fusion becomes worse confounded if we
attempt to correlate modern usages with
anything that can be proved pertinent to
the original Puritans themselves. To seek
no further, it was the habit of proponents
for the repeal of the Eighteenth Amend-
ment during the 1920's to dub Prohibition-
ists "Puritans," and cartoonists made the
nation familiar with an image of the Puri-
tan: a gaunt, lank-haired killjoy, wearing
a black steeple hat and compounding for
sins he was inclined to by damning those
to which he had no mind. Yet any ac-
quaintance with the Puritans of the seven-
teenth century will reveal at once, not
only that they did not wear such hats, but
also that they attired themselves in all
the hues of the rainbow, and furthermore
that in their daily life they imbibed what
seem to us prodigious quantities of alco-
holic beverages, with never the slightest
inkling that they were doing anything
sinful. True, they opposed drinking to ex-
cess, and ministers preached lengthy ser-
mons condemning intoxication, but at
such pious ceremonies as the ordination
of new ministers the bill for rum, wine,
and beer consumed by the congregation
was often staggering. Increase Mather
himself -- who in popular imagination is
apt to figure along with his son Cotton as
the arch-embodiment of the Puritan --
said in one of his sermons:

Drink is in itself a good creature of God,
and to be received with thankfulness, but the
abuse of drink is from Satan; the wine is from
God, but the Drunkard is from the Devil. ¹

Or again, the Puritan has acquired the
reputation of having been blind to all
aesthetic enjoyment and starved. of
beauty; yet the architecture of the Puritan
age grows in the esteem of critics and the
household objects of Puritan manufac-
ture, pewter and furniture, achieve pro-
hibitive prices by their appeal to discrim-
inating collectors. Examples of such dis-
crepancies between the modern usage of
the word and the historical fact could be
multiplied indefinitely. ² It is not the pur-
pose of this volume to engage in contro-
versy, nor does it intend particularly to
defend the Puritan against the bewilder-
ing variety of critics who on every side
today find him an object of scorn or pity.
In his life he neither asked nor gave mercy
to his foes; he demanded only that con-
flicts be joined on real and explicit issues.
By examining his own words it may be-
come possible to establish, for better or
for worse, the meaning of Puritanism as
the Puritan himself believed and prac-
ticed it.

Just as soon as we endeavor to free our-
selves from prevailing conceptions or mis-
conceptions, and to ascertain the histori-
cal facts about seventeenth-century New
Englanders, we become aware that we
face still another difficulty: not only must
we extricate ourselves from interpreta-
tions that have been read into Puritanism
by the twentieth century, but still more
from those that have been attached to it
by the eighteenth and nineteenth. The
Puritan philosophy, brought to New Eng-
land highly elaborated and codified, re-
mained a fairly rigid orthodoxy during
the seventeenth century. In the next age,
however, it proved to be anything but
static; by the middle of the eighteenth
century there had proceeded from it two
distinct schools of thought, almost un-
alterably opposed to each other. Certain
elements were carried into the creeds and
practices of the evangelical religious re-
vivals, but others were perpetuated by

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