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

Will these bones live?

Ezek. 37.1-14

It is a term proposed to alleviate ignorance of the causes, as physicians are wont to call the strange effects of plants and minerals "secret powers," not because they have no causes, but because their causes are unknown. And indeed, there is nothing in nature or event that does not have a whole chain of causes, which, though obscure to us, cannot be so to God, who is the first cause of all things.

Samuel Butler, Characters and Passages from Note-Books, p. 300[1968]

You all who have overthrown the old tyrants, look seriously what you still have to do, and so that you can create and maintain the equality of all goods and lands... And if you don't do that, you're worse than the old tyrants, because you claim to improve and they don't.

[Anon.], Tyranipocrit, Discovered with his

wiles, wherewith he vanquisheth (Rotterdam, 1649)