Differing widely in their targets, these various Puritan
enterprises had one character in common: they were all efforts to combat
immorality with the weapons designed for crime. In each of them there
was a visible effort to erect the individual's offence against himself
into an offence against society. Beneath all of them there was the
dubious principle--the very determining principle, indeed, of
Puritanism--that it is competent for the community to limit and
condition the private acts of its members, and with it the inevitable
corollary that there are some members of the community who have a
special talent for such legislation, and that their arbitrary fiats are,
and of a right ought to be, binding upon all.
Sec. 4
This is the essential fact of the new Puritanism; its recognition of the
moral expert, the professional sinhound, the virtuoso of virtue. Under
the original Puritan theocracy, as in Scotland, for example, the chase
and punishment of sinners was a purely ecclesiastical function, and
during the slow disintegration of the theocracy the only change
introduced was the extension of that function to lay helpers, and
finally to the whole body of laymen.
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