that the wild outbreak of immorality which followed the restoration of Charles was partly due to the unnatural restrictions of the Puritan era.  The criticism is just; but we must not forget the whole spirit of the movement.  That the Puritan prohibited Maypole dancing and horse racing is of small consequence beside the fact that he fought for liberty and justice, that he overthrew despotism and made a man’s life and property safe from the tyranny of rulers.  A great river is not judged by the foam on its surface, and certain austere laws and doctrines which we have ridiculed are but froth on the surface of the mighty Puritan current that has flowed steadily, like a river of life, through English and American history since the Age of Elizabeth.

CHANGING IDEALS.  The political upheaval of the period is summed up in the terrible struggle between the king and Parliament, which resulted in the death of Charles at the block and the establishment of the Commonwealth under Cromwell.  For centuries the English people had been wonderfully loyal to their sovereigns; but deeper than their loyalty to kings was the old Saxon love for personal liberty.  At times, as in the days of Alfred and Elizabeth, the two ideals went hand in hand; but more often they were in open strife, and a final struggle for supremacy was inevitable.  The crisis came when James I, who had received the right of royalty from an act of Parliament, began, by the assumption of “divine right,” to ignore the Parliament which had created him.  Of the civil war which followed in the reign of Charles I, and of the triumph of English freedom, it is unnecessary to write here.  The blasphemy of a man’s divine right to rule his fellow-men was ended.  Modern England began with the charge of Cromwell’s brigade of Puritans at Naseby.

Religiously the age was one of even greater ferment than that which marked the beginning of the Reformation.  A great ideal, the ideal of a national church, was pounding to pieces, like a ship in the breakers, and in the confusion of such an hour the action of the various sects was like that of frantic passengers, each striving to save his possessions from the wreck.  The Catholic church, as its name implies, has always held true to the ideal of a united church, a church which, like the great Roman government of the early centuries, can bring the splendor and authority of Rome to bear upon the humblest village church to the farthest ends of the earth.  For a time that mighty ideal dazzled the German and English reformers; but the possibility of a united Protestant church perished with Elizabeth.  Then, instead of the world-wide church which was the ideal of Catholicism, came the ideal of a purely national Protestantism.  This was the ideal of Laud and the reactionary bishops, no less than of the scholarly Richard Hooker, of the rugged Scotch Covenanters, and of the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay.  It is intensely interesting to note that Charles called Irish rebels and Scotch Highlanders to his aid by promising to restore their national religions; and that the English Puritans, turning to Scotland for help, entered into the solemn Covenant of 1643, establishing a national Presbyterianism, whose object was: