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How it escaped mutilation in the seventeenth century is hard to explain, for a crucifix would be particularly obnoxious to the Puritan mind, and, standing as this one does almost on the level of the ground, it would seem to have been especially exposed to risk of destruction. Fortunately, however, it has escaped with only the loss of part of the right forearm and shoulder.
The poet's only hope of winning in his argument with the puritan lies in the possibility that the race of puritans is destined for extinction. Certainly they were much more numerous fifty years ago than now, and consequently more voluble in their denunciation of the poet. At that time they found their most redoubtable antagonists in the Brownings.
God forbid that we should be prim and Puritan when the sun shines and life calls! There are no sillier things in life than the mere affectations of intellectuality. Mere solemnity is both an ugly and a futile thing, and nothing is duller than a constant enforced earnestness.
The reign of Charles was not marked by the passage of harsher laws against the Puritans, but it was distinguished from all periods that preceded or followed it by the continuous, steady, and thorough-going application of those already in existence. It was under this regime that the great Puritan migration to America took place.
Yet for the Puritan there was some excuse. He was an avowed enemy: he had wrongs to avenge; and even he, while remodelling the ecclesiastical constitution of the country, and ejecting all who would not subscribe his Covenant, had not been altogether without compassion. He had at least granted to those whose benefices he seized a pittance sufficient to support life.
It is to be hoped that this was often considered an equivalent for the "trouncing" which was the common penalty of accident or inadvertence suffered by the Puritan child. In truth, Solomon's unwholesome caution, "Spare the rod and spoil the child," was all too strictly observed in those conscience-ridden Puritan days.
Content, the stranger, and Mark, were near, subdued and bound, the sole survivors of all that band they had so recently led into the conflict. The gray hairs and bodily infirmities of the Puritan spared him the same degradation. The only other being present, of European origin, was Whittal Ring.
It was a touch of this inspiration that the Puritan caught from his earnest and reverent study of the sacred text, and that served to justify and intensify his yearning for a better life, and to give it the character of a grand and holy ideal. Yet with all this religious enthusiasm, the Puritan was in every fibre a practical Englishman with his full share of plain common-sense.
'That is hardly an orthodox notion for a Puritan, said Somerset mischievously. 'I am not a Puritan, insisted Paula. The day turned to dusk, and the guests began going in relays to the dining-hall.
From such facts as those above cited we may infer that the early relations of the Puritan settlers to the Algonquin tribes of New England were by no means like the relations between white men and red men in recent times on our western plains.
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