[MrEdd]

Flags at the end.

The puritans obsessed over their own sin, and how to know that their repentance was sincere. They wrote deep tomes on the subject that take years to comprehend.

[TradicalRC]

True enough, but the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne made some keen observations about the Puritans that seem more in line with what AS wrote. One has only to read Young Goodman Brown or The Scarlet Letter.