Spenser's Defense of Lord Grey
by Harry Stuart Vedder Jones (9780217876209)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II The Cult Of Nationalism And Tolerance In England And France In the period of the Reformation and the Religious Wars the culture of the Renascence was endangered by fanaticism. Passionate and vindictive loyalties delayed the triumph of liberal thought. The excesses of religious enthusiasm insulted that ideal of the tempered passions and the open mind which it was the concern of the humanist to inculcate; and as an instrument of reform the pliant Erasmian disposition, open to impressions, barbed with irony, impatient of the mechanism of dogma, gave way before the inquisition and the auto-da-Jt. Everywhere, according to Janet, Protestant intolerance imitated and equaled the intolerance of Catholic-. Beza, Calvin, and even Melanchthon argued strongly for the punishment of Catholics.2 In Spenser's time the strategic answer to the Catholic challenge was made not so much by those who like Beza adopted Catholic tactics as by moderates of both religions who recognized in the spirit of religious tolerance the salvation of the state. The outstanding documents of Anglican religious literature are apologetic. To meet the attacks of both Catholics and Puritans the chief apologists of the Establishment, Jewel and Hooker, interpreted the English Reformation as a revival on the one hand of early Christianity and patristic Catholicism, as contrasted with the scholastic and corrupt Catholicism of the Romanists; on the other hand, as a conservative bulwark protecting at once the state and the traditional church against the extravagance and the vagaries of the extreme Protestant sects. In his Apologia Ecdesiae Anglicanae?7 Bishop Jewel compares the Romanists with the Anabaptists and the Libertines in that they all shake off the yoke of civil power.28 An exponent of order and a cham...

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