The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

Macaulay uses this line in his famous Whig-history portrait of the English Puritans, contrasting their moral austerity with the popular entertainments of earlier Stuart England. Writing in the early Victorian period, he describes Puritan hostility to theatres, festivals, and “sports” such as bear-baiting as part of a broader campaign to regulate public life and suppress what they saw as frivolity and vice. The remark appears in his narrative of the social and cultural climate leading up to the English Civil War, where he argues that Puritan reform was driven as much by suspicion of pleasure and sociability as by compassion or humanitarian concern.

The epigram suggests that Puritan moral condemnation was less about alleviating suffering than about policing enjoyment. By claiming the Puritan objected to bear-baiting chiefly because spectators took pleasure in it, Macaulay frames Puritanism as an ethic of distrust toward recreation—an impulse to curb communal delight and the disorderly emotions it can unleash. The line is also a rhetorical critique of moralism that targets “sin” in others’ happiness rather than in cruelty itself. More broadly, it illustrates Macaulay’s tendency to explain ideological conflict as a clash of temperaments: the austere, reforming conscience versus the festive, traditional culture of the crowd.