In 1676 Richard Baxter published The judgment of Non-conformists of the interest of reason in matters of religion, a protest signed by fifteen Presbyterian ministers. The tract declared that

Baxter denied that Nonconformists denigrated reason, and that there was ‘any real difference between conformists and Nonconformists, or any other parties of true Protestants, about the interest and use of reason in religion’. However, he distinguished such ‘true Protestants’ from ‘enthusiasts or true fanatics, who pretend revelations which reason cannot prove to be what they pretend them to be and are contrary to true reason and scripture itself’.Footnote ¹ It was a favourite Baxter tactic, identifying the divinity of moderate Nonconformists with that of the Church of England, but differentiating them from those whom he represented as dangerous extremists. There were, he admitted, disagreements over the role of reason among both conformists and Nonconformists, ‘but not any party against another, many conformists as well as Nonconformists being jealous of giving too much to human reason’.Footnote ² So why was the protest necessary, and why did the Presbyterians have to defend themselves? Why were accusations of irrationality being flung around, at this time and against these people? This paper examines the causes, course and consequences of a polemical controversy over the role of reason in religion.

This particular dispute is related to two wider debates, one about the relationship between reasoning and other sources of religious understanding, the second about the relationship between ecclesiastical conformity and nonconformity. The former considered the perennial Christian problem of ‘the rule of faith’ – how were the truths of religion to be known? Were they from an infallible authority, as Roman Catholics asserted (and if so, by the authority of Church, council or pope)? Was it through the tradition of the Church, as Henry Hammond had suggested (and if so, which part of tradition)? Was it by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, as sectarians supposed (and if so, how could the working of the Holy Ghost be distinguished from the temptations of Satan)? Was it by revelation in the Scriptures, as orthodox Protestants had generally argued (and if so, how was Scripture to be interpreted and could it give sufficient certainty)? Was it by man's rational analysis, as Socinians insisted (and if so, did that not lead to heresy and a multiplicity of ‘truths’)? Were there any limits to the proper sphere of human reason, and how should reason relate to revelation? Could biblical revelation be understood by the application of reason, or must reason be enlightened by grace? Or, as Thomas Hobbes seemed to say, should people just stop worrying and do as they were told? These were serious theological questions, but in Restoration England at least they tended to be manipulated to polemical advantage in arguments between different religious allegiances.Footnote ³

The conformist attack on Nonconformists in the 1660s had generally focussed on their disobedience to the 1662 Act of Uniformity, their disloyalty to the national Church and their record as rebels and regicides. However, Nonconformists claimed a shared religion with conformists as grounds for readmission to the Church of England or toleration outside it, and the Crown was willing to concede ‘indulgence’ to orthodox and ‘peaceable’ Nonconformists. So, as was argued in an earlier article, for conformists who opposed any concessions it became necessary to go further – to deny that there was any common divinity, and to assert that Nonconformist religion was in its nature subversive and dangerous.Footnote ⁴ The allegation that Nonconformists were antinomians fitted the bill: their version of justification by faith led them to devalue moral virtue and undermined obedience. It was the Nonconformist failure to preach the place of good works in salvation that had led to the breakdown of order and the sectarian excesses of the 1640s and 1650s. So some conformist clergy accused Nonconformists of antinomianism, and through the 1670s there was an acrimonious argument over whether they were antinomians.Footnote ⁵ The assertion that Nonconformists were irrational enthusiasts pointed in the same direction: their version of the work of the Holy Spirit led them to denigrate reason and their claim to divine inspiration brought fanaticism and the risk of heresy. Nonconformists were too dangerous to be tolerated, much less readmitted to the Church on easy terms.

The charge of enthusiasm and unreason had hitherto been levied against extremists, Familists and particularly ‘that fanatical sect of the Quakers’. In Enthusiasmus triumphatus (1656), the Cambridge Platonist Henry More had argued that alleged inspiration by the Holy Spirit ‘is nothing else but that flatulency which is in the melancholic complexion’, and in An explanation of the grand mystery of godliness (1660) he asserted the rationality of Christian religion against claims of inspiration by ‘the light within them’.Footnote ⁶ Henry Thurman justified a learned ministry against ‘the pretences of the enthusiasts’ who relied on ‘the spirit within them’, and the newly-ordained Joseph Glanvill condemned those who took ‘the more vigorous impressions of fancy for the spirit's motions’.Footnote ⁷ The biblical scholar John Spencer's Discourse concerning vulgar prophesies (1665) complained that some thought that they approached God only ‘by going off from reason, by raptures, visions, prophesies, enthusiasms, hot and vigorous impressions of the spirit, and have verily thought … that they are scarce ever full of God till they are half beside themselves’. He hoped that with the rise of natural philosophy ‘considerate men’ would now be immune from the slogans of ‘carnal reason, the spirit of God, superstition, reformation, and the coming in of popery’.Footnote ⁸ Thomas Sprat noted that ‘The universal disposition of this age is bent upon a rational religion’, and he too thought that reason and science might defeat ‘the fury of enthusiasm’.Footnote ⁹

There was, it is true, a suspicion of ‘carnal reason’, the worldly calculation that put sensual appetite before the following of Christ – but the doubt was not, nor was it generally thought to be, confined to Dissenters or enthusiasts. It was a common theme that ‘carnal reason’ was a weapon of Satan to fight against faith and seduce people into sin. Edward Reynolds, who became a bishop, used the conventional distinction between ‘carnal reason’ and ‘right reason’, and the Cambridge vicar John Edwards thought that the brain was ‘stuffed with carnal reasonings, fleshly wisdom, fond disputes, pride and false principles’.Footnote ¹⁰ The popular religious publicist Robert YoungFootnote ¹¹ and the Independent ministers Thomas Mall and Theophilus Gale all wrote of the corrupting effects of ‘carnal reason’ and its opposition to faith – and Richard Baxter noted that ‘erroneous reason’ could be ‘captivated by the flesh and subservient to the carnal interest’.Footnote ¹²

When reason in religion was discussed in the 1660s, it was usually to defend Protestant Christianity against papists, Socinians and doubters. The rigorous scepticism of Descartes and the mechanistic natural philosophy of Hobbes had subverted revealed Christianity, and in a fashionable reaction against Puritan seriousness the wits mocked religion as credulous.Footnote ¹³ In response, there was a considerable literature on the reasonableness of Christianity. Edward Stillingfleet's Origines sacrae (1662) sought to establish the rationality of belief in God and acceptance of revelation in the Scriptures: ‘But although I assert that these rational evidences are sufficient arguments for the truth of the doctrine they come to manifest, yet I would not be so understood that I thereby resolve all religion into a mere act of reason and knowledge’; as well as reason there is faith, ‘the one to satisfy men's minds of the truth of the doctrine, the other to bring them effectually to adhere unto it’.Footnote ¹⁴ A rational account of the grounds of Protestant religion (1665) was Stillingfleet's response to the Catholic argument that certainty in religion could only be supplied by papal infallibility, arguing that reason could establish sufficient probability – ‘moral certainty may be a most firm, rational and undoubted certainty’.Footnote ¹⁵ And Richard Baxter insisted that ‘The Christian religion must be the most rational in the world’ because it was the truest, and argued for the harmony of reason with the faith that repaired defective reason.Footnote ¹⁶

So far, then, the charge of unreason was confined to Quakers and other ‘fanatics’, and there was no apparent disagreement between conformists and orthodox Nonconformists about the role of reason in religion. But late in 1668, or early in 1669, conformist writers began to attack Nonconformists in general as irrational enthusiasts, associating them with the ‘fanatics’ and deliberately widening the gulf between the Church and Dissent. There seem to have been several possible reasons for this tactic. The most obvious was a response to the campaign for comprehension of Nonconformists within the Church of England, which had gained political traction in 1668. A key element in the Nonconformists’ claim for inclusion was that they shared the Church of England's religion, and denying this was an effective means of neutralising the demand for comprehensionFootnote ¹⁷ – hence the contrast now made between churchmen's rationality and Nonconformist fanaticism.

The conformist accusation of enthusiasm deliberately linked the sober Nonconformists of the 1660s with the radical fringe of the 1640s and 1650s, and all the dangers of ‘the world turned upside down’ that had threatened the social order and brought a king to the scaffold.Footnote ¹⁸ For the dissenters, at least in London, were beginning to look dangerous again. Their ministers preached to large assemblies, their representatives gained office in civic administration, their publicists asserted the rights of conscience against a coercive Church, and there were confrontations between Nonconformist crowds and the London militia. This was, perhaps, ‘the first Restoration crisis’, and certainly a threat to the security and stability of the Church of England.Footnote ¹⁹ Unsurprisingly, some churchmen argued that Nonconformist were a threat and sought to ensure a renewal of the Conventicle Act, due to expire on 1 March 1669, and provoke a sometimes-reluctant lay magistracy into enforcing laws on conformity.Footnote ²⁰

However, the accusation of irrationality came from a particular conformist quarter. It is noticeable that most of those who first wrote against Nonconformist irrationality were reputed to be ‘latitude men’.Footnote ²¹ Some had been associates of or were influenced by Henry More – Joseph Glanvill, Edward Fowler and George Rust. Samuel Parker and Glanvill were both enthusiasts for ‘natural philosophy’ and members of the Royal Society. Certainly, Parker had attacked some of More's ideas, and William Sherlock, a late recruit to the campaign against unreason, had only a weak link to the others.Footnote ²² But Patrick, Glanvill, Fowler and Rust were supposed to be ‘latitudinarians’, and this was not an altogether safe reputation in the 1660s – ‘I hear them represented as a party very dangerous both to the king and Church, as seeking to undermine them both.’Footnote ²³ Such men had cause to be nervous.Footnote ²⁴

Henry More was suspected of Christological heresy, and in 1665 was roundly attacked by Joseph Beaumont, Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and a protégé of Matthew Wren, for alleged heresy, sedition and apostasy. Ominously, the licence to print issued for Beaumont's book by the vice-chancellor took the form of a strongly-worded attack on ‘perniciosa dogmata’ in More's Mystery of godliness.Footnote ²⁵ Others were criticised for conformity under the Protectorate and insufficient devotion to the principles of the Church of England and the persecution of Dissenters.Footnote ²⁶ They specifically defended themselves as faithful churchmen and proponents of reasonable religion against enthusiasm.Footnote ²⁷ And when attitudes towards Dissent became a test of commitment, they demonstrated their loyalty by attacking Nonconformists as irrational and dangerous, and sought to associate suspicion of reason with fanaticism. As Simon Patrick was told by a critic, ‘[I]f you yourself had not sometimes leaned towards the N. C. [sic] and such as they, you had scarce ever attained to so much violence and fierceness against them.’Footnote ²⁸ Dissenters were horrified that men with a reputation for moderation and sympathy should have turned so vigorously against them,Footnote ²⁹ but Patrick now found favour with Archbishop Sheldon, ‘who had long been angry with me upon the account of Queen's College business’.Footnote ³⁰

In A friendly debate betwixt two neighbours, Simon Patrick was the first to extend the allegation of irrationality from enthusiasts to Nonconformists in general: Nonconformists had contrasted their religion of the spirit with the reasoned religion of conformists, and ‘by their confidence and bold pretence of the spirit would overbear all sober reason and impose all their fond opinions on us’. ‘They have been taught not to rely upon impartial reason, but to seek still for a place of holy Scripture to be their guide and warrant’; ‘reason is decried as enmity to the things of God’ and ‘they imagine the spirit guides them, which must not submit to reason’. Nonconformists, he claimed, could not distinguish between ‘carnal reason’ and ‘spiritual reason’ – ‘And generally when they discourse of human reason they imagine it is that very thing which St Paul calls “the wisdom of the flesh”.’Footnote ³¹ Samuel Parker made the same accusation: Nonconformist meetings ‘prate phrases, make faces and rail at “carnal reason” (i.e. in their sense all sober and sincere use of our understandings in spiritual matters), whereby they have effectually turned all religion into unaccountable fancies and enthusiasms’.Footnote ³² Dissenters had protested against exclusion and persecution, on the grounds that they shared the theology of conformists; now Patrick and Parker were telling them that they did not.

The Congregationalist guru John Owen's Brief declaration and vindication of 1669 was not written as a deliberate response to Patrick, but it might as well have been. Indeed, its attack on the Socinians’ elevation of reason above God's revelations probably suggested that Patrick was one of them. An anonymous Humble apology for Non-conformists was an explicit reply to Patrick's charge:

Owen himself responded to Samuel Parker in Truth and innocence vindicated (1669), where he asserted the Christian's need for operations of the Holy Spirit: anyone could reason, but sound Christians had guidance from God that was peculiar to them.Footnote ³⁴

Patrick and Parker had discussed reason only in passing, but it was the central theme of Joseph Glanvill's assault on Nonconformists. It began with a visitation sermon, which was then published in 1670 as A seasonable recommendation and defence of reason in the affairs of religion, reprinted in 1671, and later revised for republication in a collection of essays. Reason was necessary in religion, Glanvill insisted, to prove the existence of God and the authority of Scripture, and to protect sound divinity against enthusiasm. Faith and reason are in agreement, but dissenting ministers had ‘set up a loud cry against reason as the great adversary of free grace and faith and zealously endeavoured to run it down under the misapplied names of vain philosophy, carnal reasoning, and the wisdom of the world’. Nowadays, ‘’tis Socinianism to plead for reason in the affairs of faith and religion. And I answer, ’tis gross fanaticism to plead against it’.Footnote ³⁵ Philosophia pia in 1671 continued Glanvill's attack on enthusiasm and its ‘disparagement of sober reason as an enemy to the principles of faith’, and warned that hostility to reason in religion had spread from fanatics to ‘multitudes of pious people’.Footnote ³⁶ Other conformist writers asserted the need for reason in religious matters, and the agreement of faith and reason, though with a less polemical edge. Edward Fowler's 1670 defence of ‘certain moderate divines’ contested the claim ‘that only faith is to be set on work in matters of religion, not reason’, and mocked those who dismissed his ‘moderate divines’ as ‘the rational preachers’ – ‘as if to be a spiritual preacher were to be an irrational one’. Nothing in divine revelation contradicted reason, and in the following year Fowler repeated the point in his Design of Christianity.Footnote ³⁷

John Bunyan would have none of this: true Christians are led not by reason but by the Holy Spirit – ‘This is a far other than is your human description of acting as a creature indued with a principle of reason’, he told Fowler. ‘Yet if the principles from which he acts be but the habit of the soul, the purity, as he feigns, of his own nature, the principles of natural reason or the dictates of human nature, all this is nothing else but the old gentleman in his holy-day clothes: the old heart, the old spirit, the spirit of man not the spirit of Christ is here.’Footnote ³⁸ Perhaps Bunyan's response to Fowler smacked of enthusiasm, and other Nonconformists sought to avoid such a charge. The Presbyterian Thomas Jacombe was adamant that the Christian must walk after the spirit, but ‘Let not any mistake me, as though I did in this assert or advance any enthusiasms, immediate inspirations or directions from the spirit, without or besides, much less against, the written word’.Footnote ³⁹ Robert Ferguson's Sober enquiry was directed mainly against Samuel Parker's views on grace and virtue, but in advancing the spirit over reason he too insisted that the inner leading of the spirit worked together with the outward guidance of Scripture, ‘so there is no fear of enthusiastic frenzies where this method is attended to’.Footnote ⁴⁰

The accusation of irrationality and enthusiasm clearly hurt Dissenters, and this may be one reason why some of them now turned their fire against Quakers. The (probably) Congregationalist John Faldo's Quakerism no Christianity (1673) was the most effective text. He objected to the Quaker assertion of the inner light, and claimed that they had abandoned reason and the Scriptures. ‘I have not a little been amazed to read in their authors such expressions as prompt us to divest ourselves of being men that we may be Christians, as if rational and spiritual, God and the Scriptures, understanding and Christianity were mortal foes’ – with echoes of Patrick against Nonconformists in general.Footnote ⁴¹ William Penn protested in Quakerism a new nick-name for old Christianity (1672) and The Christian-Quaker and his divine testimony vindicated by Scripture, reason and authorities (1674), but probably proved their critics’ point. ‘All such knowledge and profession of religion from the mere letter of the Scriptures, distinct from the revelation and operation of the eternal spirit within, must be unlearned, unravelled, unbottomed.’Footnote ⁴² Faldo responded with a second, expanded, edition of his book, which carried a warning against ‘their anti-fundamental doctrines’ signed by twenty-one ministers, both Presbyterians and Congregationalists.Footnote ⁴³ The signatories included major figures such as Thomas Manton, William Jenkyn, Jacomb and Baxter – keen to distinguish Nonconformists from sectarian enthusiasts.

Unsurprisingly, the Nonconformist attempts to refute or deflect accusations of irrationality did not silence their critics. In 1674 the ever-controversial William Sherlock opened up a new front, arguing that John Owen's conception of a Christian's union with Christ entailed the denial of reason in religion. Those that held such a view ‘cry down reason for such a profane and carnal thing as must not presume to intermeddle in holy matters’. But God ‘governs reasonable creatures by principles of reason, as he doth the material world by the necessary laws of matter and brute creatures by the instincts and propensities of nature’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Owen replied specifically to this assertion, which ‘is so weak in this case and impertinent that it deserves no consideration’. Grace assists reason, ‘But if by “governing reasonable creatures by the principle of reason” he intends that God deals no otherwise by his grace with the souls of men but only by proposing objective arguments and motives unto a compliance with his will, without internal aids and assistances of grace, it is a gross piece of Pelagianism.’Footnote ⁴⁵

Conformists thought that the argument was about reason, but John Owen and his allies thought it was about the Holy Spirit. Owen tackled the tricky question of the relationship between human reasoning and the workings of the spirit at length in Pneumatologia. He protested that anyone who asserts the role of the spirit is represented ‘as a person fanatical, estranged from the conduct of reason and all generous principles of conversation’, and insisted that God communicates truths in different ways – natural truths by reason, supernatural truths ‘by the special operation of the holy spirit’. But such doctrine was suspected as enthusiasm, as if ‘those who plead for the effectual operations of the holy spirit in the illumination of the minds of men … are therein and thereby enemies to reason and impugn the use of it in religion’. This accusation was untrue, Owen claimed, and there was agreement on the limits of reason in the understanding of the mysteries of Christian faith:

Owen's book had a distinctly defensive tone: ‘And I do not know but what hath been delivered may be looked on as fanatical and enthusiastical.’Footnote ⁴⁶ It was. William Clagett's reply mocked Owen's stress on spiritual enlightenment: ‘So that if you do not understand what the Doctor says, the reason is plain, because you do not have the spirit, and at this rate any man may write nonsense safely enough and put it off for a gospel-mystery when he has done.’Footnote ⁴⁷

Robert Ferguson's Interest of reason in religion (1675) was a comprehensive response to Parker, Glanvill and Sherlock by an ally of Owen: ‘Is it not now necessary that we should vindicate ourselves from these aspersions and endeavour to give a stop to those groundless and unjust clamours, or at last to make it appear that the whole party ought not to be traduced because of the extravagances of a few?’ For Dissenters recognised that reason was fundamental to Christianity, in demonstrating the divine authority of Scripture, ‘upon which our faith, as to all particular articles and duties of religion, is grounded’. Reason is also necessary in the interpretation of Scripture, but ‘the spirit of wisdom is absolutely necessary for the understanding the sense of Scripture-propositions in a spiritual, saving manner’.

Joseph Glanvill was not impressed. When attacked the Nonconformists always said that it was unfair to condemn them all for the errors of some, that is, he scoffed, ‘because some few that go with them are somewhat less foolish and extravagant than the rest’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Nor was William Sherlock: ‘To wipe off this reproach, which was not cast upon them but which they brought upon themselves by their perpetual declamations against reason, our author writes a large chapter to show the use of reason in matter of religion.’ If it had been better done, he might have persuaded other Dissenters, ‘But for aught I see they may talk at their old rate still, for all Mr Ferguson.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Vincent Alsop sneered back at ‘your rational divines’, and in a few succinct pages set out the Nonconformists’ defence: ‘But what is their crime? Why, they cry down reason for such a profane and carnal thing as must not presume to meddle in holy matters. I have met with some who decry carnal reason, but never with one that affirmed reason was carnal.’Footnote ⁵¹ And at this point, Baxter published The judgment of Non-conformists of the interest of reason in matters of religion. Hitherto, explicit defence against conformist allegations had come from men of a separatist persuasion – the Congregationalists Owen, Ferguson and Faldo, the Baptist Bunyan, and the separatist-minded Presbyterian Alsop.Footnote ⁵² Doubtless the prominence of Owen was because he had been personally pilloried by conformists, but Congregationalists were less cautious of distancing themselves from conformists than were Presbyterians. Yet Presbyterians too feared they were now tarred as irrational extremists.

The Presbyterians’ Judgment, drafted by Baxter, was conciliatory in tone and content, and made four key points about reason. First, ‘that really not only conformists and Nonconformists but also all Protestant parties are herein of one mind’. Second, ‘We all reject the fanatic or enthusiastical opinion of them that pretend a necessity of immediate inspiration, instead of Scriptures.’ Third, that the corrupted reason of fallen man must be ‘illuminated by God's word and spirit’ to see spiritual truths. And fourth, that reason and revelation cooperate together in religion and do not conflict.Footnote ⁵³ Two signatories of the Judgment separately tackled the issue of faith and reason, but sidestepped explicit engagement in the controversy. William Bates's Harmony of the divine attributes (1674) insisted that there were things above reason, but reason was an essential instrument in religion and there was nothing in the Christian faith contrary to reason.Footnote ⁵⁴ Thomas Manton also noted the limitations of unguided reason, but ‘God doth not write his law upon our hearts by enthusiasm, rapture, and inspiration, as he wrote in the hearts of the apostles and prophets, but maketh use of our reason and reading, hearing, meditation, conference and prayer; ’tis made our work, because we work under God.’Footnote ⁵⁵

The controversial waters were badly muddied by the publication in 1674 of A treatise of humane reason by Martin Clifford, maverick (and deist) headmaster of Charterhouse. Clifford asserted the primacy of individual reason and conscience:

This meant, he argued, that none should be persecuted for religion and that non-Christians might be saved if they honestly followed their conscience – though they would be saved through the merits of Christ and the mercy of God.Footnote ⁵⁶ There was, of course, a furore. Edward Stephens retorted that reason was not the guide in religion, but the thing to be guided, by the Holy Spirit and revelation.Footnote ⁵⁷ Andrew Marvell protested that every society ‘(let it be the Charterhouse itself)’ needs to be ordered by rules, not the individual reason of its members.Footnote ⁵⁸ Robert Ferguson declared ‘I know not an opinion more pernicious in its consequences’ than that people were as safe in honest error as in truth.Footnote ⁵⁹

The (probable) Dissenter Philologus insisted that ‘the inward testimony of the holy ghost himself is necessary to assure us of the divine authority [of Scripture], which testimony is better and more certain than all our reason’. ‘A Christian should so far deny his natural reason and wisdom in things spiritual that his assent to the truths and mysteries of the gospel may be an assent of faith as to a divine testimony and not the assent of mere reason.’Footnote ⁶⁰ The conformist John Warley argued that faith had to correct ‘mere carnal reasoning’, and an appeal to divine aids should not be dismissed as enthusiasm.Footnote ⁶¹ Warley made use of Some consideration about the reconcileableness of reason and religion (1675), almost certainly by Robert Boyle – setting the arguments of ‘the Reconciler’ against those of Clifford, ‘the Reasoner’. Boyle had stated that reason and revelation agreed, though ‘wherever no better light is to be had, I estimate truth by my own reason, but where divine revelation can be consulted I willingly submit my fallible reason to the sure informations afforded by celestial light’.Footnote ⁶²

Clifford's intervention derailed the conformist attack. It probably made ‘rational divines’ more cautious in advancing the role of reason, and it certainly made their arguments more vulnerable to the charge of Socinianism. Indeed, in 1675 two royal chaplains preached before the king against Socinians and fellow-travellers. John Standish complained that ‘false apostles and deceitful workers’ had reduced religion to natural theology and grace to morality, ‘making reason, reason, reason their only Trinity’.Footnote ⁶³ Miles Barne asserted ecclesiastical authority over individual judgement, and warned that Christians must be saved by faith, not reason: ‘if we assent to no doctrines but such as our reason fully comprehends, this is no longer faith but science, and so we may continue infidels whilst we go under the notion of Christians’.Footnote ⁶⁴ It looks as if someone in authority, possibly Peter Gunning, the new bishop of Ely,Footnote ⁶⁵ thought the extolling of reason had gone too far and had organised a response. Robert Grove, a prominent London rector, rebutted the implication of Socinianism, and declared ‘I have heard of none in this Church who do not firmly believe that it is necessary to have our understanding illuminated by divine revelation and to have our faculties strengthened by the efficacious assistances of the holy ghost’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Joseph Glanvill, now a royal chaplain too, tried to shift attention back to the Nonconformists, reprinting his 1670 sermon on reason and religion in a collection of essays, and adding ‘Anti-fanatical religion’, which portrayed conformists like himself as promoting reasonable religion against ‘fanatic devices’ – but were then denounced ‘as Socinians and advancers of proud reason above free grace and faith’.Footnote ⁶⁷ However, Clifford had certainly damaged the cause of the ‘rational divines’ and the drive to convict Dissenters of enthusiasm was silenced for a time.Footnote ⁶⁸

The field was now open for the Nonconformists’ defence, which came in three substantial works by John Owen. In The nature of apostasie (1676) he ascribed the doctrinal errors afflicting the Church of England – doubting predestination, personal union with Christ, justification by imputation of Christ's righteousness, and the work of the Holy Spirit – to the intellectual pride that led men to subject revelation to the judgement of reason, ‘the very idol of this age’. There were things above reason and things contrary to carnal reason, and the proper Christian response was to submit to the authority of divine revelation without question.Footnote ⁶⁹ Owen's Reason of faith (1677) was written as a sequel to his 1674 Pneumatologia, ‘to declare the work of the holy ghost in the illumination of the minds of men’. It was only through the Holy Ghost ‘that we truly believe the Scripture to be the word of God and that we understand savingly the mind of God therein, both which belong unto our illumination’. This leads to dangerous accusations of fanaticism: ‘For some are ready to apprehend that this retreat unto a spirit of revelation is but a pretence to discard all rational arguments and to introduce enthusiasm into their room. Now although the charge be grievous, yet because it is groundless we must not forego what the Scripture plainly affirms and instructs us in, thereby to avoid it.’Footnote ⁷⁰ The doctrine of justification by faith maintained that those who attempt to reduce the Gospel to rational propositions simply corrupt it, and they dismiss spiritual mysteries as ‘enthusiastical canting’ and ‘unintelligible fanaticism’. ‘For carnal reason, being once set at liberty under the false notion of truth, to act itself freely and boldly against spiritual mysteries, is subtle in its arguing and pregnant in its invention of them.’Footnote ⁷¹

Conformists too cautioned against the excesses of reason. James Arderne's visitation sermon of 1677 was very different from that of Glanvill in 1670, and not only in its verbosity. Once reason had established that the Bible is the word of God, ‘after this hearing is over reason changes its person, it lays down all ensigns of jurisdiction, descends from its judgement-seat, and does homage to this vicegerent come from heaven, professing an entire obedience to its authority’.Footnote ⁷² The Lancashire scientist John Webster also warned that ‘there is hardly any one thing that the Scriptures are more against or do more condemn than the too-much extolling and idolising of human and carnal reason’. Matters of faith must be decided ‘from the divine authority of the Scriptures and the clear deductions that may be drawn from thence, for this is that clear light that we ought to follow and not the dark lantern of man's blind, frail and weak reason’.Footnote ⁷³ But how is Scripture understood?

John Wilson's carefully-argued The Scripture’ s genuine interpreter asserted (1678) identified the key issue in this debate as the relationship between Scripture, reason and the Holy Spirit. Reason has a supportive role in the understanding of Scripture, but

Rather, ‘there needs an effectual operation of the holy spirit to enlighten men's understandings and cause them rightly to apprehend and readily to approve the mind of God in Scripture’ – and this was not to admit enthusiasm and direct illuminations by the spirit.Footnote ⁷⁴ This is what Owen had said in Reason of faith, and he said it again in The causes, waies and means of understanding the mind of God (1678): ‘there is a special work of the holy spirit in the supernatural illumination of our minds, needful unto the end proposed, namely that we may aright and according to our duty understand the mind of God in the Scripture ourselves or interpret it unto others’. This ‘doth not depend upon, is not resolved into, any immediate inspiration or enthusiasm; it doth not depend upon nor is resolved into the authority of any Church in the world; nor is it the result of our reason and understanding merely in their natural actings, but as they are elevated, enlightened, guided, conducted by an internal, efficacious work of the spirit of God upon them’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Other Dissenters joined the heavyweight Owen in the fight-back. The Congregationalist John Flavel knew that ‘there is nothing in the word or works of God that is repugnant to sound reason, but there are some things in both which are opposite to carnal reason as well as above right reason’. ‘Beware therefore you lean not too much to your own reasons and understandings. Nothing is more plausible, nothing more dangerous.’Footnote ⁷⁶ Vincent Alsop's Melius inquirendum (1678) mocked the ‘rational divines’ and their method, ‘for there's a certain malapert, saucy thing, as blind as a beetle and as giddy as a goose, which they have nick-named “reason”’.Footnote ⁷⁷ John Lougher's 1680 Treatise asked ‘How souls … may know certainly and infallibly that the evidence of their union with Christ received is really from God, and not a diabolical enthusiasm or inspiration’? Lougher's answer was, by faith: ‘the prime demonstration of the truth of that evidence must be a demonstration given to faith only: reason must not aspire so high to be the judge of faith's action’.Footnote ⁷⁸

By 1679 conformists had returned to the attack, perhaps prompted by the eruption of another ‘Restoration crisis’ – the Popish Plot, the Exclusion campaign and a renewed drive against episcopal intolerance.Footnote ⁷⁹ The conformist response was, however, cautious, denouncing enthusiasm rather than advancing reason. Thomas Pierce, the combative dean of Salisbury, declaimed before the king against two enemies of the Church, ‘the pretenders to enthusiasm and the disciples of the Leviathan’: ‘The first of them will allow of no other test than the sturdiness and strength of their own persuasion, which it is their will and pleasure to call “the testimony within them”.’Footnote ⁸⁰ Timothy Puller, a Hertfordshire rector, condemned the Quakers and their ‘enthusiastical conceit of the light within’, but he also had in mind John Owen and ‘the enthusiasts of our late age, who would make the privileges of the holy spirit special and singular to their enclosures, affirming a particular inspiration of the spirit absolutely necessary to convey to our mind the sense and interpretation of holy Scripture’. Indeed, he explicitly linked Owen with the Catholic polemicist John Sergeant, as both ‘traducing our faith as a probable, fallible, human, natural faith’. Yet Puller was guarded in his treatment of reason, rejecting ‘the intemperate asserters of human reason’ and especially ‘a late tract of Human reason’. However, ‘our Church doth allow and suppose rational men's perceiving the sense of the Scripture by the due use of their understanding’.Footnote ⁸¹

In 1680 George Hickes devoted an Oxford sermon to ‘the spirit of enthusiasm’, and as printed it went through three editions. He declared that the doctrine of immediate revelation was like that of papal infallibility, differing ‘only in this, that that makes only the bishop of Rome, but this makes every private Christian, a pope’. His attack was directed mainly against Quakers, but he too included Dissenters who thought that they were inspired by the Holy Ghost.Footnote ⁸² Joseph Glanvill again attacked ‘the sects’ and their ‘fanatical impostures and delusions’. They call all reason ‘carnal’, failing to distinguish between ‘the reason of our minds’ and ‘the reason of our appetite, passion and corrupt interest, which is not reason truly so called’ – so they ‘rail violently against all reason, as the grand adversary of the truths and mysteries of the gospel’. But Glanvill was less pressing of reason than he had been in 1670, admitting that ‘what we call reason is many times but a chain of fantasms’. ‘By faith reason is further enlightened, and by the use of reason faith is applied.’Footnote ⁸³ And Robert Boyle's Discourse of things above reason (1681) was also cautious, suggesting that there were ‘privileged things’, not to be judged in the same way as ‘ordinary things’, though ‘even about privileged things our enquiries, if modestly and discreetly managed, may not only be allowable but sometimes profitable’.Footnote ⁸⁴

Bishop George Rust's Discourse of the use of reason in matters of religion was edited by his former pupil Henry Halliwell and published in 1683, thirteen years after Rust's death. It contained the usual slights against enthusiasm, pretended revelations and misunderstandings of the work of the spirit. Above all, it was a brisk and clearly-argued assertion of the rationality of Christian religion and the ability of right reason to comprehend what is required in explicit faith: ‘For faith consists in assent; the assent follows the judgement, but no judgement can be made of a thing that is not at all known or understood.’ However, much had changed through the 1670s, including the political climate, and Halliwell's defensive editorial additions in 1683 sought to clear Rust and himself of any suspicion of setting up individual reason against the authority of the Church. Further

Rust and the rest freely acknowledge their dependence on the Holy Spirit, ‘Although perhaps they may not think the operation of the spirit of God to be by an omnipotent power at large, but hypothetical and upon certain terms and conditions.’Footnote ⁸⁵ There, of course, was the rub.

There is a nice parallel to Halliwell's defensiveness in the anonymous Nonconformist text Vox clamantis, likewise published in 1683. The author told fellow Dissenters that they were ‘stigmatised and publicly disgraced, viz. with folly and fanaticism’ – but ‘I do believe you are much wronged in this matter’. The accusation arose because ‘some of you are taken notice of to deny the use of reason in matters of religion, or to deny that we should judge of the ways and procedures of God, about our salvation and in matter of divine revelation, by our reasons and understanding’. ‘But on the contrary, divers of the nonformists [sic] have writ and spoken and preached rationally on the behalf and in the defence of the use of reason in religion.’ Robert Ferguson and Richard Baxter were cited. The mysteries of Christianity were opened by revelation, and it was now possible and permissible ‘to understand and judge of them’ by reason. Indeed, ‘If we do not thus employ our reasons and understandings in enquiry into the things of God, we are like to be deceived, and some other spirit will get into us that is not of God, and so we are like to be misled, turned indeed into the way of enthusiasm and fanaticism, as we see daily it is with some.’ Halliwell had said much the same thing.Footnote ⁸⁶ It looks as if mutual recriminations had forced both Nonconformists and ‘rational divines’ into more restrained expositions, especially when the threat of a Catholic succession to the throne made Protestant unity more important than theological point-scoring.Footnote ⁸⁷

In 1676 Baxter and his Presbyterian co-signatories had protested that there was no disagreement between conformists and mainstream Dissenters on the place of reason in religion: ‘We do verily believe that this scandalous contention ariseth from men's unskilfulness in the art of framing and expressing the notions of that same matter which they commonly hold.’Footnote ⁸⁸ There is much to be said for this view, but things were a little more complicated than they admitted. Baxter and his Presbyterian colleagues emphasised points of agreement, and insisted that all ‘true Protestants’ recognised that the Holy Spirit ‘is given to enable, dispose and help us to understand, believe, love and practise the doctrine and law … by sanctifying our power, our reason and our wills’.Footnote ⁸⁹ But, as Halliwell admitted, they did not quite agree on how this happened and what the spirit actually did.

John Owen, Robert Ferguson and John Wilson all argued that biblical revelation could only be properly understood if reason was enlightened by direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. For Owen, the Holy Spirit worked on Christians immediately, irresistibly and dramatically: it was necessary for a full understanding of the voice of God in the Scriptures, so only the regenerate could have ‘a saving perception of spiritual things as revealed’. His opponents claimed to recognise the work of the spirit, he noted, but they did so only ‘as metaphorically to be interpreted’. They were, bluntly, a ‘crew of Socinianised Arminians’, ascribing all to man himself.Footnote ⁹⁰ In his answer to Owen, the royal chaplain William Clagett asserted that the spirit functioned ‘in an intellectual way, i.e. by convincing, by persuading, by prevailing, by the power of truth’, and its working could not be distinguished ‘from our natural reasonings and the operations of truth upon our souls’. He denied that the Holy Spirit gave anyone an immediate understanding of biblical revelation, and the regeneration by the spirit which Owen said must precede understanding was to be interpreted only as a metaphor for reformation of life. Rather, Scripture will be opened by reason assisted by meditation and discussion, ‘which may through the grace of God be improved by me into an occasion of more humility, modesty and charity’. If Owen dismissed this as carnal reasoning, ‘there will be small hope left of doing any good upon him, nor is anything to be done with him but to turn him over to the Quakers’.Footnote ⁹¹

Thus, despite Baxter, there were disagreements – if only of emphasis – between the ‘rational divines’ and Nonconformists: but were Nonconformists themselves in agreement? Almost all those who responded to the rationalist attack were Congregationalists or Baptists, especially the former. This was partly because some of the churchmen's slights had been aimed specifically at the Congregational leader, John Owen, but it was also because Congregationalists were more relaxed about discussing the work of the Holy Ghost. This made them both more willing to set the spirit as an alternative or essential corrective to reason and more vulnerable to the charge of enthusiasm. Presbyterians were more cautious: Baxter denied there was an issue, Alsop mocked churchmen's emphasis rather than considered the relationship between faith and reason, while Manton and Bates saw faith and reason working together towards God's truth.Footnote ⁹² John Humfrey – more nearly a Presbyterian than anything else – defended Owen on the spirit against Clagett, but tried it ‘by going the middle way’. Others were less restrained, said Humfrey: ‘There is a great deal of acrimony, I see, with a little truth mixed, methinks.’Footnote ⁹³

In the heat of polemical argument, apparent differences might be generated, and minor differences magnified. When conformists wanted to yoke Dissenters to ‘fanatics’, Presbyterians insisted that they were different, and Congregationalists wanted to identify ‘rational divines’ with Socinians. It is not surprising that Nonconformists, especially Owen, accused conformists of denying the work of the Holy Spirit in illuminating understanding, since in this debate the conformists rarely mentioned it, and when they did it was with caution and caveats. Conformists thought that they knew where emphasis on the spirit led – it had ‘divided the Church and disturbed the peace of mankind, and involved the nation in so much blood and so many ruins’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Glanvill and his fellows regarded reason as an essential corrective: ‘They saw there was no likelihood any stop should be put to the extravagances of fancy … but by vindicating and asserting the use of reason in religion.’Footnote ⁹⁵ And if Owen and others suggested that an emphasis on reason was dangerous, it was in part because they suspected that it led to Socinianism, scepticism and a denial of the Trinity – so they insisted that reason should be controlled by revelation and the spirit: ‘For whatever perfection there seems to be in our art of reasoning, it is to be subjected to the wisdom of the holy ghost in Scripture.’Footnote ⁹⁶ There were differences of opinion, and more of emphasis, but they were magnified by suspicion and polemical design and turned into party positions. ‘Hence we see then’, wrote Baxter, ‘that divines have great cause to take heed of setting Christians together by the ears, by feigned differences where they are none, and so destroying love and concord, and tempting the ignorant to hate and falsely accuse their brethren, to the trouble of the Church and the hazard of their salvation.’Footnote ⁹⁷

Whether there were ‘feigned differences’ or real ones, fifteen years of controversy had certainly set ‘Christians together by the ears’, with serious consequences for English religion. Most Presbyterian clergy had hoped that they would eventually be reincorporated in the Church of England by comprehension, and in the meantime many of them were occasional or partial conformists. They accepted thirty-six of the Church's Thirty-nine Articles, and attended some services at the parish church; they deliberately timed their own meetings so they would not clash with parish worship. They denied that they were separatists and schismatics, and dismissed those who were as sectaries and ‘true fanatics’.Footnote ⁹⁸ They regarded themselves as eligible for membership of a reformed, Protestant, national Church. Richard Baxter's Judgment of Non-conformists of the interest of reason in the matters of religion was one of a set tracts he printed in 1676 to demonstrate that ‘mere Nonconformists’ (or his kind of Nonconformists) believed the same things as conformists (or conformists whom he regarded as orthodox).Footnote ⁹⁹ But Patrick, Parker, Glanvill, Fowler and others had said that they did not – rather, they believed the same things as the fanatics: they were antinomians and enthusiasts, subversive of Christian morality and ecclesiastical order. The moderate Nonconformists were put in their place – and their place was with the fanatics.

The conformist attack had two broad consequences. For the Presbyterians, it contributed to their denominationalism – the drift away from comprehension and towards separatism and sect-type organisation.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ It was hard to sustain a hope for comprehension when churchmen created (or pretended) theological differences and stigmatised Presbyterians as factious and irrational. It was bad enough to be denounced as fanatics by hard-liners such as Peter Heylyn and William Saywell,Footnote ¹⁰¹ but what chance was there when clergymen thought to be more sympathetic were saying virtually the same thing? Glanvill and Fowler had been in friendly correspondence with Baxter (until 1671), and Patrick and Fowler were against persecution – but that didn't stop them abusing Nonconformists as enthusiasts and antinomians.Footnote ¹⁰² Baxter continued to seek common ground with conformists and to minimise disagreements, but was there now any point? Instead, Vincent Alsop, one of the younger generation of Presbyterian ‘ducklings’, argued that ‘your rational divines’ had deliberately created an unbridgeable gulf with Nonconformists:

Agreement with such men did not look likely.

There were consequences too for the Church of England. For the criticism of Nonconformists had not only been directed to them, it was addressed to conformists too: it advanced a particular conception of Protestant religion as the alleged orthodoxy of the Church of England. It deflected accusations from fellow conformists that the ‘rational preachers’ were closet Socinians, and implied that suspicion of reason in religion smacked of fanaticism: ‘Whom do you gratify by decrying reason? Do you need to be remembered who they were that pretended the spirit against all your learning, and would have pulled down the places wherein you acquire it?’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The emphasis on rational religion also countered the criticisms of sceptics and freethinkers, and provided an answer to the Catholic argument that only infallibility could give a certain rule of faith.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ More significantly for the future of the Church of England, the identification of Nonconformists as irrational enthusiasts suggested that all conformists should, by contrast, be ‘rational men’, espousing ‘anti-fanatical doctrines’ and ‘reason, sobriety and moderation’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The Calvinist soteriology which had been a fundamental doctrine of the Church of England was now held to be implicitly antinomian, leading to ‘gross superstition, fanaticism and enthusiasm’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Instead, the ‘rational divines’ advocated a religion of moral righteousness based on reason, restraint and moderation, and Simon Patrick mocked the devotional style of godly religion and deliberately set The whole duty of man (1658) against Lewis Bayly's classic The practice of pietie (1612) as a pattern for the Christian life.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The row over reason (and the associated dispute over soteriology) added to and widened the differences between English Protestants. Baxter had tried to paper over theological cracks, arguing that disputes were only about words or based on misunderstanding or about things that did not matter, but even he realised (at times) that no-one was listening: ‘being incapable of prevailing with the present church-disturbers, I do apply myself to posterity’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ For the truth is that there were theological differences and Baxter's subtle distinctions and elaborate contortions could not eliminate them. Nonconformists claimed that they held still to the theology of England's first reformers, but that some conformists had moved on and left the Thirty-nine Articles behind – and they were right.Footnote ¹¹⁰ So when, faced by the threat of a popish king, Edward Stillingfleet and others argued for Protestant union and that there was sufficient agreement on essentials to justify Nonconformists in returning to the Church,Footnote ¹¹¹ it was already too late. When Nonconformists had asserted a fundamental unanimity as grounds for comprehension, some conformists had denied that there was any: now conformists asserted a fundamental unanimity as grounds for reunion, and some Nonconformists denied there was any. So Vincent Alsop reasoned that there were irreconcilable theological disagreements, and true Protestants could not rejoin the Church of England at any price likely to be available: better, perhaps, to accept sectarian status and the right of congregations to reform themselves – to become a denomination.Footnote ¹¹² Conformists had found it hard to offer comprehension: now even Presbyterians would find it hard to accept it.