the reflection, and were making sport with it. Unwonted titterings
arise and strengthen into bashful laughter, but are suddenly hushed as
some minister, heavy-eyed from his last night's vigil, or magistrate,
armed with the terror of the whipping-post and pillory, or perhaps the
governor himself, goes by like a dark cloud intercepting the sunshine.

About this period, many causes began to produce an important change on
and beneath the surface of colonial society. The early settlers were
able to keep within the narrowest limits of their rigid principles,
because they had adopted them in mature life, and from their own deep
conviction, and were strengthened in them by that species of enthusiasm,
which is as sober and as enduring as reason itself. But if their
immediate successors followed the same line of conduct, they were
confined to it, in a great degree, by habits forced upon them, and by
the severe rule under which they were educated, and in short more by
restraint than by the free exercise of the imagination and
understanding. When therefore the old original stock, the men who
looked heavenward without a wandering glance to earth, had lost a part
of their domestic and public influence, yielding to infirmity or death,
a relaxation naturally ensued in their theory and practice of morals and
religion, and became more evident with the daily decay of its most
strenuous opponents. This gradual but sure operation was assisted by
the increasing commercial importance of the colonies, whither a new set
of emigrants followed unworthily in the track of the pure-hearted
Pilgrims. Gain being now the allurement, and almost the only one, since
dissenters no longer dreaded persecution at home, the people of New
England could not remain entirely uncontaminated by an extensive
intermixture with worldly men. The trade carried on by the colonists
(in the face of several inefficient acts of Parliament) with the whole
maritime world, must have had a similar tendency; nor are the desperate