Sprat as Anglican Royalist historian

Faced with scepticism and ‘scoffing’, as well as with insecure finances and institutional rivalry, in 1663 the nascent Royal Society invited Thomas Sprat, a writer rather than a natural philosopher, to produce an account of the Society's methods, achievements and potential contributions. The result was The History of the Royal Society (1667).Footnote ¹ Sprat portrayed experimentalism and the Royal Society as enemies of dogmatism and atheism, as the basis for national wealth and European leadership, as supporters of the civil state, and as avenues to a more rational knowledge of God. Opponents such as Robert South, Henry Stubbe and Meric Casaubon quickly savaged Sprat's, as well as the Society's, apparent concepts of learning. They also accused the History of undermining Church, state and universities, and even of aiding popery.Footnote ² Even within the Society the History raised some concern, though there was also an effort to support its propaganda value.Footnote ³ It is now accepted that Sprat told a misleading story concerning the origins of the Society, the role of hypotheses, difficulties with experiments and a great deal else.Footnote ⁴ There has been much modern interpretation, perhaps most contentiously concerning whether Sprat's book sought to attach the Royal Society to any particular ideological position, beyond a generalized support for restored king and Church,Footnote ⁵ and in particular whether the religious tone of the History can be associated with latitudinarianism.Footnote ⁶ One of the most fruitful recent lines of research has been analysis of what established a ‘matter of fact’ and how, and by whom, truth in natural philosophy was to be constructed and reported, and the necessarily ideological content of this. Perhaps drawing upon both law and the writing of history, the Society's public representations became heavily dependent upon the literary construction of the ‘report’, based upon acts of personal ‘witnessing’, carefully redrawn within boundaries that privileged higher status and excluded the ‘enthusiastic’, spiritual type of witnessing. In Simon Schaffer's shorthand, the knowledge, which was to be produced by self-defining communities, had to be ‘safe’ and ‘valuable’, and serve not only its own interest but also that of the restored regime.Footnote ⁷

Sprat himself has generally been treated as little more than an amanuensis for John Wilkins.Footnote ⁸ In the dedication to his earlier poem on Cromwell (1659), Sprat had indeed assumed a client relationship to Wilkins, who had been Warden of Sprat's college, Wadham.Footnote ⁹ In the History Sprat very likely took direction from Wilkins regarding the historical development of scientific knowledge and perhaps language theory. He also took direction from the Council, via Wilkins, regarding which of the Society's accomplishments to include.Footnote ¹⁰ At times Sprat even acknowledged that he was writing to order.Footnote ¹¹ But Michael Hunter has convincingly argued that there is no evidence of close supervision of Part III of the History after the interruption caused by the composition of the reply to Sorbière, the Plague and the Great Fire.Footnote ¹² Sprat's oft-quoted comment that the ‘substance and direction’ came from one of the secretaries appears in the part written before the hiatus.Footnote ¹³ Most of the religious and political comment occurs after this point and Sprat apologized to his readers for not having amended the earlier (supervised) part to eliminate any inconsistencies.Footnote ¹⁴ Sprat may also have believed himself to be writing for the committee established by the Council of the Society on 16 May 1665 to review his work.Footnote ¹⁵ Furthermore, the History's overt ‘Baconianism’ could have had various origins,Footnote ¹⁶ while many of the ideas often attributed to Wilkins were common coin. Sprat's comment may simply have been an attempt to represent the work as an approved statement of the Society. In addition, formulaic self-debasement of the client before the mentor and patron would likely have been read as conventional by the gentlemanly audience (largely) intended for the History, rather than as specific indebtedness for the text. This customary expression of subordination served as a public advertisement of Sprat's loyalty, and so as a trolling device for other patrons. Such relational statements should be seen in the context of the language play of early modern deferential bonding. Finally, Sprat's other publications do not follow Wilkins's latitudinarian views, nor is there any instance of a contemporary calling Sprat a latitudinarian. Sprat apparently played no part in the attempts at a comprehension bill of 1667–8 and clearly opposed comprehension later.Footnote ¹⁷

This raises the little-investigated question of what Sprat himself hoped to accomplish with the History. Part of his motivation may well have been personal: the early Restoration commonplace of salvaging one's career. The commission offered him a chance to display his literary talents and associate himself with a ‘company’ which enjoyed royal patronage and which might afford him, as a priest, a transition to a career in the Church.Footnote ¹⁸ But he also wove an ulterior motive into the tale of the Royal Society.Footnote ¹⁹ Sprat ended up as a ‘High Church’ Anglican and ardent royalist, supporting James II almost to the end. ‘Anglican Royalism’, as Mark Goldie has termed it, was opposed to mixed monarchy and identified the king as the ‘sole, omnicompetent and illimitable source of law’. At the same time, monarchical supremacy entailed defence of the Church of England.Footnote ²⁰ Already in the early 1660s, Sprat held Anglican Royalist views. From the beginning, his texts had a political and religious thrust. His earlier paean to Cromwell, which in any case lauded England's power rather than usurpation, had already been balanced by The Plague of Athens (1659). There Sprat had used plague as a metaphor for the effects of overthrowing the proper natural order, drawing special attention to the decay of virtue and to the troubles accompanying the desertion of established forms of worship.Footnote ²¹

While the History was certainly composed as a strong defence of the Royal Society and its experimentalism, it was also intended to construct a longue durée history of English religious politics with direct application to the struggles of the early Restoration. At the beginning of the Restoration, armed uprisings, the strength of Nonconformity, the Plague, the Great Fire, losses in the Dutch war and the continued availability of radical ideologies all represented serious challenges to the re-established regime. While proper authority had been restored in law, there was still a need for relegitimation. In order to overcome ‘enthusiasm’, the Church of England, in particular, had to demonstrate that it was the only authentic Christian organization, thus stripping opponents of a secure site from which to contend. Rather than look at the Society's needs, at the ‘Baconian’ nature of the History, or at the pamphlet war over the new philosophy – all of which have been ably done – here I wish to examine Sprat's use of rhetorical conventions, especially the Reformation and the idea of England as a chosen nation (‘Israel’). Through reconfiguration of these fundamental ideas Sprat argued that experimental natural philosophy would not merely support a generic Christianity but rather assist the long-standing anti-Calvinist movement within Anglicanism. The History is not seen here as a rather surprising, one-off venture from someone who exhibited virtually no later interest in the Royal Society, but rather as a polemic which can be integrated with Sprat's other writings to show that defence of the Society served a consistent purpose for its author.

In order to establish this, I shall examine not only the History itself but also the contemporary Observations on Monsieur de Sorbier's Voyage into England (1665). Samuel de Sorbière had visited England in 1663, joined the Royal Society, met Charles II and, upon returning to France, written a commentary entitled Voyage to England (1664). While it was complimentary to the Royal Society and its experimentalism, the Society feared that Sorbière established primacy for the rival Montmor Academy. Sorbière may also have been considered dangerous because he was a friend and translator of Thomas Hobbes. Although Charles II apparently intervened to prevent an official response from the Society, Sprat interrupted the writing of the History to produce an extremely vindictive reply.Footnote ²² In addition to some offensive remarks about the English character, Sorbière had portrayed an extremely unsettled and unpopular regime in England. Of particular relevance here were his criticisms of the Church of England's liturgy and discipline and his emphasis on continuing Presbyterian strength, such that ‘the National Religion, now set up, is not that which is most followed’ and even that ‘all our Sects may shortly unite to destroy it’.Footnote ²³ It seems very likely that Sprat was in large part reacting against Sorbière's religio-political comments in the Voyage, which clearly demeaned the cause of Anglican Royalism, though Sorbière had also attacked English policy in his Letter to Mons. de Courcelles at Amsterdam … (1652).Footnote ²⁴ Given that the Observations was very probably neither commissioned nor supervised by the Royal Society, it may be taken as direct evidence of Sprat's own opinions and mindset exactly when he was composing his ‘history’ of the Society.

The writing of history was undergoing considerable change in the seventeenth century. Growing reliance on first-hand witnessing or on the documents produced by actors in a past tale took the writing of history away from its often fictive past and in the same intellectual direction as the Royal Society.Footnote ²⁵ Bacon had united natural philosophy and history by emphasizing the necessary utility of each and their similar dependence upon probability.Footnote ²⁶ While Sprat stressed the Royal Society's desire to ‘separate the knowledge of Nature, from the colours of Rhetorick, the devices of Fancy, or the delightful deceit of Fables’, he was not writing a scientific ‘report’ but a civil history. And even Bacon had made clear his view that rhetoric was very important for what he called ‘persuasions’.Footnote ²⁷ Sprat showed his colours early in the History by calling for a narrative of the ‘most memorable Actions of Twenty years’, which would serve ‘His Majesties Interest’ by providing a ‘full view of the miseries, that attended rebellion’.Footnote ²⁸ As Justin Champion has noted, the battle over representations of the past became a ‘crucible for ideological disputes’, in which, rather like Sprat's portrayal of natural philosophers, the historian sought to establish himself as having ‘transcend[ed] his cultural and political identity in the name of universal truth’. The historian therefore had ‘to establish the competence of his own credit, while undermining his opponent's integrity’.Footnote ²⁹ Where the historian relied on other sources, he understood that they also had similarly to be trustworthy.Footnote ³⁰

These emphases are clear in a number of Sprat's works. In Plague of Athens, Sprat emphasized the advantage Thucydides had as a historian through having ‘been present on the place’ about which he was writing.Footnote ³¹ In his apologetical Second Letter (1689), Sprat referred to ‘several Original Papers still in being, which would be more than enough to convince all impartiall Men’, thus satisfying the requirements of documentary proof and disinterested appraisers.Footnote ³² He understood that in a fractious age it was advantageous to portray the narrator as non-threatening. So against Sorbière he conventionally professed himself ‘an enemy to all manner of controversies’, insisting that ‘I hate contention’.Footnote ³³ This should not, of course, be taken at face value. On occasion Sprat departed radically from Boyle's injunction to challenge ‘reports’ but respect persons.Footnote ³⁴ In general, however, he sought to undermine Sorbière's views by denigrating their trustworthiness. So he chided Sorbière for drawing conclusions from a single unpleasant encounter at Dover, when the proper procedure was simply to report what he had witnessed.Footnote ³⁵ Sprat also took Sorbière to task for relying on witnesses who themselves were not credible. On the central question of English religion, Sorbière's views were so inaccurate that he must have relied on ‘one that had been a Soldier in Cromwells Army’ – that is, a rebel, and therefore inherently an unreliable witness.Footnote ³⁶ In the History, Sprat noted he had included ‘many Subjects that are not Historical’, but had kept the title since ‘that was the main end of my Design’. He also conceded that the style was ‘larger and more contentious’ where ‘purity and shortness’ were ‘the chief beauties of Historical Writings’. This he blamed on the ‘Objections and Cavils’ of the Royal Society's ‘Detractors’ and explained why he had written ‘not altogether in the way of a plain History, but somtimes of an Apology’.Footnote ³⁷ Sprat thus seems to have had a clear idea of what constituted a ‘history’ and also of how it might be used. This is worth stressing because historical error was one of the principal charges that Henry Stubbe later laid against Sprat.Footnote ³⁸

The religious context of the History of the Royal Society

Much of the modern comment on the religious views expressed in the History has remarked on its anti-enthusiast thrust, while acknowledging that the new science could itself be seen as ‘enthusiastic’.Footnote ³⁹ But the range of ecclesiological and theological contention was far wider in the early 1660s. Of greatest relevance to Sprat's texts were the overall decline of Calvinism and the continuing battles over two very important conventions: the Reformation and ‘Israel’.Footnote ⁴⁰ While ‘high’ Calvinism remained influential in the early Restoration, especially at Oxford and even on the episcopal bench, Arminianism, as it was often called, was now the dominant theology. Restoration churchmen increasingly abandoned Calvinist double predestination. Rather than the passive vessel being infused with faith, grace came to those who repented and showed themselves willing to combine a holy life with their faith: some measure of sanctification had to precede justification. Once again, humans could aid in their own quest for salvation, though not to the degree possible in the Roman church. Another aspect of this theological shift was the idea that reason could discover all aspects of Christianity necessary for salvation. Yet reason was at once both ill-defined and hotly contested. The Calvinist Dissenter Robert Ferguson agreed that there was nothing in Calvin's understanding of reprobation which conflicted with reason,Footnote ⁴¹ while conformist high Calvinists such as Thomas Barlow and Robert South were clearly terrified by the enthusiast threat to learned theology. Yet, like many Calvinists, South was wary of depending too heavily on reason in bridging the gulf with God. For South, ‘eternal happiness and pardon of sin’ came ‘upon the sole condition of faith and sincere obedience’.Footnote ⁴²

Fear of inappropriate use of reason had led to widespread Calvinist concern that the study of nature might be construed as a superior basis for comprehension of the Creator. South's and Barlow's attacks on the Royal Society (though not on all natural philosophy) have often been seen as defences of particular styles of learning.Footnote ⁴³ But they were also intended to offer a theological defence of Calvinism in the face of an Arminian assault. Barlow's lectures at Oxford in 1669 against George Bull's critique of justification by faith alone were closely connected to Barlow's criticisms of claims made for the Royal Society.Footnote ⁴⁴ South was particularly concerned by the theological and moral implications of experimentalism. Fearing that the Society would ‘admit of no other measure of good and evil, but the judgment of sensuality’, he linked ‘high assumers and pretenders to reason’ with ‘that profane, atheistic, epicurean rabble’ and ‘diabolical society’ of the Royal Society.Footnote ⁴⁵ His plaint that ‘what am I benefited, whether the sun moves about the earth, or whether the sun is the centre of the world, and the earth is indeed a planet and wheels about that?’ was diametrically opposed to Bacon's assurance that God's created world was ‘a key’ to the scriptural.Footnote ⁴⁶ Contemporaries noted the division. Ferguson reported that such Calvinist reticence earned them the label of ‘Defamers of Reason’, while John Beale commented that ‘stauncher Calvinians’ criticized the Royal Society.Footnote ⁴⁷ It was one of the last great intellectual struggles in which a still-powerful Calvinism would engage in England.

The historical and theological meanings of the Reformation were arguably the central religious questions of the period before the civil wars.Footnote ⁴⁸ John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563) brought to every parish church the Reformed story of the church's succession through gathered groups of believers who held to true doctrine, sometimes against the established church. In this telling, possession of the Word, not lineage, defined the godly community and so subverted institutional emphasis on particular acts such as baptism and communion in favour of inward faith.Footnote ⁴⁹ This view was forcefully challenged by Richard Hooker in the 1590s and thereafter by those who stressed the visible church. Rome was now seen as indeed a true, although corrupt, church that by its refusal to reform had forced the English Church to separate. This undercut the ‘positive testimony of true faith’ involved in the Reformed narrative of active repudiation of Rome, and raised a division between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ relations with Rome. The passive approach favoured by Hooker, Overall, Laud and others denied any ‘active hostility’ on the Protestants' part. Greater emphasis was correspondingly given to the political and institutional nature of the English Reformation. This also served to deny sects in England the same right of separation since they lacked ‘due authority’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The struggle over the Reformation continued in the early Restoration. The re-establishment of episcopacy was built on purging those who took ‘most seriously’ their connection to a Calvinist-interpreted Reformation. Dissenters saw the 1662 liturgy and the pressure for conformity as a great step back from the Reformation. Less than a decade after Sprat finished the History, amid rising anti-popery, Shaftesbury would argue that ever since Laud and Charles I, the bishops had been plotting to overturn the Reformation.Footnote ⁵¹

The idea that God had made England a new ‘Israel’ dated at least to the fourteenth century. Foxe's canonical text reinforced this continuing self-perception.Footnote ⁵² While Protestant writers accepted that England was not uniquely chosen, national pre-eminence was commonly associated with identification as Israel.Footnote ⁵³ Since Israel was a continuing exhibition of God's providence, typological readings were common.Footnote ⁵⁴ As the early Stuart religious and political scene became more difficult, a literature of jeremiads increasingly portrayed Israel as a narrative of necessary suffering. Failure to fulfil the terms of the covenant with God, now as in ancient times, would bring warnings and afflictions. If they did not lead to repentance then God might well abandon England.Footnote ⁵⁵ Concern with ‘Israel’ reached its apogee in the millenarian rhetoric of the civil wars. After the regicide, while republican writers used the convention in self-justification, royalists explained the problems of ancient Israel as punishment for rebelling against God's established order. Scholars have argued for a ‘gradual repudiation of sacred politics’ in the later seventeenth century,Footnote ⁵⁶ but the contest over ‘Israel’ continued after 1660. From their prisons, Quakers called upon God to gather his Israel, while the radical Edmund Ludlow described Charles II as a ‘Pharaoh’ overseeing a renewed Egyptian bondage.Footnote ⁵⁷ After 1660 the Anglican Royalist objective was to rescue the ‘chosen’ signifier from the private sphere of gathered believers and relocate it in the public institutions of the Church and the monarchical state. Robert South used the image in a sermon at Westminster Abbey as late as 1692, but it was strongest in the 1660s.Footnote ⁵⁸ Charles II was portrayed as David, ‘almost as anti-type to type’; in turn, he referred to the English as God's ‘own chosen people’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Restoration Anglicans, too, sought to control providentialism, so the jeremiad remained a ‘clerical stock in trade’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Now it was the recent suffering of the Anglican clergy which was likened to Israel's time in Egypt, while the Restoration became the emergence of monarchical Israel from God's chastisements for waywardness.Footnote ⁶¹ The official ‘Form of Common Prayer’ after the Plague (1665) reminded the English that God had also sent a plague to the Israelites after their rebellion.Footnote ⁶² Dryden's Annus Mirabilis, which appeared in the same year as Sprat's History, offered a typological reading of the English, yet at the same time sought to ‘justify the status of the poem as history’.Footnote ⁶³ John Milward MP made note of two sermons about Israel he heard at St Margaret's, Westminster (the House of Commons' church), in October 1666. The image still resonated politically: the very next day the Commons established a committee ‘to bring in a bill for the suppressing atheism, swearing, cursing, lying, profaneness and luxury’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Sprat as anti-Calvinist

Set in this context, Sprat's statement that the relationship of the Royal Society and ‘the Christian Faith’ was the ‘weightiest, and most solemn part of my whole undertaking’ is worthy of closer examination.Footnote ⁶⁵ What exactly did Sprat understand by ‘Christian faith’? In the light of Simon Patrick's comment that ‘new Philosophy will bring in new Divinity’, how might that play upon his representation of the interconnection of natural philosophy and theology?Footnote ⁶⁶ Sprat's own religious beliefs drew on the ideas of Richard Hooker, further developed by anti-Calvinists such as Laud, Hales, Whichcote, Hammond and Chillingworth, the last two of whom Sprat himself praised.Footnote ⁶⁷ In the early Restoration Hooker was being constructed as the first real apostle of a via media ‘Anglican’ Church.Footnote ⁶⁸ Hooker's works were certainly known within Sprat's circle.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, Sprat may have relied on Izaak Walton's Life of Mr. Richard Hooker (1665), a revisionist attempt to construct a long-standing, rational and moderate Anglicanism immediately serviceable to the religious politics of the moment.Footnote ⁷⁰ Walton emphasized Hooker's criticisms of strict predestinarianism, his acceptance of the ceremonies and his insistence that faith be accompanied by works. In Hooker's England, too, ‘pertinacious zeal’ had upset reason and peace and had led to the ‘spiritual wickedness’ of opposition to the government.Footnote ⁷¹ Sprat's probabilistic discourse may well have been learned from Hooker's distinction between certainty of evidence and certainty of adherence; that it was available elsewhere would at least have made his representation of the Royal Society's methods seem less novel.Footnote ⁷² Walton also popularized the image of Hooker, who had written scathingly about his puritan opponents, as ‘judicious’ and as acting ‘with the spirit of meekness and reason’, a rhetorical posturing highly adaptable to Sprat's own work.Footnote ⁷³

Sprat's persistent comments that the Church of England ‘can never be praejudic'd by the light of Reason’, that religion was ‘the perfection and the crown of the Law of Nature’, as well as his identification of rational religion as the ‘universal Disposition of this Age’,Footnote ⁷⁴ can be situated as part of a long-term anti-Calvinist thrust against the primacy of the inner light. So when Sprat insisted that religion ‘should not stand in need of any devices of reason’, he meant divisive ratiocination, that it ‘ought not to be the subject of Disputations’. A ‘bare promulgation, a common apprehension, and sense enough to understand the Grammatical meaning of ordinary words’ would do the trick.Footnote ⁷⁵ This was not simply a matter of intellectual methodology. In recounting the unwillingness of early Christians to cease disputing after overcoming ‘the Heathens’, Sprat likened the situation to ‘an Army that returns victorious, and is not presently disbanded’, and which then ‘began to spoyl, and quarrel amongst themselves’, a clear recollection of Army rule and the religious chaos of the 1640s and 1650s.Footnote ⁷⁶ In a still-troubled era, plain reason was also proffered as a pacifier: the ‘most efficacious Remedy’ against religious distempers ‘is not so much the sublime part of Divinity, as its intelligible, and natural, and practicable Doctrines’, attainable, as Hooker had argued, through reason.Footnote ⁷⁷ Sprat also exhibited other aspects of anti-Calvinism in both the History and the Observations. His comment that Christ had spread his faith by ‘some visible good Work’ illustrated the increasing Anglican emphasis on James at the expense of Calvinist reliance on Paul. The stress on ‘spiritual Repentance’ similarly displayed the Arminian emphasis on human reform before justification. Sprat also stressed the ‘purer’ and ‘original’ patristics and maintained that the ancient doctrine of the Church of England had been ‘establish'd by Christ and his Apostles’.Footnote ⁷⁸

Sprat was attempting to construct a civil history of the post-Reformation Church: a narrative of historical ‘fact’, supported by testimony, and to which assent had been given through the longue durée of Anglicanism. Given the contemporary importance of longevity as a basis of legitimacy, there was much rhetorical advantage not merely in denouncing ‘enthusiasm’ but also in establishing a more formidable status quo ante for the period before 1640. So, playing to the new historical standards, Sprat discounted Henry VIII's ‘private passion’ as not a credible explanation of the Reformation. It might have ‘served well enough in the mouths of Moncks two hundred years agoe’ but it would ‘not pass muster in a Philosophical and Inquisitive Age’. Now, no one ‘looks upon his breach with the Pope, to have been a Reformation’; this was ‘of a latter date’. While it involved certain doctrinal differences, the ‘Real Cause of our first reformation’ – and its central message for anti-Calvinist Anglicans – was a public effort to liberate ‘Christians from tyranny’ and re-establish legitimate princely authority by overthrowing subordination to ‘one mans Command’.Footnote ⁷⁹ This was a striking criticism of older Roman pretensions, but also of the recent Protectorate. Sprat dismissed religious rivals by disconnecting them from the Church's monarchical beginnings: since the ‘Sects are inconsistent with any Government but a Common-wealth’, they could not be the true inheritors.Footnote ⁸⁰

In order to claim primacy – crucial in religion, as in science – and so appropriate the Reformation, Sprat stressed that Calvinism had been added later to a pre-existing moderate church. Those who continued to pursue doctrinal differences were thus not only engaging in divisive activity but also aspiring to a goal that, on historical testimony, was not central to the Reformation. As part of the attack he criticized Sorbière personally for embodying at different times both Calvinist and papist extremes, and because Calvinism had not yet been ‘wholy rooted out of his Heart’.Footnote ⁸¹ It was this contest which caused him to react so vehemently against Sorbière's slurs concerning the popularity of the Church and the sense of ‘re-establishing Episcopacy with so high a Hand, That having been the Stumbling-Block in his Father's Time’.Footnote ⁸² Against the claim that the English were ‘Schismaticks and Hereticks’, Sprat offered a defence of Church discipline and royal policy, wholly denying all Sorbière's charges.Footnote ⁸³ The Church's ceremonies, he insisted, had been established ‘by the deliberate Counsels of Wisemen, and by the authority of that power, which bears the immediate image of God’.Footnote ⁸⁴ And to paint his opponent's comments as extremist, so not deserving of credit, Sprat suggested that Sorbière's criticisms ‘might well have fitted the mouth of Bradshaw, or the pen of Ireton’, both regicides who had recently been ‘disinterred and dishonoured’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Challenging the role of Presbyterians in bringing back the king, Sprat argued that the Restoration was due to ‘divine Providence’, General Monck, the royalists and overwhelming popular desire. The Calvinist Presbyterians, a ‘private Sect’, just ‘went along with the mighty Torrent’.Footnote ⁸⁶ He also insisted upon the popularity of the re-established Church: in London ‘the far greater number is for the Rights of the Church, then against them’, while in ‘the middle, or remoter parts of our Nation … Non-conformity is but very sparingly spread’. The stress in the History on the advantages that a scattered and ‘generally uninfected’ gentry offered to experimental philosophy reflects in part their religious reliability.Footnote ⁸⁷

In both texts Sprat followed the Hookerian argument that the Church was very much a helpmeet of the state rather than the Calvinist reverse. In imitation of early Christianity, the Church was bound ‘to keep itself in a due submission to the Civil Magistrate’. The Church's discipline, Sprat insisted, constituted ‘the True, the Sound, the Apostolical Episcopacy: because it does yield to the Temporal Power’. Pointedly contrasting pre-1640 religious politics with recent disasters, he insisted that it was indeed ‘the glory of the Church of England that it never resist'd Authority, nor engag'd in Rebellion’.Footnote ⁸⁸ The Church's interest, as he later put it, ‘is inseparable from the Interest of our Nation, and Government’.Footnote ⁸⁹ His association of ‘private’ religion with the politically suspect was part of a long Anglican tradition of seeing sedition at the heart of Calvinism.Footnote ⁹⁰ Sprat's hope that ‘our several Interests, and Sects may come to suffer one another’ should therefore not be read as an argument for comprehension or toleration. Rather, in an unsettled time, Sprat was very concerned that ‘the more [religious differences] are rubb'd, the rawer they will prove’, and so strove to remove or control the bases of antagonism and unite the nation under the restored regime.Footnote ⁹¹ He later made clear that the grounds for claiming a tender conscience in ‘so Pure, so Pious, so Regular, so Moderate a Church’ were necessarily specious.Footnote ⁹² Fighting against sects, as he told Sorbière, was part of the earthly hardships of the true church. Nonetheless, as became ‘so Moderate a Church’, the bishops, at least in Sprat's telling, were very lenient, inflicting punishments only on the ‘Obstinate’.Footnote ⁹³

The reduced antipathy Sprat showed to Rome in the History should also be seen in the context of Restoration anti-Calvinist views that the question now was schism rather than heresy.Footnote ⁹⁴ Sprat could still rise to anti-Catholicism on occasion, but given his great emphasis on the institutional (rather than congregational) view of the true church, he was virtually obliged to allow a greater status ‘to so antient, and so famous a Church’ as Rome. His comment that a pacific approach was appropriate where political loyalty was assured, as with the many ‘well-meaning Catholiques amongst us’ who ‘have no mind to disturb the Peace of their Country towards the restoration of their Religion’, was typical of anti-Calvinists. As Catholics sat in the Lords and Commons and were prominent in Charles II's court, so while they were practising public science they could be included in the Royal Society unmarred by their private heterodox religious views. Provided they were politically loyal, in the early Restoration this was not yet a matter of crisis. It was also an acknowledgement of the great aid that English Romanists had provided to the martyred Charles I.Footnote ⁹⁵ As in Laudian days, anti-popery now seemed a greater enemy to the Anglican Church than was Rome itself. Only after 1688 and the imposition of a Calvinist king did Sprat pronounce that the Church of England was ‘irreconcilable with the Interests of Popery, and the only impregnable Defence against its return into this Land’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Representing the Royal Society: Reformation, Israel and wealth

It remains to examine the specific ways in which Sprat interwove his Anglican Royalism with his defence of the Royal Society and natural philosophy. He first strove to establish each area's boundaries. Primacy was of course given to religion. His assurances that the Society was ‘abundantly cautious, not to intermeddle in Spiritual Things’, which were beyond its competence as an experimental organization, established that it was not a private sect.Footnote ⁹⁷ At the same time, Sprat's depiction of parallel images – ‘behold the agreement that is between the present Design of the Royal Society, and that of our Church, in its beginning’ – closely associated the new philosophy with his narrative of an Anglican past. The Royal Society and the Church might ‘lay equal claim to the word Reformation’, since they had followed ‘a like cours’ and had both stressed ‘passing by the corrupt Copies, and referring themselves to the perfect originals for their instruction’.Footnote ⁹⁸ This meant that the spirit of natural philosophy also pre-dated Calvinist influence. Like the Reformation, then, experimental philosophy could be understood as a movement to liberate human reason but which also accepted monarchical authority.Footnote ⁹⁹ Sprat's insistence that Gassendi and Descartes were not ‘Dictators over mens Reasons, nor is there any extraordinary reference to their judgments’, paralleled long-standing anti-Calvinist rejection of a dogmatic influence of foreign authorities in the English Church.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Sprat's representation of the Reformation in the defence of the Society was immediately noted. In 1667 John Beale commented that Sprat had ‘given full luster to the Church of England’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ John Evelyn took issue with Stubbe's criticisms of Sprat's explanation of the Reformation, linked Stubbe (a ‘snarling Cynic’) with earlier Protestant radicals, and suggested that any further defence against Stubbe should employ quotations from Richard Hooker and John Durch.Footnote ¹⁰²

Sprat also had to counter the mainly Calvinist charge that knowledge of nature led away from the ‘chief part’ of Christianity, ‘the Evangelical Doctrine of Salvation by Jesus Christ’. He therefore needed first to ‘vindicat[e] this Design [the Royal Society] from the imputation of being praejudicial to the Church of England’.Footnote ¹⁰³ He offered a two-pronged defence: first, that the activity was a ‘good work’ in moral-theological terms, and secondly, that individual religious shortcomings did not derive from the activity itself. For those who wished ‘to understand aright what is supernatural’, Sprat insisted, ‘it is a good step first to know what is according to Nature’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Indeed, the study of nature, properly conducted – that is, by men of substance, according to ‘Baconian’ principles – was ‘an excellent ground’ to establish divinity, in that it could establish, for all humans, evidence of the ‘Power, and Wisdom, and Goodness of the Creator’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Careful to protect the Royal Society from charges of Epicurean atheism, Sprat insisted that the ‘beauty, contrivance, and order of God's works’ revealed a Christian atomism. Only a deity could have designed the ‘numberless particles that move in every mans Blood’. By confirming God's physical creation, experimental philosophy would reinforce ‘universal Observations’ and establish as a matter of fact that there is a God who holds ‘Providence over the Creation’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ To bind this realization to the established Church against those ‘over-zealous Divines [who] do reprobate Natural Philosophy, as a carnal knowledge, and a too much minding worldly things’, or who called it ‘vain Philosophy’, Sprat insisted that it was the ‘Greatest and most Reverend’ churchmen who had supported the Royal Society and ‘taken off the unjust scandal from Natural knowledge that it is an enemy to Divinity’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Turning to individual shortcomings, Sprat declared that those natural philosophers who had been ‘negligent in the Worship of God’ were not reacting to anything inherent in the study of nature. Rather, they had been driven to such dereliction by the ‘late extravagant excesses of Enthusiasm’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Again stressing the bond, Sprat argued that it was Churchmen who had ‘confuted the false opinions of those men’ – primarily Calvinists – ‘who believe that Philosophers must needs be irreligious’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Indeed, the qualities necessary in a natural philosopher – an awareness of one's own ignorance and an ability to scrutinize one's own ideas – directly paralleled the ‘spiritual humility’ and ‘spiritual repentance’ at the centre of anti-Calvinist Christian existence.Footnote ¹¹⁰ While formally distinguishing between natural philosophers and ‘God's peculiar People’, Sprat nonetheless did suggest that natural philosophers would prove to be the most valuable worshippers of God, far above the ‘blind applauses of the ignorant’.Footnote ¹¹¹

While the Church could help experimentalism, Sprat's principal interest was the benefit that would accrue in the other direction. Experimental philosophy, he announced, ‘will be to our Church as the British Oak is to our Empire, an ornament and defence to the soil wherein it is planted’.Footnote ¹¹² He set this argument within the important early modern emphasis on harmony. As he had earlier used plague as an allegory of the division and exclusivity which were the staples of rebellion, his depiction now of a supposedly diverse collection of people working together to improve their society reflected traditional mythologies of harmonious neighbourliness and cooperative action.Footnote ¹¹³ His comment that not even any ‘difference of Country, Interest, or profession of Religion’ separated the Royal Society Fellows was a statement setting out supposedly universally held goals but it was also intended as a reassurance that natural philosophers had been cleansed of any enthusiasm and that Catholics could be admitted into the Royal Society as an instance of reducing religious tension.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Religion and science, both unjustly ‘accus'd by their enemies of the same crimes’, would now be able to proceed together in a new regimen of orderly control.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In a text full of parallels, Sprat argued that as enthusiasm had been cast ‘out of Divinity itself, we shall hardly be sure perswaded, to admit it into Philosophy’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The controversies of the ‘many different Sects, and opinions of the Christian Faith’, which depended on private speculation, had slowed the development of natural philosophy and had similarly been unhelpful to religion. Sprat directly challenged radicals, arguing – it is difficult to imagine inadvertently – ‘Many things that have bin hitherto hidden, will arise and expose themselves to their view’. This closely mimicked Daniel 12:4, a text cited by Bacon but also a favourite of recent millenarians.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The greater measure of epistemological assurance provided by the new knowledge would work to the Church's advantage against remaining enthusiastic delusions, since ‘such spiritual Frensies … can never stand long, before a cleer and a deep skill in Nature’.Footnote ¹¹⁸

For Sprat, the alleged timorousness of the Fellows in drawing conclusions when acting as a Society was a further proof of the order imposed by institutional control. The construction of an inherent restraint in the experimental method allowed him to argue that it ‘contains the best remedies for the distempers which some other sorts of Learning are thought to bring with them’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The downplaying of hypothesizing in the Royal Society was intended also, by parallel, to discourage religious and political theorizing.Footnote ¹²⁰ But in arguing that ‘the very way of disputing itself, and inferring one thing from another alone, is not at all proper for the spreading of knowledge’, in things ‘of probability onely’, Sprat was trying to force the lid closed.Footnote ¹²¹ The Calvinist Robert Ferguson recognized this for what it was: an attempt to ‘have the liberty to vent what they please without running the hazard of being contradicted’.Footnote ¹²² Things of ‘probability’ were not restricted to natural philosophy; the revolution had shown that they included government and religion. These, too, were now questions that could be gauged by the ‘facts’ of the matter, established through experimentally testing and witnessing different systems. As Sprat realized, it was now the methodology of monarchy and Church, as much as of science, which needed a defence.

Sprat himself had first used the Israel convention in portraying Cromwell as a Moses figure leading his ‘Chosen people’ and, in the language of direct providences, ‘Guided himselfe by God’.Footnote ¹²³ The idea of special blessings for a group within England was anathema to Sprat, since it detracted from the authority of Church or state, and exemplified the destructive centrifugal force at the heart of Calvinist theology. It was this notion, he later claimed, that had led to ‘twenty years mischiefs, and dislocations, which their deluded Authours were wont most arrogantly to impute to the special favour, and indulgence of divine providence’.Footnote ¹²⁴ As he forcefully indicated to Sorbière, the civil wars and the ‘Deaths of so many Martyrs for the Royall Cause’ were God's chastisement of a wayward nation.Footnote ¹²⁵ Anglican Royalists such as Sprat even challenged the identity of those who had suffered for religion's sake. True suffering was the mark of ‘Gods own People, and Children’; those who acted against the clergy of God's Church and even killed the ‘Vice-Gerent of Gods Power’ could not be of that tribe.Footnote ¹²⁶ But to turn the Israel convention from an illuminist free-for-all to a pillar of Anglican monarchism, Sprat had to establish the fact that restored society led to greater benefit than the Israel of uncontrolled theological speculation. In short, he had to offer some less subjective standard of God's ongoing favour than what he saw as enthusiastic delusion. In light of the conventional understanding that the ancient Jews had lost their chosen status by failing to fulfil the terms of the covenant, Sprat's comment that they had neglected natural philosophy and instead immersed themselves in ‘words’ constituted a call for more reliable guidance of Israel vested in ‘things’. Also, against Calvinist reservation, it tied natural philosophy to ‘Israel’. Sprat presented the new science as a dramatic change from rhetorical to material achievement: a utilitarian ‘Philosophy for the use of Cities, and not for the retirements of Schools … compounded of all sorts of men … all mutually assisting each other’. The ‘increase of Experiments’ would develop the ‘Universal Interest of the whole Kingdom’ and so redefine Israel in terms of economic success, overseen by the national institutions of re-established Church and restored monarchical state.Footnote ¹²⁷

Sprat conceded that the ‘Idea of a perfect Philosopher’ would necessarily be an amalgam of ‘the different excellencies of several Countries’. The perfect mixture of qualities ‘is scarce ever to be found in one single Man’ and ‘seldom in the same Countrymen’. But some were clearly more equal than others. The superiority of the Royal Society's Fellows, particularly their ‘excellent Philosophical Qualities’, embodied the English character, so that ‘we can hardly distinguish, whether they were taught us by degrees, or rooted in the very foundation of our Being’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Here he was euphoric. The extraordinary ‘composition of English blood’ made the difference: the ‘Noble, and Inquisitive Genius of our Merchants’, the decentralized upper classes, the English language, an ‘unaffected sincerity’, a ‘sound simplicity’, an emphasis on ‘middle qualities’, ‘an universal modesty’ and ‘an honourable integrity’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Sprat's construction of English qualities was not merely an explanation of a richer soil in which to plant natural philosophy. As his sketch was of an inherently ‘moderate’ character, it was also a self-privileging claim for his parallel Anglican revisionism of the Reformation and of the established Church as a Hookerian via media rather than a godly elite. Locating the realization of the ideal English character in the study of nature was intended to shift the meaning of ‘Israel’. It was no longer defined as truer comprehension of the Word. Where John Milton had claimed that God revealed his decrees ‘first to his English-men’,Footnote ¹³⁰ Sprat insisted that ‘Nature will reveal more of its secrets to the English, than to others; because it [Nature, as God's providential agent] has already furnish't them with a genius as well proportion'd, for the receiving, and retaining its mysteries’. God had designed the English to be best able to comprehend his creation: for ‘the improvement of this kind of light, the English disposition is of all others the fittest’.Footnote ¹³¹ The genius of the Royal Society was that it finally discovered this true Israel. Even Bacon could be linked to this revelation: in the dedicatory poem of the History, Abraham Cowley likened the English to ‘th'old Hebrews’ and insisted that ‘Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last’ to the ‘very Border’ of ‘the blest promis'd Land’.Footnote ¹³² In providential language, Sprat argued that this was truly ‘a good sign’ of God's special blessing upon the nation, in an era in which God's signifiers were still (mistakenly) discovered everywhere.Footnote ¹³³

Sprat thus constructed a broad, ‘cultural’ understanding of chosen nation as Englishness. His message was that a nation that could mimic God's manner of ruling his creation through a settled, ordered, hierarchical and law-bound structure proved itself to be most truly ‘godly’ and would best retain God's favour. Against this Anglican Royalist Israel stood the divisive and untested ‘conceits of [false] Providences’ which had been ‘one of the most considerable causes of these spiritual distractions, of which our Country has long bin the Theater’.Footnote ¹³⁴ In order to reduce the danger from uncontrolled speculation, Sprat moved to control typological readings, insisting, ‘We err … when we translate the ancient Prophecies from those times, and Countries, which they did properly regard, to others, which they do not concern’.Footnote ¹³⁵ This was a direct response to the dangerous talk of providential judgments following the Plague and Great Fire. In scientific circles, as elsewhere, there was increasing analysis of what constituted divine intervention, and of the levels of proof needed to establish such an occurrence: ‘we offend’, said Sprat, ‘when we admit of New Prophetical Spirits in this Age, without the uncontroulable tokens of Hevenly Authority’.Footnote ¹³⁶ For Sprat, the Royal Society's natural philosophy of ‘facts’, multiple witnessing and collective appraisal would stand as guardian against the ‘disgrace to the Reason’ (and threat to the state) that ‘every fantastical Humorist should presume to interpret all the secret Ordinances of Heven … though he never be so ignorant of the very common Works of Nature, that lye under his Feet’.Footnote ¹³⁷ Hence his argument that when disease such as plague strikes, should ‘we only accuse the Anger of Providence, or the Cruelty of Nature: we lay the blame where it is not justly to be laid’. Sprat's focus on human negligence in not better applying reason, rather than assuming providential punishment for the failings of the restored regime, challenged individual ability to gauge Israel's standing, and was ultimately an appeal for calm.Footnote ¹³⁸

While Sprat lauded the Royal Society for providing safe sites for disagreement, he also saw that experimentalism could establish how frequently human opinion would prove wrong in matters subject to verification. From this realization a prophylactic effect could emerge. Potentially unruly subjects might accept that they were wrong, too, about government and religion. After all, it was the ‘Idolizing of their own Wit’ that had led people to ‘set up their own Opinions, and worship them’. Happily, the Royal Society provided a remedy: ‘vain Idolatry will inevitably fall before Experimental Knowledge’. This, too, was a link to a reinterpreted Israel, since, as Sprat reminded his readers, ‘Transgression of the Law is Idolatry’, the breach of contract for which God had punished the original chosen nation.Footnote ¹³⁹ It was also to shift the ideological balance. Idolatry had commonly been a charge hurled at Rome, not at other Protestants, who were now Sprat's target. In insisting that England could now prosper only ‘If God has not in his wrath resolv'd to transplant [his favour] into some quarter of the Earth, which has not so much neglected his Goodness’,Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Sprat blatantly mimicked the puritans' warnings from the 1630s. Yet, as in earlier jeremiads, God had mercifully deigned to give his Israel one last chance. As Sprat told it, a new dawn had already broken: ‘since the Kings return, the blindness of the former Ages, and the miseries of this last, are vanish'd away’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Now, ‘a new way of improvement of the Arts’, subject to allegedly public and ordered scrutiny, could replace the dangerous individualism of private religious experimentalism, and secure God's continued affections for the nation.Footnote ¹⁴² Israel was no longer an extended scriptural moment, perpetually recording human error and divine censure. National achievement would now replace the individual salved conscience in a people ‘satiated with Religious Disputes’.Footnote ¹⁴³ Under monarchical and Anglican rule, the Royal Society would be the engine that built a permanent home for Israel. Yet exactly how was progress to be measured?

To some earlier Protestant writers, prosperity had been an indication of danger in Israel and there was still a strong moral concern, even within scientific circles, that individual wealth should not exceed ‘sufficiency’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ But the trend was otherwise. In 1660 the astrologer Joseph Blagrave cited Psalm 91 to support a connection of Israel and material success; ‘riches’, he insisted, ‘are tokens of God's love and favour unto his chosen people’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The ‘chosen’ signifier was being rescued from the private sphere of revelation and relocated in the material realm of wealth. So while religion was a ‘hevenly thing’, Sprat argued that it should also make use of ‘the Rules of human Prudence’. This meant that the Church needed to cut its cloth differently: ‘it is not the best service that can be done to Christianity, to place its chief Praecepts so much out of the way, as to make them unfit for men of business’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ For Sprat, this spoke directly to the fundamental soteriological divide with Calvinists: ‘It is a wrong conception of the state of Grace, if men believe, that when they enter upon it, they must presently cast away all the thoughts and desires of humanity. If this were so, to sanctifie our Natures were not to renew, but to destroy them.’Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The re-established Church should therefore act as a friend to ‘Commerce, Intelligence, Discovery, Navigation, or any sort of Mechanics’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Against Sorbière, he insisted that an impartial philosopher would favour the established Church in part because of ‘how neerly its interest is united with the prosperity of our Country’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ At home, in the religiously mixed confines of the Royal Society, ‘free converse’ constituted ‘the best way’ to make the Church of England's ‘Doctrine, and Discipline’ become ‘universally embrac'd’. And as the Royal Society spread knowledge of the English abroad, the Church of England would gain further. In the History he suggested that if ‘all wise Men’ were to have two religions, then whichever one they chose first – to accord with conformity in their own country – ‘I am confident, that [they] … would make ours their second’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

A dedication to making the state wealthy was, of course, neither new nor exclusively Anglican Royalist. Dissenters, too, connected national providence with commerce and trade. Sprat's contribution was to bring together continued chosen-nation status, the Royal Society, restored monarchy and a monopolistic Church of England. In the History, Israel was transformed into a national covenant of industrious labour based on the comprehension and exploitation of creation. Wealth production would now be a substitute for godly sallies against the Antichrist. Forced unity in civil and spiritual questions would combine with experimental knowledge to provide the economic expansion now required as a mark of God's blessing. Together, Sprat warranted, they would deliver ‘an infallible course to make England the glory of the Western world’, ‘Masters of the Trade of the World’ and ruler of the oceans in ‘an Universall peace’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The new Israel could turn away from Calvinist self-doubt and perpetual acceptance of providential national injury. Yet, in keeping with his co-operative theology, Sprat stressed, in the material world, too, not a Calvinist imposition but an Arminian availability of God's special blessings.

But was the claim that the Royal Society could build a new England just words, too, no more rooted than the recent millenarian ecstasies? If Israel was now a tale told in material success, it was crucial to the future of the Royal Society (and, as Sprat constructed it, the restored regime) to provide evidence of immediate benefit. To emphasize the concreteness of the Society, Sprat stressed that experimentalism did not deal with ‘imaginary Ideas of conceptions’. This was intended to ward off charges that the Society's work was ephemeral and impractical, and so would not contribute to England's wealth.Footnote ¹⁵² The new philosophy was already widely accepted; Sprat emphasized it was ‘being admitted into our Exchange, our Church, our Palaces, and our Court’, as well as the ‘Shops of our Mechanicks’. Where before it had been ‘for the most part only the Study of the sullen, and the poor’, it had now ‘begun to keep the best Company … and to become the Employment of the Rich, and the Great’. Already there were improved ‘Publick Works’ and government assistance ‘for the increase of Manufactures’, and above all Charles II's ‘Zeal for the Prosperity of our Country’.Footnote ¹⁵³ So even ‘zeal’ was to be transformed from a religious to a nationalistic and economic exercise. This monarchical energy allowed Sprat to insist that Dutch economic success was not due to Holland's republican constitution, a pointed message for those who still favoured the ‘Good Old Cause’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Even Sorbière had acknowledged a new English dedication to discovery after 1660 and the potential this held: that ‘everywhere in England, men [were] busie about Naturall Experiments from whose labours … mankind may expect prodigious Inventions’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Sprat recited a list of already successful endeavours: the ‘Cole-pits of New castle, the Clothworks of the West, and the North, the Lead Mines of Derby, the Orchards of Hereford, the Plough-lands of Devon, the New Rivers of the Fenns, the Tinn Mines of Cornwall’, as well as the overseas ventures in Barbados, Virginia and Tangier.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ As a further selling point, he emphasized that alleviating ‘idle poverty’ and so improving the material lives of the poor would bind the many-headed monster to both the state and the scientific model which had brought such benefits.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ This was also part of a shift towards viewing the underemployed as labour capital, from the exploitation of which the nation could further profit. Yet relying on quantitative measures was also a gamble. Economic shortcomings – the alleged downturn in trade, for example – might effectively rebut the claim to be a new form of Israel. Hence Sprat's insistence that customs revenues had greatly increased under Charles II – he had to establish that the new Israel was already a success.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

Conclusion

In the early 1660s the Royal Society was a marginal cultural institution. It faced learned opposition, the satire of wits and royal fecklessness. Its finances were uncertain and its collection of ‘facts’ not yet evidently of much use or intellectual influence. Natural philosophers might themselves have been of a disposition to be calmed by an emphasis on ‘things’, but in the short term (which most worried Anglican Royalists) it was likely to be only the material effects which would calm a nation largely uninterested in the Society's epistemological novelties. This essay has argued that Sprat situated his history of the Royal Society within the anti-Calvinist theological and ecclesiological battles of the 1660s. To retain the prerogatives of the Church and monarchy required more than law. It was necessary to neutralize the intellectual underpinnings of continued opposition. Part of that strategy was the appropriation of the conventions that had supported individual conscience before proper obedience. Sprat therefore set the History and the correlative Observations within an emerging Restoration discourse of a longue durée narrative of post-Reformation England. Both were emphatically conformist texts. They not only offered a legitimation of the Society's natural philosophy; probably more importantly for Sprat himself, they also constructed a close association between experimentalism and the struggle to demolish the Calvinist influence in the established Church. As this new learning promised continual discoveries and valuable application, so England's status as God's radically reconfigured Israel would be assured. In addition, Sprat preached the tantalizing prospect of theological calm. Emphasizing moral religion rather than arcane soteriology, and basing the new image on rational and probabilistic principles, Sprat offered success before suffering, self-praise in place of self-castigation, material wealth before sacrifice, and national success rather than ‘godly’ division. After the depredations and hatreds of the revolutionary era, the propaganda value of these promises and assurances for the new science should not be underestimated. Lastly and most fundamentally, for a regime not yet sitting securely once again upon its privileges, appropriating the new science from the enthusiasts and associating it firmly with Church and king while promising economic gain allowed Sprat to turn the public face of experimentalism from a potentially dangerous way to re-form society into merely a way to improve it, materially, and, through prosperity, to calm it.