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The Non-Existent Controversy: Puritan and Anglican Attitudes on Work and Wealth, 1600-1640

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Timothy Hall Breen
Timothy Hall Breen
Affiliation:
Graduate Student, Yale University
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Extract

George Herbert was a devotional poet in the early part of the seventeenth century; he was also an Anglican minister. Like his friends, John Donne and Lancelot Andrewes, he loved the Church of England, and his faith was a source of creativity. In the later part of his life Herbert had a hobby; he liked to collect simple proverbs. Herbert's sayings, which he published as Outlandish Proverbs, had little to do with religion. Compared with the themes of his poetry, in fact, they were surprisingly secular.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , September 1966 , pp. 273 - 287
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1966

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References

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2. Many historians over the past thirty years have denied that there was any direct relationship between Puritanism and capitalism. A bibliography of this debate would include scores of titles. A few major ones, however, are Robertson, H. M., Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism; A Criticism of Max Weber and His School (Cambridge, 1933)Google Scholar; Albert, Hyma, Christianity, Capitalism and Communism, A Historical Analysis (Ann Arbor, 1937)Google Scholar; Hudson, Winthrop S., “Puritanism and the Spirit of Capitalirm,” Church History, XVIII (03 1949)Google Scholar; and Charles, and George, Katherine, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation (Princeton, 1963).Google Scholar

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11. This study owes a great debt to the Georges' book, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation. The Georges examined seventeenth-century Protestant theology in depth and concluded that “Puritanism” did not exist as a separate and distinct body of thought before 1640. They pointed out that many English divines shared common beliefs on major religious issues. This essay attempts to test the Georges' thesis in one specific area—economic thought. The conclusion is that there were some subtle differences between Anglicans and Puritans on matters of work and wealth. The writings of Anglicans like Nicholas Ferrar, George Herbert, and Henry Hammond suggest that the two theologies may have clashed in ways that the Georges did not expect. A recent, provocative study of pre-Civil War Protestantism is John, F. H.New's Anglican and Puritaa, the Basis of Opposition 1558–1640 (Stamford, 1964).Google Scholar New tried to explain the confliet between the two faiths as a difference in world views and brought a fresh viewpoint to a debate that has been stale for some time.

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79. In several minor cases this essay did point up the fact that Hammond appeared more bourgeois than the “middle class” Puritan theologians. I did not intend to switch Hill's labels, however, and to suggest that the Anglicans were the core of a new “industrious” class. It was my purpose to emphasize only the consensus of economic opinion in seventeenth-century England.

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