The Puritan Humanist

“By a puritan the Elizabethans meant one who wished to abolish episcopacy and remodel the Church of England on the lines which Calvin had laid down for Geneva. They puritan party were not separatists or (in the modern sense) dissenters . . . There were therefore degrees of puritanism and it is difficult to draw a hard and fast line . . . By a humanist I mean one who taught, or learned, or at least strongly favoured, Greek and the new kind of Latin; and by humanism, the critical principles and critical outlook which ordinarily went with these studies. Humanism is in fact the first form of classicism. It is evident that if we use the words in this way we hsll not see our period in terms of a conflict between humanists and puritans . . . In reality the puritans and the humanists were quite often the same people” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, p. 18).