corruption embittereth and poisoneth all our enjoyments. Oh that I were
home where I shall sin no more!'

Puritan was an English nickname rather than a Scottish, but our Scots
Presbyterians were Puritans at bottom like their English brethren both in
their statesmanship and in their churchmanship, as well as in their
family and personal religion. And they held the same protest as the
English Puritans held against the way in which the scandalous corruptions
of the secular court, and the equally scandalous corruptions of the
sacred bench, were together fast poisoning the public enjoyments of
England and of Scotland. You will hear cheap, shallow, vinous speeches
at public dinners and suchlike resorts about the Puritans, and about how
they denounced so much of the literature and the art of that day. When,
if those who so find fault had but the intelligence and the honesty to
look an inch beneath the surface of things they would see that it was not
the Puritans but their persecutors who really took away from the serious-
minded people of Scotland and England both the dance and the drama, as
well as so many far more important things in that day. Had the Puritans
and their fathers always had their own way, especially in England, those
sources of public and private enjoyment would never have been poisoned to
the people as they were and are, and that cleft would never have been cut
between the conscience and some kinds of culture and delight which still
exists for so many of the best of our people. Charles Kingsley was no
ascetic, and his famous _North British_ article, 'Plays and Puritans,'
was but a popular admission of what a free and religious-minded England
owes on one side of their many-sided service to the Puritans of that
impure day. Christina Rossetti is no Calvinist, but she puts the
Calvinistic and Puritan position about the sin-poisoned enjoyments of
this life in her own beautiful way: 'Yes, all our life long we shall be
bound to refrain our soul, and keep it low; but what then? For the books