The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

XXII. It is time that we gave a second thought to Puritanism. In the heyday of release from forms which had lost their meaning, it was natural to look back on that period of our history with eyes that saw in it nothing but fanatical excess; we approved the picturesque phrase which showed the English mind going into prison and having the key turned upon it. Now, when the peril of emancipation becomes as manifest as was the hardship of restraint, we shall do well to remember all the good that lay in that stern Puritan discipline, how it renewed the spiritual vitality of our race, and made for the civic freedom which is our highest national privilege. An age of intellectual glory is wont to be paid for in the general decline of that which follows. Imagine England under Stuart rule, with no faith but the Protestantism of the Tudor. Imagine (not to think of worse) English literature represented by Cowley, and the name of Milton unknown. The Puritan came as the physician; he brought his tonic at the moment when lassitude and supineness would naturally have followed upon a supreme display of racial vitality. Regret, if you will, that England turned for her religion to the books of Israel; this suddenly revealed sympathy of our race with a fierce Oriental theocracy is perhaps not difficult to explain, but one cannot help wishing that its piety had taken another form; later, there had to come the "exodus from Houndsditch," with how much conflict and misery! Such, however, was the price of the soul's health; we must accept the fact, and be content to see its better meaning. Health, of course, in speaking of mankind, is always a relative term. From the point of view of a conceivable civilization, Puritan England was lamentably ailing; but we must always ask, not how much better off a people might be, but how much worse. Of all theological systems, the most convincing is Manicheism, which, of course, under another name, was held by the Puritans themselves. What we call Restoration morality--the morality, that is to say, of a king and court--might well have become that of the nation at large under a Stuart dynasty safe from religious revolution.