Part II - Moderate churches

Summary

Moderate churches

We have seen in Part I, in general and synchronic terms, how the ideal of moderation in early modern England combined ethical restraint and political authority. This did not simply mean, as has often been stated, that self-control authorised external government; this was partly true, as in the paradigmatic cases of idealised manhood and idealised godliness, but at the same time claims for self-government were always at least partially attenuated by the weight of original sin. The point, then, is that at one higher level of abstraction the concept of moderation subsumed and combined internal and external moderation in a dialectical relationship: the moderation of individuals always depended upon them being restrained from the outside, but that external restraint was authorised by the moderation of the individuals who performed it. In a public or political context, this tension produced a suspicion of worldly power as sinful, fallen and in need of restraint, even as it nominated such worldly power as the proper agent of restraint upon a sinful and fallen world.