Laiid^ the Levellers^ and the Virtuosi 



(A contribution to the book of essays, Christianity and the 



Social Revolution^ I935) 



Seventeenth-Century England. 



In seventeenth-century England, we have the fascinating picture of a 

 balance trembhng on a poise of equal weights — western religion having 

 lost little of its ancient power, western science having gained its first 

 magnificent victories. Even within religion there was a moment of 

 equal poise between the antagonists, before the mediaeval tradition, 

 in the form of the Church of England, ceded the power to the 

 Protestant and Puritan bodies. This contrast, like the former, was 

 but an aspect of what was perhaps a more deep-seated one, namely, 

 the passing of power from the feudal aristocratic and monastic system 

 to the middle or bourgeois class arising out of the mediaeval town 

 merchants. The civil war and the Commonwealth were the outward 

 and visible signs of the victory of this new order. The abolition of 

 the laws against usury; the "freeing" of trade from galling restrictions; 

 the beginning of large-scale industrial "ventures"; the great advances 

 in technology backed by science; the complete removal, in a word, 

 of mercantile and economic life from theological control — all signified 

 the triumph of the middle class. 



The Laudian Divines. 



Of all the ages of the Church's history after the first two centuries 

 there are few which can compare in brightness with the Church of 

 England in the seventeenth century. Poets like George Herbert, 

 Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Henry King, and, we might add, 

 Thomas Browne and Jeremy Taylor; saints like Nicholas Ferrar and 

 Thomas Ken; careful restorers of what was destroyed, like John 

 Hacket, Matthew Wren and John Cosin; scholars like Lancelot 

 Andrewes and Henry More, statesmen like William Laud — all 

 combined to give the period a charm and depth which can never 

 be forgotten by those who have studied it.^ But while we usually 



^ Cf. Grierson, H. J, C, Cross Currents in English Literature of the Seventeenth Century 

 (Chatto & Windus, London, 1929); and Willey, B., The Seventeenth-Century Background 

 (Chatto & Windus, London, 1934). 



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