What We Actually Did

“One of our cultural commonplaces is that the Puritans were dour iconoclasts, capable of smashing beautiful things in cathedrals, but incapable of producing anything of literary merit. But if we examine the works produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by men who were either Puritans or establishment Protestants, what do we find? These men practically invented modern English literature” (5 Cities, p. 137).