It is for this reason that I would hesitate to dismiss, out of hand, those elements within the strata of Christianity that are sometimes referred to as ‘puritanical.’ For while I myself do not identify as such (Puritanism was, after all, a rejection of not only corruptions in the Roman Catholic Church, but also traditions and practices), I am not so foolish as to be unable to recognize that the origin of the movement to which that term has been ascribed, and that at some point, perhaps, lost its way, through the exaggeration or single-mindedness of its methods, might have had good cause, and been well-intended.