iples both of
economic and political life. The civilization he set up was compact and
commercial. He organized it in towns and townships. The Meeting House
was the center, the source of all power and authority. No dwelling could
be built further than two miles from a church and attendance on worship
was made compulsory by law.

The South, against whose life Brown was organizing his militant crusade,
was agricultural, scattered, individual. Individualism was a passion
with the Southerner, liberty his battle cry. He scorned the "authority"
of the church and worshipped God according to the dictates of his own
conscience. The Court House, not the Meeting House, was his forum,
and he rode there through miles of virgin forests to dispute with his
neighbor.

The mental processes of the Puritan, therefore, were distinctly
different from that of the Southerner. The Puritan mind was given to
hours of grim repression which he called "Conviction of Sin." Resistance
became the prime law of life. The world was a thing of evil. A morass of
Sin to be attacked, to be reformed, to be "abolished." The Southerner
perceived the evils of Slavery long before the Puritan, but he made a
poor Abolitionist. The Puritan was born an Abolitionist. He should not
only resist and attack the world; he should _hate_ it. He early learned
to love the pleasure of hating. He hated himself if no more promising
victim loomed on the horizon. He early became the foremost Persecutor
and Vice-Crusader of the new world. He made witch-hunting one of the
sports of New England.

When not busy with some form of the witch hunt, the Puritan found an
outlet for his repressed instincts in the ferocity with which he fought
the Indians or worked to achieve the conquest of Nature and lay up
worldly goods for himself and his children. Prosperity, therefore,
became the second principle of his religion, next to vice crusading.
When he succeeded in business, he praised God for his tender mercies.
His goods and chattels became the visible evidence of His love. The only
holiday he established or permitted was the day on which he publicly
thanked God for the goods which He had delivered. Through him the New
England Puritan Thanksgiving Day became a national festival and through
him a religious reverence for worldly success has become a national
ideal.

The inner life of the Puritan was soul-fear. Driven by fear and
repression he attacked his rock-ribbed country, its thin soil,