He picks out the most favorable specimen he can find,--Colonel
Hutchinson,[475] whose well-known memoirs, written by his widow, we have
all read with interest. "Lucy Hutchinson," says Mr. Goldwin Smith, "is
painting what she thought a perfect Puritan would be; and her picture
presents to us not a coarse, crop-eared, and snuffling fanatic, but a
highly accomplished, refined, gallant, and most amiable, though
religious and seriously minded, gentleman." Let us, I say, in this
example of Mr. Goldwin Smith's own choosing, lay our finger upon the
points where this type deflects from the truly humane ideal.
Mrs. Hutchinson relates a story which gives us a good notion of what the
amiable and accomplished social intercourse, even of a picked Puritan
family, was. Her husband was governor of Nottingham. He had occasion,
she said, "to go and break up a private meeting in the cannoneer's
chamber"; and in the cannoneer's chamber "were found some notes
concerning paedobaptism,[476] which, being brought into the governor's
lodgings, his wife having perused them and compared them with the
Scriptures, found not what to say against the truths they asserted
concerning the mis-application of that ordinance to infants.
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