What Were the Original Puritans Like?
I serve a precise God. – RICHARD ROGERS Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” So said a modern debunker of the Puritans. But a contemporary of William Tyndale, often considered the first Puritan, gave exactly the opposite assessment. Thomas More, the great Catholic, found the Protestant religion of Tyndale overly indulgent. He described its adherents as people who “loved no lenten fast” but instead “eat fast and drink fast and lust fast in their lechery.” Their theology, according to More, erred in the direction of making the Christian life too easy: “I could for my part be very well content that sin and pain and all were as shortly gone as Tyndale telleth us: but I am loathe that he deceived us.” Puritanism, we are told today, “damages the human soul, renders it hard and gloomy, deprives it of sunshine and happiness.” This charge would have come as quite a surprise to the Quaker George Fox, a contemporary of the Puritans who despised their “ribbons an
