The Book of Books (11 page)

And the King James Bible had come through. It would move away from being primarily the source for arguments and
pamphleteering to become the buttress of the constitution. It would be thoroughly revised and tenderly corrected up until 1769, when the Oxford Edition became the standard which we still use (or some do) today. This managed the masterful feat of keeping the greatness of the original sound and sense while clearing away extraneous clutter. Out of that Civil War and the rule of Cromwell, the King James Version emerged victorious and, astonishingly, unimpaired. It had achieved and would retain dominance in the English-speaking Protestant world for centuries.

 

The spirit of enquiry was let loose by the Bible more than by any other book of the age. That spirit of enquiry would turn against the Bible itself. It was grounded in the new arguments which arose out of this civilisation-changing development. It was a new dawn in English-speaking life; this ability for Everyman openly to discuss what to them at that time were the most profound of all matters: the Holy Scriptures. They were at home and secure in their own language. Henry VIII was right to fear the consequences and so were Thomas More and Charles I and many a thousand bishops, aristocrats and autocrats. The walls were down, the Word was out, opinion and interpretation were not solely for priests; each person could now be a judge.

What a difference it made to ‘ordinary' people, to be able, as they did, to dispute with Oxford-educated priests and, it is reported, often better them! What an illumination it must have given to minds blanketed for centuries, deliberately excluded from the knowledge said to govern their lives and promise their eternal salvation, minds deliberately stunted! There was, we read, ‘a hunger' for the English Bible, for the words of Christ and Moses, of Paul and David, of the Apostles and the prophets. God had come down to earth in English and they were now earthed in Him. It was the discovery of a new world.

It was a treasure chest of sayings, of instances, of teachings. It could be closely read by scholars. It could be memorised and used in daily discourse. Above all, above anything, it could not only be argued about, this Book of Books, it could and did embolden argument
against
itself. The habit of argument was democratised with a speed and spontaneity which indicated how frustratingly imprisoned that capacity had been. The majority had been below the salt of debate for millennia. It was a luxury above and beyond them. It was a mystery they were not allowed to penetrate.

They were literally screened off in the great cathedrals. They had to sit mute for hundreds of years and worship in the Latin they did not understand and believe and act on the diktat of interpreters, priests, bishops, whose agenda was based on the subservience of the congregation. Now they were free. Thanks to martyrs, courageous believers and brave scholars, their minds were liberated in an act even greater than the Pentecostal miracle when the Apostles were said to have been given the gift of many tongues. The English speakers were given the gift of this charismatic, self-contradictory, resonant, historical work. It was drenched in blood. It was enriched by a sacred constellation. The trickle they had only been allowed to sip from became the spring from which they could drink as long and as deeply as they wanted.

There were many forces which began the long haul to democracy in the English-speaking world. But one, perhaps the vital one, was the gift which widespread Bible reading and individual interpretation gave to a literate group of the independent-minded. They knew that if they could challenge what was in the Bible, then they could challenge what was in the constitution. Therefore they could challenge the world they had inherited and make it the world they wanted.

This new power, this build-up of the muscles and sinews of individual questioning, took time partly because they had scarcely
been exercised before and certainly not on this scale. Before this tectonic shift, who was to dispute their place in society when God had ordained that place? Who dared speak out when the ruling monarch and aristocracies and the princes of churchly power and wealth were on constant guard to make sure that tongues were stopped? When things remaining as they were consolidated the rich and the powerful?

But the greatest weapon of all had been the ability to preserve ignorance among the mass of people. Illiteracy was authority's best ally. Again and again over the centuries which succeeded the publication of the King James Bible, those in authority would retreat only inch by inch and their argument would be that these uneducated, these peasantry and populace were obedient only as long as they did not know the secrets of the trade of rule. These people did not understand how the mighty forces of the state worked. They did not understand the arts of civilisation and their crude and vulgar intervention would surely wreck the destined and stable order of things.

It was a recurring theme: keep out the majority by characterising them as ignorant and disruptive. Educate them and they would become dangerous. They were to be kept down and, whenever necessary, suppressed. Build an insurmountable wall and call it God's ordering. Democracy eventually clawed its way up and over that high wall as a result of the determination of thousands of individual men and women, who in many instances drew inspiration from the New Testament.

Thanks to the Bible in English, the people, after millennia of repression, could speak for themselves. They had lifted up their eyes. They had found help. And even those who were to abandon the Bible owe their liberation to a book commonly available, in alehouses, in taverns and in homes and in English.

The political routing in Britain of the Presbyterians and other nonconformist groups like the Quakers, who had fought to the last to preserve New Model Army rule, was complete. As Dissenters they sought and found other ways to influence the realm with the most positive results. But within months of King Charles II's coronation, all that bloody biblical warfare seemed to belong to a different world.

By imploding, the Presbyterians judged themselves to have been cast into the wilderness by the Lord and punished for failing to create His Kingdom on earth. They condemned themselves to a pacific regrouping which might take many years. And by accepting the King so warmly, the people expressed above all relief that a familiar order had returned and the Presbyterians were both rejected and snubbed: and disenfranchised.

But though it looked the same, the monarchy was not the same. In the 1680s, James II would attempt to emulate the highhandedness of his father, Charles I. After a brief bloody skirmish he was shunted out of the country never to return. His daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William assumed the throne after a Bill of Rights in what became known as the ‘Glorious Revolution'. This confirmed the strength of Parliament's position in the constitution and was regarded as the model of the way in which a nation could bring about fundamental change without much bloodshed. The Bible had declared that the killing of a king could be acceptable: and a king had indeed been executed. His son was exiled. The message was clear. In that regard, the Bible's work was done.

Like a high flow of water which, baulked in one direction, will find another, the King James Version, though it was never to leave the battlefield, moved on. For example, ‘All serious English political theory dates from this period,' writes Christopher Hill. ‘Hobbes and Harrington, Levellers, Milton and Winstanley . . .
the concept of progressive revelation allowed the possibility of new insights, new interpretations.'

It is remarkable how quickly a country which had fought to the death inspired by the Bible so abruptly and decisively switched its mood. Common sense emerged from the debris. In 1662, John Gardner, a bishop, said: ‘Nothing is by Scripture imposed upon us to be believed which is flatly contradictory to right reason and the suffrage of our senses.' A dozen years earlier, if he had dared say that in public, he would have been imprisoned and probably hanged. Now he walked the streets freely to give his views. This liberty raced throughout the culture although censorship was not entirely lifted. Yet the Bible could be mocked by Thomas Hobbes and his ears would not be cropped, his life not threatened.

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.