husiasm, the Puritan was in every fibre a practical Englishman with
his full share of plain common-sense. He avoided the error of
mediaeval anchorites and mystics in setting an exaggerated value upon
otherworldliness. In his desire to win a crown of glory hereafter he did
not forget that the present life has its simple duties, in the exact
performance of which the welfare of society mainly consists. He likewise
avoided the error of modern radicals who would remodel the fundamental
institutions of property and of the family, and thus disturb the very
groundwork of our ethical ideals. The Puritan's ethical conception of
society was simply that which has grown up in the natural course of
historical evolution, and which in its essential points is therefore
intelligible to all men, and approved by the common-sense of men,
however various may be the terminology--whether theological or
scientific--in which it is expounded. For these reasons there was
nothing essentially fanatical or impracticable in the Puritan scheme: in
substance it was something that great bodies of men could at once put
into practice, while its quaint and peculiar form was something that
could be easily and naturally outgrown and set aside. [Sidenote: The
impulse which sought to realize itself in the Puritan ideal was an
ethical impulse]

Yet another point in which the Puritan scheme of a theocratic society
was rational and not fanatical was its method of interpreting the
Scriptures. That method was essentially rationalistic in two ways.
First, the Puritan laid no claim to the possession of any peculiar
inspiration or divine light whereby he might be aided in ascertaining
the meaning of the sacred text; but he used his reason just as he would
in any matter of business, and he sought to convince, and expected to
be convinced, by rational argument, and by nothing else. Secondly, it
followed from this denial of any peculiar inspiration that there was no
room in the Puritan commonwealth for anything like a priestly class, and
that every individual must hold his own opinions at his own personal
risk. The consequences of this rationalistic spirit have been very
far-reaching. In the conviction that religious opinion must be consonant
with reason, and that religious truth must be brought home to each
individual by rational argument, we may find one of the chief causes of
that peculiarly conservative yet flexible intelligence which has enabled
the Puritan countries