Pride

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 57 of 174 · 20 per page

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  even a single century earlier, the Christianity to be transplanted to the western world would have been that of the Church of Europe at its lowest stage of decadence.’ Hence he saw ‘great providential preparations as for some “divine event” still hidden behind the curtain that is about to rise on the new century.’ The ‘divine event’ could only be, in some form, the Christianization of the world according to American standards. Hence in the period 1880–1914 America, too, developed its own form of Christian imperialism, linked generally to missionary endeavour but sometimes embodying armed Christian – indeed Protestant – force. In the McKinley-Roosevelt era, the Protestant churches were vociferous supporters of American expansion, especially at the expense of Spain, since they saw it as a God-determined process by which ‘Romish superstition’ was being replaced by ‘Christian civilization’. President McKinley justified the American seizure of the Philippines – where Philip II had imposed Catholicism by the sword – in Christian evangelical terms: ‘I am not ashamed to tell you, Gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance that one night. And one night late it came to me this way. . . . There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all and to educate the Filippinos and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.’ It was among the evangelical sects, with their predominance in the missionary field, that the consciousness of a national or racial destiny was strongest. In 1885, when the movement was just getting under way, Josiah Strong, General-Secretary of the Evangelical Alliance, argued in Our Country: its Possible Future and its Present Crisis: ‘It seems to me that God, with infinite wisdom and skill, is here training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the World’s future. . . the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled. . . this race of unequalled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it – the representative, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization – having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth. And can any one doubt that the result of this competition of the races will be the survival of the fittest?’ In 1893, in The New Era: or, The Coming Kingdom, he pushed the argument further. ‘Is it not reasonable to believe that this race is destined to dispossess many weaker ones, assimilate others, and mould the remainder, until in a very true and important sense, it has Anglo-Saxonized mankind?’ Such racial theories were not uncommon in the 1890s: they reflected popular misconceptions of Darwin.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Pius exonerated him in the encyclical Inter Multiplices, in which he commanded the hierarchy to be ‘generous in their encouragements and to show their goodwill and love towards those men who . . . devote the watches of the night to writing books and papers . . . so that the ancient rights of the Holy See and its acts may enjoy their full force, so that opinions and sentiments contrary to this Holy See may disappear, so that the darkness of error may be dissipated and the minds of men flooded with the blessed light of the truth.’ And what was this ‘blessed light of the truth’? L’Univers had the answer: ‘Who is the Pope? He is Christ on earth.’ This was the paper’s theme throughout the 1850s and 1860s. It was also the theme of an increasing number of bishops. Trains and steamships made it possible for most of them to travel to the Vatican regularly, and they did so increasingly at the Pope’s invitation; communications thus served to break down the ‘Gallican’ element in the Church, itself a product of isolation and distance as much as anything else, and to make it increasingly difficult for bishops to resist the papal inclination, even on quite minor matters. Many bishops, in fact, moved wholly into the triumphalist camp, and became the fuglemen and drum-beaters of the new populism. Bishop Mermillod went so far as to deliver a sermon on the three incarnations of Christ – in the womb of the Virgin Mary, in the eucharist, and in the person of Pius IX. As episcopal subservience developed, the resurrected conciliar theory of the eighteenth century was quietly buried again, and it became clear that Pius IX had very little, if anything, to fear from a council. A council was necessary to crown triumphalism by giving the sanction of the Church Fathers to the doctrine of papal infallibility, long asserted but never formally pronounced as dogma. For many years Pius IX had been urged to take such a step by his supporters, led by Manning, now Archbishop of Westminster, for whom papal infallibility was the necessary and ultimate endorsement of the authoritarian principle. And much of Pius’s reign had seemed a preparation for the event. In 1854, his bull Ineffabilis Deus plunged into the heady waters of theological adventurism by declaring ‘the Blessed Virgin Mary to have been, from the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of Almighty God, in view of the merits of Christ Jesus the Saviour of mankind, preserved free from stain or original sin’. Here was a case of a pious traditional belief turned into ineradicable dogma – and in the teeth of Protestant, and even liberal Catholic, hostility. Such gestures appealed to the faithful Catholic masses; they were part of the populist repertoire. So, too, were great gatherings of the clergy.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The first draft of the Genealogia, which was to become a standard work of reference on classical mythology for the next 500 years, was completed around 1360, and it was revised and enlarged at frequent intervals up to the year of the author’s death, as indeed were most of his other encyclopaedic Latin works and some of his earlier, vernacular writings. The Genealogia is in essence a compendium of the knowledge concerning the myths of the ancient classical world accumulated by Boccaccio during a lifetime of intensive study. Critical attention tends nowadays to be focused, however, upon the two concluding books (there were fifteen in all), where the author’s poetic creed, newly formulated in the wake of his discussions with Petrarch, is expounded with polemical vigour and intense inner conviction. In Book XIV, Boccaccio defends the art of poetry against its many detractors, asserting that it was a rare and precious accomplishment of an élite whose work was distinguished by Truth composed under a veil of Beauty. In a similar vein, he also describes the true poet’s distinctive quality as ‘a certain fervour for exquisitely discovering and saying, or writing, what you have discovered’ (‘fervor quidem exquisite inveniendi atque dicendi, seu scribendi, quod inveneris’). As for the art of storytelling, he stresses its didactic function by saying that narratives should ‘at one and the same reading instruct and entertain’ (‘fabulae... una et eadem lectione proficiunt et delectant’). In the concluding book (XV) Boccaccio proceeds to defend himself against those who have charged him with frivolity. There are echoes here of the Decameron, especially of his replies to his critics in the Introduction to the Fourth Day and in the Author’s Epilogue, but in the Genealogia strong emphasis is placed upon the poet’s moral and didactic function. The work ends with the significant claim, addressed to God, that poetry brings glory, not to its earthly creator, but to the name of the Lord: ‘Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo dat gloriam.’ Boccaccio’s conversations with Petrarch in Padua, in the spring of 1351, coincide more or less exactly with a change of direction as well as of emphasis in his literary interests. At that time, he was almost certainly working on the latter part of the Decameron. It would be hazardous to suggest that the edifying tales of the Tenth Day, culminating in the story of Griselda’s extraordinary forbearance (a story which Petrarch admired so greatly that he eventually translated it into Latin), were in any sense motivated by the older poet’s moralizing counsels. It is certainly true, however, that after completing the Decameron Boccaccio wrote no other substantial piece of imaginative literature, and that the major part of his subsequent output was composed, not in Italian, but in Latin.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  (Inferno, XXVI, 119–20) need to observe certain standards of behaviour (‘We could go and stay together on one of our country estates, shunning at all costs the lewd practices of our fellow citizens and feasting and merrymaking as best we may without in any way overstepping the bounds of what is reasonable’), and this same concern for propriety is seen in her spirited declaration that ‘it is no more unseemly for us to go away and preserve our honour [I’onestamente andare] than it is for most other women to remain and forfeit theirs [lo star disonesta-mente].’ When one of her companions, Neifile, objects that their retreat to the country in young men’s company will bring disgrace and censure upon them all, she is promptly told (by Filomena this time) that if a woman lives honestly and with a clear conscience, then people may say whatever they like, for God and Truth will defend her. These are noble sentiments, totally in keeping with the aristocratic ethos which informs the world of the lieta brigata, whose impeccable and carefully regulated mode of existence, with its leisurely, civilized daily routine of bodily and spiritual refreshment, its country walks, its noontide siestas, its games and pastimes, its polite conversations, its singing, dancing, and decorous merrymaking, above all its delight in beauty, whether natural or created by man, reflects the Golden Age, the first and best age of the world, in which the poets of antiquity envisaged mankind in a state of ideal prosperity and happiness. Such an ideal world, the attractions of which are greatly enhanced by the circumstances of its creation in direct antithesis to the barbaric and anarchic urban life described by Boccaccio in the opening pages of the Introduction, can exist only in the imagination of the author and his readers, so tenuous is its connection with everyday reality. It is above all for this reason that none of the individual members of the lieta brigata, not even Dioneo with his penchant for non-conformity and mischievous humour, acquires credibility as a fully formed individual composed of flesh and blood.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Not a man easy to work with, or confute in argument, or rebuke into silence, or to advance a compromise: a dangerous, angular, unforgettable man, breathing friendliness, indeed, but creating monstrous difficulties and declining to resolve them by any sacrifice of the truth. Moreover, Paul was quite sure he had got the truth. He has no reference to the Holy Spirit endorsing, or even advancing, the compromise solution as presented by Luke. In his Galatians letter, a few sentences before his version of the Jerusalem Council, he dismisses, as it were, any idea of a conciliar system directing the affairs of the Church, any appeal to the judgment of mortal men sitting in council. ‘I must make it clear to you, my friends,’ he writes, ‘that the gospel you heard me preach is no human invention. I did not take it over from any man; no man taught it me; I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.’ Hence, when he comes to describe the council and its consequences he writes exactly as he feels, in harsh, concrete and unambiguous terms. His Council is not a gathering of inspired pneumatics, operating in accordance with infallible guidance from the spirit, but a human conference of weak and vulnerable men, of whom he alone had a divine mandate. How, as Paul saw it, could it be otherwise? Jewish elements were wrecking his mission in Antioch, which he was conducting on the express instructions of God, ‘who had set me apart from birth and called me through his grace, chose to reveal his Son to me and through me, in order that I might proclaim him among the gentiles’. To defeat them, therefore, he went to Jerusalem ‘because it had been revealed by God that I should do so’. He saw the leaders of the Jerusalem Christians, ‘the men of repute’, as he terms them, ‘at a private interview’. These men, James, Christ’s brother, the Apostles Peter and John, ‘those reputed pillars of our society’, were inclined to accept the gospel as Paul taught it and to acknowledge his credentials as an apostle and teacher of Christ’s doctrine. They divided up the missionary territory, ‘agreeing that we should go to the gentiles while they went to the Jews’. All they asked was that Paul should ensure that his gentile congregations should provide financial support for the Jerusalem Church, ‘which was the very thing I made it my business to do.’ Having reached this bargain, Paul and the pillars ‘shook hands on it’. There is no mention that Paul made concessions on doctrine. On the contrary, he complains that enforcing circumcision on converts had hitherto been ‘urged’ as a sop to ‘certain sham-Christians, interlopers who had stolen in to spy upon the liberty we enjoy in the fellowship of Jesus Christ’. But ‘not for a moment did I yield to their dictation.’ He was ‘determined on the full

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘If you knew me a little better, you’d soon find out whether I can keep a secret or not. Why, when Messer Guasparruolo da Saliceto was on the magistrates’ bench at Forlimpopoli, 14 he confided nearly all his secrets to me, knowing they would be in safe keeping. And if you want me to prove it, I was the first man he told that he was about to marry Bergamina. Now what do you think of that?’ ‘That settles it,’ said Bruno. ‘If a man of that sort confided in you, I can certainly do the same. Now what you have to do is this. In this company of ours we have a captain and two counsellors, all of whom hold office for six months, and we know for certain that from the beginning of next month, Buffalmacco is to be captain and I am to be one of the counsellors. Whenever there is any question of nominating and electing a new member, the captain’s views carry a great deal of weight, so I advise you to go out of your way to make friends with Buffalmacco, and entertain him on a suitably lavish scale. Buffalmacco’s the sort of man who will take a powerful liking to you from the moment he discovers how intelligent you are, and when you’ve softened him up a little with your sparkling wit and those priceless treasures of yours, you can put the question to him, and he won’t know how to refuse. I’ve already had a word with him about you, and he’s dying to make your acquaintance, so do as I’ve suggested, and then leave the rest to Buffalmacco and myself.’ ‘This plan of yours seems most excellent,’ said the Master, ‘for if Buffalmacco takes a delight in the company of the wise, he has only to converse with me for a little while, and I guarantee that he will never want to let me out of his sight. I have enough intelligence to supply a whole city, and still remain a paragon of wisdom.’

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  endeavour to purge and protect the churches of Christ from the doctrines of false brethren within, as much as from destruction by pagans without. The divine power has armed your majesty with these two swords in the right hand and in the left hand.’ Again, such a Melchisadech-figure naturally appointed bishops and other Church dignitaries – the theory was elaborated to protect the otherwise defenceless Church against the lay nobility. The point was underlined, for instance, by Thietmar, Bishop of Merseburg early in the eleventh century: ‘Our kings and emperors, vicars of the supreme ruler in this our pilgrimage, alone arrange the appointment of bishops, and it is right that they should have authority before other men over their pastors; for it would be wrong if those pastors whom Christ made princes after his own likeness should be under the dominion of any except those who are set above other men by the glory of benediction and coronation.’ The anointed king-emperor was thus raised above any other type of secular ruler; and the theory was completed by a description of the complementary roles of priest and king. ‘Both priest and king in their office,’ as a late eleventh-century Anglo-Norman writer put it, ‘bear the image of Christ and God; the priest of the inferior office and nature, namely the human; the king of the superior, the divine.’ With the coronation of Charlemagne, therefore, the Christian take-over of human society in the West became, in theory at least, complete. Both the papacy and the strong-minded ecclesiastical element at the Carolingian court saw the new power- structure they had brought into existence not only as a restoration of the Roman empire in all its glory, but as a reconstruction from within of society in all its aspects, to produce a model of the Christian kingdom on earth. Charlemagne was to realize the Augustinian vision. He supplied much of the drive himself. He was a very intelligent, and in many ways clear-minded man. He grasped the intimate connection between effective government, culture and Christianity. But of the three, the last undoubtedly had priority in his mind. Charlemagne was, above all, a religious man. He fully accepted the Augustinian mission the Church placed on his shoulders. Einhard shows his efforts to educate himself, to improve his knowledge and practice of the Christian life: ‘. . . he tried to write, and usually placed tablets and sheets of parchment under his pillows so that at odd moments when he was resting he could practise tracing letters. But he took up writing too late, and the results were not very good . . . He gave much attention to correct reading and psalmody; for he was an expert, although he never read in public, and sang only in unison or to himself.’ His

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Since my sole remaining family heirloom is my honour, I am determined to safeguard and preserve it for as long as I live.’ Jeannette’s reply seemed to present a serious obstacle to the plans the lady had devised for keeping her promise to her son, though in her heart of hearts, being a sensible woman, she greatly admired the girl’s sentiments. ‘Come now, Jeannette,’ she said. ‘Supposing His Royal Highness the King of England, who is a dashing young nobleman, wished to enjoy the love of an exquisitely beautiful girl like yourself, would you deny it to him?’ To which Jeannette promptly replied: ‘The King could take me by force, but I would never consent freely unless his intentions were honourable.’ The lady, realizing how strong a character the girl possessed, pressed the matter no further, but decided to put her to the test. And so she informed her son that as soon as he was better, she would lock them in a room together so that he could try and bend her to his will, adding that it seemed undignified for her to go bowing and scraping on her son’s behalf, as though she were a procuress, to one of her own ladies-in-waiting. The young man was not at all pleased with this idea, and his condition immediately took a severe turn for the worse. On seeing this, the lady took Jeannette into her confidence, only to find that she was more adamant than ever. So she acquainted her husband with what she had done, and although both of them thought it a grave step to take, they mutually decided to let him marry her, preferring their son to be alive with an unsuitable wife than dead without any wife at all. And after a great deal of further heart searching, they announced their consent. This made Jeannette very happy, and she thanked God from the depths of her devout heart for not deserting her; nor, despite everything, did she once reveal that she was anyone other than a Picard’s daughter. The young man recovered, married the girl thinking himself the happiest of men, and proceeded to enjoy her to his heart’s content. Meanwhile, Perrot, who had remained in Wales in the household of the King of England’s Marshal, had likewise become a favourite of his lord and master. He was an outstandingly handsome and fearless youth, and there was no one in the island who could match his skill at jousts, tournaments and other contests of arms. Everybody called him Perrot the Picard, and his fame resounded through the length and breadth of the country. And just as God had not forgotten his sister, so too He showed that He had not lost sight of Perrot. For a great plague descended on that region, carrying off half the population and causing a large number of the remainder to take refuge in other parts, so that the country appeared to be totally deserted.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Now it happened that a frivolous and scatterbrained young woman, whose name was Monna Lisetta da Ca’ Quirino, the wife of a great merchant who had sailed away to Flanders aboard one of his galleys, came to be confessed by this holy friar of ours accompanied by a number of other ladies. Being a Venetian, and therefore capable of talking the hind leg off a donkey, she had only got through a fraction of her business, kneeling all the time at his feet, when Friar Alberto demanded to know whether she had a lover. ‘What, Master Friar?’ she exclaimed, giving him a withering look. ‘Have you no eyes in your head? Does it seem to you that my charms are to be compared to those of these other women? I could have lovers to spare if I wanted them, but my charms are not at the service of every Tom, Dick or Harry who happens to fall in love with them. How often do you come across anyone as beautiful as I? Why, even if I were in Heaven itself, my charms would be thought exceptional.’ But this was only the beginning, and she droned on interminably, going into such raptures about this beauty of hers that it was painful to listen to her. Friar Alberto had sensed immediately that she was something of a half-wit, and realizing that she was ripe for the picking, he fell passionately in love with her there and then. This was hardly the moment, however, for whispering sweet nothings in her ear, and in order to show her how godly he was, he got up on to his high horse, reproached her for being vainglorious and made her listen to a great deal more of his balderdash. The lady retorted by calling him an ignoramus, and asserting that he was incapable of distinguishing one woman’s beauty from another’s. And since he did not want to irritate her unduly, Friar Alberto, having heard the rest of her confession, allowed her to proceed on her way with the others. After biding his time for a few days, he went with a trusted companion to call upon Monna Lisetta at her own house, and, having got her to take him into a room where nobody could see what he was doing, he threw himself on his knees before her, saying: ‘Madam, in God’s name I beseech you to forgive me for talking to you as I did on Sunday last, when you were telling me about your beauty. That same night, I was punished so severely for my insolence that I have been laid up in bed ever since, and was only able to rise again today for the first time.’ ‘Who was it who punished you, then?’ asked Lady Numskull.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Never was rider more proud or more happy than Stephen, when first she and Raftery went a-hunting; and never was youngster more wise or courageous than Raftery proved himself at his fences; and never can Bellerophon have thrilled to more daring than did Stephen, astride of Raftery that day, with the wind in her face and a fire in her heart that made life a thing of glory. At the very beginning of the run the fox turned in the direction of Morton, actually crossing the big north paddock before turning once more and making for Upton. In the paddock was a mighty, upstanding hedge, a formidable place concealing timber, and what must they do, these two young creatures, but go straight at it and get safely over—those who saw Raftery fly that hedge could never afterwards doubt his valour. And when they got home there was Anna waiting to pat Raftery, because she could not resist him. Because, being Irish, her hands loved the feel of fine horseflesh under their delicate fingers—and because she did very much want to be tender to Stephen, and understanding. But as Stephen dismounted, bespattered and dishevelled, and yet with that perversive look of her father, the words that Anna had been planning to speak died away before they could get themselves spoken—she shrank back from the child; but the child was too overjoyed at that moment to perceive it. 4Happy days, splendid days of childish achievements; but they passed all too soon, giving place to the seasons, and there came the winter when Stephen was fourteen. On a January afternoon of bright sunshine, Mademoiselle Duphot sat dabbing her eyes; for Mademoiselle Duphot must leave her loved Stévenne, must give place to a rival who could teach Greek and Latin—she would go back to Paris, the poor Mademoiselle Duphot, and take care of her ageing Maman. Meanwhile, Stephen, very angular and lanky at fourteen, was standing before her father in his study. She stood still, but her glance kept straying to the window, to the sunshine that seemed to be beckoning through the window. She was dressed for riding in breeches and gaiters, and her thoughts were with Raftery. ‘Sit down,’ said Sir Philip, and his voice was so grave that her thoughts came back with a leap and a bound; ‘you and I have got to talk this thing out, Stephen.’ ‘What thing, Father?’ she faltered, sitting down abruptly. ‘Your idleness, my child. The time has now come when all play and no work will make a dull Stephen, unless we pull ourselves together.’ She rested her large, shapely hands on her knees and bent forward, searching his face intently. What she saw there was a quiet determination that spread from his lips to his eyes. She grew suddenly uneasy, like a youngster who objects to the rather unpleasant process of mouthing.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Burton family, leading Methodists who were said to be exceptionally generous to their workers, summoned cannons to defend their print-works at Rhodes and, aided by the prayers of Methodist preachers, mowed down the factory hands. In 1818 the preachers took the conformist title of ‘Reverend’, thus defying an earlier ruling; and three years later, one of them, John Stephens, put their social philosophy plainly: ‘The objects we have to keep in view are: (1) to give the sound part of society a decided ascendancy . . . (2) To put down the opposition . . . (3) To cure those of them that are worth saving. (4) To take the rest one by one and crush them . . . They are down and we intend to keep them down . . . Methodism stands high among the respectable people.’ Of course it did, though it did not primarily interest itself in ‘respectable people’. Or, rather, it was designed – and in this it was highly successful – to convert a significant section of the upper working-class to moral ‘respectability’. Wesley ignored the upper classes. He told his preachers: ‘You are no more concerned to have the manners of a gentleman than a dancingmaster.’ Yet indirectly Methodism was to have a powerful influence on the ruling class. A number of wealthy families were associated with the movement; and when it split from the Anglicans they remained within the Establishment and sought to evangelize it from within. They were primarily concerned with moral reform, but also to some extent with social reform, since they believed that poverty, squalor and cruelty were enemies of the Ten Commandments. They wanted to make society more moral by making it more bearable; but of course they did not want to change its structure. Most of the Evangelicals were Tories. Their real founder was John Thornton of Clapham, who was born in 1720 and who became the wealthiest merchant in England. After his death in 1790, the leadership devolved on William Wilberforce, the heir to a Hull merchant fortune, a diminutive orator and friend of William Pitt, the Prime Minister. He and his friend Hannah More constituted the nucleus of the Clapham Sect, which was not really a sect at all but a pressure-group within the Anglican Church and within the ruling class. The idea had met with Wesley’s approval. He said to Hannah’s sister: ‘Tell her to live in the world – there is the sphere of her usefulness; they will not let us come nigh them.’ While Methodism sought to make the working class respectable, reformist and tame, the Evangelicals sought to instil a spirit of noblesse oblige among their betters. They presented a ‘change of heart’ as a more moral, and acceptable, alternative to change of a more fundamental kind.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Only one of them, a Genoese called Bernabò Lomellin, took a different line, maintaining that he, on the contrary, was blessed with a wife who was possibly without equal in the whole of Italy, for not only was she endowed with all the qualities of the ideal woman, but she also possessed many of the accomplishments to be found in a knight or esquire. She was extremely good looking and still very young, she was lithe and lissom, and there was no womanly pursuit, such as silk embroidery and the like, in which she did not outshine all other members of her sex. Furthermore, he claimed it was impossible to find a page or servant who waited better or more efficiently at a gentleman’s table, for she was a paragon of intelligence and good manners, and the very soul of discretion. He then turned to her other accomplishments, praising her skill at horse-riding, falconry, reading, writing and book-keeping, at all of which she was superior to the average merchant. And finally, after a series of further eulogies, he came round to the subject they were discussing, stoutly maintaining that she was the most chaste and honest woman to be found anywhere on earth. Consequently, even if he stayed away for ten years or the rest of his life, he felt quite certain that she would never play fast and loose in another man’s company. Among the people present at this discussion, there was a young merchant from Piaccnza called Ambrogiuolo, who, on hearing the last of Bernabò’s laudatory assertions about his lady, began roaring with laughter and jokingly asked him whether it was the Emperor himself who had granted him this unique privilege. Faintly annoyed, Bernabò replied that this favour had been conceded to him, not by the Emperor, but by God, who was a little more powerful than the Emperor. Then Ambrogiuolo said: ‘Bernabò, I do not doubt for a moment that you believe what you say to be true. But as far as I can judge, you have not devoted much attention to the study of human nature. For if you had, you surely possess enough intelligence to have discovered certain things that would cause you to think twice before making such confident assertions. When the rest of us spoke so freely about our womenfolk, we were merely facing facts, and so as not to let you run away with the idea that we suppose our wives to be any different from yours, I would like to pursue this subject a little further with you.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Harvard, put it (1673): ‘According to the design of our fathers and the frame of things laid by them, the interests of righteousness in the commonwealth and holiness in the churches are inseparable. . . . To divide what God hath joined . . . is folly in its exaltation. I look upon this as a little model of the glorious kingdom of Christ on earth. Christ reigns among us in the commonwealth as well as in the church and hath his glorious interest involved and wrapt up in the good of both societies respectively.’ Was New England, then, to expand into a gigantic Geneva? Not exactly. It was not a theocracy. It gave the clergy themselves less actual authority than any other government in the western world at the time. The minister’s power lay in determining Church membership. Moreover, the churches were, right from the start, managed by laymen. The religious establishment was popular, not hieratic. This was the foundation of the distinctive American religious tradition. There was never any sense of division in law between layman and cleric, between those with spiritual privileges and those without – no jealous juxtaposition and confrontation of a secular and ecclesiastical world. America was born Protestant, and did not have to become so through revolt and struggle. It was not built on the remains of a Catholic Church, or an Establishment; it had no clericalism or anti-clericalism. In all these respects it differed profoundly from a world shaped by Augustinian principles. It had a traditionless tradition, starting afresh with a set of Protestant assumptions, taken for granted, self-evident, as the basis for a common national creed. In any case, the idea of a gigantic Geneva was quickly rendered impossible by events. A Calvinist Church-State could not maintain itself without a terrifying apparatus of repression: even Geneva had had to expel people. Some of the problems of the Old World rapidly reproduced themselves in the New. Dissidents like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson emerged, were ejected and took refuge in the future Rhode Island, termed by the orthodox ‘the sewer of New England’. Founding Providence, Williams wrote: ‘I desired it might be for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience.’ In 1644 he published his defence of religious freedom, The Bloody Tenent of Persecution for the Cause of Conscience Discussed, and his new instrument of government declared that ‘the form of government established in Providence Planations is DEMOCRATICAL, that is to say, a government held by the free and voluntary consent of all, or the greater part, of the free inhabitants.’ To its laws and

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  moderate, the Reverend Alexander Carlyle. Carlyle was publicly rebuked by the General Assembly, and the unfortunate minister of Liberton, also present, was prosecuted by the Edinburgh Presbytery. He answered that ‘he owned the charge, but pleaded by way of alleviation that he had gone to the playhouse only once and endeavoured to conceal himself in a corner to avoid giving offence.’ But by 1784, when Mrs Siddons appeared in Edinburgh, the General Assembly altered its timetable to give delegates the chance to go to a matinée. Clergymen led the Scottish Enlightenment, and Carlyle was able to claim in his Autobiography: ‘Who has written the best histories, ancient and modern? It has been a clergyman of this church. Who has written the best system of rhetoric, and exemplified it by his own orations? A clergyman of this church. Who wrote a tragedy that has been deemed perfect? A clergyman of this church. Who was the most profound mathematician of the age he lived in? A clergyman of this church . . .’ The claim was to secular, not spiritual, excellence. On the Continent, Catholicism, the pattern set by France, made its way essentially to the same destination, though by a more devious and complicated route. After Westphalia, Spain ceased to count, and until 1815 France determined the course of Roman orthodoxy. Now the French Church was a peculiar case. It had not, like Spain, undergone a pre-Reformation renewal. On the other hand, it was Gallican, not papist. It had, by concordat, achieved a degree of independence which Henry VIII and England seized unilaterally. Thus the reform movement in France had never been buttressed by the salient force of xenophobia and nationalism, and that was the principal reason why it had never become the majority. Instead, the essential conflict was fought out in the seventeenth century within the French Catholic Church itself, with the puritanical Jansenists representing moral and doctrinal reform, the Jesuits and the crown standing for traditional Catholic authority, and an entirely secular third force pressing the claims of reason. Jansenism needs to be examined in some detail because it serves to show, more explicitly than the Protestant movement in the sixteenth century, that reform was an evangelical rather than a progressive force, and explains why in the long run Locke’s synthesis between basic Christianity and science was bound to break down. Cornelius Jansen, the Bishop of Ypres, was essentially a Catholic Lutheran – that is, he moved from Paul’s Romans, through Augustine to the doctrine of justification by faith and predestination. For this reason, his Augustinus, published in 1640, was

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  in some way. He wrote to his son Sam, later Bishop of Winchester, that he had just contrived to introduce an ‘excellent man’ to the Archbishop of Dublin, ‘in conformity to a principle I hold to be of first-rate importance. . . It is that of bringing together all men who are like-minded, and who may probably at some time or other combine and concert for the public good. Never omit any opportunity, my dear Samuel, of getting acquainted with any good or useful man . . . More perchance depends on the selection of acquaintances than on any other Circumstance in life . . . Acquaintances, indeed, are the raw Materials, from which are manufactured friends, wives, husbands etc.’ The Evangelicals believed in ‘getting on’ and pushing ahead anyone who agreed with them. In particular, the way in which Evangelicals penetrated the Church of England was thoroughly worldly, and almost Jesuitical in its subordination of means to ends. In 1814, for instance, the Reverend Charles Sumner, a young Evangelical, went on a Continental tour with the two sons of the Marquess of Conyngham. To prevent the elder marrying the daughter of a Geneva professor, Sumner married her himself. In gratitude, Lady Conyngham, George IV’s mistress, had Sumner made royal chaplain and historiographer, Deputy-Clerk of the Closet, Bishop of Llandaff in 1826, and the next year, aged thirty-seven, Bishop of Winchester, a see he held for forty-two years during which he nominated Evangelicals throughout the diocese. His brother, another Evangelical, got Chester in 1828 and, in 1848, Canterbury. Like-minded clergy were termed by Evangelicals ‘religious’ ‘sincere’ or ‘pious’; the rest were ‘Scribes and Pharisees’, ‘Fat Bull of Bashan’ or ‘priests walking in darkness’. Like the Puritans in the sixteenth century, they plotted hard to grab positions of power within the Establishment. In 1788, they captured Queens’, Cambridge, by getting Isaac Milner elected President. Tutors who opposed him had to resign or accept country livings. The college expanded rapidly; Evangelicals sent their clever sons there; and it churned out large numbers of potential right-thinking clergymen. From this bridgehead, the Evangelicals expanded their hold on Cambridge through a brilliant and wealthy organizer, Charles Simeon, who was ‘converted’ in 1779, at the age of nineteen, and who was minister at Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge, for fifty-three years. The aim was to exploit the existing, but under- utilized, propaganda resources of the Anglican Church itself. Cobbett argued shrewdly in 1802: ‘The clergy are less powerful from their rank and industry than from their locality. They are, from necessity, everywhere, and their aggregate influence

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Faint furrows had come between the thick brows and faint shadows showed at times under the eyes; the eyes themselves were the eyes of a writer, always a little tired in expression. Her complexion was paler than it had been in the past, it had lost the look of wind and sunshine—the open-air look—and the fingers of the hand that slowly emerged from her jacket pocket were heavily stained with nicotine—she was now a voracious smoker. Her hair was quite short. In a mood of defiance she had suddenly walked off to the barber’s one morning and had made him crop it close like a man’s. And mightily did this fashion become her, for now the fine shape of her head was unmarred by the stiff clumpy plait in the nape of her neck. Released from the torment imposed upon it the thick auburn hair could breathe and wave freely, and Stephen had grown fond and proud of her hair—a hundred strokes must it have with the brush every night until it looked burnished. Sir Philip also had been proud of his hair in the days of his youthful manhood. Stephen’s life in London had been one long endeavour, for work to her had become a narcotic. Puddle it was who had found the flat with the casement windows that looked on the river, and Puddle it was who now kept the accounts, paid the rent, settled bills and managed the servants; all these details Stephen calmly ignored and the faithful Puddle allowed her to do so. Like an ageing and anxious Vestal Virgin she tended the holy fire of inspiration, feeding the flame with suitable food—good grilled meat, light puddings and much fresh fruit, varied by little painstaking surprises from Jackson’s or Fortnum and Mason. For Stephen’s appetite was not what it had been in the vigorous days of Morton; now there were times when she could not eat, or if she must eat she did so protesting, fidgeting to go back to her desk. At such times Puddle would steal into the study with a tin of Brand’s Essence—she had even been known to feed the recalcitrant author piecemeal, until Stephen must laugh and gobble up the jelly for the sake of getting on with her writing .

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  premature disclosure. . . . If the discovery of America had been achieved . . . even a single century earlier, the Christianity to be transplanted to the western world would have been that of the Church of Europe at its lowest stage of decadence.’ Hence he saw ‘great providential preparations as for some “divine event” still hidden behind the curtain that is about to rise on the new century.’ The ‘divine event’ could only be, in some form, the Christianization of the world according to American standards. Hence in the period 1880–1914 America, too, developed its own form of Christian imperialism, linked generally to missionary endeavour but sometimes embodying armed Christian – indeed Protestant – force. In the McKinley-Roosevelt era, the Protestant churches were vociferous supporters of American expansion, especially at the expense of Spain, since they saw it as a God- determined process by which ‘Romish superstition’ was being replaced by ‘Christian civilization’. President McKinley justified the American seizure of the Philippines – where Philip II had imposed Catholicism by the sword – in Christian evangelical terms: ‘I am not ashamed to tell you, Gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance that one night. And one night late it came to me this way. . . . There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all and to educate the Filippinos and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.’ It was among the evangelical sects, with their predominance in the missionary field, that the consciousness of a national or racial destiny was strongest. In 1885, when the movement was just getting under way, Josiah Strong, General-Secretary of the Evangelical Alliance, argued in Our Country: its Possible Future and its Present Crisis: ‘It seems to me that God, with infinite wisdom and skill, is here training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the World’s future. . . the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled. . . this race of unequalled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it – the representative, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization – having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth. And can any one doubt that the result of this competition of the races will

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  indeed, he seemed to have taken an almost physical delight in his personal struggle to hold the liberal world at bay, and a pride in epitomizing the traditions and characteristics of the ancien régime. He incarnated the papacy as de Maistre had conceived it; and, as de Maistre had perceived, this constituted part of his undoubted power to attract loyalty and devotion from very large numbers of people, including many who were his intellectual superiors. He was the first pope for centuries to become a popular symbol; and it was his very quality of intransigence which seemed to constitute his chief appeal. Sixteen centuries before, Tertullian had remarked with satisfaction that Christianity made outrageous demands on one’s credulity – therein lay the glory and power of faith. The point was still valid: indeed, the seemingly relentless march of science and liberalism made it seem, to some, more valid than ever before. There were also less paradoxical reasons for the success of populist triumphalism. 1848 had frightened other people besides the Pope. In France (and the movement can be paralleled elsewhere) there was a mid-century bourgeois rallying to the stable old faith. The motive was not so much religious as Voltairean: ‘I like my lawyer, my tailor, my servants and my wife to believe in God because I can then expect to be robbed and cuckolded less often.’ As Lacordaire’s friend, Frederic Ozanam, put it (1849): ‘Every Voltairean with a decent income is anxious to send people to mass, provided he does not have to go himself.’ Ernest Renan called them ‘Christians by fear’. (They nevertheless read his shocking and best-selling Vie de Jésus.) During the nineteenth century, the Church’s economic and financial assets were steadily rebuilt. By the 1860s, especially in certain countries like France, Italy, Germany and Belgium, it had more schools and institutions than ever before, and all the religious orders, but especially the teaching ones, were expanding their numbers. The Church was a ‘possessing’ body, with which the bourgeois could feel strong affinities, economic if not intellectual. In the state schools, radical secular teachers aroused bourgeois fear and hostility. As Thiers put it: ‘Their teachers are 35,000 Socialists and Communists. There is only one remedy: elementary education must be left in the Church’s hands.’ Such attitudes became the prevailing wisdom of French bourgeois society under the Second Republic of Napoleon III. Perhaps as much by accident as by design — certainly not as a result of deeply shared convictions – Napoleon and Pius IX became allies and, in a sense, partners. Each propped up the regime of the other. From the 1850s, Napoleon, while generally supporting the House of Savoy’s anti-Austrian

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  But you said: ‘I’ve got muscles, haven’t I, Father? Williams says I’ve got riding muscles already!’ Then you dug your heels sharply into the pony, so that he whisked round, bucking and rearing. As for you, you stuck to his back like a limpet. Wasn’t that enough to convince them? ‘Steady on, Stephen!’ came Sir Philip’s voice, warning. Then the Master’s: ‘She’s got a fine seat. I’ll admit it—Violet’s a little bit scared on a horse, but I think she’ll get confidence later; I hope so.’ And now hounds were moving away towards cover, tails waving—they looked like an army with banners. ‘Hi, Starbright—Fancy! Get in, little bitch! Hi, Frolic, get on with it, Frolic!’ The long lashes shot out with amazing precision, stinging a flank or stroking a shoulder, while the four-legged Amazons closed up their ranks for the serious business ahead. ‘Hi, Starbright!’ Whips cracked and horses grew restless; Stephen’s mount required undivided attention. She had no time to think of her muscles or her grievance, but only of the creature between her small knees. ‘All right, Stephen?’ ‘Yes, Father.’ ‘Well, go steady at your fences; it may be a little bit slippery this morning.’ But Sir Philip’s voice did not sound at all anxious; indeed there was a note of deep pride in his voice. ‘He knows that I’m not just a rag doll, like Violet; he knows that I’m different to her!’ thought Stephen. 3The strange, implacable heart-broken music of hounds giving tongue as they break from cover; the cry of the huntsman as he stands in his stirrups; the thud of hooves pounding ruthlessly forward over long, green, undulating meadows. The meadows flying back as though seen from a train, the meadows streaming away behind you; the acrid smell of horse sweat caught in passing; the smell of damp leather, of earth and bruised herbage—all sudden, all passing—then the smell of wide spaces, the air smell, cool yet as potent as wine. Sir Philip was looking back over his shoulder: ‘All right, Stephen?’ ‘Oh, yes—’ Stephen’s voice sounded breathless. ‘Steady on! Steady on!’ They were coming to a fence, and Stephen’s grip tightened a little. The pony took the fence in his stride, very gaily; for an instant he seemed to stay poised in mid-air as though he had wings, then he touched earth again, and away without even pausing. ‘All right, Stephen?’ ‘Yes, yes!’ Sir Philip’s broad back was bent forward over the shoulder of his hunter; the crisp auburn hair in the nape of his neck showed bright where the winter sunshine touched it; and as the child followed that purposeful back, she felt that she loved it utterly, entirely. At that moment it seemed to embody all kindness, all strength, and all understanding. 4They killed not so very far from Worcester; it had been a stiff run, the best of the season. Colonel Antrim came jogging along to Stephen, whose prowess had amused and surprised him.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  had been accused of Judaism as a student in 1527 simply because of his strict religious observances. He later said, defiantly, that he would consider it an honour to be descended from Jews: ‘What? To be related to Christ Our Lord and to Our Lady the glorious Virgin Mary!’ He and his first three successors as General of the Jesuits were all firmly opposed to the limpieza statutes and ecclesiastical anti-Semitism, and the Jesuits only gave way in the end because their attitude was ruining recruitment in Spain. In fact it was the moderate line the Jesuits took on the Jews which lay at the bottom of their ferocious 200-year struggle with the Dominican Inquisition. The rule seemed to be that, in a period of intense religious conflict, everyone needed to have an obsessional enemy, but no one could cope with more than one at a time. In Spain, orthodoxy hunted Jews but very rarely witches. The Jesuits were pro-Jewish (up to a point) but prominent witch-hunters. Burning of witches increased wherever they triumphantly carried the Counter-Reformation, especially in Germany, Poland and Franche-Comté; and in the Low Countries, where they were less successful, they intensified witch-hunting after a proclamation by Philip II in 1590, which declared witchcraft ‘the scourge of the human race’. Jesuits were associated with the most savage campaign, conducted around Trier by Archbishop Johann von Schoneburg, and his suffragan, Bishop Binsfield. In the years 1587–93, the archbishop burned 368 witches in some twenty-two villages, leaving two of them with only one female inhabitant each. As with the Inquisition against heretics, officials who dragged their feet were liable to become victims: thus Schoneburg had the University Rector, Dietrich Flade, chief judge of the electoral court, arrested for leniency, tortured, strangled and burned. The hunters constantly alarmed the authorities by stories of vast and growing conspiracies of witches; once they were allowed to torture they produced not only scores of victims but hundreds of accusations – thus justifying their forecasts. Some hunters were paid by results: Balthasar Ross, minister to the Prince-Abbot of Fulda, made 5393 guilden out of 250 victims, 1602–5. There seems to have been a fairly steady correlation between the intensity of the Protestant-Catholic struggle and the number of witches accused and burned. Just as there had been a lull in the early sixteenth century, ended by the Lutheran Reformation and its violent consequences, so there was another lull just before the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618. Then, with the Catholic reconquest of Bohemia and parts of Germany, the witch-trials multiplied. This last great phase of witch-hunting was the product of Catholic-Protestant rivalry, since hunters on both