form were but the symptoms of a freshly-communicated informing
intelligence). It transfigured them; from men sunk in the gross and
sensual thoughts and aims of an irreligious and priest-ridden age--an age
which ate and drank and slept and fought, and kissed the feet of popes,
and maundered of the divine right of kings--from this sluggish degradation
it roused and transfigured the Englishmen who came to be known as
Puritans. It was a transfiguration, though its subjects were the uncouth,
almost grotesque figures which chronicle and tradition have made familiar
to us. For a people who were what the Puritans were before Puritanism,
cannot be changed by the Holy Ghost into angels of light; their stubborn
carnality will not evaporate like a mist; it clings to them, and being now
so discordant with the impulse within, an awkwardness and uncouthness
result, which suggest some strange hybrid: to the eye and ear, they are
unlovelier and harsher than they were before their illumination; but
Providence regards not looks; it knew what it was about when it chose
these men of bone and sinew to carry out its purposes. Once enlisted, they
never could be quelled, or seduced, or deceived, or wearied; they were in
fatal earnest, and faithful unto death, for they believed that God was
their Captain. They had got a soul; they put it into their work, and it is
in that work even to this day.

It does not manifestly appear to our contemporary vision; it is
overloaded with the rubbish of things, as a Greek statue is covered with
the careless debris of ages; but, as the art of the sculptor is vindicated
when the debris has been removed, so will the fair proportions of the
State conceived by the Puritans, and nourished and defended by their sons,
declare themselves when in the maturity of our growth we have assimilated
what is good in our accretions, and disencumbered ourselves of what is
vain. It is the American principle, and it will not down; it is a solvent
of all foreign substances; in its own way and time it dissipates all