Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: Locke's intellectual development
- PART I RELIGION AND THE POLITICS OF TOLERATION
- 1 Against the ‘tyranny of a religious rage’
- 2 Restoration churchmanship and the ‘Essay on Toleration’
- 3 Undermining the temple of worship of priest and prince
- 4 The theology of a reasonable man 1667–83
- PART II RESISTANCE AND RESPONSIBILITY
- PART III HERESY, PRIESTCRAFT AND TOLERATION; JOHN LOCKE AGAINST THE ‘EMPIRE OF DARKNESS’
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History
2 - Restoration churchmanship and the ‘Essay on Toleration’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: Locke's intellectual development
- PART I RELIGION AND THE POLITICS OF TOLERATION
- 1 Against the ‘tyranny of a religious rage’
- 2 Restoration churchmanship and the ‘Essay on Toleration’
- 3 Undermining the temple of worship of priest and prince
- 4 The theology of a reasonable man 1667–83
- PART II RESISTANCE AND RESPONSIBILITY
- PART III HERESY, PRIESTCRAFT AND TOLERATION; JOHN LOCKE AGAINST THE ‘EMPIRE OF DARKNESS’
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History
Summary
Setting the agenda for much political and religious conflict throughout the Restoration, when the Church of England was re-established in 1662, shortly after Locke's second tract on government, it was restored as a severely defined episcopalian regime retaining ceremonial forms thought by many to incline to ‘popish’ superstition. Instead of achieving an uniform religion in the nation, this resulted in severe divisions. Over seventeen hundred of the clergy resigned or were ejected from their parishes. Estimates of those who followed them and worshipped as nonconformists in the Restoration varied, but there were probably at least several hundred thousand – somewhere between 5% and 20% of the population. Most of those who became nonconformists were presbyterians who agreed with Anglicans that they were separated by ‘indifferent matters’ but thought that these ought to be removed because they limited their ‘edification’, at least as important a requirement of worship as ‘decency and order’. For many other nonconformists, including some of the Independents, the next largest nonconformist group, nothing ought to be commanded as necessary to communion but what was recognised to be expressly commanded in the Scripture, and a devolved rather than hierarchic church authority was required by Christianity.
The strict episcopalian settlement was supported by many Anglican clerics for whom the central ecclesiastical message of the Civil War was that ‘the same hands … took the crown from the king's head and the mitre from the bishops’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- John LockeResistance, Religion and Responsibility, pp. 33 - 72Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994