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The first step towards making Puritanism beautiful is to free the word from exclusive association with the manners and morals of any particular period. Puritanism is not a fixed form off life; it is a formative spirit, an urgent exploring and creative spirit. And so the shape of the Puritan cannot be cast in bronze for all time. He is an iconoclast, an image-breaker; and when he is convicted of self-idolatry, he is the first, beautiful and strong in wrath, to raise the hammer and shatter his own image. Strike at the shadowy incarnations of him around the witch fires of history: he offers you a sharper sword. A hard man in this or any age to keep pace with or to understand.

Both the contemporary and the historical Puritan are still involved in clouds of libel, of which the origins lie in the copious fountains of indiscriminating abuse poured out upon the Puritans of the seventeenth century by great Royalist writers like Butler, Dryden, and Ben Jonson. The Puritan of that day was ordinarily represented by his adversaries as a dis-