The puritans were a group composed largely of yeomen farmers, artisans, country gentlemen and city merchants. There was no class-struggle in their minds; their common bond was religion. There ideas a bout religion weren’t wrong, they were just medieval. The central core of Catholic thought in the middle ages was that man was created for the glory of God, and that the unique duty and purpose of man was to serve Him and to do His will. This is just what the puritans thought about life. Most people think that the puritans only had their faith to keep them busy, but this isn’t true. They felt that idleness

was a cardinal sin. This concept is modern, it is the very fabric of American life. We as Americans are always busy, most of us barely sit to have a meal. "We resolve to approve ourselves to the Lord in our particular calling" reads the Salem covenant "shunning idleness as the bane of every state." Some people even believe that puritans caused prohibition. This is completely fabricated because hard liquor was consumed by the men and "small beer" and "hard"cider by a large portion of the populace, including children(the fermentation process acted as a prophylactic against some of the diseases borne by poor well-water quality). Of course drunkenness was forbidden and punished.

As can be seen the puritan people weren’t really wrong in their convictions just misunderstood. They were a group of regular people who were very religious and at times, completely ignorant. People shouldn’t hold the puritans ignorance against them. Truly it wasn’t their fault, they were actually quite brilliant for the people of that age. Nathaniel Hawthorne showed us that a lot of their behavior was

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