Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I THE IDEOLOGY AND ORIGINS OF HETERODOXY
- PART II LOCKE AND HETERODOX OPINION
- PART III POLICING THE MARGINS
- 5 Samuel Parker, religious diversity, and the ideology of persecution
- 6 The Societies for the Reformation of Manners: between John Locke and the devil in Augustan England
- 7 Irony as subversion: Thomas Woolston and the crime of wit
- 8 The limits of moderation in a Latitudinarian parson: or, High Church zeal in a low churchman discovere'd
- PART IV ORTHODOX DEFENSES, HETERODOX RESULTS
- Select bibliography
- Index
5 - Samuel Parker, religious diversity, and the ideology of persecution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I THE IDEOLOGY AND ORIGINS OF HETERODOXY
- PART II LOCKE AND HETERODOX OPINION
- PART III POLICING THE MARGINS
- 5 Samuel Parker, religious diversity, and the ideology of persecution
- 6 The Societies for the Reformation of Manners: between John Locke and the devil in Augustan England
- 7 Irony as subversion: Thomas Woolston and the crime of wit
- 8 The limits of moderation in a Latitudinarian parson: or, High Church zeal in a low churchman discovere'd
- PART IV ORTHODOX DEFENSES, HETERODOX RESULTS
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Samuel Parker, ardent Interregnum Presbyterian turned persecuting Restoration divine and briefly – at the end of his life – Bishop of Oxford, had a deep and profound understanding of the intimate relationship between the civil and religious institutions that defined Stuart England. He appreciated, as did few of his contemporaries, the heterodox, sectarian threat to that relationship which the future might hold. His view of that future was not unlike the hell that Plato derisively called “democracy” in the Republic – a world of isolated, undisciplined individuals in which the “Wild and Fanatique Rabble” would run free, and the interests of “proud, ignorant, and supercilious Hypocrites” would replace the temperate judgment, wisdom, and order of traditional authority.
That was Parker's view in 1669. By 1681 the deterioration of English Protestantism was well under way. “The general Term of Protestancy,” he said then, “is an indefinite thing.”
… there are Hobbian Protestants, Muggletonian Protestants, Socinian Protestants, Quaker Protestants, Rebel Protestants, Protestants of 41, and Protestants of 48. All or most of which are as different as Popery it self from the true Protestancy of the Church of England. And therefore it is necessary to stick close to that, both as it is established by the Law of the Land, and by the Law of Christ. For unless we limit it to the Law of the Land, we may in time have a Church consisting of nothing but Protestants dissenting from the established Religion, that is, a Church not only without, but against it self. […]
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- The Margins of OrthodoxyHeterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750, pp. 119 - 148Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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