While, therefore, we proceed to unfold yet more distinctly and minutely the religious blemishes of our national character, in their origin and successive modifications, we are prepared to assert our respect, and even our veneration, for the virtues of our ancestors. They who brought religion, and planted and nourished it here, were men of a high order. Nevertheless, it would be allowing more than belongs to man, in any stage of his history, or to any set of men, to write them down as perfect. We do conscientiously believe, that the puritanism of England, and that portion of it which has so extensively leavened the religion of this country, was gravely faulty, in some very essential and influential particulars. We believe, moreover, that these faults have been, directly and indirectly, the occasion of evil--of disaster to our religious history.
We have said, that puritanism was itself a novelty, in the form it assumed at the period to which we allude. It was the offspring of circumstances peculiar to the time. We have hinted that it was the parent of novelties in a series of changes that have come down to our own day. Certain it is, our eyes and ears have recently been forced to witness some strange, not to say alarming, exhibitions of religion and moral reform, in this land. They have assumed an aspect to challenge universal attention. Whoever feels an interest in Christianity, cannot fail to look upon those extraordinary phenomena of the moral world, with some concern. They demand and must receive the most grave consideration. The press which sustains them must be the organ to discuss them. They must be viewed calmly and considerately, and treated philosophically as well as conscientiously. Beyond a question, they are novel developments, but not without cause; and as certain as there is a cause, we think it may be sufficiently palpable to be traced. For ourselves, we have presumed upon the essay, and will deliver our opinion.
We have intimated that the severity of the puritanical character could not endure in all its vigor, without the continued action of its producing causes. In correspondence with this theory, we observe, that the growth of this portion of American society has given birth to a gradual and uninterrupted modification. Not to speak of others, there are two attributes very essential to give permanency and controlling influence to any specific form of human society: antiquity and a proof commending itself to the good sense of the community. Puritanism, in the form now under consideration, could not claim antiquity. True there had been things like to it; but this particular type was well understood to have been of recent origin. It grew out of resistance to oppression, in part, within the memory of living witnesses. It was the product of an accident, and the resort of a temporary expediency. Circumstances being changed, and so far as it differed from the doom of necessity, that same discretion which adopted the expedient in one case might and would naturally accommodate itself to another. So far as necessity was the cause, it was equally impossible to oppose necessity in a change of circumstances. The force of antiquity was utterly nugatory.