The Protestant Frame of Mind
W.R. Ward looks at belief in eighteenth-century Europe and explores the tensions and creativity as the impulses of Reformation met the world of the Enlightenment.
Profoundly riven by competing confessional orthodoxies of Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist and other reformed churches, each organised around an orthodox party, tied generally to states which differed endlessly in organisation and political interests, eighteenth-century Protestantism possessed in a deeper sense a common frame of mind. Deep-seated failures of understanding such as those created by new enterprises like American religion in the nineteenth century or African Christianity in the twentieth were still to come. In the early-eighteenth century there were still common perceptions of common problems, even shared disagreements on how to react to them which transcended the bounds of nation and denomination.
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