Stephen Bachiler
An Unforgiven Puritan (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Stephen Bachiler: An Unforgiven Puritan<br><br>The story which I have to tell concerns the biography of one who lived through the years of the most wonderful century of English history, that period from 1560 to 1660. Those years marked the youth and splendor of British achievement in the realm of spiritual awakening, of literary and intellectual development, and of commercial activity, colonization, and world building.<br><br>In the hundred years I have mentioned Puritanism made its first successful stand against the English church, which still clung to Romish superstition. They saw, those golden years, the imperishable dramas of Shakespeare unfolded to the world, the lofty verse of Milton, the graceful muse of Jonson, and the brilliant philosophy of Bacon. For them the poetical soul, the chivalrous life and death of Sir Philip Sidney, were current fact, not history and tradition.<br><br>In that short century lived and died the great freebooters of the virgin seas, Raleigh and Drake, Frobisher and Hawkins. Less afraid of new worlds than of old creeds, the Pilgrims and the Puritans in that century left their homes in the "haunt of ancient peace," and sought fresh soil wherein to plant the colony which was to grow into our present vast-spreading republic. The feeble, pedantic, and pleasure loving Stuarts saw in that century the sceptre snatched from their hands, when Hampden, Cromwell, and Harry Vane turned England from a kingdom into a commonwealth.<br><br>In the same period Holland became a Protestant republic in spite of the bloody persecutions of Philip. France turned Huguenot after the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the graps of Spain began to weaken in the old world and the new.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.