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 726 Seventeenth century New England. [1620- Granting this, and putting aside the question of what changes have occurred in England since 1625, our question now becomes more definite still. It concerns only the ways in which native Americans have developed, in their own country, since the reign of King Charles I. So far as records go, in literature or in any other form of literary expression, this question may conveniently be considered century by century. Clearly, the nineteenth century that in which American nationality became conscious and generally recognised has been by far the most noteworthy. But the two preceding centuries have left abundant records of certain kinds, chiefly religious and political. The religious records are on the whole characteristic of the seventeenth century; the political of the eighteenth. And the former issued in such preponderance from New England that, for the present purpose, New England may fairly be held to comprehend seventeenth century America, so far as America was intellectually active. Seventeenth century New England was founded by Elizabethan Puritans, whose motive for immigration is well stated in the words of Cotton Mather, " Tis possible that our Lord Jesus Christ carried some Thousands of Reformers into the Retirements of an American Desart, on purpose that, with an opportunity granted unto many of His Faithful Servants to enjoy the precious Liberty of their Ministry,. . .He might there . . .give a Specimen of many good things, which He would have His Churches elsewhere aspire and arise unto." In other words, the founders of New England fervently desired to establish a society, free from those distracting complexities which in the Old World had prevented them from leading a life in accordance with what they believed positive right. No purpose could have been more nobly ideal, nor any much less tolerant. Their effort was on the whole successful. They made short work of dissent from their principles ; and for two or three generations they preserved, with little alteration, the religious and political systems which they had planted at the time of the settlement. In religion they were rigid Calvinists. The somewhat grotesque austerity of their consequent aspect and manners has combined with the rather lifeless formalism of Yankee Puritanism in its decline to obscure the truth that early Calvinism was an intensely ideal, imaginative faith. Convinced that man was fallen, that salvation could be the lot only of the elect, and that the test of election was miraculous ability to use the human will in accordance with the will of God, the founders of New England exhausted the resources of human passion and aspiration in unceasing effort to image Divinity and to assure themselves, if so might be, that they would merge their own being in that of God. Without some understanding of this intense pristine idealism of New England it is hard to understand the subse- quent development of American character. Keeping this idealism in mind, one finds the development of America natural and simple. For even before the seventeenth century ended the Pilgrim Fathers were