Under dispute

BY AGNES REPPLIER, Litt.D. AUTHOR OF “POINTS OF FRICTION,” “COMPROMISES,” “COUNTER-CURRENTS,” ETC.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1924
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY AGNES REPPLIER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
Five of the twelve essays in this volume, “To Counsel the Doubtful,” “The Happiness of Writing an Autobiography,” “The Divineness of Discontent,” “Strayed Sympathies,” and “The Battlefield of Education,” are reprinted through the courtesy of The Atlantic Monthly ; four of them, “The Masterful Puritan,” “Are Americans a Timid People?” “Allies,” and “The American Laughs,” through the courtesy of The Yale Review ; “The Preacher at Large,” through the courtesy of The Century Magazine ; “They Had Their Day,” through the courtesy of Harper’s Magazine ; “The Idolatrous Dog,” through the courtesy of The Forum .
UNDER DISPUTE
When William Chillingworth, preaching at Oxford in the first year of England’s Civil War, defined the Cavaliers as publicans and sinners, and the Puritans as Scribes and Pharisees, he expressed the reasonable irritation of a scholar who had no taste or aptitude for polemics, yet who had been blown about all his life by every wind of doctrine. Those were uneasy years for men who loved moderation in everything, and who found it in nothing. It is not from such that we can hope for insight into emotions from which they were exempt, and purposes to which they held no clue.
In our day it is generously conceded that the Puritans made admirable ancestors. We pay them this handsome compliment in after-dinner speeches at all commemorative meetings. Just what they would have thought of their descendants is an unprofitable speculation. Three hundred years divide us from those stern enthusiasts who, coveting lofty things, found no price too high to pay for them. “It is not with us as with men whom small matters can discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again,” wrote William Brewster, when one half of the Mayflower Pilgrims had died in the first terrible year, and no gleam of hope shone on the survivors. To perish of hunger and cold is not what we should now call a “small discontentment.” To most of us it would seem a good and sufficient reason for abandoning any enterprise whatsoever. Perhaps if we would fix our attention upon a single detail—the fact that for four years the Plymouth colonists did not own a cow—we should better understand what life was like in that harsh wilderness, where children who could not get along without milk had but one other alternative—to die.