Primitive Christianity revived: religious renewal in Augustan England

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Abstract
The restoration of Charles II seemed to the men of the church of England the miraculous inauguration of a golden age—‘When the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion: then were we like unto them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter: and our tongue with joy.’ The clerical beneficiaries of the settlement of 1662 had much to rejoice them; the act of uniformity symbolised the secure replanting of the Laudian ideal, an ideal which, as R. S. Bosher has shown, had stiffened and intensified in the years of adversity. The restored church was more certain of itself, more intransigent in its jure divino episcopal claims, than the church of the 1630s. This new assurance was nourished by the flowering of anglican patristic learning which is so striking a feature of the later seventeenth century. The magisterial works of Ussher and Pearson on the Ignatian epistles, of Pearson and Fell on Cyprian, and of Bull on the ante-Nicene fathers, each contributed to a deepening sense of the continuity of the church of England with the catholic church of the first centuries. More and more the appeal to antiquity became the criterion of orthodoxy, and in that antiquity anglicanism found not merely its origins, but, occasionally and increasingly, a mirror image of itself. William Beveridge told his hearers at St Peter’s Cornhill.there are [some] who blame our Reformation as defective, as if the Church were not reformed, not purged enough from the errors it had before contracted; but if such would but lay aside all prejudices and impartially consider the constitution of our church, as it is now reformed, they might clearly see that as there is nothing defective so neither is there anything superflous in it, but that it exactly answers the pattern of the Primitive and Apostolical Church itself, as near as it is possible for a national church to do it.

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