Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 54:216 (Oct 1897)
Article: Some Characteristics Of The Cambridge Platonists
Author: F. J. Powicke

BSac 54:216 (Oct 1897) p. 646

Some Characteristics Of The Cambridge Platonists

Rev. F. J. Powicke

England was never more intensely alive than in the middle of the seventeenth century. Englishmen have always been politicians; but then they were politicians and theologians as well. Moreover, it was their theology which shaped their politics. It was the conviction that the king-had a divine right to rule in church and state which engaged the Royalists for what is now seen to have been an unjust cause. It was the conviction that God’s will must be done; that God’s will meant the welfare of the people, and in a special sense the welfare of their souls; that God’s will could not be done so long as any man, even though a king, stood in the way, claiming to interpret but often perverting its dictates,—it was this conviction which kindled in the Puritans so stern a passion of resistance. God was the supreme element. At that time, if at any time in our history, God seemed to men a living God. We need not say, as Carlyle would seem to say, that he was a living God only to the Puritans. A faith in God which craved to know what it was right to believe about him, and in what way it was right to worship him; a faith which charged all actions of the present life with momentous issues for the life to come,—was not confined to Puritans. It was a possession diffused, more or less, through all parties and ranks. It was as real in Falkland as in Cromwell, in Laud as in Owen, in George Herbert as in Colonel Hutcheson.

BSac 54:216 (Oct 1897) p. 647

Here, in fact, is the truest key to the multiplicity of sects and the fierceness of their conflict. Men do not become zealous for things about which they feel no great concern. When there sprang up swarms of “Antiscripturists, Familists, Antinomians, Antitrinitarians, Arians, Anabaptists,” it might be natural for Puritan and Prelatist alike to ban them as “the very dregs and spawn of old accursed heresies which had been already condemned, dead, buried, and rotten in their graves long ago.” Nevertheless, the sudden uprising, the rapid growth, the fervent zeal of such sects bear sure witness to the dominant interest of the age. They tell of the universal craving for acquaintance with God and God’s will as the secret of satisfaction and peace. In this view, the tumult and contention which to men like Baxter appeared so utterly deplorable, may be seen to deserve something more than denunciation. We are to God not what we seem, but what we mean. And there was scarcely a sect in those earnest days which did not mean or intend the truth.

Still, even as the contrast between the strife and chatter of the agora and the seclusion of the Academic grove where Plato walked and talked, so seems to our imagination the contrast between the tumult o...