The solution of the Church of England was to establish control by means of church censorship and the appointment of a permitted interpreter of the Bible in each parish; He was not supervised too strictly, but he had to be sufficiently educated and prepared not to stray too far from the accepted norms. Robert South, in the early months of 1660, told the lawyers of the Linlol's Inn: "If there were no clergyman in every parish, you would soon have reason to increase the number of policemen." But too many Protestant souls questioned the state-sanctioned priesthood. Comprehensive censorship supervision, as practice has shown, was impossible to establish. The foundations on which the age-old intellectual edifice rested have collapsed. What will take their place?

It was revealed that the Bible itself was the greatest idol for everyone. It was not toppled like the statues of Stalin in Eastern Europe: it was still revered as a sacred relic, like the gods of classical Greece and Rome; But it lost its political power. The divine right of kings and the divine right of the clergy to tithe ceased to exist along with this biblical authority. This did not mean that kings ceased to rule or tithes were collected; This meant that other arguments had to be sought to defend them. And for a long time, these arguments were open to rational criticism. Kings as "the Lord's anointed" were a joke for the "Vicar of Bray."

Disputes about the Bible were crucial. They were forbidden to the Lollards; Henry VIII first allowed the Bible to be in English, and then made sure that the lower classes did not discuss it. Edward VI went too far in one direction, Mary the Bloody in another. Elizabeth tried to interfere with the "prophecies" and the Bible discussion classes after the sermons; Archbishops Whitstaff, Bancroft, and Laud all wanted to interfere with the development of preaching. After the end of control in the 1640s, the "artisan preachers" became self-appointed, popularly accepted chairmen who led new discussions. When the Earl of Leicester read the Declaration of the House of Commons against the preaching of those who had not been ordained (December 31, 1645), he exclaimed that "this declaration makes the reading of the Bible dangerous," since there is no point in reading the Bible unless it is interpreted and discussed. Sectarianism after 1660 was such a great force that the Church of England could no longer regain its monopoly position. Her next step was to license nonconformist clerics in order to retain some control and prevent too much democracy. Clergy who could be held responsible for and in control of their flock ensured stability and continuity. This was facilitated by the exhaustion of the nonconformist movement after two decades of conflict and futile attempts at agreement, the need for consolidation under the persecutions of Charles II and James II, and the recognition that the world could not be changed by the efforts of even the most selfless saints. Thus, the Puritans rejected politics and slipped into sectarianism.

One conclusion is that the Bible can serve any social or political purpose. The Bible and the Christian religion have evolved over the centuries and have absorbed many different social interests. The seeds of all heresies can be found in the Bible, and most of them were cultivated and flourished during the Revolution. The glory of this revolution, as Milton observed, was this discussion, this ferment: truth could take more than one form—this is the principle of sectarianism, the contempt for established authority shown by those ordinary people who could not, as Banian immortally put it, speak Hebrew, Greek, and Latin with Pontius Pilate. The failure of the attempt to thwart the continued middle- and lower-class debate, as evidenced by the survival of sectarianism, was perhaps as important in preparing the intellectual climate for the Industrial Revolution as the political change and freedom of the revolutionary decades.

V

The vexing questions of predestination and free will, infant or adult baptism, the state church, or independent congregations were still unresolved when the Restoration abruptly ended most of the debate. The hope that a free discussion of the Bible would soon lead to agreement on these issues proved unrealistic. It is perhaps not surprising that the royalist Sir John Denham thought that printing was "the devil's most pernicious tool." But in 1643 Laud's supporter John Jigon, an Essex pastor, was also said to have said, "It is a pity that the Bible has been translated into English, for now every woman and beggar thinks that they are capable of disputing with certified theologians." A few years later, the skeptical layman Matthias Pridow asked, "Has the invention of printing and gunpowder done more harm than good?" [1959] Comparison offered an answer. The distribution and discussion of the Bible among the people led, strange as it may seem, to a decrease in its authority.

It was amusing when the Catholic Patrick Carey, brother of the Falklands, used the analogy of the Bible to object to laws being translated into English:

Our church would still flourish, If the Holy Scriptures were always They kept them out of reach for the laity; But when it was transferred, semi-literate people And even women were allowed to Interpret all the texts and preach. And then – what a mess arose! The shoemakers began to despise the theologians, So they couldn't do anything anymore, Their priests began to mock everyone; Preaching began to be considered an easy matter, Everyone could do it well[1960].

We have seen above how millenarian-disciplinary Puritanism showed that in many ways it suited the interests of the parochial elite, producing yeomanry and industrious artisans who wanted to impose order on their families and the landless poor, as well as to cultivate walled heaths. It also proved acceptable to settlers in the American wilderness.[1961] I suspect that those who emphasize that in 1642 people chose which side to join in the civil war on the basis of religious affiliation do not take into account this correspondence between ideology and economic interests. As Conrad Russell wisely notes, "To say that parties were divided along religious lines is not the same as to say that religion was the cause of the Civil War." Active millenarian Puritanism was better suited to economic expansion and colonization than traditional religion. Anti-clericalism demonstrated, among other things, a desire to liberate the conscience of the laity. When the millenarian impulse faded, this ideology turned into an ideology of selfish and class gain, a utility embellished by some biblical texts. As time passed, these texts became less and less important, and there appeared, like a butterfly from a chrysalis, the true English ideology of pragmatic empiricism—the least theoretical of all the leading ideologies, because its biblical basis had been rejected. This ideology was flavored with common wisdom, which sometimes took biblical forms, but more often it was purely peasant or craft knowledge derived from practical experience. Bacon advised English intellectuals to learn from artisans; Sprat praised their lucid writing style in his History, which was sanctioned by the Royal Society, under the patronage of the head of the Church of England.

The British were proud of their ability to "somehow cope", "to conquer the empire in a fit of absent-mindedness", "the English genius of compromise". These glaring faults, which we boast of with false humility, are probably the remnants of the Calvinistic confidence that God will help his elect without regard to their merits. The fact that England became for two and a half centuries the most powerful power in the world in economy and at sea allowed this attitude to be preserved. The English were no longer the people of the Book, but they still seemed to be the chosen ones; and England achieved a clear success in the fate of the United States. The gift of holy cheating among the Anglo-Saxons still allows them to believe that their handling of power is different from that of the inferior in birth, and more pleasant. This is so second nature to them that it is difficult to determine in any given case whether their hypocrisy is conscious or unconscious.

We are considering a much more important process than the decline in commitment to the Bible. The Antichrist, after a century and a half in which he had been a central figure in English politics, sank into vulgarity when millenarianism was secularized. Hell was also in decline, and so were the executions for witchcraft. Calvinism lost the dominant position it had long held in English intellectual life, although it continued to thrive in the subculture of sectarianism. Providential history, God working out his purposes for mankind, gave way to a more mundane history to which Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Harrington had more to do than the Bible. Preachers always curse the singular godlessness of their times, but the sophisticated and sober John Owen thought that "no age compares to the one in which we live" in terms of atheism, "that abomination with which our part of the world was completely unknown until recent times." Yet atheism was still an attitude, a negation, not a philosophy. Francis Osborne was one of many who argued for its impossibility: there must be a root cause for everything. The Earl of Rochester told Burnet that he had never met an absolute atheist. Before the scientific theory of evolution, it was indeed difficult to comprehend a universe that did not have a Creator. The Ranters insisted on the eternity of matter: but where did matter come from?

One of the unexpected consequences of the defeat of the radical revolution was that the Permitted Version replaced the Geneva Bible: the last edition of the Geneva Bible was published in 1644. As soon as government objections to popular editions of the Bible ceased, it turned out that the Permitted Version was much cheaper to produce than the Geneva Bible, with its abundant notes, illustrations, and other accessories. An attempt to create a revised commented edition in the 1650s came to nothing. The decline of theological politics resulting from the victory of Parliament in the civil war, the failure of the attempt to reach agreed solutions, and the fading of millenarian hopes all contributed to the loss of the relevance of the Geneva notes to the pre-1645 period.1967 The anti-Puritan intellectual climate, which became respectable after 1660, led to the denigration of the Geneva Bible, as well as the Psalters of Sternhold and Hopkins. James I's desire for an indisputable Bible was fulfilled one generation and one revolution later than the publication of the Permitted Version. Not for the last time in English history, "unquestionable" meant conservative.

20. Unfinished business