Thomas Traherne (1637?–1674) was one of many conforming clergy who grew up during the Civil War and who were at university during the Interregnum. In 1657, a year after completing his B.A. at Oxford, he was admitted to the rectory at Credenhill, Herefordshire, by the Commissioners for the Approbation of Public Preachers; he later briefly served also as chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Charles II. In 1660 Traherne conformed to the Church of England and was a part of the group of young men to whom the church looked for definition and leadership at the Restoration. This group of clergymen remained unaligned theologically, and they resist easy classification. Preoccupied with their pastoral office, they took ‘to heart the nation's superficial godliness and hypocrisy’. At the Restoration Traherne was ready to take his place as a public minister, conscientiously conforming with full agreement to the Thirty-nine Articles, hoping to make his contribution to the peaceful establishment of a unified church. Convinced that the doctrine of the Church of England when ‘rightly understood’ was ‘the most Wholsom and Excellent in the World’ (p. 78), he offered in A Sober View a solution to the controversy over the doctrine of election, thinking himself ‘happy’ if he could ‘produce such conceptions about it, that shall any way be beneficial to the Church of God, either in promoting her publick Peace, or in satisfying her Private Doubtings’ (p. 186). He fully accepted the public, pastoral obligations of his vocation and, as he writes in Inducements to Retirednes, was willing to exchange all his ‘Liberty and Blessed Retirements’ (p. 17) to attend to ‘the Life and Salvation of Multitudes’ (p. 16). Traherne knew that even in a small, obscure parish any ‘Notable Benefit’ people may receive would be of ‘Publick Influence to a whole Kingdom’ (p.17).

Traherne was irenic and moderating in his theology and temperament, advocating a middle way in all things. In A Sober View he steers a course between radical Calvinism and Arminianism, ‘for as al Virtu, so all verity fitteth in the Golden Mean: and to erre on either Extreme is Equally Dangerous’ (p. 78).