...subject of Puritanism has done me that much
good that it will have the same effect
on you.
But it has generated in me more than
a little enthusiasm for communicating to others what
I have learned about the Puritans and what
the Puritans have taught me.
And so I myself am looking forward to
this course very much.
Well, I hope you'll enjoy it too.
A word, sir, about the books which will
come nearest to the state of the textbooks
in this course.
Though let me say straight away that because
we are doing it in a great rush,
four lectures a week, and because in any
case it's an elective and not, therefore, compulsory,
I would think it a little rough to
inflict on you a lot of textbook work,
and I would think it a little rough
to inflict on you a lot of essay
writing.
And so, in fact, these books will not
be used as textbooks, in the sense that
I shall ask you to read sections of
them in preparation for particular lectures.
All that I shall do is refer you
to them and to sections in them where
you can read at measure, following up things
that I say.
This course is going to be a self
-contained affair.
I shall take it out of you when
we get to the examinations, but I'm not
going to demand any specific reading or any
specific essay writing during the next six weeks.
That, I hope, comes as good news.
Right now to our first lecture, which I've
entitled, Puritanism, the Word and the Thing.
I'm sorry, I haven't given the titles of
the textbooks that I'm thinking of.
Pewter Puritanism by M.
M.
Nathan.
There's the paperback edition of it which you
can get if you want to own one
of your own.
That, as the title indicates, takes you up
to the beginning of the 17th century.
The Rise of Puritanism by William Haller.
That's the complementary book, written from a different
standpoint, which takes you up to 1640.
Hugh Martin, Puritanism and Richard Baxter.
The value of this is as a survey.
It's not a deeply technical work at all,
but it's a good survey of the various
clarifications about the Puritans that have resulted from
thirty years and more of study in this
century.
Oh, by the way, Craig, I've forgotten his
initials for the moment, I haven't put it
down here.
Craig Puritan, C-R-A-G-G.
Puritanism and the Period of the Great Revolution.
That's the one book that covers the period
from 1660 up to 1690.
It's not a complete survey of the period,
it's just a study of certain aspects of
the movement during the persecuting times.
There isn't, in fact, a good textbook that
covers the whole of Restoration Puritanism.
A certain H.
G.
Plum, in the preface to his book entitled
Restoration Puritanism, published in 1943, wrote very justly,
I quote him, that students of English history
must long have been dissatisfied with historians' treatments
of Restoration Puritanism.
But unfortunately his own book doesn't do very
much to lessen this dissatisfaction, and we're still
in need of a textbook for the later
period of the quality of Nathan and Paula,
which, once you accept their presuppositions and standpoints,
are both of them very good textbooks indeed.
And the final work, the first volume by
Terry Miller, on the New England Mind, entitled
The New England Mind of the 17th Century.
And that's the study of Puritan culture, a
cross-sectional study, very able, and again, once
you accept his presuppositions, a work of permanent
value and very great helpfulness on a whole
lot of issues.
I'll explain in a moment what these cryptic
references to the presuppositions mean.
It's a rather important point, if you'll take
it in its proper order and in its
proper place in the lecture.
So then, to our first topic, our first
lecture subject, Puritanism, the Word and the Thing.
First, some very general remarks, designed to give
you my point of view in presenting this
material to you.
As I said to the class before this
one, I think that it's part of a
teacher's business to make his overall standpoint plain
to those at the receiving end before he
begins.
You don't have to agree with my point
of view, but at least it'll help you
in assessing what I say if you know
what the overriding point of view is.
So here are just a few remarks designed
to give you my point of view and
to lead us into our subject.
The remarks, actually, number three, and I'll give
you the unwritten numbers.
One, this course is a course in history.
What is the essence of history?
What should you look for when you study
history?
Well, to cut a long story short, I
think that a Christian philosophy of history will
always guide you to what common sense also
would lead you to, namely the proposition that
the essence of history is people and what
they do and what happens to them.
I make that point at the outset because
in these days there are many secular historians
who would say that the essence of history
is the study of forces operating in societies
over periods of time.
If they're Marxist historians, they'll specify economic forces.
If they're not Marxists, they will be able
to point to other forces whose influence their
concerns trace.
My comment on that is, well, it's certainly
part of the story, but if you stopped
there, your history would be viciously abstract.
The essence of history, I say again, is
people.
The people caught up in these movements, the
people who, if you like, are the subject
of the pressure which these forces exert.
And the real interest of history is in
the people.
And it seems to me the real task
of the historian is not done until he's
focused on the people and not simply used
them as lay figures who from time to
time say comic things that you can quote
in the text verbatim for light relief, but
as people who were just as serious, just
as honest, just as much alive as the
historian is himself.
And the real interest in history is to
get inside their minds and to see what
makes them tick.
They were contemporary to themselves.
What the historian has got to try and
do when he's fed up with pressure of
forces and operative pressures and the abstract, he
then goes to try and get into the
minds of these people, to try by an
effort of imagination to make himself contemporary with
them, to see through their eyes, to hear
through their ears, to see what made them
tick, and to write about them in the
way that a good biographer writes about people.
To this extent, every historian should have the
quality of a good biographer.
He should be able to get into the
minds of people and see how they work.
So I think, of course, this is something
which other professional historians, historians with more claim
to be called professional indeed than I have,
would dispute.
But that's my point of view, and that's
going to be my aim in this course.
It's a course on English Puritanism.
I am interested in these chaps who were
called Puritans.
And I want to try and show you
what sort of people they were and to
enable you to understand them.
That's point one.
Point two, solidarity, is this.
As this is a course in history, so
it's a course in church history.
Now, what is church history?
Church history must be understood not simply as
the action and reaction of ordinary secular forces
on secular people.
Church history has a further sector added, which
makes a difference from any other sort of
history.
In church history, what you are studying is
the action of the word of God on
people and on situations, and men's reaction to
the word of God in those situations.
And this, too, must be part of the
story whenever you're studying church history.
These people on whom our attention is directed,
they worshipped God, they had Bibles, they said
their prayers, they sought to walk before God,
just as we do.
They lived under the word of God according
to their love.
And when studying church history, we've never got
to lose sight of that fact.
Here we are studying the action of men
who were trying to serve God.
And we haven't understood any of the things
that any of them do until we understand
it in the light of their beliefs that
hereby they did God's service.
Now, I labour this point a bit, because
most textbooks of church history stop a good
way short of that.
And they show you these churches acting in
what, to our minds, also seems to be
a perfectly fantastic manner.
And sometimes they make a joke of it.
Historians know their subjects don't, and it's their
way to bring in any light and comic
relief that they can to adorn their pages
and make them easier to read.
But this is not enough.
You've got to ask, well, how the dickens,
that's English in case you didn't know, how
the dickens did these people ever suppose that
by behaving the way they did, they could
please God?
Now that's the real question which church history
raises at point after point.
And we haven't finished our job as church
historians until we've carried the inquiry up to
the place where we can answer that question.
And this means that you can't do church
history without also doing a certain amount of
historical theology and history of Christian piety.
That's true of all periods of church history.
And it's supremely true of the Puritan.
For the Puritan age was a supremely theological
age, and it was supremely an age in
which piety, living to God, was everybody's admitted
concern, and the only question at issue was
how are you to do it?
And our study of English Puritanism would be
an inadequate study if theology and piety were
neglected.
And it's at just this point that I
want to warn you against those textbooks that
I mentioned just now.
Because it's just here that they fail.
They're honest minds, they tell you in their
prefaces that from our standpoint they're going to
fail.
The subtitle of Nathan's book is A Chapter
in the History of Idealism.
And in his preface he makes it very
plain that what he means by idealism is
the state in which you have ideals as
ethical objectives as contrasted with the state in
which you don't have either.
So that's simply a relativist, a pragmatist, a
secularist, in the full sense of that word.
Well, all right.
That's his point of view, and from that
standpoint he tells the story.
But what it means is that when he
comes to the Puritan...
comes to the point of telling us how
the Puritan fits, he usually doesn't get there.
And his presentation of the Puritan is external.
And his work as a historian, therefore, from
our standpoint, is not finished.
But it's even more so with William Harlow
and the rise of Puritanism.
Harlow was a student of English literature, and
he tells us, in the first sentences of
his preface, that the privilege which led to
this book, I'm quoting, was first prompted by
a desire to understand the face of Milton's
early apologitica in its own time.
In other words, he's interested in the ideas
of Milton's early apologitica.
He's got a secular interest.
He's interested in democracy and liberty and that
kind of issue.
But he's not interested, and he makes it
very plain in the way that he writes
this book, that he's not interested in theology,
Godliness, Christianity as such.
And he writes this book from that standpoint,
and it's a very able book.
But again, like Harlow, it comes short of
explaining to us how the Puritan fits.
And the same is true of Terry Miller,
who wrote his book as the prolegometer to
a generic intellectual history of New England.
And here again, understanding of the theological motivation
of Puritanism is not merely lacking, but this
list of the subjects which need not concern
us, because this is the age in which
we've all outgrown that kind of thing.
Miller is quite open in telling you that
this is his point of view, but it
means that in his presentation of the Puritan
culture, just as in Nassau and Harlow's presentation
of Puritan history, there is, in a very
real sense, a God-shaped blank.
And you must always make allowance for that
when you're reading these books, and you must
remember that the very heart of the matter
is something about which these brethren aren't qualified
to tell you, and for the most part
don't even attempt to tell you.
They're content with a merely external description, categorized
perhaps in terms of literary criticism, a purely
external description of some of the things that
they did.
So as to the further question of how
and why it was that these men thought
that by the things that they were doing
they were serving God, these books don't give
you very much help.
Well, once you know that, it's all right.
You can get what's valuable from the textbooks,
but you're also alerted to what the textbooks
don't tell you.
And that's something which I think is always
important in a situation like this situation, in
which the textbooks don't tell you enough.
One always tends to assume that a textbook
on a subject tells you everything, basically, that
you need to know.
And that's why, right at the outset, I
was hesitant about calling these books textbooks, not
just because they're not going to use them
as textbooks, but because they aren't quite that,
because of this central and fundamental thing that
they leave out.
Well, by saying that, you'll be able to
see what it is that I'm going to
try and do in my treatment of this
period.
I am going to attempt, whether I shall
succeed at another question, but at least I'm
going to attempt to show you how these
people picked and why it was that they
thought that their course of action was through
an authentic service of God.
In fact, at this point, I want to
put in a little lamentation about the way
in which modern study of the Puritans, not
simply in these books I mention, but quite
generally, has been weakened, or triggered, in one
way, by the contentment, which these various writers
have shown, contentment in an external posture, an
attitude of standing outside the Puritans, so far
as their theology and their piety is concerned,
a contentment, that is, to dismiss those things
as so outmoded, as not even to be
interesting, and certainly not an essential part of
the picture they're trying to paint, matter, therefore,
that can be treated as both quaint and
dead, and dismissed from consideration.
The truth is that if you review the
historiography of Puritanism in this last, well, let's
say, this last sixty years of this century,
you'll find that modern Puritan study has been
motivated, chiefly, by what we would call a
liberal concern, using that word liberal in its
modern political and secular sense, where it stands
for a general interest in moral and cultural
and political progress, and the refining of culture,
and the refining of moral attitudes in the
light of developing knowledge.
It's a kind of evolutionism, this liberalism, and
it's led to a study of the Puritans
as forerunners of the better and more fully
developed, and highly developed culture that we have
today.
That's been the standpoint, and of course your
standpoint, as you know, operates the spectacle, or
rather, blinkers.
In any field of study, your standpoint determines
what you're looking for, and what you're looking
for determines what you see.
So it's not surprising that historians with this
particular limitation and definition of interest have not
seen certain things which we certainly, I hope,
will be unable to see in our own
study of the Puritans.
And Haller himself is an instance of this.
Haller is interested in libertarianism.
He's written a good deal beside the rise
of Puritanism on Puritan thoughts about civil liberty,
liberty and reformation in the Puritan revolution, the
level of trend on civil liberty.
These are other works by William Haller.
Or think of a title like Woodhouse's Puritanism
of Liberty, or the subtitle of that book
by Plum that I mentioned just now, A
Study of the Growth of English Liberty.
Same secular interest.
That is why, that's a justification for my
saying earlier on that his book doesn't provide
the treatment of post-restoration Puritanism that we
want.
It's not interested in the religious springs of
the movement.
It's not interested in theology.
It's not interested in piety.
The interest is fundamentally secular.
Hence, as I say, these points, these central
things get missed.
Another writer on Puritanism who's an avowed Marxist,
Christopher Hill.
He, of course, with his Marxist preoccupation on
economic and revolutionary forces, he's even less, from
the standpoint of our interest, than do these
other writers.
And so on might go on.
But all that I'm doing here is illustrating
the way that this secular interest has determined
the direction of Puritan studies and explaining to
you why it is that you'll find the
book.
I think I may say you should find,
you ought to find the books on Puritanism
woefully inadequate.
From their own standpoint, they're learned and competent
enough.
But from the standpoint of presenting us with
what Puritanism actually was, they fall seriously and
sadly short.
And this is why the standard presentation in
the books of the activities, the particular activities
of the Puritan movement and those who made
it up, those which are in fact presented,
often leaves one feeling, well, these Puritans, surely
they were a pretty pernickety crowd.
Because they're presented by the books as a
pretty pernickety crowd.
Not that the actual external states are wrong,
it's simply that the motivation isn't understood.
You find, in fact, that the standard presentation
of Puritan history in most of the recognized,
the academically recognized textbooks of the present time,
is essentially an episode in the power politics
of Ecclesiasticism, a movement motivated by certain social
pressure, a movement aimed at the capture of
the Church simply because these people were the
sort of people who wanted to have the
Church under their control, a movement whose professed
theological preoccupations marked fundamentally secular concerns, a movement
that is, which used theology as a blind
for the pursuit of secular ambitions, a movement
which has at its heart the love of
power, pride, self-assertiveness, all those secular motivations
which have prompted, well, shall I say, secular
history, which are common in secular history, which
indeed form part of the story, but which
are not, I repeat, not, and I hope
to prove this before I finish, at the
heart of the Puritan movement.
The story is told something like this.
Here were these men who, just because they
were men who temperamentally were inclined to extremes,
were dissatisfied with the Elizabethan settlement in England
after 1568, and they'd made friends, some of
them on the continent, and they wanted to
see the English Church brought into line with
the greater austerity of outward form which the
Church, the Reformed Churches of the continent had
acquired, and so they campaigned for more reformation,
and the big battalions of the establishment and
the civil power were turned against them, and
they didn't get what they wanted, and this
made them mad and made them more insistent
in campaigning, and made them more radical in
stating what they wanted.
They couldn't get reform of the Church's worship,
abolition of the serfdom, and the conduct of
worship, and little things like that, so they
started campaigning for pre-superializing of the whole
form of the establishment, and they campaigned for
20 years.
It pointed out, truly, that their leaders were
young men, and young men, the historians imply,
were inclined to run to extremes, and they
fought this fight, and they were beaten, and
by the end of the 16th century, that
particular sort of Puritanism had been temporally exhausted,
and the Church of England could go on
with its own development.
One thing that had happened in the Elizabethan
period was that, as Carla will tell you
in great detail, in great length, frustrated by
the impossibility of reforming the outward face of
the Church, some of the Puritans became preachers,
and they tried to solace their egos by
dramatizing the Christian life and using their influence
as preachers to encourage people to engage in
the dramatic and exciting business of living the
Christian life as the preachers presented it in
their sermons.
Solace to a wounded ego.
This is how Carla presents the motivation at
that point.
And then in the 17th century, various social
injustices were perpetrated by the powers that were,
the king and his advisers, and similarly the
Church of England fell more and more into
line with Arminianism on the continent, and the
children of the Elizabethan Puritan movement, whose friends
were still amongst the reformed churches of the
continent, were shocked at the Arminianism, and they
were even more shocked by the things that
the Lord was doing, and they saw it
as a halfway house back to Romanism, and
that made them fight again, and then eventually
things got so hot that they had a
civil war about it.
And then when they'd won the civil war,
none of them knew what to do with
the situation, and the country was thrown into
chaos.
They couldn't make, they couldn't restore order, either
ecclesiastical or civil order, once they got power,
they didn't know what to do with it,
they had to have the king dead, they
were outsmarted in the restoration debate, their ministers
were ejected from the Church of England because
they were required to abjure certain things that
they stood for in the past, and they
were too proud to do that, and so
they had to leave the Church of England
and English non-conformity began, and so the
whole story teetered out, really, in a shambles
and a heap of ashes.
These cantankerous fellows, these awkward men, they'd fought
their fight, they'd lost it, that was the
end of the pure little episode.
And the implication is that since the Church
of England was allied more directly with, well,
was allied fairly directly with the political and
social developments of England after that time, it
was probably a good job that it went
that way.
Well, that's a bit of a caricature, telling
the story in that session, but you will
find in the book that that is the
way that it's been.
Perhaps the language used is politer, but the
motivation to which weight is given is the
secular motivation of pride, self-assertiveness, natural inclination
to run to extreme, natural cantankerousness, the desire
to rule, the desire to have things under
your hand, and nothing more respectable, really, is
allowed to have operated.
The theological and Christian and biblical motivation is
not given any serious weight at all.
If it's mentioned, and sometimes in the books
it is mentioned, it's mentioned on the grounds
of the chap's professed that their motivation was
theological and religious.
But it's not always the case that the
writer commits himself to believing that it was
so, or he does commit himself to believing
that he was so.
He will usually hasten to tell you that
he thinks that their theological position was really
quite unreasonable and untenable.
So you don't get sympathy with the Puritan
at the point at which I'm seeking to
identify as the real heart of Puritanism, the
theological, the religious, the theological and the religious
area, the area of serving God and seeking
to please God.
But the truth is that Puritanism, more or
less than any movement of its kind in
history, had religion, theology and piety at its
heart.
We may say with truth that its watchword,
and this doesn't really get you to the
heart of Puritanism, was holiness unto the Lord.
And if I wanted to give you a
preliminary characterization of the Puritan spirit, I couldn't
do better than tell you a little story.
A story found in a book by Giles
Sterlin entitled The Real Christian, concerning one of
the earliest of the Puritan ministers, a person
Richard Rogers, who preached the word of God
in Ethics in the 1880s and 1890s.
Now, those were the days in which the
people called Puritans were also called Precisions, because
of their alleged preciseness and what seemed to
non-Puritans pernicativeness in the way in which
they served God.
And Richard Rogers was out riding one day
and the Lord of the Manor overtook him
and they were riding along together and the
Lord of the Manor took occasion to upbraid
Richard Rogers for his Puritanism.
And he said, why are you fellows so
precise?
Why are you fellows so precise?
What is it that makes you so?
Don't you see how unreasonable it is?
Don't you see what awkward customers it makes
you?
Why so precise?
And Richard Rogers came out with the unanswerable
reply, Oh sir, he said, oh sir, I
serve a precise God.
Now that's Puritanism.
That's historical Puritanism.
And that is what surely gives you the
real party to the movement that we're going
to study together.
There then is my second introductory point.
This is church history, we must study it
as we must study all church history in
terms of the Word of God as men's
response to the Word of God.
And this last quarter of an hour I've
been seeking to work that out a bit
with reference to the Puritan movement and the
book that you may chance to read about
the Puritans.
And now my third point, which is a
very short one.
This is a study in English church history.
Not American.
The history of American and English Puritanism well
I say the history as well of English
and American Puritanism has to be studied separately.
They went quite different ways.
In New England, the Puritans came, they colonized
they were the dominant, indeed the sole cultural
and ecclesiastical force.
And the problems which arose for them arose
out of that situation in which, for better
or for worse, they were in charge.
But in England, Puritanism would never be dominant
even less the sole cultural and ecclesiastical force.
Except perhaps for that very short period between
1645 and 1660 and only doubtfully actually even
during that period Puritans, apart from that period
anyway Puritans were always a minority.
And the main course of English ecclesiastical and
cultural development was not going their way.
In other words, from their standpoint it was
an evangelistic situation throughout in the broadest sense
of their frame.
They were seeking to win their fellow men
for the gospel they were seeking to win
the church for the gospel they were seeking
in the broadest way to win the whole
of English culture for the gospel but they
never actually won that battle.
They were a minority movement they did great
things but it can't be said that they
ever won the country although they made lasting
contributions to the religious the religious heritage of
England perhaps right at the end of the
course I'll be able to say something about
those contributions down the line, two and a
half centuries.
But they were never in charge they were
never dominant in their own day and this
must always be borne in mind when you're
comparing English and American Puritans.
I don't want to develop that fact now
I don't want to draw out the differences
I just warn you at this stage that
there is a fundamental difference at that point
leading to all sorts of detailed differences in
the way that the two movements developed in
the two cultures.
Now we move directly to some evidence and
we set ourselves this question Who were the
Puritans?
And that is going to lead on to
a second question which we'll answer in a
preliminary way before we get down to any
detailed history What was Puritanism?
First, who were the Puritans?
And I propose to answer this question for
the present at any rate by glancing at
the history of the word Now, in origin,
just as at the present time the word
Puritan was a nickname an abusive nickname When
it was first used in the 1560s and
on the list of those who used it
after that time during the Elizabethan period it
had a specific meaning It was used as
the English equivalent of Cathery, but pure people
C-H-A-R-I in English there's
the Greek word katharos there which you may
recognise The Cathery, which was the name given
to them by the novation of schismatics in
the first century And the implication of this
abusive nickname therefore straight away was that these
people are sectarian and schismatic that they believe
that they're pure where other people aren't pure
in other words, that they're probably they're probably
hypocrites into the bargain So it was a
nickname and a rude word And there have
been others in the history of the Church
Think, for instance, of the word fundamentalist in
this century or the word necessitist in the
18th century Both of them have been, or
were in the first instance at any rate,
or at any rate rapidly became after they've
been coined abusive nicknames And there's a certain
law of nicknames a kind of anatomy of
abuse First, nicknames always spread in application When
you've got a bad name that will hang
any dog you give it to you're inclined
to give it to any dog in sight
anyone whom you want to damn with a
name So these abusive words spread in their
application and were applied to more and more
people whom you want to knock down by
calling them a rude name Secondly, the word
is differently used by different people it loses
its preciseness People use it for its emotional
force rather than because they think that it
particularly fits the person to whom they're applying
it So its precise meaning, if ever it
had a precise meaning it eroded away And
different people turned out to be using it
in a number of quite distinct senses So
that you can't give a single crisp definition
of it after it's been in the world
for a few years Already you need half
a dozen definitions to cover the various applications
of it that are being made Think of
the difficulty now, in our 1967 situation of
defining the word fundamentally for a parallel situation
And then the third law in the anatomy
of abuse The word gets claimed by some
because of the good core of meaning which
they believe they find in it There's always
a few who claim these words just as
there's always been a few who think that
it's better to call themselves fundamentalists than have
done with it And just as in the
18th century the Methodists went on calling themselves
Methodists and gloried in the world although it
was a word of ridicule on the lips
of other people But equally, there are always
other people who think it's better to disclaim
the word because it's so tainted and so
imprecise And they think that for them to
claim it would be to mislead people and
to jeopardise their own chances of bearing witness
to the things for which they stand So
they prefer to say, we are not one
of those We don't recognise this label We
don't want to be called by that name
Well, it's happened with the word Puritan just
as it's happened with these other nicknames that
I've mentioned Now, here's the history In 1564
a separatist group in London who'd organised themselves
as a private little congregation distinct from the
established Church of England and its parochial network
covering the country were described by a contemporary
chronicler as, I quote his phrase calling themselves
Puritans the unspotted lambs of the Lord claiming
in other words purity for their lives and
for their churchmanship and justifying their separation on
the ground that it was necessary for purity
In 1567 the word began to be applied
by the opponent it began to be applied
to those who were campaigning for the abolition
of the separatists people who in the books
are called the bestiary of reformers began to
be applied to them by their opponent Then
after 1570 it began to be applied to
the different and distinct group who under the
leadership of Thomas Cartwright at Cambridge I mean,
he was at Cambridge for 12 months and
then he was thrown out In 1570 he
was at Cambridge and this group of people
started a movement campaigning for the Presbyterian I
mean, of the Anglican hierarchy These people were
sometimes called the discretionarians because part of their
passion was a desire for parish discipline in
a way that the established Anglican order wouldn't
provide it But here was another application of
the word purity It wasn't applied, I may
say under an Elizabeth reign that is 1558
to 1603 if you haven't got the date
During that period it wasn't applied by the
opponent of separatists to those who separated and
set up their own independent congregations Those people
were called Brownists after Thomas Brown, one of
the first of them In fact, there weren't
very many of them Separatist experiments under Elizabeth
were crowned on by the orthologists Because they
involved separation from the established church they were
subjected to official pressure and they were, in
fact, all of them suppressed There weren't any
separatists operating in Britain in 1603, when Elizabeth
died But none of these separatist experiments had
been given the name of Puritans In those
days, Puritanism didn't commence separatism Rather, it implied
that you took a certain line within the
established church This is interesting The first Puritans,
the unspotted lambs of the Lord apparently no
longer existed Saving separatists, but apparently their usage
just died out During the closing 30 years
of Elizabeth's reign the word was repudiated both
by those who wanted the abolition of the
surface and by those who wanted a Presbyterianizing
of the hierarchy They said, this is not
a proper name to apply to us It
implies separatist tendencies We haven't got separatist tendencies
We are seeking the reformation of the national
church But then, by the end of the
century the Disciplinarians and the Vestiarians the Vestiarian
Reformers just ceased to make this point They
seemed to have recognized the situation had gone
so far that it was useless to make
the point They would be called Puritans whether
they repudiated the name or not so they
might as well grin and bear it The
further thing that has happened during those 30
years is that a pastoral prompt of the
Puritan movement has developed which was doing great
work on the pastoral front in some of
the English towns and villages more about that
at a later stage And this in itself
was giving a positive content to the word
that is, these pastors were known as Puritans
and their pastoral ministry was winning them golden
words words of approval from very many English
people This had done something to rehabilitate the
word So for all these reasons, towards the
end of the 16th century the protests from
those who were called Puritans against the word
petered out and the complaints against its application
to the police But meanwhile, in the 1580s
and after the word had come more and
more to be used by the ordinary people,
the ordinary secular-minded people of England who
were many to apply quite indiscriminately to anyone
who was noted for his strict personal morality
The implication being that he was a prig
and a killjoy and self-righteous And as
an example of that, think of Malvolio the
butt of the jokes in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
who is then a stupid and conceited and
self-righteous fellow and is described by one
of the clones in the play as a
kind of a Puritan And in a play
by Ben Johnson, produced in the 1590s, called
Bartholomew Fair there's a Puritan character with the
revealing name of Zeal of the Land Busy
Zeal of the Land Busy and then he
just hops around doing the Puritan thing trying
to prevent his fellow men enjoying themselves Richard
Baxter has his comment on this development of
the use of the word that it had
come by the end of the 16th century
to express, quote, the vulgar hatred of serious
godliness Inconformist and non-conformist In other words,
it was being given an application now that
had no relation at all to one's church
view It simply meant that you were a
serious, moral man with at least a form
of godliness that you took very seriously but
the chances are you were a hypocrite and
a frig and a killjoy Next step in
the history the word had become a good
right term of abuse by now and in
the 1620s certain persons in the hierarchy of
the Church of England whose own theology was
anti-Calvinist Arminians, if you like they coined
the phrase doctrinal Puritan as a bad name
to give their Calvinistic opponents that is, those
who stood for the five points of the
Syllabus d'Or and Montague certain Richard Montague
who afterwards became Bishop of Chichester wrote in
a book of his about the Puritan doctrine
of final perseverance which earned a protest from
Bishop Carlton who had been one of the
Anglican one of the Anglican ministers, I may
say, to the Syllabus d'Or and his
protest was that I never heard of a
doctrinal Puritan there's no such thing as a
doctrinal Puritan this is just a new phrase
you've invented in order to malign people who
stand for what the sinners stood for but
the usage went on and Archbishop Lord on
one occasion gave to his patron, his then
patron, the Duke of Buckingham what he called
in his diary a little tract quote, about
doctrinal Puritanism in 1624, same year as Montague
wrote this phrase and on another occasion he
gave to Charles I a list no, sorry,
he gave to Buckingham, I should say Buckingham
again a list of men who might be
thought eligible for preferment preferment, that is appointment
to the position of a dean or a
bishop or any other high dignitary in the
Church of England then and now was a
matter of royal prerogatives the king chose and
in the 17th century the monarch did it
personally and so Lord is sending off this
list of people who might be thought eligible
for preferment distinguished churchmen, distinguished in their own
line but he marked against them either O
or P and O stood for Orthodox, a
man to be preferred and P stood for
Puritan, a man not to be preferred a
man not to be given any high appointment
in the church and it's interesting that their
Lord is drawing this contrast O, Orthodox, that's
people who hold my doxy and P, that's
people who hold a different doxy who hold
a different doxy so here in 1624 and
1625 you've got this new usage, doctrinal Puritanism
referring in fact to what we would call
Orthodox Calvinism then in the civil war, after
1640 the royalists supplied the word indiscriminately to
all those who supported the parliament including the
independents from the separatists who now for the
first time began to be called Puritan because
of their politics and this broadened the use
of the word still further then finally after
1662 the word dropped from current usage and
became a historical term used in the way
that it's used today that is, if you
called a man a Puritan you were implying
that he is just as bad as those
shocking people of old who used to be
called Puritans once upon a time a term
of abuse with a historical reference the historical
reference being for the first half of the
17th century culminating in the civil war in
the commonwealth for the people who couldn't conform
to the restored Church of England in 1662
the people who were rejected from their livings
they were in fact ministers who had been
called Puritans before but now they were called
either Presbyterians which for many of them actually
was a misnomer but that's what they were
called or non-conformists or dissenters Puritan became,
as I say, a term of abuse with
a historical reference however, this is the last
thing I'll say now in the mid-17th
century one or two people turn up content
to vindicate the word to vindicate it as
an honourable title for men who were concerned
to live lives that were pure in the
sight of God and so you get in
1646 the work of a certain John Geary
entitled The Character of an Old English Puritan
or Protestant Non-Conformist and that little track
ends with these words quote the Puritans were
men who sorry the Puritans were men who
stood four square, unmovable so that they who
in the midst of many opinions have lost
the view of true religion may return to
him and there find it that was the
claim and Richard Baxter, writing after the restoration
deals with the accusation of a certain person
who, writing against him, has said I quote
Baxter, and I think he saved me he
says that I am purus putus puritanus a
pure Puritan pop pop used apparently in the
same way that it's now used in a
in a vulgar word like sex pop I
am a pure Puritan pop and one qui
totum puritanismum totus puract one who wholly breathes
out the whole of Puritanism and Baxter's comment
on that is alas I am not so
good and happy not worthy to be spoken
of in words of such high praise well,
this is the story of the history of
the word and by this history you can
already see what kind of phenomenon it is
that we're going to study my time has
gone the kind thing to do is to
say to you now hold any questions that
you've got until three o'clock tomorrow the
lecture's gone and I won't speak thank you