This chapter sets the Laudian view of the Sabbath within their wider account of the feasts and festivals of the church and their account of the church’s capacity to constitute holy times as well as places. The Laudians’ opposition to puritan sabbatarianism is thus explained within their wider position, which enabled them to diminish the significance of the Sabbath attributed by the puritans as the only day marked down for worship by scripture, while simultaneously exalting the role and status of the other holy days denominated by the church, which were thus placed on an at least equal footing with the Sabbath. It was a position adumbrated in conscientious opposition to what was presented as the crude scripturalism and divisive effects of puritan sabbatarianism.

This chapter analyses the Laudian attitude to Sunday sports, in a discussion designed to include the meaning of the altar and the sacrament in the constitution of the Christian community. Allowing Sunday sports re-inscribed the line between the secular and the spiritual as defined by the Laudian notions of holy places and holy times. It allowed affirmations of two different versions of the social body to be made on the same day, the one reinforcing the other, and it also prevented the day being dominated, and the social body being divided, by the essentially private, household-based, religious observances of the puritans. Here was affirmation of a broad-based Laudian version of the Christian community being enabled and maintained by the rites and observances of the national church against the divisive practices and beliefs of the puritans.

establishes Southwell’s Puritan allegiances and situates her within a wider godly community that included Walter Raleigh, Francis Quarles, and Roger Cocks, male authors equally committed to trenchant political critique of early Stuart kings and court. Writing exclusively in manuscript, Southwell challenges the politics of both King James and King Charles in the contentious decades of the early seventeenth century. Much like Whately, Speght, and Lanyer, Southwell deploys a politically-charged domestic rhetoric not only to represent the wife as counselor to her husband but also to rhapsodize a prospective union with the ideal bridegroom and husband, Christ.

John Marshall Harlan the Elder is best known for his lonely judicial dissents in favor of civil rights for African-Americans, such as Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. A life-long Calvinist Presbyterian, Harlan had come to understand the Civil War as part of God’s plan to free the nation from the sin of slavery. Borrowing the method of typology from Bible reading, Harlan saw the Civil War as following the type set by the American founders who had overthrown the tyranny of kings. A former slaveholder, Harlan retained the idea that Anglo-Saxons were particularly good at creating constitutional governments. Anglo-Saxonism prompted him to try to extend equal rights to his church’s Presbyteries and to the inhabitants of American colonies after the Spanish-American war, but to avoid talking about so-called social rights that involved inter-racial schooling and marriage. His philosophy of legal formalism could not solve the problems of logic that resulted.