Quotation of the Day: The New Puritans
7th June 2026
G. K. Chesterton:
Puritanism was not a mere code of cruel regulations, though some of its
regulations were more cruel than any that have disgraced Europe. Nor was
Puritanism a mere nightmare, an evil shadow of eastern gloom and
fatalism, though this element did enter it, and was as it were the
symptom and punishment of its essential error. Something much nobler
(even if almost equally mistaken) was the original energy in the Puritan
creed.I should roughly define the first spirit in Puritanism thus. It was a
refusal to contemplate God or goodness with anything lighter or milder
than the most fierce concentration of the intellect. A Puritan meant
originally a man whose mind had no holidays. To use his own favourite
phrase, he would let no living thing come between him and his God; an
attitude which involved eternal torture for him and a cruel contempt for
all the living things. It was better to worship in a barn than in a
cathedral for the specific and specified reason that the cathedral was
beautiful. Physical beauty was a false and sensual symbol coming in
between the intellect and the object of its intellectual worship. The
human brain ought to be at every instant a consuming fire which burns
through all conventional images until they were as transparent as glass.
This analysis makes clear the applicability of the term New Puritan to the modern proglodyte, as well as explain why New England is its homeland.