Puritanism was a youthful, vigorous movement.

For the Puritans, the God-centered life meant making the quest for spiritual and moral holiness the great business of life.

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise.

The Puritans were obsessed with the dangers of wealth.

No group of people has been more unjustly maligned in the twentieth century than the Puritans. As a result, we approach the Puritans with an enormous baggage of culturally ingrained prejudice.

In Puritan thinking, the Christian life was a heroic venture, requiring a full quota of energy.

Puritanism was a youthful, vigorous movement.