in the field.  Some among us who claim to hold unreduced or softened the old ancestral faith have been twice in late years convened in our State-House, by especial call, to legislate upon the potato-disease and the pleuro-pneumonia among our herds.  Their joint wisdom resulted in money-appropriations to discover causes and cures.  The debates held on these two occasions would have grievously shocked our ancestors.  But are there any among us who could in full sincerity, with logic and faith, have stood for the old devout theory of such visitations?

But if it would be equally vain and unjust to attempt to make Puritanism lovely to ourselves,—­a quality which its noblest disciples did not presume to make its foremost attraction,—­there is all the more reason why we should do it justice in its original and awfully real presentment in its single generation of veritable discipleship.  What became drivelling and cant, presumption and bigotry, pretence and hypocrisy, as soon as a fair trial had tested it, was in the hearts, the speech, the convictions, and the habits of a considerable number of persons in one generation, the most thoroughly honest and earnest product of all the influences which had trained them.  We read the heart-revelations of John Winthrop with the profoundest confidence, and even with a constraining sympathy.  We venture to say that when this book shall be consulted, through all time to come, for the various uses of historical, religious, or literary illustration, not even the most trifling pen will ever turn a single sentence from its pages to purposes of levity or ridicule.  Here we have Puritanism at first-hand:  the original, unimitated, and transient resultant of influences which had been working to produce it, and which would continue their working so as to insure modifications of it.  Winthrop notes it for a special Providence that his wife discovered a loathsome spider in the children’s porridge before they had partaken of it.  His religious philosophy stopped there.  He did not put to himself the sort of questions which open in a train to our minds from any one observed fact, else he would have found himself asking after the special Providence which allowed the spider to fall into the porridge.  His friend and successor in high-magistracy in New England, Governor John Endecott, wrote him a letter years afterward which is so characteristic of the faith of both of them that we will make free use of it.  The letter is dated Salem, July 28th, 1640, and probably refers to the disaster by which the ship Mary Rose “was blown in pieces with her own powder, being 21 barrels,” in Charlestown harbor, the day preceding.[A]