prevent their drifting. His insight and intelligence may have enabled him
to foresee to what a goal the New England settlers were bound; but though
he would have sympathized with them, he would not have been swayed to join
them. As it was, he wrought only good to them, for they were in the
formative stage, when moderation helps instead of hindering. He mediated
between the state they were approaching, and that from which they came,
and he died before the need of alienating himself from them arrived. His
resoluteness was shown in his resistance to Anne Hutchinson and her
supporter, Sir Harry Vane, who professed the heresy that faith absolved
from obedience to the moral law; they were forced to quit the colony; and
so was Roger Williams, as lovely as and in some respects a loftier
character than Winthrop. In reviewing the career of this distinguished and
engaging man, we are surprised that he should have found it on his
conscience to leave England. Endicott was born to subdue the wilderness,
and so was many another of the Puritans; but it seems as if Winthrop might
have done and said in King Charles's palace all that he did and said in
Massachusetts, without offense. But it is probable that his moderation
appears greater in the primitive environment than it would have done in
the civilized one; and again, the impulse to restrain others from excess
may have made him incline more than he would otherwise have done toward
the other side.

But tradition has too much disposed us to think of the Puritans as of men
who had thrown aside all human tenderness and sympathy, and were sternly
and gloomily preoccupied with the darker features of religion exclusively.
Winthrop corrects this judgment; he was a Puritan, though he was sunny and
gentle; and there were many others who more or less resembled him. The
reason that the somber type is the better known is partly because of its
greater picturesqueness and singularity, and partly because the early life
of New England was on the whole militant and aggressive, and therefore