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Puritans believed it was the government's responsibility to enforce moral standards and ensure true religious worship was established and maintained. [98] Education was essential to every person, male and female, so that they could read the Bible for themselves.
Some believe that women who were gaining economic or social power, specifically in the form of land inheritance, were at a higher risk of being tried as witches. [85] Others maintain that females were more susceptible to being witches as the Puritans believed that the weak body was a pathway to the soul which both God and the Devil fought for.
The history of the Puritans can be traced back to the first Vestments Controversy in the reign of Edward VI, the formation of an identifiable Puritan movement in the 1560s and ends in a decline in the mid-18th century.
Puritans argued that the bishops were attempting to aggrandize themselves at the Parliament's expense. In the end, James acceded to Parliament's demand, and withdrew the book of canons. The 1604 parliament marks the first time that the Puritans had allied themselves with the cause of Parliament over against the cause of the bishops.
Under Charles I, the Puritans became a political force as well as a religious tendency in the country. Opponents of the royal prerogative became allies of Puritan reformers, who saw the Church of England moving in a direction opposite to what they wanted, and objected to increased Catholic influence both at Court and (as they saw it) within the Willy
This led to the further alienation of Anglicans and Puritans from one another in the 17th century during the reigns of King James and King Charles I, that eventually brought about the English Civil War, the brief rule of the Puritan Lord Protector of England Oliver Cromwell, the English Commonwealth, and as a result the political, religious ...
The Puritan culture of the New England colonies of the seventeenth century was influenced by Calvinist theology, which believed in a "just, almighty God," [1] and a lifestyle of pious, consecrated actions. The Puritans participated in their own forms of recreational activity, including visual arts, literature, and music.
Many Puritans believed the Church of England should follow the example of Reformed churches in other parts of Europe and adopt presbyterian polity, in which an egalitarian network of local ministers cooperated through regional synods. [16] Other Puritans experimented with congregational polity both within the Church of England and outside of it.