Thus the Puritans were made up of two different men, the one all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion, the other proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in the dust before his Maker: but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his devotional retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans, and tears. He was half maddened by glorious or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres of angels or the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught a gleam of the Beatific Vision, or woke screaming from dreams of everlasting fire. Like Vane, he thought himself intrusted with the sceptre of the millienial year. Like Fleetwood he cried in the bitterness of his soul that God had hid his face from him. But when he took his seat in the council, or girt on his sword for war, these tempestuous works of the soul had left no perceptible trace behind them.
People who saw nothing of the godly but their uncouth visages, and heard nothing from them but their groans and their whining hymns, might laugh at them. But those had little reason to laugh who encountered them in the hall of debate or in the field of battle. These fanatics brought to civil affairs a coolness of judgment and an immutability of purpose which some writers have thought inconsistent with their religious zeal, but which were in fact the necessary effects of it. The intensity of their feelings on one subject made them tranquil on every other. One overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself pity and hatred, ambition and fear. Death had lost its terrors, and pleasure its charms.
They had their smiles and their tears, their raptures and their sorrows, but not for the things of this world. Enthusiasm had made them Stoics, had cleared their minds from every vulgar passion and prejudice, and raised them above the influence of danger and of corruption. It sometimes might lead them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means. They went through the world like Sir Artegal's iron man Talus with his flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with human beings, but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities, insensible to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain, not to be pierced by any weapon, not to be withstood by aһ barrier.
Such we believe to have been the character of the Puritans. We perceive the absurdity of their manners. We dislike the sullen gloom of their domestic habits. We acknowledge that the tone of their minds was often injured by straining after things too high for mortal reach: and we know that, in spite of their hatred of Popery, they too often fell into the worst vices of that bad system, intolerance and extravagant austerity, that they had their anchorites and their crusades, their Dunstans and their De Montforts, their Dominics and their Escobars. Yet, when all circumstances are taken into consideration, we do not hesitate to pronounce them a brave, a wise, an honest, and a useful body.
Notes.
The most casual examination of Macaulay's style shows us that the words, the sentences, and the paragraphs are all arranged in rows, one on this side, one on that, a column here, another just like it over there, a whole row of columns above this window, and a whole row of columns above that window, just as bricks are built up in geometrical design. Almost every word contains an antithesis. The whole constitutes what is called the balanced structure.
We see also that Macaulay frequently repeats the same word again and again, and the repetition gives strength. Indeed, repetition is necessary to make this balanced structure: there must always be so much likeness and so much unlikeness—and the likeness and unlikeness must just balance.
We have shown the utility of variation: Macaulay shows the force there is in monotony, in repetition. In one sentence after another through an entire paragraph he repeats the same thing over and over and over. There is no rising by step after step to something higher in Macaulay: everything is on the dead level; but it is a powerful, heroic level.
The first words repeated and contrasted are press and stage. The sentence containing these words is balanced nicely. In the following sentence we have four short sentences united into one, and the first clause contrasts with the second and the third with the fourth. The sentence beginning “The ostentatious simplicity of their dress” gives us a whole series of subjects, all resting on a single short predicate—“were fair game for the laughers.” The next sentence catches up the, word “laughers” and plays upon it.
In the second paragraph we have as subject “those” followed by a whole series of relative clauses beginning with “who,” and this series again rests on a very short predicate—“were no vulgar fanatics.”