New Thoughts on the Puritan Conscience

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

It has been such a delight to have a new thought on this subject that I feel I must not eat my morsel alone. It has only recently come to me, and I have not gotten quite used to it myself. Perhaps some one will help me. At times it fills me with joy as almost too good to be true; in other moments I do not feel quite able to support the weight of the discovery. Whenever during all these years my conscience has become insupportably disagreeable it has always been a relief to me to throw the blame of it upon the Puritans, and hope that when we had gotten a little farther away from them such things would become impossible. I tried to think of it all as a piece of atavism and that I should get over it. What brought me up with a sharp turn was to find what an unconscionably long time it took for the Puritan power in me to get on the wane. It is now some thirty years, nearly a generation, and long enough for anything merely provincial to show signs of wear if it were ever going to, and yet it is as lively and as uncomfortable as ever.

Of late a suspicion, half joyous and half sad as I have intimated, has come over me that perhaps it was not the Puritan conscience at all. I have felt just the possibility of the Puritan, living in the enlightened state above, doing what I never used to think a Puritan could do, laughing, laughing in his sleeve at us, and wondering how long it would take us witty people to realize that it was not his conscience we had gotten hold of but our own.

Ah, that Puritan conscience! Would that it were Puritan, indeed! I could stand its slings and arrows well enough, but one sign and another warns me that it has lasted too long for any reasonable person to lay it to the Puritan any longer, and that it is ours, our very own, gotten not from him, but from the same place from which he got it, and that whether we like it or not we must get used to the situation. We can call it all the bad names we like, but it has come to stay.

Providence has broken the truth to us gently. For two hundred years we were allowed to meet together and discuss the matter, and act as if it were not really ours, while all the time we were being accustomed to it. The time has come for us to own up to it. Instead of berating the Puritan henceforth, or admiring him unduly, I shall have to think of him in a brotherly sort of way as having had the same trouble that I have had, or, in more jubilant moments, think of myself as just as good as he was, and stay away from dinners founded on the delusion that conscience was his specialty.

It has been such a comfort to me to think that the Puritan was provincial. It is hard to have one of my stoutest beliefs thus rudely questioned. I fear the fact is that he did not begin to be as provincial as could be desired, but rather that he had run plump up against some enormous spiritual laws, that he could not escape them and did not try to, but took what little comfort there was to be had out of the situation by acting more or less as if he had made the laws himself. It was probably better so; a slight sense of ownership being, on the whole, rather necessary, and no harm done by it. We can call the laws what we please so long as we obey them. Nowadays most people seem to prefer to call them universal, when what they mean is God; or Puritan, which takes the edge off them for a little, until we realize down deep that they are ours just as much as the Puritans’. Why not give them credit for their youth, and admit once for all their depressing contemporaneousness ?

I see the transfigured Puritan floating off on his cloud. Not the kind of Puritan we put up in the parks in bronze or talk about at dinners, but a soberly cheerful figure with just the suspicion of a wink in his eye, as, receding forever, he seems saying to me: “It was n’t our conscience at all. We did n’t like it any better than you do. It is yours; it is everybody’s. It will crop up everywhere. If it has helped humanity to call it ours for a century or two, we are glad to have been of service in breaking it to you more gently than it was ever broken to us. We have been at your dinners and outlaughed you all, wondering when you would wake up and see where the real laugh came in. If we can be of further help, command us, but we foresee a swiftly coming time when we shall no longer be of use to you. Farewell.”