But the heart will not be perpetually repressed; kept from natural pleasures, it will seek supernatural delights. Men were certain sooner or later to soften the iron rigidity of Puritanism by cultivating those subjective joys for which Calvinism provided abundant materials. While preachers like Hooker were scourging the soul into a self-abasement that could approve its own damnation, and while ingenious scribes were amassing additional burdens of scruple for heavy-laden shoulders, there arose in England a new school of Puritan pietists. These shirked none of the requirements of the legalists, but their spirits sought the sunnier nooks of Calvinism, and they preached the joy of the elect and the delight of a fully assured faith. Cotton, whose fair complexion, brown hair, and ruddy countenance attested a sanguine temperament, belonged by nature to this new order. He rejoiced that he had received the "witness of the Spirit" on his wedding day, and he delighted to draw out Scripture imagery to a surprising tenuity in describing the "covenant of marriage" and the intimacy of the "covenant of salt" or of friendship between God and the soul of the believer. Preachers of the same sort brought relief to multitudes in various towns of England. The people, tired of churchly routine on the one hand and of legalism on the other, thronged to hear such divines "filling the doores and windows." It was the evangelicalism of the following century sending up its shoots prematurely into a frosty air. The old-fashioned Puritan had always conceived of religion as difficult of attainment. It was a paradoxical system wherein men were saved by the works they theoretically abjured. Conservative Puritans complained of the preachers who spread a table of "dainties," as though it were meritorious to sustain the soul on a rugged diet of rough doctrine. In Thomas Shepard's Memoirs of his own Life we may overhear "a godly company" of the time in familiar "discourse about the wrath of God and the terror of it, and how intolerable it was; which they did present by fire, how intolerable the torment of that was for a time; what, then, would eternity be?" XIV. [Sidenote: Cotton's revivalism.] [Sidenote: Winthrop's Journal, i, 144.] [Sidenote: Report of Record Com. ii, 5. Boston Town Records, 1635. Hutchinson Papers, p. 88.]