The Book of Books

by Melvyn Bragg

  John Wesley organised other itinerant preachers. Charles Wesley’s hymns, as Diarmaid MacCulloch points out, ‘featured much reference to divine wounds and blood’, which the mass industrial workforce knew too well. The Wesleyan message was that life could be changed utterly, even for the poorest, by accepting that Christ had suffered for ‘me’. To embrace Wesley’s interpretation of the New Testament, for which he asserted clear and strong evidence, was to find the hope that little or nothing else in their lives offered.

  The rousing hymns – frequently mentioned and applauded by the poor at the time – electrified these open-air meetings and Methodism took off in massed singing. Wesley built centres in London and Bristol; local societies gathered funds to put up their own chapels. The sound of the King James Bible rang out across the cities. In the course of this, Wesley, envied and feared by fellow Anglicans, even though he fought to remain an Anglican and called his Church ‘a connexion’, was levered out and branded as part of the Dissenting Fraternity. His ‘enthusiasm’ did for him. He was not one of them. He was exiled to what they saw as the margins, much to his sadness and their loss.

  Wesley went to America. He only went to America once, but he played a vital role. As the American War of Independence drew nearer, many Anglican clergy left for England and safety. But by 1784, Wesley was so impatient at the Anglican bishops’ sloth in encouraging clergy to go and work in the new republic, so he took it on himself to ordain priests. That sensible, legal, useful move was yet another black mark as far as the Anglicans were concerned.

  Wesley’s teaching and what became ‘his’ Church sank deep roots in Britain, mostly in England in the growing industrial towns. It became a new tribe in the land and its preachers exercised influence often beyond the reach of Anglicans. It was the Methodists who took the Bible into areas of life ignored by Anglicans – the lower ranks of the army and navy are another example. From their evangelical example were to come many converts all over the world. ‘I look upon all the world,’ said Wesley, ‘as my parish.’ As it was. The King James Bible had once again regenerated itself.

  Now the time had come for its other great triumph, the Awakening of America. One Englishman, an Oxford contemporary of and heir to John Wesley, George Whitefield, from the age of twenty-two ‘as famous as any man in the English-speaking world’, played a remarkable role.

  By the end of the seventeenth century the Puritan grip on America appeared to the zealots to be slackening and they were alarmed. They saw the corruption of their discipline after three or four generations of dedication. There was a fear that this New England was slithering towards the state of Babylon which had been their reason for quitting the old England. Jonathan Edwards, a Puritan preacher from Massachusetts and a celebrated theologian, spearheaded what would become a corps of preachers dedicated to reclaiming the people of America. As with Wesley, he went back to what he saw as the core of the matter and preached that all of them would be accepted by God’s grace. Grace was the key. Grace was the message.

  Meanwhile, in Oxford, George Whitefield was beginning on a similar journey which would take him to America seven times, for periods from as little as six months to as long as four years.

  Like so many of these God-driven, Bible-loving, passionate Christian evangelists, he was an odd one. He had clawed his way to Oxford University. To pay his way once he got there, he was a servant to the better-off students. He found the comfort of friendship and spiritual excitement in John Wesley’s Holy Club, of which he became an ardent member. He went in for severe selfdiscipline in his daily readings from the Bible, and through many acts of charity and devotion. He was addicted to self-purification through fasting. At one time it was so prolonged and excessive that it took him seven weeks to recover. His views on what he saw as a gin-soddened, gambling-obsessed, immoral, ungodly, putrefyingly over-privileged, avaricious, unforgivably unjust England echoed the views that Jonathan Edwards held about New England. He was ordained at the age of twenty-two and within months his preaching drew thunderclaps of praise. He ‘awakened souls’.

  After a successful first visit to America where he preached every day and was hailed as ‘the greatest evangelist’ he returned to London to find himself barred from many churches. They feared his ‘enthusiasm’ which they saw as the gateway to extremism as they did with Wesley. Whitefield took to the fields to bring the blinding light to the people.

  He was fearless. For example, he went to Kingswood, an isolated mining area in which bestial conditions had conditioned a fearsome, tribal community who dealt savagely with strangers. There was no church. On the first day he had a congregation of 200 to whom he preached for three hours on the theme that Jesus loved each and every one of them and had been crucified for each and every one of them. Two weeks later, after more sermons, 10,000 attended one of his meetings, a figure that rose to 30,000 a few weeks after that.

  By the time he arrived in America for his second visit, in 1739, he was already described as someone who had preached to more people than any man in history. Whitefield, for whom the adjective ‘charismatic’ seemed to have been coined, and America’s Great Awakening to rediscover the faith, were made for each other.

  He was always dressed in the correct attire of an Anglican clergyman, a long black gown with a small white cravat, the priestly bands around his neck, and a powdered wig. His voice was exceptionally loud, clear, mellifluous and seductive. We are told that he had a bad squint.

  Whitefield knew about corruption and the decay of an immoral, unbalanced society from his time in Oxford and London. He had also seen for himself the unspeakable distress and poverty of industrial England. He seemed to know what the people wanted and he had the King James Version to sate that want. They wanted hope, salvation, a lifting of the burden of life: and some joy, some song, some acclamation with a place for the public ecstasy of the ignored and the powerless: some pride: and a place in the Kingdom of Heaven.

  His dramatic renderings of Gospel truths gave them that. He travelled the length of the eastern seaboard of America. He averaged ten sermons a week – some of them hours long. Over thirty-four years he delivered approximately 18,000 sermons.

  He preached ‘the key test of election to the Kingdom of God is whether you have an emotional experience of conversion.’ Gone were the thumbscrew and detailed demands of the hard-line Calvinists and their enforcements. Gone their straitjackets of rules. Gone their displeasure in life. Gone the all but impossible difficulty of making it to heaven. That was gone just as surely as the English-language Bible had thrown off for so many Christians any need for priests and bishops to do their reading for them. You were now free to read the direct Word of the Lord and of Jesus Christ who died on the Cross to take away your sins. And you would now be accepted by the Lord and Jesus Christ if deep inside yourself you simply felt, if you experienced conversion, the awakening, the moving spirit.

  Whitefield would raise his head and his hands to the skies and speak directly to God and His words came back. ‘Become Christian in deed and truth and you will be saved.’ Whitefield nowadays is not difficult to mock and reduce to derision or disparagement. But then, among those thousands of mostly desperate people there was a longing for goodness and truth and an acute hunger for a better, different life. His preaching reached their hearts and touched their imaginations. Somehow the music and the Gospel in Whitefield’s voice carried messages which struck directly into their experience and enriched them. Who are we to mock that?

  The King James Bible from Tyndale on had always aimed to be a preacher’s Bible, best when read aloud. Whitefield, it appears, gave it full volume. Benjamin Franklin measured the carrying power of that voice and concluded that in an open space, 30,000 people could clearly hear him. Myths arose that his voice could carry over three miles.

  Benjamin Franklin was a rather unlikely supporter of Whitefield. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society in London where he lived as America’s Ambassador until the outbreak of the War of Independence which despite hi
s best efforts he failed to prevent. His experiments with electricity had brought him international recognition and acclaim. He was an active rational intellectual and a man of public affairs who was thought to be an ornament to the age in which he lived. His own Christian religion was at best weakly expressed. And yet he took up George Whitefield with a passion.

  Among his many activities, Franklin edited a weekly newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. He devoted 50 per cent of these issues to Whitefield’s activities and especially the public sermons. Franklin was just as captured as thousands of others by the power of this strange man’s sermons, by the way he brought the words of the Bible and the story of Christ into the heartlands of the eastern seaboard and re-fortified a fledgling nation. He loved the numerous ways in which Whitefield declared and illustrated from the Bible his conviction that ‘All men are equal’ and that ‘liberty of conscience was the inalienable right of every natural creature’. Huge sermon halls were built simply to accommodate the congregations who travelled great distances to listen to George Whitefield and be converted or born again.

  The American evangelists, like their leader Jonathan Edwards, praised him and tried to copy his style and power and failed. He was their standard-bearer. Sarah Edwards, the wife of Jonathan, wrote: ‘it is wonderful to see how he casts a spell over the audience by preaching the simplest truths of the bible.’ All denominations came to listen – Catholics, Quakers, Presbyterians, Lutherans . . . And he could claim to have been largely responsible for the widespread reinvigoration of the idea that America was a nation chosen by God for a special purpose. The earliest Puritan settlers had come to New England to create ‘a city on a hill’. The Great Awakening, driven by George Whitefield and powered by the Bible, led them to that exhilarating summit and profoundly marks the United States still today. It seems fitting that Whitefield died on the east coast of America.

  One crucially important consequence of this whirlwind of religious teaching, those vast, singing, praying, crying congregations, was the beginnings of the inclusion of the slaves.

  Whitefield was one of the first white preachers to speak to ‘the blacks’. The Methodists firmly regarded slavery as sinful and their evangelical determination entered the forbidden territory of slavery. Up to this point the attempts to Christianise the slaves had been few and feeble. Now the preaching of these new evangelicals gave to the slaves not only a dignity they had never enjoyed but the opportunity to use their intelligence on the words and sayings in the Bible.

  There was a long way to go. The Great Awakening began as a call to the established white settlers to mend their ways and go back to the roots of their faith, and it succeeded. It called on the more uncertain, more recent white settlers to go along with this and join the flow along the seaboard which would unite them into a chosen state of grace, and that too called in the masses. Soon it was to hit America’s deepest nerve.

  PART TWO

  THE IMPACTION CULTURE

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE ROYAL SOCIETY (1660): EARLY MODERN SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE

  The division between religion and science is such a given in most of today’s intellectual arguments that it takes a deep breath and an act of imagination to return to a time when they were mutually reaffirming. A useful date is 1660. When Charles II landed at Dover he made a very public show of embracing the Bible authorised by his grandfather James I. Not long afterwards he gave a royal patent to a small group of gentlemanly scholars. This became the Royal Society which still thrives. The poverty-stricken King hoped it would generate great wealth. It did. But in knowledge, not in gold.

  Charles gave the society the right to publish its learned papers without censorship, a rare and invaluable gift in that period and one which rapidly gave it fame in both Europe and America. It virtually invented professional scientific publishing. English became a leading language of science. And the Royal Society systematised experiments. Its declared intention was ‘for the Promoting of physico-mathematico experimental learning’; its motto ‘Nullius in verba’ – ‘take no man’s word for it’. Experimenting was believing. Its experiments aimed to reveal the works of God.

  I’ll use the words ‘science’ and ‘scientists’ here although those engaged in the experiments at the time would have been called ‘natural philosophers’.

  Some of the greatest experimental scientists were there at the outset. Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, soon to be joined by Isaac Newton, and later Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Paul Dirac, James Clerk Maxwell, Stephen Hawking and, over 350 years, 8,000 more.

  What distinguished the pioneers in the seventeenth century was that they were united in a determination to study nature and a conviction that a radical reading of the King James Bible went hand in hand with that aim. Their guiding star was Francis Bacon who had died several decades before the society was formed. He coined the phrase ‘knowledge is power’; he called scientists ‘merchants of light’. Most of all, however, he asserted that life could be fully understood through two books: the Scriptures and the Book of Nature. Between these two the Fellows of the Royal Society set out to compose a new world.

  Both these books had to be questioned. Nature had to be put to the test; ‘interrogated’ was another word used by the lawyer in Francis Bacon. And the King James Bible, also, had to be put to the test. It bears emphasising that the Bible in English had revitalised the way people saw the world and their own place in it. The Civil Wars had seared it into the minds of men and women throughout the land. The intensity of thought and the extremes of opinion which the Bible both provoked and enabled had probably made more people in the country more actively and consciously religious than at any time in history.

  The Protestant notion that you could have personal and direct contact through the Bible, that you, without any intermediary, could make up your own mind on these sacred matters, became an open invitation. Fellows of the Royal Society and like-minded men and women took it to be an invitation to scrutinise the Bible for evidence that would underpin their science: and vice versa.

  Despite what some now see as an unbridgeable rift between the two, in 1660 and for many years on (for some, up until the present day) the King James Bible authorised the work of a substantial number of the finest and most influential early modern scientists. The scientists made increasing use of instruments – the telescope, the microscope and so on – to investigate nature and, equally, in the Royal Society employed a new way of examining the Bible.

  This ‘modern’ period in Western history saw the movement over centuries from one dominating system of thought – Christianity – to what emerged as its successor – science. It was neither a rapid nor an abrupt transition. Medieval scholars like Thomas Aquinas, who attempted to integrate the classical thought of Aristotle and the Christian thought of Augustine, still had a powerful impact on the way in which thought was cast. Oxford University was the seedbed of the Royal Society, as it had been the centre for centuries of the struggle to translate the Bible into English and see it accepted by the crown and Parliament.

  Oxford also deserves credit for an intellectual vigour which began in the Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century it had been famous in the Latin-speaking Christian world for its philosophers – Duns Scotus and William of Occam, for instance. The theology they worked on is now largely ignored or discredited. Yet we cannot deny that they were thinkers of the highest order. They worked on the material they had and their processes of thought were strong. This was not an inheritance to be lightly thrown over. Nor was it, as Wycliffe and Tyndale, and then Wren, Boyle and Hooke proved.

  There was also in the medieval Church the recorded tradition of intense and what were thought of as mystical experiences of faith. Thinking the unthinkable in a way which might be considered a herald of science. This medieval theology was at that time a bedrock factor in a way that the secular elements in our society today can scarcely imagine or take seriously. But then they did.

  Aquinas, for
example, the volume and the quantity of whose work is a monument to theological scholarship, experienced a vision towards the end of his life which, he said, brought him closer to an understanding of God than all his scholarship had done. He would not discuss it but the impact it had on him was respected and in some measure understood by those – the majority at that time – who saw faith as innate and as valid a way to understand the world as reason later became. That later medieval world was rooted not only in the Bible but in much classical and preclassical thought that had become entwined in the making and the interpretation of the Bible.

  All the key players in the advancement of early modern science – Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes, Galileo, Newton – understood what was at stake in the revolution they were engineering. This was the place of the soul. Where did it exist? The nurturing and the salvation of the soul was the fundamental duty and joy of Christians. Newton’s proof that all space obeyed the same laws abolished the essential separation and different space for God and the soul.

  This separate space had been argued for by Aristotle. The soul, a non-material part of being human, had a long prehistory before Aristotle and a fervent history in Christianity where Augustine and Aquinas were only two of those who constructed systems of thought designed to prove its existence and its essentiality. Now where were these arguments? If there was no special, separate place in the universe for God and the soul, where and in what way could they be said to exist? And therefore what to do about God and the soul in the quest for new knowledge?

  The Royal Society’s way for many years until, in some cases, this day was to hold the faith and through the King James Version find historical and other proofs. Robert Boyle, one of the original group, a man whose work led him to be called ‘the father of chemistry’, published an enormous book on the intimate relationship between his admiration for the works of God and the advantages experimental philosophy would bring to religious faith.