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To attempt a survey of the thought of the era is to enter a tangled world, where the shape of the wood is hard to discover and even the tall trees are choked by undergrowth. The seventeenth century had a simple cosmic philosophy, that of the old Ptolemaic universe, but inside this rudimentary framework it spun an intricate web. No age has been more deeply moved by ideas, but these ideas are not to be hastily identified with modern notions which they may at first sight resemble, since they derive from a mood and an outlook far different from our own.

Religion, as in the Middle Ages, was still interwoven with the texture of men’s minds. The Council of Trent, by formulating certain dogmas which had hitherto been vague, had made final the barrier between protestant and catholic, but protestantism itself dwelt in a divided house. The spirit of the Reformation, which was on the side of freedom and simplicity and the return of Christianity to its source, had in England soon been diverted by political needs, and presently schisms were revealed in both doctrine and church government of which the origin was as much secular as religious. Moreover there was still the mediæval hankering after an absolute creed and a universal church, so that each divergence was apt to claim to be the only truth, and to admit no compromise. THE ECCLESIASTICAL STRUCTURE We shall not understand the epoch unless we realize that, though the germinating ground of many of our modern beliefs, it is also to be regarded as the closing scene of the Middle Ages. Religion coloured the whole of life, secular and sacred were indissolubly mingled, a public act was regarded not as a matter of expediency, but as linked somehow or other with the soul’s salvation. God and the Devil were never absent from the political stage, and their presence led to the quickening of passion as well as to the obscuring of reason.

Let us first consider this pervading religion as exhibited in ecclesiastical bodies. The Elizabethan settlement had explicitly laid down what the Church should believe, how it should be governed, and how its services should be conducted. If protestantism chose to quarrel within itself, it was essential that England at any rate should be undivided. The royal jurisdiction was made supreme, and there was one obligatory rule of worship. The Thirty-Nine Articles crystallized theology, a prayer-book regulated ritual, and around both there soon began to gather that conservative sentiment which in England quickly sanctifies innovations. Church and Throne seemed in the eyes of many to be indissolubly united, and the support of the second to be the surest defence of the first.

But the settlement contained within itself much matter of strife. Uniformity meant a strict enforcement of discipline, and the powers which Elizabeth gave to her ecclesiastical commissioners were far greater than those exercised by the courts of the old church. The layman found his daily life harassed by new legalities. Again, anglicanism had separated itself from continental protestantism, and was admittedly a via media between the old and the new, and earnest iconoclasts found interwoven in the new formulas much stuff derived from that which they had been taught to reprobate. There was also a supineness and laxity in the new clerical civil service, disquieting to serious folk. Milton saw them in their youth at college “writhing and unboning their clergy limbs to all the antic and dishonest gestures of Trinculoes, buffoons, and bawds,”^[13] and in Lycidas they are the “blind mouths,” who know nothing of the craft of the shepherd: and Richard Baxter, a kindlier witness, has a vivid picture of the ecclesiastical squalor of the Shropshire of his youth.^[14] But the fundamental trouble was due to the natural reaction against the absoluteness of the first Reformers. High-churchism in its modern meaning, which is the claim of a church to an overriding authority over, and complete independence in, sacred things, was unknown to the anglican of the seventeenth century; the true high-churchman in that sense was the presbyterian. The seventeenth century anglican high-churchman is to be defined by his appeal to other authority than the bare letter of the Scriptures; by his insistence that the Reformation had involved no breach of continuity with the past, and that his church was catholic in Hooker’s sense, following “universality, antiquity and consent”; and finally, since he believed in a uniform national church, by his clinging to the authority of the Crown. He was an Arminian in doctrine, since the Calvinistic predestination led inevitably to an atomic individualism; and, though he had little sympathy with the extravagant royalism of men like Sibthorpe and Manwaring, he looked in practice to the king as the court of ultimate appeal.

Within the Church there were elements like Falkland and his friends that stood for liberty before authority, championed the right of private judgment, and desired a church of “volunteers and not of pressed men,” and there were those that followed Laud and sought one rigid pattern of thought and worship under the ægis of the Throne. Between these extremes lay the great mass of plain citizens who had acquired a sentimental attachment to an institution not a century old, who valued decency and order above prophetic fervours, and preferred to think of their church as holding an honest, comprehensible, royal warrant. They were Erastians in the ordinary sense of that disputed term, for they PURITANISM asserted the omnipotence of the secular State as against the clericalism of Rome and Geneva. Theology was not a branch of politics—the State in its ecclesiastical policy must obviously take counsel with the experts—but assuredly politics were not a branch of theology.

Such moderation as existed in the early seventeenth century is in the main to be looked for in the Church. But it was a mood rather than a faith, based on apathy and mental indolence as much as on conviction, and therefore it could not have the compelling power of the extremer creeds. The dynamic force in anglicanism lay rather in the rigidity of a man like Laud, who was rational in doctrine and the patron of Hales and Chillingworth, but in ritual and government was a fanatic apostle of uniformity. Those on every side who believed in their creeds were agreed on one thing, that toleration was deadly sin, and that they must spend themselves to enforce compliance with that in which they believed. In the last resort only the State could ensure this enforcement, and therefore the State must be brought to their way of thinking. The Civil War in one aspect may be regarded as the struggle of various communions for the control of the secular arm.

As against the moderates and the politiques stood the school of thought, inside and outside the Church, which may be called in the largest sense puritan. It represented the last wave of the impulse which made the Reformation, coming as a new surge when the first great tidal movement had become slack water. To begin with, it was a stirring within the Church itself, due to a special conception of what that Church’s character should be. Under Elizabeth there were puritans in high places—Burleigh and Leicester, Jewel and Grindal; the Elizabethan adventurers had a puritan tincture, like Sir William Smyth, the first governor of the East India Company; Hakluyt and Purchas and John Walker, the friend of Drake, were puritans. At first the bond of connection was merely a desire to purge the usages of the Church from all taint of romanism. In 1603 the aim of puritans, as shown by the Millenary Petition, was only that their preference for simplicity should be legalized. But the harsh treatment of the protesting divines hardened and enlarged their dissidence. They became first indifferent and then hostile to episcopal government. Forced back upon themselves, they developed ever increasing points of divergence from the conforming majority. They ceased to ask merely for toleration, and became a reforming and a disruptive force both in Church and State. To a belief in simplicity of worship they added a passion for simplicity of life. Doctrinally they tended to emphasize what was harshest in Calvinism as against the lax Arminianism of their opponents. They found in the Scriptures a stern moral code, and became rigid censors of conduct.

The term puritan began to be defined popularly by its extreme sense, and with justice, for the extremist was the essential puritan. A measure of puritanism was indeed almost universal in a fear of romanizing influence, of high-flying clergy, and of government by ecclesiastics, so that in 1625 Pym could complain with truth that Laud under the name of puritans “collecteth the greatest part of the king’s true subjects.”^[15] But the dynamic power was in the few who, with the Bible as their base, were prepared to admit no impediment of tradition to the liberty of their interpretation, and waited hourly on a new revelation. No more significant words were spoken than those of John Robinson, the pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, on the eve of their departure. “The Lord has more truth yet to bring forth out of His Holy Word.... I beseech you to remember it—’tis an article of your church covenant—that you be ready to receive whatever truth shall be made known to you.”^[16] In such a mood of utter confidence and tense expectation lay the certainty of revolution.

Outside the Church puritan dissent manifested itself in two main groups. The first was presbyterianism, which drew its inspiration from the Genevan and French churches; its central doctrines were the priesthood of PRESBYTERY all believers and parity among ministers; and on these fundamentals there was based a system of government by lay elders, a system in essence unclerical and democratic. At first it was the creed of a party inside the Church; “almost all those who were later called Presbyterians,” wrote Richard Baxter, “were before conformists”;^[17] and such antecedents saved English presbyterianism from the supreme intransigence of the Scottish Kirk. It was the creed of a considerable part of the nobility, of a great mass of country gentry, and of the solid merchants of London, and it was adopted by many because it seemed to represent a middle way. But, even in its English form, it involved certain perilous extensions. It asserted the separate kingdoms of Church and State, but it was always in danger of blurring the outlines, and demanding for the first the powers and functions of the second. Moreover it claimed to be the only church, since it was based on jus divinum, and, as defined by men like Cartwright and Goodman, it required that the State should compel the nation into its fold. Its creed led logically to a theocracy, and its apparent anti-clericalism to a clericalism as strict as Rome’s. There was justice in the words of a later critic that presbyterianism in its seventeenth century form was “inconsistent with all government except its own oligarchic spiritual tyranny, and even with that adored Democracy which it pretends to hug and embrace with so much tenderness and affection.”^[18]

Presbytery believed in an organic church, with a graded hierarchy of government, but the other group, the independents, stood for the sovereignty of the smaller unit, the congregation. There is no such disruptive force as a common creed held with a difference, and the hostility between presbyterians and independents was mainly due to their different conceptions of popular rule. Descending through devious ways from outlawed continental sects, the latter asserted not the liberty of the individual but the liberty and authority of the worshipping unit, and since they admitted no higher ecclesiastical constraint their views involved a measure of toleration. They had not the jealousy of the civil magistrate which their opponents displayed, for he might be their only buckler against an intolerant universal church; if they were left at peace within their own little communion they had no desire to interfere with others. To Laud they were schismatics, a blot on the fair pattern he had designed, and, to the presbyterian, Laodiceans and heretics in the fundamentals. “The Independents,” wrote the exasperated Robert Baillie, “have the least zeal to the truth of God of any men we know.”^[19]

Behind all ecclesiastical parties in England, shaping them without the knowledge of the partisans, lay a profound dread of Rome. The Tudors had defied the Pope with ease, but they had weaned with difficulty the people of England from the ceremonies of the ancient church. Yet by the close of the sixteenth century the fissure had become a chasm. The danger from Spain had identified protestantism with patriotism; events on the Continent—the massacre of St Bartholomew, the success of the Counter-Reformation, the circumstances which gave rise to the Thirty Years War—impressed the ordinary Englishman with the power and malignance of the church which he had forsaken; and the Marian persecutions at home became a legendary horror as presented by popular writers. The Reformation in the eyes of many was still in jeopardy. Moreover England contained, in spite of the penal laws, a great multitude of romanists, and, since an exact computation was impossible, their numbers were exaggerated by suspicion. Lancashire, Cheshire and North Wales were catholic strongholds, and, except in the east, every shire could show a catholic nucleus. The typical English catholic, who desired only to be allowed to follow his worship in peace, was obscured by the missionary activity of the Jesuits, whose purpose was avowedly to win back England to their faith. Their ROME method was the assertion of popular rights as against the monarchy, and the doctrines of Bellarmine and Suarez, which were given an English version by writers like Doleman,^[20] seemed to have perilous affinities with the politics of the ultra-protestants. The consequence was a wide distrust and a profound hatred of Rome. To the puritan she was the mother of idolatry, a splendid edifice which, like an Egyptian temple, had in its inner shrine a cat or a crocodile; to the royalist she was the foe of kings and of all secular government, the more to be feared because his English opponents seemed to be tainted with her poison;^[21] while to the ordinary man she was the “wolf with privy paw,” an enduring menace to England’s ways and English freedom. To most men, as to Thomas Hobbes, she was the “kingdom of darkness”; therefore one section sought to purge from their church whatever savoured of her in creed and worship, while another, with more political foresight, strove to set up against the power of the Keys the sacrosanctity of the Crown.

The ecclesiastical unrest was determined mainly by historical causes and by economic and political pressures. Pure theory played but a minor part, and there was little of the mediæval heresy-hunting. Even the dispute about church government was at first conducted on practical rather than on academic grounds, the purpose with most men being not so much the discovery of an absolute revelation as the fashioning of something orderly and enduring—in the spirit of Bruno’s apophthegm, “If the first button of a man’s coat be wrong buttoned, then the whole will be crooked.” In matters of doctrine there was to begin with little argumentative fervour, except over the eucharist. Calvinism in England was more a communion and a way of life than a body of dogma, Arminianism a tendency rather than a tenet. As in all such epochs, there were minds that sought the kernel and not the shell of truth. The rationalism of All’s Well That Ends Well—“They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless”—had its modest disciples, but its spirit was still almost wholly Christian. Platonism, at once devout and sceptical, combined a passion for the unseen and the eternal with joy in the seen and temporal; it heard, with George Herbert, “church-bells beyond the stars” and not less, with Thomas Traherne, exulted in the richness of the visible world.^[22] But as the years passed the struggle became more bitter and the antagonisms sharper, dogmas which had been only vague inclinations took definite shape when they were contraverted, and the most tolerant were forced into a confession of faith. The overriding controversies, which in the last resort shaped all the sectarian and party wrangles, were narrowed to two; what was the true relation between a church and a civil society, and to what degree was a man to be permitted to find his religion for himself.