Monday, August 31, 2015

Indulgent Puritans

But there is no understanding the period of the Reformation in England until we have grasped the fact that the quarrel between the Puritans and the Papists was not primarily a quarrel between rigorism and indulgence, and that, in so far as it was, the rigorism was on the Roman side. On many questions, and specially in their view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party; if we may without disrespect so use the name of a great Roman Catholic, a great writer, and a great man, they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries.

- CS Lewis  (“Donne and Love Poetry” (1938), in Selected Literary Essays [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979], 116).  Cited by Doug Wilson.

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