thought to be the instinct of escape from the clerical architects
of the Cambridge Platform. Yet no one would today call Thomas
Hooker a liberal in religion, pioneer in political liberty though
he proved to be. His extant sermons have the steady stroke of a
great hammer; smiting at the mind and heart. "Others because they
have felt the heavy hand of God . . . upon these grounds they
build their hopes: 'I have had my hell in this life, and I hope
to have heaven in the world to come; I hope the worst is over.'"
Not so, thunders the preacher in reply: "Sodom and Gomorrah they
burnt in brimstone and they shall burn in hell." One of Hooker's
successors has called him "a son of thunder and a son of
consolation by turns." The same may be said of Thomas Shepard,
another graduate of Emmanuel College in the old Cambridge, who
became the "soul-melting preacher" of the newer Cambridge by the
Charles. Pure, ravishing notes of spiritual devotion still sing
themselves in his pages. He is wholly Calvinist. He thinks "the
truth is a poor mean thing in itself" and that the human reason
cannot be "the last resolution of all doubts," which must be
sought only in the written Word of God. He holds it "a tough
work, a wonderful hard matter to be saved." "Jesus Christ is not
got with a wet finger." Yet, like so many mystics, he yearns to
be "covered with God, as with a cloud," to be "drowned, plunged,
and swallowed up with God." One hundred years later we shall find
this same rhapsodic ecstasy in the meditations of Jonathan
Edwards.

John Cotton, the third of the mighty men in the early Colonial
pulpit, owes his fame more to his social and political influence
than to his literary power. Yet even that was thought commanding.
Trained, like Hooker and Shepard, at Emmanuel College, and fresh