5 - Anglican responses
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
The surprise with which so many Anglicans reacted to the emergence of a perfectionist group which claimed to be Anglican becomes more explicable when set against the changing cultural background of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) offers a natural starting-point, because he shocked his contemporaries, not by passionate religious aspiration, but by his thorough rejection of religious dogmatism, and his belief that the human mind worked best in sceptical isolation. Hobbes was too cautious to rule out the possibility of a written revelation, but he restricted the claims of theology that truth had already been divinely revealed. No supernatural intervention illuminated the minds of men and women to bestow wisdom from above: a stable, ordered society had to be maintained by absolute power. At his most sarcastic, Hobbes argued, in a discussion of ‘separated essences’:
theologians say that Faith, and Wisdom, and other Virtues are sometimes powred [sic] into a man, sometimes blown into him from Heaven; as if the Virtuous and their virtues could be asunder; and a great number of other things that serve to lessen the dependence of Subjects on the Sovereign Power of their Country. For who will endeavour to obey the laws, if he expect Obedience to be Powred or Blown into him?
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- Wesley and the WesleyansReligion in Eighteenth-Century Britain, pp. 140 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002