Religious Prose of Seventeenth-Century England [antikvár]

Introduction In order to read with discrimination the religious literature of the seventeenth century, we must educate ourselves in some unfamiliar assumptions, must learn to recognize certain historical conditions which are foreign to us because we live in the twentieth century, nourished by a literature largely secular, irreligious, or religious, if at all, in ways which would be quite incomprehensible to seventeenth-century readers. We must recognize, first, that religious writings of the types included in this volume—sermons, devotions, confessions of faith, manuals of piety, polemical tracts, spiritual autobiographies, moral allegories, meditations, aphorisms—were not a literary bypath of the seventeenth century, not exclusively the interest of special groups, specially learned or devout. Religious words were written, published and read by all sorts of people. The two greatest poets of the period, John Donne and John Milton, spent more years of their lives writing religious works in prose than composing poems, Donne as a priest of the Church of England, Milton as a would-be priest whose conscience drove him out of that Church. Not only poets and priests, but men of almost every profession were engaged in this activity. Among the other religious writers in this volume, Sir Thomas Browne was a physician, Lord Herbert a courtier and ambassador as well as a philosopher, John Bunyan a tinker, Isaac Barrow a mathematician and teacher of