Puritans

Nearly every association which now clings to the word puritan has to be eliminated when we are thinking of the early Protestants. Whatever they were, they were not sour, gloomy, or severe; nor did their enemies bring any such charge against them. [. . .] For More, a Protestant was one “dronke of the new must of lewd lightnes of minde and vayne gladnesse of harte.” [. . .] Luther, he said, had made converts precisely because “he spiced al the poison” with “libertee.” [. . .] Protestantism was not too grim, but too glad, to be true.

- English Literature in the Sixteenth Century