parallels between their own mission and that of the apostles,--a
likeness which was interchangeable at pleasure with the fancied
resemblance of their condition to that of the Israelites. When one
considers the remoteness of the field from their native shores, the
enormous energy needful to collect the proper elements for a population,
and to provide artificers with the means of work; the almost impassable
wildness of the woods; the repeated leagues of hostile Indians; the
depletions by sickness; and the internal dissensions with which they had
to struggle,--one cannot wonder that they invested their own unsurpassed
fortitude, and their genius for government and war, with the quality of
a special Providence. But their faith was inwoven in the most singular
way with a treacherous strand of credulity and superstition. Sometimes
one is impressed with a sense that the prodigious force by which they
subdued the knotty and forest-fettered land, and overcame so many other
more dangerous difficulties, was the ecstasy of men made morbidly strong
by excessive gloom and indifference to the present life. "When we are in
our graves," wrote Higginson, "it will be all one whether we have lived
in plenty or penury, whether we have died in a bed of downe or lockes of
straw." And Hawthorne speaks of the Puritan temperament as
"accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so
little." Yet, though they were not, as Winthrop says, "of those that
dreame of perfection in this world," they surely had vast hopes at
heart, and the fire of repressed imagination played around them and
before them as a vital and guiding gleam, of untold value to them, and
using a mysterious power in their affairs. They were something morbid in
their imaginings, but that this morbid habit was a chief source of their
power is a mistaken theory. It is true that their errors of imagination
were so closely knit up with real insight, that they could not
themselves distinguish between the two. Their religious faith, their
outlook into another life, though tinged by unhealthy terrorism, was a