The police were in constant collision with ruffians who wore rapiers and daggers. At night bands of dissolute youth domineered over the streets, which were buried in profound darkness. It was these pests of London that suggested to Milton the lines:

'And in luxurious cities, when the noise

Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers,
And injury and outrage, and when night

Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons

Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.'

In the outcast quarters of the city, even the warrant of the Chief Justice could not be executed without a company of musketeers. Sanguinary encounters with robbers were frequent. Mounted highwaymen infested all the great approaches to the metropolis.

With the decline of enthusiasm and respect, courtly manners degenerated into a base sensuality. An arch of triumph under James I often represented obscenities. On one occasion, the king and his royal brother of Denmark were carried to bed drunk. Hear a description of the entertainment - the masque of the Queen of Sheba:

"The ladies abandon their sobriety, and are seen to roll about in intoxication. . . The lady who did play the Queen's part. . . did carry most precious gifts to both their Majesties; but, forgetting the steppes arising to the canopy, overset her caskets into his Danish Majesties lap, and fell at his feet, tho rather I think it was in his face. Much was the hurry and confusion; clothes and napkins were at hand, to make all clean. His Majesty then got up and would dance with the Queen of Sheba; but he fell down and humbled himself before her, and was carried to an inner chamber and laid on a bed of state; which was not a little defiled with the presents of the Queen which had been bestowed on his garments; such as wine, cream, jelly, beverage, cakes, spices, and other good matters. The entertainment and show went forward, and most of the presenters went backward, or fell down; wine did so occupy their upper chambers. Now did appear, in rich dress, Hope, Faith, and Charity: Hope did assay to speak, but wine rendered her endeavors so feeble that she withdrew, and hoped the king would excuse her brevity; Faith . . . left the court in a staggering condition. . . . They were both sick and spewing in the lower hall. Next came Victory, who by a strange medley of versification . . . and after much lamentable utterance, was led away like a silly captive, and laid to sleep in the outer steps of the ante-chamber. As for Peace, she most rudely made war with her olive branch, and laid on the pates of those who did oppose her coming.

Farther on we shall see how, underneath the disorderly bubbles at the surface, Puritanism was raising the national morality.

Religion. The Reformation was incomplete. It had been made in accordance with the interests of its leaders,- the king and the prelates, who divided between themselves the riches and power of which they had despoiled the popes. By a large body of Protestants the alliance was regarded as a scheme for serving

two masters.

It had closed reform, while the greater part of the abuses which induced them to desire it were continued. They denounced its pretensions, complained of its tyranny. They had not thrown off one yoke in order to receive another. They were not afraid to dissent from those who had themselves dissented. To no purpose were they fined, imprisoned, pilloried, mutilated; their ministers dismissed, tracked by spies, prosecuted by usurping and rapacious courts. They flourished in spite of the efforts to destroy them, because they lived honestly, sustained by the powerful ideas of God and conscience. Private life was transformed. Enthusiasm spread. From individual manners, the movement extended to public institutions. When the Long Parliament assembled, they were able to resort to arms. Every week the Commons occupied a day in deliberating on the progress of religion. The external and natural man was abolished. Recreations and ornaments were abandoned. To wear love-locks, to starch a ruff, to read the Fairy Queen, were sins. Law was changed into a guardian of morals:

Though the discipline of the church was at an end, there was nevertheless an uncommon spirit of devotion among people in the parliament quarters; the Lord's day was observed with remarkable strictness, the churches being crowded with numerous and attentive hearers three or four times in the day; the officers of the peace patrolled the streets, and shut up all publick houses; there was no travelling on the road, or walking in the fields, except in cases of absolute necessity. Religious exercises were set up in private families, as reading the Scriptures, family prayer, repeating sermons, and singing of psalms, which was so universal that you might walk through the city of London on the evening of the Lord's day, without seeing an idle person, or hearing anything but the voice of prayer or praise from churches and private houses.'

All the outlets of instinctive nature were closed. In 1644 it was ordained:

That no person shall travel, or carry a burden, or do any worldly labour, upon penalty of 10s. for the traveller and 5s, for every burden. That no person shall on the Lord's day use, or be present at, any wrestling, shooting, fowling, ringing of bells for pleasure, markets, wakes, church-ales, dancing, games or sports whatsoever, upon penalty of 5s. to every one above fourteen years of age. And if children are found offending in the premises, their parents or guardians to forfeit 12d. for every offense. If the several fines above mentioned cannot be levied, the offending party shall be set in the stocks for the space of three hours."

One ordinance directed that all the May-poles in England should be cut down. Later they attacked the stage. Theatres were to be dismantled, the spectators fined, the actors whipped at the cart's-tail. They persecuted pleasure, the more surely to punish crime. In the army there was a like theory and a like practice. Cromwell's Ironsides were organized upon the principle that a

perfect Christian makes a perfect soldier. A quartermaster, convicted of blasphemy, was condemned to have his tongue bored with a red-hot iron, his sword broken over his head, and himself to be dismissed. During the expedition in Ireland, soldiers passed their leisure hours in reading the Bible, in singing psalms, in religious controversy.

Into the primeval forests of America, exiles, from conscience, they carried the same fixed determination, the same fervent faith, the same stoical spirit. A rigid morality was raised into a civil law, and the Bible was the basis of the state. It was enacted in New Hampshire:

"That if any person shall in the night time break and enter any dwelling-house in this State, with intent to kill, rob, steal, or to do or perpetrate any felony, the person so offending being thereof convicted shall suffer death.'

Again:

'That no person shall travel on the Lord's day between sun-rising and sun-setting, unless from necessity, or to attend public worship, visit the sick, or do some office of charity, on penalty of a sum not exceeding six dollars, nor less than one.'

And:

'If any person shall openly deny the being of a God, or shall wilfully blaspheme the name of God, Jesus Christ, or the Holy Ghost, or shall curse or reproach the word of God, he shall be punished by fine not exceeding fifty pounds, and may be bound to good behavior for a term not exceeding one year.'

In Maryland the law declared:

'That if any person shall hereafter, within this province, wittingly, maliciously, and advisedly, by writing or speaking blaspheme or curse God, or deny our Saviour, Jesus Christ, to be the Son of God, or shall deny the Holy Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, or the Godhead of any of the three persons, or the unity of the Godhead, or shall utter any profane words concerning the Holy Trinity, or any of the persons thereof, and shall thereof be convicted by verdict, he shall, for the first offence, be bored through the tongue, and fined £20 to be levied of his body. And for the second offence, the offender shall be stigmatized by burning in the forehead with the letter B, and fined £40. And that for the third offense, the offender shall suffer death without the benefit of clergy.'

In Massachusetts, a man was publicly whipped for singing a profane song. A girl, who gave some roasted chestnuts to a boy, adding ironically that they would put him into Paradise, was sentenced to ask pardon three times in church, and to be imprisoned three days. So does personal asceticism develop into public tyranny.

Such were the 'Precisians' or 'Puritans,- Protestant dissenters, precise and combative minds, who, with the fundamental honesty of the race, demanded of the Anglicans a more searching and extensive reform, resolved to do all and to bear all rather

than be false to their convictions, firm in suffering as scrupulous in belief, and, amid all the fluctuations of fortune, leavening the temper of the times with a new conception of life and of man. If this ideal was, in the end, warped and overwrought, think of its genesis. Puritanism was the product of war. Hence the rigor of its precepts, its social austerity, its unbending creed. The general intoxication forced it into total abstinence. Only thus could it withstand laxity and license. To become belligerent was to become severe.

Each party-Royalists and Episcopalians in alliance against the Puritans - was in turn oppressed by the other. The latter, in the day of its power, was as intolerant as had been the former. We hate with a will, when we can hate at once God's enemies and our own. How will it be when power is restored to the supporters of the throne and Established Church, embittered, not instructed, by misfortune, and fretting under restraints like a checked and flooded stream?

If now it be asked what was the worth and meaning of this heroic sternness, the answer is,-it accomplished much, and we walk smoothly over its results. It enthroned purity on the domestic hearth, labor in the workshop, probity in the countinghouse, truth in the tribunal; developed the science of emigration, fertilized the desert, practised the virtues it exacted; above all, it saved the national liberty, against the predominating Church, who, seeking to realize in England the same position as Romanism had occupied in Europe, flung herself on every occasion into the arms of the Court, and taught that no tyranny however gross, no violation of the constitution however flagrant, could justify resistance.' Little culture, indeed; no philosophy, no sentiment of harmonious beauty; but solid and convincing reasoners, energetic men of action. We can excuse the fanaticism of those who, when the battle-instinct is yet strong, are so intent on the essence of things, against others intent on semblances and forms divorced from reality.

Not unmixed good, certainly. The sun flings out impurities, gets balefully incrusted with spots. Ideals can never be completely embodied here. Not to reiterate what has already been

Eternal damnation is prepared for all impenitent rebels in hell with Satan, the first founder of rebellion."

noticed, one effect of Puritanism was to inflame, by its gloomy tenets, the zeal against witches. In the short space of the Com、 monwealth, more of these unfortunates perished than in the whole period before and after. In Suffolk sixty were hung in a single year,- -a barbarity to which Butler alludes in Hudibras:

Hath not this present parliament

A leger to the devil sent
Fully empowered to treat about
Finding revolted witches out?
And has not he within a year

Hanged three-score of them in one shire?'

The superstition grew into a panic. In Scotland, controlled by a system of religious terrorism, it obtained an absolute ascendancy. In solemn synod, every minister was enjoined to appoint two of the elders of his parish as 'a subtle and privy inquisition,' who should question all parishioners upon oath as to their knowledge of witches. If the witch-commonly a half-doting womanwas obdurate, the first method of extorting confession was to 'wake her.' Across her face was bound an iron hoop with four prongs, which were thrust into her mouth. It was fastened behind to the wall, in such a manner that the victim was unable to lie down; and in this position she was sometimes kept for several days, carefully prevented from closing her eyes for a moment in sleep. To discover the insensible mark, which was the sure sign of guilt, long pins were thrust into her body. If this was ineffectual, other and worse tortures were in reserve-a kind of thumb-screw, or a frame in which the lower limbs were inserted, then broken by wedges driven in by a hammer. The seeds of the superstition were carried to New England by the Pilgrim Fathers. It flourished with frightful vigor in Massachusetts. Cotton Mather proclaimed it, and created a commission. Those who ventured to oppose the prosecutions were denounced as Sadducees and infidels. Multitudes were imprisoned, others fled, twenty-seven were executed. An old man of eighty was pressed to death. The clergy of Boston drew up an address of thanks to the commissioners, and expressed the hope that their zeal would never be relaxed.

Yet this was orthodoxy once, attested by an amount of evidence so varied and so ample as to preclude the possibility of doubt! You who would stifle the voice of reason, you who deem