incipality was only the old Mark of Brandenburg. Their own name was
Hohenzollern.

XIII

THE AGE OF THE PURITANS

We should be very much bored if we had to read an account of the most
exciting argument or string of adventures in which unmeaning words such
as "snark" or "boojum" were systematically substituted for the names of
the chief characters or objects in dispute; if we were told that a king
was given the alternative of becoming a snark or finally surrendering
the boojum, or that a mob was roused to fury by the public exhibition of
a boojum, which was inevitably regarded as a gross reflection on the
snark. Yet something very like this situation is created by most modern
attempts to tell the tale of the theological troubles of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, while deferring to the fashionable distaste
for theology in this generation--or rather in the last generation. Thus
the Puritans, as their name implies, were primarily enthusiastic for
what they thought was pure religion; frequently they wanted to impose it
on others; sometimes they only wanted to be free to practise it
themselves; but in no case can justice be done to what was finest in
their characters, as well as first in their thoughts, if we never by
any chance ask what "it" was that they wanted to impose or to practise.
Now, there was a great deal that was very fine about many of the
Puritans, which is almost entirely missed by the modern admirers of the
Puritans. They are praised for things which they either regarded with
indifference or more often detested with frenzy--such as religious
liberty. And yet they are quite insufficiently understood, and are even
undervalued, in their logical case for the things they really did care
about--such as Calvinism. We make the Puritans picturesque in a way they
would violently repudiate, in novels and plays they would have publicly
burnt. We are interested in everything about them, except the only thing
in which they were interested at all.

We have seen that in the first instance the new doctrines in England
were simply an excuse for a plutocratic pillage, and that is the only
truth to be told about the matter. But it was far otherwise with the
individuals a generation or two after, to whom the wreck of the Armada
was already a legend of national deliverance from Popery, as miraculous
and almost as remote as the deliverances of which they read so
realistically in the Hebrew Books now laid open t