Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/90

Rh The Puritans represented the natural reaction of mankind against old institutions that were absurd or tyrannical. The Catholic church had multiplied feast days to an extreme, and taken unnecessary pains to promote fun and frolic. The Puritans would have none of the saints' days in their calendar; thought sport was wicked; cut down Maypoles, and punished a man who kept Christmas after the old fashion. The Catholic church had neglected her golden opportunities for giving the people moral and religious instruction; had quite too much neglected public prayer and preaching, but relied mainly on sensuous instruments — architecture, painting, music. In revenge, the Puritan had a meeting-house as plain as boards could make it; tore the pictures to pieces; thought an organ "was not of God," and had sermons long and numerous, and prayers full of earnestness, zeal, piety, and faith, in short, possessed of all desirable things except an end. Did the Catholics forbid the people the Bible, emphatically the book of the people—the Puritan would read no other book; called his children Hebrew names, and reenacted "the laws of God" in the Old Testament, "until we can make better." Did Henry and Elizabeth underrate the people and overvalue the monarchy, nature had her vengeance for that abuse, and the Puritan taught the World that kings, also, had a joint in their necks.

The Puritans went to the extreme in many things: in their contempt for amusements, for what was graceful in man or beautiful in woman; in their scorn of art, of elegant literature, even of music; in their general condemnation of the past, from which they would preserve little excepting what was Hebrew, which, of course, they over-honoured as much as they undervalued all the rest. In their notions respecting the Sunday they went to the same extreme. The general reason is obvious. They wished to avoid old abuses, and thought they were not out of the water till they were in the fire. But there was a special reason, also: the English are the most empirical of all nations. They love a fact more than an idea, and often cling to an historical precedent rather than obey a great truth which transcends all precedents. The national tendency to external things, perhaps, helped lead them to these peculiar notions of the Sabbath. The precedent they