But there was one outrage which they did not attempt. They made no attempt to forbid the fermented drinks which immemorial tradition and the example of Our Lord himself permitted to Christian men. It is true that they refused to drink healths, for the practice added ceremony to feasting and they held it to be a cause of intemperance. Beyond this they did not go. Incidentally it should be noted that when the Puritans ruled England none but fermented drinks were known. Tea, coffee, and chocolate were curiosities until after the Restoration. At all events, fermented drinks were the one form of social pleasure permitted to Englishmen under Puritan rule. In New England, Calvinism ran riot. In Europe it had been the creed of a minority living in the midst of nations firm in the traditions of Christendom. Therefore, while it had been bad enough in Europe, it had never felt itself omnipotent. In New England, on the contrary, Calvinism had isolated communities founded especially for its glorification, and the result was horrible. “Its records read like those of a madhouse where religious maniacs have broken loose and locked up their keepers. We hear of men stoned to death for kissing their wives on the Sabbath, of lovers pilloried or flogged at the cart’s tail for kissing each other at all without licence from the deacons, the whole culminating in a mad panic of wholesale demonism and witch-burning....”[41] The picture could be supplemented ad infinitum by a study of the town records of the New England Puritans. For the elaboration of it, one of their own descendants, Brooks Adams, has written a book, the “Emancipation of Massachusetts,” in which they hanged, gibbeted and damned for ever, and to that book I refer my readers who may be curious in the matter. They were appalling people. For the purposes of this study, the essential thing to remember is that the eighteenth century slackening of Puritan fervour in America was not death but sleep. Or, to use another metaphor, when its stream appeared to be drying up, it was still running strongly underground. Such a man as John Brown, with his savage and almost crazy fanaticism, would have been perfectly at home in Cromwell’s army, or with Praise-God-Barebones and his ilk.