to have one’s thoughts hit the mark; but the Hebrew held that it was to serve the Lord day and night.  It was a touch of this inspiration that the Puritan caught from his earnest and reverent study of the sacred text, and that served to justify and intensify his yearning for a better life, and to give it the character of a grand and holy ideal.  Yet with all this religious enthusiasm, the Puritan was in every fibre a practical Englishman with his full share of plain common-sense.  He avoided the error of mediaeval anchorites and mystics in setting an exaggerated value upon otherworldliness.  In his desire to win a crown of glory hereafter he did not forget that the present life has its simple duties, in the exact performance of which the welfare of society mainly consists.  He likewise avoided the error of modern radicals who would remodel the fundamental institutions of property and of the family, and thus disturb the very groundwork of our ethical ideals.  The Puritan’s ethical conception of society was simply that which has grown up in the natural course of historical evolution, and which in its essential points is therefore intelligible to all men, and approved by the common-sense of men, however various may be the terminology—­whether theological or scientific—­in which it is expounded.  For these reasons there was nothing essentially fanatical or impracticable in the Puritan scheme:  in substance it was something that great bodies of men could at once put into practice, while its quaint and peculiar form was something that could be easily and naturally outgrown and set aside. [Sidenote:  The impulse which sought to realize itself in the Puritan ideal was an ethical impulse]

Yet another point in which the Puritan scheme of a theocratic society was rational and not fanatical was its method of interpreting the Scriptures.  That method was essentially rationalistic in two ways.  First, the Puritan laid no claim to the possession of any peculiar inspiration or divine light whereby he might be aided in ascertaining the meaning of the sacred text; but he used his reason just as he would in any matter of business, and he sought to convince, and expected to be convinced, by rational argument, and by nothing else.  Secondly, it followed from this denial of any peculiar inspiration that there was no room in the Puritan commonwealth for anything like a priestly class, and that every individual must hold his own opinions at his own personal risk.  The consequences of this rationalistic spirit have been very far-reaching.  In the conviction that religious opinion must be consonant with reason, and that religious truth must be brought home to each individual by rational argument, we may find one of the chief causes of that peculiarly conservative yet flexible intelligence which has enabled the Puritan countries to take the lead in the civilized world of today.  Free discussion of theological questions, when conducted with earnestness and reverence, and