PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 199
an England which is unmistakably modern emerges.
But, immense as were its accomplishments on the high
stage of public affairs, its achievements in that inner
world, of which politics are but the squalid scaffolding,
were mightier still. Like an iceberg, which can awe
the traveller by its towering majesty only because
sustained by a vaster mass which escapes his eye, the
revolution which Puritanism wrought in Church and
State was less than that which it worked in men's souls,
and the watchwords which it thundered, amid the hum
of Parliaments and the roar of battles, had been learned
in the lonely nights, when Jacob wrestled with the angel
of the Lord to wring a blessing before he fled.
We do it wrong, being so majestical
To offer it the show of violence,
In the mysticism of Bunyan and Fox, in the brooding
melancholy and glowing energy of Cromwell, in the
victorious tranquillity of Milton, " unshaken, unseduced,
unterrified," amid a world of self-seekers and apostates,
there are depths of light and darkness which posterity
can observe with reverence or with horror, but which
its small fathom-line cannot plumb.
There are types of character which are like a prism,
whose various and brilliant colours are but broken
reflections of a single ray of concentrated light. If
the inward and spiritual grace of Puritanism eludes the
historian, its outward and visible signs meet him at
every turn, and not less in market-place and counting-
house and camp, than in the student's chamber and the
gathering of the elect for prayer. For to the Puritan,
a contemner of the vain shows of sacramentalism,
mundane toil becomes itself a kind of sacrament. Like
a man who strives by unresting activity to exorcise a
haunting demon, the Puritan, in the effort to save his
own soul, sets in motion every force in heaven above
or in the earth beneath. By the mere energy of his
expanding spirit, he remakes, not only his own character