Opposing Views of the Puritan and the Transcendentalist cultures.

Opposing Views of the Puritan and the Transcendentalist cultures.

Ubiquitous to early American Literature, especially throughout the works of the Puritans and the Transcendentalist, showed how America went through a dramatic change in culture and philosophy. The mindsets of the two cultures are very distinctive in their own ways. The Puritans were very strict and severe in morals and opposed pleasure. They even went as far as hanging innocents as a punishment for witchcraft. The puritans took religion to the extreme and showed this by the way they lived, a life that was bound to the Holy Bible. Transcendentalists, on the other hand, still believed in a God, but that deity played a lesser role in public life.
      The Puritans were very religious and they displayed their radical vision on faith through their literature, government, lifestyle, and culture, weather it would be from executing witches to finding no pleasure in life, they would always be abided to God’s laws. Pleasures we take for granted today, were banned in the Puritan era.   Activities such as dancing, walking in the woods, and even listening to music had some concealed evil to it.   In fact the ideal Puritan could only work and worship God in his or her life.   Puritans were also scared into believing that God was a fearful, powerful, and vengeful God. In Jonathan Edward’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God he stated that “The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart” and “Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf. These statements scared the Puritans into a belief of superstitions and prevented them from challenging a society based off religious extremes.
  Well sooner or later the Puritan culture would subside to a rise in a new way of thinking, a way of thinking that encouraged intuition and...