Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/760

 728 The Magnalia and New England character. [1620-1700 the mid-seventeenth century, or earlier. Published after Dryden died, its style and literary temper are, at the very latest, those of Fuller. But it is clear ; it is rarely dull ; it has occasional beauties ; and, above all, it sums up virtually the whole of New England experience during the first century of New England. Examples of all the kinds of writing, in verse or in prose, which had proceeded from that earlier time the publications were mostly Puritan sermons, to be sure may be found most conveniently in its pages. What is more, the Magnolia went far to prove its main point. The doings of New England which it records for seventy years were doubtless human, and therefore often weak and sinful. Nevertheless, the amount of simple human virtue, and of honestly aspiring godliness, which those years could show, was something to prove that the new world was specially favoured by the God whom it was founded to serve. Though the Magnalia thus sustained Cotton Mather's position, it in no wise served his purpose. He had hoped that it might prove an efficient exhortation to the present and the future. Instead, it has proved only a comprehensive record of the past. Despite the Puritan traditions which have so deeply affected American life, that national life was already started on the course which it has followed. And this course has been considerably affected by precisely the moral fact which Mather attributed to the miracles of God in a region specially dedicated to His service. For this moral fact a somewhat exceptional purity of personal character, general freedom from excess of sensual vice, and persistent effort to govern life, political and domestic as well as religious, by earnest principle we can discern nowadays a reason far from miraculous. Though the material and economic conditions of early New England were hard and narrow, they were remarkably simple, and free from every kind of social complexity. The very sparseness of population made the struggle for life chiefly a contest with the forces of nature. Acute wickedness, obviously deformed distortion of human character, is apt to develop chiefly in regions where population is congested. The transplantation of an essentially idealistic and earnest race to an empty continent would involve less change of temper than would occur in a crowded world ; it would rather promote the unchecked growth of a simpler type of character than would be frequent in any old and densely settled parts of the earth. Incidentally, too, the growth of this simpler character would tend in time to general views signally different from those of the Calvinists anywhere. The social phenomena of Europe have usually been such as to warrant unfavourable conclusions about human nature, which have become crystallised in theological doctrines of human depravity. But, if in any district God's elect, as Mather would have put it, are to be found in considerable numbers, the happy dwellers in such a region find themselves surrounded by a kind of human beings who do not seem bound hell-ward. Their experience tends to prove human nature on the whole well-disposed. Calvinism no longer