Most Reviews More reviews, by subject:- Film, TV, DVDs, CDs, media critics | Health, Medical | Jews (Frauds, Freemasons, Religions, Rules, Wars) | Race | Revisionism | Women | Bertrand Russell | Richard Dawkins | Martin Gardner | H G Wells
I heard of this work from Bertrand Russell, in On Education, where he takes an example of how not to educate from The History of the Fairchild Family by Mrs Sherwood. Read, for example, the chapter in The Fairchild Family, about how little Henry was taught Latin. He was told that he could never hope to become a clergyman unless he learned that language, but in spite of this argument the little boy did not apply himself to his book as earnestly as his father desired. So he was shut up in an attic, given only bread and water, and forbidden to speak to his sisters, who were told that he was in disgrace, and they must have nothing to do with him. Nevertheless, one of them brought him some food. The footman told on her, and she got into trouble, too. After a certain period in prison, the boy, we are told, began to love Latin, and worked assiduously ever after.
Sure enough, about a third of the way through the complete 3-volume book (p 147 in my copy) is Story of the Absence of God in which the son Henry tries to learn Latin; his father becomes infuriated, and decrees that the family should ignore Henry. The point is that Latin was needed to become a clergyman. Russell, a member of an aristocratic family, made fun of this ambition, a fashion established by 'Jane Austen'. This was all very well for them, but, as with U.S. Jews now, and people in the BBC and the Civil Service now, a lifetime career was more-or-less guaranteed. Patrick Brontë is a good example of a determined careerist, rewarded with a parsonage in a recently built part of Yorkshire. England was divided into parishes, sufficient of them, with the then death-rate, to guarantee livings to something like half of the entire output of Oxbridge colleges. In my young and naive days, I'd thought many academics and professors wanted to discover and invent and classify things and ideas, but of course this is rare. So Henry's dad might well have been right to try to continue, with his own inside knowledge, his 'career'.
The principle is similar to 'tenure', in what are called 'universities' now, in which evidence of adequate acceptable performance over many years lands the job. In both cases there's something like a commissar class to check.
Russell in Power, his chapter Powers and forms of governments wrote: 'In capitalistic enterprises there is a peculiar duality of purpose: on the one hand they exist to provide goods or services for the public, and on the other hand they aim at providing profits for the shareholders.' There's a similar duality in official religion.
Maybe I missed it, but I've never seen any attempt to assess the costs and benefits of established Christianity. No doubt it was useful to register births, marriages, and deaths, and have some format for stability, and have distributed centres covering an entire country. There were literacy and calendars and holidays. Some vicars made discoveries or creative works; Brewer's Phrase and Fable, Stirling's engine, Cox's orange pippin, twiddly hazel, Tristram Shandy, and (at a higher level) The Compleat Angler, illustrate the sort of thing. Governments must have regarded the Church of England in the way the BBC is regarded, as a convenient source of lies, broadcast across the country, telling people who to hate and fight and celebrate and admire—however much they may have contradicted official dogma. Its constant grasping must have been tolerated.
The weakness of course is the fundamentalist dogma. (Russell liked to point out that the Service for the Ordination of Deacons all the respondents had to agree to: Do you unfeignedly believe all the Canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testament?)
Since the vast promotional push for the King James translation of the Bible—not just the Jesus part, but the much longer part from the mists of the oriental Mediterranean—and deliberately mistranslated to obscure horrors and atrocities—and since Edward Gibbon on 'antifa'-style funded thugs, and the emergence of novelties such as the early 20th century Scofield Bible (published by Oxford University Press) it's become clear that the Church of England is almost as phoney as the Bank of England.
Rae West 1 Feb 2020