This section contains 5,496 words (approx. 19 pages at 300 words per page) |
SOURCE: Smith, Julia J. “Attitudes toward Conformity and Nonconformity in Thomas Traherne.” Bunyan Studies 1, no. 1 (autumn 1988): 26-35.
In the following essay, originally presented in March, 1988, Smith characterizes Traherne as a political conformist, based on views expressed in Select Meditations and other works.
Thomas Traherne in the 1670s refused to admit that genuine religious persecution could be found in England; where Christianity ‘is freely and purely Professed in any Nation or Kingdom (as at present in Ours) a Man may be as divine and heavenly as an Angel’, and would be valued in proportion to his holiness. If schismatics and heretics, in endeavouring ‘to overthrow the established Religion and Discipline among us’ did bring ‘Enemies and Penalties’ on themselves, they were ‘not to be fathered on Vertue’.1 To nonconformists like Richard Baxter, John Bunyan, George Fox and many others, it did not seem that the nation valued them in...
This section contains 5,496 words (approx. 19 pages at 300 words per page) |