Now be it known--such at least is our philosophy--the religious novelties of the age, on our side of the water, owe their being to the New-England spirit, and had their germ in puritanism. The straitness of this excellent sect was too strait to last always. Children, kept so close on Sunday as to run themselves out of breath when let loose at sun-down, were very likely to relax that kind of discipline when they came to be parents. The blue-laws of Connecticut, once thrown off, were naturally supplanted by a more generous code. The Saybrook Platform has been thrown into the garret, or buried beneath the wreck and dust of some other deposit of old rubbish. Who can find a copy? And as for the Westminster Catechism, what pastor of New-England now assembles the children of his parish in the old school-house once a quarter to hear them recite this elaborate and comprehensive body of divinity, from beginning to end, as was the universal custom of olden time? These blessed days of New-England have gone by. The fathers are dead. A new generation, new laws, new customs, and a different set of manners, have succeeded. But how did this grow out of puritanism? Is it not rather an abandonment of that high character? There may be a little, and not a little, of truth in both. Puritanism was itself a novelty, and novelty begets novelty. We do not mean that it never had a type; but it was cast in an English mould--a mould that was formed at a particular juncture of English history, by the operation of special and peculiar agencies; and even on English ground, it could last in all its force only while the causes which produced it continued to take effect, and just in that proportion, allowing, indeed, a reasonable time for its natural subsidence. In America, the causes did not exist, and the subsidence was unavoidable. It was indeed a high and stern character, which would require a space for its abatement into milder forms; but it was not in man to maintain it without its original provocations.