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142 literature of the day, though there was much more than quibbling. But the keenest minds, no matter how vivid and beautiful their intelligence, were certain that neither man as a body, nor the world as a home, were anything but black evils, ruined by the fall of Adam, and to be ignored and despised with every power and faculty. Faith in God came to be faith in "a microscopic and picayune Providence," governing the meanest detail of the elect's existence, and faith in man had no place in any scheme of life or thought. If a poem were written it came to be merely some transcription from the Bible, or an epitaph or elegy on some departed saint.

In spite of themselves, however, humor, the Saxon birthright, refused to be suppressed, and asserted itself in unexpected ways, as in Nathaniel Ward's "Simple Cobbler of Agawam," already mentioned. What the cobbler saw was chiefly the theological difficulties of the time. Discord and confusion seemed to have settled upon the earth, and "looking out over English Christendom, he saw nothing but a chaos of jangling opinions, upstart novelties, lawless manners, illimitable changes in codes, institutions and creeds." He declaims ferociously against freedom of opinion, and "the fathers of the inquisition might have reveled over the first twenty-five pages of this Protestant book, that actually blaze with the eloquent savagery and rapture of religious intolerance." He laughed in the midst of this declamation, but it was rather a sardonic laugh, and soon checked by fresh consideration of man's vileness.

Liberty had received many a blow from the hands of these men, who had fled from home and country to