An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature

An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature is a concerted effort at intellectual mediation in the deep religious dispute of the English civil war in the seventeenth century. On one side was the antinomian assertion of extreme Calvinists that the elect were redeemed by God’s free grace and thereby free from ordinary moral obligations. Opposite to that was the Arminian rejection of predestination and assertion that Christ died for all, not just for the elect.

Robert A. Greene is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

Hugh MacCallum was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Toronto.