It was no sin in Virginia to dance and play the fiddle; the Anglican Church, while prescribing a formal creed, did not concern itself to inquire every Sunday, or every Thursday, into all the dogmatic abstractions of the Westminster Assembly’s Catechism, longer or shorter; men’s minds were left to take the course most natural to them. But in New England, along with much acute speculation (the best type of which is Jonathan Edwards), there went a morbid conscientiousness, turning its eyes upon inward and even petty matters, and leading to numberless quarrels about Original Sin, Half-way Covenants, Justification by Faith, etc. Concord was less infested by this carping, persecuting, quarrelsome spirit than most of New England; yet the church records, and the collections of old Dr. Ripley, show there was much of it. Emerson declares, and justly, that good sense has marked our town annals: “I find no ridiculous laws, no eaves-dropping legislators, no hanging of witches, no ghosts, no whipping of Quakers, no unnatural crimes.” But the spirit which led to these mischiefs in other regions of Massachusetts and Connecticut was all about us; and it narrowed the minds and the opportunities of Concord before the Revolution. It was chiefly in New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont, where ecclesiastical domination was less rigid, that mental freedom manifested itself. In the other colonies of the North, wealth and culture were apt to be on the side of England, when our troubles began; in Virginia and the Carolinas, and to some extent in New Hampshire and Maine, wealth took the colonial side. We may call the imaginative force and [Illustration: A. BRONSON ALCOTT. (1875.)]