by Melvyn Bragg
Though Maurice became an Anglican in his late twenties, his roots were inside that nonconformist world which has given so much to radical thought and action since 1611. His father was a Unitarian minister who worked with Joseph Priestley in Hackney in London in a church which became an unofficial nonconformist university. He went to Anti-Slavery Society meetings and he was a regular attender of the Bible Society. When he became the Anglican chaplain at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, he entered the legal establishment and found an influential platform.
It was his book The Kingdom of Christ, published in 1838, that made his mark. Politics and religion were inseparable, he asserted, and the Church should be active in redressing social injustices. He was against individualism which he associated with selfishness.
In 1853, following the formation of the Christian Socialists, his development of these ideas led King’s College to deprive him of his post as Professor of Theology. So he set up a scheme for a Working Men’s College and became its first principal. Later he went to Cambridge University as Professor of Moral Philosophy but still continued to run the Working Men’s College in London. It was a life lived out according to his beliefs and with him as with the many like him, the motivation came from the Bible. Would he have done all that without the Bible? Likely not. Did others who were not religious at all or not as religious as Maurice accomplish what he and his colleagues accomplished? Some did. But these Christian Socialists were the role models and the leaders in the field.
A more prominent member of the group was Charles Kingsley, previously mentioned. He is still best remembered for his children’s book The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1863) about a boy chimney sweep miraculously washed clean and swept into eternal happiness. It carried a sentimental but strong and emotionally persuasive message, converting its target audience for generations. I still remember reading it when I was about seven or eight. With the memory still comes a warmth of optimism. Charles Kingsley (1819 – 75) was the son of a clergyman. He himself became a clergyman and, like his brother, a novelist. He was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, as distinguished an academic post as any in England, and yet he renounced it to go to Chester, where he took up the comparatively humble role of a canon of the cathedral. Maurice’s book The Kingdom of Christ had influenced him greatly and he wanted to serve both his religion and society. Politics was the sway to bind them together, he thought, and the Christian Socialist movement provided his political base.
Kingsley made his contribution through his writing. His novels carried the sentiment; his articles, in Politics for the People and the Christian Socialist, carried the argument which, broadly, aimed to demonstrate that democracy and egalitarianism came from the Bible and therefore to work for the social improvement of the weaker in society was to do the work of God. He, like Maurice, became involved in Working Men’s Associations and set up a famous Night School in Little Ormond Yard.
His reading of the Bible had begun early in his life and remained intense throughout his life. In his early novel Hypatia, for example, a book of 491 pages, it takes fifty pages to list the biblical references. In the first ten pages there are quotations from Psalms, Matthew, Luke, Ezekiel, Ephesians and Proverbs. He read from the Psalms every morning and evening. He wrote of the Bible as ‘the true poor man’s book, the true voice of God against tyrants, idlers and humbugs . . . the Bible demands for the poor as much, and more, than they demand for themselves; it expresses the deepest yearnings of the poor man’s heart . . . it is the poor man’s comfort and the rich man’s warning.’
Men such as Kingsley and Maurice were not in the mainstream of the nineteenth-century religious establishment which was more like that which the novelist Anthony Trollope wrote of in its hierarchical, snobbish, satirised, Anglican, landowning, socially acceptable venal character. There were exceptions and there is a heroic roll call of Anglican preachers at work in the new slums of the newly industrialised cities. But the Christian Socialist movement sprang directly out of convictions aroused through study of the King James Version and a close knowledge of the poverty in the country which led to a compulsion to act for the betterment of those most in need.
Keir Hardie spoke for many political figures, in the USA and around the English-speaking world as well as in the UK. These people saw in the Bible the means and the encouragement to take on the growing varieties of social injustice in a proliferating industrial society. They also brought vision.
Octavia Hill has been referred to earlier but her work through contact with the Christian Socialists shows how far-sighted and effective they were in identifying and helping these increasingly populous agglomerations of the poor to steer towards a better world for the living as well as to aim for a better world after death. Octavia Hill was conservative in many ways – accepting that there was a male ‘sphere’ which was not to be broached; speaking in public, for instance. Yet her actions went to the core of public need.
John Ruskin, the art critic, loaned her money in 1864 to begin what proved to be one of her most successful and influential Christian enterprises. With Ruskin’s money she bought slum properties in Little Hill in Marylebone Place in London. She renamed it Paradise Place. She rebuilt and rented these properties at very low rents to poor tenants. This scheme then took off both in the UK and abroad. The Ecclesiastical Commissioners approached her to manage similar properties in Southwark and in Lambeth and Wandsworth. This was not cosmetic. They became huge undertakings – involving demolition, new roads, recreation grounds, community facilities. And for many poor people they were indeed thought of as a metropolitan paradise.
Octavia Hill saw her mission to include the moral as well as the material improvement of the poor. Therefore she decreed that tenants who did not pay their rent on time were to be evicted. She was determined to instil a sense of responsibility and would not tolerate laziness. There were the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor: any forgiveness had to be earned. What was even more striking was that Octavia Hill saw the importance of the larger environment and, like Wordsworth, she saw it in moral terms; she believed that a true appreciation of nature could teach and improve you. First, though, in her new ‘Paradise’ nature had to be available. For this she insisted on parks and gardens within easy reach of the new settlements and if possible part of them.
Her career took her into key developments in what eventually became desired social policy ambitions in many countries in the second half of the twentieth century. Though denied, through her gender, a place on the Royal Commission on Housing, she was appointed to the Royal Commission on the Poor Law in 1905, the first female commissioner to be allowed on to that body. She was methodical, she used trained volunteers, she laid the foundations of modern housing management with her ‘Fellow Workers’. She not only cleared slums and rebuilt new properties, she set the example and standard for doing so. Her methods were taken up in other countries, including Holland, Ireland and the USA. There is still a flourishing Octavia Hill Association in Philadelphia. Her example led many women to take up professional roles in social work. ‘By the last quarter of the 19th century,’ writes Jane Lewis, ‘the large numbers of unpaid visitors were middle class women, bent on leaving their homes in order to instruct working class women how to manage theirs.’
Not all of these women were Christian Socialists, but they were in the vanguard. Octavia Hill’s personal example, her achievements and the obvious need for her efforts undoubtedly led the way. Similarly her Kyrle Society formed to ‘Bring Beauty Home to the People’, for which she enlisted William Morris, is considered the forerunner of the Civic Trust. She looked to improve the quality of life for the poor across the spectrum. Hospitals and schools were to be decorated, open spaces purchased and made into gardens for the people, trees and flowers planted in the congestions of cheap urban brick. Everywhere, to create Paradise Place on earth was to be one of the two great objectives of her mission: the other was to save immortal souls. And on she went: she h
elped found the Women’s University Settlement movement and in 1895 she helped form the National Trust. She had already proposed what she called a ‘green belt’ to link together and protect the open spaces around London.
These are just a few of the people who took what they had found in the Bible into a wider society. They acted in a tradition. They were modern-day Apostles whose ‘miracles’ tended to be organisational rather than divine. It is difficult to quantify the effect the Christian Socialists had: it spanned work in the slums, the writing of pamphlets and novels, social management, urban and city planning, cultural upgrading and conservation. It came from the companionate egalitarianism which can be found in the Bible.
The movement was not as strong in America but Walter Rauschenbusch promoted the notion of what he called the Social Gospel. He had an original way of looking at the death of Christ. This, he wrote, was because of ‘six sins, all of a public nature’. The idea of ‘social sins’ was key to his mission to improve the social conditions. These six social sins were: ‘religious bigotry, the combination of graft and political power, the corruption of justice, the mob spirit (by the ‘social group gone mad’), and mob action, militarism and class contempt . . . every student of history will recognise that these sum up constitutional forces in the Kingdom of God.’
Socialism to Rauschenbusch was not an ideology but the best practical answer to the problems of the day: and Christianity, he believed, both informed that socialism and steered it. ‘His writings,’ wrote Martin Luther King, ‘left an indelible impact on my thinking.’
Christian Socialism is underpinned by a vision of the Kingdom of God. It takes into account human self-interest and attempts to guide it to socially useful ends and it directs people into politics to bring about change. The new word ‘socialism’ which entered the language in the early 1830s (oddly enough at the same time as the word ‘science’) was soldered on to the egalitarian strand in Christianity. There were other movements, such as that pioneered by Robert Owen in his New Lanark cotton mills: a commitment to social engineering outside the established Churches but emanating from Owen’s Christianity.
Alongside this, throughout the century, was an atheistic social movement which was going in much the same direction. It is arguable that Marx was influenced by the Judaeo-Christian tradition but he was more influenced by Feuerbach in his rejection of the Christian consciousness. From 1844 onwards, Marx advocated the abolition of religion – ‘the opium of the people’. He saw it as an impediment to progress. Marx’s vision of the inevitable triumph of the proletariat was as prophetic as any of the prophets of the Old Testament but his God was the working out of economic determinism. He thought there was no need for God. There was no need for Christianity. Charity, the individual enterprise of helping the poor, all the work to be done by Octavia Hill and so many others was trivial compared to the destiny of the proletariat promised by the engines of the Marxist system.
Yet Christian Socialism has left a legacy which is substantial. It could be argued that the godless statist socialism of Marx and Engels and their apostles led to far more violence, misery and damage than the altogether pacific Christian Socialists could ever have dreamed of. The Christian Socialists, by combining what they saw as the sacred with the social, built on firmer and better ground. Marxism is dead save for its historical-philosophical interest to universities. It is conceivable that the time of Octavia Hill and Keir Hardie might be revived.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE BIBLE AND DEMOCRACY
Democracy, as it took root and developed in Britain and then in America in the seventeenth century, owed an essential debt to the Reformation and to the King James Bible. This could be its greatest achievement.
Together with the growth of early modern experimental science and the new encounters with civilisations beyond the long confined boundaries of the post-Roman European stagnancy this marked a great culture shift. It was the Bible in English, both what it said and the way in which it licensed its listeners and readers to attempt new thoughts that proved to be the vital catalyst. The Bible was the keystone in the bridge to democracy. In Wide as the Waters, the biblical scholar Benson Bobrick wrote: ‘without a vernacular bible, the English Bible in particular, through its impact on the reformation of English politics, there could not have been a democracy as we know it, or even what today we call the “free world”.’ I have touched on democracy several times in the course of this book – this is to draw it together and finally emphasise the biggest of the unexpected consequences and impact of that publication in 1611.
The Bible was the book for most people for centuries. As has been mentioned, because of its size, and variety, its rich contradictions, its exhilarating prophecies, its exalted promises and its vivid ‘characters’ with heroic, fragile or damned lives, it could be embraced on many levels.
It provided a universal basis for arguments on morality, on war, and above all, and most importantly, on the question of authority. Where did authority come from? Whose territorial world was it? This English translation let loose a deluge of knowledge unlike anything that had happened before in human history. And as the waters irrigated what had been the deliberately uncultivated minds of millions, new shoots appeared: and the most remarkable of these, over time, was to be democracy.
The powers in the land spotted this from the beginning. Henry VIII, once such a proud lieutenant of the Pope, joined a Protestant movement he loathed and feared in order to father a legitimate heir. His dynastic imperative took precedence over his faith and the faith of the overwhelming majority of his subjects. One unforgivable unforeseen consequence included his vandalism and looting of some of the finest monasteries in Europe. The other and far more seismic unexpected consequence—the replacement of the Latin with the English Bible in churches throughout his kingdom – proved to be the rock on which his God-given idea of kingship was to be wrecked.
He himself saw that when, a few years after he had authorised the reading of the Bible in English, he lamented to Parliament, in 1545, that the Bible was ‘disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern’. It was the access by the lower classes that grated. They were the growling beasts of the realm kept down by well-exercised oppressions: now their baying could be heard and the old and golden age and God-given hierarchical order of things would start to fall apart.
There was a Protestant pride in the liberation afforded by the Bible in the common language. As early as in the sixteenth century Bishop John Jewel wrote: ‘we allure the people to read and hear God’s Word . . . We lean unto knowledge, they [Catholics] unto ignorance . . . unless thou know thou canst not judge: unless thou hear both sides thou canst not know.’ That new phrase ‘hear both sides’ could be an early encapsulation of the democratic process.
The ‘uneducated’ proved swift to learn. Thwarted and rendered frustrate by the bits of Latin that were whispered at the high altar, they now had meat. Christopher Hill notes: ‘the Biblical sophistication of the lower class Marian martyrs [Protestants burned at the stake by the Catholic Queen Mary and her government in the middle of the sixteenth century] is one of the most remarkable things about them. They took on bishops and scholars, out-argued and out-texted them. The memory of this did not die easily.’ The Catholics warned against this rampage of the peasants. In 1554, John Standish expressed Roman Catholic fears when he wrote that uncontrolled Bible reading ‘would set man against wife, master against servant and vice versa. Women have taken upon them the office of teaching: servants have become stubborn, forward and disobedient to their masters and mistresses.’ A decade later, Anthony Gilby complained that soldiers and serving men can talk so much Scripture that they ‘are no longer respectful to their betters’.
This was the first great fissure in the medieval Church-state’s grip on power. And it came from the translated Bible which not only gave an intellectual landscape common to all, but provided ammunition for arguments. These arguments pierced the pomps and ceremonies and above all th
e claims to sole and unique authority of the establishment, at first in the Church but quite soon to follow in the state as well.
It is significant that the defenders of the status quo feared the overthrow of previous hierarchies in the everyday workings of life, man-wife, master-servant. It was in at the roots, and this was the evidence of the real danger. The plague of learning had got among the people, had reached to the bottom of the barrel, had got into the foundations and was gnawing away. ‘When God gave Adam reason,’ wrote Milton, ‘he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing.’ Through the translated Bible the great blessing of being able to decide for themselves now reached the people: they used it to choose. And it was in Protestant England that this was put to the test, in the Civil War.
So central was the use of the Bible in the Civil Wars, in pamphlets and meetings and among the numerous preachers, that when Charles II reintroduced monarchy in 1661 he passed an ‘Act for the Safety and Preservation of His Majestie’s Person and Government against Treasonable and Seditious Practices and Attempts’. This attempted to outlaw what the Restoration government saw as a prime cause of the Civil Wars – the religiopolitical tracts and sermons which had led to the case being made against the King. It was intended to make the King yet again unassailable. The Act was passed but a generation later, when James II attempted to reintroduce Catholicism he was swept away in the ‘Glorious Revolution’. The subsequent ‘Bill of Rights’ established a landscape of discussion – rooted in the Civil War – which legitimised the trek towards a more democratic state.
