Puritanism and Liberty

REVIEWS PURITANISM AND -LIBERTY! A. S. P. WOODHOUSE I P ROFESSOR HALLER'S~ollection of Tracts on Liberty represents an important and valuable effort to open to the student of seventeenth-century literature, politics, and thought, some of the treasures of the Thomason Collection (British Museum), in whose then uncharted waters Masson had uncritically but fruitfully a4ventured, and- of the McAlpin Collection (Union Theological Seminary, New York). Both were exhaustively catalogued some years ago, but, except to students who have worked in these or other great librfLries, their contents have remained unknown or been known only at second hand. Professor Haller has selected nineteen of the more important from the several hundred tracts bearing on ,liberty in the ten years between 1638 and 1647, and has presented them in facsimile. Hereafter the student working in any reasonably well-equipped library will at least be able to turn from the Thomason and McAlpin catalogues to Professor Haller's volumes for representative examples of the tracts with which the presses of London teemed-London "the mansion house of liberty" (as Milton called it), "the sink of the ill humours of. the kingdom" (in Clarendon's phrase). And the student will find in Professor Haller's learned and lucid commentary a welcome guide through the tangled undergrowths of controversy. The selection is undeniably representative. Many of the major ,forces in the period are clearly illustrated: the fanning of discontent by the exploitation of personal sufferings (in Lilburne's complaints); the inspiring power of Puritanism in the war (John Goodwin's Anti-Cavalierism); the emergence in the attack on episcopacy of principles destined to prove fatal to. presbytery as well (Lord Brooke's Nature of Episcopacy); most fully and satisfactorily, the evolution and the significance of the plea' for liberty of conscience (the Ap%getical Narration, GoodwinJs 8Eop.axla, Robinson's Llberty of Conscience, Overton's Arraignment oj Mr. Persecution, ITracJs on Liberty in the Puritan Reoolution, 1638-/617, edited by William Haller, 3 vok" ~olumbi~ University Press. In the following pages where ~o_ reference to Haller is given, the tract is not included by him. 395 9 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Walwyn's Compassionat,e Samaritan, and other tracts); much less satisfactodly, the transition from the plea f~r religious to the plea for political freedom, from Christian liberty to natural rights (of which more below). No two students of the period would select precisely the same documents. To go no further than the pamphlets on toleration, one is grateful for the reprint of Henry Robin-. son's important Liberty of Conscience, which is not unworthy of a place bes-ide the Areopagitica and The Bloody Tenent, and for the exceedingly interesting_. Power oj Love, which Professor ' Haller attributes, with much show of probability, to William Walwyn. But one looks in vain for other documents of equal importance: _A Paraenetic for (not loose but) Christian Liberty, which il~u§trates the importance of a theological concept' that Haller completely ignores, The Ancient Bounds or- Liberty of Conscience, perhaps the weightiest utterance on toleration in the wh~le period if one excludes those of Roger Williams, that writer's own ~ueries of Highest Consideration, which, unlike The Bloody Tenent, is not readily available, and Samuel Richardson's..Necessity of Toleration, which offers iri·epitome the whole range of argument covered in the battle for liberty of conscience. . ,The exigence of space is, of course, a valid plea; so too is the not-unrelated fact of a method to which Professor HaBer stands committed: the method of presenting the works selected in their entirety and in an exact reproduction of their original form. Choice of passages within a pamphlet is even more obviously open to objection than the choice of a given pamphlet from the writings of an author or of a period. Haller's method has the certain merit of allowing the reader to follow one pamphlet's argument in all its ramifications, and the far from certain merit of presenting him with an image of the actual page-for some of the pamphlets exhibit the worst-printing of which even the seventeenth century was capable! Facsimile appears to be quite out of...