antagonism not less deep from all the reigning ideas of nominal
Christendom.

In a community thus unworldly must have arisen a mode of thought,
energetic, original, and sublime. The leaders of thought and feeling
were the ministry, and we boldly assert that the spectacle of the early
ministry of New England was one to which the world gives no parallel.
Living an intense, earnest, practical life, mostly tilling the earth
with their own hands, they yet carried on the most startling and
original religious investigations with a simplicity that might have been
deemed audacious, were it not so reverential. All old issues relating to
government, religion, ritual, and forms of church organization having
for them passed away, they went straight to the heart of things, and
boldly confronted the problem of universal being. They had come out from
the world as witnesses to the most solemn and sacred of human rights.
They had accustomed themselves boldly to challenge and dispute all sham
pretensions and idolatries of past ages,--to question the right of kings
in the State, and of prelates in the Church; and now they turned the
same bold inquiries towards the Eternal Throne, and threw down their
glove in the lists as authorized defenders of every mystery in the
Eternal Government. The task they proposed to themselves was that of
reconciling the most tremendous facts of sin and evil, present and
eternal, with those conceptions of Infinite Power and Benevolence which
their own strong and generous natures enabled them so vividly to
realize. In the intervals of planting and harvesting, they were busy
with the toils of adjusting the laws of a universe. Solemnly simple,
they made long journeys in their old one-horse chaises, to settle with
each other some nice point of celestial jurisprudence, and to compare
their maps of the Infinite. Their letters to each other form a
literature altogether unique. Hopkins sends to Edwards the younger his