English literature remarks: "In one sense, the reign of James is
the most religious part of our history; for religion was then
fashionable. The forms of state, the king's speeches, the debates
in parliament and the current literature, were filled with
quotations from Scripture and quaint allusions to sacred things."

Even the soldier studied divinity, and Colonel Hutchinson, after
his "fourteen months various exercise of his mind, in the pursuit
of his love, being now at rest in the enjoyment of his wife,"
thought it the most natural thing in the world to make "an
entrance upon the study of school divinity, wherein his father was
the most eminent scholar of any gentleman in England and had a
most choice library.... Having therefore gotten into the house
with him an excellent scholar in that kind of learning, he for two
years made it the whole employment of his time."

Much of such learning Simon Bradstreet had taken in unconsciously
in the constant discussions about his father's table, as well as
in the university alive to every slightest change in doctrine,
where freer but fully as interested talk went on. Puritanism had
as yet acquired little of the bitterness and rigor born of
persecution, but meant simply emancipated thought, seeking
something better than it had known, but still claiming all the
good the world held for it. Milton is the ideal Puritan of the
time, and something of the influences that surrounded his youth
were in the home of every well-born Puritan. Even much farther
down in the social scale, a portrait remains of a London house
mother, which may stand as that of many, whose sons and daughters
passed over at last to the new world, hopeless of any quiet or
peace in the old. It is a turner in Eastcheap, Nehemiah