ment restricted. In general, I think the extracts speak for
themselves and need little exposition.

This book is based on a previous anthology that Thomas
H. Johnson and I published in 1939, The Puritans, now
out of print. A few items not in that volume are added,
and I have tried to retain those that have proved of general
interest. A few of these, because then for the first time made
available to the modern reader, have in effect become
standard passages in American literature. Of course many
of the others had long ago found their places in the canon.
In one respect this anthology falls short, in that it omits
one of the greatest and certainly the most engaging of the
Puritans, Roger Williams. The primary consideration is lack
of space, but also, while his is the essential Puritan con-
science, he developed heretical ideas which make him a
sport amid the "orthodox" mind on which I wish to con-
centrate. Furthermore, William cannot fairly be exhibited
in only short extracts, and I am the less worried about do-
ing him an injustice because in 1953, in the Makers of the
American Tradition series (Bobbs-Merrill), I issued a full
volume of his writings.

Following the lead of Samuel Eliot Morison in his edition
of William Bradford, I assumed as regards Williams the
privileges of an editor and prepared a modern--not a "mod-
ernized"--text. Here I have again exercised that preroga-
tive. I have regularized the spelling and capitalization,
omitted italics, broken up long paragraphs, and endeavored
to refashion the punctuation so as at once to remain faith-
ful to the spirit of the text and yet to assist the modern
reader. Since writers and printers in the seventeenth cen-
tury observed no consistent rules in these matters, the dis-
cretion permitted an editor is large. However, since they
punctuated on a rhetorical rather than a logical system, to
impose the strict laws of modern practice on their sentences
would be folly. Still, just as few readers today would be
comfortable in reading Shakespeare were he always pre-
sented in the exact style of the First Folio, so I have found
that many are put off by the unfamiliarity of seventeenth-
century typography.

In that sense, then, my text is modern, but I have other-

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