The Social Ideas Of Religious Leaders 1660-1688 (Paperback)

THE SOCIAL IDEAS OF RELIGIOUS LEADERS 16601688 By RICHARD B. SCHLATTER O 1971 OCTAGON BOOKS New York PREFACE IN the reign of Charles II clergymen were intellectual leaders. No other thinker had such a wide audience as did the preacher in his pulpit, and his printed sermons and treatises were the staple reading matter of his parishioners. Perhaps no religious leader of the period seems so important to us as Hobbes or Locke, but in the opinion of contem poraries the refutations of the Leviathan were as sound or sounder than the work itself, and it was plain that Locke had built upon ideas of natural law which divines had thought out before him. We are certainly justified in assuming that clerical social theory is an important chapter in the history of ideas about society which were current from 1660 to 1688. What clergymen thought is, of course, interesting in itself. Richard Baxters Christian Directory is the last medieval summa published in England, while Richard Cumberland and John Wilkins are among the earliest writers on the wonders of natural law. Old-fashioned persons like Baxter deduced from the Decalogue that theft and adultery were sins up-to-date authors proved that adulterers and thieves were naturally unhappy and poor. I have tried, however, to do more than describe the in teresting thoughts of the divines. Instead of assuming that their social ideas were independent, developing by an internal dialectic of their own, I have tried to show how they were integrally connected at every point with social facts. This is, in general, the genetic method used by Professor Tawney, to whom I am more indebted than I was able to acknowledge in the footnotes. Professor Tawney, however, isoften concerned to find at what point social theory went wrong, at what point it ceased to take account of the facts his history is frequently a criticism of modern society, an attempt to put our theorists on the right track by showing how men in the past ceased to be realistic and deviated from the truth. 1 I have tried to focus on the period 1 For a criticism of this tendency in Tawneys writings, see Walton Hamilton, Property According to Lockes Tale Law Review, vol. 41. vi PREFACE in question, without glancing into the future I have been less concerned with judging by absolute standards, more concerned with understanding the relative criteria of the day. As a consequence, perhaps of this rather different orienta tion, I have discovered less to condemn in the social theory of the clergymen of the Restoration. Although they may be inadequate for us, the ideas about society which revolved in the heads of the divines of the period were not infrequently reasonable deductions from facts, and were often useful justifications of progressive tendencies. I have avoided being drawn into the debate about the causal connexion between capitalism and protestantism. 1 For the time being it is more a rattling of dry bones than a discussion a recent Italian spokesman attributes both capitalism and protestantism to the triumph of brachy cephalic over dolichocephalic rulers. 2 I have confined myself to the easier task of describing some of the connexions between religious thought and economic fact in Restoration England. In his excellent article on the economic ethic of the Dutch Calvinists, Ernst Beins remarks that he found difficulty in generalizing because of the paucity of material. 3 I haveencountered the same difficulty. Although the clergy were still the intellectual leaders of England, they said less than we could wish about social problems. Perhaps the spirit of controversy had to some extent exhausted itself in the preceding decades many persons whose names appear in the following pages had taken full part in the hot debates of the Interregnum. Certainly the government of Charles II did not welcome clerical opinion on matters which it regarded as its own affair...