For the Puritan, on the other hand, using the word to describe a type of mind, the natural and the supernatural exist in an unmediated dualism, and it is a difficulty with him to clothe the naked idea-religious or ethical -in any sensuous medium or body. Hence Puritanism in itself is ill fitted to produce a great art. Yet the inward life of the soul may be intense, and the more intense because it does not readily distribute itself through appointed forms; and absorbing thoughts and passions cannot fail in some way to discover or to create that outward vehicle through which alone they can secure a complete self-realisation. In the Fourth Part of "The Saints' Everlasting Rest" Baxter considers the aids which the senses can afford to the spirit. It is a point of spiritual prudence, he says, to make friends of powers which are usually our enemies; our senses and their objects would not have been given to us by God if they might not be serviceable in His own praise; the Holy Ghost in the phrase of Scripture sets forth the excellences of things spiritual in imagery borrowed from the objects of sense; the Son of God assumed our human nature "that we might know Him the better." Are we, then, to think heaven to be made of gold and pearl? Or picture Christ, "as the Papists do," in such a shape? Or believe that departed saints and angels do indeed eat and drink? Or hold that God actually is moved by human passions? Not so: we are to accept such notions as aids to our infirmity, but they cease to be aids when we take them for a literal presentation of the facts; the condescending language of the Spirit is so designed that we may "raise suppositions from our bodily senses," and so elevate our affections towards things invisible. Suppose with thyself thou hadst been that Apostle's fellow traveller into the celestial kingdom, and that thou hadst seen all the saints in their white robes, with palms in their hands; suppose thou hadst heard those songs of Moses and the Lamb; or didst even now hear them. praising and glorifying the living God. If thou hadst seen these things indeed, in what a rapture wouldst thou have been? I would not have thee, as the Papists, draw them in pictures, nor use mysterious, significant ceremonies to represent them. This, as it is a course forbidden by God, so it would but seduce and draw down thy heart; but get the liveliest picture of them in thy mind that possibly thou canst." Thus the imaginations of a Michael Angelo or a Raphael are forbidden to serve their fellows, unless they can employ, like Baxter himself, the medium of written words. instead of the more suitable language of colour and of line. In his criticism of English Puritanism, Matthew Arnold strangely misconceived its essential character and its governing idea. Puritanism, he told us, existed for the sake of certain doctrines derived mainly from an imperfect interpretation of the writings of Paul the doctrines of predestination, original sin, imputed righteousness, justification by faith. The historical answer is sufficient: these doctrines, though truly Puritan in their tendency, were held by many members of the Church of England who were outside of the Puritan party and were even opposed to it 1 "Saints' Everlasting Rest," Part IV., section ii. The ceremonial controversy preceded the controversy concerning theological dogma; it was independent, in a large measure, of the controversy as to Church government. To discover the dominant idea of Puritanism we must look beyond dogma to something common to every phase of the great contention. And undoubtedly the unvarying central element was thisPuritanism maintained, as far as was possible, that the relation between the invisible spirit of man and the invisible God was immediate rather than mediate. It set little store by tradition, because God had spoken to man directly in the words of revelation. It distrusted human ceremonies, because these stood between the creature and his Creator; the glory of the Christian temple is the holiness of the living temple which rises in the heart of the child of God. The pretensions of an ecclesiastical hierarchy are an estrangement of the adopted son of the Father; every lay Christian is himself a royal priest. The Calvinistic doctrines, on which Matthew Arnold laid extreme and exclusive stress, were maintained because they were held to be Scriptural, and also because they seemed to bring the divine agency immediately into every part of human life: predestination meant the presence of God's foreknowledge and God's will in every act and thought that pulsates on the globe; imputed righteousness meant that Christ and His faithful follower were regarded by the Father as one; and through faith, which justifies the believer, that union is effected. Such was the central idea of Puritanism. Its cardinal error, which in many directions tended to defeat its own purpose, lay in a narrow conception of God as the God of righteousness alone, and not as also the God of joy and beauty and intellectual light. The higher Puritanism has been preached in our own day by Browning: "no beauty, nor good, nor power, Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist When eternity affirms the conception of an hour." It was taught by Goethe in "Wilhelm Meister," where the uncle of the devout lady, in the eighth book, instructs his niece that the lit lamp and the girt loin are needful for other things than the culture of the religious spirit. But among the Puritans of the seventeenth century few besides Milton, who was more than a Puritan, had that coherent conception of human life and human culture which recognises the Divine Spirit as present and operative in all the higher strivings of man. Scholarship, knowledge, beauty, art appeared to Milton to be sacred things; means by which the "ruins of our first parents" may be repaired; means, therefore, by which we may recover the image of God, and possess our souls in true "virtue" in its widest sense, which, being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection." Religious ideas and religious emotions, under the influence of the Puritan habit of mind, seek to realise themselves not in art, but, without any intervening medium, in character, in conduct, in life. It is thus that the gulf between sense and spirit is bridged: not in marble or in colour is the invisible made visible, but in action public and private-"ye are the temples of the Holy Ghost." In an ordered life, an ordered house hold, an ordered commonwealth, according to the ideal of Puritanism, the spirit is to be incarnated. Let the praise which Virgil gives to the Roman people be translated into Evangelical meanings and it applies accurately enough to the Puritan ideal: "Others, I ween, to softer form shall mould The breathing bronze, shall win the living face Its Through what was practical in the Puritan spirit, when seen at its highest, a noble ideality breaks forth. canticles of joy and thanksgiving, if heard meanly in the church or chapel, are heard nobly on the battlefield. If Puritanism did not fashion an Apollo with the bow or a Venus with the apple, it fashioned virile Englishmen. "We that serve you," writes Cromwell to the Speaker of the Parliament immediately after the amazing victory of Dunbar, "beg of you not to own us-but God alone. We pray you own this people more and more; for they are the chariots and horsemen of Israel. Disown yourselves; but own your authority; and improve it to curb the proud and the insolent, such as would disturb the tranquillity of England, though under what specious pretences soever. Relieve the oppressed, hear the groans of poor prisoners in England. Be pleased to reform the abuses of all professions :-and if there be any one that makes many poor to make a few rich, that suits not a Commonwealth. If He that strengthens your servants to fight, please to give you hearts to set upon these |