Читать книгу Highways of Canadian Literature онлайн
27 страница из 84
But what of the Puritan settlers in Nova Scotia? They were in the land for at least a decade before the coming of the Loyalists. They had social and religious problems for discussion and solution. Did not these problems of the Puritan émigrés issue in a literature? They did. But the Puritan literature in Nova Scotia was not in mood, aim, form, or result at all significant, or as genuinely creative as the Loyalist literature, and may be shortly noticed and dismissed. The Puritans were Congregationalists, and brought with them the old New England ideals of the ‘Town Meeting’—Responsible Civic Government and Religious Liberty. They were political and religious Democrats. But Church interests were paramount. Congregationalism, though essentially a democratic form of Church government, developed all the formalism, of an aristocratically conducted religion. The inevitable happened. There were ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘modernists’ in those days as in ours. Under Whitefield a schism occurred in Congregationalism. The leader of the schism in Nova Scotia was Rev. Henry Alline (1748-84). Under Whitefield in the American Colonies and Henry Alline, ‘the Whitefield of Province’ of Nova Scotia, the ‘New Lights’ (as they were called) triumphed over the Orthodox or Formalistic Congregationalists in America. But, oddly, this religious schism also resulted in a political schism. It resulted, in short, in a separation of the Puritans in Nova Scotia from the Puritans in the New England Colonies. So that the Puritan colony in Nova Scotia became a community apart, with a new and distinct sentiment of British connection. They retained, however, their New England ideals of responsible municipal government and absolute religious liberty. Nova Scotia thus became the home of a new experiment in Political and Religious Democracy.