While we
are here, noble sir, let us _viriliter hoc agere, rem agere humanam,
divinam, Christianam_, which, I believe, is all of a most public genius,"
or, as we should now say, true patriotism. If Williams means no play on
the word _humanam_ and _divinam_, the order of precedence in which he
marshals them is noticeable. A generation later, what Williams had
predicted was in a great measure verified. But what made New England
Puritanism narrow was what made Scotch Cameronianism narrow,--its being
secluded from the great movement of the nation. Till 1660 the colony was
ruled and mostly inhabited by Englishmen closely connected with the party
dominant in the mother country, and with their minds broadened by having
to deal with questions of state and European policy. After that time they
sank rapidly into provincials, narrow in thought, in culture, in creed.
Such a pedantic portent as Cotton Mather would have been impossible in
the first generation; he was the natural growth of the third,--the
manifest judgment of God on a generation who thought Words a saving
substitute for Things. Perhaps some injustice has been done to men like
the second Governor Dudley, and it should be counted to them rather as a
merit than a fault, that they wished to bring New England back within
reach of the invigorating influence of national sympathies, and to rescue
it from a tradition which had become empty formalism.
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