The home-keeping English continued, with
changes of ritual, much like the peoples who still acknowledged
as their head "the Bishop of Rome." Their greater morality, if it
was greater, was temperamental rather than spiritual, and,
leaving the church to look after religion much more than our
Puritans did, they kept a simplicity of nature impossible to the
sectaries always taking stock of their souls. In fact, the
Calvinists of New England were almost essentially different from
the Calvinists of Holland, of France, even of Scotland. If our
ancestors were the children of light, as they trusted, they were
darkened by the forest, into which they plunged, to certain
reasons which the children of darkness, as the Puritans believed
the non-Puritans to be, saw by the uncertain glimmers from the
world about them. There is no denying that with certain great
gains, the American Puritans became, in a worldly sense,
provincialized, and that if they lived in the spirit, they lived
in it narrowly, while the others, who lived in the body, lived in
it liberally, or at any rate handsomely.
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