This renewed affliction is turned by the still young sufferer to uses which should assure and intensify his piety according to the best Puritan type of it.  He continues his heart-record.  He subjects his mode of life, his feelings, habits and aims, the material of his daily food, and the degree of his love for various goods, as they are to be measured by a true scale, to the most rigid tests.  He spares himself in nothing.  The Bible does him as direct a service in rebuke and guidance as if every sentence in it had been written for himself.  It is interesting to note that the quotations from it are from a version that preceded our own.  His rules of self-discipline and spiritual culture, while wholly free from unwholesome asceticism, nevertheless required the curbing of all desires, and the utter subjection of every natural prompting to a crucial test, before its innocent or edifying character could pass unchallenged.

Vain would be the attempt in our generation to make Puritanism lovely or attractive.  Its charms were for its original and sincere disciples, and do not survive them.  There is no fashion of dress or furniture which may not be revived, and, if patronized as fashion, be at least tolerated.  But for Puritanism there is no restoration.  Its rehabilitated relics do not produce their best influence in any attempt to attract our admiration,—­which they cannot do,—­but in engaging our hearts’ tolerant respect and confidence towards those who actually developed its principles at first-hand, its original disciples, who brought it into discredit afterwards by the very fidelity of their loyalty to it.  Puritanism is an engaging and not offensive object to use, when regarded as the characteristic of only one single generation of men and women and children.  It could not pass from that one generation into another without losing much of what grace it had, and acquiring most odious and mischievous elements.  Entailed Puritanism being an actual impossibility, all attempts to realize it, all assumptions of success in it, have the worst features of sham and hypocrisy.  The diligent students of the history and the social life of our own colonial days know very well what an unspeakable difference there was, in all that makes and manifests characters and dispositions, between the first comers here and the first native-born generation, and how painfully that difference tells to the discredit of the latter.  The tap-roots of Puritanism struck very deep, and drew the sap of life vigorously.  They dried very soon; they are now cut; and whatever owed its life exclusively to them has withered and must perish.  A philosophy of Nature and existence now wholly discredited underlay the fundamental views and principles of Puritanism.  The early records of our General Court are thickly strown with appointments of Fast-Days that the people might discover the especial occasion of God’s anger toward them, manifested in the blight of some expected harvest, or in a scourge upon the cattle