2.The antagonism of the early Puritan to popular frivolity needs to have the times around it to be understood.No great movement carries everybody with it, and while it is still struggling the majority will be on the opposing side.While the real leadership of England was passing into the stronger and more serious hands the artificial excesses of life grew strong on the people."Fortunes were being sunk and estates mortgaged in order that men should wear jewels and dress in colored silks."[1] In the pressure of grave national needs men persisted in frivolity.The two reigning vices were drunkenness and swearing.In their cups men were guilty of the grossest indecencies.Even their otherwise harmless sports were endangered.The popular notion of the May-pole dances misses the real point of the Puritan opposition to it in Old and New England.It was not an innocent, jovial out-door event.Once it may have been that.Very often it was only part of a day which brought immorality and vice in its train.It was part of a rural paganism.Some of the customs involved such grave perils, with their seclusion of young people from early dawn in the forests, as to make it impossible to approve it.Over against all these things the Puritans set themselves.Sometimes they carried this solemnity to an absurd length, justifying it by Scripture verses misapplied.Against the affected elegancies of speech they set the plain yea, yea and nay, nay of Scripture.In their clothing, their homes, their churches, they, and in even more marked degree, the Quakers, registered their solemn protest against the frivolity of the times.If they went too far, it is certain their protest was needed.Macaulay's epigram is familiar, that the Puritan "hated bear- baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators." In so far as that is true, it is to the credit of the Puritan; for the bear can stand the pain of being baited far better than human naturecan stand the coarsening effects of baiting him, and it is nobler to oppose such sport on human grounds than on animal grounds.But, of course, the epigram is Macaulay's, and must be read with qualification.The fact is, and he says it often enough without epigrams, that the times had become trifling except as this grave, thoughtful group influenced them.
[1] Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts, p.66.
3.The attitude of the Puritans toward the Sabbath came from their serious thought of the Bible.Puritanism gave England the Sabbath again and planted it in America as an institution.Of course, these men learned all that they knew of it from the Bible.From that day, in spite of much change in thought of it, English- speaking people have never been wilful abusers of the Sabbath.But the condition in that day was very different.Most of the games were on the day set apart as the Sabbath.There were bull-baiting, bear-baiting, and football on Sunday.Calvin himself, though not in England, bowled on Sunday, and poor Knox attended festivities then, saying grimly that what little is right on week-days is not wrong on Sundays.After the service on Sunday morning the people thronged to the village green, where ale flowed freely and games were played until the evening dance was called.It was a work-day.Elizabeth issued a special injunction that people work after service on Sundays and holidays if they wished to do so.Employers were sustained in their demand for Sunday work.
There are always people in every time who count that the ideal Sabbath.The Puritans found it when they appeared.The English Reformation found it when it came.And the Bible found it when at last it came out of obscurity and laid hold on national conditions.Whatever is to be said of other races, every period of English-speaking history assures us that our moral power increases or weakens with the rise or fall of Sabbath reverence.The Puritans saw that.They saw, as many other thoughtful people saw, that the steady, repeated observance of the Sabbath gave certain national influences a chance to work; reminded the nation of certain great underlying and undying principles; in short, brought God into human thought.The Sunday of pleasure or work could never accomplish that.Both as religionists and as patriots, as lovers of God and lovers ofmen, they opposed the pleasure-Sunday and held for the Sabbath.
But that comes around again to the saying that the persistent moral appeal of the Bible gives it inevitable influence on history.It centers thought on moral issues.It challenges men to moral combats.
Such a force persistently working in men's minds is irresistible.It cannot be opposed; it can only fail by being neglected.And this is the force which has been steadily at work everywhere in English-speaking history since the King James version came to be.
