Year: 1969
Type: article
Abstract: The age of theTudorsand Stuarts is one of continuous rebellion in religious worship, as successive generations of Protestants broke with the vestments, ceremonies, and even sacraments of medieval Christianity.Especially important in these developments is the argument frequently voiced in Puritan attacks on orthodox worship, and just as frequently assumed, that the physical worid is at best a feeble reminder, and more likely a pollutant, of the spiritual.William Perkins went so far as to correct St. Paul on this subject.Concerning the apostle's exhortation, "Glorifie God in your bodies and in your spirits" (I Cor. 6. 20), Perkins warned his readers.Yet there must be some distinction and difference observed.For pri- marily and properly God is worshipped in our spirits. . ..By the spirit, I understand the thought of the mind, the conscience, & the affections of the heart.For in these is the first and principall seate of divine and spiritual worship.As for the bodie, it is but a secondarie instrument of the service of God.By this, we may discerne the vanitie of Popish reli- gion.For it consists, for the most part, upon externall and bodily rites, gestures, and ceremonies borrowed partly from the Jews and partly from the heathen: whereas the true religion of the newe testament, hath but fewe prescribed ceremonies, and for the most part is divine and spirtuall.^Of the many corollaries to be drawn from this view of rehgion as a purely spiritual activity, one was the virtual secularization of marriage.The Church of England, to circumvent the technicality that sacraments had to be instituted by Christ, had described marriage as a "holy estate" (Art.25).Elizabethan Puritans, dissatisfied with Anglican compromises on this and other points, resented the sacramental flavour of "holy estate," not to mention the traces of Catholic ritual that still remained in * A version of this paper was presented at the English I Section of the 1976 Midwest Modern
Source: Renaissance and Reformation
Author: Richard F. Hardin
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2724199040