by Melvyn Bragg
They ordered things rather differently in the British Isles, where Anglicanism was the denomination that bound the crown to the constitution and the monarch was the Head of the Church of England as well as being the King or Queen and thereby constitutionally head of the country.
In the seventeenth century, apart from the very small numbers in the Presbyterian congregation who took literacy seriously from the outset, education for the vast majority of children in Britain barely existed. The wealthier boys were educated privately and some of them were groomed for Oxford and Cambridge – the only two universities in England, or for Edinburgh and St Andrews in Scotland. There was from the beginning the familiar English anxiety, as Derek Gillard author of Education in England points out, ‘that . . . education would only lead to the working poor being discontented with their lot.’ The fear of the upper classes of the potential disruption which would surely follow any education or liberation of the masses was unrelenting.
When education on a larger scale got under way it was managed through charity movements. The largest of these was a Protestant organisation which came out of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), founded in 1698, a domestic missionary project which built up a network of primary schools in England and Wales. There were similarly based enterprises in Scotland and in Ireland. At the end of the eighteenth century, Robert Raikes set up Sunday schools in Gloucestershire. These Sunday schools were the educational salvation of hundreds of thousands of poor children and only ten years later they were giving elementary education to three-quarters of a million children.
Derek Gillard point out that the SPCK formed the National Society for the Education of the Poor throughout England and Wales. Thereby the Protestant Church got a hold on elementary and often secondary education which they have not lost. The Church was in the schools and the schools were in the Church. The King James Bible was used for assemblies and prayers every school day and Religious Instruction was in the syllabus. The local vicar considered it his right and duty to visit the local school whenever he wanted to and he would be on the board of governors. The Bible would be as prominent in the school halls as it was in the churches themselves and its authority would be reinforced by reference to people taking their oath on the Bible. These people would include kings and queens as well as witnesses in the well-reported trials in court.
In its own only seemingly bumbling way, the Anglican Church in England and Wales and then – in its different forms – in Scotland and Ireland, was taking up the credo of the Jesuits, who declared that once they had the child until the age of seven, they had the man. From 1811, the King James Bible was fundamental to the curriculum and the numerous Church of England schools were pervaded by its presence. This was often superficial, non-propagandist, even at times no more than a token presence. The reality was far less rigorous than the constitution suggested. Even this was to ease off yet further in the twentieth century. Until then the British Isles could still be described as a Christian country. Despite the mass of the indifferent and the increasing criticism from atheists and the claims of other religions, ‘C of E’ ruled, often by default. The exception was Northern Ireland, where its clash with the Roman Catholic schools led to intense indoctrination.
In the new industrial cities, the poor were herded to school partly out of charity but partly to give them the elementary education necessary to cope with the Industrial Revolution. ‘Coping’ could be interpreted as being trained to bear the boredom of the industrial process. This was to be induced by children being subjected to trained silences in uniform groups for hours on end and being delivered a dose of teaching, generally by rote. Obedience was the supreme virtue. The teaching was accompanied by threats of reprisals, earthly and heavenly, should any deviations be attempted. These were often taken with a large pinch of salt and did little to endear religion to many industrial workers. But it was a start.
School attendances rose in the early nineteenth century, a movement which owed much to religious support. In 1816, 875,000 of the country’s 1.5 million children ‘attended a school of some kind for some period’. By 1855, this was 1.45 million out of 1.75 million. The average length of attendance was one year. Nevertheless, the majority of the population shunted their way forward: writing and arithmetic eventually became a regular part of the school curriculum and later there was an inclusion of other subjects, geography and history.
A new system was introduced late in the nineteenth century, called ‘the steam engine of the moral world’. This involved the transfer of the new factory system into the schoolroom. Teachers would walk up and down the aisles between hundreds of small shared desks, not unlike factory foremen or, to be hyperbolic, plantation bosses in the slave fields, and supervise repetitive exercises. In this way, one man could ‘teach’ hundreds of children the same lessons at the same time and the authority of what was being taught was not in doubt. The stalking master was the Old Testament God in that classroom.
Sunday schools continued to thrive – for adults as well as for children, but only for Bible studies. Writing and arithmetic were considered ‘dangerous . . . and even harmful’. In 1807, one Justice of the Peace said, of the poor receiving an education: ‘as to writing and arithmetic, it may be apprehended that such a degree of knowledge would produce in them a disrelish for the laborious occupations of life.’ The original idea, which had turned into a hard ‘philosophy’ that the poor must be kept in their place, was still, in many quarters, as active as it had been in the time of Tyndale, when similar arguments had been used to oppose the translation of the Bible into English.
For all the changes in the Reformation, the Civil Wars and the Enlightenment, the masses in the British Isles were treated as if they were at one and the same time, helpless and inferior yet potentially revolutionary. They had to be curbed even though they were already crushed. Yet the King James Bible could be an escape. If the poor had to be given one book only, then the King James Version, in their own language, was as nourishing and as potentially liberating as any.
The Church of England was far from being the villain in all this. For who else cared? Charities were in their infancy: national government was absent and local government was often downright opposed to the expense of education. So the nonconformist Churches looked after their own as they had done for years and there were Dame schools, small private enterprises, and independent establishments which became, in the mid-century, public (i.e. privately paid for) schools. A few public schools such as Eton already existed as did a number of grammar schools. At these schools the study of the classics was more intensive than the study of religion but the religious basis of life was ‘taken for granted’ with all the long habit and lack of enthusiasm that phrase describes.
The focus of the internal missionary campaign was among the poor and here the Church of England was the main mover. If you thought education to be desirable for children, then the Established Church’s dedication was admirable. Many were opposed to it, especially the industrialists and mass manufacturers who employed tens of thousands of very young children.
Religion was the ‘First R’ alongside ‘Reading, Writing and’Rithmetic’. When the government did begin to give grants to schools they went through religious channels. Piecemeal, unsatisfactory, often well-intended, often negligent, the education of the majority of children achieved a national platform only in 1870 with the Elementary Education Act. This established compulsory education for all children aged five to eleven and was driven on to the statute books by men of religious conviction and biblical learning.
But the state did not drive out the Churches. The Anglican Church took full advantage of the government’s offer of funds for new buildings and within fifteen years the number of Church of England schools, at a crippling cost to itself, rose from 6,382 to 11,864. (In the same period, Catholic schools rose from 750 to 892.) Attendance at Protestant Church schools doubled to 2 million.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Church scho
ols secured government funding for the secular curriculum but held on to their privileged position in the matter of religious education. In the twentieth century, driven by the National Society set up in 1811, the national religion was still fundamental to the national education, although there were other faith schools, most importantly the Roman Catholic.
The Church schools were served by some admirable men and women whose religious conviction was central to the way they tackled their society. One such was Joshua Watson, who retired from business in 1814, having done well as a wine merchant out of the Napoleonic Wars. He dedicated the rest of his long life – until 1855 – to the provision of a Christian education for the many. He was referred to as ‘the best layman in England’ and he devoted all his working time and a large part of his great fortune to the National Society, which upheld the religious component in education. His aim was to plant Protestant Christianity in the minds of the impoverished young who would, he believed, benefit both spiritually and materially from a religious education.
He was determined to put a Church school in every parish in the land. At that time, the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Established Church was yet again publicly arraigned for its corruption and its effete nature, this was a bold ambition. He saw it through. Many a village in the remotest parts of the kingdom was to benefit from the small and sturdy little schools which gave the most disadvantaged an educational start in life and hopefully brought to the Church its future congregations. Joshua Watson was at the heart of this achievement. His services to the Church, it was said, were so manifold and so ubiquitous that William Wordsworth suggested that to the petition in the Litany should be added the clause ‘To all Bishops, Priests and Deacons’ the words ‘and also Joshua Watson’.
In a lecture given in 1961 to celebrate the National Society’s 150th anniversary, Canon Charles Smyth of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, used the occasion to revive the reputation of Joshua Watson. He gave him much of the credit for what was a successful educational mission of the Anglican Church inside its own country. Towards the end of his lecture he said:Regarded in the light of our modern educational system, with all the resources of the community behind it, this [what Joshua Watson had achieved] may seem very inadequate and unenlightened. But, regarded against the background of the widespread ignorance and brutality of the England of the Napoleonic Wars, it can be recognised as a heroic missionary enterprise, financed by private charity, and designed to illuminate the surrounding darkness and to rescue the children of the poor, particularly in the new industrial and manufacturing towns, from heathenism and barbarity.
The Protestant religion, in the English-speaking world, through its Bible, at the very least opened the doors of education to millions who had been shut out from learning until this book of faith brought them their enlightenment.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
ON A MISSION AROUND THE WORLD
The Protestant mission around the world – it was to include America, Oceania, Africa, India, China, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and more than a hundred other destinations – began, in earnest, some centuries after the Roman Catholic mission. But when it got under way, it had lasting effects. The central instrument was the King James Bible. Those who had not heard must hear, for without it, the Protestants believed, their earthly lives would be condemned to sin and an eternal peace would be denied them. And, most vitally, they had the truth in the Word. Did not the one God in their Bible of truth command all Christians according to Mark, when ‘He said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature’?
It could be argued that the British Protestant mission abroad began when the Pilgrim Fathers reached the east coast of America. There were missions to neighbouring Indian tribes. They were tentative and under-resourced, but that was to be expected from an alien community fighting a neck and neck battle for survival. Nevertheless the indigenous neighbouring population was approached by those who saw part of their Christian duty to spread the Word of the Lord. The King James Bible was translated into Indian languages. The ‘prayer towns’ were established and it was in these, outside their own settlements, that the dedicated Puritans hoped, as it proved rather over-optimistically, that their seeds might find fertile ground.
But at the end of the eighteenth century – coincidentally at the time of what was thought by some to be the victory of the Enlightenment – there was a London outburst of missionary work. The Reverend Thomas Coke was appointed by the Wesleyan Conference in 1790 as general supervisor of what would be a global reach of Methodist World Missions. As if moved by the spirit of emulation, the Baptists set up their Missionary Society in 1792, the Congregationalists came into the ring in 1795, Anglican evangelicals in 1799, the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804 and an American Board of Communities for Foreign Mission in 1810.
As Diarmaid MacCulloch points out, ‘this activity had a complementary relationship with that feature of British Protestantism unique in Europe, its large sector of churches separate from the established churches.’ It had, also, in common, the King James Bible which over almost two centuries had securely established itself as the national book, and for the religious the key to life and the answer to death.
Perhaps the French Revolution and the consequent increase in apocalyptic fears were two of the factors which triggered this apparently sudden movement in London. Perhaps Romanticism encouraged the religiously minded to see in the ‘natural’ condition of much of the planet a ready earth to farm. Or could it have been a ‘London Awakening’? Whatever the combination of causes, by 1830 around 60 per cent of British Protestants were involved in some variety of evangelical religious practice. There was also that visceral recurring fear that the end of the world was nigh: between 1800 and 1840 over a hundred books were published scouring the evidence for the end of the world.
In many cases, colonial and later imperial rule followed the missionaries: and in many cases, devastation of local cultures was the result. It is difficult to tell the missionary story with enthusiastic one-sidedness. While it is impossible to doubt the integrity of the majority of individual missionaries and possible to give their guiding organisations full credit for what they saw as a need for the world to be ‘improved’, ‘saved’, and ‘brought to Christ’, some of the human and cultural results, often the debris, are still with us. And ‘enthusiastic one-sidedness’ cannot escape blame.
Whether, given the way the nineteenth and twentieth centuries became harnessed to the unbridled horsepower of the industrial and then the technological and then the ideological revolutions, the ‘native’ peoples would have stood a better chance without Christianity, who can tell? We cannot trust the thesis that all the ‘natives’ lived in a state of innocence until the arrival of the horrors of the Europeans and the Americans. There is too much evidence in pre-colonial life of mayhem, murder, savagery and oppression. The attempt to zone the world geographically into the good and the bad does not seem to work: the bad is always present, the good has always had to be struggled for and ‘civilisations’ come out of that struggle.
Nevertheless there was much to mourn on the part of those who met the zealous brunt of the Protestant missionaries: as there was much to mourn among the missionaries themselves whose lives were cut down, whose teachings were ignored and whose influence was often minimal. Despair and loss were often shared.
Oceania was a priority for the London Missionary Society. It had become England’s province of the tropical imagination after the bold voyages of Captain Cook and the botanical harvesting of Joseph Banks. Tahiti would be the goal and a ship carrying about thirty practical English missionaries set out with an expectation not unakin to those of the Pilgrim Fathers. It was an all but total disaster. Some went native in what proved to be a treacherous Eden; others were murdered; at least one missionary went insane – he had tried to teach Tahitians Hebrew, but the connection is not established – until only one missionary remained. Yet his story, of which more later, can be
seen as inspirational and in the longer view of the Christian mission can be claimed to be successful.
Other Pacific Islands were boarded with, at first, little success, though there again, the sheer obstinate belief in themselves and their mission which was displayed by a handful of Christian Englishmen bore Christian fruit in longer terms. It was a strange, mad enterprise, looking back, this assault on deep, alien, illiterate, untechnological oceanic cultures by these raw platoons of theologically primed, industrially educated, European-based men. Even stranger when we realise that to these peoples with their own gods, their own ways, they brought what must have seemed such a weird story.
The story was of a monotheistic, invisible, all-powerful, allmerciful God and His Son Jesus Christ whom He had watched crucified on the Cross to save the world from sins which most oceanic people did not see as sins at all. Yet Christ became the figure who was eventually to bridge the divide between these wide-apart cultures.
The Maoris took more readily to Christianity and by 1845 we are told that at least half the Maori population was worshipping in churches – outnumbering European churchgoers. They followed Isaiah’s lead in the Old Testament. And they discovered to their relief that nothing in the King James Version forbade tattooing. But when the colonists grew in number, following Roman Catholic colonists in Central and South Africa, and Protestant colonists in North America, they wanted more land, in this case Maori land, without Maori interference or participation. It was easier to murder them and rob them of their territories than to convert them, and this is what happened.
The Churches stood in the way of this ethnic cleansing but the Churches were pushed aside. Lust for land swept aside the Bible however much those who slaughtered might give it homage and, in a bewildering way, respect. And they had read in the Old Testament that God’s chosen people in the Old Testament had not flinched from slaughtering whole peoples whom they saw as their enemies. God had not discouraged them. The missionary project exposed the Bible to some sceptics as merely a pawn, just another power-political player on the board. There was one Bible for war and another for peace, it seemed; one for the strong, another for the weak; one for contemplation, another for action; one for murder, another for compassion.
