John Dury, Advocate of Christian Reunion

Extract

Richard Baxter correctly described the seventeenth century as a “contentious, dividing Age”. Divisive tendencies had been dominant in the preceding century. But the Protestant leaders in the Age of the Reformation had generally maintained that there was but one universal church. Their protests against Roman Catholic abuses and the consequent counter-charges of a revived Roman Catholicism produced the cleavage of Western Christendom and broke the formal unity of the church. Despite the inevitable differences of opinion which emerged amid the storm and stress of the time, the Protestant leaders often expressed their interest in the promotion of the visible unity of the church and they shared a common hope for the ultimate establishment of a new catholicity expressed in terms of universal free communion in place of the old Catholicism under the headship of the pope. But tendencies which the reformers failed to curb soon produced a succession of divisions. The separatists from Rome showed a marked inclination to form separate communions which, at first, followed territorial and national lines. Due to territorial, national, personal, political, and theological differences, the lines of demarcation between the groups into which Christendom was being divided gradually became defined with more pronounced clearness. In the latter part of the sixteenth century new lines of cleavage appeared. The development of rigid types of Protestant scholasticism intensified the strife over confessional differences and the Wars of Religion increased the hatreds of the age.