Since the resurgence of interest in the Augustan period, the myriad of sixteenth- seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary attacks on the Puritans have been enumerated, catalogued, analyzed, and elucidated. Although the Puritans were accused of a seemingly endless series of malefactions, most of the anti-sectarian assaults, we have been told, charged them with ignorance — the inability to see the value of the established church — or hypocrisy — the desire to use religion to advance political ambitions, secure riches, or satisfy libidinous interests. By mid-seventeenth century, however, a change occurred in the nature of the attacks which has not been adequately discussed. Instead of questioning the sincerity of the Puritans' religious countenance or ascribing the usual peccadillos to them, Puritan traducers charged the sectaries with insanity. Although societies in all ages have protected themselves from unpopular and dissenting opinions by declaring them products of a deranged mind, anti-sectarians in the Restoration and eighteenth century established a rationale for their charges of madness by employing contemporary medical theory to demonstrate that the Puritans suffered from mental and emotional disorders as a result of natural physical causes. Enthusiasts were seen as splenetic sufferers, and their erratic behavior and religious delusions were explained as the inevitable consequence of melancholic vapors.

In the provocative eleventh book of his Confessions, Augustine mused:

What then is time? Who can find a quick and easy answer to that question? Whoever in his mind can grasp the subject well enough to be able to make a statement on it? Yet in ordinary conversation we use the word ‘time’ more often and more familiarly than any other. And certainly we understand what we mean by it, just as we must understand what others mean by it when we hear the word from them. What then is time? I know what it is if no one asks me what it is; but if I want to explain it to someone who has asked me, I find that I do not know.

John Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions had its genesis in 1623 when Donne fell into a nearly fatal illness. In an age which held that there is literally no health in man — “only two degrees, sickness and neutrality,” as Donne wrote to Sir Henry Goodyer — sickness was widely taken as the visible sign of a sinful condition, and Donne's Devotions is no exception. Like “Good Friday, 1613,” “Batter my heart, three person'd God,” and “A Hymne to God the Father,” the Devotions reflects a soul distressed by sin and longing for the assurance of grace. Yet the Devotions is more than a series of meditations on his physical and spiritual condition; it is also a prose sequence on repentance that is aimed at a public audience. As Donne wrote to Sir Robert Ker while convalescing, “I have used this leisure to put the Meditations, had in my sickness, into some such order as may minister some holy delight.” Given Donne's public intention, both the “order” of the Devotions and its “holy delight” merit further examination.

The Chorus of Milton's Samson Agonistes is highly platitudinous because it relies on Old Testament traditional wisdom to account for Samson's experience. It is groping within that kind of wisdom to understand the significance of what is happening to Samson, while his experience cannot be made explicable on the basis of Old Testament legalism. Trying to cope with the Chorus, critics often speak of the “different levels of awareness” in the poem and tend to press a division between Samson and his Chorus, too frequently insisting that the separation obtained is even greater at the end of the work. Professor Summers, for example, ascribes this tension between the protagonist and the Hebraic Chorus to the disparity between heroic and non-heroic experience: “…the Chorus is often wrong in typically unheroic ways, and … only as a result of the action does it acquire ‘true experience’ and understanding. Those Danites, friends and contemporaries of Samson, represent the ‘conventional wisdom’ of the drama; but the premise of the poem is that conventional wisdom is inadequate for tragic experience. If it were otherwise, there would be no function for the tragedy; the community would already have been saved …” The Chorus (with Manoa) is impercipient; but the fact that it follows after Samson, noting his changes and his actions and often repeating his attitudes, attests to a unity between Samson and the Chorus which Professor Summers' otherwise excellent treatment misses. Christian heroism does not, as he seems to suggest, depend upon separation, but upon communion with others, even as a true relationship with God, for Milton, removes the obscurities from one's relationships with other men. Milton plays off Samson's former selfheroism — which does separate him from his people — against the true heroism of the ending; responsiveness to the latter pulls the Chorus and Samson together.

Recently R. S. Hartigan examined Augustine's position on war and killing particularly in relation to the fate of the innocent. Although attention was rightly focused on some of the difficulties inherent in Augustine's views, Hartigan's handling of certain supportive texts is, in the view of this writer, open to question. It may be profitable, then, to reconsider his arguments and, more fundamentally, to question his structuring of the problem as a whole.