Quakers and Conscience: Edward Burrough's Promotion of Religious Tolerance 1653-1663
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The English Civil War period is a fascinating area of study given the religious, political and military battles which were waged from 1642-1649. Following the regicide of 1649 and the ascendency of Oliver Cromwell during the Interregnum, the formation of radical groups dominated the social sphere. This thesis is concerned with one particular sect, the Quakers, or Society of Friends. Beginning as a loosely organized meeting of like-minded individuals and quickly numbering in the thousands, the Quakers became a source of contention for the government. Their unorthodox behaviour, unpretentious lifestyle and philosophy of the equality of all, set them apart in the class-conscious society of seventeenth-century England. Convinced that they were led by the Light of Christ, they defied state laws, the formalism of the Church of England and the social mores of deference to superiors. This caused many to be imprisoned and persecuted both by state authorities and by neighbours.\n\n\t This thesis examines one Quaker’s responses to this persecution and his arguments in favour of toleration. It reviews the copious writings of the Quaker Edward Burrough, who published extensively from 1653 to 1663. He not only refuted tracts written by others against Quakerism, but also wrote to those in authority to advocate liberty of conscience and relief from persecution. Confrontational and hostile at times in his replies to John Bunyan, he defended Quaker doctrine which the latter had challenged. Burrough wrote to Oliver and Richard Cromwell and Parliament imploring them to relieve Quakers of persecution and to provide liberty of conscience. Correspondence to Charles II after his Restoration in 1660 was forceful and relatively successful as the persecution of Quakers in the Boston area was somewhat relieved.\n\n\tThis thesis demonstrates that Burrough’s argument for requesting liberty of conscience was that conscience was sacred because it was informed by God through the Light of Christ. The Light of Christ, moreover, dwelled equally within all people. He also suggested that the benefits of allowing liberty of conscience would be felt in the economic, social and political aspects of English life and would help to make England great. Ultimately, Burrough advocated toleration because he argued that toleration was a basic right of freeborn Englishmen.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".