Thus the Puritan was made up of two different men, the one all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion, the other proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious.  He prostrated himself in the dust before his Maker; but he set his foot on the neck of his king.  In his devotional retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans, and tears.  He was half maddened by glorious or terrible illusions.  He heard the lyres of angels or the tempting whispers of fiends.  He caught a gleam of the Beatific Vision, or woke screaming from dreams of everlasting fire.  Like Vane, he thought himself intrusted with the sceptre of the millennial year.  Like Fleetwood, he cried in the bitterness of his soul that God had hid his face from him.  But when he took his seat in the council, or girt on his sword for war, these tempestuous workings of the soul had left no perceptible trace behind them.  People who saw nothing of the godly but their uncouth visages, and heard nothing from them but their groans and their whining hymns, might laugh at them.  But those had little reason to laugh who encountered them in the hall of debate or on the field of battle.  These fanatics brought to civil and military affairs a coolness of judgment and an immutability of purpose which some writers have thought inconsistent with their religious zeal, but which were in fact the necessary effects of it.  The intensity of their feelings on one subject made them tranquil on every other.  One overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself pity and hatred, ambition and fear.  Death had lost its terrors and pleasure its charms.  They had their smiles and their tears, their raptures and their sorrows, but not for the things of this world.  Enthusiasm had made them stoics, had cleared their minds from every vulgar passion and prejudice, and raised them above the influence of danger and of corruption.  It sometimes might lead them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means.  They went through the world, like Sir Artegal’s iron man Talus with his flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with human beings, but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities; insensible to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain; not to be pierced by any weapon, not to be withstood by any barrier.

Such we believe to have been the character of the Puritans.  We perceive the absurdity of their manners.  We dislike the sullen gloom of their domestic habits.  We acknowledge that the tone of their minds was often injured by straining after things too high for mortal reach; and we know that, in spite of their hatred of popery, they too often fell into the worst vices of that bad system, intolerance and extravagant austerity, that they had their anchorites and their crusades, their Dunstans and their De Montforts, their Dominics and their Escobars.  Yet, when all circumstances are taken into consideration, we do not hesitate to pronounce them a brave, a wise, an honest, and a useful body.