Moreover, there had for some time been growing up into prominence a new class, which we now call the middle, and which had had no assigned position under the feudal form of society. In the Stuart period, this class was, for the first time, to impress its character deeply upon national affairs. The activities by which, during the preceding two centuries or more, its members had been gradually rising into their new position had given a marked quality to their minds and characters. Looked down upon by the noble, and disliked by the peasant, they returned these feelings with interest. When the noble disdained their birth and breeding, they in turn condemned the immorality of those above them in both. Again the element of negation entered, and the Puritan fostered an ideal which was the reverse of the lives of those who looked down upon him. Puritanism became the “reasoned expression of the middle-class state of mind,”[[189]] which it has always remained.
Among the leaders, however, as among the middle class and country gentry, there was a group which had a very great influence, not only upon the party in England, but upon colonization in America, and which will concern us more directly. We must now turn to examine the settlement of those two colonies in the New World which represented, in the main, the earlier religious, and the later economic and political, aspects of the English Puritan movement.
[150]. C. Burrage, The Early English Dissenters in the Light of Recent Research, 1550-1641 (Cambridge, 1912), vol. I, pp. 84, 93. Hinds, in The England of Elizabeth, p. 19, traces “the first whisper of that sound” to Calvin's letter of 1554.
[151]. Burrage, English Dissenters, vol. I, p. 34. Cf. E. Channing, History of the United States (New York, 1916), vol. I, p. 272 n.
[152]. Channing, History, vol. I, pp. 271 ff.; G. B. Tatham, The Puritans in Power (Cambridge, 1913), p. 2; and R. G. Usher, The Reconstruction of the English Church (New York, 1910), vol. I, pp. 244-46.
[153]. Lord Acton, Lectures on Modern History (London, 1907), p. 5.
[154]. Cf. Usher, Reconstruction, vol. I, p. 273
[155]. Burrage, English Dissenters, vol. I, p. 152.
[156]. “Unless we allow for the innate capacity of the human mind to entertain contradictory beliefs at the same time, we shall in vain attempt to understand the history of thought in general and of religion in particular.” J. G. Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris [The Golden Bough] (London, 1907), p. 5 n.