The providential preparations for this great enterprise--"the Holy Experiment," as Penn delighted to call it--had been visibly in progress in England for not more than the third part of a century. It was not the less divine for being wholly logical and natural, that, just when the Puritan Reformation culminated in the victory of the Commonwealth, the Quaker Reformation should suddenly break forth. Puritanism was the last expression of that appeal from the church to the Scriptures, from existing traditions of Christianity to its authentic original documents, which is the essence of Protestantism. In Puritanism, reverence for the Scriptures is exaggerated to the point of superstition. The doctrine that God of old had spoken by holy men was supplemented by the pretension that God had long ago ceased so to speak and never would so speak again. The claim that the Scriptures contain a sufficient guide to moral duty and religious truth was exorbitantly stretched to include the last details of church organization and worship, and the minute direction of political and other secular affairs. In many a case the Scriptures thus applied did highly ennoble the polity and legislation of the Puritans.[113:1] In other cases, not a few, the Scriptures, perverted from their true purpose and wrested by a vicious and conceited exegesis, were brought into collision with the law written on the heart. The Bible was used to contradict the moral sense. It was high time for the Quaker protest, and it was inevitable that this protest should be extravagant and violent.