¹ Bredvold, L. I., The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (Ann Arbor, 1934)Google Scholar.

² Monk, Samuel Holt, “Dryden Studies: A Survey,” ELH, xiv (1947)Google Scholar.

³ Bredvold, Intellectual Milieu, 121.

⁴ Secord, A. W., JEGP, xxiv (1935), 463Google Scholar, reviewing Bredvold's book is convinced of Dryden's fideism, but is less careful than Bredvold in denning it as “the medieval distinction between reason and faith.” Such a definition would make Catholicism generally and a whole array of Anglicans fideistic.

⁵ Among the pertinent studies of this question are: Bush, D., The Renaissance and English Humanism (Toronto, 1939)Google Scholar; Walsh, G. G., Medieval Humanism (New York, 1942)Google Scholar; Haydn, H., The Counter-Renaissance (New York, 1950)Google Scholar; Baker, H., The Wars of Truth: Studies in the Decay of Christian Humanism in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Baker, Wars of Truth, 98.

⁷ Smith, John, Selected Discourses (Cambridge, 1859), 61Google Scholar.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Whichcote, Benjamin, Moral and Religious Aphorisms (London, 1753), 76Google Scholar.

¹⁰ The contemporary need was to counter the twin dangers of Puritan bibliolatry and Hobbistic materialism.

¹¹ Cudworth, Ralph, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1845)Google Scholar, Preface.

¹² Smith, Selected Discourses, 442.

¹³ Whichcote, , Select Sermons (London, 1698), 298Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Quoted in Wiley, M. L., The Subtle Knot (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 93Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Whichcote, Aphorisms, 99.

¹⁶ Cragg, G. R., From Puritanism to the Age of Reason (Cambridge, Eng., 1950), 68Google Scholar. However, Bethell, S. L., The Cultural Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1951), 15Google Scholar, takes issue with G. N. Clark's assertion that post-Restoration writers “tried to justify Christianity itself not on the ground that it was divinely revealed but on the ground that it was reasonable.” On the contrary, says Bethell, “Seventeenth-century thought, both earlier and later, has a subtlety and precision that eludes such broad-meshed categories.”

¹⁷ Stillingfleet, Edward, Origines Sacrae (London, 1666), Bk. II, Ch. V, passimGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ This sermon and one by South and Tillotson respectively are conveniently reproduced in Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose, eds, White, , Wallerstein, , Quintana (New York, 1952)Google Scholar. For the present quotation see ibid., II, 186.

¹⁹ Ibid., II, 185.

²⁰ Ibid., II, 204.

²¹ Throughout the Anglican tradition there was general agreement that, in the words of Donne (Works, ed. H. Alford, II, 7), “no natural man can do anything towards a supernatural work….”

²² Bredvold is especially confusing on this point. At page 81, Bredvold says that Hooker and Chillingworth “appealed unhesitatingly to reason.” And yet Hooker (Polity, III, viii, 18) insists that men's reason in divine matters must not be thought of as working independently of “the aid and assistance of God's most blessed Spirit.” Furthermore, it is difficult to see why Chillingworth's professed willingness to adopt Roman Catholicism if infallibility were indeed a fact (Anglicanism, eds. P. E. More and F. L. Cross, 113), as well as Sherlock's (cited in Bredvold, 94), is consistent with the sturdy rationalism of Chillingworth and Sherlock, and yet that a similar suggestion in Dryden is conclusive evidence of his hankering for authority.

²³ Bredvold's treatment of Edward Worsley (Intellectual Milieu, 94) illustrates the unsatisfactoriness of such exaggerations. Worsley, a Catholic apologete, defends himself against the allegation of impugning reason by conceding that “Reason euer precedes Faith, and is grounded vpon those rational motiues which Induce to Belieue” but that “Faith, precisely considered as Faith, relies vpon a quite Different Obiect, God's pure Reuelation….” Bredvold regards this as a “tangle of logic” and as a typical example of fideistic apologetic, in spite of the fact that, as this paper shows, this position is common to Hooker and Laud and the majority of Anglicans.

²⁴ Hooker, Polity, III, viii, 18.

²⁵ John Dryden, Works, ed. Scott-Saintsbury, XVII, 33. This passage is quoted in Bredvold, Intellectual Milieu, 114, as evidence of Dryden's “rationalism” in spite of Dryden's clear distinction between revelation and reason.

²⁶ Anglicanism, eds. More, P. E. and Cross, F. L. (Milwaukee, 1935), 100Google Scholar.

²⁷ Ibid., 102.

²⁸ I find it impossible to conclude, with Bredvold (Intellectual Milieu, 119), that the Preface to Religio Laici makes it clear that Dryden had “Hooker and other Anglican ‘philosophizing divines’ in mind….” As a matter of fact, Dryden there associates himself with “venerable Hooker” in resisting the extreme individualism of the sectarians.

²⁹ Even Hooker, who cannot be suspect of disregarding or understressing the rights of reason, insists (Polity, III, viii, 15) that “other motives and inducements, be they never so strong and consonant unto reason, are notwithstanding uneffectual of themselves to work faith concerning this principle [i.e. the reliability of Scripture], if the special grace of the Holy Ghost concur not to the enlightening of our minds.”

³⁰ This is not to deny, of course, the subtle changes which were occurring in the way in which the relationship between nature and grace was being viewed. Cf. Bethell, The Cultural Revolution, 58, for a description of the narrowing of the concept of reason that is responsible for the grave differences in tone which complicate the apparent agreement between Hooker and Tillotson.

³¹ Donne, John, Works, ed. Alford, H. (London, 1839), II, 7Google Scholar.

³² Rand, E. K., Founders of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ Baker, Wars of Truth, 191.

³⁴ Anglicanism, 113.

³⁵ Quoted in Bredvold, Intellectual Milieu, 94.

³⁶ Bredvold, Intellectual Milieu, 126.

³⁷ Donne's view of the self-elected saints as the white spots of leprosy in the Church, and Browne's recognition that every “man is not a proper Champion for Truth” as well as Burton's fear of the “fopperies” of private judgment, can be matched by Taylor's comment on the sectarian insistence that conscience is above law: “And so Suspicion; and Jealousie, and Disobedience, and Rebellion are become Conscience; in which there is neither knowledge, nor revelation, nor truth, nor charity, nor reason, nor religion.” For these references see Donne, The Works, IV, 511; Browne, Religio Medici (Everyman ed.), 8; Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (Bohn Library), III, 372; Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, in Smith, L. P., The Golden Grove (Oxford, 1930), 145Google Scholar.

³⁸ Bredvold, Intellectual Milieu, 94.

³⁹ Hooker, Polity, I, iii, 1.

⁴⁰ Ibid., V, viii, s.

⁴¹ Cf. Anglicanism, 121–131, for representatives of those who prefer the Apostles' Creed rather than the more theologically explicit Creeds without, however, intending to undermine the content of those Creeds.

⁴² Hooker, Polity, I, xiv, 4.

⁴³ Ibid., Ill, viii, 10.

⁴⁴ Ibid., II, vii, 6.

⁴⁵ Ibid., II, vii, 5.

⁴⁶ Herschel Baker's phrase, Wars of Truth, 193.

⁴⁷ Hooker, Polity, II, vii, 5

⁴⁸ Ibid., Pref., vi, 4.

⁴⁹ Bredvold, Intellectual Milieu, 87, quotes the Independent John Owen's answer to the Franciscan John Vincent Canes, the first of whom Bredvold considers rationalistic, the second fideistic: “This Protestants think sufficient for them, who as they need not to be wise above what is written; nor to know more of God, than he hath so revealed of himself, that they may know it….” This seems to be essentially the position of Dryden, and so it is difficult to see how a sturdy rationalism in Owen can become metamorphosed into conclusive evidence of Dryden's hankering for authority.

⁵⁰ I am now preparing an article which discusses the general question of Dryden's Catholicism.