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Religio Laici; A Series of Studies Addressed to Laymen
Religio Laici A Series of Studies Addressed to Laymen Author:Henry Charles Beeching General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1902 Original Publisher: Smith, Elder Subjects: Christianity Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Bo... more »oks.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: THE SPIRIT OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH, AS EXHIBITED IN THE LITERATURE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THE SPIRIT OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH, AS EXHIBITED IN THE LITERATURE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. Many people must have felt that there is about the best religious writings of the Church of England a tone and temper proper to it, and distinguishable from those of other communions. Whether this temper can be precisely described as well as distinguished, whether in any attempted analysis so volatile a spirit would not escape, is another matter. The attempt at least to indicate it seems worth making, because at the present day there prevails in some quarters a disposition to deny to our Church any peculiar characteristics of its own, other than a certain cold formalism, due to its connection with the State ; which Erastian coldness it is considered to be the duty of loyal Churchmen to qualify by an infusion from the literature and ritual of warmer climes. Against such ill-instructed loyalty the following pages may serve as a protest. Their aim is to call attention, in the literature of the great period when our Church started upon her independent I) 2 career, to the reasonable faith, the wide intellectual sympathy, the reserved enthusiasm, the reverent piety, which inspire those writings; qualities which were no merely accidental reaction against Romanism on the one hand and Puritanism on the other, though they define themselves constantly by reference to those, but an ideal that was framed by a study of Scripture and the primitive Church ; and reflected as it ...« less