The weight of personal responsibility which rests upon the Puritan conception of life offers small play for the wantonness and spontaneity of childhood. Moreover, the theological substratum of Puritan morality denied to childhood any freedom, and kept the life of man in waiting upon the conscious turning of the soul to God. Hence childhood was a time of probation and suspense. It was wrong, to begin with, and was repressed in its nature until maturity should bring an active and conscious allegiance to God. Hence, also, parental anxiety was forever earnestly seeking to anticipate the maturity of age, and to secure for childhood that reasonable intellectual belief which it held to be essential to salvation; there followed often a replacement of free childhood by an abnormal development. In any event, the tendency of the system was to ignore childhood, to get rid of it as quickly as possible, and to make the state contain only self-conscious, determinate citizens of the kingdom of heaven. There was, unwittingly, a reversal of the divine message, and it was said in effect to children: Except ye become as grown men and be converted, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. Nevertheless, though Puritanism in its excessive anxiety may have robbed childhood of its freedom, the whole spirit of the movement was one conservative of family relations, and the narratives of domestic life under Puritanic control are often full of a grave sweetness. Indeed, it may almost be said that the domestic narrative was now born into English literature. Nor could the intense concern for the spiritual well-being of children, a religious passion reinforcing natural affection, fail to give an importance to the individual life of the family, and prepare the way for that new intelligence of the scope of childhood which was to come later to an England still largely dominated by Puritan ideas. Milton expressed the high flight of the soul above earthly things. He took his place upon a summit where he could show the soul all the confines of heaven and earth. Bunyan, stirred by like religious impulses, made his soul trudge sturdily along toward an earthly paradise. The realism of his story often veils successfully the spiritual sense, and makes it possible for children to read the Pilgrim’s Progress with but faint conception of its religious import. In the second part of the allegory, Christian’s wife and children set out on their ramble, in Christian’s footsteps. There is no lack of individuality in characterization of the persons. The children are distinctly conceived as children; they are, to be sure, made to conform occasionally to the demands of the spiritual side of the allegory, yet they remain children, and by their speech and action betray the childish mind.