his pocket"; and it was so with them all: they would pocket anything but
a bribe to themselves or an insult to God or their profession. They
flinched from no reproof that was needed: "Sharp rebukes make sound
Christians" was a proverb among them. They sometimes lost their tempers,
and sometimes their parishes, but never their independence. I find a
hundred anecdotes of conscientious cruelty laid up against them, but not
one of cowardice or of compromise. They may have bored the tongues of
others with a bar of iron, but they never fettered their own tongues
with a bar of gold,--as some African tribes think it a saintly thing to
do, and not African tribes alone.

There was such an absolute righteousness among them, that to this day
every man of New-England descent lives partly on the fund of virtuous
habit they accumulated. And, on the other hand, every man of the many
who still stand ready to indorse everything signed by a D.D.--without
even adding the commercial E.E., for Errors Excepted--is in part the
victim of the over-influence they obtained. Yet there was a kind of
democracy in that vast influence also: the Puritans were far more
thorough Congregationalists than their successors; they recognized no
separate clerical class, and the "elder" was only the highest officer of
his own church. Each religious society could choose and ordain its own
minister, or dispense with all ordaining services at will, without the
slightest aid or hindrance from council or consociation. So the stern
theology of the pulpit only reflected the stern theology of the pews;
the minister was but the representative man. If the ministers were
recognized as spiritual guides, it was because they were such to the
men of their time, whatever they might be to ours. Demonax of old, when
asked about the priests' money, said, that, if they were really the
leaders of the people, they could not have too much payment,--or too
little, if they were not. I believe that on these conditions the Puritan