"Though every where in New England the greatest possible decency and respect with regard to morals and religion is still observed, I have no hesitation in saying that I do not think the New Englanders a _religious_ people. The assertion, I know, is paradoxical, but it is nevertheless true, that is, if a strong and earnest belief be a necessary element in a religious character: to me it seems to be its very essence and foundation. I am not now speaking of belief in _the truth_, but belief in something or any thing which is removed from the action of the senses.... I am not trusting to my own limited observation in arriving at this conclusion; I find in M. de Tocqueville's work an assertion of the same fact. He accounts for it, indeed, in a different way.... What I complain of is, not the absence of nominal, but of real, heartfelt, unearthly religion, such as led the Puritan Nonconformists to sacrifice country and kindred, and brave the dangers of the ocean and the wilderness for the sake of what they believed God's truth. In my opinion, those men were prejudiced and mistaken, and committed great and grievous faults; but there was, at least, a redeeming element in their character--that of high conscientiousness. There was no compromise of truth, no sacrifice to expediency about them; they believed in the invisible, and they acted on that belief. Every where the tone of religious feeling, since that time, has been altered and relaxed, but perhaps nowhere so much as in the land where the descendants of those Pilgrims lived."--Godley's _Letters from America_, vol. ii., p. 90, 133.] [Footnote 339: "The arbitrary will of the single tyrant, the excesses of the prerogative, seem light when compared with their (the Puritans') more intolerant, more arbitrary, and more absolute power."--_Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles I._, vol. iii., p. 28, by I. D'Israeli. London, 1830.]