Re: A Modest Proposal

["James M. Cobb" <jcobb@ahcbsd1.ovnet.com>]

  Tim, 
 
  
  On 01 17 96 you say: 
 
    ...we are for people looking out for Number One, with the 
    expectation that many other people simply won't make it. 
 
 
  I'm reading Christopher Hill's The English Bible and the 
  Seventeenth-Century Revolution.  At page 270: 
 
    In 1616 John Rolfe, Secretary to the Virginia Company, 
    attributed to Sir Thomas Dale the view that the English 
    were 'a peculiar people marked and chosen by the finger 
    of God' to possess North America.  But the phrase [pecu- 
    liar people] soon ceased to be equivalent to 'the chosen 
    people' and came to be restricted to descriptions of them- 
    selves by the saints.  In 1659 Christopher Feake urged 
    'the real fifth-kingdom men' to 'become a peculiar people 
    (or, as it were, a nation in the midst of the nation) wait- 
    ing for the word of command from their leader [i.e. God] to 
    execute the vengeance against Babylon'.  Christ's cause 
    will 'be amiable in the eyes of all the nations in due time'. 
    Quakers and Bunyan also used the phrase.  It indicated 
    a group conscious of its superiority but also aware that 
    it was a minority.
 
  
  Time tests prophecy and expectation alike. 
 
  Hill's book has other pertinent things to say.  At p 248: 
 
    There are two (at least) ways of using the Bible for political 
    controversy, which are not easily separated.  First as CODE. 
    When Thomas Goodwin in 1639 asked 'How, by degrees, do these 
    Gentiles win ground upon the outward court in England?' he had 
    already told us that Gentiles mean Papists.  'The outward court' 
    continues a metaphor about the Jewish temple; but it was at 
    Charles I's court that the Papists were making headway. 
 
 
  At 249: 
 
    Secondly, the symbols of the myth can be interpreted to taste. 
    We have seen Cain pass from being all the reprobate to 'all 
    great landlords', Nimrod from a tyrannical king to all kings, 
    all persecutors; Samson from a type of Christ to a freedom 
    fighter or a terrorist.  There seemed to be no limits.  Cen- 
    sorship had to be restored.... 
 
    Some of the myths came to be put to secular uses.  John Bull 
    with his cudgel, the bully of the waves, the master slave- 
    trader, becomes the symbol of the chosen Anglo-Saxon people, 
    of their manifest destiny to bring the world to protestant 
    Christianity, to civilization, and in our century to 'demo- 
    cracy'.  But long before that the Bible had lost its function 
    as final arbiter. 
 
 
  At 176: 
 
    But it is not totally absurd to suggest that the role of the 
    [church] elders who decide and whose decisions are taken over 
    by 'the people' is performed in our [present-day] society by 
    the media.  The main difference is in the way in which spokes- 
    men of the latter find their way to such powerful positions: 
    unlike elders, they are not elected. 
 
 
  I expect those spokesmen are simply looking out for their Number 
  Ones 
 
                       --their employers. 
 
 
  Cordially, 
 
  Jim 
 
 
 
  NOTE.  The first bracketed insertion in the first quotation 
  is mine; the second is not.  I capitalized CODE in the second 
  quotation for the minority who can't see all that well. 
 
  The book was published in 1993 by Allen Lane / The Penguin Press. 
  Its ISBN: 0 713 99078 3.  Pages: xiv + 466.