CHAPTER II.

THE EARLY ENVIRONMENT.

HE generation to which "Sam Bowles" belongedfor by that name every one called the magnetic and mercurial man, whom the stiff Biblical trisyllable Samuel never fitted-was the generation in which New England broke through the sheath of Puritanism, and flowered into broader and more various life. Two centuries before, certain grave and resolute Englishmen had turned their backs on the refinements and corruptions of the Old World, to found a pure spiritual commonwealth in the wilderness. They and their descendants had been trained in a conflict for existence under rigorous physical conditions. They had been compelled to win a livelihood from soil which asks a hard price for all it yields. They had battled with a climate of extreme and swift fluctuations. They had been separated by the ocean's breadth from the resources with which the Old World ministered to comfort, taste, and imagination. Three advantages attended them:-they came of picked English stock, they were free from all political inequalities among themselves, and their community was founded under a lofty religious impulse. Two hundred years had developed and confirmed them as a shrewd, serious, hard-headed people. They had grown strong in the robust qualities of manhood. Nature had said to each man, "Work or you

starve!" Society had said to each man, "Work, and all you get shall be your own!" So they became resolute and patient to labor and careful to save. The fields of interest open to them were the household, the political community, and the divine realm of which the visible symbol was the church. In these currents ran the New Englander's life, in a stream quiet, somber, and deep.

The ideal at which the founders of New England aimed was a theocracy. The peculiarity of their theocracy was that it assumed, as the authoritative interpreter of the divine will, not any official class, but a book—and a book on whose interpretation no one could place a limit. In the practical government of the community they followed the forms and usages which had grown up during many centuries of English life, but subject to certain modifications: there was no privileged class; the authority of crown and parliament was remote, and when it began to press closely was thrown off altogether; and the immediate affairs of each town and hamlet were ordered by its inhabitants in a popular assembly. The clergy, though not invested with secular authority, were for a long time the most influential class in the community. With the progress of time the political and religious life of the community flowed more and more into separate channels. The decadence of the Puritan theology is to be measured, not so much by open revolt against it, as by the withdrawal of intellectual energies into other fields. The two great and antithetical intellects which New England produced in the eighteenth century were Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin,- the one a metaphysician and mystic, the other a man of science, of public affairs, and of philanthropic humanity. Franklin got his chance by going to Philadelphia and thence to England; he would not have found room enough in Massachu

setts. Then the Revolution brought to the front the lawyers, the soldiers, the statesmen, and left the clergy comparatively in the rear. The temper of the Revolutionary patriots was far different from that of Cromwell's Ironsides. With the next generation came the disestablishment of the Congregational churches. Then, slowly at first, began the prodigious development of the physical resources of the country; then came invention, discovery, enrichment; and men, toughened but cramped for two centuries, found a continent beckoning them to stride into possession. There was expansion of energy and opportunity in every direction.

While the collective forces of the community had thus been undergoing a gradual diversion from the ecclesiastical into the secular field, the religious lifethat which was recognized as such-still remained one of the most striking features of the New England development. The "meeting-house" was the most conspicuous building in every town, and the church society ranked as first beyond comparison among social organizations.

Religion may be said in a broad sense to include three elements-theology, worship, and ethics; in other words, an intellectual explanation of the universe, a conscious relation of the human soul to the divine and infinite, and an ordering of the practical conduct of life. Puritanism made theology the corner-stone of religion. Theoretically it took the Bible as its law; but what it really offered was a scheme of the universe; -God in three persons; the race of man ruined through the sin of its first parent; a sacrificial atonement; the appropriation of that atonement through faith as the sole condition of an eternal Heaven, and its rejection the seal of an endless perdition. This view confronted the soul directly with the most tremendous realities and immeasurable issues. It was a view which in its essentials was com

mon to all branches of the Christian church; but in its practical application was elsewhere softened, by intermediary elements of priesthood and sacrament, and venerable and beautiful forms of worship. Puritanism steadily rejected all such aids and interpositions, and set the trembling soul face to face with its Maker, whose sovereign decree had destined it irreversibly to measureless bliss or woe. The Puritans renounced the authority and mediation of the church on which the soul might comfortably repose; they rejected the vision of interceding saints filling the air; angelic ministrations faded almost out of view, while Satanic activity was vividly imagined; and the liturgies and forms of worship which the genius of ages had enriched were almost wholly thrown aside. The English Puritans turned Beauty out of the service of Religion. For their American descendants, the resulting barrenness was intensified by the absence of all artistic creations in the New World. The worshiper had no aid to his imagination from sculptured aisle or swelling organ; no gracious Madonna looked down on him; the prayers to which he silently listened were but the improvisation of his minister; the beauty of nature was without meaning for him. The spirit of worship languished in so thin and innutritious an atmosphere, and the mass of the community tended to a dry formalism in their religious observances, save when lifted by the wave of a "revival." But the theological spirit was very active. The founders of New England included many clergymen among their leaders, and most of these were Oxford or Cambridge graduates. In every town they planted the school beside the church, and no population in the world had so high an average of education. In the dearth of literary and social resources, the minds of the clergy, and largely of the intellectual class in general, continued to work eagerly and unceas

ingly on the problems of the universe. The main line of their speculation was a series of modifications of Calvinism. The attempt to apply these abstruse speculations to the conduct of individual life produced a strange result. A highly metaphysical system was made the basis upon which every man must work out his salvation from hell, and a mystic experience of conviction of sin, self-despair, and conversion was required of the soul with the definiteness of an apothecary's prescription. It was a theory of life which gave constant exercise to speculative natures; by turns exalted and depressed the sensitive; and lost its practical hold on the mass of the community long before it was confessedly modified by the clergy.

But Puritanism, while it was narrow in its philosophy, and by its lack of beauty and of tenderness stinted the fountains of spiritual feeling, was strong in its appeal to moral purpose. It roused men with the idea of a great destiny. Its tremendous presentation of the issues of existence woke an energy like that which is inspired by man's conflict with the elemental forces of nature. The ideal of conduct which it offered was austere but lofty. It appealed to the sense of obligation rather than to sympathy or delight. It made men strong rather than sweet; it made them sober, chaste, and upright. From whatever source derived,-from Puritanism, from the older Christianity, from English stock, from Hebrew religion, from primitive humanity,—the sense of duty lay deep in the New England character. Conscience was the bed-rock of the typical New Englander, as granite is the foundation of his soil. Deficient in spiritual imagination, severely logical in intellect, he was in the practical conduct of life the loyal servant of Duty. To Calvinist, Unitarian, or Rationalist the sovereign word was I ought. The interests of the state had an absorbing interest