Gerrard Winstanley

Gerrard Winstanley (1609-1676) was an English religious and political writer, born in Wigan, Lancashire, who became the leading figure of the Diggers, or True Levellers, the group that in 1649 cultivated common land at St George's Hill in Surrey to assert the right of ordinary people to work the earth in common. Before the Digger venture he published a series of theological pamphlets, and The Mysterie of God has been described as among the earliest works in English to teach that all of humanity would ultimately be reconciled to God. His later manifesto, The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652), set out a plan for an egalitarian commonwealth, and in later life he was associated with the Quakers.

The first pamphlet of Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger — written before his communist experiment on St George's Hill — declaring the "mysterie" that God will in the end dwell in the whole creation and every son and daughter of Adam, and that the serpent's work will be utterly destroyed. It stands with Jeremiah White and Samuel Richardson, both also in this collection, among the seventeenth-century English radicals who denied endless torment a century before the Universalist movement organized. This is Columbia University's scan of the 1649 second edition, printed for Giles Calvert, the great publisher of radical religion.

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)

The theological climax of Winstanley's pamphlets and the immediate prelude to the Digger experiment: the Spirit rising in all flesh, the curse to be rooted out of creation, and the earth become a common treasury. With The Mysterie of God, also in this collection, it shows the universal restoration at the root of his radical politics. The scan is from the British Library's copy.

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)