The essence of Puritanism, however, was not its
dogmas, but its strenuous earnestness, its exaltation of self-denial,
and its distrust of the guidance of the senses.
The original Puritans made their religion satisfy their aesthetic
sense, even while they were insisting upon the virtue of starving that
part of their nature. To believe literally and with a realizing sense
of its meaning the creed of Calvin, would have been impossible without
madness to any nature short of the incarnate inhumanity of a Jonathan
Edwards. The aesthetic sense of humanity demands that the imagination
shall be nourished; and the imagination is fed by receiving things as
only ideally true. The Puritans were right in declaring that art was
hostile to religion as they conceived it; but they failed to perceive
that this hostility arose from the fact that the acceptance of their
theology was only possible in virtue of the very faculties to which art
appealed. They were obliged to deprive the imagination of its natural
food, in order that it should be forced to feed upon that the
assimilation of which they conceived to be a moral obligation. It may,
at first sight, seem a bold assertion that our Puritan ancestors
believed their creed, however unconsciously, simply in the sense in
which we believe in the bravery of the heroes of Homer or in the loves
and sorrows of the heroines of Shakespeare.
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