Opposition was therefore but fuel to the Puritan flame. Every persecution of society or obstacle of nature encountered in the endeavor to withdraw from the world was a confirmation of its corruption, a device of the devil to tempt him astray, or God's wise method of testing his faith. To persevere was the very proof of his election, the sure evidence of right thinking. The doctrine of eternal torment in hell, said Jonathan Edwards, used to appear "like a horrible doctrine to me. I remember very well when I seemed convinced, and fully satisfied, but never could give an account how, or by what means I was thus convinced." The very painfulness of the idea was doubtless what induced him to accept it. It was not the truth of the doctrine convincing his intellect, but the discipline of the will involved in vanquishing the horror of it, that gave him peace; so that in the end it seemed to him, not so much true, but "exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet." St. Augustine furnished us one of the keys to Puritanism when he said: "No man loves what he endures, but he may love to endure." The Puritan loved to endure. To expect resistance and to meet it unmoved; to welcome calumny and reviling with a steadfast mind; to transform a hostile verdict of the majority into an unconscious award of merit:--such was the Puritan temper in its most distinguished representatives. III In England the Puritan temper was given its effective edge during the latter years of Elizabeth and the reigns of the first Stuarts. The Armada was scarcely destroyed before the queen assumed a less complaisant attitude toward dissent. James I warned the clergy at Hampden Court that he would make them conform or harry them out of the land. The third decade of the century witnessed the triumph of Anti-Christ on every hand: in Germany the success of imperial arms was crowned by the Edict of Restitution; with the capture of Rochelle, the Huguenots in France lost their towns of refuge and found themselves at the mercy of the state; and in England itself the first Charles, more absolutist and more Catholic than his father, was thought to aim at nothing less than the ruin of Parliament and the restoration of the Roman religion. Under the stress of opposition there was accordingly a marked accentuation of the Puritan and the Separatist spirit. To Nonconformist and Independent alike the truth became more clear the more it was traduced and maligned. Year by year there was a deepening sense of being in the world but not of it; and to those who were already spiritual exiles, the idea of removing to America came to seem but the outward expression of an inner fact: "All the churches of Europe have been brought under desolation; it maybe feared that the like judgements are coming upon us; and who knows but God hath provided this place to be a refuge for many, whom he meanes to save out of the generall callamitie."