UNDER DISPUTE BY AGNES REPPLIER, LITT.D. AUTHOR OF “POINTS OF FRICTION,” “COMPROMISES,” “COUNTER-CURRENTS,” ETC. [Illustration] BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1924 COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY AGNES REPPLIER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. Note Five of the twelve essays in this volume, “To Counsel the Doubtful,” “The Happiness of Writing an Autobiography,” “The Divineness of Discontent,” “Strayed Sympathies,” and “The Battlefield of Education,” are reprinted through the courtesy of _The Atlantic Monthly_; four of them, “The Masterful Puritan,” “Are Americans a Timid People?” “Allies,” and “The American Laughs,” through the courtesy of _The Yale Review_; “The Preacher at Large,” through the courtesy of _The Century Magazine_; “They Had Their Day,” through the courtesy of _Harper’s Magazine_; “The Idolatrous Dog,” through the courtesy of _The Forum_. Contents The Masterful Puritan 1 To Counsel the Doubtful 31 Are Americans a Timid People? 58 The Happiness of Writing an Autobiography 88 Strayed Sympathies 119 The Divineness of Discontent 148 Allies 178 They Had Their Day 203 The Preacher at Large 233 The Battlefield of Education 258 The American Laughs 286 The Idolatrous Dog 312 UNDER DISPUTE The Masterful Puritan When William Chillingworth, preaching at Oxford in the first year of England’s Civil War, defined the Cavaliers as publicans and sinners, and the Puritans as Scribes and Pharisees, he expressed the reasonable irritation of a scholar who had no taste or aptitude for polemics, yet who had been blown about all his life by every wind of doctrine. Those were uneasy years for men who loved moderation in everything, and who found it in nothing. It is not from such that we can hope for insight into emotions from which they were exempt, and purposes to which they held no clue.