This denominational view of the church found only limited acceptance in England, where the Church of England retained a favored position, even after the Act of Toleration in 1689 recognized the rights of Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers to worship freely. In the English colonies of America, however, the denominational theory gained increasing acceptance. It seemed to be God’s answer for the multiplying faiths in the New World.
You always see it in those closest to you.
Irritation and contempt were, after all, not things one felt for people far removed from oneself.
(Sonuçta, sinirlenme ve küçümseme, insanın kendisinden çok uzak insanlara karşı hissettiği duygular değildi.)
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The idea that God’s Word could be found on both sides of a battle line was a revolutionary concept that gained a hearing only after both sides fell from exhaustion.
After abolishing the House of Lords, the House of Commons proclaimed England a republic—the Commonwealth. But in 1653 the army, still distrusting Parliament, overthrew the Commonwealth and set up a form of government called a protectorate. Cromwell held the Office of Lord Protector, virtually a military dictator of England.
The Lord Protector tried to achieve a religious settlement for the nation by granting liberty to a wide variety of Christian groups growing on the religious landscape: Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, Quakers, Levelers, and others. Unfortunately, he found the task impossible, and the last three years of his life were filled with disappointment and trouble. When he died in 1658, the “rule of the saints” in old England died with him. Within two years the country welcomed the return of the monarchy and, with the king, the office of bishop.
Laud’s high-minded and high-handed policy drove some Puritans toward Separatism and others across the Atlantic to America. Within ten years after Laud became archbishop, twenty towns and churches had sprung up in Massachusetts Bay: in all sixteen thousand people, including the four hundred who heard John Cotton’s farewell at Southampton.
The Chinese mission, however, met with misfortune, this time not from external pressures but from Dominican and Franciscan missionaries who argued that adaptation to Chinese ways had gone too far. Ricci had tried to avoid presenting Christianity to the Chinese as something new. He refused to consider these advanced and religious people as atheists, so he taught that traditional Chinese devotion reached perfection in the Christian faith. The “Lord of Heaven,” whom the Chinese had so long revered, was God. Ricci contended that the reverence for ancestors, so common in China, was not a religious act but a social one, and therefore acceptable to Christians.
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One pope approved, another disapproved, until after a century the whole mission in China fell into serious decline.
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