Legatine-Arians

The Seekers, or Legatine-Arians as they were sometimes known, were an English Protestant dissenting group that emerged around the 1620s, probably inspired by the preaching of three brothers – Walter, Thomas, and Bartholomew Legate. Seekers considered all organised churches of their day corrupt and preferred to wait for God's revelation. Many of them subsequently joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

Long before the English Civil War there already existed what Hill calls a "lower-class heretical culture" in England. The cornerstones of this culture were anti-clericalism and a strong emphasis on Biblical study, but specific doctrines that had "an uncanny persistence"; rejection of Predestination, Millenarianism, mortalism, anti-Trinitarianism and Hermeticism. Such ideas became "commonplace to seventeenth century Baptists, Seekers, early Quakers and other radical groupings which took part in the free-for-all discussions of the English Revolution."

The Seekers were not an organised religious group in any way that would be recognised today, (not a religious cult or Denomination) but informal and localised. Membership in a local Seekers assembly did not preclude membership in another sect. Indeed, Seekers shunned creeds (see nondenominational Christianity) and each assembly tended to embrace a broad spectrum of ideas.

Seekers after the Legates were Puritan but not Calvinist. Some contemporary historians, though accepting their zeal in desiring a "godly society", doubt whether the English Puritans during the English Revolution were as committed to religious liberty and pluralism as traditional histories have suggested. However, historian John Coffey’s recent work has emphasised the contribution of a minority of radical Protestants who steadfastly sought toleration for so called heresy, blasphemy, Catholicism, non-Christian religions, and even atheism. This minority included the Seekers, as well as the General Baptists. Their collective witness demanded the church to be an entirely voluntary, non-coercive community able to evangelise in a pluralistic society governed by a purely civil state. Such a demand was in sharp contrast to the ambitions of magisterial Protestantism held by the Calvinist majority. Nevertheless, in common with other Dissenters, the Seekers believed that the Roman Church corrupted itself and, through its common heritage, the Church of England as well. Only Christ himself could establish the "true" Church.

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