title of Men Naturally God's Enemies: “A "A natural man has a heart like the heart of a devil. The heart of a natural man is as destitute of love to God as a dead, stiff, cold corpse is of vital heat.” And in another sermon upon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: "The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked

you are ten thousand times as abominable in his eyes as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in You hang by a slender thread,

ours.

with the flames of divine wrath flashing about

it.

If you cry to God to pity you, he will be so far from pitying you in your doleful

case

foot;

that he'll only tread you under

he'll crush out your blood and

make it fly and it shall be sprinkled on his garments so as to stain all his raiment.

What an effect this doctrine of terror had upon sensitive natures is described by one of the initiated, a minister's daughter.

"What have I not read and suffered at the hands of theologians? How many lonely hours, day after day, have I bent the knee in fruitless prayer that God would grant me this great,

unknown grace, for without it how dreary is life!

"We are in ourselves so utterly helplesslife is so hard, so inexplicable, that we stand in perishing need of some helping hand, some sensible, appreciable connection with God. And yet for years every cry of misery, every breath of anguish, has been choked by the theological proofs of theology-that God is my enemy, or that I am his; that every effort I make toward him but aggravates my offence; and that this unknown gift, which no child of Adam ever did compass of himself, is so completely in my own power that I am every minute of my life to blame for not possessing it." (Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Oldtown Folks," 1, page 256.)

For the poor, for the stepchildren of Nature and Fate, this creed was a most potent, because personal, truth. An enemy, not a loving Father, had given them their accursed existence, and thus it was a consolation to know that the favored, the lucky ones of this world, were advancing toward eternal damnation, while they, who were languishing in this life, would be the first in the life everlasting. The doctrine of election by grace, of a divine aristocracy is, as

the historian Bancroft once observed, the most exalted conceit of human pride. The needy said to the privileged classes: "You point to your fifteen ancestors? We, the elect, were appointed by God the aristocracy of the world from the beginning of creation. Whose nobility is more ancient?”

The farmers of New England, like the Scotch cotters of to-day, were extremely well versed in theology. Farmer Marvyn, as Harriet Beecher Stowe depicts him, tilled the soil with his own hands, but in his leisure hours and on Sundays he was an eager, thoughtful reader whose attention scarcely any production worthy of notice, in Biblical exegesis or theological lore in general, would escape. He did not read uncritically; his books were full of marginal notes of a polemical character. The sons—and daughters-followed this model, and independence of thought became thus the inalienable heritage of every Puritan.

The Puritanic way of observing the Sabbath made the Lord's day a torment instead of a recreation. Two illustrations from Alice Morse Earle's book, "The Sabbath in Puritan New England," will suffice:

"Jonathan and Susannah Smith were fined

5 s. for smiling during service." "Two lovers, John Lewis and Sarah Chapman, were accused of and tried for sitting together on the Lord's day under an apple tree."

Puritan New England, like Scotland in the more modern history of the British polity, constituted the steely point of the nation's spear. The hard, niggardly, refractory soil of the New England States has contributed to the peculiar mixture which is termed the American national character the elements to which it preeminently owes its qualities of endurance, of tenacity, of conquering force. Efficiency-"faculty" in the language of New England-is synonymous there with virtue; all the conceptions associated with the Greek arete and the Latin virtus become vivid to a Yankee of the old stamp on mention of the word "efficiency." To efficiency everything is possible, everything attainable; for efficiency there are no insurmountable obstacles, no impassable gulfs. And efficiency is "elected" to rule the weak and helpless, to force them into its service. Puritanic efficiency takes the lead in the American States as the Doric "virtue" vanquished the Ionic genius, as the barrenness of the Judaic chalk-cliffs brought under subjection the wealth and abundance of Samaria.

The ambition of all the gifted school-children of New England, even the poorest, turned toward a university education and literary renown. Harvard College was the new Jerusalem, the ideal of all aspiring youth. Benjamin Franklin and J. G. Whittier longed for that high aim without ever attaining it.

2. SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF PURITAN POETRY

All that made the settlers in New England irresistible their intense religiosity, the unalterable conviction of their election, their modest wants and along with this a constant care for the morrow, their humbleness toward God and their inflexible pride toward man, their feeling for freedom and independence, their strong sense of justice-were distinguishing marks of these poets, genuine descendants of those Puritan forefathers. This or that one among them may on the surface have lifted himself above this Calvinist heritage; but in the blood, in marrow and muscle, the Puritan spirit, ineradicable, lives on. One should like to regard the freethinker, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the naturalist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, as completely emancipated, but they themselves confess that they are subject to the Puritan