THE SOCIAL IDEAS OF RELIGIOUS LEADERS 16601688 By RICHARD B. SCHLATTER O 1971 OCTAGON BOOKS New York PREFACE IN the reign of Charles II clergymen were intellectual leaders. No other thinker had such a wide audience as did the preacher in his pulpit, and his printed sermons and treatises were the staple reading matter of his parishioners. Perhaps no religious leader of the period seems so important to us as Hobbes or Locke, but in the opinion of contem poraries the refutations of the Leviathan were as sound or sounder than the work itself, and it was plain that Locke had built upon ideas of natural law which divines had thought out before him. We are certainly justified in assuming that clerical social theory is an important chapter in the history of ideas about society which were current from 1660 to 1688. What clergymen thought is, of course, interesting in itself. Richard Baxters Christian Directory is the last medieval summa published in England, while Richard Cumberland and John...