SOURCE: Introduction to Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution 1638-1647, edited by William Haller, Octagon Books, Inc., 1965, pp. 1-8.

In the following essay, Haller surveys the sources "from which the Puritan doctrine of liberty sprang." He also argues that in revolutionary pamphlets the doctrine of liberty was developed alongside modern English prose.

The pamphlets of the Puritan Revolution have seemed to later generations like relics of a universe

and yet those "embryon atoms" there engaged in elemental strife were the seeds of the modern world. Controversy in that great crisis revolved in ever-widening circles about religious questions which came to be not solved, so much as dismissed, or, it would be better to say, transformed beyond recognition. To attempt reform of the English Church in the seventeenth century was to attempt the reorganization of society. Dissenting religious minorities, one after another, seized the occasion to demand toleration...