Puritanism was cradled among small traders, conscious of their virtues, but socially ill at ease. It at once became terribly at ease in the courts of Zion. It began with a retail outlook, and it soon politicised its creed. It became eminently republican, nor was it ever democratic. Instinctively counter to all forms, whether “temporal” or “spiritual,” it aimed at the destruction both of Monarchy and the Church, and yet it set up an exclusiveness of its own. The Jewish Theocracy had, as I have pointed out, broken down even under that monarchical shape which suited it, just because its outward _State_ apparatus was mechanical and out of touch with the development of national life. The finer spirits of Puritanism--and they were very fine--had these features to reckon with. Cromwell, like Savonarola, compassed an impracticable solecism. He desired a Republican Theocracy. His scheme only chimed with that of the Church which he sought to ruin in this, that he too wished religion to be nationally organised--to be political. But the result was an intolerant fanaticism of mutually persecuting sects, and a Parliamentary censorship of morals which cramped, nay, imprisoned self-developing virtue, confounded holiness with austerity, and furnished the best argument for a “national Church.” Milton, who tempered the Puritanic fire with the Renaissance light, who, in his youth, was a worshipper of the subdued loveliness of the Church and “her dim, religious light,” came to regard our national Church as merely, in his own phrase, “an anti-papal schism.” Like Cromwell, he longed to destroy it.