o them. The august
accident of that Spanish defeat may perhaps have coincided only too well
with their concentration on the non-Christian parts of Scripture. It may
have satisfied a certain Old Testament sentiment of the election of the
English being announced in the stormy oracles of air and sea, which was
easily turned into that heresy of a tribal pride that took even heavier
hold upon the Germans. It is by such things that a civilized state may
fall from being a Christian nation to being a Chosen People. But even if
their nationalism was of a kind that has ultimately proved perilous to
the comity of nations, it still was nationalism. From first to last the
Puritans were patriots, a point in which they had a marked superiority
over the French Huguenots. Politically, they were indeed at first but
one wing of the new wealthy class which had despoiled the Church and
were proceeding to despoil the Crown. But while they were all merely the
creatures of the great spoliation, many of them were the unconscious
creatures of it. They were strongly represented in the aristocracy, but
a great number were of the middle classes, though almost wholly the
middle classes of the towns. By the poor agricultural population, which
was still by far the largest part of the population, they were simply
derided and detested. It may be noted, for instance, that, while they
led the nation in many of its higher departments, they could produce
nothing having the atmosphere of what is rather priggishly called
folklore. All the popular tradition there is, as in songs, toasts,
rhymes, or proverbs, is all Royalist. About the Puritans we can find no
great legend. We must put up as best we can with great literature.

All these things, however, are simply things that other people might
have noticed about them; they are not the most important things, and
certainly not the things they thought about themselves. The soul of the
movement was in two conceptions, or rather in two steps, the first being
the moral process by which they arrived at their chief conclusion, and
the second the chief conclusion they arrived at. We will begin with the
first, especially as it was this which determined all that external
social attitude which struck the eye of contemporaries. The honest
Puritan, growing up in youth in a world swept bare by the great pillage,
possessed himself of a first principle which is one of the three or four
alternative first principles which are poss