Such unworthy persons doubtless swelled the mass of uncovenanted. Yet the historian is apt to think that for many, honest and good men enough, the cold inner temple of the ideal commonwealth must have proved more forbidding than its wind-swept outer courts. To enter its portals was an ordeal which the average man will not readily undergo, involving, as an initial procedure, a confession of faults and a profession of faith, a public revelation of inner spiritual condition, an exposure of soul to the searching and curious inspection of the sanctified. And the covenant itself was found to be no warmed and cloistered retreat, secure from the rude impact and impertinent gaze of the world. Quite the contrary! To enter the covenant was to renounce all private spiritual possessions, to give one's intimate convictions into the keeping of others, to subscribe to a very communism of the emotional life. This un-Roman Church was after all but a public confessional, in which every brother was a confessor, and life itself a penance for constructive sin. The soul that is constantly exposed grows callous or diseased; and the New England covenant provided a regimen well suited to repel the normal mind or induce in its patients a fatal spiritual anaemia. And with every decade the house of the covenant became at once more difficult to enter and less comfortable to abide in. The Puritan was not necessarily a sad or solemn person. Yet the light heart and the merry mind were not the salient characteristics even of the cheerful Winthrop or the genial Cotton; while the conditions of life in the wilderness--the unrelieved round of exacting labor, the ever present danger from the lurking Indians, the long cold winters with their certain harvest of death from diseases which could be ascribed only to the will of God and met with resignation instead of skill, the succession of funerals as depressing as they were public and pervading--were well calculated to deepen the somber cast of the Puritan temper and accentuate the critical and introspective tendency of his mind. Inspection of one's own and one's neighbor's conduct was, indeed, always a Puritan duty; shut within the restricted horizon of a New England village, it became a necessity and almost a pleasure. When few stirring events diverted thought from the petty and the personal, when pent-up emotion found little outlet in the graces or amusements of social intercourse, observation and introspection fastened upon the minutiae of life and every eccentricity of speech and conduct was weighed and assessed. Close espionage on conduct was matched by the careful scrutiny accorded every novel opinion. When the weekly sermon was the universal topic of conversation, the refinements of belief were more discussed than essentials; often discussed, they were often questioned--by strict Separatists like Roger Williams; by cavilers at infant baptism like that "anciently religious woman," the Lady Deborah