Subtle Puritan allegiances in the English Civil War: J C Ryle on Thomas Manton

This year — 2010 — marks the 350th anniversary of the Restoration of the Crown in England.  Charles II restored the monarchy in England after Cromwell’s oppressive Interregnum.

Allow me to interject at this point that I found out about this grand anniversary only because of a limited edition coin commercial I saw on television recently.  This is certainly nothing that the BBC or our government is pontificating about.  In fact, very few people in England are even aware of this.

The reason why Puritanism is unlikely to gain a foothold in our green and pleasant land — for the foreseeable future, anyway — is that too many Englishmen have studied the Cromwell years at school.  It was a dire time and represented a most ugly side of Calvinism as influenced by John Knox, a Scot.  Knox’s Reformation preceded the Interregnum, to be sure, but the English Puritans took up all his worst ideas with a vengeance.  Knox went considerably beyond where John Calvin’s teachings ended, but that’s a subject for another time.  Needless to say, England has no appetite for any whiff of extra-strong Calvinism in its established Church or in its government.  Having said that, you may be excused for thinking that the Labour Party has been a pretty good representation of Cromwellian government, minus the religion, from 1997-2010.  It seems apposite then that we now have a coalition government and many of us hope that the oppressive 4,289 new laws over the past 13 years will begin to be repealed soon.

In any event, discussion of the Restoration generally brings up the subject of opportunism.  Then, as now, those with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge (known as ‘Oxbridge’) were Cromwell’s biggest supporters.  However, once Charles II assumed the throne, vacated by his father (Charles I whom Cromwell had beheaded), these same people changed their allegiances overnight.  The most famous example is the diarist Samuel Pepys (Cambridge), who ended up becoming a Royalist in 1660 and worked in the Admiralty on a continuous career trajectory throughout his adult life. The same was true of his friends from university.  To Spouse Mouse and me, these chaps were opportunists.  How can someone sincerely shift their loyalties so quickly?

This brings us to the attitudes of Puritan clergymen.  Certainly, some of them must have been opportunists, too, one would think.  Sometimes, however, we encounter the biographies of men who had principles and a conscience.  J C Ryle, before he became the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, wrote a biography of the Rev’d Thomas Manton (1620-1677), a Puritan minister in England (pictured at right).  Excerpts of Ryle’s ‘Estimate of Manton’ follow.

Ryle wrote his essay in 1870, when Modernism was taking hold in our churches, not only in Europe but in the United States.  (See the final four paragraphs here.)  He laments that teachings are falling by the wayside and that, as a result, so is a lively faith among church members:

We have fallen upon evil days both for thinking and reading. Sermons which contain thought and matter are increasingly rare. The inexpressible shallownesss, thinness, and superficiality of many popular sermons in this day is something lamentable and appalling. Readers of real books appear to become fewer and fewer every year. Newspapers, and magazines, and periodicals seem to absorb the whole reading powers of the rising generation. What it will all end in God only knows. The prospect before us is sorrowful and humiliating.

True then, true now — 140 years later.

However, in Manton’s time:

… vague, indistinct, and indefinite statements of doctrine were not tolerated. The Christian Church was not regarded by any school as a kind of Pantheon, in which a man might believe and teach anything, everything, or nothing, so long as he was a clever and earnest man. Such views were reserved for our modern times. In the seventeenth century they were scorned and repudiated by every Church and sect in Christendom. In the seventeenth century, every divine who would achieve a reputation and obtain influence, was obliged to hold distinct and sharply cut opinions. Earnestness alone was not thought sufficient to make a creed. Whether Episcopalian or Presbyterian, whether Conformist or Nonconformist, whether an admirer of Luther, or Calvin, or Arminius, every divine held certain distinct theological views. A vague, colourless, boneless, undogmatic Christianity, supplying no clear comfort in life, and no clear hope in death, was a Christianity which found favour with none.

Ryle defies suggestions that Manton (Oxford) was an opportunist, supporting Cromwell, then becoming the King’s Chaplain:

Some one may perhaps imagine that Manton was a prudent, “canny ” man, who avoided doing anything to give offence, and had a keen eye to his own interests. There is not an atom of foundation for such a theory. When it was first proposed to bring to trial and execute Charles I., Manton was one of fifty-seven divines who signed and published a bold protest against the design. When Christopher Love was beheaded by Oliver Cromwell on a charge of treason, Manton accompanied him to the scaffold, and afterwards preached his funeral sermon at St. Lawrence Jewry, though the soldiers threatened to shoot him. As to minding his own interests, no man perhaps ever thought less of them than Manton. The mere fact that he refused the Deanery of Rochester, when offered to him by Charles II., and afterwards resigned St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, for conscience sake, is plain evidence that he never shrank from giving offence if Christ’s truth, in his judgment, seemed to make it necessary.

Of the Puritans in general, Ryle sets us straight (emphases in the original):

For Dr. Manton’s sake, and for the honour of a cruelly misrepresented body of men, let me try to explain to the reader what the Puritans really were. He that supposes they were ignorant, fanatical sectaries, haters of the Crown and Church of England – men alike destitute of learning, holiness, or loyalty – has got a great deal to learn. Let him hear some plain facts, which I will venture to copy from a work written by myself in 1868 (” Bishops and Clergy of other Days “).

“The Puritans were not enemies to the monarchy. It is simply false to say that they were. The great majority of them protested strongly against the execution of Charles I., and were active agents in bringing back Charles II. to England, and placing the crown on his head after Oliver Cromwell’s death. The base ingratitude with which they were afterwards treated, in 1662, by the very monarch whom they helped to restore, is one of the most shameful pages in the history of the Stuarts.”

“The Puritans were not enemies to the Church of England. They would gladly have had her government and ceremonial improved, and more liberty allowed in the conduct of public worship. And they were quite right! The very things which they desired to see, but never saw, are actually recommended at this day as worthy of adoption by Churchmen in every part of the land! The great majority of them were originally ordained by bishops, and had no abstract objection to Episcopacy. The great majority of them had no special dislike to liturgies, but only to certain details in the Book of Common Prayer …”

“The Puritans were not unlearned and ignorant men. The great majority of them were Oxford and Cambridge graduates – many of them fellows of colleges, and some of them heads or principals of the best colleges in the two Universities. In knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, in power as preachers, expositors, writers, and critics, the Puritans in their day were second to none. Their works still speak for them on the shelves of every well-furnished theological library. Their commentaries, their expositions, their treatises on practical, casuistical, and experimental divinity, are immeasurably superior to those of their adversaries in the seventeenth century. In short, those who hold up the Puritans to scorn as shallow, illiterate men, are only exposing their own lamentable shallowness, their own ignorance of historical facts, and the extremely superficial character of their own reading.”

“The Puritans, as a body, have done more to elevate the national character than any class of Englishmen that ever lived. Ardent lovers of civil liberty, and ready to die in its defence – mighty at the council board, and no less mighty in the battlefield – feared abroad throughout Europe, and invincible at home while united, great with their pens, and no less great with their swords – fearing God very much, and fearing man very little, – they were a generation of men who have never received from their country the honour that they deserve … Unhappily, when they passed away, they were followed by a generation of profligates, triflers, and sceptics; and their reputation has suffered accordingly in passing through prejudiced hands. But, ‘judged with righteous judgment,’ they will be found men of whom the world was not worthy. The more they are really known, the more they will be esteemed.”

Yet, many of us have a distrust of Puritans for the above reasons, which we learned at school.  In the United States, the sentiments are probably somewhat more nuanced, although, there, too, is an ambivalence towards their theology and way of life, the latter probably common amongst many people of the day with regard to home life, Puritan or not.

In many ways, people carry the same sentiments over to today’s Calvinists, even the Young, Restless and Reformed types. Not a good idea to mention Reformed theology, Puritanism or John Calvin in polite company, certainly here in England, at least.  In order to appreciate the forensic characteristics of the Reformed Church, one must read about it in depth.  No slouches, these chaps.

Ryle commends Manton’s sermons to us.  Whilst conceding that Manton lacks the emotional power of other ministers and theologians, he held:

… the same views which were held by nine-tenths of the English Reformers, and four-fifths of all the leading divines of the Church of England down to the accession of James I. He maintained and taught personal election, the perseverance of the saints, the absolute necessity of a regeneration evidenced by its fruits, as well as salvation by free grace, justification by faith alone, and the uselessness of ceremonial observances without true and vital religion. In all this, there was nothing remarkable. He was only one among hundreds of good men in England who taught all these truths. But in Manton’s Calvinism there was a curiously happy attention to the proportion of truth. He never exalts one doctrine at the expense of another. He gives to each doctrine that place and rank given to it in Scripture, neither more nor less, with a wisdom and felicity which I miss in some of the Puritan divines.

Nonetheless Manton:

… in a day of hard-and-fast systems could dare to be apparently inconsistent, in order to “declare all the counsel of God.” I firmly believe that this is the test of theology, which does good in the Church of Christ. The man who is not tied hand and foot by systems, and does not pretend to reconcile what our imperfect eyesight cannot reconcile in this dispensation, he is the man whom God will bless. Manton was such a man …

At the time Ryle wrote this essay, Manton’s works were to soon be republished, hence the endorsement at that time.

Manton, as Ryle alludes above, was removed of his Royal Chaplaincy in Charles II’s Great Ejection. He was sent to prison, although he was allowed to preach from there.  He died in October 1677 and is buried in the parish church of Stoke Newington (a rural area then but, now, for over a century, a very urban borough of London).

Sometimes, as with the Puritans and Thomas Manton, things are not all they seem, so before we pass judgment, it is worthwhile doing a bit of research and reading.

If you would like to follow Ryle’s recommendation to read Manton’s sermons and other treatises, please visit his home page (see Resources, left-hand column of this blog) which has a complete set of his many works.