There is curiously little sentiment in these volumes. Most of the
letters, except where some point of doctrine is concerned, are those of
shrewd, practical men, busy about the affairs of this world, and earnest
to build their New Jerusalem on something more solid than cloud. The
truth is, that men anxious about their souls have not been by any means
the least skilful in providing for the wants of the body. It was far less
the enthusiasm than the common sense of the Puritans which made them what
they were in politics and religion. That a great change should be wrought
in the settlers by the circumstances of their position was inevitable;
that this change should have had some disillusion in it, that it should
have weaned them from the ideal and wonted them to the actual, was
equally so. In 1664, not much more than a generation after the
settlement, Williams prophesies: "When we that have been the eldest are
rotting (to-morrow or next day) a generation will act, I fear, far unlike
the first Winthrops and their models of love. I fear that the common
trinity of the world (profit, preferment, pleasure) will here be the
_tria omnia_ as in all the world beside, that Prelacy and Papacy too will
in this wilderness predominate, that god Land will be (as now it is) as
great a god with us English as god Gold was with the Spaniards.
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