Essays

In Eton’s overgrown churchyard, a tomb calls John Hales “ever-memorable”—yet the grand title is nearly all the world remembers of him.

Arthur Christopher Benson opens his essays amid the mossed stones and cypresses of Eton, then follows Hales into the fierce religious arguments of seventeenth-century England. A quiet scholar with a taste for wit, Hales returns from the Synod of Dort questioning the certainties he carried there; later, a tract mocking church authority brings him face to face with Archbishop Laud. Benson finds comedy and courage in the clash, and asks what becomes of an independent mind when powerful men demand submission. Can Hales make his case without surrendering the freedom to think?

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