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Publication date: Topics: Catholic Church, Methodism -- Controversial literature. Publisher: London: Printed for J. and P. Knapton.
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Chapman, p. Even learning itself, the love of arts and curiosities, the spirit of travelers and adventurers, gallantry, war, heroism—all, a l l enthusi-a s m! By the second half of the eighteenth century the learned Elizabeth Carter was able to declare to a friend that "it is true, that the philosopher who examines the wonderful internal construction of natural objects, must discern the power and wisdom of the Supreme Being; but the superficial Spectator who, with a refined imagination, and sensible heart, surveys the external beauties of the universe, feels his goodness.

Men agreed that it was possible to use the imagination and the sensibili t ies, not only the reason, to gain from Nature a knowledge 6 0 Chapman, p. Stanford University 19 Carter's, in Tuveson, p. The new attitude to the imagination would find its finest literary expression in the works of the Romantic poets.

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Unlike poetic or philosophic enthusiasm of the Shaftesbury type, religious enthusiasm never found a champion to make it popularly accepted by the respectable in society. It is ironic that the form of enthusiasm which came to be fully accepted sprang in part from the work of one who CA had written against religious enthusiasm.

But, as the following chapter w i l l show, popular censure never succeeded altogether in suppressing religious enthusiasm. Chapter II Enthusiasm in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England Enthusiastic groups in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England invariably sought to justify their existence and practices by an appeal to the Bible, especially to the life and teachings of Christ and to the record of the Christian Church in the New Testament.

It does not matter that they tended always to see the primitive Church through rose-tinted glasses; what matters is what they thought they saw. When the enthusiasts looked around them, they saw an established Church controlled by the temporal, power, whose wishes often determined the course of religious life for a l l ; they saw what they considered worldliness or, at best, morality void of the true religion of the heart; they saw practices for which they could find no scriptural authority; they saw everywhere a Christian religion so so-phisticated and cold that it bore little resemblance to the simplicity and warmth of the primitive Church they read about in the New Testament.

These seventeenth- and eighteenth-century enthusiasts declared the Bible and the Bible only to be their guide to worship, belief, and practice. Accordingly, they refused to identify themselves with doctrines In this and succeeding chapters I use the term "Enthusiasts" in its widest signification, in keeping with the practice of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Al l Protestant groups who separated or dissent-ed from the established Church were unceremoniously termed enthusiasts.

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Remembering that Christ promised the Holy Spirit to His disciples and that this Spirit was to guide them into a l l truth St. John The history of the early Church as recorded in the book of Acts and in the writings of St. Paul showed the enthusiasts what they should ordinarily expect if they lived as devoutly as the early Christians d id.

They might expect gifts of tongues, interpretations of tongues, discern-ment of spirits, prophecy, and healing, among others. Their reading of chapters twelve to fourteen of the first epistle to the Corinthians showed them that the early Church ordinarily received many gifts which the Angl i -can Church lacked. Many of these enthusiasts believed that Christ 's promise of the Spirit meant that individuals would have the Spirit dwelling in them bodily, and having such a divine presence abiding within, none would need to depend on any human supports, like academic learning and set forms of prayer, in their performance of the duties of the Church— preaching and praying, for example.

Christ promised that the Spirit w i l l guide each individual into a l l truth; having this divine light of the Spirit, then, one would need no other light or assistance, and one could be 34 certain that a l l his actions would be acceptable to God. In Church organization the enthusiasts frequently adhered strictly to the pattern of the primitive Church, having no hierarchy among the leaders, who might be called elders, bishops, or presbyters; the deacons and widows, in some cases were the only other group of officers recog-nized as b ib l ica l.

Some enthusiasts for example, the Quakers refused to have a clergy, considering each individual, man and woman al ike, as of equal rank in the assembly of the saved. Continuing in the pattern of the early Church, many of the groups of enthusiasts who formed separate congregations allowed each congregation to be autonomous.

And some enthusiasts sought to establish the Kingdom of Christ on this earth, ap-pealing to the prophecies of Daniel and the Revelation of St. John for their warrant and to the books of the Pentateuch for their laws. Because these enthusiasts characteristically desired to return to the supposed purity of the primitive Church, they always posed a threat to the unity of the Church to which they belonged; it is therefore almost a truism that enthusiasts are schismatic. Indeed, most enthusiasts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries desired a charismatic rather than an institutional church.

The initiative for the founding, control, and discipline of the church should come from the Spirit, they believed, not from man. What follows in this chapter w i l l be an attempt to give in barest outline only an indication of the more important enthusiastic groups in England of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; however, reference w i l l first be made to earlier examples of enthusiasm in the Christian Church simply to suggest that enthusiasm was not restricted to England of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but was, in fact, an old and frequent, though often unwelcome, presence in the Christian Church.

Father Knox has shown that those elements which later became associated with enthusiastic groups were present to some extent in the Church at Corinth to which St.

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At its very beginnings the Church, s t i l l blessed with extraordinary evidences of divine guidance, was nevertheless reflecting its human composition by the weaknesses its leaders were called upon to rectify or reprove. Later, during the middle of the second century, the Church was faced with the challenge of the Montanists. Their leader, Montanus, a convert to Christianity, declared that he was the Paraclete, and that he was initiating a new era. He is reported as having seizures, during which he would fall in a trance and then start raving in his speech, would speak in strange tongues at some times and at other times prophesy, though not in the traditional manner of the prophets.

Associated with 2 R. Knox, Enthusiasm Oxford, , pp. The Montanists called for a very strict way of l i fe, a life demanding much more moral rigour than was found in the Church of their day. As Knox put it: The history of Montanism is not to be read as that of a great spiritual revival, maligned by its enemies. It is that of a naked fanaticism, which tried to stampede the Church into greater severity, when she had not forgotten how to be severe.

Casaubon believed that the case of the Montanists was one involving what he called "natural" enthusiasm. The Donatists of the fourth century were moral rigorists reacting to what they termed laxity among ordinary Catholics and to the Catholics' loss of zeal for martyrdom. The Donatists, like the Montanists, became schis-matic, and so were the Albigensians, Waldensians, and the Cathari, en-thusiasts of the Middle Ages who advocated a return to the simplicity and purity of the Apostolic Church.

Rigorous in their moral standards, they were anti-sacerdotal and charismatic in outlook. Joachimism, an enthusi-astic movement started by Abbot Joachim of Fiore d. Another enthusiast, Wilhelmina of Bohemia d. The fourteenth century contributed the Lollards and Hussites, the Jansen-ists and the Quietists. In the sixteenth century with the coming of the Protestant Reformation, thanks to the printing press and the translators of the Bible, individuals claimed their liberty to study and interpret the Scriptures for themselves. A new day had dawned for the Christian Church; and to the dismay and chagrin of its spiritual and temporal leaders, the Church in England, busy with purifying itself into the Church of England, was to be dismembered by the zeal of those clamouring for yet greater simplicity and purity of discipline, ceremony, and government than the On the Donatists and the others following, see Knox, pp.

The main developments of enthusiasm in England can be divided into three periods: the years of Puritan ascendancy in government , the early years of the eighteenth century which saw the activities of the French prophets in London, and the period of the Methodist revival from and on to the end of the century. But the elements which led to the fury of the Puritan revolution were long present in the English Church.

If the Puritans of the C i v i l War period and the Commonwealth must be re-membered as enthusiasts, as many of the clergy of the Restoration period declared they were, the Puritans of the preceding three quarters of the century should also be classified as enthusiasts, because what Puritans of the Elizabethan years demanded was precisely what those of the Stuart period were asking for. They were a l l acting by the same principles. The hallmark of the enthusiasm of the Puritans of the Commonwealth, in the eyes of the Restoration Anglican clergy, was their studied attempt, under the guise of extraordinary zeal and spiritual insight, to stay in the Church and reform it out of existence by destroying its episcopal system of govern-ment, or to separate from the Church, setting up rival meetinghouses of their own, and by their defections and constant extemporary prayers and sermons cause many to be disaffected, thus weakening and eventually destroying the Church from without.

The very nickname, Puritan, was a derisive reminder of the Puritan's desire to have the Church purified ac-cording to his wishes. Various historians and critics hold that the fragmentation of the English Church began during the reign of Mary Tudor. Frere and Douglas 7 declare that the Puritan faction in the Church began as a result of the Marian persecution of clergy favourable to the reforms initiated during the reign of Edward VI.

The persecution, they claim, forced English re-formers into exile in various European ci t ies, to Zurich, Basle, Frankfurt, Geneva, and Strassbourg. There the exiles found other reformers who had broken away completely from the "ancient continuity of church organi-zation" and who were violently opposing a l l externals in church worship.

Differences arose among the English churchmen when many of the more conservative found themselves unable to accept the levelling attitudes of the advanced European reformers.

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When the exiles returned to England at the accession of Eli2abeth, the more extreme party remained in sympathy with the attitude of the foreign reformers, while the others became a part of the main body of English reformers, thus beginning that cleavage which developed into conformist and sectarian Puritanism. Lewis Berens, in more general terms, says that in the reign of Elizabeth the Church of England occupied somewhat of a middle ground between the Roman Catholic, on the one hand, and the Reformed Churches of the Continent, on the other hand.

The attempt of the Church and Sovereign to enforce conformity to the religious settlement forced the extremists on both sides to separate, 7 W. Frere and C. Douglas, ed. According to Berens, "Within the Church the Catholic sentiment crystal-lized into the Episcopalian, the Protestant sentiment into the Presbyterian section of the Church of England. Clark shows that Puritans, that i s , one group of Nonconformists within the Church, accepted in its main outlines the reformed settlement of the English Church, granting that the "existing episcopal doctrine and method of Church government with its adjuncts was right and wise and v a l i d , " 3 but desired that certain unreformed elements be removed because they hindered the spiritual ministry of the Church to its members and the spiritual impression the Church made on the world.

The Puritan interest in further reform was therefore particularly concerned with the spiritual ministry of the Church. The Presbyterians, on the other hand, did not accept the reformed settlement, holding that it was no refor-mation at a l l ; they clamoured above a l l else for a particular form of Church order. The Presbyterians were so dissatisfied with the condition of the Q Lewis H.

Berens, The Digger Movement London, , p. Henry W.


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At first the objections were to ecclesiastical vest-ments: surplices, tippets, copes, and gowns. One may question the relationship between spiritual ideals and the wearing of certain ecc les i -astical vestments, but Laurence Humphrey and Thomas Sampson both Elizabethan clergymen felt that the vestments were a real danger to 1 0 Clark, I, Knappen London, , p.

Enthusiast

The robes were too closely connected with the religion of Rome to be completely innocuous if adopted by the Church of England. As Clark. Sampson declared that the Church needed pastors who could feed the people "with knowledge and understanding. Paul and the Apostles sent out note the appeal to the primitive Church , men who were able to teach, "rightly dividing the word of truth.

Besides showing concern for the quality of the clergy, the Puritan leaders desired a stronger spirit-ual tone among the parishioners. They accordingly asked for reforms by which the ministers would be expected to ensure that prior to the Com-munion Service, members wishing to communicate were spiritually fit; and members who absented themselves from the Service were to give good reasons for their neglect.

The Puritans also wanted special services for the exposition of the Scriptures and more opportunities than they formerly had had for preaching.


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    • They therefore began holding weekly or fortnightly 1 3 C l a r k , I, Though some-times used for disputes on matters of church discipline and government, these "prophesyings" were primarily religious rather than polemical, for the benefit of both clergy and laity. The "Admonition" constantly contrasted current practice in the Church of England with the practice of what the writers, John Field and Thomas Wilcox , called "the olde church," obviously the early Christian Church.

    The "Admonition" was a clear ap-peal to take the Anglican Church back to the practice of the biblical Church and away from Romish practices which had no scriptural basis. The writers divided their work into three sections dealing with reforms needed in the 1 5 Clark, I, Ministers should be elected by the common consent of the whole Church and should not be placed in any congregation without the cal l and consent of that congre-gation; ministers should be admitted to the ministry only after they proved their ability to function effectively and received the laying on of hands from the elders only; they were to be preachers, not merely readers: "Then ministers were not tyed to any forme of prayers invented by man, but as the spirit moved them, so they powred forth hartie supplications to the Lorde.

    Now they are bound of necessitie to a prescript order of service, and booke of common prayer in which a great number of things contrary to Gods word are contained. To reform the situation, among other things implied in what is given above, the leaders requested that authorities appoint a learned and diligent preacher to every congregation and see that godly ministers preach the word continually, not merely quarterly or monthly. Douglas London, ; a l l page numbers given within the text w i l l be to this work, unless otherwise indicated.