Neither a knowledge of human
nature nor of history justifies us in confounding, as is commonly done,
the Puritans of Old and New England, or the English Puritans of the third
with those of the fifth decade of the seventeenth century. Fanaticism,
or, to call it by its milder name, enthusiasm, is only powerful and
active so long as it is aggressive. Establish it firmly in power, and it
becomes conservatism, whether it will or no. A sceptre once put in the
hand, the grip is instinctive; and he who is firmly seated in authority
soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of
statecraft. From the summit of power men no longer turn their eyes
upward, but begin to look about them. Aspiration sees only one side of
every question; possession, many. And the English Puritans, after their
revolution was accomplished, stood in even a more precarious position
than most successful assailants of the prerogative of whatever _is_ to
continue in being. They had carried a political end by means of a
religious revival. The fulcrum on which they rested their lever to
overturn the existing order of things (as history always placidly calls
the particular forms of _dis_order for the time being) was in the soul of
man.
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