Puritanism found _such_ forms insupportable; trampled on such forms;--we have to excuse it for saying, No form at all rather than such! It stood preaching in its bare pulpit, with nothing but the Bible in its hand. Nay, a man preaching from his earnest _soul_ into the earnest _souls_ of men: is not this virtually the essence of all Churches whatsoever? The nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is preferable to any semblance, however dignified. Besides, it will clothe itself with _due_ semblance by and by, if it be real. No fear of that; actually no fear at all. Given the living _man_, there will be found _clothes_ for him; he will find himself clothes. But the suit-of-clothes pretending that _it_ is both clothes and man--! We cannot "fight the French" by three hundred thousand red uniforms; there must be _men_ in the inside of them! Semblance, I assert, must actually _not_ divorce itself from Reality. If Semblance do,--why then there must be men found to rebel against Semblance, for it has become a lie! These two Antagonisms at war here, in the case of Laud and the Puritans, are as old nearly as the world. They went to fierce battle over England in that age; and fought out their confused controversy to a certain length, with many results for all of us. In the age which directly followed that of the Puritans, their cause or themselves were little likely to have justice done them. Charles Second and his Rochesters were not the kind of men you would set to judge what the worth or meaning of such men might have been. That there could be any faith or truth in the life of a man, was what these poor Rochesters, and the age they ushered in, had forgotten. Puritanism was hung on gibbets,--like the bones of the leading Puritans. Its work nevertheless went on accomplishing itself. All true work of a man, hang the author of it on what gibbet you like, must and will accomplish itself. We have our _Habeas-Corpus_, our free Representation of the People; acknowledgment, wide as the world, that all men are, or else must, shall, and will become, what we call _free_ men;--men with their life grounded on reality and justice, not on tradition, which has become unjust and a chimera! This in part, and much besides this, was the work of the Puritans.