THE RELIGION OF PROGRESS: WHAT THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION DID FOR THE WORKERS OF ENGLAND

New Zealand Tablet, 22 August 1918, Page 11

THE RELIGION OF PROGRESS: WHAT THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION DID FOR THE WORKERS OF ENGLAND

A paper read before the Auckland Newman Society on July 5, by Rev. M. Edge.

(Concluded.)

To the German-made religion of progress the worker owes also a crushing burden of taxation. “It was calculated in 1833 that a laborer earning £22 10s was paying in taxes £ll 7s 7d a year.” (T.L., p. 214.) “But in the expenditure from this taxation was there a single item in which the poor had a special interest” The great mass of the expenditure was war expenditure. Fifty millions went in subventions to the Courts of Europe, two and a half millions to Prussia, millions to Austria, a million and a half went every year in absolute sinecures.” “Not a single penny went to the education of the laborer’s, child or to any purpose that made the perils and difficulties of his life more easy to be borne.” (V.L., p. 172-173.) Some of this huge taxation went to pay the German mercenary soldiers brought to England to keep the worker in slavish subjection. When England was Catholic the burden of taxation did not fall unjustly on the working man. In 1377 the Duke of Lancaster was rated 520 times the payment of the peasant. In 1435 and again in 1450 taxation was levied graduating from 21 per cent, on small incomes to 10 per cent, on large. (E.I. Hy., p. 124.) It was reserved to the religion of progress to tax the laborers’ earnings. Working class women owe their own special debt of gratitude to' the religion of progress, which deliberately deprived workers of employment?: then it sold the unemployed husbands and children by auction like slaves ; then it harnessed the women to carts in place of animals, transforming them into beasts of burden. “There were English villages in which it was the practise of the overseer to harness men and women to the parish carts and the sight of an idiot woman between the shafts was not unknown.” (V.L., p. 242.).

With these I will end for the present the list of blessings English' Workers owe to the Protestant Reformation. History is our witness that the toiler of Protestant England was made to plumb a deeper depth of misery and shame than was the toiler of any other land.” In no other country were there so many capital offences.” (1.H.M.E., p. 52.) “The British use of the whip was regarded in the French Army as an atrocious and incomprensible thing.” (Ib. 57.) “Crime and poverty were as typical in the England of a century ago as iron or cotton.” (Ib.) “An Englishman went to Rouen to superintend a factory there, and when he tried to establish the English discipline, there was a strike.” (T.L., p. 21.) “No foreigners were known to work the same* number of hours.” (Ib. p. 164.) In this respect (Elementary education) England was far behind the rest of the civilised world.” (Ib., p. 55.) “The use of children for sweeping chimnies was a practice peculiar to the British Isles ” (Ib. p. 177.) Was Protestantism responsible for this appalling degradation of English workers Our answer, I think, must be, yes; for it was the basic principle of early Protestantism that he who rules vour country, rules .your conscience. (cujus rer/io, ill lus religio.) The community counts for nothing, the individual is supreme. Subjects had no rights but such as their sovereigns allowed; tenants-had no rights but such as their landlords conceded ; workers had no rights but to do as their masters told them. The diabolical fiction of royal supremacy was an invention of the Reformation, prior to which “absolute power was deemed more intolerable and more criminal than slavery.” (Acton Essay on Liberty, p. 39.) Absolute power of the individual was the raison d’entre of Protestantism. To the Protestant mind the king was king by divine right, the great landlord was landlord by divine right,

the employer was employer by divine right; and , the enslaved worker was cast in the mould of a slave by a dispensation of Providence. The only people or empire that will tolerate that incarnation of wickedness called a “supreme war lord” is a people or empire that is essentially Protestant. Only in Protestant Russia (the one country of Europe that was never really Catholicised) could a man and a very mediocre man, command the people to worship him in an orgy of human slaughter. Says Mr. Gerard in My Four 1 ears in Germany: In 1648 when the treaty of Westphalia was concluded Germany was almost a desert. Its population had fallen from 20 millions to 4 millions. The few remaining people were so starved that cannibalism was openly practised. Of 35,000 Bohemian villages only 6000 were left standing. In the lower Palatinate only one-tenth of the population survived ;in Wurthemburg only one-sixth. Hundreds of miles of once fertile country, were overgrown with forests inhabited only by wolves.” (p. 57.) The seven years war cost Germany one-tenth of her population and Frederick the Great entered that war “merely in order to be talked about.” (p. 58-59.) The present Crown Prince said that when he came to the throne, there would be war, if not before “just for the fun of it (p. 60.) “The women in the farming districts of Germany are harder worked than the cattle, and this hard working of women in agricultural pursuits tends to stupify and brutalise the rural population, and keeps them in a condition of subjection to the. Prussian- Church and the Prussian system” (p. £3.) In the Protestant principal the individual counts for everything the community counts for nothing., (Jujus regia, ilhus reliyio. To whom you owe your allegiance you owe your soul, is the principle that made all workers slaves. Principles apart, the Protestant Church was responsible tor the oppression and degradation of the English worker; for the heads of that Church were part, and a large part, of the ruling body of the nation. In their position as legislators the Protestant bishops of England might have proposed legislative measures conducive to the well-being of that once great body, the English Commons; they might have resisted oppressive and unjust laws. They did not, and when more humane men introduced Bills to mitigate or redress the wrongs of the workers, these Bills invariably succumbed to the hostility of the Protestant Church. In 1807 Whitbread introduced a Bill for the general provision of elementary schools throughout England, but the House of Lords rejected it, at the instance of the Archbishop of Canterbury.” (T.L., p. 56.) In 1804 a Bill passed the Commons to ameliorate slightly the conditions of the chimney sweepers. It was rejected by a House of Lords composed of one archbishop, five bishops,” etc. (T.L., p. 184.) They were members of the House that passed the Combination or antitrade union laws, and of the House that disgraced England s statute books with 200 capital offences; that enabled the magistrate to hang the man, woman, or child that stole sixpence, or lamented intolerable working conditions, that enabled magistrates to transport for seven years (really for life) the child that broke a branch off a tree. The bishops’ example was more than emulated by the lesser clergy. “In most of the places that were turned from rural solitudes into mining camps or textile towns, the Church scarcely existed for the poor, except as the most unrelenting of the forces of law and order.” (T.L., p. 268.) Protestant clergymen were generally magistrates and says The Town. Laborer: They threw themselves into their duty as magistrates with an ardor and a thoroughness that made the discontented look upon them as the most unpityinej of justices” (p. 269). When riots broke out during the miners strike in 1822 against a reduction of wages and for the abolition of truck, the Vicar of Abergavenney put. himself at the head of the Yeomanry and the Greys” (that charged the strikers). (T.L., p. 269.) In 1820 Brougham introduced a Bill for the founding of elementary schools, which he was compelled to with-

draw after its second reading on account' of the hostility of the Church of England and of the Nonconformist bodies. (T.L., p. 58.) When Parliament, determined to abolish the iniquitous truck system, two parson magistrates of Bilston tried to defeat the Bill. (T.L., p. 68.) “A parson magistrate wrote to the Home Office in 1817 to report that he had seized "two men who were distributing Cobbett’s pamphlets and had them well flogged at the whipping post.” (T.L., p. 72.) “Spies were employed by several of the more active magistrates and by the parsons Ethelston and Hay in Lancashire” (IB) When , the workers of .Bolton in Yorkshire, who labored about 16 hours a day for six days a week, met on a Sunday to discuss their affairs, it was a parson who reported to the Home Office that “it was dreadful that the leisure allowed on this Sacred day should be prostituted to such mischievious purposes.” (T.L., p. 237.) - Guilt in this matter is not a monopoly of the clergy of the Established Church. In 1801 Dr. Coke expressed to the Duke of Portland his satisfaction in finding from the strictest scrutiny that three Methodists that were engaged in the rebellious business of helping to form a trade union “had been expelled about five years ago from the late Mr. Wesley’s Society solely for their democratic sentiments.” (T.L., p. 279.) Brougham attributed the absence of riotous acts, such as trade unions meetings or strikes, to “the happy prevalence of the principles of Methodism.” A similar testimony was given to the effect of the teaching of Wesleyanism on the Cornish miners, and in 1819 a Mr. Marris of Ardwick sent up handbills to show that the Wesleyan Methodists were loyal to the great landowners and employers, “even in Manchester.” (T.L., p. 279.) “Some of the leading working class Reformers regarded the Methodists quite definitely as enemies. Cobbett said in 1824 that the bitterest foes of freedom in England have been and are, the Methodists. Among the people of the North they have served as spies and blood-money men. The friends of freedom have found fault, and justly found fault with the main body of the established clergy ; but hostile to freedom as the established clergy have been their hostility has been nothing in point of virulence compared with that of these ruffian sectarians. Books upon books they write. Tracts upon tracts. Villanous sermons upon villanous sermons they preach. Rail they do, like Cooper and Bolt Smith, against the West Indian slave-holders but not a word do’ you ever hear from them against the slave-holders in Lancashire. Cobbett’s statement that the spies were Methodists could not be accepted without confirmation from other sources. There is no hint to that effect in any of the Home Office papers on the subject. But his general view of the attitude of the Methodists and their influence does not differ from the accounts of his contemporaries.” (T.L., p. 282.) The teaching of Methodism was unfavorable to working class movements ; its leaders were hostile, and its ideals perhaps increasingly hostile; but by the life and energy and awakening that it brought 'to this oppressed society it must, in sjfite of itself have made many men better citizens, and some even better rebels.” (T.L., p. 287.) Some writer has said that the Black Death did less harm to England in 150 years than the Reformation in 50. The nineteenth century opened its infant eyes upon an England enormously rich, first among the nations outlie world in commerce and in industry.

But not only was this pre-eminence not due to the Protestant Reformation ; it was due to that Reformation that this pre-eminence had not begun to fall to England’s lot a couple.of centuries earlier. What is due to the Protestant Reformation—to its principles, its ideals, its teaching, and its clergy is the deplorable condition, worse than slavery,' to which the English toilers were reduced. If there was progress, retarded for a long time, in commerce and industry, there was from the beginning of the Reformation era, steady and uninterrupted progress in ravin 'and rapine; progress in ignorance, in injustice, in inhumanity, in starvation, in slavery,—progress in everything that conduces to the utter degradation of the mass of the people. The authors from which I have borrowed the contents of this paper make it plain to their readers that the Catholicism of old England secured to English workmen, as far as was possible, all the rights due to creatures ennobled by kinship with the living God. The 300 years during which Catholicism was suppressed and malinged in England were the saddest 300 years known to oppressed labor in any period of human history. Catholicism, renascent in England, comes to us with her ancient and enduring interest in the toiling sons of God. Where time will not permit me to adduce other proofs, let it suffice to remind you that on several occasions the paid organiser of the Protestant Political Association (who professes tt> know all oui ciimes) has charged us with the capital offence of being in league with organised Labor: and if, as yet, we cannot say that there is any formal compact between us, we will unhesitatingly say that the worker of England and of every land, may be fully convinced that the hand and heart of the Catholic Church are with him, Catholicism was banished from England by the Reformation of the sixteenth century; the Catholic Hierarchy was restored to England in 1850. In the same 16th century, at the introduction of the same Reformation into England, trade unions or guilds were plundered, suppressed, and declared illegal. In 1871 they were once more recognised as lawful corporations. And when in 1889 Labor fought to get a tooling on the ladder of self-respect by a dockers’ strike in London, it found its ablest champion, not in the Protestant Hierarchy but in Cardinal Manning the official head in England of the religion of ignorance and superstition. Joseph Clayton tells us that to “Cardinal Manning more than to any other man was due the settlement.” (Trade, r,tin ns p. 61.) that dragged the London dock laborer and with him every English laborer, from a fathomless inferno of misery and shame. Catholicism and organised labor were banished from old England together . Catholicism and organised labor, rejuvenated, have returned to modern England together. I hope, I heartily hope, self-respecting, dignified labor has returned to stay. 1 am certain old England’s Catholicism has returned determined to stay. Out of the present world-war a common and great consolation come to both of us : never again can the laborer who dares to be an Englishman : never again can the Catholic who dares to be an Englishman, be trampled to death under the hoofs of imported German cavalry. Never again. . J '