CHAPTER VII. THE PURITAN AGE (1620-1660)
HISTORICAL SUMMARY
THE PURITAN MOVEMENT.In its broadest sense the Pu-
ritan movement may be regarded as a second and greater
Renaissance, a rebirth of the moral nature of man follow-
ing the intellectual awakening of Europe in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. In Italy, whose influence had been up-
permost in Elizabethan literature, the Renaissance had been
essentially pagan and sensuous. It had hardly touched the
moral nature of man, and it brought little relief from the
despotism of rulers. One can hardly read the horrible records
of the Medici or the Borgias, or the political observations
of Machiavelli, without marveling at the moral and politi-
cal degradation of a cultured nation. In the North, espe-
cially among the German and English peoples, the Renais-
sance was accompanied by a moral awakening, and it is pre-
cisely that awakening in England, "that greatest moral and
political reform which ever swept over a nation in the short
space of half a century," which is meant by the Puritan move-
ment. We shall understand it better if we remember that it
had two chief objects the first was personal righteousness;
the second was civil and religious liberty. In other words, it