If those came who thought
differently about religion, they were told that there was sufficient room
elsewhere, in Rhode Island, for instance, whither Roger Williams went after
he was banished from Salem. The history of the Puritan clergy would have
been more pleasing had they been more tolerant, less narrow, more modern,
like Roger Williams. Yet perhaps it is best not to complain overmuch of the
strange and somewhat repellent architecture of the bridge which bore us
over the stream dividing the desert of royal and ecclesiastical tyranny
from the Promised Land of our Republic. Let us not forget that the clergy
insisted on popular education; that wherever there was a clergyman, there
was almost certain to be a school, even if he had to teach it himself, and
that the clergy generally spoke and acted as if they would rather be "free
among the dead than slaves among the living."
POETRY
The trend of Puritan theology and the hard conditions of life did not
encourage the production of poetry. The Puritans even wondered if singing
in church was not an exercise which turned the mind from God. The Rev. John
Cotton investigated the question carefully under four main heads and six
subheads, and he cited scriptural authority to show that Paul and Silas
(_Acts_, xvi.
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