Abstract :
Sprat situated his analysis of the Royal Society within an emerging Anglican Royalist
narrative of the longue dure´e of post-Reformation England. A closer examination of Sprat’s
own religious views reveals that his principal interest in the History of the Royal Society, as in
the closely related reply to Samuel de Sorbie`re, the Observations, was to appropriate the
advantages and benefits of the Royal Society as support for a re-established, anti-Calvinist
Church of England. Sprat connected the two through a reformulation of the powerful conventions
of ‘Reformation’ and ‘ Israel ’, both of which still resonated strongly in the religious
politics of the 1660s. Applying his voluntarist theology, Sprat changed especially the representation
of the chosen nation from a tale of divine castigation and punishment to a rational
and probabilistic covenant based on material success as the indicator of God’s pleasure. Sprat
proposed that the knowledge and application of nature, through the experimental labours of
the Royal Society, could build an increasingly wealthy nation and so a permanent home for the
reconfigured Israel. Attaching this to a renewed monarchical and Anglican state also meant
security for the traditional forms of rule.
