If we would know what the Puritan spirit really is, we must observe the Puritan when he is dominant.

He was dominant here in the last generation; and his little finger was thicker than the loins of the prelates.

He drove hundreds of quiet students from their cloisters, and thousands of respectable divines from their parsonages, for the crime of refusing to sign his Covenant.

No tenderness was shown to learning, to genius or to sanctity.

Such men as Hall and Sanderson, Chillingworth and Hammond, were not only plundered, but flung into prisons, and exposed to all the rudeness of brutal gaolers.