Yet with, all their virtues, with all their sublime heroism, was blended an inordinate, morbid selfishness. Shut in within their little republic from all Communion with the outer world, lacking the healthful influences of conflicting ideas and that moral attrition which polishes the cosmopolitan man, enlarging his views of life and giving broader scope as well to the active energies of the soul as to the kinder sympathies and benevolent sensibilities of the heart, this little community became more set in their traditional opinions, and gradually imbibed a hearty contempt for all beyond the pale of their own religious belief, which soon extended to all without the bounds which circumscribed their narrow settlements. Living alike, thinking alike, feeling alike, placing under solemn ban all speculations in religion, and even all research into the deeper mysteries of natural science, grinding with iron heel the very germ of intellectual progress, in their blind presumption they would have closed the doors of heaven itself upon all mankind save the called and elected of the Puritan faith. This intellectual life was one of mere abstractions, and as a natural consequence all their thoughts and emotions, their joys and sorrows, their loves and hatreds, became morbid to the last degree. But the bent bow will seek release; the reaction came at last, and the astonishing mental progress of the New England of to-day, the wild speculation upon all questions of morals and religion, rivalling in their daring scope the most impious theories of the German metaphysicians, which our New England fosters and sustains, and above all, the proverbial trickery of the Yankee race, are but the reaction of the stern and gloomy tenets of that olden time which would have made of our earth a charnel house crowded with mouldering bones.