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Conversion and the Imitation of Christ in Anglican and Puritan Writing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

J. Sears McGee
J. Sears McGee*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Extract

In recent years a great deal of scholarly energy has been expended in attempts to identify differing religious parties and movements in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. On the one hand, J.F.H. New has described the actions of Anglicans and Puritans as “teleological acts – attempts to make practice conform to preconceived philosophies.” He believes that Anglican and Puritan doctrines derived from quite different conceptions of human moral capacity, conceptions which were distinct from their sixteenth-century origins and which grew more so as time passed. On the other hand, Charles and Katherine George have insisted that we can at best talk about minor differences of emphasis and of degree within a doctrinally unified “English Protestant mind” before 1640. There were, so this thesis goes, no really significant Anglican-Puritan ideological distinctions, and therefore religious differences had nothing to do with the coming of the English Civil War. The effect of these efforts has been to make historians aware that defining the terms “Anglican” and “Puritan” is a much more difficult enterprise than used to be thought. Despite the Georges' book, the terms are still being used; but New's argument about their meaning has not gone uncriticized.

It would be impossible in a short article to deal with all of the points raised in this extensive debate. The present purpose is to concentrate upon only two of many points of difference between writers traditionally identified as Anglicans and Puritans by means of their activities, attitudes, and associates.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , Spring 1976 , pp. 21 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1976

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References

1. This article is derived from my dissertation (Yale, 1971). The revised version of that dissertation will be published in 1976 by the Yale University Press as The Godly Man in Stuart England: Anglicans, Puritans and the Two Tables, 1620-1670. Grants from the Committee on Research of the University of California at Santa Barbara and the National Endowment for the Humanities were helpful in the preparation of this article. Seventeenth-century spelling and punctuation have been modernized throughout. Biographical information for writers quoted (except for John Benbrigge) is available in the Dictionary of National Biography. Place of publication is London unless otherwise noted.

2. New, John F. H., Anglican and Puritan: the Basis of Their Opposition, 1558-1640 (Stanford, 1964), p. 4Google Scholar. See also his article, “The Whitgift-Cartwright Controversy,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte (1969), pp. 203–11Google Scholar. John S. Coolidge, although he does not approach the subject as New does, finds significant differences between Puritans and “Conformists” in The Pauline Renaissance in England (Oxford, 1970)Google Scholar.

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50. Ibid., pp. lxiv-lxv.

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