Let it not be supposed that the doctrinal Puritans in Stuart times were perpetually preaching, or writing on doctrinal subjects; or that they had the least sympathy with the sectaries. Thomas Adams is an eminent doctrinal Puritan of that age, but no sermons can be more eminently practical than his; they are the furthest removed from Antinomian tendencies. He is ever combating the vices around him, and insisting upon a solid scriptural morality; whilst his allusions to Brownists are caustic enough to have satisfied, in that respect, the taste of the most decided Anglican. Puritanism was not so much a creed, or a code, as a life. Though a reaction, the movement was no superficial phenomenon thrown up by the chafing together of obstinate minds on opposite sides. The causes were some of them ancient, and all of them deep. It is possible even that peculiarities of race and blood might have somewhat to do with the strong sympathies of the middle and lower classes, in a simple and unostentatious kind of religious worship. The plain and sturdy nature of the Anglo-Saxon was still pure, in a multitude of cases, from Norman admixture in those ranks of society where Puritanism most prevailed; and the Anglo-Saxon had ever shown himself unfriendly to that ecclesiastical pomp of architecture and glittering ritual which delighted the Norman. Traditional opinions and sentiments, opposed to the spirit of Romanism, had been handed down through the middle ages, from one generation to another of the English commonalty in their homesteads and cottages; and, probably, as those opinions and sentiments had contributed to the outbursts of Lollardism, and helped on the cause of the Reformation, so also they ministered to the later development of principles, proceeding further in the same direction. Beyond all doubt, the Puritan under James was the religious son and heir of the reformer under Elizabeth; he inherited, and expressed more boldly and more truly, his father's spirit. Puritanism came only as the second stage in a progress of which the Reformation was the first. Such an impulse as Protestantism could not be resisted--set, as it was from the beginning, decidedly in the direction of change beyond what the compromise under the Tudors allowed. The pent-up waters of Protestantism found a vent through Puritanism. Besides, the persecutions under Mary rendered Rome more hateful to Englishmen during the last half of the sixteenth century than during the first; the children who heard of the Smithfield fires were more exasperated even than the parents who saw them, and they hated with a bitter hatred everything in the Church which, in their opinion, pointed Romewards. The Puritan reaction against Popery is to be regarded as also aided by its alliance with the reactions, moral and political, against despotism; freedom appeared to the Puritan not merely as something expedient, and to be desired for temporal ends, but as a heaven-born