IV

The service of Puritanism to the cause of liberty is not bounded by its disinterested attachment to liberty as an ideal. If this attachment had been wholly absent, if Puritanism had advanced no theological doctrine of liberty, elaborated no theory of religious toleration, pointed no analogies between the economies of grace and nature or between a free church and a free state, it would still have been, in the circumstances, a potent engine of destruction Edition: current; Page: [[61]] and the most effective school of revolution then available. It is a truism that the years between 1640 and 1649 saw the overthrow of a system of absolutism in church and state, which if it had been allowed to prevail, might radically have altered the whole subsequent course of English political development: in so far at least the ‘Whig view of history’ is correct. Nor is it easy to conceive of this overthrow without the powerful incentive and example of Puritanism, not at one stage merely but at point after point of its course. Nothing could dissipate the divinity that hedged a king save the divinity of religion itself when religion was ranged against him. The analogies between Puritan and Jesuit thought seized on by the Royalists are not all fanciful: Puritanism effected in Protestant England what even the Church could not (or would not) effect in the Roman Catholic countries of Europe. . . .

It is true that in the twin sources of Protestant thought, Calvin and Luther, there was impressive authority for passive obedience even to ungodly magistrates. But the oracles were not altogether consistent: Milton was able to quote from the Reformation divines in order to round out a universal testimony against tyrants—and if they sometimes spoke in another sense, so much the worse for their authority! On the Puritans of the Right Calvin was the dominant influence. Notably more reticent than Luther on Christian liberty and the privileges of the Saints, Calvin does not, like Luther, limit the application to the spiritual sphere; and he writes between the lines of his injunction to passive obedience a prescription of strictly limited disobedience, which in the emphatic closing sentences of the Institutes becomes perfectly specific:

But in that obedience . . . due to . . . rulers we must always make this exception . . .: that it be not incompatible with obedience to Him to whose will . . . kings should be subject, to whose decrees their commands must yield, to whose majesty their sceptres must bow. And indeed how preposterous were it, in pleasing men, to incur the offence of Him for whose sake you obey men! . . . If they command anything against Him, let us not pay the least regard to it, nor be moved by all the dignity which they possess as magistrates—a dignity to which no injury is done when it is subordinated to the special and truly supreme power of God.

Calvin enjoins Christian obedience and fixes its limits. Nor does he leave active resistance without recognition or a means of becoming effective: private citizens may not actively oppose their prince; but the inferior magistrates may, and when godliness is Edition: current; Page: [[62]] menaced, must (pp. 197-8). Here Calvin is at one with the more liberal thought of the Renaissance. His prescription might have been written for the Presbyterian Party of the First Civil War. Charles is cast for the role of prince, and Parliament for that of the inferior magistrates; they fight by the book. In practice Calvinism imposes little restraint upon the rebels: they are not to destroy monarchy, but they are to discipline it and render it wholly subservient to the higher ends of government. Once the inferior magistrates have declared against the prince, and freed opposition from the stigma of rebellion, so staunch a Calvinist as Rutherford can forge in Lex Rex almost every argument of revolution later to be employed by the Levellers, can invoke the law of nature and the ultimate sovereignty of the people (pp. 203-211). It is thus that one side—on the face of it the more emphatic side—of Calvin’s teaching is sunk in favour of the other, the revolutionary. ‘We can pick and choose from a Reformer,’ says Saltmarsh in another connection, ‘what fits to the standard of our own light and reformation, and cast the other by. . . .’

There was a point in action beyond which the Presbyterians would not go. With the end of the First Civil War the side of Calvin’s teaching neglected in the heat of the struggle began to reassert itself. But by this time an increasing body of Puritans were quite ready, as we have seen, to run counter to Calvin’s views on magistracy as also on church polity, while they held for the most part by his fundamental doctrine of predestination. The Presbyterians, not without chapter and verse in the Institutes, had sown the wind: the year 1647 marks the beginning of the whirlwind. On the basis of the doctrine of predestination had been erected the ideal of the rule of the Saints. With many this ideal swept away every other theory of government. For many others the belief in the sovereignty of the people no longer required such dubious underpinnings as Calvinistic theology could be made to yield. It appeared self-evident. One might even go so far as to secularize the Civil War—might decide that it was never legitimate to take up the sword for religion, but only for the gaining of civil rights: the revolution could proceed under its own power.

For others no authority was left but the sword: the conquerors should distribute the spoils whether in terms of the rights of the people or the privileges of the Saints—two standards which seemed less incompatible in practice than they now appear in theory. In this later period of conflicting doctrines, however, Puritanism is still—indeed more unconditionally than ever before—a mighty revolutionary agent; for its radical elements are liberated to act by themselves. If the Calvinistic view of the limits of Christian obedience is one of the chief impelling forces in the First Civil War, the confused ideals of Christian privileges and human rights then take its place, all but sweeping away the authority of Calvin’s inferior magistrates, the Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled, and substituting the rule of the Army in its stead.

This fact raises an issue of fundamental importance. From the vantage ground of a later century no one will doubt that the most important political doctrine to emerge from the revolution was one temporarily defeated, but destined to ultimate triumph, the sovereignty of Parliament, a doctrine whose assertion altered the character of that body, and vastly extended its powers. The direct debt of this doctrine to Puritanism does not appear to be great. Its indirect debt is, on the other hand, immense; for Parliament allied itself with the forces of Puritanism and asserted its own sovereignty by claiming its right to undertake the reform of religion. The doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty is not necessarily a doctrine of liberty or of democracy. It is significant that we find arrayed against it, in the Debates, the most extreme forces of Puritanism, both democratic and anti-democratic. In order that the sovereignty of Parliament may become a doctrine of liberty and democracy, and their most effective safeguard, Parliament must be democratized and its general conformity to the will of the nation must be ensured. These are the hard-won achievements of a later day. But they are implicit in the Levellers’ opposition to the sovereignty claimed by the existing Parliament; and that opposition draws sustenance from the Puritan belief in liberty of conscience and, more generally, from the habits of thought which directly and indirectly Puritanism inculcates.

It is not on particular issues, however fundamental, that the Edition: current; Page: [[64]] influence of Puritanism in the revolution alone depends. The contemporary view is best given in such a retrospect as the Declaration of the English Army now in Scotland (pp. 474-8), which unhesitatingly assigns the chief place to religion, and exhibits Puritanism’s marshalling of its forces as a continuous and divinely appointed process, extending from the outbreak of the Bishops’ War to Cromwell’s invasion of Scotland eleven years later. The constant operation of the ideal of godliness is also the burden of Ireton’s masterly account of the revolution, written at the end of 1648: the object of the struggle was the establishment of ‘common right and freedom’; but true religion alone can make men free, and godlessness and superstition are equally the allies of the tyrant (pp. 458-9). It is thus that Puritanism visualizes its role in the revolution and stakes its claim to have fought for emancipation.

In part that claim must be allowed, but without confusing the service of liberty with its disinterested and unqualified service. If the cause of emancipation had depended alone on disinterested and unqualified believers in liberty as an ideal, it would have made but a sorry showing in the world. For objectives in practical politics are always limited and generally selfish. But those who start revolutions build—and destroy—better than they know. The pressure of events bears them along and forces them to develop ever more extreme inferences from their original premises (witness the Presbyterian Rutherford and the Independent Ireton). And when they reach the point beyond which they will not go, the moment of imperative compromise, there are others who will complete the last syllogism—or finish the final furrow: Rutherford has declared the right, and Goodwin will acclaim the meeting of right with might (pp. 212-20); the Independents invoke the purposes of God and the duties of the Saints, and the Millenarians will define those purposes and duties with a terrifying literalness; or the Independents invoke the sovereign people, and the Levellers will demand the reforms to which the invocation points—and get them if they can. . . .

All or much of this might have been true even if Puritanism had not evolved from its theological consciousness ideas of liberty, of equality, of individualism, of government by consent and agreement, and of a species of privilege which had nothing to do with worldly possessions or existing class distinctions. But these very ideas Puritanism did evolve. They come into strongest relief in the struggle for religious freedom and reform, and thence, by processes already glanced at, are transferred to the political field. Edition: current; Page: [[65]] The foundation of each is some Protestant doctrine pushed to an extreme.

Most fundamental for our discussion is one which has received little attention—we might almost say none—from students of Puritanism: the doctrine of Christian liberty. Its sources in the New Testament, particularly in St. Paul, are rehearsed in Luther’s exposition of Galatians (pp. 221-5) and in Milton’s practical applications of the doctrine (pp. 226-8). In simplest terms, the Gospel frees men from the burden of the Law. The essence of the old dispensation is bondage: men were slaves of an outward law. The essence of the new dispensation is freedom: believers are sons of God and joint-heirs with Christ. Theirs is a voluntary service—and in the spirit, not to the letter. Deo parere libertas est. The idea was familiar to every Protestant, and, with varying emphasis, was accepted by them all. Its revolutionary influence turns chiefly on two questions: (1) What portion of the Mosaic Law (Ceremonial, Judicial, and Moral) is abrogated by the coming of the Gospel? (2) How far is the liberty conferred a purely spiritual gift without applications beyond the religious experience of the individual? To the first question Luther and Milton return the same extreme answer: Not the Ceremonial Law merely, but the whole Mosaic Law is abrogated (p. 224). Their answers to the second question differ widely: Luther limits the application to the spiritual life and experience of the believer, a decision characteristic of his theological radicalism and practical conservatism. Milton, on the contrary, makes Christian liberty the very corner-stone of his theory of toleration (pp. 226-8); Edition: current; Page: [[66]] and from the ecclesiastical sphere he presses on boldly to the civil (pp. 229-30). In many of his contemporaries the doctrine has its influence even when it is not set forth in detail. Wherever in the struggle for toleration one encounters the phrase Christian liberty—and it is everywhere—this theological basis is implied.

Christian liberty itself the Presbyterians do not deny; but they seek to limit the inferences drawn from it and to counteract them by an appeal to the Old Testament, to other theological doctrines, and to common sense. Thomas Edwards would have the issue squarely faced: ‘Whether the commanding men by the power of laws to do their duties, to do the things which God requires of them, with the using outward means to work them to it when unwilling, be unlawful for the magistrate, and against Christian liberty, yea or no?’ George Gillespie states the Presbyterian position in Wholesome Severity Reconciled with Christian Liberty (1645); and the Westminster Confession of Faith significantly concludes its chapter (chiefly devoted, in the manner of Calvin, to explaining what the doctrine is not) with the declaration that ‘they who, upon pretence of Christian liberty, shall oppose any lawful power . . . whether . . . civil or ecclesiastical, resist the ordinance of God,’ while whoever disturbs the peace of the church may be proceeded against not by ecclesiastical censures only, but by ‘the power of the civil magistrate.’ With this view the moderate Independents at Whitehall do not disagree in principle, but rather in its application. They believe that it is a Congregational polity that the magistrate is authorized to set up and defend, and they are willing to concede to allies, past and present, a measure of toleration under the new system. No such compromise will satisfy their allies of the Left. They are for Christian liberty in its widest range.

With those who emphasize Christian liberty and plead for freedom of conscience as the Christian’s birthright, the doctrine is a genuine and perennial source of emancipation. It is closely associated with—is indeed an aspect of—that appeal from the Old Testament to the New, which is a feature of liberal Puritan thinking. In Milton’s interpretation the note of the old dispensation in general is the note of bondage; that of the new, the Edition: current; Page: [[67]] note of freedom: Christ came to set men free (p. 229). In Roger Williams the matter is put in another way. The Old Testament is prophetic and symbolic: it is the type of which the New Testament supplies the antitype, and its models and precepts are not, under the Gospel, to be taken literally. Israel’s church-state does not countenance a church-state to-day, but merely foreshadows the true Church, God’s mystical Israel; so the injunctions to purify Israel of idolater, heretic, and blasphemer, with the civil sword, prescribe no such duties to the Christian magistrate, but hold forth the purity of the true and voluntary church of Christ, and the spiritual censures by which that purity is maintained (pp. 288-92). Thus in their different manners Williams and Milton try to nullify the arguments from the Old Testament for the magistrate’s power and responsibility in religion, the arguments which will be advanced so long as Christian liberty is interpreted as the abrogation merely of the Ceremonial Law, and which are actually advanced at Whitehall, and countered straight out of The Bloody Tenent (pp. 150-69). In both Milton and Williams there is really more than an appeal from the Old Testament to the New; there is an effective application of what I have called the principle of segregation. Like Luther, Williams, and in measure, also, Milton, insist on the purely spiritual character of all that pertains to the Christian religion, but, unlike Luther, they do not infer from this that the organization of the church and the relation of church and state are things indifferent and at the discretion of the civil magistrate. On the contrary, they insist that by the Gospel these things are prescribed, and that, with the Separatists, one must interpret the autonomy of the spiritual sphere as including the freedom of the church.

Though this is the most notable achievement, and the clearest practical result to which it ministers, the doctrine of Christian liberty extends its influence on Puritan thought in various, and (it must be admitted) sometimes contrary directions; three of which may be briefly indicated at this point. (1) Despite the spiritual character of Christian liberty the doctrine was actually pressed into the service of revolution, as Milton, no doubt speaking the language of the military Saints whom he was defending, clearly illustrates; and for the Millenarians in particular it was obviously quite compatible with a rule of the elect won and exercised by the sword. (2) The very fact of grounding one’s appeal for freedom on Christian liberty restricts the direct benefits of that appeal to the regenerate: Christian liberty freed you for, not from, the Edition: current; Page: [[68]] service of God. It is thus that the Millenarians conceive of freedom, and that Milton comes increasingly to conceive of it; and they are so far typical, at least, that the freedom of the regenerate is the primary concern of all genuine Puritans: here Presbyterians, Independents, and sectaries stand on common ground, differing only in their definition of the regenerate and their conception of the kind of liberty to be sought. But two forces counteract this restrictive emphasis: the first is the impossibility, recognized alike by Milton, Williams, and the Levellers, of guaranteeing the liberty of the regenerate without guaranteeing the liberty of all, and on this fact at last depends the direct contribution of Puritanism to general liberty; the second counteracting force is a consistent and thorough-going application of the principle of segregation, whereby the idea of Christian liberty is freed to operate by analogy in the natural order: Christian liberty for the regenerate, natural liberty for man. (3) There are other ways in which the doctrine of Christian liberty may operate by analogy. Christian liberty is conceived in terms of the abrogation of outward law, and the influence of this conception is apparent in one dominant Puritan attitude to the state and its enactments. But to these questions we shall return.

Not less clearly than the idea of liberty, that of equality rests on a theological foundation. The priesthood of the believer and the doctrine of election established an equality in the spiritual sphere. This equality is, strictly speaking, quite independent of worldly rank and possessions and has no bearing upon them. But it is susceptible of an extension precisely similar to that observed in the case of Christian liberty: the equality of believers may be thought of as a spiritual condition which carries certain definite implications for the church. The demand is not for a free church only, but for a church of equals. The equality of believers is used to assail first the ecclesiastical hierarchy and then the distinction between cleric and lay (pp. 312-13). It is a levelling principle of no little potency, and it may be extended outside the ecclesiastical sphere in one of two ways, and with results diametrically opposed. (1) It may give effect not to absolute equality but to a new species of privilege. The equality of believers is an equality in their superiority to other men. This is a view discernible in the thought of Presbyterians and Independents; and it reaches its logical consequences in the creed of the Millenarians, the full doctrine of the privileges of the Saints. But (2) where the principle of segregation is applied, this result is prevented, and the doctrine of the equality of believers operates in the Edition: current; Page: [[69]] natural sphere by analogy alone. As in the order of grace all believers are equal, so in the order of nature all men are equal; as the church is composed of believers all equally privileged, so the state should be composed of men all equally privileged. The premise was the lesson taught by the sects; the conclusion was the inference drawn in politics by the Levellers and in economics by the Diggers.

Their position had its secular sources in the ideas of the law of nature and of natural rights; but these ideas were, for men bred in the conventicle, enormously reinforced, and given a sort of religious sanction, by the parallel presented between the order of nature and the order of grace, and between the ideals of liberty and equality as they appeared in state and in church. It is the sectaries whom Overton is really addressing when he writes:

For by natural birth all men are equal, . . . born to like propriety, liberty and freedom, and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, every one with a natural innate freedom and propriety, . . . even so we are to live, every one equally . . . to enjoy his birthright and privilege, even all whereof God by nature hath made him free. . . . Every man by nature being a king, priest, prophet, in his own natural circuit and compass, whereof no second may partake but by deputation, commission, and free consent from him whose right and freedom it is.

This is virtually a statement of the doctrines of Christian liberty and equality, with man written over the word ‘believer,’ and nature written over the word ‘grace.’ . . .

In close connection with its ideals of liberty and equality, Puritanism developed its own pronounced note of individualism. Once more the main theological basis is to be sought in the doctrines of election and of the priesthood of the believer, with their enormous emphasis on the value of the individual soul, chosen by God before time was. Beside that, the organized forces of society must seem a trivial thing. Moreover the priestly function included, with ever-increasing emphasis, the prophetic. Here the experiential side of Puritan religion—manifested in ‘prophesyings,’ disputations, and harangues such as Lilburne’s from the pillory—played its part in fostering and expressing individuality and perhaps an overweening sense of the individual’s importance. There are, of course, considerations which limit the action of Puritan individualism. One is the element of stern repressiveness Edition: current; Page: [[70]] in the Puritan creed, but this is mitigated wherever the doctrine of Christian liberty is emphasized, by some sense of having risen superior to all outward law. Another is the necessity (nowise peculiar to Puritanism) of subordinating the individual to a group and a cause: under pressure from without, the Puritans manifest remarkable powers of association and temporary cohesion, but the inherent individualism, with its disruptive force, remains, and is written large in the history of the sects. A true church, said Milton, may consist of a single member.

In politics we have already noticed the force of individual judgment, or the Puritan conscience. It remains to observe another important result, in an attitude towards the state which anticipates the individualism of a later day. Burke remarked the similarity in language between the revolutionaries of 1649 and of 1789, with their talk of natural rights and the sovereignty of a free and equal people; and some historical connection can be traced, mainly through the leaders of American thought. Not less striking, and perhaps more significant, is the anticipation of Bentham and James Mill. Up to a point Independents and Levellers agree in advancing a laisser-faire ideal of the state. One tendency of all the Agreements of the People is clearly to circumscribe the activity of government as such. This they do by placing certain matters for ever beyond its power, by limiting the duration of Parliaments, and otherwise reducing to a minimum their possible independence of the nation’s will. Like the famous essay On Government, they set forth a scheme of democratic reform whose motive was quite as much the provision of satisfactory guarantees against interference with the individual as any sentiment of abstract equality. Human nature being what it was, a measure of democracy was the best protection against tyranny. Economic motives mingle with political, and, as in Mill, the underlying philosophy is individualist, not socialist, in character. Recent history had done much to foster individualism. Under the absolutist system of Charles I, government had been everywhere; and under a self-perpetuating Parliament the old menace had assumed a new guise.

Though they differed as to the degree of institutional reform needed, many of the Independents were at first hardly less determined than the Levellers to end it. It is obvious that the reforms contemplated by the Independents (pp. 424-6) and by the Levellers (pp. 318-22, 335-42, 433-5) are in the main negative reforms, the removal of restrictions. An example is the effort to abolish state-granted monopolies and to establish what they called free Edition: current; Page: [[71]] trade. Their ingenuity runs much to the erection of political machinery to compass these ends; and in this they remind the modern reader of Bentham. Added to the practical motives were some more theoretic. Government, said Ireton, was a necessary evil, the result of man’s fallen condition; it could not be abolished; but it could be restricted, and the individual safeguarded; the merit of the Agreement of the People was that it achieved these results. Milton, a little remote from the tumult of practical politics, formulates the position with perfect clarity: the function of the state is to preserve peace and order and to guarantee the freedom of the individual; a wise government will be more willing to repeal old laws than to enact new ones, for the intention of laws is to check the commission of vice, but liberty is the best school of virtue (p. 230). Here in the implied conceptions of both law and liberty, the supporting influence of the doctrine of Christian liberty can be seen. Outward laws are a mark of bondage, a burden to the good; and liberty is conceived in terms of their abrogation, whereby individuals are freed to follow the inner law, which, according to Milton, is the law of nature written in the heart. The ideal condition is to be able to live without laws because ‘our reason is our law.’ Too extreme to be wholly typical, this view is at least symptomatic.

For the safeguarding of the individual, the restriction of the state to its proper sphere, and the founding of necessary government on an equitable basis, the Levellers relied on an Agreement of the People whose simple philosophy must at this point be recalled. The social contract was, in the first instance, a voluntary covenant, based on, and expressive of, the fundamental law of nature. Custom had thwarted its intention and obscured its meaning. The Agreement would restore them. It would reserve to the individual his inalienable rights; it would give effect once more to the principle of government by the consent of the governed, and provide, through universal suffrage, for the renewal of the consent as each succeeding Parliament was elected. The elements of which the Agreement was compounded were none of them new. The fundamental law of nature, known to reason, conformity to which must furnish the final sanction of every positive law; the notion of inalienable rights embodied in Magna Charta and other Edition: current; Page: [[72]] grants or established in the courts of law; and even the idea of a social contract originally voluntary in character—all these had been rendered more or less familiar by the long struggle with the Crown. But an Agreement of the People turned on something more than an elaboration and weaving together of these notions. Behind the idea of a free state lay the model of a free church. In the Ready and Easy Way Milton points the basic analogy. Those who would reform the state, he remarks, are

not bound by any statute of preceding Parliaments but by the law of nature only, which is the only law of laws truly and properly to all mankind fundamental, the beginning and end of all government, to which no Parliament or people that will thoroughly reform but may and must have recourse, as they had (and must yet have) in church reformation . . . to evangelic rules, not to ecclesiastical canons though never so ancient, so ratified and established in the land by statutes which for the most part are mere positive laws, neither natural nor moral. . . .

The model of ecclesiastical excellence, says another writer, is founded on the law of God set forth in the New Testament and received by faith; that of civil excellence is ‘founded on the law of God engraven in nature and demonstrated by reason.’ In each case there is a fundamental law and a primitive model of excellence; and in each case the injunction is to depart from, and if need be destroy, whatever conflicts with the law or fails to conform to the model. In the church Puritan scripturism is a mighty agent of destruction and reform. And whether operating directly or, as in the case of the Levellers and of the writers cited above, analogically, it is capable of having a similar effect in the state. But the analogy can be carried further. If the Leveller emphasizes the contract on which the authority of just government depends, and insists on the principle of consent, he has had, in his church, experience of a community organized on these very principles. Not the idea of the social contract, but the hold which it took upon the Puritans of the Left, may with some confidence be attributed to the covenanted and more or less democratic Puritan churches.

The idea of a covenant, derived ultimately from the Old Testament, appears in different forms in the more extreme Protestantism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where its vogue is associated with that of ‘covenant’ theology in general. First found among the Anabaptists of Germany (in what was to be its dominant ‘congregational’ form), the idea passes, about the middle Edition: current; Page: [[73]] of the sixteenth century, into Scotland; and there, characteristically, it adheres more closely to the Old Testament model and produces a series of national covenants, destined in a later day to be opposed to the congregational church covenant, but at the same time to reinforce the covenant idea. In England the first exponent of the congregational covenant is Robert Browne, whose True and Short Declaration of the Gathering and Joining Together of Certain Persons recounts:

A covenant was made and their mutual consent was given to hold together. There were certain chief points proved unto them by the scriptures; all of which being particularly rehearsed . . ., they agreed upon them, and pronounced their agreement to each thing particularly, saying, ‘To this we give our consent.’ First therefore they gave their consent to join themselves to the Lord in one covenant and fellowship together and to keep and seek agreement under his laws and government. . . . Further they agreed of those which should teach them . . . whom they allowed and did choose as able and meet for that charge. . . . So they prayed for their watchfulness and diligence and promised their obedience. Likewise an order was agreed on for their meetings together for their exercises . . . as for prayer . . . exhortation and edifying either by all men which had the gift or by those which had a special charge before others; and for the lawfulness of putting forth questions to learn the truth, as, if anything seemed doubtful and hard, to require some to show it more plainly, or for any to show it himself and cause the rest to understand it. . . . Again it was agreed that any might protest, appeal, complain, exhort, dispute, reprove, &c., as he had occasion, but yet in due order, which was then also declared. . . . Furthermore they particularly agreed of the manner how to watch to disorders and reform abuses, . . . for gathering and testifying voices in debating matters and propounding them in the name of the rest that agreed, for an order of choosing teachers, guides and relievers . . .; for separating clean from unclean, for receiving any into fellowship, for presenting the daily success of the church and the wants thereof, . . . for taking an order that none contend openly, nor persecute, nor trouble disorderly, nor bring false doctrine nor evil cause, after once or twice warning or rebuke.

The basic ideas of agreement and covenant persist in English Separatism, whether in England or Holland, and are transferred to New England. The distinguishing mark of Congregationalism, Robert Baillie (who is not concerned with nice distinctions between separating and non-separating varieties) finds in ‘an explicit covenant, wherein all and every one of the members by a voluntary association . . . do bind themselves under a solemn oath to Edition: current; Page: [[74]] walk in the ways of the Gospel.’ Among the non-separating Congregationalists, and among some of the Separatists, less power was conceded to the people than in Browne’s scheme; and the former would allow of an implicit covenant when an explicit could not be achieved. But it remains broadly true that Congregationalism, in its different forms, by emphasizing the idea of the covenant, preserved the possibility of a free and democratic church order, and of its influence in the civil sphere, between which and the ecclesiastical there is constant interaction. The classic example of a social contract modelled on a church covenant is the civil covenant of the Pilgrims, and the charter and constitution of the Providence Plantation, with other colonial documents, furnish instances no less striking of the idea of agreement, and the principle of government by consent, transplanted into the civil life. On the other hand, the church covenant itself could be defended by a reference from the ecclesiastical sphere to the civil. ‘All voluntary relations,’ wrote Richard Mather in his Apology for Church Covenant, ‘[that is] all relations which are neither natural nor violent, are entered into by way of covenant’ (p. 300). The ultimate consequence of such a theory had already been hinted by Robert Browne in his Book Concerning True Christians; he finds in church ministers, and in civil magistrates, an authority, derived from God, but bestowed on them respectively by the consent and agreement of the congregation and the people.

In trying to estimate the influence of the church covenant on Puritan political thought, and especially on the ideals and practice of the Army, it must be made clear that among the sectaries the Baptists seem to have discarded the covenant. Hanserd Knollys speaks of churches gathered in London ‘without urging or making any particular covenant with members upon admittance,’ for their conditions were ‘faith, repentance and baptism, and none other.’ And William Dell, manifesting the extreme Puritan tendency to approximate the Visible to the Invisible Church, and to discover new distinctions between the spiritual and the secular, repudiates the covenant as belonging to the light of nature merely, whereas the true Church has a higher and purely spiritual bond of union; the use of a covenant, then, is the mark not of the true Church, but of the churches of men (pp. 304-5). It would be a mistake, however, to exaggerate the importance of these facts. The Edition: current; Page: [[75]] churches which retained the covenant idea embraced the Puritans of the Centre, and possibly the majority of the Puritans of the Left. And in the minds of those who came to repudiate the covenant as essential to the constitution of a church, the idea had already done its work and become firmly established as the only mode of association in civil things. There is no reason to suppose that the Baptist churches were less democratic in their practices than the congregation described by Browne in the preceding century (see pp. 307-14). If the absence of a covenant withdrew the formal dependence of the ministry on the laity, this was more than offset by the progressive disappearance of the distinction between the two orders. Finally, all the churches remained in fact voluntary associations with power over the individual only after he had conceded it and only for so long as he continued to acquiesce in its exercise. Thus the results of the church covenant were preserved even among the sectaries who had pressed beyond its formal employment. Familiarity with the idea of the covenant, and with the principles that it embodied, gave a common ground for agreement—and for argument—among the Puritans of the Centre and the Left. By analogy it had helped to establish in the civil sphere the doctrine of the social contract and government by consent. And it provided in the covenanted churches models of organization in different degrees democratic. Its influence is widespread and pervasive.

To that influence the beginning and the end of the General Council of the Army alike testify. The Solemn Engagement of the Army was a contract of voluntary association, a covenant among the soldiers, with the nation, and before God. As such it suggests a linking of two forms of the covenant idea. It is a simple and almost perfect example of the church covenant transposed to secular ends, based on and embodying the law of nature as the church covenant is based on and embodies the law of Christ, and elaborating, as do the early church covenants, its own organs of expression and administration. At the same time it derives something from the Solemn League and Covenant, which it is in measure designed to offset; and in its quasi-national character, as in other respects, it marks a step on the way to the Agreements of the People. But the covenant idea is potent in defeat as well as in victory. When Fairfax is able to undo the work of the Solemn Engagement and insist on the Army’s retirement from ‘England’s freedom’ to ‘soldiers’ rights,’ he can effect those purposes only by a new engagement (p. [30]).

It is, of course, the Agreements of the People that mark the Edition: current; Page: [[76]] apotheosis of the covenant idea and its complete and triumphant translation to the civil sphere. In the Agreements the covenant’s every principle is represented: the recognition of a fundamental law (the law of nature for the law of Christ), which the terms of the contract must embody and by which alone they are conditioned; the ideas of voluntary association and government by consent; the reservation of the individual’s inalienable rights, implicit in the church covenant and safeguarded by the power of withdrawal, but necessarily explicit in the Agreements (since the power of withdrawal is virtually non-existent in the civil state); the delegation of power, under due safeguards, to those who must act for the community; the elaboration of an ‘order,’ or the necessary machinery of administration and of popular expression; and the whole thing extended and raised to a national scope and level, thus assimilating, and subordinating to the principles of the church covenant, the model of its deadly rival from beyond the Scottish border. Such was the final object of the Agreements, but on the way to that object they exemplify yet another ideal recognized in some of the church covenants. The reader will recall what was said at an earlier point about the Puritan belief in the progressive interpretation of truth and will remember that this principle was written into the covenant of the Pilgrims’ church (p. [45]). It is not written into the Agreements, but it is recognized in the fact that, as issued by the Levellers, and perhaps also by the Independents, they were designed to furnish a basis for discussion, and to serve as explorations leading to truth and consent. Behind the Agreements lies the belief in free and equal discussion which seems to have been nourished by the more liberal forms of Puritanism, and which dominates the proceedings of the General Council of the Army.

Considered in themselves those proceedings are sufficiently remarkable; and one would wish to know more, and with greater certainty, of their models. Mr. A. D. Lindsay has suggested that the congregation was the school of democracy. There the humblest member might hear, and join in, the debate, might witness the discovery of the natural leader, and participate in that curious process by which there emerges from the clash of many minds a vision clearer and a determination wiser than any single mind could achieve. To the congregation we may look for the source and model of that democratic organization and practice of which the recorded proceedings of the General Council of the Edition: current; Page: [[77]] Army are the most striking examples. To this suggestion may be added certain others, in no way incompatible with it. By the soldiers at large, the Council of the Army would be most naturally regarded as a sort of extension, to include their representatives, of a body already instituted by Fairfax: the Council of War, in which the General placed his plans of campaign before the higher officers and sought their criticism and advice. And it is observable, in contrast with its later developments, that the first object of the General Council was also to reach decisions on particular and practical issues like those presented in the Reading debate (pp. 409-21). But the Council of War, as Fairfax used it, was itself an innovation whose origin has not been fully explained, a remoter product of the zeal for discussion and agreement whose more striking example is the General Council; so that we succeed merely in forcing the question one step back. There is, however, another parallel with the General Council which seems unescapable though it has never been noticed: the House of Commons itself. And actually the General Council is referred to as ‘the Representative of the Army’ (p. 48). Though it might be at odds with its masters, this was the Army of the Parliament, pledged at first to maintain the liberties of Parliament, on which those of the nation were supposed to depend. What more likely than that it should take the Parliament for its model? The parallel extends to details. Like the Parliament the Army bids for public support by issuing its declarations; like the Long Parliament the General Council makes extensive use of committees; nor is it fanciful to see in the added deliberations of Fairfax and the higher officers, the ‘meeting in the inner room’ to which Cromwell refers (p. 412), something which stands to the General Council in the double relation of executive and second chamber. But more important is the view taken by the Puritans of the object and method of Parliamentary debate. Two years before the founding of the General Council a pamphleteer wrote (p. 264):

And what reformation this kingdom had in the late days, it did consist in the . . . spontaneousness of it in the Parliament . . . as one reports of it: ‘For in the senate . . . all had the opportunity to speak, nor was leave denied any kind of man to speak in opposition and utter his own belief, to argue and contend with free exchange of opinions; wherein shines forth greatly the justice and moderation of the rulers that have sought to allure, to lead, to persuade, and not to force, to drag, or Edition: current; Page: [[78]] to command. So that it is a shameless falsehood if any shall say that it was the power of authority that won the day, and not truth. . . .’ I quote the words because if they had never been realized, yet the idea of such a carriage when men are seeking out the truth is lovely as being very equal and rational.

It would not be easy to find a better formulation of the ideal at which the Army Debates also aim than this (confessedly idealized) account of the proceedings in the Parliament. At the least, those proceedings supplement for the Puritan the lessons learned in the congregation. The sum of the matter seems to be that a common ideal of truth and agreement through free debate comes into special prominence in the seventeenth century, and that it informs the proceedings of congregation, of Parliament, and of General Council alike, in part at least because it finds in the Puritan mind and temper a peculiarly congenial ground. But due recognition of the Parliamentary model brings one’s understanding of the Council into line with another fact. The principles advanced in the Debates (as in the Agreements and other pamphlets of the Levellers) are not altogether new. They are the principles advanced by the Parliament in its struggle with the King, carried to their logical conclusion, and that conclusion is democratic. Repeatedly in support of their own contentions, the Independents and their allies of the Left turn to the declarations of Parliament. And so with the organization and practice of the Council itself, if the Parliament furnishes one of its models, it is the Parliament democratized. To explain the impulse towards democracy is clearly the ultimate problem.

It is widespread and can be seen working not only in the democratic idealism of the Agreements of the People and in the General Council of the Army, but less conspicuously, though with a curious exactness of parallel, in the London companies and in agitations for a reform of the City’s government. Like the soldiers the commonalty of the companies assert their rights, demand to be heard in free debate, and carry the question back to first principles, not without allusions to the changes in the national government. In the Clothworkers’ Company, for example, there were debates between representatives of the commonalty and of the Court of Assistants, whether by the letter of the charter the commonalty had not a voice in the election of officers; this the Court refused to concede, but was willing to discuss less drastic changes which might safeguard the interests (and, it was hoped, satisfy the demands) of the commonalty; but new popular leaders emerged, and the question had to be referred to the Parliament. The Saddlers trace their woes to that common source of tyranny, the Norman Conquest; and the commonalty of the Founders, admitting that ‘men in all ages have, through their supine carelessness, degenerated from the righteousness of their first principles,’ demanded the restoration of their ‘primitive rights and privileges’ in the name of ‘the law of God, of nature, and of nations.’ The Leveller leadership which such language plainly attests, also appears in the agitations regarding the City’s government. There the issues are complicated by the City’s importance in national politics and by the dominance of the Presbyterian interest in the oligarchy; and Independents, as well as Levellers, raise their voice. Lilburne, who enjoyed some popularity in the Common Council, writes on London’s Liberty in Chains (1646). A Moderate Reply to the City Remonstrance (1646) distinguishes between the ‘city representative’ and the ‘city collective,’ and anticipating the arguments to be used by the Army against the Parliament, maintains that the ‘city collective’ owes no obedience to commands of the ‘city representative’ which contravene ‘the will and word of God,’ ‘the good of the kingdom,’ ‘the proper end’ of the representative’s being, i.e., ‘the city’s welfare,’ or the limits set to the representative’s power. And Wildman, with John Price, upholds Edition: current; Page: [[80]] in debate the right of the citizens to elect the City’s officers, quoting Parliament’s declaration that ‘the original of all just power under God proceeds from the people’ (pp. 369-78).

Against this background of democratic agitation the Debates are to be read. The ideas advanced and the methods adopted are everywhere the same: a primitive model of excellence to which institutions, corrupted by custom, must be restored, or a fundamental law into conformity with which they must be brought; the possibility of arriving through discussion at truth, that is, at a free and unconstrained recognition of what model and law demand, and hence of agreement therein; government resting on a contract and on consent; and implicit in it all—becoming explicit when necessary—the idea of equal rights, which is the distinguishing idea of democracy. How do these things relate themselves to Puritan thought and experience? The materials for answering that question have been set forth above, and hints towards an answer have been given. It remains to bring them together, to bring together also what has been said of the obstacles to secular democracy which Puritanism presents, to suggest once more the way in which those obstacles were partially overcome, and to estimate the contribution of Puritanism to democracy. We need not further consider the Puritans of the Right, or the Puritans of the Centre in the points where they differ from those of the Left: on the Puritans of the Left we may concentrate our final attention.

In some of them the concern for liberty as an authentic feature of Puritanism most unequivocally appears. They emphasize the doctrine of Christian liberty, and (as one would expect from the active Puritan temper) they use it to support a campaign for religious liberty. But to demand liberty as the Christian’s birthright is, strictly, to demand it only for Christians, or (as the Puritan would phrase it) for the Saints: it is the truth that makes you free, and only for the truth can liberty be challenged. This is the source of the reproach so often uttered against the Puritan (and in fact rather exaggerated), that he believes in liberty for himself but not for other people, and it is one source of the policy of partial toleration or toleration in indifferent things for those who are sound in essentials. In its extension beyond toleration to revolutionary politics Christian liberty may manifest the same limitation, may support an idea of the privileges of the Saints. But the fact that there is a Puritan doctrine of liberty, whatever its limitations, is immensely important. Repeatedly Puritanism brings the question of liberty up for discussion, and this is a major Edition: current; Page: [[81]] service. While operating within the prescribed bounds of ‘Christian’ liberty, Puritanism, further, does a great deal to foster the notion of individuality, and an individualistic outlook, with results partially, though not wholly, favourable to democracy.

Puritanism also fosters equality within the ‘Christian’ scheme: there is a Christian equality as well as a Christian liberty. In the more extreme sects truth may come from the meanest of the brethren (p. [46]), and, in the spirit of the Gospel, which weights the scales against the rich man, Williams finds that God has ‘chosen a little flock out of the world, and those generally poor and mean’ (p. 282). Within the sects, clearly, a levelling principle of great potency is at work. But what Christians enjoy is an equality of superiority to other men. To describe the congregation as a model democracy in little, is true of the congregation considered in itself. But considered in relation to the world in which it subsists, it is an aristocracy of grace. Liberty and equality for the privileged is the ideal of an aristocracy, though there is certainly some wider significance in the fact that Christian privilege has nothing to do with (or is even thought of in contrast to) privilege as the world understands it. In the Millenarians’ view the Saints constitute an aristocracy of grace whose divinely appointed destiny is to conquer and rule the world. And they question whether the natural man has really any rights at all (p. 246).

A measure of practical equality was, however, forced upon the Puritans in the struggle for religious liberty. (In a careful discussion equality must be distinguished from liberty; but the distinction is always breaking down.) The Puritans of the Left discovered that you cannot effectually guarantee the liberty of the Saint without guaranteeing the liberty of all men—without adding, in this one department at least, equality to liberty. The Levellers, and also Cromwell, record their frank recognition of this fact when they make liberty of conscience not the birthright of the Christian, but one of the natural rights of man (p. 444). The amazing importance of the struggle for religious liberty is due partly to the momentous issue with which it deals; but Edition: current; Page: [[82]] beyond that is the fact that it holds, as it were in solution, within itself all the rest of the struggle for liberty and equality. ‘Where civil liberty is entire,’ said Harrington, ‘it includes liberty of conscience; where liberty of conscience is entire it includes civil liberty.’ It also includes equality. When the Puritans of the Left are forced by the hard logic of facts to champion liberty of conscience for others as well as for themselves, we see the thin end of the wedge. But until it becomes, with Williams and the Levellers, something more than a grudging concession to facts, the wedge will not get much further.

Before turning to the Levellers, and considering again the process by which the forces of democracy, of liberty and equality, in Puritanism are released to operate in the secular sphere, it will be well to take a final view of the group, sometimes associated with them in action, in whom the release is not finally effected. The importance of the Millenarians resides in the fact that they carry to an extreme one set of principles found in the Independents of the Army, just as the Levellers carry to an extreme another set of principles. In their church order the Millenarians do not differ from other Puritans of the Left. Their churches are voluntary and democratic congregations (pp. 241, 245), though some form of national union may be necessary before they can rule the world (p. 245). Meanwhile they join in the demand for liberty, and above all for liberty of conscience (because without it the churches cannot exist and increase, as they must if they are ever to rule). The resort to violence, the effort to establish and exercise the rule of the Saints by force, is not perhaps an essential of the Millenarian creed, but rather a character impressed upon it Edition: current; Page: [[83]] by a revolutionary era. In the inevitability of the process by which the Saints shall inherit the earth they have a strong incentive to patience, but in the supposed plotting of that process in scripture, and in the definite role assigned to the Saints, they have a strong temptation to direct action. They are dimly conscious of the problem (pp. 39-42). In the result, they are like the Levellers, who should be willing to wait till reason has wrought conviction, but who actually seek to anticipate the triumph to come. Their reading of the Bible is at once fantastic and literal, but it is instructive to observe how much of spiritual religion can be woven into it (pp. 390-6). One should not exaggerate their difference from other Puritans of the Left. When all is said, however, they present a marked contrast with Williams and the Levellers. In all who share in any degree the Millenarian outlook, the doctrines emphasized by Puritanism—Christian liberty and equality, election (with final perseverance), the priesthood of the believer—issue in a theory of the special privileges of the Saints. The active Puritan temper carries this theory into the secular sphere and gives equal development to its converse side, the special duties of the Saints. And the Puritan tendency to draw literal inferences from scripture and dogma operates in connection not only with the theological doctrines mentioned above, but with prophecy and especially with the dazzling hope of Christ’s kingdom on earth, which, in its turn, absorbs and directs the utopian and iconoclastic impulses. The latent impulses towards democracy are not merely thwarted; their motive power is appropriated and directed to other ends. At an earlier point, we recognized somewhere near the heart of Puritanism an unresolved conflict between the concern for liberty and the concern for reform, and we saw how in the Puritans of the Right the concern for reform was in the ascendant. The ideals of the Millenarians differ widely from the Presbyterian: theirs is a clericalism without clergy (the Saints having taken its place), an ecclesiasticism without a uniform church (the Puritan distrust of outward forms having destroyed the church in favour of the sect); for the rest, they may even have adopted some of the proposals of the Levellers. But with them the concern for reform, by coercion if need be, is once more in the ascendant; and at bottom they are indifferent or hostile to the liberty and equality for which the Levellers stand. This statement is borne out by a set of political ideas, much less fully organized than the Levellers’, but clearly perceptible in the Debates: repudiation of, or at least indifference to, the democratic ideas of agreement, of representative institutions, Edition: current; Page: [[84]] of safeguards for the rights of the individual; emphasis, instead, on the monarchy of Christ as administered by the Saints, and (in conformity with this ideal) a reliance on good men rather than on a good constitution or a duly elected Parliament; willingness, finally, to regard victory in the field as the outward call of the Saints to rule the world. These ideas lead not to the democratic state but to junto and dictatorship; and though the Millenarians soon found that they had mistaken their man, and learned to speak of him in terms previously reserved for the Pope and Charles I, the prevalence of these ideas far beyond the ranks of the strict Millenarians was a foundation of Cromwell’s power. There is in Puritanism a possibility of autocracy as well as a possibility of democracy. To that fact the Puritans of the Left, as well as those of the Right and Centre, bear undeniable testimony. Each possibility—which develops, of course, in relation to a set of particular circumstances, and within the limits imposed by the need of compromise when that need is felt—inheres in a group of theological doctrines; and they are, with some difference in emphasis, the same doctrines.

How are the inferences from dogma inimical to democracy avoided by the Levellers and by others who manage to avoid them? No doubt the weakening of dogma, where it occurred, ministered to that result. But we have seen some reason to believe that the weakening was not very widespread, and that Walwyn and Overton, while very influential, were less typical than a Leveller like Lilburne or a radical thinker like Roger Williams. And we have stated our conviction that the second and more important answer to the question is found in what we have called the principle of segregation, which means a clear-cut and consistent distinction between the order of grace and the order of nature. There are, as Roger Williams puts it, ‘divers sorts of goodness,’ and ‘a subject, a magistrate, may be a good subject, a good magistrate, in respect of civil or moral goodness, . . . though godliness (which is infinitely more beautiful) be wanting’ (pp. 282-3). That belongs to the order of grace; the others to the order of nature. The principle of segregation is momentous in its results; but it has another claim on our attention. It is the Puritan counterpart of a widespread principle in modern thought which Herr Ernst Cassirer runs back chiefly to Bacon, and the Archbishop of York to a twofold source in Edition: current; Page: [[85]] Luther and Descartes. In the strict Puritan it springs from a sense of the superlative value of the order of grace and the uniqueness of the spiritual experience which seals one a member thereof, and from the accompanying determination to keep them untainted by anything of this world. The result as seen in Luther is to prevent the drawing of inferences from one order to the other. In a sense the basic result with those Puritans of whom Roger Williams may stand as our example, is the same—but with an important difference added: direct inference is banished, but analogy is instated in its place. The most obvious example of the principle of segregation is the absolute separation of church and state; and in Williams (as also in Henry Robinson and Milton) this does immediate service to the cause of liberty by becoming one of their chief supports in the argument for toleration. Further, if it destroys the idea of a state church, it also destroys the idea of a church-state; if it spiritualizes the church—and Dell’s essay (pp. 203-16) indicates how eager is the Puritan for that result—it also secularizes the state and invites a new examination of its origin, function, and sanctions. The new examination does not necessarily issue in a democratic theory—it is the virtual, though not formal, secularizing of the state on other terms, that permits Hobbes’s realistic defence of absolutism—but it may do so. The secularizing of the state is democracy’s opportunity. The effectiveness of the principle of segregation as a barrier to direct dogmatic inference is seen when we contrast Williams’ theory of a church with his theory of a state (pp. 283-4). His church is of the most rigorously restrictive kind, a church of visible Saints, which, viewed in relation to the world, could be regarded only as an aristocracy of the elect. But his state is a pure democracy—though the great majority of its members are, spiritually speaking, unregenerate and lost. Viewed in relation to the world his church is an aristocracy; but it must not be so viewed, for they belong to two different orders. Viewed in itself the church too Edition: current; Page: [[86]] is a democracy, a voluntary association of equals, and as such may well furnish a model for the civil state as Williams conceives it. Behind the church covenant as it was elaborated by the first of the Separatists there lie (it has been suggested) the guilds and merchant companies. It is significant that when Williams comes to describe the relation of the church to the civil state in which it exists, the terms are precisely those applicable to the guild or merchant company (p. 267). The church preserves the free form of community and finally enables (or at least aids) it to influence by analogy the theory of the state. First the principle of segregation; then, after that is enforced, the power of analogy: on these two things the democratic influence of Puritanism chiefly depends. Where they are applied but partially the result will be a limited and inconclusive acceptance of liberty and equality—the attitude illustrated by the leaders of the Independent Party, whose effort at compromise springs immediately from practical considerations, but nevertheless runs back from the particular issue to first principles. Where, on the contrary, segregation and analogy are fully applied, the result is more than a set of logical inferences; it is nothing less than a release of the forces of Puritanism to work in the natural order on the side of democracy, and these forces include its active and (within limits) experimental spirit, its utopianism and iconoclasm, and the libertarian, equalitarian, and humanitarian impulses, in precisely the degree in which they had manifested themselves within the limits of the Puritan church or sect.

The conclusions reached, or perhaps merely supported and rendered acceptable, by the principle of analogy, have been sufficiently indicated above: natural liberty and equality; a fundamental law of nature and a primitive model of civil excellence, alike known by reason; a social contract embodying that law and conforming to that model, safeguarding the individual’s rights and applying the principle of government by consent; a democratic order of administration and expression with some provision for arriving at truth and agreement through free discussion. All this seems clear enough; but the parallel of a fundamental law for each of the economies, the law of Christ and the law of nature, requires a little further elucidation.

It is a feature of their common scripturism that all the Puritans should affect (though with different degrees of rigour) to draw the Edition: current; Page: [[87]] prescriptions and models of church government from the Bible: the Presbyterians, from the New Testament read in the light of the Old and tempered by reference to the authoritative example of Geneva and the demands of a national organization; the non-separating Congregationalists, from the New Testament with a simpler emphasis but not without some reference to Israel and to the needs of a Christian state; the sectaries who most emphasize the difference between the Law and the Gospel and most logically apply the principle of segregation, from the New Testament alone, the ‘evangelic rules’ to which Milton refers. For these Puritans of the Left, then, the fundamental law for a church is simply the law revealed in the New Testament and received by faith. But in perfect consonance with that law (it is held) is the inward law in the heart of the believer; and this inward law too must be included in the wider definition of the fundamental law spiritual. Sometimes it is interpreted as the mystical indwelling of Christ; sometimes, as the inward law given to Adam, restored by God to its original brightness.

In the civil sphere Puritan scripturism (as we have seen) also exercises its widespread influence. The political thinking of groups so divergent as the Presbyterian and the Millenarian depends in no small measure on a direct appeal to the Bible; and, with certain modifications, so too does the political thinking of the Congregationalists, which sometimes approaches the scriptural ideal of the Presbyterians, and may sometimes even be coloured by that of the Millenarians. In the case of Presbyterians and Congregationalists alike the scriptural reference, in addition to being tempered by the needs of a particular historical situation, is accompanied by various degrees of attention to the law of nature. In those Puritans of the Left, however, with whom we are at present chiefly concerned, the differentiation of the Law and the Gospel logically implies the second result of limiting the scriptural reference to the New Testament, and the principle of segregation (seconded by the reticence of the Gospel in matters political) operates to shift the reference altogether from scripture to the law of nature. The Leveller, by the principles of his religious thinking, was thrown back wholly upon the law of nature in the civil sphere.

The concept itself was no way peculiar to Puritan thought. The law of nature was familiar to every one if only in the celebrated text-book, Doctor and Student (where, however, the term Edition: current; Page: [[88]] is said not to be in general use in English law) or in defences of the Parliament (where it often occupies only a subordinate place). But it is worth while to see what could be known of the law of nature from a Puritan source (pp. 187-91). For William Ames (1) God’s law is of two kinds, natural and positive. (2) The law of nature consists of whatever rules of conduct can be immediately apprehended, or logically arrived at, by reason, ‘out of the natural instinct of natural light, or . . . at least from that natural light by evident consequence.’ (3) It is eternal ‘in relation to God, as it is from eternity in him,’ and ‘natural as it is . . . imprinted in the nature of man by the God of nature.’ (4) God’s positive law is ‘added to the natural by some special revelation of God,’ and differs from the natural in two respects. Though it can be received, it cannot be arrived at, by reason. And it is not immutable, but ‘mutable and various according to God’s good pleasure; for that which was heretofore in the Judaical church is different from that which is in the Christian church.’ (5) All the precepts of the moral law (as embodied in the Decalogue) are

out of the law of nature (except the determination of the sabbath-day . . . which is from the positive law). For . . . we meet with nothing in them which concerneth not all nations at all times, so that these precepts do not respect any particular sort of men, but even nature itself. . . . There is nothing in them . . . but what may be well enjoined from clear reason. . . . They all much conduce to the benefit of mankind in this present life, insomuch that if all these precepts were duly answered there would be no need of any other human laws or constitutions.

(6) The judicial and ceremonial laws of the Jews, as distinct from the moral, are positive, not natural; but some precepts of the so-called judicial law may be in reality moral, for ‘where the special intrinsical and proper reason of the law is moral, there it always follows that the law itself must be moral.’ (7) As has already been implied (above, 5), the ‘worshipping of God . . . is a principle of the law of nature.’ Hence the common formulation of that law (‘To live honestly; not to hurt another; to give every man his due’) is ‘confused and imperfect.’ (8) Much less can one admit the teaching of some Civilians, that ‘the law of nature is that which nature hath taught all living creatures.’ For though the brutes have their law it implies neither reason to distinguish, nor will or choice, nor justice. The law of nature is the law for man. (9) The civil law enacted by men for their city or society ‘inasmuch as it is right is derived from the law of nature,’ and receives its moral sanction from this fact. It falls short of the law of nature, however, Edition: current; Page: [[89]] because ‘it hath no eye at all upon the inward affections but only upon outward actions’ and ‘doth not make good men but only good subjects or citizens,’ and because even within these limits ‘the reason of man can only imperfectly judge . . . and is often therein cozened.’ For (10) it is fallen man of which we speak; and the full implication of this fact appears when the question is asked why, if it is identical with the natural law ‘writ in the hearts of all men,’ the Decalogue required to be promulgated by God. It is because

ever since the corruption of our nature such is the blindness of our understanding and perverseness of our will and disorder of our affections that there are only some relics of that law remaining in our hearts like to some dim aged picture, and therefore by the voice . . . of God it ought to be renewed as with a fresh pencil. Therefore is there nowhere found any true right practical reason, pure and complete in all parts, but in the written law of God (Psalm 119. 66).

One observes the exalting of the law of nature as the only moral law (5, 6); its clear distinction from the positive law of God (with the statement that this might vary between the Old Testament and the New) (4); the asserted dependence of all civil laws upon the law of nature (9); the recognition of the law as common to all men and of reason as the faculty by which it is cognizable (2, 3, 5); and the implication that a test of the law of nature is its conduciveness to civil welfare (5). These are the points on which democratic Puritanism fastens and which it develops; they are also adopted by the Party of the Centre, and furnish the common ground on which Ireton and Nye meet and argue with Goodwin and the Levellers at Whitehall (pp. 125-69). But they are accompanied by other propositions: that practically the whole Decalogue and even parts of the so-called judicial law are identical with the law of nature and unabrogated by the Gospel (5, 6); that not merely what is immediately perceptible to reason, but whatever may be logically derived therefrom, has the sanction of natural law (2), and particularly that the belief in the true God, commanded by the Decalogue, is a part of that law (7); that though civil laws can reach only to outward actions and make good subjects the law of nature is concerned with beliefs and motives, and not merely with good subjects but good (which, in contrast with Williams’ use, implies religious) men (9, 7, 5); that, as a result of man’s fallen condition, the natural law as reason can actually know it is inadequate and requires to be set in a brighter light by the written law of God (10). These propositions the Congregationalists at Whitehall would without reservations accept; but the Separatists and Edition: current; Page: [[90]] Levellers reject them, or accept only with marked reservations. Agreeing enthusiastically with an appeal to the law of nature, and especially with the decision of all civil questions thereby (5), they insist on rigorous separation of the natural and civil from the religious sphere. There must be no overlapping, no cross-reference between the two that may furnish a pretext for the magistrate’s interference in matters of conscience; his commission is purely civil and concerned with the outward man, and its terms are prescribed by natural law. The law of nature becomes then God’s law for the natural order as distinct from the order of grace. It is (we repeat) in the interests of religious liberty that the principle of segregation is fully developed; but it has momentous consequences in the civil as well as in the religious field.

Once the principle is adopted, the idea that the natural law as it is known by reason in man’s fallen state is necessarily imperfect, may be safely accepted. The restored illumination of the Saint is a spiritual gift, whose appropriate place of exercise is not the state but the church. In a sense the imperfection of the natural law is precisely its inadequacy to anything higher than civil or natural ends. For these it is perfectly adequate, furnishing the only rule—and all the rule that is required. In an opinion of the practical adequacy of the law of nature within its appointed sphere, the Levellers were no doubt confirmed by the frequent appeals heard to it, and by the whole secular tradition of the law of nature, glanced at and condemned as inadequate by Ames (7, 8).

In opposing Ireton’s effort to use the law of nature as a touchstone to distinguish between the merely typical portions of the Mosaic Law which are abrogated by the Gospel and the portions identical with the law of nature and hence of permanent and universal application, the Levellers (supported by Goodwin) give their clearest exposition of the principle of segregation as applied to the idea of a natural law. Scripture is the rule for the church; the law of nature, the only rule for the state. To attempt to introduce the Mosaic Law into the constitution of the state under the guise of natural law is sophistical. Nor are we left without strong indications of what the law of nature teaches in the civil sphere: it teaches that the people not only designate the persons of their governors, but bestow upon them all their power (pp. 157-9).

The insistence on the law of nature as the only rule for the state and on its basic democracy is of the first importance. But to gauge the full bearing of the appeal to nature in politics one must turn to the Putney Debates (pp. 53-79) and to the pamphlets of the Levellers. At Putney Ireton declares that the Levellers can ground their demand for manhood suffrage only on some plea of natural rights as opposed to the historic rights held forth by the fundamental constitution of the English state. They do not deny the fact. To the law of nature they confidently appeal, and when Ireton further declares that the appeal to nature will destroy all property, they try to show that the right to property is guaranteed by the law of nature, and not, as Ireton maintains, merely by positive laws (pp. 61-2). It is the law of nature, furthermore, that teaches the individual his rights and their attendant duties: the right and duty of self-preservation, and the natural limits of obedience (or the right and duty of resistance to tyrannical rulers). It teaches him what are the ends of government; and it inculcates the basic principles of social life, the principles of natural justice and equity which dictate the political equality of all men within the state and issue in the maxim (also enshrined in the Gospel), ‘to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’

Behind the Levellers’ appeals to the law of nature lie those of Parliamentarians against the King, and of the Army against both the King and Parliament. Already in 1642, Parliamentary apologists are declaring that the law of nature is paramount: by it all power is ‘originally inherent in the people,’ and (whatever was the case among the Jews, where God intervened by a direct revelation) the source of the magistrates’ authority ‘can be nothing else among Christians but the actions and agreements of such and such political corporations.’ The ‘paramount law that shall give law to all human laws whatsoever . . . is salus populi. . . . Neither can the right of conquest be pleaded to acquit princes of that which is due to the people . . .; for mere force cannot alter the course of nature or frustrate the tenor of law. . . .’ ‘The charter of nature entitles all subjects of all countries whatsoever to safety by its supreme law.’ Most striking of all the early pleas is that of Rutherford’s Lex Rex, which, like the later appeals of the Army, Edition: current; Page: [[92]] is fully illustrated in the texts that follow (see Index sub ‘Law of Nature’). Behind these again lies the long and complex tradition of the law of nature, as it comes down from classical times, as it is adapted and formulated by the Civilians and Canonists, and as it influences the theory and practice of English law. The law of nature comes to the Levellers with peculiar authority, even if they are ignorant of many of the stages in its august tradition; for is it not God’s law for the natural order? And it comes to them with unexhausted potentialities; for it is unwritten (all formulations being but partial and approximate), and finally determinable only by reason. By resolutely applying the principle of segregation it can be freed from the trammels of its association with the written law of scripture. By the principle of analogy it can take its place as the fundamental law for the state not less certainly than does the law of Christ as the fundamental law for the church. With this vast authority, with these potentialities, and with a new freedom from reference to anything beyond itself, the law of nature becomes the foundation of the Levellers’ political creed and their final court of appeal.

Where the principle of segregation is applied in its most radical form, the effect is to exalt the law of nature as known by the reason of fallen man into an absolute standard within, but not beyond, the natural order. There remains, however, the large body of Puritan thought, even of extreme Puritan thought, in which the principle of segregation is not rigorously applied. For it, the distinction between the law of nature in its primal brightness (a brightness restored in the regenerate) and the dim relic of that law known to fallen men (above, p. [89], (10)) retains its full effect, and with two results already indicated: the necessity of supplementing reason by scripture in the civil field, and the possibility of calling in the doctrine of the law of nature to support an enforcement upon the unregenerate of a standard whose full glory is hidden from them and known only to the Saints. Even in Milton (if he were our chief concern here) we could demonstrate something of these results, though in a more refined form. Despite his passion Edition: current; Page: [[93]] for liberty, and his partial application, in the interests of religious liberty, of the principle of segregation, he is, as Wordsworth rightly divined, radical but not democratic. For him the law of nature is not a law for the natural order merely, and sufficiently known to all men within that order. It is a law of liberty which the regenerate alone can fully know, and by which only they are adequately equipped to live. The most obvious inferences to be drawn in the political field are reactionary in character, and they appear in Milton’s final disregard of the will of the majority. But this does not mean that the law of nature thus conceived is wholly without a liberating influence. It has some effect upon the provisions suggested for civil life; and, above all, nothing can prevent its exerting its influence as an ideal. Thus Milton’s interpretation of liberty as the abrogation of outward law, while it applies only to the regenerate, has a pronounced effect on his conception of the state (if only because the state’s highest purpose is to serve the regenerate); and it holds forth an ideal of liberty, individualist, and even anarchist, in character. So long as dogma remains unimpaired the ideal is, strictly, inaccessible to the ordinary man, but the use of the term nature in designating the ideal is a perpetual invitation to the unwary to extend its benefits to him. And sooner or later dogma is impaired. As this occurs there are two ways in which the identification of the law of nature with the rule of man’s unfallen, or his regenerate, condition may tend to radical conclusions. To associate the natural with the unfallen state is to approach the general type of thought now described as primitivistic. To associate it with a regenerate condition presents, on the other hand, some affinity with the type of thought known as perfectibilitarian. In the eighteenth century these two types were to furnish, separately and together, the dominant modes of radical thinking. Discontent with the existing social order issued in the cry of ‘back to nature,’ or in the cry of ‘onward to perfection.’ Then the happy discovery was made that the two things were really identical: in order to go onward to perfection one had only to go back to nature for one’s rule. But before this blessed state of confusion could be achieved dogma must have disappeared or have been interpreted so figuratively that nothing but the smudged outline of its pattern persisted. In some of the radicals of the Puritan revolution these processes are seen at work. Walwyn and Winstanley furnish examples. But in another way, and without any break-down of dogma, these primitivistic and perfectibilitarian tendencies can in measure be released to work in radical political thought: namely, by analogy. Grant that Edition: current; Page: [[94]] natural reason is adequate within the natural sphere; then it can lead men to the perfect natural state; and this line of thought encounters strong support from the secular tradition of natural law to which Stoicism had bequeathed some primitivist and some perfectibilitarian elements.

Bound up with the conception of the law of nature, however it is defined, is the idea that it is known by reason (either by reason unaided or by right reason, which is reason illuminated from above): the appeal to the law of nature is virtually an appeal to reason. The attitude of Puritanism towards reason, we have remarked, ranges all the way from the contempt of the voluntarist to the idolatry of the rationalist (see Index). Voluntarism, which seeks the final sanction of positive laws in the will of the law-giver, has for its natural outcome absolutism. Rationalism, whose final sanction is conformity to reason, is opposed to absolutism in so far as the latter is an expression of mere arbitrary will, and leads naturally to a doctrine of liberty. But the principle of segregation can achieve the curious result of establishing a rationalist standard in the natural order while leaving the view of God purely voluntarist. Precisely this result is achieved in Lilburne’s thinking, who can even turn the dichotomy to account by declaring that only God can act from arbitrary will, and the magistrate is not God! In the natural order the appeal must be to reason (p. 317). An observer of the General Council comments on ‘a new sect sprung up among them, and these are the rationalists, and what their reason dictates to them in church and state stands to them for good, until they be convinced with better.’ But reason, like nature, is a term which always stands in urgent need of precise definition. In few of the Puritans does it receive that definition. In Winstanley it approximates to the Quaker notion of the ‘inner light’ and is used so loosely that it can be interchanged with the expression, the universal love. In Overton, discursive reason no doubt sets the tone of his use of the term. In most of the Puritans, as in Ames, it embraces both discourse and intuition. The fact of most importance is that in this volume its use is never, I think, ‘intellectualist’ or esoteric. Reason is Edition: current; Page: [[95]] thought of as something common to all men and independent of education. It is the light of nature, not of the schools: an equalitarian conception. Natural truth may be perceived by any man, just as spiritual truth may be perceived by the meanest of the brethren. And this furnishes the basis of the belief in free discussion, in which the humblest may be convinced (as is his right), and may in his turn convince if he can (as is his right also). The only distinction is that between reason operating unaided and reason illuminated from above; and we have gauged the significance of that distinction.

The appeal to reason in politics brings us once more to the attitude towards historical precedent. In the earlier opponents of absolutism the appeal was twofold, to precedent and to a paramount law known by reason (which might or might not be described as the law of nature). Positive laws finally claimed obedience as particular and approximate embodiments of that general law. To appeal to precedent was not to deny, but rather silently to assume, the paramount law. This too was the position of Lilburne, who was for ever conning the Book of Statutes and citing Magna Charta and the other formularies of the Englishman’s historic rights. But the struggle of Parliament with the Crown, and of the Army and people with Parliament, soon outran precedent; and this fact, combined with Puritan utopianism and the predominant Puritan view of custom and of history, resulted in a progressive shift of emphasis from precedent to the law of nature, or from historic to abstract rights. It is on this point that Ireton and the Levellers divide (pp. 52-62). The appeal to reason as opposed to history, whatever its weaknesses, has (as Mr. Laski observes) one great advantage: it permits an extension of rights, not merely a defence of rights already won. The fact did not escape the debaters at Putney. Already Walwyn had dissented from Lilburne: ‘Magna Charta hath been more precious in your esteem than it deserveth; for it may be made good to the people and yet in many particulars they may remain under intolerable oppression.’ And Overton is equally dissatisfied with the appeal to existing laws:

Ye know the laws of this nation are unworthy a free people, and deserve from first to last to be considered and seriously debated and reduced to an agreement with common equity and right reason, which ought to be the form and life of every government. Magna Charta Edition: current; Page: [[96]] itself (being but a beggarly thing, containing many marks of intolerable bondage) and the laws that have been made since by Parliaments have in very many particulars made our government much more oppressive and intolerable.

But even the most radical were loath to break entirely with the past. So they invented a new past more consonant with the demands of reason.

As the most primitive age of the church was that in which it embodied most purely the law of Christ, so in the most primitive era of English history did not the state embody most purely the law of nature? And here the rival theory of absolutism played into the hands of the radicals by asserting that the King’s right rested not on contract but on conquest. It was an old contention assailed by Buchanan, revived by the Royalists, and attacked once more by Parker and Rutherford (pp. 204-5); and it was obviously a two-edged sword: ‘There were more reason why the people might justify force to regain due liberty than the prince might to subvert the same.’ The effects of conquest could be reversed by victory. This was an idea highly congenial to a victorious Army, especially to those who held that there was now no power in England but the sword—there was no other power and since the Norman Conquest there never had been. A wave of Anti-Normanism swept through the ranks, and Edward the Confessor became a Puritan hero. The Normans had destroyed the primitive English state and enslaved a nation; all the long struggle with kings had been an effort to regain its lost rights; Magna Charta and the other concessions wrung from them were so many fragments of recovered freedom. Now the Army’s victory had exchanged the roles of conqueror and conquered. It must be followed by a new constitution with the abrogation of all those positive laws which were a badge of slavery; and a restoration of their rights to the commons whom the Norman had despoiled. What were the barons but William the Conqueror’s colonels? Their right fell with his: a convenient doctrine for those whose equalitarian sentiments or practical needs were demanding the abolition of the House of Lords and the end of all feudal privileges.

Not only the military Saints and the Levellers, but the Diggers too, could find their account in the attractive theory of Anti-Normanism (p. 383). It is, of course, no more tenable than the absolutist theory of conquest which first suggested it. Nathaniel Bacon found them the subject of excited debate and determined to examine the evidence on which they rested. His Historical Discourse of the Uniformity of the Government of England (1647) yields them little support. But this does not diminish the significance of Anti-Normanism as an effort of the imagination to accommodate history to the demands of reason, and (with the pattern of ecclesiastical history hovering in the background) to clothe abstract rights in a concrete and primitive form. It furnishes also a striking example of a theory on which divergent groups of the Puritan Left could temporarily combine.

To forget the fact of such combination is to misread the history of Puritanism, of the Army, and of their relations to democracy in the seventeenth century: a common enemy is almost as important as common principles—at times, more important. Though the main direction of the Levellers was democratic, while that of the military Saints was not, some alliance was possible—even some mutual influence. And the moment of inevitable conflict was forestalled by the practical politicians of the Centre who snatched all the fruits of victory from the busy and contradictory theorists of the Left. They did so by participating in and directing the precarious union of interests and ideals, which was the Army in politics, and a phenomenon of great, if temporary, importance. For the victorious Army combined, and in some sort reconciled, two divergent notions: it was a godly Army, in which the Saints were sufficiently numerous (and vocal) to satisfy the religious ideal; and it was a representative Army, a cross-section at least of Puritan England, which satisfied the democratic ideal and supported its pretence of speaking in the name of the nation. It deliberated in a council whose forms were democratic and whose language was quasi-religious. The deliberations could be turned into a debate on natural rights by Rainborough, or into a prayer-meeting by Goffe. They bore a general resemblance to those of the House of Commons—not least in the rather sinister fact that Cromwell could control them, and end them. The Council of the Army was, within limits, a genuine democratic assembly. Where else in 1647 could the common soldier urge his reasons upon his commanders, or grandees be told to their faces that ‘the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he’? It was democratic, also, in including among its Edition: current; Page: [[98]] members many who at bottom cared for democracy not at all. And it betrayed the weakness of the democratic assembly: it was the easy prey of political astuteness and of physical force. . . .

We must take its good meaning; and to do so is to see the Council as the very imperfect realization of the Levellers’ hope, and hearken chiefly to their utterances. They, at least, were passionately devoted to the democratic ideal: taking justice and equality as the foundation of their scheme; believing in truth and agreement through free discussion; in their hearts distrusting force even as a method of effecting beneficent ends and even when betrayed into acquiescing in its use; willing, when truest to themselves, to postpone victory till reason, and not the sword, could win it. They were often intolerably factious, and they were incurably rash and doctrinaire. But the ideals for which they stood were magnanimous. The position of the Centre Party is more equivocal. That they used the Council of the Army it is idle to deny—but no one (unless it were Mr. Belloc) could now be found to assert that it was for personal ends. Ireton, who was probably the ablest political thinker that the revolution produced, sympathized with many of the Levellers’ pleas for practical reforms, as the Heads of the Proposals (pp. 422-6) makes abundantly clear; and the vigour and acuteness with which he debates are incompatible with a merely opportunist and cynical attitude towards free discussion. But his belief in democracy was much less thorough-going than the Levellers’. Indeed in the Centre Party in general Puritan democracy was crossed and finally defeated not only by practical considerations, but by anti-democratic elements in the Puritan creed. The Levellers remain the chief exponents of Puritan democracy; and even their limitations are significant.

They are at bottom individualists, distrusting the state and thinking in terms of safeguards: a character which is part of the Puritan inheritance and shared with the Independents, where, Edition: current; Page: [[99]] however, it is at war with the zeal for making righteousness prevail. Only in the Diggers, who carry over from politics to economics the Levellers’ feeling for justice and equality, is there an unmistakable shift to a philosophy predominantly socialist in character—and it is an idealistic socialism that has more in common with William Morris than with Karl Marx. It does not follow, Edition: current; Page: [[100]] however, that the Diggers are better exponents of the democratic ideal than the Levellers. In that ideal individualism has its place, and if history teaches anything it is the permanent necessity of individualism as a corrective. Nor need it issue merely in distrust of the state, as the Areopagitica and the Essay on Liberty remind us. But even at its best, individualism requires to be balanced—not over-balanced—by a sense of the community, the sense that speaks in the noblest of all English definitions of the state: ‘It is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence, of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, . . . in every virtue and in all perfection.’ From no descendant of the Puritans, these words come; but from an Anglican and a conservative, from one for whom the state has not been completely secularized and by whom (with only the safeguards of the historic constitution) it can still be trusted. But that is another story. . . . In the Levellers an individualism which prompts an emphasis on reserves and new safeguards, is in fact balanced by a more limited, but still real, sense of the community. It finds no direct expression in the Agreements of the People and little enough in other pamphlets. But in their belief in the arrival at truth and agreement through free discussion a sense of the community is implied because the individual needs the help of his fellows—or, if not consciously implied, it is inevitably discovered in the process of translating the belief into action. And, unlike Burke’s, it is a sense of the democratic community because it is realized in the experience of the democratic assembly. We have noticed how William Dell, in his Way of True Peace, repudiates the church covenant in favour of a spiritual bond between all believers, achieved in Christ. Here the analogy between the order of nature and the order of grace seems to fail—and does fail. But it is neither irreverent nor fanciful to detect in a sense of the community which cannot be written into constitutions, but can only be experienced, some dim and partial analogy of the spiritual bond.