The Protestant Nation

Abstract

‘Our present task is to examine the peculiar characteristics of the English and the special circumstances from which these derive.’ Those are not my words. No English observer can be so detached and no historian ought to stand so far back from his canvas as to be able even to envisage such a task. Roger Anstey, for all his breadth of vision, would not have dreamed of anything so foolish. It is a German scholar (Levin L. Schü;cking, The Puritan Family) who is writing, in 1929, and who is struck by the English character as ‘a very special… character … sharply distinguished from its counterpart on the European mainland’, and which he assumes to be a protestant, or puritan character. Nevertheless while this book is not about the peculiarity of the English protestant character it may occasionally suggest why it should have been thought, and not only by foreigners, that it was a certain ‘very special character’.