brought the rigid and positive qualities more prominently forward.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the piety of the dominating powers in
Massachusetts during the first years of the colony's existence. It was
almost a mysticism. That intimate and incommunicable experience which is
sometimes called "getting religion"--the Lord knocking at the door of the
heart and being admitted--was made the condition of admission to the
responsible offices of government. This was to make God the ruler, through
instruments chosen by Himself--theoretically a perfect arrangement, but in
practice open to the gravest perils. It not merely paved the way to
imposture, but invited it; and the most dangerous imposture is that which
imposes on the impostor himself. It created an oligarchy of the most
insidious and unassailable type: a communion of earthly "saints," who
might be, and occasionally were, satans at heart. It is essentially at
variance with democracy, which it regards as a surrender to the selfish
license of the lowest range of unregenerate human nature; and yet it is
incompatible with hereditary monarchy, because the latter is based on
uninspired or mechanical selection. The writings of Cotton Mather exhibit
the peculiarities and inconsistencies of Puritanism in the most favorable
and translucent light, for Mather was himself wedded to them, and of a
most inexhaustible fertility in their exposition.

Winthrop was responsible for the "Oath of Fidelity," which required its
taker to suffer no attempt to change or alter the government contrary to
its laws; and for the law excluding from the freedom of the body politic
all who were not members of its church communion. The people, however,
stipulated that the elections should be annual, and each town chose two
representatives to attend the court of assistants. But having thus
asserted their privileges, they forbore to interfere with the judgment of
their leaders, and maintained them in office. The possible hostility of