teration in their
theories. But they were facing a new situation, and that new situation
became an immense factor in their unconscious growth. Their intellectual
and moral problems shifted, as a boat shifts her ballast when the wind
blows from a new quarter. The John Cotton preaching in a shed in the new
Boston had come to "suffer a sea-change" from the John Cotton who
had been rector of St. Botolph's splendid church in Lincolnshire.
The "church without a bishop" and the "state without a king" became a
different church and state from the old, however loyally the ancient
forms and phrases were retained.

If the political problems of equality which were latent in Calvinism now
began to take on a different meaning under the democratic conditions of
pioneer life, the inner, spiritual problems of that amazing creed were
intensified. "Fallen" human nature remained the same, whether in the
crowded cosmopolitan streets of Holland and London, or upon the desolate
shores of Cape Cod. But the moral strain of the old insoluble conflict
between "fixed fate" and "free will" was heightened by the physical
loneliness of the colonists. Each soul must fight its own unaided,
unending battle. In that moral solitude, as in the physical solitude of
the settlers upon the far northwestern prairies of a later epoch, many
a mind snapped. Unnatural tension was succeeded by unnatural crimes.
But for the stronger intellects New England Calvinism became a potent
spiritual gymnastic, where, as in the Swedish system of bodily training,
one lifts imaginary and ever-increasing weights with imaginary and
ever-increasing effort, flexor and extensor muscles pulling against one
another, driven by the will. Calvinism bred athletes as well as maniacs.

The new situation, again, turned many of the theoretical speculations of
the colonists into practical issues. Here, for example, was the Indian.
Was he truly a child of God, possessing a soul, and, if so, had he
partaken of the sin of Adam? These questions perplexed the saintly Eliot
and the generous Roger Williams. But before many years the query as to
whether a Pequot warrior had a soul became suddenly less important than
the practical question as to whether the Pequot should be allowed any
further chances of taking the white man's scalp. On this last issue the
colonists were unanimous in the negative.

It would be easy to multiply such instances of a gradual change of view.
But beneath all the changes and