"I was now grown familiar with the Lord Jesus Christ; he would oft tell me that he loved me; I did not doubt to believe him. If I went abroad he went with me; when I returned he came home with me. I talked

Bradford gathered up the spirit with which the Pilgrims set foot on the shores of Plymouth:

"Being thus passed ye vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation (as may be remembered by yt which wente before), they had now no friends to wellcome them, nor inns to entertaine or refresh their wetherbeaten bodys, no houses ог much less townes to repair to, to seeke for succoure And for ye season it was winter, and they that know ye winters of yt cuntrie know them to be sharp & violent, subject to cruel & fierce stormes, deangerous to travill to known places, much more to serch an unknown coast. Nether

could they, as it were, goe up to the top of Pisgah to view from this willdernes a more goodly cuntrie to feed their hope; for which way soever they turned their eys, (save upward to ye heavens) they could have litle solace or content in respecte of any outward objects. For sumer being done, all things stand upon them with a wetherbeaten face; and ye whole cuntrie, full of woods & thickets, represented a wild and savage heiro. What could now sustain them but ye spirite of God & his grace?"1

The same profound trust and elevation of spirit characterized those who carried through the hardly less heroic enterprise of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It would be difficult to find in the entire literature of mysticism a more tender and sincere passage than that in which John Winthrop the Elder, whom Cotton characterized as "a governor who has been to us as a mother, parent-like distributing his goods to brethren and neighbors at his first coming, and gently bearing our infirmities without taking any

1 History of Plymouth Plantation, Chapter IX.

with him upon the way. Now I could go into company and not lose him, and so sweet was his love to me, as I desired nothing but him in heaven or earth."

The mysticism of the founders and earlier divines was almost lost in the

aridity of the period that followed, but it flowered anew in the glowing reflections of Jonathan Edwards and the fervid rhapsodies of David Brainerd. Edwards' mysticism was as rational as it was intense. In spite of the light which has of late been thrown upon him, few Americans are aware of either the profound philosophic genius or the incomparable mysticism of the author of Notes on the Mind and The Nature of True Virtue. How the wielder of the lurid fulminations of the sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," could have written such passages of nature mysticism as the following must remain one of the mysteries of our disparate nature:

"There seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast or appearance of divine glory in almost everything. God's excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything-in the sun, moon, and stars; in clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water and all nature, which used greatly to fix my mind. I often used to sit and view the moon for continuance, and in the day spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in these things; in the meantime singing forth, with a low voice, my contemplations of the Creator and Redeemer." 3

Nor was Edwards the only New England theologian who possest mystical qualities. The redoubtable Samuel Hopkins, with all his Calvinistic rigorism, wrote of that "divine illumination" without which there can be no

2 ROBERT C. WINTHROP. Life and Letters of John Winthrop the Elder, II, p. 272. See Allen's Jonathan Edwards, p. 25.

true idea of the real beauty and excellence of the things of the Spirit of God."

From Jonathan Edwards to Horace Bushnell, the robust and vital mystic of the new era, and his successors of the "new theology"-Henry Ward Beecher, T. T. Munger, Egbert C. Smyth, and their comrades-seems a long way, and there is no apparent line of continuity, for the barren polemic scholasticism of the New England theology lies between; yet they possest the same devoutness, tempered by sanity of mind-traits which the spirit of New England seems to produce as naturally as her rocky soil and pine woods harbor the hepatica and arbutus. The Transcendentalists, too, altho they drew their academic and bookish instigations from Orientalism, Neoplatonism, Kant, and Coleridge, were nevertheless of the native soil and spirit, and all their idealism and speculation are stamped with its impress. Alcott was as nearly timeless and spaceless as mortal can be, yet he belongs as securely to New England as Laotze to China. As for Emerson, he is as much a part of Massachusetts as Concord itself, one with its pines and wood-lots and old apple-trees and its placid river, within whose narrow banks there fares "that other stream" whose waters go

"Through years, through men, through nature fleet,

Through love and thought, through power and dream."

And Thoreau-what were he apart from Walden or Walden without this nature mystic, refusing to be lonely because "our planet is in the Milky Way," observant and nature-wise as an Indian and as hardy, sitting on a snow bank to count the rings of an old apple-tree, till Nature chid him to a safer clime to count the rings of the tree of life. Yet Thoreau represents but one side of the typical Yankee.

Emerson was the more Catholic son of New England, at once sage and seer, and holding sageship and seership in perfect equipoise and harmony, no less the spiritual patriot that he was also the "cosmic patriot." The Journals have revealed to us the secret springs of his mysticism, as well as the course of his inner development and the ripeness of his wisdom, so as to afford a fresh revelation of the universal as well as the distinctively New World quality of his mind.

What wonder that the New World literature flowing from such crystal fountains is full of translucent mysticism. How unmistakably is the essence of Puritan mysticism distilled into Hawthorne's subtle, introspective sketches and romances; what measures of solemn joy and tender sadness lift Bryant's verses into the light of an enduring place in literature; what pure, not to say Puritan, sentiment suffuses Longfellow's pages; what sincere and ardent faith makes Whittier's voice like that of the songsparrow heard in the fields of Essex in the spring; what power of spiritual gravitation binds Lowell,-man of the world yet "clear mystic and enthusiast" as he calls himself to the unseen verities, and impels him to keep open

"The East window of divine surprise!" This incomparable "singing band" is silent, but its ethereal spirit will invest with quiet charms the land of the Pilgrims as long as her hills stand and her skies drop down dew-and snow.

It is easier to win recognition for the fragrance of the best of the Puritans' piety than for the pungency of their wit-if indeed it can be shown that this is one of New England's "commodities" at all. The arbutus is more winsome than the wintergreen. Yet the wintergreen is not to be overlooked altho it, too, was buried beneath the snows for most of the long season that made the cold Puritan

blood run yet colder. Custom has ascribed to the Puritan a drearily somber and provincial mind, and not without reason. For he was as harsh as his wintry clime toward whatever he deemed out of keeping with serious and godly living. Yet he was no misanthrope, crabbed by nature or soured by defeat. His life-attitude was a deliberate and reasoned choice-a philosophy, a religion. There were reasons why these self-denying souls frowned so darkly upon the pleasures and recreations of life, and these reasons were not without credit to them. They had seen what unrestrained "libertinism" led to and they wanted none of it, fleeing in disgust to shores which, if desolate, had at least never been desecrated by debauchery and "ribaldry"; they hated the laughter that is like the crackling of thorns under a pot, therefore they would laugh not at all; they scorned play that is a masque for "lewdness," therefore they would renounce it altogether; they abominated a vile jest, therefore they would jest never; they feared the seductions of an impure art, therefore they would have no art whatever, and art-less they were, yet not entirely.

It is not apparent upon the surface how greatly we, their successors, lovers of sweetness and light, have profited by these renunciations. For when lower relaxations are put resolutely away, clean mirth and pure pleasure steal in to take their placebefore even the Puritan is aware. And that is precisely what happened in New England. The forefathers in their less guarded moments found themselves relaxing from their customary rigor, scenting the "sweet herbs, delightful to the smell," indulging in orthodox pleasures, and even guilty of jocosities of a mild variety. This appears in an incident which Cotton Mather relates of Governor Winthrop,

"In an hard & long winter, when wood was very scarce in Boston, a man gave him private information that a needy person in the neighborhood stole wood sometimes from his pile; whereupon the governor, in seeming anger, did reply, 'Does he so? I'll take a course with him; go, call that man to me, I'll warrant you I'll cure him of stealing.' When the man came, the governor considering that if he had stolen, it was more out of necessity than disposition, said to him, 'Friend, it is a severe winter & I doubt you are but meanly supplied for wood; wherefore I would have you supply yourself at my woodpile till this cold season be over.' And he then merrily asked his friends, 'Whether he had not effectually cured this man of stealing wood?"

The quality of mercy-however it may be with wit-is not strained.

It

droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.

But tho colonial governors might, on rare occasions, descend to pleasantry-would parsons? The Puritan parson was certainly a solemn and at times an awful personage. He denounced "levity" in unmeasured terms, and made such "deviltries" as dancing and dice seem an affront to dieth not and the fire that is not high heaven worthy of the worm that quenched. Yet with all his sustained severity, an occasional flash of wit broke through his stern and highstrung affirmations, like a spark struck from some rusty old flintlock in a battle with the redskins. On the distinguished occasions when these earnest defenders of the faith showed wit it seems to have been chiefly in the field of polemics. It took a good warm theological controversy to bring out whatever ironic fire smoldered within their sedate and placid exteriors. To illustrate this one need go no further than that freest and most daring of the New England ministers, Roger Williams, "a mighty and benignant form," as Moses Coit Tyler describes him, "always pleading for some magnanimous idea, some tender charity, the rectifi cation of some wrong, the exercise of some sort of forbearance toward men's

souls or bodies." Here was no provincial but a man in advance of his time, in modo as well as in re. It is a wellknown incident that when, in reply to his famous book, The Blood Tenet of Persecution, which is in the form of a dialog between Truth and Peace and is not without touches of humor as well as eloquence, John Cotton wrote his The Bloody Tenet of Persecution Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb, Williams responded in a kind of grim humor with his The Bloody Tenet of Persecution yet more Bloody by Mr. Cotton's Endeavor to Wash it White in the Blood of the Lamb. The greatest wit, however, among the New England divines, thinks Professor Parrington, who deals with these worthies in the Cambridge History of American Literature, was Nathaniel Ward of Ipswich, author of The Simple Cobbler of Agawam.

"Faithful disciple of Calvin tho he was, there was in him a rich sap of mind, which, fermented by long observation and much travel, made him the raciest of wits, and doubtless the most delightful of companions over a respectable Puritan battle. 'I have only two comforts to live upon,' Increase Mather reported him as saying; "The one is in the perfections of Christ; the other is in the imperfections of all Christians.'"

Effusions of intended humor appear in sorry profusion in the writings of some of the less able successors of the earlier Puritan parsons, notably in the effusive laudatory verse in which they condescendingly indulged with lamentable results-an aftermath of which appears in the New England "epitaphy." But parsons aside or included, much good evidence might be adduced to show that, closely as it had been cut down, and crude as were many of its shoots, the root of the matter was in these unspoiled men and women. It is true that their stern inhibition of play withered much of the tender herbage that would have gladdened

the lives of the young, and of the old as well, and relieved the terrible strain of life in those hard pioneer days.

Especially tragic was its absence in those barren years of the latter part of the seventeenth century, the period of the popularity of The Day of Doom, that dread outburst of the otherwise amiable Michael Wigglesworth, and of the witchcraft delusion. If only the witchcraft trials might have been touched by some sense of the ludicrous or punctured by an occasional hearty laugh the whole awful tragedy might have been dissipated and rolled away like fog before the genial rays of the sun. But the currents of mirth and good cheer had been too fatally chilled by the icy breath of a fanatical superseriousness.

No one can reasonably deny the sin-for it was that, plainly put in their own terms,-of the Puritan suppression of the God-given instinct for recreation. And yet I return to the assertion that the heroic excision of its abuses was the fons et origo of much of the finer playfulness and humor that have irradiated the later generations of the children of the Puritans. "Out of the strong cometh forth sweetness," tho the dead lion must lie for long in the purifying airs of heaven before he is fit for the housing of honey. As an example of the return of the springtime of mirth and cheer to the shorn and starved New England mind, one need only instance the family of that stanch latter day Puritan, Lyman Beecher, as Mr. Gamaliel Bradford has pictured it in his sketch of Harriet Beecher Stowe in a recent Atlantic. This is but one of many instances of the bitter waters of New England Puritanism becoming sweet. Should one ask a second instance, what more apt than that of Oliver Wendell Holmes, the sketch of whom in the Encyclopædia Britannica-that com

pendium of all excellencies save wit opens as follows:

"His father, Abiel Holmes, was a Calvinist clergyman, the writer of a useful history, Annals of America, and of much very dull poetry. His mother was Sarah Wendell, of a distinguished New York family. Through

her Dr. Holmes was descended from Governor Thomas Dudley and Simon Bradstreet of Massachusetts, and from her he derived his cheerfulness and vivacity, his sympathetic humor and wit."

Thomas Dudley, Simon Bradstreet

Sarah Wendell, Oliver Wendell Holmes! If a third example were wished, who more germane than Emerson, once more too wise not to be also witty, seven of whose ancestors were Puritan ministers; and for a fourth one may cite James Russell Lowell again, most a Yankee of all our humorists, son of a minister and grandson of John Lowell the orthodox first pastor of Newburyport. It might be said that these and other liberated spirits became witty and playful by reaction rather than by inheritance, and so in truth they did; only they had from their forbears. the native wit that could react-the sealed fountain which under a more genial sun melted and flowed in copi

ous streams.

It is true it took some time for the ice to thaw and for the New England conscience to get to functioning in a more normal direction. As Hosea Bigelow put it:

"Pleasure does make us Yankees kind o' winch

Ez tho it waz sumthin' paid for by the inch;
But yet we du contrive to worry through,
If dooty tells us thet's the thing to do
An' kerry a hollerday, ef we set out,
Ez stiddily ez tho 'twas a redoubt."

Here speaks the emancipated heir of the Puritans, possest of that fine trait of humor, the ability to see the peculiarities of his own kind. Yankee humor is surely sui generis and Lowell is its prophet. Yet not its only one. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table rises to dispute any such exclusive claim. Indeed in him there is perhaps even more of the pungency of the New England herbs, as Lowell himself detected, writing to Holmes:

"You know that odor of sweet herbs in the New England garret and will know what I mean when I say that I found it in your book.”♦

The Pilgrim Tercentenary is fraught with large possibilities in rebinding us to our heroic and sacred traditions. of this peculiarly sacred and sigIt will do us good, under the incentive nificant anniversary, to turn away for a little from our hothouse orchids and gorgeous roses, from our dahlias and poinsettias and chrysanthemums, to the sweet and simple New England herbs, that are still as full of fragrance and sincere delight as when those exiles for conscience's sake came upon them on the bleak shores of Plymouth and of Massachusetts Bay.

THE decision that Luke wrote the Acts does not necessarily show that the speeches in the book are authentic.' That question calls for special inquiry.

I. THE CUSTOM OF ANCIENT HIS

1 M. Jones, St. Paul the Orator, p. 9.

TORIANS: We have the example of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Livy, Josephus, Tacitus, Dio Cassius, to go no further. These writers record numerous speeches. Are they verbatim reports such as a

4

Letters, Volume II, p. 292.