III

These divergences of opinion may be allowed to raise here a question of definition. Can such divergences be profitably embraced under a single term? What does one mean by Puritanism?

Puritanism is an entity. It is to be understood neither as a resurgence of medieval thought (though there is some force in Acton’s description, ‘the middle ages of Protestantism’) nor simply as a harbinger of the modern world, of naturalism and democracy (though it actually advanced them both). It is to be studied in itself—and the penalty of disregarding this counsel is to misunderstand not only the movement, but its relation to past and future. One’s definition must be eclectic and must ignore no fact that is prominent in the period under consideration.

It is possible to extend the term Puritan to cover all the varied forces generated by the Protestant Reformation, and given their Edition: current; Page: [[36]] opportunity of expression and action by the revolt against the Crown and the Church in the first half of the seventeenth century; and this is probably still its commonest use. Again, it is possible to subdivide these forces and relegate the term Puritan to the more conservative, to those that remain strictly Calvinistic, adhering not only to the doctrine of predestination but also to the Genevan pattern in church and state, and opposing religious, while setting severe limits to political, liberty—or in other words to make Puritan practically synonymous with Presbyterian; this practice has some historical foundation and has been adopted by one or two modern historians. The cleavage between the Presbyterians and the sectaries is indeed marked; and it is tempting to adopt and enforce Troeltsch’s distinction between the church-ideal and the sect-ideal. But the problem is the Centre Party, the Independents, who increasingly dominate the situation in and after 1647. They occupy (as we have observed) the whole interval between the Right, where the Puritan church-type is dominant, and the Left, where the Puritan sect-type is not less supreme. No fact is more prominent than the existence of the two types side by side, or than their mutual influence particularly in the Centre Party, where indeed they merge.

The reason is this: Calvinism itself, the main seed-ground of the Puritan movement, is (as Troeltsch has made clear) deeply influenced by the ‘sect ideal.’ In especial, Calvin adopted the ideal of the ‘holy community.’ And as a result, Calvinism ‘was obliged to make the bold attempt of constituting its national church as a church of professing believers, and of constituting its unity of church and state as a Christian society in the strict sense of the personal faith and character of each individual member.’ In some form the ideal of the ‘holy community’ remains constant among all the Puritan groups. And the Calvinistic, or Presbyterian, is but one of the possible inferences therefrom. If the primary effort is to erect the holy community among the Saints (as the sect ideal in its simplest form demands), one of two inferences may be drawn: the world may be left to perish in its own fashion, which means temporarily to live and order itself by its own standards; or the Saints, constituted as a holy community, may seek to impose their will upon the world and to inaugurate Edition: current; Page: [[37]] an outward conformity to their standards—a result which approximates to the course taken by Calvinism as a church-type, but must still be distinguished from it. The active presence of this ideal of the ‘holy community’ (however divergent the inferences in theory and practice therefrom) appears to me to furnish the only satisfactory basis for a working definition of Puritanism in its social and political aspects. Puritanism means a determined and varied effort to erect the holy community and to meet, with different degrees of compromise and adjustment, the problem of its conflict with the world. The acceptance of the ideal bespeaks a common element in all Puritan thought. The rival modes of application denote wide differences. One’s definition of Puritanism must be broad enough to include them both, with the specific ideas and the habits of mind from which they spring. Nor must one forget that the differences, inherent in the creeds of Presbyterian and Congregationalist, of Separatist and Anabaptist, from the beginning, are brought in our period into sharp relief by the pressure of swiftly moving events, or that the interval between the extreme positions is always occupied by the composite Centre Party. It is unnecessary to posit a unity in all Puritan thought; it is sufficient to recognize a continuity. Such a continuity is apparent in the documents here collected, even where the divergences of interest and opinion are most acute.

For the purposes, then, of the present volume, I have adopted the popular definition of Puritanism. But I have tried to render the divergences within Puritanism thus conceived, at once clear-cut and intelligible by discriminating between the Parties of the Right, the Centre, and the Left—and where necessary, still further between the components of these large divisions. And in my effort to isolate the elements in Puritan thought which bear, positively or negatively, upon the problem of liberty, I have been careful to set down nothing which cannot be found in the Debates and illustrated abundantly from other documents in the period. It is scarcely necessary to observe that all the generalizations are not equally applicable to all sections of Puritanism, but the difference (unless attention is specifically called to it) is usually one of emphasis only. As is natural, the stage is mainly occupied by the Parties of the Centre and the Left. The Right, which is unrepresented in the Debates, receives only occasional reference. But it has some share in the discussion and illustration of principles of resistance; and extracts not only from Prynne and Rutherford, but from Calvin and Luther (in the form in which the Puritans read them), are included in order to remind the reader of the Edition: current; Page: [[38]] continuity of Puritan thought. Beyond the Puritan Left, as it appears in the Debates and in the Supplementary Documents, there lie reaches to which again we can afford only occasional references: they are marked by the break-down of traditional dogma and the emergerce of habits of mind which belong rather to Quakerism than to Puritanism proper. To penetrate farther into this subject would be to forsake the centre afforded by the Debates; but one must not ignore in Puritans like Saltmarsh and Dell, Collier and Erbury, Lilburne and Winstanley, trains of thought and feeling which finally led some of them into association with the despised followers of George Fox.

There are certain defects in analysis, considered as a method, which cannot be escaped. In one sense it is possible too successfully to isolate the elements in the Puritan mind which bear upon the problem of liberty: we murder to dissect. But the documents may be relied upon to correct the deficiencies of the Introduction, and to restore to their proper complexity and animation the elements which we have isolated in order to explain. The Puritans (though in different degrees) were men who had undergone a religious experience, whose effect was to bestow a new unity of feeling upon their thoughts. Thus (to take a single example) it will be necessary for us to distinguish between the emphasis upon dogma and scripture and the emphasis upon experiential religion; but in very many cases these are not two things, but one, dogma furnishing the framework within which the experience is enjoyed, and scripture confirming the experience by the record of Moses, of Elijah, of St. Paul. ‘This,’ says Thomas Collier, preaching to the Army at Putney, ‘I shall for your satisfaction confirm unto you from scripture, although I trust I shall deliver nothing unto you but experimental truth’ (p. 390).

The first feature of the Puritan mind to strike a reader of the Debates is the dominant place held in it by dogmatic religion, and the tendency to carry inferences from dogma into secular life. It is true that this character is peculiar to the Puritan rather in degree than kind. Grotius observed the addiction of the English as a nation to theology; and, with certain notable exceptions (Hobbes, Harrington, Selden), the cast of its political thinking in the first half of the seventeenth century is definitely theological. Yet, despite some common ground, the distinction between the Anglican and the Puritan mind is valid; for Anglican dogmatism Edition: current; Page: [[39]] was continually moderated by the tradition of Hooker, with his appeal to philosophy and history to supplement and correct a reliance on the bare letter of the scripture. More important as qualifying our generalization is the evident beginning of a movement among the Puritans of the Left, away from dogma and towards humanitarianism. This is the Puritan counterpart of the Latitudinarian current already becoming apparent in Anglican thought, the Puritan premonition of that general secularizing of the English temper, the date of whose beginnings is conventionally placed in 1660. But even in his movement away from dogma the Puritan retains his identity and carries with him the lessons learned in the conventicle. Almost to our own day the difference of the Anglican and the Nonconformist outlooks was a fact to be reckoned with in English life. To the growth of a secular spirit which leaves the Puritan identity still easily recognizable, we shall return. Our present interest is in the more obvious features of Puritanism during the decade of the Debates; and of these the dominance of dogmatic religion is easily the most obvious, together with the tendency to carry the implications of dogma into secular life, into the fighting of civil wars and the subsequent reform of institutions.

The Puritan turned to the theological aspects of a question as naturally as the modern man turns to the economic; and his first instinct was to seek guidance within the covers of his Bible—or was it rather to seek there justification for a policy already determined on other, on political and economic, grounds? Our own answer to the query has been suggested above in discussing the tactics of Cromwell at Putney, and need not be repeated here. Granted the theological mode of argument is in some sort a ‘rationalization,’ granted even the disingenuousness with which it is often pursued; that does not dispose of the matter. The terms in which the Puritan insists that the argument shall be carried on, are real to him, and of first-rate historical importance because they are the terms in which he views his world. Ignore the terms, or misunderstand them, and the Puritan mind has eluded you. The Puritan viewed the world as a twofold system, a scheme of nature and a scheme of grace. The two were interrelated: because God was the creator and supreme ruler of them both, and because they had a common subject-matter in man, and a common object, the good. Man as man belonged to the natural order; the elect belonged also to the order of grace. The author of The Ancient Bounds writes (pp. 247-8):

Christ Jesus, whose is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, both in nature and in grace, hath given several maps and schemes of his Edition: current; Page: [[40]] dominions . . .: both of his great kingdom, the world, his dominions at large which he hath committed to men to be administered in truth and righteousness, in a various form as they please; . . . and also his special and peculiar kingdom, the kingdom of grace. Which kingdoms though they differ essentially or formally, yet they agree in one common subject-matter (man and societies of men) though under a diverse consideration. And not only man in society, but every man individually, is an epitome, either of one only or of both these dominions: of one only, so every natural man (who in a natural consideration is called microcosmus, an epitome of the world), in whose conscience God hath his throne, ruling him by the light of nature to a civil outward good and end; of both, so every believer who, besides this natural conscience and rule, hath an enlightened conscience carrying a more bright and lively stamp of the kingly place and power of the Lord Jesus, swaying him by the light of faith or scripture, and such a man may be called microchristus, the epitome of Christ mystical.

There was a goodness appropriate to the natural order; and there was a goodness appropriate to the order of grace, which, while it included the natural goodness, also (because spiritual) transcended it. The views taken of the precise relation of these scparate, yet interrelated orders, colour the Puritans’ thought, and condition the terms—and perhaps more than the terms—of their particular and practical demands, as, for intance, that of Roger Williams for the absolute separation of church and state (the social organs of grace and nature) with complete liberty of conscience, or again the demand of others for the subjection of the natural man, and his institutions, to the church—or the Saints (pp. 241-7). God was the lawgiver of the two orders. Israel was a model (so ran the simpler view), and in the Bible might be read the precepts by which all men ought to be governed: ‘Though the laws be few and brief, yet they are perfect and sufficient, and so large as the wisdom of God judged needful for regulating judgment in all ages and nations. For no action or case doth, or possibly can, fall out in this or other nations . . . but the like did, or possibly might, fall out in Israel.’ If one was to escape the conclusion which the Old Testament enforced in a particular issue (as, for example, in the question of the magistrate’s power in religion), it could be only by an appeal to the New Testament, with an elaborate argument tending to prove that Israel was ‘typical,’ that its law (or some part of its law) was abrogated by the appearance of Christ, who was the ‘antitype,’ and that Israel Edition: current; Page: [[41]] furnished, therefore, no literal model for life under the Gospel. Beside precept and model, there was prophecy. Daniel and Revelation afforded a key to events, past and present, and a vision of the future. From these books the Millenarians derived a view of history and a motive of revolution. And the pattern exhibited coloured the thought of many who could not be described as active adherents, so that one may speak of Millenarian doctrine as in a sense typical.

The cultural and disciplinary value to the Puritan mind, of all this biblical study, formal theological reasoning, and eager and disputatious searching into the purposes of God, is rarely, I think, appreciated to the full. It was on such studies that the logical faculty of Roger Williams was formed. Narrow and one-sided as the Puritan mind is apt to be, it is never flaccid. In their attitude toward reason the Puritans differed widely among themselves, ranging from the extremes of voluntarism and obscurantism to almost pure rationalism; but whatever the avowed attitude, their tacit reliance in the exposition of dogma and text was on logical thought: no one was ever more insistent on hearing a reason for the faith that was in you. That is why Puritanism carried its own special mental discipline. The Debates furnish abundant illustration of the dominance of dogmatic religion and scriptural reference; it appears in connection with every subject discussed, and (though in varying degrees) in all the participants. Unbelievably remote as the argument often seems, its general level attests the bracing effect of the Puritan discipline on ordinary minds. Nor must the limits which it set to inquiry be exaggerated. Dogma, brought into hourly relation with life, led men beyond dogma. Especially is this true of the group who separated most sharply the two orders of nature and grace. But this is to anticipate.

According to the Puritan notion, God spoke in the first instance through his word—the dominance of dogmatic religion means Puritan scripturism; but there were two other modes of learning his will. There was the mode of immediate religious experience. If dogmatic religion is heavily represented in the Debates, so is experiential. There are moments when one could hardly parallel the atmosphere at Putney outside the walls of Little Bethel. Yet to the Puritans it seems perfectly natural. They listen to each others’ experiences and are duly edified and impressed. Even the hard-headed Ireton is strangely moved (pp. 21-2). The exposition of dogma and text make their claim upon reason, but in these experiences imagination and emotion have their play: the Edition: current; Page: [[42]] Puritan imagination is fired, and the passions necessary to great, and sometimes desperate enterprises, are kindled. And there is a community of feeling not less important than intellectual agreement; this, too, religious experience, enjoyed in common, fosters. But the thing has its dangers. Cromwell finds that he is without anything to report ‘as in the name of the Lord’ (p. 102), and is a little fearful lest ‘carnal imaginations’ may pass themselves off as promptings from heaven (p. 104). He prefers, because it seems more objective, the testimony of events. That is God’s third mode of revealing his will. The Puritan lives in a world of particular providences. God has ‘owned’ the Army by the success he has vouchsafed. Let the Army pursue its course, but let it not outrun its commission or seize an opportunity before God has given one; and guidance will not fail. We have seen the Army on its momentous march to London, ‘there to follow Providence as God shall clear our way.’ The way was cleared to Pride’s purge and the judicial murder of the King.

The sense of special insight into, and co-operation with, the purposes of God, is a distinguishing mark of the Puritan, and it sets him at a distance from other men. It is both a strength and a weakness. At its worst it issues in self-righteousness. (All the publicans and sinners were on one side, said Chillingworth, all the scribes and Pharisees on the other.) But it nerved the arm and brought an access of courage, which on any other premise, would have been reckless. Like everything else in the Puritan’s outlook, the separation from his fellows rested on a dogmatic basis: the doctrine of predestination taught him that it was from the beginning. The Saint alone belonged to the order of grace, with its special equipment, its privileges, and its duties. The possible inferences from this fact were various, but so long as the dogma remained unimpaired, or uncircumvented, the attitude towards the natural man was constant. ‘Men as men,’ said Ireton, ‘are corrupt and will be so’ (p. 174).

If this account of the dominant place held by religion in the Puritan mind is even approximately correct, no wonder the religious issue bulked so large in the Civil War and the subsequent settlement. ‘The interest of England is religion,’ said Hugh Peter (p. 138). ‘Kings, and Armies, and Parliaments,’ said another speaker, ‘might have been quiet at this day if they would have let Israel alone’ (p. 147). And the religious issue is not Edition: current; Page: [[43]] isolated. It complicates, and is complicated by, the civil. Nor does the connection depend merely on the fact observed above, that each section of the Puritan Party has both religious and civil interests to guard, and religious and civil aims to secure. There is perpetual interaction between the two struggles. Passion generated in the one is available for the prosecution of the other. And here the primacy of the religious struggle appears: in it Puritan idealism burns with its steadiest flame, and religion exercises its influence not only directly by intrusion into the civil sphere, but indirectly by analogy. Milton speaks of ‘the best part of our liberty, which is our religion’; and the Puritan’s whole conception of liberty is (as we shall see) deeply coloured by his religious thought, while the second and partially incompatible object of his concern, positive reformation, is equally so coloured.

The zeal for positive reform is one of the most constant and indisputable notes of Puritanism. ‘Reform the universities. . . . Reform the cities . . . the countries, . . . the sabbath, . . . the ordinances, the worship of God. . . . Every plant which my heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted up.’ Alike in Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and the sects, the ideal of the ‘holy community,’ pure in doctrine and exemplary in life, is dominant; but with very different effects upon political thought and action. By the strictest and most logical of the Separatists the ideal is recognized as applicable to, and attainable by, the elect alone; and it operates within the limits of a voluntary religious community made up of visible Saints, with no attempt to influence the state save by exhortation and example. Wherever, on the other hand, the ideal is combined with that of a national church, an attempt will be made to bring the nation into outward conformity with the standard of the godly. The non-elect and the unbelievers are (as Troeltsch puts it) disciplined for the glory of God and the peace and welfare of the church. Thus the effect of what is at bottom the same motive would appear to be totally different in the Puritans of the Right and of the Left, with those of the Centre Edition: current; Page: [[44]] occupying the interval between them. But this does not exhaust the possibilities. A further distinction has to be drawn among the Puritans of the Left, where the idea of a national church, at least in its Presbyterian form, has no place. It is among some of the sectaries, whose church organization is Separatist and who (for their own purposes) join in the plea for liberty of conscience, that the ideal of the ‘holy community’ assumes its most menacing aspect, the doctrine of the rule of the Saints. And the rule of the Saints means the enforcement of the standards of the ‘holy community’ upon the nation at large, as the Millenarians frankly avow. If the idea of toleration is one ground of alliance between the Parties of the Centre and Left, this opposing idea is certainly another. Puritanism was not only committed in all sections to the ideal of the ‘holy community,’ but, in most of them, strongly drawn to the establishment of its reign outside the body of the elect, where, since persuasion could be of no avail, reform must be by coercion.

Its zeal for reformation results in part from the fact that the Puritan temper is in general active rather than contemplative. Though its official creed repudiates works as a means of salvation, it emphasizes them as a sign; and the Puritan has an overwhelming sense of one’s responsibility to use every effort for advancing the kingdom of God. ‘It is action,’ says Baxter, ‘that God is most served and honoured by.’ And the predilection comes out repeatedly in different forms. There is a vein—even here it is not the dominant vein—of pure contemplation in Anglican literature. The Puritans on the other hand, despite their addiction to experiential religion, seem very often deficient in the higher and more disinterested kinds of mysticism. Milton is the least mystical of all great religious poets. And in his hands spiritual concepts like ‘Christian liberty’ are capable of being wrested from the contemplative to the active sphere. This is not to deny an element of mysticism in some of the Puritans. Cromwell can remind the Council of the Army, eager to dictate the settlement of the kingdom, that the best government ‘is but a moral thing; . . . it is but dross and dung in comparison of Christ’ (p. 97). They appear to disagree with him—and when the time comes Cromwell too will act. In Roger Williams a more unfaltering sense of the mystical quality of religious experience tends to set it apart, thus assigning religion to the contemplative spirit, but to the active reserving all the rest of life. Where no such separation occurs the strong Puritan impulse to action results in the constant Edition: current; Page: [[45]] intrusion of religion into the secular sphere in an effort to enforce the standards of the holy community upon the world, and in a marked tendency to press on, in the name of that ideal, from the quest for religious liberty to the quest for political power.

Within limits the spirit of Puritanism is not only active, but experimental. Naturally the experimental spirit will be operative only in those sections of the party which conceive that the necessary point of compromise between the ideal and the demands of actual life has not yet been reached. For the rest, and notably for the Presbyterians, the period of its operation is already past. For the Independents, and much more markedly for the sects, the point is not yet reached. The Bible embodies a revelation complete and unalterable; but there is still room for progressive comprehension, progressive interpretation; and it is here that free discussion can (as Milton maintains in the Areopagitica) minister to the discovery of the truth and to agreement in the truth. ‘I am verily persuaded,’ said John Robinson to the departing Pilgrims, ‘the Lord hath more truth yet to break forth out of his holy word. . . . I beseech you remember it is an article of your church covenant that you be ready to receive whatever truth shall be made known to you from the written word of God. . . . It is not possible that the Christian world should come so lately out of such thick Antichristian darkness and that perfection of knowledge should break forth at once.’ The Apologetical Narrators, the most moderate of Congregationalists, resolve ‘not to make our present judgment and practice a binding law unto ourselves for the future’ and could wish that this principle ‘were (next to that most supreme, namely to be in all things guided by the perfect will of God) enacted as the most sacred law of all other . . . in Edition: current; Page: [[46]] Christian states and churches throughout the world.’ The Christian, Henry Robinson urged, ought continually to grow not only from grace to grace, but from knowledge to knowledge. ‘The true temper and proper employment of a Christian is always to be working like the sea, and purging ignorance out of his understanding and exchanging notions and apprehensions imperfect for more perfect, and forgetting things behind to press forward’ (p. 259). ‘To be still searching what we know not, by what we know,’ said Milton, ‘still closing up truth to truth as we find it . . .: this is the golden rule in theology as well as in arithmetic.’ The exponents of toleration, says another writer, ‘count not themselves perfect but stand ready to receive further light, yea though from the meanest of the brethren.’ This experimental spirit, this eager quest of truth (whether adequately or inadequately conceived), with the attendant confidence in truth’s power to guard itself and to prevail if given an open field, is the deepest and most abiding element in the Puritan campaign for liberty of conscience. There it joins hands with other traditions of free inquiry coming down from the Renaissance, as appears in quotations from Charron (pp. 260-1), and in John Goodwin’s argument:

If so great and considerable a part of the world as America is . . . was yet unknown to all the world besides for so many generations together, well may it be conceived . . . that . . . many truths, yea and those of main concernment and importance, may be yet unborn and not come forth out of their mother’s womb—I mean the secrets of the scripture to see the light of the sun. . . . [No] man is completely furnished for the ministry of the Gospel . . . who is not as well able to make some new discovery, and to bring forth something of himself Edition: current; Page: [[47]] in the things of God in one kind or other, as to preach the common and received truths. . . . That is neither new nor unjustifiable by the practice of wise men, to examine, yea and to impugn, received opinions. He that will please to peruse the first book of Doctor Hakewell’s learned Apology of the Power and Providence of God &c., shall meet with great variety of instances . . . in divinity, philosophy, in ecclesiastical history, in civil or national history, in natural history, of opinions which had a long time been received, and yet were at last suspected, yea and many of them evicted and rejected upon due examination. . . . There are many errors (erroneously so called) in the Christian world which are made of the greatest and choicest truths; yea and which doubtless will be redeemed from their captivity and restored to their thrones and kingdoms by diligence, gifts and faithfulness of the approaching generation.

Transferred to the political field, the experimental spirit manifests itself chiefly in the Levellers. But it is shared in some degree by the official body of the Independents and underlies the idea of the Debates.

An attitude tentative, yet confident and expectant, was further fostered by the rapid march of events. The break in the ordered procession of the traditional in church and state seemed to the more visionary to place the ideal within their reach. ‘God,’ wrote the Leveller leaders, ‘hath so blessed that which has been done as thereby . . . to afford an opportunity which these six hundred years has been desired, but could never be attained, of making this a truly happy and wholly free nation.’ ‘God’s people, as well as worldlings,’ said Henry Robinson, ‘have their times to fish in troubled waters.’ The circumstances of the period fostered in those whose minds already contained the germs, both utopianism and the iconoclasm which, for the active temper, is inseparable from it.

Already in the Grand Remonstrance there is a suggestion of the utopian spirit in the programme of reforms which its framers outline; Charles, indeed, specifically complains of ‘that new Utopia of religion and government into which they endeavour to transform this kingdom.’ Here again Puritanism met other currents of thought: the still-living tradition of Renaissance utopianism (always more academic than the Puritan), embodied in the work of a More and a Campanella; the teaching of Bacon, Edition: current; Page: [[48]] now commencing to find eager disciples and to shape its own august memorial, the Royal Society (a dream of the New Atlantis come true); the cult of Comenius, assiduously fostered by Samuel Hartlib, who had plans for the reform of everything from beehives to the state, not to mention a scheme, the special department of his friend John Dury, for the reunion of Protestant Christendom. Whatever the intentions of the Long Parliament, there were plenty of persons ready to point the way to Utopia: in education (to mention only the most important examples), Hartlib, Dury, Milton, Petty, John Webster, and William Dell; in the organization of society and the state, Hartlib, Harrington, Milton, Vane, Baxter, Hugh Peter, Henry Robinson, the Levellers in general, and Richard Overton in particular (see pp. 335-8), the Millenarians with their vision of rule by the Saints, and Gerrard Winstanley with his communist Law of Freedom in a Platform. All these writers, with the exception of Harrington and Petty, definitely belong to the Puritan parties (and even they have connections with the Puritans). Up to a point the outcropping of utopianism may further illustrate the beginnings of a trend away from dogmatic and towards humanitarian religion, or, in the case of the Levellers, Harrington, and Petty, a definite process of secularization; but Baxter, Vane, Dell, and the Millenarians certainly manifest no drift from dogma, on whose acceptance, indeed, their utopias depend. And all exhibit qualities recognized elsewhere in the products of the Puritan mind—above all the Puritan impulse to action; for these are not utopias in the sense of Sir Thomas More, but somewhat visionary schemes of reform to be actually attempted, utopias in the sense of Charles I’s indignant protest. They may, like the Areopagitica, even repudiate ‘Atlantic and utopian politics.’ Typical is John Cook’s Unum Necessarium, which pleads for the control of the drink trade and the relief of the poor (including free medical service): ‘I am not of their opinion that drive at a parity, to have all men alike. ’Tis but a utopian fiction. The scripture holds forth no such thing: the poor ye shall have always with you. But there ought to be no beggar in England, for they live rather like beasts than men.’ Fostered by the unsettled state of English institutions, and supplemented by various intellectual influences, this utopianism takes its rise in the Puritan mind and temper, and constitutes an important element in the Army Debates.

Hand in hand with utopianism goes iconoclasm. The common effort to destroy religious institutions of a thousand years had Edition: current; Page: [[49]] confirmed this trait in the Puritan mind, even when the purpose was to replace them with a sterner rule and ‘not to loose the golden reins of discipline and government in the church.’ ‘And for the extirpation of prelacy,’ wrote John Saltmarsh, ‘though it be a government riveted into our laws and usages . . . yet let us not like the Jews lose our Gospel with holding our Laws too fast. I know this kingdom hath ever been a retentive nation of customs and old constitutions. . . . And hence it is that reformation . . . hath been with such little power and duration. . . .’ Though fostered by the revolution in the church the triumph of iconoclasm was but partial in the end; for some of the deepest instincts of the national temper (as Saltmarsh hints) were ranged against it, and these kept cropping up—in the Puritans themselves. Only in the Parties of the Left is iconoclasm willingly adopted and unhesitatingly pursued. Beyond a certain point, the Independents are drawn into it not by choice, but by the force of circumstances. In November 1647, Ireton defends ‘the fundamental constitution’ from Leveller attacks. By November 1648, he has had to retreat from this position: ‘the fundamental constitution’ gives too little ground for beheading monarchs and establishing republics in their place. The subject leads into a Edition: current; Page: [[50]] consideration of the appeal to natural rights, which must be reserved for our consideration of liberty; but we may glance at the Puritan attitude to custom, precedent, and history, taking Milton as our example. No sooner has he attacked the problem of religious liberty and reform than he decides that change cannot be too ‘swift and sudden provided still it be from worse to better.’ Custom, he discovers, is ‘a natural tyrant’ in religion and in the state, a tyrant which has an ally in man’s fallen nature—‘a double tyranny of custom from without and blind affections within.’ Custom, it is assumed as self-evident, always enters into alliance with error, never with truth: ‘. . . Error supports custom, custom countenances error, and these two between them would persecute and chase away all truth and solid wisdom out of human life, were it not that God, rather than man, once in many ages calls together the prudent and religious counsels of men, deputed to repress the encroachments and to work off the inveterate blots and obscurities wrought upon our minds by the subtle insinuating of custom and error.’ In this passage is implied the Puritan view of history (the view which informs Adam’s vision in Paradise Lost): deterioration is its note, but deterioration relieved by sudden interventions of God in behalf of truth and righteousness, as seen in the prophets of old, pre-eminently in the earthly ministry of Christ, and recently, after twelve hundred years of increasing darkness, in the Reformation, whose work England was called on to complete, ‘even unto the reformation of reformation.’ The view can best be characterized as the direct antithesis of Burke’s: history is not ‘the known march of the ordinary providence of God’; it is a protracted wandering from the way, relieved by sudden interventions of God’s extraordinary providence. The common elements of theism and idealism in the two thinkers make the comparison legitimate and significant. For Milton theism does not validate the actual, does not dispose him to seek for evidences of the ideal in the actual, or in history which is the record of the actual. Though other influences contribute to form his mind, there is strong indication that in this he speaks for Puritanism: and he is at one with the Independent John Cook, who repudiates ‘the puddles of history,’ and with the Levellers, Edition: current; Page: [[51]] who dismiss the past as vicious and irrelevant: ‘. . . Whatever our forefathers were, or whatever they did or suffered, or were enforced to yield unto, we are men of the present age and ought to be absolutely free from all kinds of exorbitancies, molestations, and arbitrary power.’ It is in connection with the plea for liberty that Puritan iconoclasm most frequently appears; but the attitude was learned in connection with church reform. ‘Let them chant while they will of prerogatives,’ said Milton, ‘we shall tell them of scripture; of custom, we of scripture; of acts and statutes, still of scripture.’

With the Puritan concern for liberty we come to a trait immensely important in itself and for our purposes, but also problematical as those previously enumerated are not. It is the subject of the concluding section of this essay, but the question of its status must be broached at this point. The problem is raised by two facts: that a concern for liberty does not appear to be a constant feature of the Puritan mind, and that it runs counter to another and the most universally recognized of traits, the passionate zeal for positive reform, with the will, if necessary, to dragoon men into righteousness—or the semblance of righteousness. If we confine our attention to the Puritans of the Right we shall find as time goes on little enthusiasm for liberty as an ideal, and many hard sayings regarding it. Preaching before the House of Commons on 26th May 1647, Thomas Case denounced liberty of conscience as opening the floodgates of anarchy. Publish liberty of conscience as one of the people’s rights, he said, ‘and see . . . how long your civil peace will secure you when religion is destroyed. . . . For no doubt if this once be granted them . . . they may in good time come to know also—there be them that are instructing them even in these principles, too—that it is their birthright to be freed from the power of parliaments and . . . kings. . . . Liberty of conscience (falsely so called) may in time improve itself into liberty of estates and . . . houses and . . . wives, and in a word liberty of perdition of souls and bodies.’ Here speaks the outraged Puritan ideal of righteousness, reinforced by a sense that the moment of a necessary compromise between the impulse towards liberty and the demands of actual life is long overdue. The protest is thoroughly typical and could be paralleled by dozens of others. If, on the contrary, we turn to the Puritans of the Centre, and more particularly of the Left, we find Edition: current; Page: [[52]] not only the utterances of the Levellers, but the official declarations of the Army, exalting liberty to the position of the main motive in the Puritan revolution, and Overton (typical in this at least) championing the ideal of liberty against what he chooses to regard as the pseudo-ideal of reform. The conflict between the two ideals is, or may become, real enough. But the contrast between the Puritans of the Right and the Left is apt to be misleading. The desire for liberty was not (or rather had not always been) absent as a motive from the Party of the Right. In the hour of oppression it had been a main plea of every group. In the matter of liberty of conscience, one of the chief indictments against the Presbyterians was that they withheld from others what they had demanded for themselves. Nor can one fail to recognize in such a document as Rutherford’s Lex Rex (pp. 199-212) a genuine (if limited) passion for liberty and a host of arguments in its behalf. Again the concern for liberty is by no means equally manifested in the different groups which form the Puritan Left. The ideal of reform in the interests of righteousness is certainly not less dominant in the Millenarians than in the Presbyterians. Finally, in seeking to determine which of the two constitutes the authentic Puritan ideal, it is an error to concentrate on the Right and Left to the exclusion of the Centre. In the Independents the two ideals are constantly present, and the conflict between them is unmistakable. The principal Whitehall debate is very largely a record of that conflict. So much for the attitude towards liberty and reform manifested by different Puritan groups. There is another way of viewing the problem. One may ask what bearing the basic theological dogmas adopted by Puritanism have upon these issues. Of the reforming spirit, the zeal for righteousness, and the willingness to coerce if need be, the theological foundations have been sufficiently explored above. These things, there is no denying, are of the essence of Puritanism. In the case of the concern for liberty, the theological foundations, which have not perhaps been so fully understood, will be discussed in some detail below. For the moment it is enough to indicate their existence by a single sentence from Milton (p. 228), who is pleading for liberty of conscience but is ever ready to extend the demand from religion to politics: ‘Ill was our condition changed from legal to evangelical and small advantage gotten by the Gospel, if for the Edition: current; Page: [[53]] spirit of adoption to freedom, promised us, we receive again the spirit of bondage to fear. . . .’ Basic Puritan theology and the history of the revolution suggest the same answer to our problem. The motives are equally authentic: the passionate concern for liberty and the passionate zeal for reform in the interests of righteousness. Capable of co-operation up to a certain point, they finally remain, somewhere near the heart of Puritanism, in a state of potential and unresolved conflict.

More or less closely connected with the feeling for liberty are Puritan individualism and Puritan equalitarianism, each with its appropriate dogmatic basis, whose fuller discussion may also be postponed. Here one must recognize, however, counter-tendencies and counter-associations in the Puritan mind. Puritan individualism speaks most significantly of all in the voice of conscience. The Puritan asserts the right and duty of thinking for himself. Those in authority (the Agents observe to Fairfax) may demand an unquestioning obedience, but a man is finally answerable to his own conscience (p. 436 n.)—that is (in Ireton’s phrase) to ‘conscience obliging above or against human and outward constitutions’ (p. 459). The consciences of common men were a new phenomenon in politics, and one that has never since disappeared. Ideally, to assert one’s right of private judgment should be to concede the same right to every one else. But it is not always thus that the celebrated Nonconformist conscience has reasoned—and we understand the Puritan conscience the better if we give it its later name. Some of its associations are with liberty, but not all. For it can argue that all it pleads for is the autonomy of the illuminated conscience and that this it denies to no man. Again, in regard to Puritan equalitarianism it is sufficient to observe that the equality of believers implies their superiority to unregenerate men. And this superiority, so long as dogma is unimpaired, or in the secular field uncircumvented, will continue to oppose an effective barrier against a wider equalitarianism.

The two processes, the impairing of dogma and its circumvention, must be clearly distinguished. Both are present in Puritanism of the Left, and each has its place in the history of liberty and equality.

Of the forces counteracting, and ultimately impairing, the dogmatic attitude we have noticed one, the principle of the progressive interpretation of truth. With its operation (as also with the ineptitude of amateur theologians) may be associated the rapid multiplication of sects and heresies which Thomas Edwards deplores. Standing in varying relations to the Puritan movement, Edition: current; Page: [[54]] the new opinions consist either in some exaggeration of the dominant Calvinistic creed (a repudiation of some compromise which it had sanctioned) or in a reaction, theological or ethical, against some part of that creed and its inferences. For our present purpose the latter type alone is directly important, though the very multiplication of opinions, whatever their character, would do something to weaken the authority of dogma as such. Most significant of all is the reaction against the Calvinistic dogma of predestination as that dogma is set forth by Prynne (pp. 232-3) and others. The reaction, which extends far beyond the ranks of the Puritans, represents a shift towards a rational theology and a humanistic, even a humanitarian, religion. As the Cambridge Platonists were to demonstrate, Arminianism was preeminently the doctrine of Christian rationalism and Christian humanism, re-reading the stern pronouncements of the Reformation in the mellow light of the Renaissance. The Calvinists were quick to point out its affinities with the Pelagian heresy, whose effect was to eliminate divine grace and substitute a gospel of self-help. This is a gospel comfortable to human nature (All men, said Culverwel, are naturally born Pelagians), and one whose role in the making of the modern mind is self-evident. It is not surprising then to find some of the sectaries going far beyond the Arminian position proper, hinting the sufficiency and the natural goodness of human nature and calling in question the doctrine of original sin. But apart from these dubious inferences, and by its central attack on the extreme form of the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, of absolute election and reprobation, Arminianism weakens the theological basis of Puritan inequalitarianism, of the conception of an aristocracy of the elect, and thus undermines the most formidable of the barriers separating Puritanism from democracy.

Other forces are at work among the sectaries to a similar end. Two may be distinguished, though not so as to exclude their mutual influence. For, as Chesterton observes, heterodoxies, often of the most opposite kinds, will flock together. In seventeenth-century England (as in the Europe of the Reformation) Edition: current; Page: [[55]] currents which in spirit belong to no religious tradition but rather to libertinism, seek a temporary alliance with radical Protestant thought. In Overton there is a militant naturalism and a thinly veiled hostility to dogmatic religion. He champions the mortalist heresy in the name of scripture and reason and advances a materialistic view of man and the world. He claims to have attempted a proof of the main truths of revelation from nature and reason; it is difficult to judge of his motives, but the method seems to link him with the beginnings of Deism. He is perfectly familiar with Puritan doctrine and can use it on occasion. He talks of the order of nature in terms reserved by the more orthodox for the order of grace, by the simple expedient of omitting all reference to the Fall (p. [69]). He seizes upon the radical plea for liberty of conscience put forward on religious grounds by Roger Williams and others, and gives it his own emphasis. Wildman can also speak the language of the Saints: on the most extreme Separatist ground, he argues against the magistrate’s power in matters of religion, developing the doctrine of the two orders in a direction which might lead to either scepticism or fideism, and incidentally in one diametrically opposed to Overton’s boasted effort to deduce the truths of revelation from nature (pp. 168-9). By Walwyn a subtler method is used. His aim is to inculcate a sentiment. He adapts (sometimes almost out of recognition) such parts of Puritan doctrine as he can use, while undermining, rather than openly assailing, the rest. The doctrine of Christian liberty, detached from its dogmatic basis, becomes an invitation to free oneself from the oppression of religious ordinances; Eden is approximated to the life of the golden age, and of Montaigne’s happy savages; the Fall is thus interpreted as a forsaking of nature for human ‘inventions,’ and the rule of the Gospel as an injunction to return to a natural simplicity; the genuine (and at this time somewhat neglected) humanitarian element in Christianity is emphasized at the expense of every other, and, more dubiously, it is presented as a militant and revolutionary creed. It is not without significance that Walwyn here affects to be expounding the Edition: current; Page: [[56]] doctrines of the Familists. Such teaching carries us over from the sceptics to the mystics, who tend to undermine dogma in the act of reinterpreting it. This is the second force to which we referred above. The influential teaching of Winstanley may serve as an example, whose blend of the practical with the mystic points on to Quakerism. His method of interpreting the Bible is frankly allegorical. The unfallen state is one in which the indwelling God (variously described as Reason and as Universal Love) rules the life of man. The Fall means the intrusion of self-love, which is followed by the curse. This, however, can be but temporary; for Reason or Universal Love must triumph, and mankind be restored to its primal perfection (pp. 375-89). By this and other such reinterpretations of the Christian scheme (in which some of the essential dogmas of Calvinism are omitted and the whole takes on a universalist colouring) Winstanley builds the theological foundations of his social teaching.

A fourth influence is less theoretic. Apart from the varying notes of naturalism and scepticism detected in some of their leaders, there was among the Levellers a marked transfer of interest from religion to the world. But even in the leaders the drift from Puritan belief and sentiment is by no means constant. There appears to have been no such drift in John Lilburne, the most influential of them all. His earliest sufferings had been in the cause of liberty of conscience, and eight years later he published an account of his religious experience at this time. Increasingly preoccupied with secular concerns, and thrown into association with Overton and Walwyn, he seems, nevertheless, to have Edition: current; Page: [[57]] remained a religious enthusiast to the end. And wherever he deals with religion he appears as a rigorous Separatist who could readily subscribe to all the teachings of Williams’s Bloody Tenent. More significant still is the fact that all the Levellers, when arguing in favour of religious liberty, do so on the grounds set forth in that great book, which is as orthodox as it is radical.

For the undermining of dogma is not a necessary prelude to a contribution by Puritanism to liberty or even equality. While there are enemies to be encountered, an uncritical religious enthusiasm, not too careful of logical consequences, may do yeoman service. But before the contribution can be one of ideas, and unequivocal in its logical bearings, limits must be set to the drawing of inferences from religious dogma in the secular sphere. The way actually taken by true Puritans depends on no serious undermining of dogma itself, but on quite another process which leaves the reign of dogma in religion unimpaired. With this we come to the final characteristic of Puritan thought. If it is ignored, one cannot gauge correctly the relation of Puritanism to political liberty and secular progress. That characteristic is a tendency, already hinted, to distinguish sharply between religion and the rest of life, to segregate the spiritual from the secular, and to do this, in the first instance, for the sake of religion, though with momentous consequences for the life of the world. As in the case of the Puritan concern for liberty itself, the characteristic is of the utmost importance; and, once more, it is problematical because it manifests itself only in some of the Puritans, and those not the majority, and because it would seem to run counter to one of the characteristics already fully established: the tendency of the Puritan mind to carry the implications of dogma into secular life. Like the Puritan concern for liberty, it obviously requires to have its status examined and vindicated.

The groups in which the new characteristic appears are roughly identical with those already cited as exhibiting most clearly the Puritan concern for liberty and as setting limits to the Puritan zeal for positive reform. In the Party of the Right, the Presbyterians, the new characteristic is absent; but so is it also in the Edition: current; Page: [[58]] Millenarians, and in the other groups (of the Centre and Left) who share in any appreciable degree their vision of the future. On the other hand, in those groups of the Left who are most deeply devoted to liberty of conscience and from whom proceeded the main Puritan argument and effort in behalf of political liberty, the new characteristic is very strongly marked. In the Independents, the Centre Party, it clearly emerges, but less decisively than in these. From the facts thus baldly set forth, one might predict a close relation between the new characteristic—the tendency to segregate the spiritual and the secular—and the effective emergence of the Puritan concern for liberty. The segregation of the spiritual and the secular is indeed the means by which the concern for liberty frees itself in the secular sphere from other and countervailing impulses, and disposes of all those particular inferences from dogma which are inimical to liberty. If the concern for liberty is an authentic characteristic of the Puritan mind, so also is this, the necessary mode of its transfer to the secular field. But the proof need not rest here. As in the case of the concern for liberty, the separation of the spiritual and the secular (or what we may for brevity call the principle of segregation) is traceable to the foundations of Puritan thought. In discussing the Puritan conception of man and the world, we observed as a constant feature, the recognition of a twofold system, an order of nature and an order of grace, and we remarked on the extent to which the different views taken of the precise relation subsisting between the two orders coloured Puritan thought. It is upon an extreme interpretation of this dogma of the two orders that the principle of segregation depends. The two orders are separate and opposed. God indeed is the creator and ruler of them both, but he rules them by different dispensations, and the goods which pertain to them are totally different (for, though spiritual goodness no doubt assumes all the natural virtues, it also transcends them). What God has thus divided, the Christian may not seek to join. He must not (for example), through mistaken zeal, try to bring the natural man under a rule meant only for the elect. In all his thinking, indeed, he must be mindful of the distinction of the two orders. This principle, thoroughly applied, imposes severe limits upon the intrusion of dogma into secular life. In other words, it completely secularizes one division of existence. But the principle is derived not from any conscious reaction against dogma as such, but from a confident and extreme appeal to one of the basic dogmas of the Puritan creed. The correctness of this interpretation is, I think, confirmed by the fact that for many who apply the principle Edition: current; Page: [[59]] of segregation the reign of dogma in the spiritual sphere remains (for a long time at least) unassailed.

The practical manifestations of this principle, and its less immediate results, are far-reaching indeed. The most obvious manifestation, the perfect example in action, is the insistence by Puritans of the Left on the absolute separation of church and state, the social organs of grace and nature respectively. That this insistence becomes the groundwork of a plea for complete liberty of conscience illustrates the close connection between the principle of segregation and the Puritan concern for liberty. But the alliance does not stop short with religious liberty; the reasoning which issues in a purely spiritual view of the church issues just as certainly in a purely secular view of the state. This in itself invites a reconsideration of the state’s origin, function, and sanctions. It does not follow that the reconsideration will be democratic in tendency; but it may be so, and the invitation is the first service of the Puritan principle of segregation to the cause of liberty and equality. There is a second service. We have seen that Puritanism nourishes both a concern for liberty and a sentiment of equality (and this it does without reference to the principle of segregation). But both terms require to be qualified: it is Christian liberty, and it is the equality of believers. The natural man can claim no share in these privileges, which belong to a higher order, the order of grace. The sense of a fundamental inequality underlies both the concern for liberty and—the paradox is only seeming—the sentiment of equality itself. In other words: when the order of nature and the order of grace are considered together, the superiority of the latter will always assert itself. The principle of segregation enters to insist that they must be considered apart. That is its second service. But there is a third. Puritanism fosters the impulse to reform in the interests of righteousness, and this impulse (we have seen) runs, or may run, counter to a concern for liberty. Viewing Puritanism as a whole, we detected a potential and unresolved conflict between these two motives. The incentive to reform belongs to the order of grace, but it may be translated into action in the order of nature. To such a passage from one order to the other the principle of segregation once more opposes a barrier. At least it insists that the attempt to reform the world shall be in the terms appropriate to the world, the terms not of religion but of natural ethics. Indeed where the principle is carried to its logical conclusion, as it is in Roger Williams, it resolves the conflict between the two motives of liberty and reform. This is the third and final service.

But is not the principle of segregation a two-edged sword? Will it not, logically applied, cut off from the secular sphere the liberalizing as well as the reactionary influences of Puritanism, at least in so far as these are grounded in dogma? Theoretically it should. Indeed, in so far as the principle is anticipated by Luther it has precisely that result: Christian liberty, he reiterates, has no bearing on politics. Furthermore, Separatism in essence means separation from the world and its cares. But the predominantly active character of the Puritan temper—not to mention the instincts of human nature, even when sanctified—may be depended on to forestall that result. And the segregation of the spiritual and the secular cannot in practice mean that all influence of the one upon the other will cease. The lessons learned in the conventicle will not be forgotten in the forum. But we may look for a new mode of influence: not the direct influence of intrusion, but the indirect influence of analogy. There is a spiritual equality in the order of grace: is there not an analogous equality in the order of nature? This is but one of a dozen points at which analogically Puritanism could reinforce the cause of liberty and equality.

In briefest outline, and too abstractedly perhaps (but illustration will follow), we have suggested the importance of the principle of segregation in its bearing on liberty. The principle opened to the Puritan other developments in the secular field: it enabled him to adopt Baconian ideas in education as readily as democratic ideas in politics, and in the next century it contributed to make some of the Dissenting academies outposts of the Enlightment and of radical thought. With the true Puritan, religion remains the first concern: the principle—one might almost call it the device—of segregation prevents (or rather, as the subsequent history of Dissent seems to show, postpones) the repercussion upon his dogmatic creed, of radical and naturalistic ideas adopted in a secular sphere.