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Puritanism and Democracy1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

A. S. P. Woodhouse
A. S. P. Woodhouse*
Affiliation:
The University of Toronto
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Extract

I have been invited to present to you my thesis regarding Puritanism and Democracy in seventeenth-century England. The thesis in question is simple and obvious, though some of its ramifications are (I hope) neither simple nor altogether obvious. The period of the Puritan revolution was one in which religion and even theology dominated the common modes of thought and expression. Lord Acton, who (unlike some historians) was sufficiently unenlightened to know theology when he saw it, described the period as “the middle ages of Protestantism”. It follows that the concepts whether of liberty or of authority which the Puritans developed, can be fully understood only if they are studied in their proper setting, and their native terminology. Dogma formed that terminology and the Puritan church organization constituted the setting. Without denying the validity of other approaches (the constitutional approach for example, in which the liberals have long had their own way, or the economic, in which the Marxists are, I understand, taking theirs)—without denying the usefulness of these approaches, I suggest the value to the student who would know what really happened, of a third, namely the religious approach. For the Puritan concept of democracy, if it did not spring from Puritan religion, at least sprang up in closest contact with it. Puritan religion constituted the climate of opinion in which the concept was born and nourished. The religious approach has one advantage (shared in measure with the constitutional): it can stay within the period under discussion, and it can afford to rest its case on the actual words used. It does not require a transposition of terms, whereby theology is shown to be a roundabout way of saying economics, and St. Mark's gospel gets spelled with an x. Nor does it ask us to make any large assumptions—to believe that Calvin built better than he knew: he intended a church and it turned out to be a bank! One will no doubt be told that some of the theological argument with which the pamphlets in the Thomason Collection are filled, and most of the reasons urged in the Councils of the Army at Putney and Whitehall, are what are now called “rationalizations”, and that we gain nothing by refusing to recognize this fact. So be it. But if these are rationalizations they involve the terms in which the Puritan viewed his world and they rest upon the convictions with which he was prepared to face not only his fellows, but his Maker. We shall gain nothing by brushing those terms and those convictions aside, though to comprehend them requires patient study and a modicum of historical sympathy. “Nothing”, says Lord David Cecil, “is more baffling to the imagination than the religion of another age.”

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , February 1938 , pp. 1 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1938

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Footnotes

1

A lecture delivered to the Political Economy Seminar in the University of Toronto, on November 18, 1937. The conclusions are for the most part based on material collected in my volume Puritanism and Liberty, shortly to be published, in London, by Messrs. J. M. Dent and Sons. Instead of referring to pamphlets inaccessible to the reader, I have, wherever possible, cited the appropriate pages of this volume. The reader may wish to consult, in addition, Pamphlets on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, ed. by William Haller (New York, 1934), and in so doing to test my thesis by reference to a collection made with no such thesis in view.

References

2 Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 1-178.

3 Institutes, IV, xx, 32.

4 Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 233-41.

5 Ibid., pp. 390-6.

6 Ibid., pp. 241-7.

7 Troeltsch, Ernst, Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (London, 1931).Google Scholar

8 Husband's Exact Collection (1643), p. 315.Google Scholar

9 Puritanism and Liberty, p. 246.

10 Ibid., pp. 312-3 (from The Way of True Peace and Unity, 1648).

11 Puritanism and Liberty, p. 282.

12 Ibid., p. 263, and introduction, p. 42.

13 Ibid., p. 436.

14 Ibid., p. 459.

15 Imputatio Fidei (preface).

16 The best example is Richard Overton whose edifying combination of hostility to organized religion, crude materialism, and radical opinions in politics, has gained him some admirers in Moscow—where he would no doubt be locked up just as he was in London.

17 Puritanism and Liberty, p. 271 (from The Bloody Tenent, 1644).

18 Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 247-8.

19 Ibid., pp. 282-3 (from The Bloody Tenent).

20 This is treated in some detail in my article, “Milton, Puritanism and Liberty” (University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. IV, 07, 1935, pp. 483–513).Google Scholar

21 Debated with cognate questions in the Council of Officers at Whitehall on December 14, 1648 (Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 145-67).

22 Ibid., pp. 221-5 (from the Commentary on Galatians in the form in which the Puritans read it).

23 Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 228-32.

24 Ibid., pp. 226-8 (from Of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes).

25 Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 266-92.

26 Political Aphorisms, nos. 23-4.

27 Puritanism and Liberty, p. 231.

28 Paradise Lost, IX, 654.

29 Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 230-1.

30 Ibid., pp. 422-6.

31 Ibid., pp. 355-67, 443-5.

32 Presented to Parliament in January, 1649.

33 Pease, C. T., The Leveller Movement (New York, 1918)Google Scholar; to which admirable study I would acknowledge my indebtedness at this point.

34 Puritanism and Liberty, p. 420.

35 Ibid., pp. 53, 57.

36 Ibid., p. 63.

37 Ibid., p. 59.

38 Ibid., p. 363; cf. p. 340.

39 Ibid., pp. 379-85.