PURITANISM. The name Puritan, "would-be purifier," was applied in England about 1564 to groups who disapproved of Queen Elizabeth's choice of a middle path between Rome and Geneva, and sought further purification of the Church of England. Originally scornful, Puritan has become, particularly in New England, a term of honor.
The initial principles of Puritanism were brought to England from Zurich or Geneva by English Protestant refugees. There was frequent objection to the surplice as not expressly author ized in Scripture ; to this "vestiarian controversy," succeeded in 1570-72 the second stage of Puritan agitation, the strife over Church polity. Thomas Cartwright, spokesman of the party which wished to reform the Church of England from within, on the Presbyterian model, found no warrant in the Bible for prel acy. Archbishop Whitgift vigorously opposed this movement, as he did the Separatist movement led by Robert Browne.
James I rejected the Millenary Petition, a syllabus of Puritan requests, and demanded that the Puritans conform or be harried out of the land. By 1610 most of the opponents of the growing Stuart tendency toward autocracy found in political Puritanism a rallying-point against tyranny. A generation later the Grand Remonstrance accused the party of Charles I and Archbishop Laud of plotting to expel the Puritans. Civil war ensued.
The Solemn League and Covenant (1643) led to the attempt to reform the Church of England on the Scottish model; but Cromwell successfully opposed the plan. Charles II's Act of Uniformity (1662) threw nearly two thousand Puritan clergymen out of their benefices.
The Restoration reopened the theatres and took many a fling at the Puritans, the classical attack being Butler's Hudibras: low-born, sour-faced hypocrites, jealously disapproving the pleas ures of their superiors. Puritanism, however, was never a mere
class movement : many great noblemen and statesmen were Puritans as were most of the wealthy merchants. London and the University of Cambridge were strongholds of Puritanism. The ethical standards of later Puritanism, seen in Perkins and in Baxter, were deduced from the detailed injunctions of Scrip ture. The economic life on both sides of the Atlantic has been deeply influenced by Puritan discussions.
Seventeenth-century Puritanism diverged at a number of points from continental Calvinism, particularly because of the publication in 1595 of Robert Bounde's treatise on Sabbath ob servance. Puritanism influenced Pietism in Holland and in the Empire ; and many emphases survived in the Methodist and in the Evangelical movement. New England gave the first oppor tunity for putting the Puritan theories into practice; there an earnest effort was made to model legislation on Scripture.
Posterity tends to misrepresent Puritan standards. Very few Puritans were total abstainers from alcoholic beverages. They did not hate art, and when they had power, as in 1644, did not smash all "images," but spared effigies of statesmen and others not likely to be worshipped. Cromwell himself patronized painters, and loved athletic games, fast horses, and music.