In a sense this explicit coincidence between Puritan tents and the qualities of science as a calling is casuistry.  It is an express attempt to fit the scientist qua pious layman into the framework of the prevailing social values,  It is a bid for religious and social sanction, since both the constitutional position and the personal authority of the clergy were much more important then than now.  But it is not the entire explanation.  The justificatory efforts of Sprat, Wilkins, Boyle, or Ray do not simply represent opportunistic obsequiousness, but rather an earnest attempt to justify the ways of science to God. The Reformation had transferred the burden of individual salvation from the Church to the individual, and it is this "overwhelming and crushing sense of the responsibility for his own soul" which explains the acute religious interest.  If science were not demonstrably a lawful and desirable calling, it dare not claim the attention of those who felt themselves "ever in the Great Taskmaster's eye."  It is to this intensity of feeling that such apologias were due (1968, pp. 632-633).