The Book of Books Page 9

  Yet the Bible could still stir up the law. The nonconformists who preached on the sentence in Hebrews: ‘You have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin’ and Judges: ‘the Children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord, and forgot the Lord their God and served Baalim and Asheroth’ were clapped into jail. References linking Charles II to Nimrod and Nebuchadnezzar and Nero were still made in Bibles printed abroad and circulated underground. But they were now illegal. The fervent, righteous torrent had been quite suddenly reduced to a dribble. Among the intelligentsia believers openly agreed that the Bible could not be infallible given its internal contradictions and, as time moved on, the historical problems it began to pose.

  The place of the Authorised Version was now assured and for the next 250 – 300 years, in the United Kingdom, its congregation was split into two broad groups.

  First there were the nonconformists, the Congregationalists and later the Methodists, the heirs and successors of the Presbyterians of the Civil Wars. This group took the Bible into science, into political thought, into social action, education and areas of the slum cities which would arise and be underserved by the Established Church. It also provided zealous missionaries. Second there were the Anglicans, the Church of England, the state Church, the Established Church, class-bound, state-tethered, still streaked with Roman Catholic practices but at an unbridgeable distance from Rome and popish authority.

  This Church of England was to carry on for practically three centuries with its own hierarchy which still aped a system reaching back to the early Middle Ages. Well-bred or wealthy young men would still go to Oxford or Cambridge to be trained for leadership in the Church. They would be parachuted into vast vicarages and plump livings where they would get on with a country life – hunting, shooting, fishing – or pursue a private hobby. They would generally delegate the harassment of pastoral care to their indigent lower-class curates. Lower-class curates would largely be funnelled into the most crowded, newest, least attractive and poorest parishes.

  Nevertheless, its adhesion to the King James Bible meant that the Anglican Church was to wield influence, even to stand for the good, despite its social immobility, its political timeserving and its smug hierarchy. It always attracted some men of outstanding talent and enterprise. It joined in the imperial adventure with some positive as well as some negative results. The chief point here is that it was a force for better and for worse.

  When the second phase of empire began, it was the King James Version which was marched out with British armies across the world. It was read aloud on all official occasions. Military vicars accompanied the troops. In the mission field it was the King James Version which spread the Word. And when primary schools began to grow in number they were Church of England schools. It was the King James Bible which provided the faith, supplemented the curriculum and became the basis of the moral law in the classrooms of the kingdoms. For many observers, this was enriching and ennobling. Many saw it as their unique property, their sovereign book, a book that defined them.

  It was not unopposed. The arguments that God was cruel and punitive and corrupted faith by these promises of eternal life found favour among some of the British intelligentsia. But the majority, in these early centuries, including the wealthy and some of the clever, paid lip service to the Church and did not want it rocked. It suited the times. For many years it suited the country’s image of itself. It did not impose.

  The memory of what had happened when it had been inflammatory took a long time to fade. It bedded in comfortably with a well-organised life of privilege, and a social, familial network. It was a convenient vehicle for snobbery and show. It could seem usefully cohesive. And for some it was a true passion. The Bible’s attraction for those in authority still included keeping the potentially militant in their place. That had been weakened but had not died out. The Church of England became a part of the anaesthetisation of England, which many found very comfortable. Its deeper, more hopeful and glorious promises were always there for a minority to fall back on.

  As we shall see, the nonconformist strand would take up arms in other struggles. But for about three centuries the authority, the social ordering and the balm of the King James Version of the Church were rarely threatened, not even by steady desertion. Not even by mockery. It was too big and too secure to care.

  But the energy drained away from it. Intellectual enquiry moved its tenets elsewhere outside the Anglican walls. It was Dissent that drove progressive thought. There was a new map in the United Kingdom.

  But while the kingdoms of Britain were setting out for quiet and regressive times after exhausting and murderous Civil Wars, America was heading for the first Great Awakening, where the King James Version would be the key determinant in the moulding of the character of a new nation.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE GREAT AWAKENING

  Bible stories had circulated before the publication of the King James Version. As well as the medieval stained-glass windows, resplendently illuminating the Bible, the medieval mystery plays acted out scenes from the Old and the New Testaments. The spectators would know something of the stories of Moses and Noah and Jonah, of David and Goliath, of Solomon and perhaps of Salome and Jezebel, of Christ on the Cross, the Virgin Mary, Ananias, the Three Kings . . . the most pertinent and graphic stories had studded the minds of largely illiterate Christians for centuries. The mystery plays were not allowed to be performed inside the cathedrals or the abbeys. The ‘real’ Bible had been effectively denied to the many: these few stories were regarded as somewhere between education and entertainment and they were tolerated only in so far as they were harmless.

  But with the wider development of printing, the rapid increase in literacy in the English-speaking world and the translations from the Latin into English, there was a new dynamic – the King James Bible. In its way, the ‘discovery’ of America, the newfound land, matched the uncovering of these sacred Scriptures, the newfound landscape for the mind. Their laws and proverbs, their parables’ examples and the prophecies became for a long time the lifeblood of the awakening modern world. The King James Version both in itself and what it led to and inspired was a transfusion which revitalised the consciousness of the post-medieval world.

  It was a form of Pentecost for the masses. The Apostles were endowed with the gift of tongues to be able to spread the Word to all people. The King James Version gave tongue to English-speaking people who had been made dumb by deliberate and rigorously monitored silences. The new book broke the silence. And what a remarkable book it proved to be! Even more remarkably, it gave energy to its opponents and even to its enemies.

  After the Civil Wars in Britain, the next major move in the voyage of the Bible was the Great Awakening in America.

  The notion that life would go on after death is as old as recorded civilisation and the evidence for that belief is regularly unearthed in the most ancient burial grounds the world over. Neanderthal grave goods have recently been unearthed. Some think that the belief in another life is no more than wishful thinking or a mere superstition. To others it expresses something true though currently ‘unprovable’ save by the Resurrection, itself often doubted. Others believe in it completely. In the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English-speaking worlds (as in those of many other nations and peoples) there were many people who believed in it completely. The question was – how did you arrive at such a belief? How were we to explain eternal life? The Christian version was layered, tantalising and elaborate, and for millions over the centuries, convincing. It carries what many feel to be an essential probability.

  The Christian agenda, for most of the time since the death of Christ, was set by the Roman Catholic Church. It had built its authority on the promise that only through belief in and obedience to the Roman Catholic laws, its bishops and priests and through its churches could eternal life be attained. It claimed direct succession from St Peter the Apostle, the rock on whom Christ built His Church.

  Calvinists
, at the other end of the Church spectrum, believed that you were chosen and if you were, there was to be eternal life. Some thought you were chosen even before you were born. But there was to be eternal life. The Celtic monks in seventh-century Britain had won over the royal courts and the pagan populace by this promise of eternal life. Indigenous populations of countries conquered by Westerners were expected to have the bitter pill of oppression sweetened by the religion which promised life after death. It was described as the glorious and unique gift.

  The faith that went to America from England at the beginning of the seventeenth century was exceptional in its high level of literacy, its emotional intensity, its tenacity and its intellectual certainty. The Chosen, the few Calvinistic settlers, had an influence way out of proportion to their numbers. They lived through faith. To have faith in itself was to be fulfilled. To have the promise of eternal life was to be saved for eternity, a goal so far beyond all others that to live for it and to lay down your life for it was welcomed: and a duty.

  In simple terms, eternal life has often been seen as a blessed if illusory hope of release from a life that is nasty, brutish and short. So bad can earthly life be that a life after death becomes not only a hope but a sole purpose. The earthly duty for Christians is to live with a moral rectitude and spiritual devotion which will earn you an eternal reward. This was the message that had to be burned into the minds of the people: the message that would save their immortal souls besides which all else was insignificant. ‘True believers’ welcomed death in the intoxicated heightening of faith in what they saw as a just cause. Or it was the glad moment, the tranquil glory moment, when your earthly race was run and you were called to meet your Maker and join the heavenly host.

  These two factors, the moral faith to see you through this life and the spiritual faith to take you into eternal life were kindling to the fire brought by the preachers who lit the flames of the Great Awakening. This was stoked through the words and messages of the King James Version, which was to go on its most significant and far-reaching voyage, from Britain to America.

  As more settlers came to America, not only from England but gradually and increasingly from Scotland, Ireland and Wales, there was a change in the development of the Protestant Christianisation of America.

  Fewer of the new settlers wanted to take on the rigours of being one of the Chosen, with its heavy duties of prayer and daily observances which confined them to a scheduled God-centred life.

  There was also the issue of the Native Americans. Many died from imported diseases which led to an easy excuse for neglect. This ‘proved’ they were of inferior stock and therefore God saw it right to let them perish to make room for the Chosen People. There were a few settlers who set out to convert and as they saw it ‘help’ the Indians by translating the Bible into a dialect of the Algonquin tribe, for instance, or organising Indian ‘Prayer Towns’ in which the Indians were encouraged to follow a Christian path. But it was all but lost in what soon became a norm of destruction and deceit as the Europeans drove west, robbed the Indians of their lands and trampled down their population and their culture.

  Then there were the slaves in the South. Diarmaid MacCulloch points out that ‘It was ironic that in the 1640s and 1650s as the English on both sides of the Atlantic were talking in unprecedented ways about their own freedom and right to choose, especially in religion, slaves were being shipped to the English Colonies in hundreds then thousands. In the early years Protestants did not challenge this any more than Catholics.’

  There was often a double standard. The philosopher of liberty, John Locke, in his Two Treatises of Government, wrote that to Englishmen ‘slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of man . . . that ’tis hardly to be believed that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it.’ Yet they did. Including one English gentleman, John Locke himself. When he helped draft the constitution for the new English colony in South Carolina, in that constitution slaves were accepted. At the end of the seventeenth century blacks outnumbered whites in South Carolina. They were essential labour. They were cheap. They could pose a great threat. So were they really God’s people? ‘Blacks,’ as MacCulloch writes ironically, ‘were different.’ It was very useful for the whites to believe that.

  But that began to change, first stirred by white clergymen preaching the King James Version, and then seized on and driven by the slaves themselves. This came about partly because the African-Americans used the language and the stories of that key to the white American mind – the King James Version. They took the words of their enemy and used them to fight and ultimately to overcome him.

  It is a strange twist of history that while the descendants of the millions of the Native Americans of the seventeenth century are now a small, dispossessed, disempowered minority, the descendants of millions of Afro-Americans who came as slaves have argued for, fought for and gained parity and grown in number. They have achieved success across the spectrum from Nobel Prizes to the presidency of the United States itself. That 300-year struggle, still ongoing, could be said to have one of its tap roots in the Great Awakening which itself owed a great deal to Methodist preachers, young, idealistic, religious men who, in a running thread in the story, once again came from Oxford.

  After decades of intense close inspection of the Scriptures and disputation sentence by sentence, sometimes around a single word, it is not surprising that the pendulum swung. There came a moment to throw off the shackles of scholarship and go to the heart of the matter. This, in the first third of the eighteenth century, was what the English evangelicals did. According to Diarmaid MacCulloch they ‘sought to create a religion of the heart and of direct personal relationship with Jesus Christ, in consciousness of his suffering on the Cross and his atonement to his Father for human sin’. He observes that ‘once more, it was the message of Augustine, filtered through Luther.’

  This movement found its natural home among the Dissenters – part of the Presbyterian grouping – who played such a persistent role in missions and conversions. Dissenters were not only outstandingly active in the religious sphere but across society. It was a society whose establishment barred them from most of its ruling heights including parliament, but they were to play a seminal part in education, science, philosophy and philanthropy.

  They formed the bedding for the English evangelicals who were spearheaded by Methodism. Methodism began inside the Anglican Church and its founders never wanted to abandon the Anglican Church. But by degrees, due not a little to the sloth and smugness of the Anglican Church, Methodism separated from it and joined the congregation of Dissenters who took the Bible to the people and through the Bible found a vital role.

  Initially, the Anglican rejection of Methodism was a cause of sorrow to its leader John Wesley, an Anglican clergyman like his father before him.

  Again, as so often in the first centuries of the story of the English-speaking Bible, we have a man who went to Oxford to be ordained as a minister in the inner temple of the establishment and came out of it to rattle the cage of that establishment and change it. Oxford in Wesley’s time, in the eighteenth century, was a fastness of reactionary views. Its graduates were expected to be gentlemen and buttress the status quo and perpetuate it. They were admitted to the colleges to be the docile persuaders for the existing authorities. Some of them would become the authorities. Yet it could be and had been the perfect stalking horse for radical ideas. They had taken root there since the fourteenth century.

  John Wesley formed an Oxford group which went back to Apostolic practices, feeding and helping the poor, practising regular and passionate devotion – meaning it, in short, unlike most of the other young men who came to the university. Wesley’s ‘Holy Club’ was mocked and given the derisive nickname of ‘Methodists’. Like many a clever and derided minority, they took on that nickname as a badge of honour and Methodists they became. Some, however, acknowledging the preaching success and enthusiasm of John Wesley and his brother Charles, who wrote almost 9,
000 hymns, called themselves ‘Wesleyans’.

  Wesley stumped up and down the country like a politician at election time. He mounted the hustings. He spoke with a passion which dismayed both the entrenched conservatives and the new daintily mannered Anglicans. He called out for converts. And they responded. This vulgar method was frowned on by the powers that be. The Wesleys brought rousing music into the churches, they sought and got warm and positive reactions from their congregations who did not follow the Church of England practice of deference, timidity and tepidity. Their hymns exalted the Lord and the congregations alike. The Wesleys lit up feelings which their fellow Anglican priests preferred to be doused down.

  Justification by faith, the message of St Paul, taken up by Luther, became a mantra for John Wesley. This was still radical. The waters had closed over the seventeenth-century religious wars and the Church of England, like the Church of Rome before it, much preferred the people to express their faith within its own established customs and practices. Wesley’s ‘enthusiasm’ was disturbing and alien – although a century or so previously it would have seemed commonplace.

  On his travels in Britain, Wesley saw that he could reach people in the new industrial cities, then largely unpatrolled by the parish church network of the Anglican Church. That was based in the more pleasant, less crowded rural areas and it wanted to stay put. The cities were dirty, ugly and poor. But there the hungry and hopeless were waiting to be fed and Wesley had the Bible with which to nourish them.

  At Oxford, George Whitefield, a fellow Anglican, had joined this Holy Club and he too travelled to preach the Word. He had begun to preach, Christ-like, in the open air, in fields and meadows, partly to accommodate the crowds, partly to counter the efforts of local churches to ban his unsettling enthusiasm. Wesley followed his younger colleague and they struck a golden seam of passionate support from the neglected congregations. Weeping, applauding, casting themselves to earth in ecstasy, these were new industrialised congregations responding to a message which had authority rooted in the King James Bible.