own decay. Individually the impact of new ideas and new
discoveries gave thinking men new horizons of thought and
active men new spheres of activity. Socially the despotism of
the early Tudors completed the disintegration which the baronial
wars had begun.

But this harrowing was the prelude to a new sowing. It was
now England's turn to be caught in that upsurge of energy
which from time to time seems to overtake certain nations for
the achievement of some mysterious end in the cosmic scheme of
things. The English people entered on a phase of expansion and
power under the driving force of qualities other than those
which had sustained and embellished the life of medieval
England.

Hard work and capital accumulation are necessary to sustain
an age of material expansion. England's progress to material
greatness was essentially founded on hard work and capital
accumulation. Puritanism was the moral atmosphere which both
nourished and was nourished by the practice of hard work and
material accumulation. Without this motivating and justifying
moral atmosphere, the energy and the self-denial required for
this tremendous national effort of self-assertion would soon have
become dissipated in the sands of human weakness.

Slowly evolved among those scholars and divines, merchants
and craftsmen, yeomen and gentlemen, who for intellectual or
for material reasons began in growing numbers and in growing
force to challenge and to change the institutions of medieval
England, Puritanism emerged in Elizabethan times as the articu-
late expression of a new age, in which competition tended to
replace contract, in which free enquiry was esteemed more than
inherited tradition, and in which the place to which a man was
going was more important than the place from which he had
come.

During the years in which Puritans were a specific and recog-
nizable group in the community--years which roughly covered
the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seven-
teenth centuries, they gradually came to form the militant wing
of that opposition to the exercise of the Royal Prerogative which

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