ABSTRACT
The range of prohibitions and penalties for disobeying the code of morality prescribed in the Old Testament was extended once the Puritans governed the country. Imprisonment could be imposed for fornication and death for adultery. As the Puritan Richard Sibbes explained in 1630, ‘God knows that people are prone to despair for sin.’ God chose who were to be saved and who were to be damned: this was determined by the Almighty prior to and apart from any worth or merit on a person’s part. The argument that the doctrine of predestination made God the author of sin did not occur to Puritans like Cromwell. It has been argued that the teachings of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, who maintained that the human will had to co-operate with God in salvation and that men were free to exercise their private judgement about the meaning of the Scriptures, penetrated into the Church of England after Charles became King.
