This book is a study of the pratical application of a religious idea: the belief in the continuing validity of the Old Testament, especially the Ten Commandments, which ordained the observance of the Sabbath on the seventh day, Saturday.
The author traces the growth and development of the most radical of English Sabbath observers, those who revered the Jewish Sabbath in a Christian context. But this is not only a pre-history of the Seventh-Day Adventists.
It is also the story of the remarkable persistence of a revolutionary religious belief powerful and convincing enough to survive the...

One of the main consequences of recent work in early modern intellectual and religious history has been a discrediting of the notion of a sudden and dramatic transition to the spiritual world of the Enlightenment. Scholars are increasingly examining the underlying spiritual trends and tendencies which confirm the variety and complexity of the slow movement from Renaissance to Enlightenment, and the profound impact of many of the manifestations of intellectual and religious tension during the early modern period. The essays in this volume are a contribution to this process of reappraisal,...