To bring the churches of God in the three kingdoms to uniformity in religion and government, to preserve the rights of Parliament and the liberties of the Kingdom; ... that we and our posterity may as brethren live in faith and love, and the Lord may delight to live in the midst of us.

In this famous Covenant we see the national, the ecclesiastical, and the personal dream of Puritanism, side by side, in all their grandeur and simplicity.

Years passed, years of bitter struggle and heartache, before the impossibility of uniting the various Protestant sects was generally recognized.  The ideal of a national church died hard, and to its death is due all the religious unrest of the period.  Only as we remember the national ideal, and the struggle which it caused, can we understand the amazing life and work of Bunyan, or appreciate the heroic spirit of the American colonists who left home for a wilderness in order to give the new ideal of a free church in a free state its practical demonstration.

LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS.  In literature also the Puritan Age was one of confusion, due to the breaking up of old ideals.  Mediaeval standards of chivalry, the impossible loves and romances of which Spenser furnished the types, perished no less surely than the ideal of a national church; and in the absence of any fixed standard of literary criticism there was nothing to prevent the exaggeration of the “metaphysical” poets, who are the literary parallels to religious sects like the Anabaptists.  Poetry took new and startling forms in Donne and Herbert, and prose became as somber as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.  The spiritual gloom which sooner or later fastens upon all the writers of this age, and which is unjustly attributed to Puritan influence, is due to the breaking up of accepted standards in government and religion.  No people, from the Greeks to those of our own day, have suffered the loss of old ideals without causing its writers to cry, “Ichabod! the glory has departed.”  That is the unconscious tendency of literary men in all times, who look backward for their golden age; and it need not concern the student of literature, who, even in the break-up of cherished institutions, looks for some foregleams of a better light which is to break upon the world.  This so-called gloomy age produced some minor poems of exquisite workmanship, and one great master of verse whose work would glorify any age or people,—­John Milton, in whom the indomitable Puritan spirit finds its noblest expression.

There are three main characteristics in which Puritan literature differs from that of the preceding age:  (1) Elizabethan literature, with all its diversity, had a marked unity in spirit, resulting from the patriotism of all classes and their devotion to a queen who, with all her faults, sought first the nation’s welfare.  Under the Stuarts all this was changed.  The kings were the open enemies of the people; the