Religious conventions and science in the early Restoration: Reformation and ‘Israel’ in Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667)

Sprat situated his analysis of the Royal Society within an emerging Anglican Royalist narrative of the longue durée of post-Reformation England. A closer examination of Sprat's own religious views reveals that his principal interest in the History of the Royal Society, as in the closely related reply to Samuel de Sorbière, the Observations, was to appropriate the advantages and benefits of the Royal Society as support for a re-established, anti-Calvinist Church of England. Sprat connected the two through a reformulation of the powerful conventions of ‘Reformation’ and ‘Israel’, both of which still resonated strongly in the religious politics of the 1660s. Applying his voluntarist theology, Sprat changed especially the representation of the chosen nation from a tale of divine castigation and punishment to a rational and probabilistic covenant based on material success as the indicator of God's pleasure. Sprat proposed that the knowledge and application of nature, through the experimental labours of the Royal Society, could build an increasingly wealthy nation and so a permanent home for the reconfigured Israel. Attaching this to a renewed monarchical and Anglican state also meant security for the traditional forms of rule.

Principalities and Corporations

When we arrive in a wealthy nation and denounce oppressive structures which exist in poor nations; when we say that some of the rich in poor countries live at the expense of the misery of thousands and even millions of their fellow citizens; when we describe the subhuman situation in which millions of God's children in the underdeveloped world continue to vegetate, it is easy to obtain understanding, svmpathy, and generosity on the part of wealthy nations.But we dare not go further. For if we wish to say that together with wrong structures which should be changed in poor countries there are also wrong structures to be changed in rich nations as well, the first impression is that we are joking: Why change, if everything is going well, the country is rich and grows more prosperous each day?