these men had so much in common with their contemporaries.  Hence the interminable discussion which has been called forth by the history of the Puritans, in which the conclusions of the writer have generally been determined by circumstances of birth or creed, or perhaps of reaction against creed.  One critic points to the Boston of 1659 or the Salem of 1692 with such gleeful satisfaction as used to stir the heart of Thomas Paine when he alighted upon an inconsistency in some text of the Bible; while another, in the firm conviction that Puritans could do no wrong, plays fast and loose with arguments that might be made to justify the deeds of a Torquemada. [Sidenote:  Acts of the Puritans often judged by a wrong standard]

From such methods of criticism it is the duty of historians as far as possible to free themselves.  If we consider the Puritans in the light of their surroundings as Englishmen of the seventeenth century and inaugurators of a political movement that was gradually to change for the better the aspect of things all over the earth, we cannot fail to discern the value of that sacred enthusiasm which led them to regard themselves as chosen soldiers of Christ.  It was the spirit of the “Wonder-working Providence” that hurled the tyrant from his throne at Whitehall and prepared the way for the emancipation of modern Europe.  No spirit less intense, no spirit nurtured in the contemplation of things terrestrial, could ever have done it.  The political philosophy of a Vane or a Sidney could never have done it.  The passion for liberty as felt by a Jefferson or an Adams, abstracted and generalized from the love of particular liberties, was something scarcely intelligible to the seventeenth century.  The ideas of absolute freedom of thought and speech, which we breathe in from childhood, were to the men of that age strange and questionable.  They groped and floundered among them, very much as modern wool growers in Ohio or iron-smelters in Pennsylvania flounder and grope among the elementary truths of political economy.  But the spirit in which the Hebrew prophet rebuked and humbled an idolatrous king was a spirit they could comprehend.  Such a spirit was sure to manifest itself in narrow cramping measures and in ugly acts of persecution; but it is none the less to the fortunate alliance of that fervid religious enthusiasm with the Englishman’s love of self-government that our modern freedom owes its existence. [Sidenote:  Spirit of the Wonder-working Providence]

The history of New England under Charles II. yields abundant proof that political liberty is no less indebted in the New World than in the Old to the spirit of the “Wonder-working Providence.”  The theocratic ideal which the Puritan sought to put into practice in Massachusetts and Connecticut was a sacred institution in faults of the defence of which all his faculties were kept perpetually alert.  Much as he loved self-government he would never have been so swift to detect and so stubborn to resist every