May we pray.
O God our Father, once more we ask
Thee that Thou would sanctify our studies, and
enable us to think, and then act, to
Thy praise and Thy glory, for Christ's sake.
Were there any questions left over that you
wanted to discuss relating to the Elizabethan separatists
we had to finish in rather a hurry
last time?
I hope not, frankly, but no, that's good.
Let's go on, then, from Elizabethan Puritanism to
Puritanism under the Stuarts, that is, under Charles
I, sorry, under James I and Charles I,
between the years 1603 and 1640.
We'll stop there because a new chapter in
the history starts with the calling of the
Long Parliament in 1640.
One of the first things that happened in
the Stuart period was that when James VI
of Scotland became James I of England in
1603, the Puritans sent him a petition asking
him to reform the various abuses, or some
of the abuses in the Church, which they
criticised under his predecessor Elizabeth.
And in this petition, which has gone down
in the books as the Millenary Petition, because
the Puritans said that they had a thousand
signatures on it, although in no text that
was ever produced or discovered at any stage
were any signatures found at all.
So the whole thing at that point is
a little bit obscure.
But anyway, there it is in the books,
the Millenary Petition, and they asked for the
removal of the ceremonies which the Elizabethan Puritans
were opposed to, also the abandoning of the
practice of reading the Apocrypha, which Anglicans then
did and still do, not for doctrine but
for examples of life and manners, in the
ordinary course of public worship.
Also they asked for the reform of the
system of Church court.
Also they asked for official action by the
new monarch to stop non-residence and pluralism,
to censure non-preaching ministers, and to make
up the stipends or endowments of particular livings
so that men would not need to do
another job in addition to being minister in
order to eke out a living.
Well, these might have seemed to be reasonable
requests, and James I received the petition politely
and said he would call a conference about
it.
And this he did, the Hampton Court Conference
of 1604.
Unhappily, the conference didn't achieve any of the
things that the Puritans were most anxious to
achieve.
You'll notice that in their requests in the
Millenary Petition, they'd said nothing about Presbyterianising the
establishment.
No doubt they realised that this might well
be an impolitic thing to say, after the
difficulty they'd had on this subject with Elizabeth.
But James was quite convinced that the ultimate
objective of the Puritans was to Presbyterianise the
establishment, and of course that was quite perceptive,
because undoubtedly it was.
And James had had his fill of Presbyterianism
while he was king in Scotland, and he
didn't want to have any more to do
with it in England.
He wanted to be a Tudor autocrat.
Quite evidently he was glad to have been
invited south of the border, to a land
where Tudor autocracy had become the pattern, and
he didn't intend to abandon the pattern.
This is that James I, who in a
very few years' time will be writing a
book called Basilikon Doron, Greek for the kingly
gift, arguing the doctrine which came to be
called the divine right of kings, that is,
that kings in the hereditary line are appointed
by God, rebellion against them therefore, or opposition
to their wishes or enactments, is not merely
a crime from the civil standpoint, but a
sin against God himself.
God had set kings on the throne to
govern in his name, and they were to
be obeyed as God.
Well, holding this doctrine, this doctrine of kingly
prerogative, James, as you can see, had no
sympathy whatever with people who he suspected of
wanting to Presbyterianise, because on the Presbyterian system,
as you know, even a monarch as a
church member is exposed to ecclesiastical censure.
You've got this clear distinction between the two
spheres of authority, as I was explaining last
time.
And just as in civil matters all church
members are subject to the king, so in
spiritual matters the king, as a church member,
may be disciplined by ecclesiastical authority.
And James had had just about enough of
this kind of talk and this kind of
thinking.
And so, as the Hampton Court Conference proceeded,
he got progressively more and more bad-tempered,
and eventually he told the Puritan representatives, Presbytery
agreeth with monarchy as well as God with
the devil, and furthermore he enunciated the dictum,
no bishop, no king, with, you see, the
unspoken corollary that since you are jolly well
going to have a king, I think you'd
better make up your mind that you're going
to have bishops too to go with him.
And he told the Puritans that they'd better
hurry up and conform or else he would
harry them out of the land.
And the conference finished in a fine flurry
of royal bad-temper.
All that was achieved of it was two
quite incidental gains for English religion.
The catechism of the Church of England was
to be extended.
There was nothing in it before on the
sacraments, and the promise was given that a
sacramental section would be added.
And the authorised version, the new version of
the Bible, was asked for, and James said
that a new version would be made.
Previously, the Puritans had all been using the
Geneva Bible, or one of the other Elizabethan
versions.
Meanwhile, in the same year, 1604, Archbishop Bancroft,
he was Archbishop now following Whitgift's death, and
he, you remember, was the man who had
hunted out the shadow Presbyterian movement in the
1580s.
Archbishop Bancroft pushed through convocation, a clerical assembly,
a clerical synod in the Anglican pattern.
He pushed through convocation a set of new
canons, a new pattern that is of church
discipline, which established the episcopal form of the
Church of England, established, re-established, reaffirmed all
the ceremonies and all the features in Anglican
life which the Puritans had disliked.
And then in 1605, he really went at
the business of enforcing conformity to the established
order in a big way.
300 Puritan clergy were suspended, temporarily, in most
cases.
50 of them, however, were actually deprived of
their livings and never got them back.
What a deprived clergyman did, after he'd been
deprived, by the way, in those days, was
to become a schoolmaster.
You could open a school and teach in
school, even though you'd been deprived of your
living.
Well, now, this final purge of 1605 really
marked the end of reforming agitation in the
Church of England until 1640.
Neither about the ceremonies and the vets and
the serfess, nor about Presbyterianism, did the Puritans,
for a whole generation, let out, really, anything
more than the softest of squeaks.
No more campaigns, no more agitation.
Why?
Not so much because they were persuaded that
their original convictions had been mistaken, as because
they saw that it simply wouldn't wash, that
they simply couldn't fight authority on these terms.
And so they simply prayed, and they did
pray earnestly over these years for better times,
and meanwhile they kept quiet.
So there was no more reforming agitation until
1640.
Now, before we go any further in the
story, because this is a real transition point,
at which some of the old issues were
put on the shelf, and some new issues
between the Puritans and the government began to
arise, I wanted to stop and to take
stock for a moment, and try and get
a general view of the situation as it
came to be after 1605.
So put down a new heading, the situation
at and after 1605, and let's just go
through the various elements in it so as
to get the overall sketch.
Here are the Puritans.
At the heart of the movement, a body
of clergy.
But with, one just doesn't know, how strong
lay support, certainly pretty strong lay support, amongst
the smaller landlords, amongst the trading classes, the
commercial classes, and among the common people too.
But they had abandoned their agitation for church
reform, after the millinery petition.
They had accepted ceremonial conformity, with minor exceptions,
that is, the exceptions of certain individuals, who
still wouldn't wear the surplice, and still wouldn't
use the sign of the cross in baptism.
So it was said, proudly, of John Carter,
by his son, writing his biography, that during
these years, oh, wait a minute, where's the
quote?
During these years, he was always a non
-conformist, one of the good old Puritans of
England.
He never swallowed any of the ceremonies against
his conscience, so that he was often troubled
by the bishops.
But God raised him up friends that always
brought him off and maintained his liberty.
These friends would be eminent laymen, who were
often the smaller landlords, who would put in
a word, you see, for the minister, when
the bishop took notice of his non-conformity,
and then the thing would be quietly settled,
and the issue would be dropped, and the
minister would not be preceded against further.
This was the pattern.
But a lot of clergy, like Richard Sibbes,
like John Preston, like some of the leading
theological writers among the Puritans, were complete conformists
during this period.
They were men absorbed in their parishes and
their lectureships, and in the case of the
Cambridge dons, in teaching their subjects, and giving
religious training to the young men in the
university.
They were, for the most part, pacific men.
There'd been real agitators and firebrands amongst the
Elizabethan Puritans, but during this next generation, the
Puritans, for the most part, were not men
of that sort at all.
They had the Greenham spirit.
When Greenham was called before his bishop, the
Bishop of Ely, on one occasion, because of
his non-conformity, he didn't wear the purpless,
you see, and from time to time he
got into trouble on this account, he told
the bishop, in effect, that he would be
grateful if he were allowed not to argue
about this issue.
Other Puritans would have taken occasion to put
up a terrific argument about what a monstrous
thing it was to require anyone to wear
the purpless, but Greenham was a man of
a pacific spirit, and this was what he
wrote back to the bishop when the first
episcopal summons to answer for his ways came.
I don't want to argue, he said, I
perceive by experience that dissension of reason does
cause alienation of affections.
Again, these matters have been and are debated
betwixt the godly learned, whereas I, a so
poor countryman, a young scholar, having occupied myself
daily by the space of these three years
last past in preaching Christ crucified unto myself
and country people, am not in these matters
any wit to reason with you.
I don't want to argue about it, I
simply want leave, says Greenham, to go on
preaching Christ crucified unto myself and country people.
That's the vision, you see, which Greenham had
of his calling.
That's what he was there to do, and
he just didn't want to bother about secondary
questions of conformity and all the rest of
it, provided that he had liberty to preach
Christ crucified unto himself and country people, well,
he had enough.
And, in fact, Greenham was known to be
such a good man that proceedings were not
taken against him on that occasion, and on
others later he got off.
Similarly, it was said of another Puritan of
the first, well, in the middle years, one
would say, of the 17th century, a man
named Samuel Fairclough, If a man lives holily
and walks humbly with God, I shall ever
love him, notwithstanding his conformity.
And if he be proud, contentious, and profane,
I will never think well of him for
his non-conformity.
In other words, to Fairclough, what matters is
not conformity or non-conformity, but rather that
a man should not be ungodly, that he
should instead be holy.
This is really a natural development in the
Puritan ministry.
Here are these chaps called, as they believe,
to be evangelists and pastors, and now finding
fulfilment in preaching and teaching and catechising and
visiting the sick and writing books to help
people in questions of Christian faith and life.
And it was taking all their time, and
they were finding joy in it, and in
this situation they were less and less enamoured
of ecclesiastical controversy.
What was the strength of the ministerial core
of the movement?
Oh, we can't say.
In the 1580s they reckoned that half of
the London ministers, that would be about 200,
were men of Puritan sympathies.
So about that same time the Puritans took
a census of the clergy and the council
of Essex and announced that only 30 out
of 300 were competent preachers and pastors, that
is presumably were Puritan sympathisers.
If that was typical, then it might be
that half the urban ministers in the country
and 10% or less, probably in the
counties furthest from the centre of the population
a good deal less, 10 or less percent
of country clergy were men of Puritan sympathies.
Did it amount to anything like a quarter
of the total ministry of the Church of
England?
Well, it might have done, but statistics don't
enable us definitely to say.
An estimate of a quarter, though, would get
the assent of most scholars these days of
being about the best guesswork estimate that one
can make.
Cambridge remained the centre of the movement.
It had been right from the start.
It was so still, in a way that,
interestingly enough, Oxford wasn't.
On one occasion the question was put to
Paul Baines, C-A-Y-N-E-S,
one of the great Puritan ministers of Cambridge
University, why Cambridge men were accounted more profitable
preachers than Oxford men.
And Mr. Baines said, the reason was that
God had from the First Reformation blessed Cambridge
with exemplary plain and spiritual preachers.
Plain and spiritual, who taught men the way
of the Lord and taught them in their
turn, by object lesson, how to preach this
same gospel to others.
The pre-eminence of Cambridge over Oxford in
producing Puritan ministers can be gauged from the
fact that when the Pilgrim Fathers left England
over those 15 years of emigration altogether, first
to last, there were just over 100 Cambridge
-trained ministers who went with them as compared
with a mere 30 from Oxford.
From which I suppose you ought to argue
that Puritan-wise, Cambridge was three times better
than Oxford and Oxford three times worse than
Cambridge.
Well, there it is.
I'm an Oxford man, I just have to
grin and bear it.
And get the pattern, by the way, of
life in Cambridge University in those days in
order to see how this tradition of Puritan
teaching in the university worked.
Oxford and Cambridge, you may know, are really
rather like the United States.
They are federations of autonomous colleges, making up
between them the university.
Each college then, as now, appointed its own
fellows.
Then, in the 16th and 17th century, the
fellows took pupils.
They were resident in the college, they had
a fellowship and a stipend, a basic stipend
which the college gave them.
They were there just to teach.
And if you wanted your boy to go
to the university, what you did was to
write either to the master of the college,
but more usually in those days, to the
particular fellow of the particular college that you
would like to be responsible for the chap's
education.
And then the fellow would take on this
chap as his own pupil and he would
have him in the university, he'd find lodgings
for him, and he would have these young
men of the kind of class, learning their
subjects in his own chambers, he would live
in the college buildings, at least if he
was unmarried he would, unmarried because the Cambridge,
Oxford and Cambridge colleges were all monastic foundations
and of course, in the days when they
were founded it was only celibates anyway who
were eligible because only celibates were monks.
So the colleges all had celibacy written into
their foundation and it was only single fellows
who had rooms in college, as we would
say.
But they used to, as I say, to
get their pupils together in their rooms and
they would take family prayers with them and
they would put them through the catechism and
make them read divinity, Christian books, as well
as making them read other subjects and they
would drill them in the basis of the
Reformed religion and the biblical gospel and they
would do everything that they could to bring
them to a living faith.
This was part of the tutor's job as
it was understood at Puritan Cambridge.
And then men who had studied at Cambridge,
or in some cases out of Cambridge with
these godly pastors, same pattern you see in
Greenham's house, Richard Rogers' house, we've referred to
that already, these men would then go out,
imbued we hope, with Puritan principles and also
the reality of Puritan piety and out they'd
go to country parishes and the torch would
be passed on.
And you had in Cambridge, during the more
than 40 years, 70 years, right through from
1570 to 1640, a whole sequence of men
who were very great preachers and very great
pastors, very great evangelicals in their own right,
rather like the famous Princeton succession, with this
stress on practical piety added on.
William Dearing, who preached that fierce sermon before
Queen Elizabeth in 1570, he was an eminent
Puritan divine and he did a lot with
his young men.
Lawrence Chanderton, C-H-A-D-E-R
-T-O-N, who became the first master
of Emanuel College, a Puritan foundation.
Perkins, of whom we've already heard, Paul Baines,
Thomas Goodwin, Richard Sibbes, S-I-B-B
-E-S, some of these names you know
because their works have been reprinted in modern
times.
John Preston, William Gouge, John Dodd, Thomas Taylor,
They all had a spell, at least, and
some of them spent their lives as fellows
and teachers in Cambridge colleges.
Now, read Haller, chapters 1-4, for more
information about these brethren.
In the examination I shall expect you to
know more about them than I am telling
you now you have been warned.
And the succession went on right the way
through up to 1640.
Now, these Puritan ministers, when they got into
the parishes, were admired.
To start with, they had virtually no rivals,
either as preachers or as pastors, or indeed
as public communicators in any form.
There were no public meetings, no radio, no
television, no newspapers.
The only form of public communication which most
people in the English countryside were ever exposed
to was the sermon.
A man's coming to preach, they'd all crowd
round to listen.
And the Puritans, as we've already seen, could
preach.
And because they were serious, and because they
preached and taught in a way that was
biblical, a way that was intelligible, a way
that was practical, they won themselves great respect
in the English parishes.
But more so because of their moral force.
We've spoken already of their insistence on application.
It isn't enough just to teach truth, you've
got to apply it.
Think of the different classes of people that
you're preaching to and bring the truth right
home to them.
And I give you some phrases which were
used of the best Puritan preachers just to
show you how seriously this was taken.
They ripped up men's consciences.
You meet that phrase again and again.
And it's a vivid phrase, isn't it?
It's a pretty homecoming application that can be
said to rip up the congregation's conscience.
They used to get inside you.
Now it isn't everybody's preaching of whom you
would say he really got inside me in
his application.
Or this, they would dive into men's hearts.
That's a lovely phrase, isn't it?
Heart readers.
Not thought readers in the fairground sense, but
heart readers in the sense that they would
apply the word and make the congregation feel
that this man is talking to me, this
man speaks as if he knows just what's
inside me.
And they used to say that it was
in application, in the use of the sermon,
as they called it, that a sermon's excellency
does consist.
The thought was that any fool can teach
sound doctrine, but it takes a man of
God to make an application that really searches
the heart and does something to the hearers.
John Dodd was a preacher like this, and
in his life this is the way they
described his preaching.
He didn't dwell so long on the doctrine
as to fill up all the time.
He spoke, quote, most largely and very home,
that is, very homecoming, in application, mightily convincing
and diving into men's hearts and consciences, there
it is, diving into men's hearts and consciences,
leaving them little or nothing to object against
it.
Robert Harris, Dodd's admirer, complained that some people
spent too much time insisting on doctrinal points
and too little upon the applications, yet it's
in an application, I'm quoting his phrase now,
that a sermon's excellency does consist.
And he, for his part, confessed that he,
quote, contrived the uses first.
He thought his sermons through backward, in other
words, from the needs of men to the
form in which the teaching of the text
was going to be presented, before he thought
it through forward, from the text to the
application.
He contrived the uses first.
He thought of the application before he thought
of the details of the doctrine he was
going to teach.
And, he said, he did often handle the
same text of the same points and yet
would still pen new applications.
And, brethren, here for you in the ministry
is a tip.
Has it ever struck you that one text
has got an infinite number of applications, or
rather, one truth has got an infinite number
of applications, and you can make many new
sermons on the same text by varying the
angle of application?
That's a thought worth thinking.
Well, this, as I say, is the way
that they were preaching with this tremendous stress
on the application and showing great moral and
spiritual insight and what we would call real
power in the way that they drove the
application home.
Their books, too, were valued.
The first popular literature ever in England, that
is, the first class of books that were
widely distributed and widely read were the little
books that the Puritans produced.
And they went through edition after edition.
People lapped them up and loved them.
The pioneer evangelical literature ministry.
Little wonder, then, that more and more as
time went on, more and more as time
went on, the ideals of which the Puritan
preachers held permeated the middle classes, the administrators,
the businessmen, and the common people of the
country.
The old aristocratic families, many of whom, indeed,
had remained secret papists, were often untouched.
And there was always an ignorant rabble in
the cities, then as now, who were also
untouched.
But the landlords and the lawyers and the
commercial classes and the ordinary working people, for
the most part, came more and more to
accept and make their own Puritan standards and
Puritan ideals.
So this was the great leavening of England
that went on during the first 40 years
of the 17th century that made possible the
tremendous upsurge of moral and spiritual concern which
marked the revolution years 1640 to 1660.
You see, what the Puritan ministers were doing,
what nobody else at the time was doing,
was to give men a real vision of
the Christian life as a whole, a vision
that gave meaning to everything.
Again, read Haller for the details, but the
essence of the vision is this, that here
am I, utterly helpless in my sin, but
in the mercy of God, saved by grace.
Of course, if I don't start there, then
the initial statement has to be amended.
Here am I, addressed by the gospel of
God.
And the word is given me, he that
seeks shall find, to him that knocketh it
shall be opened.
So seek salvation.
Lay hold of the promises.
Seek repentance and faith till you find them.
And then when you become a Christian, as
those who seek in this way surely will
become Christians of the Puritans, then realise where
you are.
Now you're a traveller, in via, on the
way, travelling home to God.
And on the way you've got to fight.
You're a warrior, opposed by the world, the
flesh and the devil, opposed by sin within,
and opposed by all kinds of temptations and
alluring circumstances without.
And what you've got to do, in your
character as a traveller and a warrior, is
to resist sin and Satan and evil at
every point, and to sanctify every department of
your life unto the Lord.
Build a holy home.
Fulfil your calling.
The Puritans took up that Reformation doctrine of
the calling and gave it a great comprehensive
development.
Fulfil your calling, your job in life, unto
the Lord.
Give yourself to furthering the public good.
This again was a central thought in the
Puritan vision of life.
The good man is the public-spirited man.
It's a Christian virtue to lay yourself out
for the public good.
That was their phrase.
It's a Puritan virtue to be public-spirited.
And equally with that, part of your service
of God is to enjoy His good gifts,
to receive them thankfully, to use those so
-called recreations that really do recreate, and to
praise God for them.
Here's a philosophy then of leisure and of
amusement to go alongside the Puritan philosophy of
work.
It was a Puritan who, as indeed I
shall be telling you next class, advised or
urged the propriety of wearing your best clothes
and indulging in moderate feasting on the Lord's
Day.
Now you don't associate that with the Puritans,
do you?
But that's what Richard Baxter actually said.
Well, you see, it's a total view of
life.
Nobody else in England was attempting to communicate
a Christian view of life of this kind
to ordinary people.
This is the way you should live, said
the Puritans, and for those who live so,
there's a hope of glorious reward.
God will give you glory.
God will give you ultimately himself.
In all this teaching, the Puritans are insistent
on the fact that God himself is the
greatest gift he can give any man.
Whom have I in heaven but thee?
And there's none upon earth that I desire
in comparison of thee.
The Lord is the strength of my heart
and my portion forever.
This is central.
And the Puritans were only concerned with material
things as a stewardship.
And when material things came and brought pleasure,
well, you were to have your eye to
God in the pleasure and you were to
praise God for the pleasure and then just
because you were sanctifying in that way, go
ahead and enjoy it to the full.
This was a very positive Puritan view of
the handling of material things and the coping
with this world's pleasures.
Of course, if people were being indoctrinated in
this way, sooner or later, questions about the
established order, political questions in particular, were bound
to arise.
God's law ought to govern the whole of
life.
How then ought God's law to be expressed
in the life of this community of England?
The question had to be raised sooner or
later.
In fact, it was precipitated by the fact
that the Stuart monarchs, Charles I in particular,
had a habit of doing unconstitutional things.
Of course, you might say, Elizabeth had done
unconstitutional things before them, and that was perfectly
true.
The pattern of Tudor absolutism had caused constitutional
lawyers a number of headaches, a good deal
of uneasiness in the second half of the
16th century, but Elizabeth, remember, had succeeded.
Elizabeth the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth Gloriana, Elizabeth the
heroine of her people.
They always retained this terrific affection for her.
A mere woman who had the stomach of
a king of England.
Do you remember?
They loved Elizabeth, even when she made them
tear their hair because she wouldn't allow them
to reform her church.
And as I say, as you know, nothing
succeeds like success.
Elizabeth had come off, and God had blessed
Elizabeth's reign, and the country had gone from
strength to strength.
And under those circumstances, people had allowed Elizabeth,
you might say, the Puritans themselves had allowed
Elizabeth to get away with it.
When we get on to Charles I, on
the other hand, we shall find that the
state of mind amongst lawyers, amongst common people,
amongst responsible laymen in the professional classes and
the commercial classes and the landowning classes in
England, their state of mind was different.
They were just not prepared to let an
absolutist monarch get away with it anymore.
And they found, as we shall be seeing,
they found in scripture, in the biblical insistence
on righteousness, in the biblical teaching about the
will of God for human life and community,
a basis for their objections to some of
the things that the Stuart monarch was doing.
And this led on to all the things
that you get after 1640.
Puritans were so convinced that there was a
biblical basis for opposition to Charles I and
his unconstitutional tax laws and other things he
was doing, that they were prepared to fight
him, that they believed that scripture gave them
a right to revolt against an ungodly monarch,
and you get the various movements that sprang
from that, the various points of view that
sprang from that after 1640, the civil war,
the egalitarian movement in England and similar types
of movement, which we'll be dealing with in
due course.
Suffice it for the moment to say that
what you had after 1640 was a kind
of composite crusade in which was combined a
campaign for law, a law against tyranny, a
campaign for liberty, a campaign too for reforming
the church, a campaign which required that kings
and bishops should be eliminated together.
Well, that's rather garbled, I'm afraid.
I'm just trying to give you, remember, a
general sense of the situation.
Some of these matters, particularly as they relate
to 1640 and after, we'll have to look
at in more detail later on.
That, I say, is the background.
And now the story of this next generation,
seen from the Puritan standpoint, is the story
of a number of ways, four ways, in
fact, in which king and bishops came to
appear more and more to the Puritans to
be quite literally partners in crime and partners
in sin.
The story climaxes, you see, with Charles I
and Archbishop Laud, whom the Puritans regarded as
really about the end.
And when I tell you a bit more
about Laud later on, you'll see reason why
they regarded him so.
Charles became king in 1625.
Laud became archbishop in 1633.
Both of them eventually lost their heads, as
you probably know, for high treason.
Laud was bishop of London before he became
archbishop of Canterbury.
When he was translated from the one position
to the other, he hired a boat to
take his coach and horses across the River
Thames.
For as bishop of London, his palace had
been on the north side of the Thames,
and as archbishop of Canterbury, his palace was
at Lambeth on the south side of the
Thames.
And I am sorry to say that in
the course of the journey, the boat sank,
and the coach and horses were lost.
And afterwards they told this story as an
omen.
But Laud went ahead, and as we, I
think, must say, mismanaged his archiepiscopate grossly, convinced
the Puritans that this man was actually a
traitor to God and a traitor to his
country, and in 1645 he lost his head.
And four years later, Charles, the unconstitutional ruler,
lost his head as well.
But as I say, there were four issues
that led up to this consummation, in all
of which king and bishops lined up against
Puritans.
For the Puritans at least felt that king
and bishops were lining up against them.
First, the ethical issue, Sabbatarianism.
This was the smallest, actually, of the four.
Second, the doctrinal issue, Arminianism.
Third, the ecclesiastical issue, Prelacy.
The divine right of the bishop in the
church.
And fourth issue, the political issue, Tyranny.
The divine right of the monarch in the
state.
All these issues were argued out.
This fourfold development took place against the backcloth
of fear of Rome.
This was more intense in the first half
of the 17th century than it had been,
I think it's fair to say, at any
time since 1570.
1570, when the Pope excommunicated Elizabeth.
And certainly, more so than it had been
during the 15 years since the Armada, when
England had basked in the sunshine of being
effectively free from Rome and the threat of
Rome.
But now, in the first half of the
17th century, both Spain and France were free,
if they so desired, to make war on
England.
And this was a constant threat on the
political horizon.
Here were two great and strong nations, and
there was a constant risk of the Pope
jockeying them, digging them in the ribs, as
it were, to make war on England.
And the whole country knew that England, by
comparison with these two great nations, was not
really too strong at all.
And James I spent a lot of his
time trying to acquire a Spanish marriage.
Well, politically, of course, this was the best
thing to do, to make a political alliance
with one of these nations in order to
gain strength against the other.
But from the ordinary, popular Puritan standpoint, neither
of the alternatives was pleasing.
That is, to make an alliance with a
Roman nation was as bad, really, as not
to make an alliance with this nation and
then having it constantly threatening you.
James, as I say, tried for a Spanish
marriage and the whole thing went on for
years.
And then negotiations fell through.
In the first weeks of his reign, Charles
I put his eggs into the other basket
and made a French marriage with the French
princess Henrietta Maria.
Well, that was all right.
Then he had an alliance with France to
make him strong against Spain.
But still, England had a Roman Catholic queen
and England didn't like that either.
Romanism was not the issue at any stage,
but it was the background.
Now, constantly people were feeling that Rome was
threatening England, Rome was making inroads against England.
Rome, in actual fact, was held to be,
and with truth, making real inroads in England
by reconverting Englishmen.
We have it on record that in 1623
the Jesuits claimed 2,600 converts.
And certainly a lot of eminent people at
court were swept into the Roman fold by
Henrietta Maria's retinue of Roman priests.
This was happening.
And one of the things that people didn't
like about Archbishop Laud was the fear that
he was going to Rome.
They saw in what he was doing and
the line of policy for which he stood
the high road to Rome, a definitely Romanising
movement.
Well, more of that when we come to
it under its proper heads.
This is the background and these are the
four issues.
And we shall begin to discuss the first
of them next time.
But it may be that you've got questions
to ask about what I've said, and certainly
I hardly think it's worth launching out on
Sabbatarianism at this stage.
Any questions?
Well, it's true, but what's in doubt, surely,
is whether it's a criticism.
You've got to remember that part of the
cultural background of those days was that children
were encouraged to become little adults just as
soon as possible.
There was no ideology of children being allowed
to be children.
There hadn't been since the Renaissance.
When popular education, school education, began to spread
through the country at the time of the
Renaissance, people founding schools in Britain under Edward
VI and in the years after, it became
very obvious that there was no time allowed
for children to be children.
The whole business of school education was to
turn them into adults as rapidly as possible,
so that John Milton, to take one random
example from the 17th century, was doing Latin
when he was two.
How's that?
And Thomas Goodwin, to take another random 17th
century example, was sent up to the university,
Cambridge University, at age 13.
And generally people, generally children were, they were
dressed like little adults.
Haven't you ever seen pictures of 17th century
children dressed up in scaled-down adult clothes?
And they were treated as little adults, and
by the time you were five or six
you were expected to be able to behave
as a little adult.
And this meant that nobody questioned that a
six-year-old, being a little adult in
other ways, could have a genuine conviction of
sin.
And so they applied, the Puritans did apply
the word in the same way, in principle
to children, as they did to adults, the
only difference being that they urged the children
to repent and turn to God now, and
seek the grace of God now, before they
got as bad as some of their grown
-up relatives who'd been at it longer.
But you see, the background of all this
is the culture of the time.
And if you're going to criticise the Puritans
for treating children as little adults, well you've
got to criticise the whole 16th and 17th
century for treating children as little adults.
And it ought to be said that a
lot of the children responded surprisingly well to
the treatment.
And it's at least a question whether this
tremendous emphasis of our day on not making
children grow up too soon, and letting them
have their years of childishness, won't in fact
appear to later generations to be as one
-sided in that direction, as this stress on
educating them in their earliest years and making
them into little adults as rapidly as possible
seems one-sided to us.
Isn't this the age in which they're putting
out a programme, teach your baby to read?
We get that in the English shops, except
you've got it here.
It may be that the pendulum's swinging back.
well that is, as you say, the modern
psychology approach.
All that I can say is that there's
plenty of material on record from children of
7, 8, 9, 10, in the 17th and
the 18th and the 19th centuries.
Material that is, in which the children not
merely talk a rather stilted adult-type dialect,
but do actually use that dialect to express
what appears to be genuine Christian awareness of
things.
And it seems to me it's purely arbitrary
and impossible of proof to say that none
of this could have been real.
In fact, in times of religious awakening, child
conversion has been a recurring phenomenon.
And who am I to say that it's
all been spoof?
I will certainly say, as categorically as I
can, that this 20th century, at least as
much of it as we've seen, has been
very far from a time of religious awakening.
But you see, this doesn't enable us to
go around pontificating and saying that all the
products of what they used to call infant
piety in earlier generations was purely spoof and
made the children unhealthy.
It just isn't so.
One of the things that I've been trying
to show you in what I've said about,
what I've taken time off to say about
the Puritan view of life and the way
the Puritans behaved, and I shall have more,
which I hope will make the same point
before this course of classes is through, is
that the Puritans essentially were very level-headed,
normal men.
They had their strange, odd, narrow-minded, lopsided
people.
We were introduced to some of the stranger
Puritans last time.
But the mainstream Puritans were very level-headed
men.
You only got to start reading their autobiographies
and their sermons to realise this, in fact.
Reading Haller, I think, when you've allowed for
his rather sneering way of speaking of the
Puritan view of life, he's not a Christian,
doesn't pretend to be.
When you read Perry Miller, when you read
Nathan on Puritan culture, you will, I think,
see that there's abundant reason to recognise healthy
-mindedness in these fellows.
When I tell you about, I've got a
lecture coming on the Puritan ideal of the
home.
Now, it's in the home that personal oddity
comes out, if it's going to come out
at all, in the way that a chap
treats his wife and his children.
Well, I hope that that lecture on the
Puritan home, which is documented, will suffice to
convince you, if you're still in doubt, that
the Puritans grew up to be very level
-headed, sane, sober, human people, even those who
had suffered, if that's the right word, from
infant piety.
Well, there it is.
It's all part of a general Puritan caricature
that we've got to try and correct.