The
mountain-streams of New England, too, afford so much water-power as to
bring in ugly factories to disfigure the beautiful ravines, and to
introduce into the community a class of people very different from the
landholding descendants of the Puritans. When once a factory is
established near a village, one no longer feels free to sleep with
doors unbolted.
It will be long, however, I trust, before the simple, earnest and
independent type of character that has been nurtured on the Blue Hills
of Massachusetts and the White Hills of New Hampshire shall cease to
operate like a powerful leaven upon the whole of American society. Much
has been said and sung in praise of the spirit of chivalry, which, after
all, as a great historian reminds us, "implies the arbitrary choice of
one or two virtues, to be practised in such an exaggerated degree as to
become vices, while the ordinary laws of right and wrong are
forgotten." [1] Quite enough has been said, too, in discredit of
Puritanism,--its narrowness of aim, its ascetic proclivities, its quaint
affectations of Hebraism. Yet these things were but the symptoms of the
intensity of its reverence for that grand spirit of Hebraism, of which
Mr. Matthew Arnold speaks, to which we owe the Bible and Christianity.
No loftier ideal has ever been conceived than that of the Puritan who
would fain have made of the world a City of God.
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