What shall we say of amenity?  Milton was born a humanist, but the Puritan temper, as we know, mastered him.  There is nothing more unlovely and unamiable than Milton the Puritan disputant.  Some one answers his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.  “I mean not,” rejoins Milton, “to dispute philosophy with this pork, who never read any.”  However, he does reply to him, and throughout the reply Milton’s great joke is, that his adversary, who was anonymous, is a serving-man.  “Finally, he winds up his text with much doubt and trepidation; for it may be his trenchers were not scraped, and that which never yet afforded corn of favor to his noddle—­the salt-cellar—­was not rubbed; and therefore, in this haste, easily granting that his answers fall foul upon each other, and praying you would not think he writes as a prophet, but as a man, he runs to the black jack, fills his flagon, spreads the table, and serves up dinner."[473] There you have the same spirit of urbanity and amenity, as much of it, and as little, as generally informs the religious controversies of our Puritan middle class to this day.

But Mr. Goldwin Smith[474] insists, and picks out his own exemplar of the Puritan type of life and manners; and even here let us follow him.  He picks out the most favorable specimen he can find,—­Colonel Hutchinson,[475] whose well-known memoirs, written by his widow, we have all read with interest.  “Lucy Hutchinson,” says Mr. Goldwin Smith, “is painting what she thought a perfect Puritan would be; and her picture presents to us not a coarse, crop-eared, and snuffling fanatic, but a highly accomplished, refined, gallant, and most amiable, though religious and seriously minded, gentleman.”  Let us, I say, in this example of Mr. Goldwin Smith’s own choosing, lay our finger upon the points where this type deflects from the truly humane ideal.

Mrs. Hutchinson relates a story which gives us a good notion of what the amiable and accomplished social intercourse, even of a picked Puritan family, was.  Her husband was governor of Nottingham.  He had occasion, she said, “to go and break up a private meeting in the cannoneer’s chamber”; and in the cannoneer’s chamber “were found some notes concerning paedobaptism,[476] which, being brought into the governor’s lodgings, his wife having perused them and compared them with the Scriptures, found not what to say against the truths they asserted concerning the mis-application of that ordinance to infants.”  Soon afterwards she expects her confinement, and communicates the cannoneer’s doubts about paedobaptism to her husband.  The fatal cannoneer makes a breach in him too.  “Then he bought and read all the eminent treatises on both sides, which at that time came thick from the presses, and still was cleared in the error of the paedobaptists.”  Finally, Mrs. Hutchinson is confined.  Then the governor “invited all the ministers to dinner, and propounded his doubt and the ground thereof to them.  None of them could defend their practice with any satisfactory reason, but the tradition of the Church from the primitive times, and their main buckler of federal holiness, which Tombs and Denne had excellently overthrown.  He and his wife then, professing themselves unsatisfied, desired their opinions.”  With the opinions I will not trouble you, but hasten to the result:  “Whereupon that infant was not baptised.”