After generations of quarrelling amongst English historians about how to define 'Puritan', a set of fundamental criteria is now generally accepted. Whatever the remaining disputes over nuances of the term, most scholars understand Puritans as those within the Protestant state church with an agenda for further protestantisation (or purification) of that church, along several lines. First, because their anti-Catholicism had a particular virulence, they sought to eliminate the 'dregs of popery' remaining in the Church of England - images, symbols, ceremonies, vestments and festivities devoted to saints or markers on the liturgical calendar. Second, they sought a greater stress on preaching, Sabbath observance and the systematic inculcation of biblical knowledge and Reformed theology. Third, they desired an effective moral discipline to create the sort of godly milieu in which full Reformation of the church could happen and (not incidentally) to avert well-deserved divine wrath on sinful communities. The people we label 'Puritans' had a sense of themselves and what they were about, of their own identity as separate from the less godly around them. They had a decidedly elevated spiritual temperature, as the Elizabethan writer Percival Wiburn recognised when he declaimed in 1581, 'the hotter sort of Protestants are called Puritans'. Wiburn was more careful with his definition than is often credited: he insisted that we 'make but one religion of those that you call Protestants and Puritans'; the latter simply 'join godly knowledge with their zeal' to avoid the sinful lukewarmness of the Laodicean church. Puritans lay along the spectrum of Protestant belief within the English church; by these criteria they were not separatists, though their spiritual fire generated a frequently intolerable warmth.