The advent of the light-hearted Cavaliers in England, flinging colour and warmth and gaiety over the land, was a sharp recoil from the drab severity of Puritan rule. The Puritans were men of strong personality: half soldiers and half preachers. They were honest without charm; strong-minded without pose; mighty in conscience, but mean in heart qualities. They were clean livers, but as they aged their visage grew hard and sour as unripe fruit, and their geniality of temper withered like a winter apple. They forgot to smile; the solemnities of life crushed them. They were grave and sagacious citizens lacking vivacity and humour, with plenty of flavour, but no sweetness. They dreamed of invisible kingdoms and fought for eternal verities. They command our admiration, but do not win our love. Their God was of the best theology mechanically constructed at Geneva by John Calvin, built up in parts composed of Righteousness, Justice, Holiness. Beauty was barred as a Divine attribute. The dismal meeting-house where they worshipped was the whitewashed prison in which the captured Deity dwelt. The burning light of this dread Presence enraptured the elect souls and intimidated the uncovenanted and graceless sinners, while the vast multitude of the nation held aloof, dreading contact with a religion so fierce and yet so gloomy, and they waited patiently through the shivering night of Roundhead rule, like watchmen on the city walls, for the coming of the king to set English homes once again humming with joy. These two strong currents of life--Self-denial and Enjoyment--are flowing side by side in our midst to-day, dividing men in thought and purpose, driving men into open collision, only to relax their strangle-hold on one another to get firmer grip and fight again another day. These two different ideals of life represent two antagonistic sides of a man’s nature that clash with each other, and the man has a stand-up fight with himself, which is an experience fiery temperaments often plunge into. Each side carries a half-truth and half an error. Blend the two half-truths into an intimate and harmonious whole and sink the errors into the bottomless pit from whence they came, and you discover human nature touching its highest and ripest form, approaching the Christlike in character, which combines the two elements in true and everlasting union.