records of our General Court are thickly strown with appointments of
Fast-Days that the people might discover the especial occasion of God's
anger toward them, manifested in the blight of some expected harvest, or
in a scourge upon the cattle in the field. Some among us who claim to
hold unreduced or softened the old ancestral faith have been twice in
late years convened in our State-House, by especial call, to legislate
upon the potato-disease and the pleuro-pneumonia among our herds. Their
joint wisdom resulted in money-appropriations to discover causes and
cures. The debates held on these two occasions would have grievously
shocked our ancestors. But are there any among us who could in full
sincerity, with logic and faith, have stood for the old devout theory of
such visitations?

But if it would be equally vain and unjust to attempt to make Puritanism
lovely to ourselves,--a quality which its noblest disciples did not
presume to make its foremost attraction,--there is all the more reason
why we should do it justice in its original and awfully real presentment
in its single generation of veritable discipleship. What became
drivelling and cant, presumption and bigotry, pretence and hypocrisy, as
soon as a fair trial had tested it, was in the hearts, the speech, the
convictions, and the habits of a considerable number of persons in one
generation, the most thoroughly honest and earnest product of all the
influences which had trained them. We read the heart-revelations of John
Winthrop with the profoundest confidence, and even with a constraining
sympathy. We venture to say that when this book shall be consulted,
through all time to come, for the various uses of historical, religious,
or literary illustration, not even the most trifling pen will ever turn
a single sentence from its pages to purposes of levity or ridicule. Here
we have Puritanism at first-hand: the original, unimitated, and
transient resultant of influences which had been working to produce it,