"Puritanism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mother happy—she wouldn't think it right; but she's only like a lot of women in that. The evils of Puritanism seem to have taken a deeper root in women than in men, and in some it has kept on cropping up generation after generation. Your mother is a born Puritan, which is why I wish her to stay a Wesleyan. There is no more arduous combination than the Puritan by instinct labouring under acquired Catholicism. ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... see the aged Erasmus on the path of reaction, which might eventually have led him far from humanism. In his combat with humanistic purism he foreshadows a Christian puritanism. ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... fact that in his speech against the High Church Bishops, Falkland, if he does not actually call himself a Puritan, twice identifies the Puritan cause with his own. Among the bad objects which he accuses the clergy of advocating in their sermons is "the demolishing of Puritanism and propriety" Again ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... its exciting ceremonial and cruel mutilations. And when they adopted Christianity, though their morality was generally austere, their credulity was intense. In the 2nd century many of them embraced the new revelations of Montanus, and in the 4th they largely affected the hard Puritanism of Novatian. In religious matters the Celts are very little {152} inclined to fickleness, and their superstitions are more closely connected with dreaminess ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... my dear son, I hope you fully understand me, and that you will not attribute to me false delicacies, and a prudery, a puritanism of independence, which I utterly disclaim.—Go on, and prosper, and depend upon the warm sympathy and entire approbation of your ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... the development of religious and ecclesiastical thought in this country. One of the first and principal effects of the change of dynasty in 1688 had been to give an immense impetus to Protestant feeling. This was something altogether different in kind from the Puritanism which had entered so largely into all the earlier history of that century. It was hardly a theological movement; neither was it one that bore primarily and directly upon personal religion. It was, so to say, a strategical movement of self defence. The aggression of James II. ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... in the gift of his fellow-townsmen. While holding this office we catch a glimpse of him giving welcome to a travelling company of players; an innovation in the uses of his position which argues a broad and tolerant catholicity of mind when contrasted with the growing Puritanism of the times. And so, for several years, we see him prosper, and living as befits one who prospers, and, withal, wearing his village honours with a kindly dignity. But fortune turns, and a period of reverses sets in; we do not ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... from the persons with whom he was connected, that he would not be indifferent to the debates around him, and that his religious prepossessions were then, as afterwards, in favour of the conforming puritanism in the Church, as opposed to the extreme and thorough-going puritanism of Cartwright. Of the conforming puritans, who would have been glad of a greater approximation to the Swiss model, but who, whatever their private wishes ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... between parents and children seem on the whole to have been more kindly. The fathers and the sons are for the most part friends in Shakespeare, nor does the evil appear to have reached its full abomination till a long course of Puritanism had familiarised men's minds with Jewish ideals as those which we should endeavour to reproduce in our everyday life. What precedents did not Abraham, Jephthah and Jonadab the son of Rechab offer? How easy was it to quote ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... temporary struggle and a bright futurity. But the agents of the convict department endeavored to rekindle the last embers of jealousy and hate. To the employers they predicted ruin; to the houseowners, desolation and emptiness; to the publicans the reign of puritanism; to the emancipists the ascendancy of the free, to be followed by unextinguishable persecution. All the sentiments and epithets known in Irish polemics and Irish seditions were re-arranged in the convict ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... and luxury. To a fifth the true history of England is the story of its expansion, the foundation and growth of its colonial empire. While to a sixth, its religious history is the one that claims most attention, and the struggles with Rome, the rise and decay of Puritanism, and the development of modern thought will fill his pages. Each of these six will select just those facts, and those facts only, that are relevant to his subject. The introduction of irrelevant facts would be felt to mark the ignorant or unskilful workman. The master of ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... sudden resentment that any other woman should presume to fill her chair. To forget her under overwhelming provocation he had reconciled to his conscience with little difficulty, for his extenuations were many, and puritanism had not yet invaded the national character; but to permit another woman to ministrate to him when ill, he felt to be an unpardonable breach of his Eliza's rights, and his loyalty rebelled. So, although he treated Mrs. Croix with politeness while she remained, he gave orders to Dr. Stevens to ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... forces of English genius in its own most natural and representative form of popular and creative activity had finally shrivelled up and shuddered into everlasting inanition under the withering blast of Puritanism. Before that blight had fallen upon the country of Shakespeare, the variety and fertility of dramatic form and dramatic energy which distinguished the typical imagination or invention of his countrymen can only be appreciated or conceived by students of what yet is left us of the treasure ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... as to-day it is around the problem of sex. Since I have of late years realized this analogy I have often thought of certain admirable and obscure men who were driven out, robbed, and persecuted, some by the Church because the spirit of Puritanism moved within them, some by the Puritans because they clung to the ideals of the Church, yet both alike quiet and unflinching, both alike fighting for causes of freedom or of order in a field which has now for ever been won. That victory has often seemed of good augury to the perhaps degenerate ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the youth will stay with us until it has been solved rightly; illustrative instruction cannot be such a solution. We must see with open eyes where we are standing. The American nation of to-day is no longer the America of yesterday. The puritanism which certainly was a spirit of restraint has gone and cannot be brought back. The new wealth and power, the influx of sensuous South European and East European elements, the general trend of our age all over ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... ales, the justices of assize and the justices of the peace attempted in some shires to put them down on various occasions.[263] More effective, perhaps, in doing away with them was the gradual growth of Puritanism. ...
— The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects • Sedley Lynch Ware
... which add so largely to human happiness. Its bent has lain in directions that are, superficially at all events, less attractive. But by its cult of cleanliness, self-control, and efficiency, it has given a new meaning to civilization; it has invented Puritanism, the gospel of the day's work, and the water-closet. These reflections may not seem very apposite to the subject of the Canal; but they will suggest themselves to one who arrives in Panama after traveling through the Latin States ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... no place of resort but the tap-room or tea-garden, and no food for conversation except such as can be built upon the politics or the police reports of the last Sunday paper? So much has Church and State puritanism done for us—so well has it succeeded in materializing and binding down to the earth the imagination of men, for which God has made another world (which certain statesmen take but too little into ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... past fifty years in reference to Sunday have indeed been very great, but we think they arise chiefly from a reaction from the too strict Puritanism of the past. While we would not have the day too strictly kept, we yet have no sympathy with that class of minds who think there should be no "day of rest" or no time set apart for religious exercises or church services, but would have all days ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... very great extent, a descendant of rigorous Puritanism. The English, who preponderated in numbers over the other elements of the European immigration into North America, never forgot that they had been the comrades of Penn or of other militant sectarians, and never lost the habit of keeping the Bible, the ledger, ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... Puritanism, as it then existed in its exclusive power, is, to all intents and purposes, dead upon this continent. The form of it still lingers in our midst, it is true, and in the Protestant parts of Europe its ritual survives, and pious hearts, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... though he is said to have contemplated marriage. But Jansenism, as represented by the religious society of Port-Royal, was morally a Puritan movement within the Church, and its standards of conduct were at least as severe as those of any Puritanism in England or America. The period of fashionable society, in Pascal's life, is however, of great importance in his development. It enlarged his knowledge of men and refined his tastes; he became a man of the world and never lost what he had learnt; and when he turned his thoughts ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... point Puritanism included all shades of belief. The name was first given to those who advocated certain changes in the form of worship of the reformed English Church under Elizabeth; but as the ideal of liberty rose in men's minds, and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... of repute, a writer of renown, an upright and fearless magistrate, a model citizen, a courageous leader, gentle, just and generous, practical and wise, William Bradford stands in history as the essence and exponent of what was best in the Puritanism of his day, the architect and builder of a God-fearing, independent, and progressive community that, throughout the ages, remains the most notable because the most typical of the foundation-stones that underlie the mighty structure ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... beautiful and highly cultivated country which spread around it, and gave rise to a gallant breed of yeomen. From time immemorial the town had been a rallying-point for the party of liberty, and for many years it had leaned to the side of Republicanism in politics and of Puritanism in religion. No place in the kingdom had fought more stoutly for the Parliament, and though it had been twice besieged by Goring, the burghers, headed by the brave Robert Blake, had fought so desperately, that the Royalists had been compelled each time to retire discomfited. On the second ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... are on the increase. To them religion offers sufficient incentives and temptations to aspire to higher intellectuality, and to experience the sentiments of authoritative self-control, of silence, and of solitude. Asceticism and Puritanism are almost indispensable means of educating and ennobling a race which seeks to rise above its hereditary baseness and work itself upwards to future supremacy. And finally, to ordinary men, to the majority of the people, who exist for service and general utility, and are only so far entitled ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectator. The Puritan regarded beauty as a pitfall and a snare: that which gave pleasure was a sin; he found his gratification in doing without things. Puritanism was a violent oscillation of the pendulum of life to the other side. From the vanity, pretense, affectation and sensualism of a Church and State bitten by corruption, we find the recoil ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... successful. They had better be poor than very rich. They had better be ignorant than learned, especially if they realize they are learned. They had better be morally indifferent than spiritually smug. If their puritanism is carried to a point where it absolutely repels, it then has its beneficent use, teaching by antithesis. They had better be loose in their discipline than carry it so far that it makes the child exempt from coming to conclusions of his own. And as for parental love, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... drolatiques;' although, like 'Don Juan,' they contain a great deal of what was best in their author, of his frank, ebullient, sensuous nature, lighted up here at least by a genuine if scarcely delicate humor. Of direct suggestion of vice Balzac was, naturally, as incapable as he was of smug puritanism; but it must be confessed that as a raconteur his proper audience, now that the monastic orders have passed away, would be ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... his great human-heartedness and loving-kindness, his burning zeal and indomitable courage, his racy humor and kindling imagination, all vitalized by the spiritual force which came upon him through the encompassing atmosphere of devout Puritanism, were consecrated to the welfare of his fellow-men. His personal friend, Mr. Doe, describes him as "tall in stature, strong-boned, of a ruddy face, with sparkling eyes, nose well set, mouth moderately large, forehead something high, and his habit always plain and modest." His ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... was the sense of repulsion, the sense of incompatibilty, of radical antagonism, making it seem dangerous to us to let such opposites to ourselves have speech and utterance. Certainly the Jew,—the Jew of ancient times, at least,—then seemed a thousand degrees nearer than the Celt to us. Puritanism had so assimilated Bible ideas and phraseology; names like Ebenezer, and notions like that of hewing Agag in pieces, came so natural to us, that the sense of affinity between the Teutonic and the Hebrew nature was quite strong; a steady, middleclass Anglo-Saxon much more ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... presence of good and evil. His Aholibah is a poem that is as moral in one sense as it is lascivious in another. As Mr. Gosse says, "his imagination was always swinging, like a pendulum, between the North and the South, between Paganism and Puritanism, between resignation to the insticts and an ascetic repudiation of their authority." It is the conflict between the two moods that is the most interesting feature in Swinburne's verse, apart from its purely artistic qualities. Some writers find ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... through the influence of his family and relations, or through a notion that his principles were rather unsuited to the heterodox opinions of Lord Byron)—behaved coldly toward Byron. Dallas, however, who from puritanism and family pride, and even from jealousy, was rather an enemy of Lord Byron's intellectual friends—(contending that it was they who had instilled into Byron all the anti-orthodox views which the poet had adopted)—makes an exception ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... the Restoration movement can only be understood when considered as a reaction against Puritanism. But it is insufficiently realised that the tyranny which half frustrated all the good work of Puritanism was of a very peculiar kind. It was not the fire of Puritanism, the exultation in sobriety, the ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... abstinence from many an inferior good, both material and immaterial, is absolutely necessary if we are to have any wholesome strength of faith in our souls. In the recoil from the false asceticism of Roman Catholicism and Puritanism, has not this generation of the Church gone too far in the opposite direction? and in the true belief that Christianity can sanctify all joys, and ensure the harmonious development of all our powers, have we not been forgetting ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... this strife at Frankfort may seem, it marks the first open appearance of English Puritanism, and the beginning of a struggle which widened through the reign of Elizabeth till under the Stuarts it broke England in pieces. But busy as they were in strife among themselves, the exiles were still more busy in fanning the discontent at home. Books, ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... labour necessitating conflicting interests. As States, we are completely identified in commerce and agriculture, and no differences need arise. Purified from all connection with the North, and with no vestige of the mischievous element of New England Puritanism, we can be a prosperous ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... of a toad, breathing into the ear of the sleeping "Mother of Mankind" deadly insinuations of disobedience and rebellion, just as freedom in religion—the serpent so unworthily abhorred by New England Puritanism—was a divinely chartered and precious privilege of mankind long before the founding of Rhode Island colonies or the birth of Roger Williams. The vagaries and fantasies of freedom, its excesses, outrages, and ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... to the Dean of Westminster the last (14th), recapitulating summary chapter on the "Relations of Early English Puritanism to Protestant Unity and Religious Liberty," for his judgment. I last evening received a kind note from him (returning the manuscript), in which he says: "I have gone through the summary of the reign of Elizabeth, and find it full of just views, rendered the more attractive by the ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... in short, except authors, of whom I never beheld even the most famous done in wax. And here, in this many-purposed hall (unless the selectmen of the village chance to have more than their share of the Puritanism, which, however diversified with later patchwork, still gives its prevailing tint to New England character),—here the company of strolling players sets up its little stage, and claims patronage for the ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Charles II was restored in 1660. Among many things of more importance than this worthless King, the theatre was restored. Since the close of Elizabethan times it had been out of business. More than thirty years before, Puritanism had snuffed out its candles and driven its fiddlers to the streets. But Puritanism, in its turn, fell with the return of the Stuarts. Pepys is a chief witness as to what kind of theatre it was that was set up in London about the ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... music literally resolves itself into a question of wind and water. The tones of the instrument are good, and they are very fairly brought out by the present organist. The services are well got through, and whilst Puritanism is on the one hand avoided in them, Ritualism is on the other distinctly discarded. A medium course, which is the best, is observed in the church, and so long as Mr. Firth remains at the place there will be nothing bedizened or foolish in its ceremonies. A small memorial ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... as out of the world altogether. The population was thin and scattered, the mode of living primitive in the extreme, and the visit of a stranger, so insignificant as myself, quite enough to make a great sensation in these secluded parts. I found the ministers ingenuous, free from all puritanism, and generally well informed.... The examination of the parish books was also a labour of love and source of endless amusement. They mostly went as far back as a century and a half, and were, in the elder times, filled with such entries as bespoke a very strange condition of society. The inquisitorial ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... replied Winter, "those in the King's chamber have revealed to thee their ways, then. Thinkest thou nothing is known concerning the purpose of my Lord Monteagle in instructing thee as to Puritanism." ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... relationship between the present and the past in the way of ancestry and descent, which historians so carefully overlook." Here, as in "The Scarlet Letter," Hawthorne is unsparing in his analysis of the meaning of early American Puritanism—its intolerance and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... things, against the prevalence of sects and schism, but who, at the same time, as Milton shrewdly intimates, dreaded more the rending of their pontifical sleeves than the rending of the Church? Who shall now sneer at Puritanism, with the Defence of Unlicensed Printing before him? Who scoff at Quakerism over the Journal of George Fox? Who shall join with debauched lordlings and fat-witted prelates in ridicule of Anabaptist levellers and dippers, after rising from the perusal of Pilgrim's Progress? "There were ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... plural of Ahwar, in full Ahwar el-Ayn, a maid whose eyes are intensely white where they should be white, and black elsewhere: hence our silly Houries. Follows Umar-i-Khayym, who spiritualized Tasawwof, or Sooffeism, even as the Soofis (Gnostics) spiritualized Moslem Puritanism. The ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... of the poets than of the warriors and the men of facts and figures. The New England poets derived their nourishment from the deep earth of that wholesome past, into which the roots of all our lives go down. The mystical and mediaeval side of Puritanism finds its embodiment in Hawthorne; its moral ideals shine in Bryant; its independency is incarnated in Emerson. Emerson is the type of the nineteenth-century Puritan, in life pure, in temperament saintly, in spirit ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... Girardi, the famous Vienna comedian! I never saw him. His humor will act as a tonic. Just what I need. I will die if I breathe none other but the air of this palace, that reeks with cheap pretensions, Jesuitical puritanism, envy and hatred, where every second person is a spy of either the King ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... free to consume it, on the tacit underlying condition that they consumed very little of it in practice. The duty of "saving" became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion. There grew round the non-consumption of the cake all those instincts of puritanism which in other ages has withdrawn itself from the world and has neglected the arts of production as well as those of enjoyment. And so the cake increased; but to what end was not clearly contemplated. Individuals would be exhorted not so much to abstain ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They were chiefly graduates of Cambridge, which had always been religiously more tolerant than Oxford, and especially of Emmanuel College, which was the stronghold of Puritanism at Cambridge. It was natural that these men, leaders in the affairs of the colony, should want to establish a New Cambridge University, but it is astonishing that they were able to do so as early as 1636, only ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... of our day is to make an idol of the great figure-head of Puritanism. We had lately (April 25, 1899) a celebration of the Tercentenary of Cromwell; in the place of his birth he has been made use of (by a strange stroke of irony) as an apostle of education. Projects are on ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... social and political upheaval, was not conducive to the encouragement of the fine arts, and from this period the art of glazing in England declined beyond measure, and was not the only art that received its death-blow in the triumph of Puritanism. The art has, however, revived greatly during recent years, thanks, among other artists, to William Morris and Burne-Jones. A few words must be said about the "Jesse" window found in some of our cathedrals and churches. Strictly speaking, it is a representation ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... of looking at things without regard to consequences, of feeling devoutly about whatever seems to us true, and of realizing that individual preferences do not alter the laws of the universe; isn't that the essence of Puritanism?" ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... witnessed the Reformation of Religion, with all its inevitably attendant evils; an unsettled faith,—gross public and private injustice,—an illiterate parochial clergy:—yet how goodly a body of sound Divinity did the controversies of that age call forth! The same century witnessed the rise of Puritanism; but then, it produced Richard Hooker!—What was the character of the century which immediately preceded the Reformation,—the fifteenth?... A tangled web of good and evil has been the Church's history from the very first. The counterpart of what we read ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... centuries would be a task of essential importance for the history of intellectual life; for in the development of the prevailing spirit of the nation the Scots as well as the English have had a large share. Even under Elizabeth these relations had begun to exist. The growth of English Puritanism especially, which had already given the Queen much trouble, must be regarded as but the dissemination of the forms and ideas that had arisen in the Church of Scotland. But how much stronger must the action of this cause have become ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... numbers. For the truth on morality in France we must go back, I suspect, to that general conclusion about the French character—the swift passage from head to heart and back again, which, prohibiting extremes of puritanism and of licence, preserves ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... Willard. The father and mother were by no means sentimental people—they were certainly not given to seeing the poetical side of life; they were plain, earnest people, rough hewn out of the coarse fibre of Puritanism, but the advent of this little child brought a joy to their hearts that had its softening influence upon the home in which ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... both men, qualified by their secret contempt for the pretensions of the upper classes, is shown in various similar ways, as is also their love of display. They differ only as their nationalities differ. Puritanism survives in the American merchant and his wife, and unconsciously sways their lives. Uncle Piper's conception of the Deity is of the vaguest kind, but he has a religion of generosity and love which ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... and I come of much the same stock ethically. My childhood was oppressed by the weight of the Puritan creed, and the reaction from it has made me what you feel obliged to call heretic; while you, with a saint for a mother, found even Puritanism hardly strict enough for you, and have taken to semi- monasticism. We are both pushed on by the same original impulse: the stress ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... gaiety of this stranded little community, its elegance, despite its limitations, its unbounded hospitality to all within its guarded portals, its very absence of intellectual criticism, made the formal life of her brief past appear dull and drab in the retrospect. The spirit of Puritanism seemed to have lost heart in those trackless wastes between the Atlantic and the Pacific and turned back. True, the moral code was rigid (on the surface); but far from too much enjoyment of life, of quaffing eagerly at the brimming cup, being sinful, they would have held ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... to say—"lurve England, but Puritanism, sorr, I abhor. It fills me with loathing. It raises my gorge. Take ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... peace and human liberty through a long and eminent career in British politics; John Dickinson of Philadelphia, who wrote the famous Farmer's Letters so signally useful in the American Revolution; Whittier, the American poet, a Quaker born in Massachusetts of a family converted from Puritanism when the Quakers invaded Boston in the seventeenth century; and Benjamin West, a Pennsylvania Quaker of colonial times, an artist of permanent eminence, one of the founders of the Royal Academy in England and its president in succession to ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... of talking, the broad stories he continued to tell, were made counts in his indictment. One of the bequests of Puritanism in America is the ideal, at least, of extreme scrupulousness in talk. To many sincere men Lincoln's choice of fables was often a deadly offense. Charles Francis Adams never got over the shock of their first interview. Lincoln clenched ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... man was created with an evil propensity. His sin was the result of an historical catastrophe. In his paradisiacal condition man is conceived as possessing a nobility and innocence of nature far beyond that even which Rousseau depicted. Milton, in spite of his Calvinistic puritanism, has painted a picture of man's ideal innocence which for idyllic charm is unequalled in literature.[7] Nor does historical inquiry bear out the theory of the utter depravity of man. The latest anthropological research ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... extent the creatures of their age, And if it be asked why that age encouraged immorality which no other age would have tolerated, we have no hesitation in answering that this, great depravation of the national taste was the effect of the prevalence of Puritanism ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... lyrics to the mask of Comus, and from Comus to the elegy of Lycidas, just as, in the corresponding periods of time, the evils connected with the reign of Charles I. and with Laud's crusade against Puritanism were becoming more pronounced. But we can hardly regard Milton as having expressed any new decision in Comus: the decision is already made when "vain deluding Joys" are banished in Il Penseroso, and "loathed Melancholy" in L'Allegro. The mask is an expansion and exaltation ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... hates such dulness—the village virus—as the saints hate sin. Indeed it is with a sort of new Puritanism that he and his contemporaries wage against the dull a war something like that which certain of their elders once waged against the bad. Only a satiric anger helped out by the sense of being on crusade could ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... perceptible through all the sudden shifts of our dithyrambic seasons and echoed in corresponding floral harmonies, made melody in the soul of Abel, the plain serving- man. It softened his whole otherwise rigid aspect. He worshipped God according to the strict way of his fathers; but a florist's Puritanism is always colored by the petals of his flowers,—and Nature never shows him a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... on its practical good sense found confronting it the people that, to its own misfortune, is least provided with that gift. Poor Ireland, with her ancient mythology, with her Purgatory of St. Patrick, and her fantastic travels of St. Brandan, was not destined to find grace in the eyes of English puritanism. One ought to observe the disdain of English critics for these fables, and their superb pity for the Church which dallies with Paganism, so far as to keep up usages which are notoriously derived from it. Assuredly we have here a praiseworthy zeal, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... again upon the threshold of extempore lecturing: on "the Revolutions of Modern Europe"; Protestantism, 2 lectures; Puritanism, 2; French Revolution, 2. I almost regret that I had undertaken the thing this year at all, for I am no longer driven by Poverty as heretofore. Nay, I am richer than I have been for ten years; and have a kind of prospect, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... families which one finds in nearly every New England community, as thoroughly New England in race as the rest, but flourishing in a hardy scepticism and contempt of the general sense. Whatever relation such people held to the old Puritan commonwealth when Puritanism was absolute, they must later have taken an active part in its disintegration, and were probably always a destructive force at ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... planned house on brand-new speculative foundations. Under these circumstances, it is not wonderful that, in this country, practical men preferred the Gospel of Wesley and Whitfield to that of Jean Jacques; while enough of the old leaven of Puritanism remained to ensure the favour and support of a large number of religious men to a revival of evangelical supernaturalism. Thus, by degrees, the free-thinking, or the indifference, prevalent among us in the first half of the eighteenth century, was replaced by ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... was indeed believed to be the life of the whole intrigue. The plot was, however, forwarded by Imbize, the roaring demagogue whose republicanism could never reconcile itself with what he esteemed the aristocratic policy of Orange, and whose stern puritanism could be satisfied with nothing short of a general extermination of Catholics. This man, after having been allowed to depart, infamous and contemptible, from the city which he had endangered, now ventured after ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... inversion, he points the sound moral and vivifies the right principle for the youth to whom the dawning consciousness of morality is the first real psychological discovery of life. With hearty laughter at the stupid irritations of self-conscious virtue, with ironic scorn for the frigid Puritanism of mechanical morality, Mark Twain enraptures that innumerable company of the sophisticated who have chafed under the omnipresent influence of a "good example" and stilled the painless pangs of an unruly conscience. With splendid satire for the base, with shrill ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... immediately attracted his attention was a succession of church steeples or cupolas that broke the roof-lines at almost regular intervals, and the fashion of these structures left no doubt in the mind that Warwick, in spite of foreign immigration, was still a stronghold of Puritanism. All suggestion of Romish or Episcopalian tradition was scrupulously avoided, even to the omission of the cross and the substitution of a weather-vane or gamecock. Only one church told a different story. At some distance north of the City Hall a ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... and far-reaching are the divine claims, the greater is our conception of the scope and worth of being. Human rights become respected in the ratio in which human responsibility is felt. Whatever objections men may hold to Puritanism—their theory since the days of St. Augustine has constantly produced tendencies to liberty and a prevalent belief in the natural rights of man—and on account of that very feature which to many, has been so offensive—its rigorous doctrine of human accountability. Here, then, is the idea of ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... But King Christian promptly made him court preacher. "He is the kind we need here," he said. There was never a day that the King did not devoutly read his Bible, and he was determined that everybody should read it the same way. The result was a kind of Puritanism that filled the churches and compelled the employment of men to go around with long sticks to rap the people on the head when they fell asleep. Christian the Fourth was not the first ruler who has tried to herd men into heaven by battalions. But ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... than Colonel Richard Nicholls; there was perhaps no girl in all the world more agitated than Jessica, then a guest at Government House. Her father was there also, cheerfully awaiting her marriage with Gering, whom, since he had lost most traces of Puritanism, he liked. He had long suspected the girl's interest in Iberville; if he had known that two letters from him—unanswered—had been treasured, read, and re-read, he would have been anxious. That his daughter should marry a Frenchman—a filibustering seigneur, a Catholic, the enemy of the British ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... chiefs, it was, in fact, stamped out. But the recollection of Cartwright and of Presbyterian principles remained in the English mind through the reigns of James and Charles, and characterized the main mass of the more effective and respectable Puritanism of those reigns. In other words, most of those Puritans, whether ministers or of the laity, who still continued members of the Church, only protesting against some of its rules and ceremonies, conjoined ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... see the very place from my roof here, on bright days. These men, Mr. Denis, were our masters. Do not be misled by what you are told of the wanton luxury of those shores; do not forget that your view of that age has filtered through Roman stoicism and English puritanism which speak with envy lurking at their hearts—the envy of the incomplete creature for him who dares express himself. A plague has infected the world—the plague of repression. Don't you think that the man who made this Faun was ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... English regular drama, that the men who wrote were almost in every case highly educated in the classics, and thus able to avail themselves of the best models. It is equally true that, owing to the religious condition of the times, when Puritanism launched forth its diatribes against all amusements, they were men in the opposition, and in most cases of irregular lives. Men of the world, they took their characters from among the persons with whom ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... The minds of the Italians assimilated paganism. In their hatred of mediaeval ignorance, in their loathing of cowled and cloistered fools, they flew to an extreme, and affected the manner of an irrevocable past. This extravagance led of necessity to a reaction—in the North, of Puritanism; in the South, to what has been termed the Counter-Reformation effected under Spanish influences in the Latin Church. But Christianity, that most precious possession of the modern world, was never seriously imperilled by the classical ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... this life was broken, however, on week days. Southern Puritanism differed from the early New England Puritanism in a certain affectionateness and sociability. The mother could play well on the piano, and frequently sang with the children hymns and popular melodies. Between the two brothers there ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... Middle Ages viewed the flesh in its representative, woman,—accursed since the days of Eve—as a thing impure. The Virgin, exalted as Virgin more than as Our Lady, far from lifting up the real woman, had caused her abasement, by setting men on the track of a mere scholastic puritanism, where they kept rising higher and higher ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... his dislike of certain opinions with personal regard for those who held them, and therefore did not, like Dorothy, recoil from the idea of obligation to one of a different creed—provided always that creed was catholicism and not puritanism. For to the church of England, the catholics, in the presence of her more rampant foes, ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... high standard, and resolve to drag both themselves and their neighbours up to it. But, as the process is difficult, so it is disappointing. People became rather shy of Mrs. Ruskin, and she of them, so that her life was solitary and her household quiet. It was not merely from narrow Puritanism that she made so few friends; her morality and her piety, strict as they were within their own lines, permitted her most of the enjoyments and amusements of life; still less was there any cynicism or misanthropy. But she devoted ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... Puritanism in relation to American art, Mr. Gutzen Burglum said: "Puritanism has made us self-centered and hypocritical for so long, that sincerity and reverence for what is natural in our impulses have been fairly bred out of us, with the ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... and conviction inclined to Republicanism and Puritanism. In America they have both. But I confess I feel a little staggered as to the practical efficacy and saving grace of first principles, when I ask myself, Can they throughout the United States from Boston to Baltimore, produce a single head like one of Titian's Venetian ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... reading of Conservative journals invariably incline her towards Radicalism, and the steady stream of Radical talk round her husband's table invariably set her seeking arguments in favour of the feudal system? Might it not have been her husband's growing Puritanism that had driven her to crave for Bohemianism? Suppose that towards middle age, the wife of a wild artist, she suddenly "took religion," as the saying is. Her last state would ...
— The Philosopher's Joke • Jerome K. Jerome
... Literature and Thought, Scotch Industry; James Watt, David Hume, Walter Scott, Robert Burns: I find Knox and the Reformation acting in the heart's core of every one of these persons and phenomena; I find that without the Reformation they would not have been. Or what of Scotland? The Puritanism of Scotland became that of England, of New England. A tumult in the High Church of Edinburgh spread into a universal battle and struggle over all these realms; there came out, after fifty years' struggling, what we all call the "Glorious Revolution," a Habeas Corpus Act, Free Parliaments, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... outgrown Puritanism," he returned, "but really she was, in her way, as much of a Puritan as you are. The country is full of people who don't understand that the essence of Puritanism is a slavish adherence to what they call principle, and who think because they have got rid of a certain set of dogmas ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... Beginnings of New England, pp. 50-71. The teacher may read "Rise and Development of Puritanism" in Eggleston's Beginners of a Nation, ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... came down like a hammer upon that corrupt so-called Christian Church, and swept it off the face of the earth, as it deserved to be swept. And the same thought of the sovereign will, of which we are but instruments—pawns on its chessboard—made the grand seventeenth century Puritanism in England, and its sister type of men and of religion in Holland. For this is a historically proved thesis, that there is nothing which so contributes to the formation, and valuation of, and the readiness to die for, civil liberty, as the firm grasp of that thought of the divine sovereignty. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... that we follow wondering and spellbound. In 'The Spiral Road' and in some of the other stories both fantasy and narrative may be compared with Hawthorne in his most unearthly moods. The younger man has read his Nietzsche and has cast off his heritage of simple morals. Hawthorne's Puritanism finds no echo in these modern souls, all sceptical, wavering and unblessed. But Hawthorne's splendor of vision and his power of sympathy with a tormented mind do live again in the best of Mr. Huneker's stories."—London Academy (Feb. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... fact the wave of protest which stormed the dikes of Dutch orthodoxy in the seventeenth century stole gently through the bars of New England Puritanism in ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... languages, and giving to the electric stir of Broadway an air which suggests a Continental rather than an English city, but it is more plausible to note that New York had no original link with the Puritanism of New England and of the North generally, and that in fact we shall find the premier city continually isolated from the North, following a tradition and a policy ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... her name had been given to her before she was born. There had nearly always been a girl called Charity in the Coe family. They had brought the name with them from New England when they settled in Westchester County some two hundred years before. They had kept little of their Puritanism except a ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... punishment. The most sweeping and shameless part of the process was not complete, indeed, until the end of the eighteenth century, when Protestantism was already passing into scepticism. Indeed a very decent case could be made out for the paradox that Puritanism was first and last a veneer on Paganism; that the thing began in the inordinate thirst for new things in the noblesse of the Renascence and ended in the Hell-Fire Club. Anyhow, what was first founded at the Reformation was a new ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... appeared in his surplice, and the Prayers of the Liturgy continued to be read or intoned. The old familiar bells, Catholic as they were in all the emotions which they suggested, called the congregation together with their musical peal, though in the midst of triumphant Puritanism. The 'Book of Sports,' which, under an order from Charles I., had been read regularly in Church, had in 1644 been laid under a ban; but the gloom of a Presbyterian Sunday was, is, and for ever will be detestable to ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude |
