all desires, and the utter subjection of every natural prompting to a
crucial test, before its innocent or edifying character could pass
unchallenged.

Vain would be the attempt in our generation to make Puritanism lovely or
attractive. Its charms were for its original and sincere disciples, and
do not survive them. There is no fashion of dress or furniture which may
not be revived, and, if patronized as fashion, be at least tolerated.
But for Puritanism there is no restoration. Its rehabilitated relics do
not produce their best influence in any attempt to attract our
admiration,--which they cannot do,--but in engaging our hearts' tolerant
respect and confidence towards those who actually developed its
principles at first-hand, its original disciples, who brought it into
discredit afterwards by the very fidelity of their loyalty to it.
Puritanism is an engaging and not offensive object to use, when regarded
as the characteristic of only one single generation of men and women and
children. It could not pass from that one generation into another
without losing much of what grace it had, and acquiring most odious and
mischievous elements. Entailed Puritanism being an actual impossibility,
all attempts to realize it, all assumptions of success in it, have the
worst features of sham and hypocrisy. The diligent students of the
history and the social life of our own colonial days know very well what
an unspeakable difference there was, in all that makes and manifests
characters and dispositions, between the first comers here and the first
native-born generation, and how painfully that difference tells to the
discredit of the latter. The tap-roots of Puritanism struck very deep,
and drew the sap of life vigorously. They dried very soon; they are now
cut; and whatever owed its life exclusively to them has withered and
must perish. A philosophy of Nature and existence now wholly discredited
underlay the fundamental views and principles of Puritanism. The early