The Book of Books

by Melvyn Bragg

  Abraham Lincoln wrote to the Christian Commission congratulating it on the work it did: ‘Your Christian and benevolent undertaking for the benefit of the soldiers is too obviously praiseworthy to admit any difference of opinion. I sincerely hope that your plan may be as successful in execution as it is just and generous in conception.’

  Abraham Lincoln, President of what would be the victorious North, had a strong commitment to constitutional democracy. The relationship between the King James Version and democracy is close and Lincoln is a good example of one aspect of it. Lincoln thought that democracy was the system ‘through which God’s plan for the nation could be worked out’. The Bible had given access to God’s word to all men (as Lincoln would have phrased it: women’s suffrage was just creeping into the argument but still way out of contact with power). The Bible had no explicit instructions for America but through debate in a democracy that purpose would, the President thought, be arrived at. The secession of the South was not just a rebellion in Lincoln’s eyes. It threatened the very process through which Americans would come to play out their divine destiny.

  Ronald C. White Jr. who has written extensively on Lincoln states that ‘Lincoln’s religion, in fact, laid a foundation for his political thinking . . . and the culmination of his religion was his attempt to discern the meaning of the Civil War.’ His own struggle with faith seems to be resolved in the short but Bible-pegged Second Inaugural Address. Within that brief speech, he mentions God fourteen times, refers to prayer three times and quotes passages from the Bible four times. It was here that he said: ‘both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other . . . it may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of the other man’s face. But let us judge not that we be not judged.’ Later he says: ‘the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ Lincoln also said: ‘with malice toward none; with charity for all . . . let us strive on to finish the work we are in . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.’

  In this, Lincoln, very conscious that he was President for the second time but presiding over a country at war with itself, sought a path which might offer a chance of reconciliation. The terms ‘moral evil’ and ‘original sin’ had entered the debate. Hatred of the one for the other’s position was ratcheted higher every day by reports of new losses. Lincoln wanted an end, an end which came quite soon after that Second Inaugural Address when the bled and battered South, fought to a standstill, surrendered in April 1865.

  In January 1865, the US Congress approved the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to abolish slavery. In April 1865, Lincoln was assassinated. The Thirteenth Amendment was passed by Congress and fully ratified on 6 December 1865 and slavery was abolished. The Bible, the victors – the abolitionists – claimed, had proved that God was on their side.

  More than 4 million slaves were freed. The majority came out of shackles into a freedom for which they were wholly unprepared and to which many of them were abandoned. But they had come through! As the stories of the Israelites and the lessons in the New Testament had promised, they had found freedom. They could throw off those chains.

  Although there was a constitutional end to the practice of slavery, equality was another matter. That would take another century and even in present-day America with a black President, there are still pockets of hard prejudice. Segregation replaced slavery but the triumph of abolition must not be denied. It was a magnificent achievement: it was world-changing. And the King James Version had played the key role.

  There were some who claimed that the lack of support for freed slaves after the Civil War, and the continued disparagement of the ‘Negro’ left black people worse off. Segregation, they argued, was slavery by another name. The braver ones did not think that. They got on with the new, often disturbed life and, largely through the Churches and a belief in the Word of God and in the mercy and love of God, began the slow build of a civilisation within America which has gradually broken into the mainstream. This was never more dramatically demonstrated than with Martin Luther King with his King James Version-led marches in the 1960s which finally sealed the victory won in 1865.

  The number of Christians in the former slave sector grew. In the 1790s, there were 12,000 black Methodists and 13,000 black Baptists. In 1860 this number had gone up to about 400,000. By 1900 there were 2.7 million black Church members out of a black population of 8.3 million. The 2.7 million figure does not include the unaffiliated members. The Words of God in the Churches became the education and the ever-strengthening political muscle in the long, bitter but tenacious struggle for full equality.

  Bi-racial Churches all but disappeared. The white Methodist intervention had been a stepping stone. The black preachers now took up their own Methodism, as did other Churches. They took it into the new struggle to construct from the post-slavery debris entirely new communities. This was a very tough and complex task following centuries of chains and objectification and disbarment from any but the most rudimentary social organisation. Even family had been destroyed. Fellowship was found in the Churches after the war just as much as worship; singing, praying, planning, organising and caring for each other began in the Methodist and Baptist Churches.

  The century of black progress that followed abolition and secured it, is a compelling time in human history. Whatever religion you might or might not have, you cannot fail to be impressed and moved by the way in which the African-Americans shook off the nullification of their humanity which had lasted for centuries. Their dynamic came through faith, founded in the King James Version. It was by the Bible that they fought their way to freedom and community. In the process they gave the world a new cultural sound and song. This happened through the black denominations, in black Churches in which the Bible was the Sacred Law. The Churches were the major instrument in bringing together, shaping, educating and leading the scattered and abandoned millions who had been told they were no longer slaves but no longer necessary.

  The white South had failed. By some alchemy of the human spirit, many of them tried to turn defeat into a moral victory. But they were a society which had been stripped of its meaning and its long-inherited structure. Their destroyed lands and towns and churches, their bankruptcies and the loss, as they saw it, of a large and cheap labour force, threw them back on their own resources. Some went into a century of denial and brutality. Others re-thought and rebuilt.

  It was in this regard that women, who had been called upon to do so much of men’s work in the war, began to sew the riven society together. Samuel S. Hill, author of Religion and the Results of the Civil War, wrote:During the Civil War, Southern women were called upon to perform many tasks normally fulfilled by men, including meeting the needs of soldiers through soldiers’ aid societies, managing plantations, mills and stores in the absence of men, and in many instances ‘refugeeing’ whole families – finding food and clothing for them when there was little to be found.

  After the War, white Southern women rebuilt or aided husbands in building plantations, and often taught school or took in sewing to generate badly needed income. Many women had to support themselves or their families alone. Of the million men who served in the Confederate Army, at least one-fourth died in battle or of disease and many more were incapacitated and unable to support their families.

  Women’s clubs and Temperance Unions sprang up and by the end of the nineteenth century women were becoming, though not considered of equal ‘value’, nevertheless a conspicuous presence in the Churches, especially in the Methodist Churches, both black and white.

  In the North, the women, according to Hill, werelaying it on the line on behalf of prohibition, suffrage and myriad social Gospel causes. Black women mainly in the South but also in the northern emigration destinations had some of the same agenda, but they worked exclusively through the congregations in their churc
hes – caring for the poor, starting up schools, combating racism, expanding civil rights such as voting and in the area of employment . . . The positive outcome of the Civil War in America was the creation of far more widespread liberties and the opportunities which come from that.

  The seismic upheaval of the American Civil War caused waves which swept in high tides across the United States for decades. The abolition of slavery was the one great result but it was as much a beginning as an end. And when the new struggle against racism began it was the churchmen and women, Bible in hand, who led it. Humanists, secularists, atheists, agnostics and the religiously indifferent also joined in the marches, but the cause was fuelled and led by the descendants of those who had suffered most and the leaders of those determined to see the positive consequences of abolition fully realised: and they were Church people.

  Martin Luther King came out of the Civil War, speaking what he believed to be Bible truths. His life and his death concluded that historic movement which took African slaves out of bondage, across the river of Jordan, to be set free in what proudly called itself ‘the land of the free’. Just under a century and a half after the last guns of war were fired in the southern United States, the world saw an Afro-American, a Christian, in that city on the hill, sworn in on the King James Version as President of the United States of America.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE BIBLE AND EDUCATION

  It would be fair to claim that for its first three centuries, the King James Bible was, in general, the prime educating force in the English-speaking world. Its impact was stronger in the first two centuries. In the nineteenth century, although there was growing competition from popular fiction and literature, it was still the dominant book. This was the case in the United States before, during and after the Civil War. From about 1850 – 1900 America was enthralled by the Bible.

  People learned to read in order to read the Bible and they learned to read by being taught through the Bible itself. In a substantial minority of cases, Bible reading led on to other religious books: the American Civil War has been called the most religiously literate war in history, as the British Civil War was before it.

  Even for those whose apprehension of faith was weak or nonexistent, the Bible could be very useful. The flowing poetic prose of the King James Version ran into American speeches, journalism and literature with an enriching effect plainly evident in letters, pamphlets and books from the early seventeenth century and it continues to this day. It was a fine and stately tongue which helped dignify and unify the new States in their conversation just as the Bible unified them in their faith. This, with America’s gift for new phrasings, new words and the welcome its English gave to immigrant terms has given it a dazzlingly layered language.

  Most of all people were educated in the Christian religion and its history from Creation, through the Jewish Chronicles and prophecies and Psalms – which the Christians absorbed as ‘theirs’ because they were God’s Word – to the New Testament. To the fundamental believers the Bible held an explanation for everything : from the creation of the world to the new Israelites, who became the new ‘Saints’, first in Britain and then in America, first white and then black.

  The widespread concentration on daily learning rituals and practices which were introduced to increase the possibility of good moral Christian behaviour on this earth and eternal salvation in God’s heaven, is hard for many of those in secular societies to fathom. But the records show it existed and in force. The King James Bible over centuries educated people who were proud of the privilege of being able to read the Holy Scriptures in their own language. It educated them primarily in faith. It was the call to arms: into the arms of the omnipotent Almighty and to arms in His cause. It was the Word of the Lord. But it also became the means of the unlocking of literary curiosity and ambition.

  It was also thought the oracle which spoke mysteries, a guide to behaviour and morality, and the lawgiver full of grave warnings if the commandments of God were broken. For some it held prophecy of the future. It was the centrifugal force in and of all life and it demanded worship and obedience. Millions of people of all backgrounds over those three centuries willingly offered that worship and obedience as millions still do today.

  But the Bible had other educative functions. It was a bounty of great stories. There were sacrifices, wars, prostitution, seduction, escapes, love affairs, judgements, conversions, family feuds, murders, disgraceful deeds, fabulous miracles and the astounding good-bad-vengeful-merciful-cruel-wise character of the Old Testament God. There were heroes and villains. There were Adam and Eve, David and Jonathan, Jesus Christ and Judas, Jacob, Nimrod, Samson and Delilah, John and Salome. There was the unblemished mother and the celibate son of God, there were the fishermen who became the fishers of men alongside pharaohs and Roman governors. Mystical writings could be found there and erotic poetry in the Song of Solomon.

  There were proverbs to be recited and debated. The purity of perfect love and a perfect society could be cherished. The dark and wild furies of the Apocalypse could be relished by the Doomsday preachers. There was the host that encircled God – the angels and archangels, the seraphim and cherubim and all the company of heaven. And there was the finest jewel of all – the soul – endlessly discussed, full of promise and grace, the gift. Then there was Satan, who reared up at every opportunity to tempt and destroy, to entice and steal that soul away. Satan stalked the Bible and was the darkness of the world which so many of the faithful feared because they had experienced it in the fragile, mostly degraded condition of their daily existence. The book provided a mirror and a window: their own lives were reflected and enlarged.

  There are those who claim it held back the shaping of the modern world. Others – including myself in the case of the King James Version – believe that it helped shape it often for the better and was integral in that process. There are those who see its moral qualities, those who can only see it as a breeder of more wickedness than goodness, more error than insight. Few can deny, though, that from 1611 in the English-speaking world, it was the primary education.

  Such formal education as there was in America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in many cases well into the nineteenth, was provided by the Churches. Inevitably it was Bible-led. Rather surprisingly, it was free. This became the norm in America which was the first nation to provide free schooling.

  The original settlers in New England demanded that everyone know the Bible. Reading was compulsory. In Massachusetts reluctant parents would have their children apprenticed so that they could ‘read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country’. Connecticut passed a similar law in 1650. By 1700, Richard Middleton a historian of Colonial America tells us, about 70 per cent of men and 45 per cent of women could read and write and the numbers were growing steadily. Middleton points out: ‘the New England Primer, used by children, contained the alphabet and a list of syllables and biblical or allied material – hymns, prayers, stories and accounts of Protestant Martyrs.’

  New England was well organised. Although education followed a similar pattern elsewhere, it was more patchy. At the centre of the educational system was the Church, usually a nonconformist sect.

  It was only in the eighteenth century that other bodies began to move in to education in America with the realisation that commerce, law and administration needed educated men (only men) who would drive the secular engines of this rapidly expanding new continent. There was also the Englightenment project which was welcomed by a number of New World scholars, politicans and intellectuals who saw that national scientific and industrial progress was not anathema to moral progress.

  Initially it was the Church schools that had the means, the motivation and the staff. As schools grew in number, teaching became a profession: Harvard was founded in 1636 to provide a trained ministry; it was also determined to offer instruction in ‘good literature, arts and sciences’. Teachers as well as preachers (often the same man)
came out of Harvard and in 1693 the College of William and Mary was founded and Yale followed in 1701. Even so, many well-heeled Americans still sent their sons to Edinburgh University and to London for their training in law.

  Slowly the colleges grew in number and slowly they moved away from the strictly theological curriculum. Benjamin Franklin, a Fellow of the Royal Society in London and the leading figure in the Enlightenment in America, helped to found the Academy of Philadelphia in 1751. This was the first secular institution to impose no religious test for admission. Despite Franklin’s measured adulation of the English Methodist charismatic preacher George Whitefield, he saw the future of the country in science and not in religion and he set the example for the North. The Philadelphia Academy emphasised what was useful – arithmetic and accounts, for example, and a course to attend to the ‘improvement of agriculture and mechanics’.

  When, in 1754, New York obtained its first college, the Anglicans and the Presbyterians competed and failed in their attempts to make of it a partisan religious institution. When it opened, it was non-denominational and its curriculum was centred on ‘languages and liberal arts and sciences’. The secularisation of American education had taken a grip.

  Yet despite this, the Bible culture held on in many of the educational establishments, especially, as described in the previous chapter, in the southern states where the Church retained its hold for much longer.

  This is not to say that the Churches were eased out of education. But the government did not have a constitutional stake in any religious denomination. There were numerous sects and they brought their religion into the schools and even more successfully into the Sunday schools. But there was no state-directed religion; no authorised religion although the Authorised Version provided a common ground between the denominations.