Church 3

The Contemporary Scene






Shortly after the publication of Paine's Age of Reason with its deist

critique of the Bible,


a certain Bishop Watson replied with an "An Apology for the Bible in

a Series of Letters addressed to Thomas Paine". George III

commented that he wasn't aware the Bible needed an apology.

Blake noted in his "Annotations to Watson's Apology" that "Paine

has not attacked Christianity; Watson has defended Antichrist". On

the back of the title page Blake wrote: "To defend the Bible in this

year 1798 would cost a man his life. The Beast and the Whore rule

without control".






The Beast and the Whore, two of the more flamboyant images of

Revelation, in Blake's vernacular symbolized respectively the State

and the Church.






A State Church






England has always had a State Church. Although many fat books

have been written about it, the English Reformation primarily

signified Henry VIII's declaration of independence from the papacy.

Through the Middle Ages religious and temporal authority had

existed side by side in continuous alliance and usually with a

minimum of tension. At the high point of papal authority in 1077 a

Holy Roman Emperor waited for three days in the snow outside the

door until Pope Gregory VII saw fit to receive him. The Pope

considered the kings and princes of Europe his spiritual children.






Henry VIII was a child who grew up. When the Pope denied him

permission to put away his wife in favor of a later romantic interest,

Henry declared himself in effect the pope of the English Church and

gave himself the necessary dispensation. That was the major event

of the English Reformation; thereafter the ultimate authority of the

Church of England resided with the Crown.






By Blake's standards a State Church is the ultimate abomination.

He was aware that in the second century at least one Emperor had

attempted to enforce the worship of his person as God throughout

the Roman Empire, resulting in considerable persecution of those

Jews and Christians who refused. Much of the New Testament

addressed the problem. In 312 A.D. Constantine took over the

Church and made it an arm of the State. That's the way Blake saw it

in the 18th Century.






In America we take for granted the separation of Church and State

as a constitutional principle. This limits the sort of power that

corrupted Henry VIII. In England many people feel comfortable with

a State Church, but traditions of freedom have limited its power. A

large proportion of the population exist in religious groups outside of

the State Church, and probably an even larger proportion have no

significant religious attachment.






Even in Blake's day the tradition of dissent was an accepted part of

the established order. True,the State Church operated Oxford and

Cambridge for its own purposes, primarily preparing clergymen. But

dissenting academies had arisen to provide a form of education in

many ways superior to that of the established universities,

especially in the new areas of science and industry. Dissenters

largely carried out the Industrial Revolution.






The 17th Century had witnessed an explosion of dissent in which

the head of State and Church had lost his own head. But the

Restoration in 1660 reinstated the former arrangements. The

Commonwealth struggle had led to a general disgust with religious

controversy. Enthusiasm came to be despised and feared by clergy

and laity alike. Conventional 18th Century religion had little to do

with the feelings. It was rather an intellectual and political matter.






One of Blake's four zoas, Urizen aptly portrays the God of the

majority of Anglicans during Blake's age. The State Church existed

as a facade or symbol of order and authority, but with limited power,

temporal or spiritual.






The State Church, like the Jewish Sanhedrin, represented a

minority of the people, the conservative establishment types, the

squirearchy, the people who for centuries had controlled society.

Frequently the landowner's younger son became the priest, though

his character may have been dissolute. Politics dictated clerical

appointments. Pluralism was common, the same man being

appointed to a number of church positions. He would hire a curate

to look after each parish's affairs, often at a tenth of the income

which the parish provided him.






The bishops served primarily as political officials; they spent most of

their time in London sitting in the House of Lords, where they

generally provided a faithful voting block for the Crown. Tithes were

the law of the land and enforced much as the income tax is today,

much of the proceeds going to the clergy. It was a convenient

arrangement, but it could not last; there was too much dissent, too

much growth, too much creativity. Change was overtaking all

England's institutions, and the Church was no exception. The

religious changes had been quietly gathering force for centuries.






Side by side with Henry VIII's Reformation had existed a grass

roots movement which we may call the Radical Reformation. It was

made up of less worldly types than Henry, people who took their

religion more seriously. One such group departed England in 1619

aboard the Mayflower. Their descendants became the Established

Church in New England and spun off dissents from their dissent,

like that of Roger Williams.






William Penn brought shiploads of other irregulars to found a new

colony. The Pilgrims, the Baptists, the Quakers of necessity learned

to coexist--with one another, with other Eurpoean religious groups,

and with the Cavaliers of Virginia, who were solidly Anglican. All

cooperated in throwing off the yoke of the mother country. In this

melting pot religious groups learned to compete in an ecclesiastical

form of free enterprise. It represented quite an improvement over

the religious wars that had decimated Europe in previous centuries.






The same fluid climate existed in the mother country. Every group

that immigrated contained members who remained behind and

found a place in English society. The State Church, with its large

and unwieldy ecclesiastical bureaucracy, existed alongside an

infrastructure of non-Conformist groups. What these groups lacked

in political clout they made up for in creativity, character, industry,

and commercial acumen. Each group has a fascinating story. In this

chapter we look at two of them which had a specific relationship to

the mind of William Blake.