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5 - Samuel Parker, religious diversity, and the ideology of persecution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2009

Roger D. Lund
Affiliation:
Le Moyne College, Syracuse
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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 Orthodoxy
Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750
, pp. 119 - 148
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

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