ABSTRACT
During the 1620s and 1630s, English Protestantism became increasingly divided between those who insisted on the Calvinist interpretation of the doctrine of predestination and those who, following the views of the Dutch theologian James Arminius, saw a greater role for the human will in the work of salvation. Opinion was also virulently divided between those who argued that the Church should be a body of the godly alone and others who argued that the Church was a national body, whose spiritual service was to be made available not only for the edification of those “Puritans” who alone seemed to consider themselves godly but, more broadly, for the salvation of all English subjects. These were certainly not the only issues which led to the English Civil War, but they were important sources of tension and conflict within the Church and in English society more broadly. And it proved somewhat difficult after the Restoration of the monarchy to settle on a form of Church government and a unifying theological vision. The final Act of Settlement (1662) resulted in a nation divided into two groups, legally very sharply defined, but in fact rather heterogeneous. There were those who conformed to the new requirements of the Church of England and those who did not – conformists and nonconformists, or “Anglicans” and “Dissenters.”1
