forever." There was also the most dreadful possibility to
be shunned. All earthly pleasure he held in suspicion, as a bait of the
great adversary of souls.

The belief of serious men in the seventeenth century was that theology
was the guide to heaven. They believed this as modern men believe that
science is the guide to human life. Hence, an infinite diversity of
sects, and hence the attempts to enforce each by authority.

The Bible fed the deeper substratum of the Puritan life. It touched and
fired the imagination of the common people. The dominant idea on which
the English Puritan laid hold was the Old Testament idea of God's chosen
people,--separate from the rest of the world, given a code of written
laws, led by a divinely appointed priesthood and prophets, disciplined by
a constant intervention of rewards and punishments. This conception they
transferred to the faithful of their own time; and against them was
Antichrist, in the Roman church, to which the English prelates seemed
traitorously to incline. They proposed to purify and maintain the church
in England, or, failing there, to transplant it to America.

The typical Puritan character, as most fully worked out in Scotland and
New England, was a mixture of intense idealism and sternest practicality.
The idealism aimed to control every action of life, and to base itself on
the ultimate reality. It renounced the aid of art and embodied
imagination; it renounced human authority; it had no aid from material
beauty, none from knowledge of nature.

This religion had an appalling side. Foremost among its teachings was
man's depravity and the terrible wrath of God. The worst cruelty of the
Iroquois was mercy compared to God's dealing with sinners. This was an
inheritance from an older religion. But the condition of salvation in
the Catholic church--and in all high church religion--was practically
obedience to the church. But the Puritan required a conscious change of
heart, which to many was impossible. The utmost pains were taken that
the most laborious right-doing should count for nothing, unless
accompanied by this mystic experience.

Catholicism put man under guardianship through the hierarchy, the
confessional, the whole church system. Calvinism threw him on his own
resources,--set him face to face with God. It, too, set a church to help
him, but even the minister of the church exhorted him to make his own
peace with God. This responsibility