time: the refreshing river 



production in small closed communities to industrial production 

 in large open ones. The country declined in importance and 

 the cities rose to power. The dominance of an aristocracy based 

 on land ownership gave place to the dominance of a merchant society 

 based on the possession of monetary wealth and the power to employ 

 it in profitable enterprises. To these changes in the world of daily 

 life there corresponded changes in the world of ideas, of philosophy 

 and theology, and here the transition was represented by the Reforma- 

 tion and all that that implied. Merit, formerly acquired by the con- 

 templative life, was now to be gained by the active life of service (not 

 without reasonable material recompense) to one's fellow-men. Wealth 

 ceased to be a sign of diabolic favour and became a sign rather of the 

 favour of God. The protestant and puritan movement was revolu- 

 tionary not only in theology, but in public life too. The right of 

 christian people to rebel against unchristian tyrants was invoked in 

 the cause of protestantism, as by Bishop John Ponnet.^ The soldier- 

 preachers of the Parliament's Army in the civil war period began by 

 finding no warrant in scripture for bishops or presbyters; they went 

 on to find no warrant there for landlords either. The mediaeval 

 restrictions on usury stood in the way of the new economic progress; 

 if some of the finest scholars and writers of Caroline England, such as 

 Jeremy Taylor and Lancelot Andrewes, stood in the way, so much 



the worse for them. 



It is almost unnecessary to ask on what side stood the protagonists 

 of that young giant awaking from his sleep, the scientific movement 

 itself. They were almost to a man associated with the progressive 

 social trend of protestantism. Miall, in his classical book on the lives 

 of the early naturalists, has shown the great preponderance of pro- 

 testants among the botanists and zoologists of the late sixteenth and 

 early seventeenth centuries.^ Only one of the men who came together 

 in the year 1649 to discuss scientific subjects and make co-opera- 

 tive scientific experiments, in what was then known as the "Invisible 

 College" and afterwards became the Royal Society, was of royalist 

 affiliations, the physician, Charles Scarborough. And he was person- 

 ally connected with the only scientist of first-class importance in the 

 English seventeenth century, who was more or less on the royalist 

 side, namely the great William Harvey, physician to King Charles I. 



1 A Short Treatise of Politique Power (1556), the first book the Parliament reprinted 

 in their propaganda campaign of 1642. 



* L. C. Miall, The Early Naturalists; their lives and work (London, 19 12). 



98 



