with his pious boast
that the sinners he jailed during his astounding career, if gathered
into one penitential party, would have filled a train of sixty-one
coaches, allowing sixty to the coach.

So much for the general trend and tenor of the movement. At the bottom
of it, it is plain, there lies that insistent presentation of the idea
of sin, that enchantment by concepts of carnality, which has engaged a
certain type of man, to the exclusion of all other notions, since the
dawn of history. The remote ancestors of our Puritan-Philistines of
today are to be met with in the Old Testament and the New, and their
nearer grandfathers clamoured against the snares of the flesh in all
the councils of the Early Church. Not only Western Christianity has had
to reckon with them: they have brothers today among the Mohammedan Sufi
and in obscure Buddhist sects, and they were the chief preachers of the
Russian Raskol, or Reformation. "The Ironsides of Cromwell and the
Puritans of New England," says Heard, in his book on the Russian church,
"bear a strong resemblance to the Old Believers." But here, in the main,
we have asceticism more than Puritanism, as it is now visible; here the
sinner combated is chiefly the one within. How are we to account for the
wholesale transvaluation of values that came after the Civil War, the
transfer of ire from the Old Adam to the happy rascal across the street,
the sinister rise of a new Inquisition in the midst of a growing luxury
that even the Puritans themselves succumbed to? The answer is to be
sought, it seems to me, in the direction of the Golden Calf--in the
direction of the fat fields of our Midlands, the full nets of our lakes
and coasts, the factory smoke of our cities--even in the direction of
Wall Street, that devil's chasm. In brief, Puritanism has become
bellicose and tyrannical by becoming rich. The will to power has been
aroused to a high flame by an increase in the available draught and
fuel, as militarism is engendered