Chapter 2

The Bible and Didactic Literature in Early Modern England

Scott Mandelbrote

When Edmund Calamy (1671-1732), the great London Presbyterian preacher and chronicler of the ministers who were ejected from their livings by the Act of Uniformity in 1662, considered the career of Timothy Wood (1617-80), vicar of Sandal Magna in Yorkshire, he concluded that ‘He was a Man of prodigious Parts, and Industry; and good Elocution. He had fram’d a Common Place Book of all the Heads of Divinity, containing the Quintessence of the choicest Authors he had Convers’d with: But he Printed nothing.’1 Calamy successfully adapted the biographical techniques of Reformation martyrologists in order to provide a record of the sufferings of a modern generation of witnesses to the Protestant conscience. The exemplary lives that he wrote stood as a reproach to the intolerance of bishops and churchmen and as models for the personal behaviour of godly nonconformists.2 Readers of Calamy approached his work in this spirit. John Collett Ryland (1723-92), a Baptist minister and schoolmaster at Warwick and from 1759 at Northampton, marked the margins of his copy of Calamy with instructions and admonitions to his son, John (1753-1825), who assisted his father as preacher and pastor from 1770. Beside the account of Timothy Wood’s careful compilation of a personal handbook of theological quotations, the elder Ryland wrote: ‘Do the same my son John Ryland.’ Elsewhere, he drew attention to the habits of fine preachers and of ministers who took care over catechizing poor children or provided them with good books to read.

Their work was ‘a bright Pattern to me and my son at Northampton’. Ryland noticed suitable books that his son might read and, in some cases, ought to acquire, and commented on a ‘Glorious method of keeping the Bible’. This was the practice of the London minister, Thomas Vincent (1634-78), who ‘had the whole New Testament and Psalms by Heart. He took that Pains, as not knowing but they (as he has often said) who took from him his Pulpit and his Cushion, might in time demand his Bible also.’3

John Collett Ryland used his copy of Calamy to instruct his son in the duties of a Christian minister and teacher. One of the ends of such instruction was the mastery of appropriate techniques for learning from the Bible, including methods for making commonplaces and committing suitable passages of Scripture to memory. At this stage in his education, the younger John Ryland was already familiar with the benefits that could be derived from knowledge of the Bible itself. By the age of five and a half, he had learned to read Hebrew, and, before the end of 1764, he had read the book of Genesis through five times in the original. His acquaintance with the Bible and with what it could teach, however, derived from an even earlier educational experience, in Warwick at the side of his mother, Elizabeth (d. 1779).

The story is told of him … that the parlour fireplace was fitted with Dutch tiles representing Bible characters and events, and in the tiles the mother found a picture-book for her child in which a grand procession of patriarchs and prophets, heroes and kings, confessions and martyrs, passed before the imagination and appealed to the heart of the boy.4

It is possible to question the spontaneity of Mrs Ryland’s fireside instruction. The mother of Philip Doddridge (1702-51) had similarly ‘taught him the history of the Old and New Testament, before he could read, by the assistance of some Dutch tiles in the chimney of the room, where they commonly sat’. In his later career as a Congregationalist minister and as the embodiment of the doctrinal middle way between Calvinism and Arminianism through his stewardship of the Academy at Northampton, Doddridge ‘frequently recommended’ this method of teaching to parents, recalling that it had been ‘the means of making some good impressions upon his heart, which never wore out’.5 Like his later reading of Calamy, John Ryland’s first experience of the Bible may therefore have owed much to the way in which the dissenting tradition constructed an ideal of sainthood. It nevertheless reveals that, within that tradition, scriptural instruction was an established part of a mother’s conduct of her household and that the initial purpose of such teaching was an appeal to the heart through the affective power of the stories contained within biblical history.6

The practice of receiving religious instruction at a mother’s knee was the fulfilment of generations of advice from the authors of godly conduct books.7 The use of everyday objects, such as Delftware tiles, in order to prompt the child’s memory and imagination nevertheless represented a modification of the standard techniques of scriptural education. The more usual stress in pious accounts of early religious education was familiarity with Scripture through precocious reading and feats of memorizing.8 Biblical subjects, however, were among the most common images to be found in the contemporary domestic setting and were represented in furniture and embroidery as well as pictures. The burgeoning domestic production of tin-glazed earthenware tiles in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provided both new decorative and new didactic opportunities at a relatively affordable price.9 Changes in the ideas and practices of learning were, however, as apparent as the transformation in the environment of the home during the childhoods of Philip Doddridge or John Ryland.

This chapter will consider the way in which the attitudes to the Bible that were expressed in didactic literature altered during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Over this period, a Reformed concentration on locating particular biblical texts that might relate to an individual reader’s own circumstances gave way to a greater understanding of Scripture as history and narrative. Nonconformist and dissenting communities preserved a sense of the importance of the verse-by-verse analysis of the Bible throughout the early modern period. Conformist authors of didactic literature who were writing after the upheavals of the English Civil Wars tended instead to praise the avoidance of doctrinal conflict and to try to establish the authority of the priesthood in matters of interpretation. As a consequence, they often advanced the merit of reading the Bible as a story that told the history of the Church. The power of the narrative to move the heart of the believer to worship God and to do good was more important than the recognition of doctrine and its application to the life of the individual. This change in emphasis was brought about in part by the writings of a number of churchmen, some of which will be considered in the course of the chapter. Yet it was also the product of contemporary changes in ideas about the way in which children learn, which were taken up by many moderate dissenters. For that reason, most of the examples that will be considered here have been drawn from nonconformist and dissenting writers whose work illustrated the growing primacy of narrative in biblical understanding during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.10

Learning and the senses

The appeal to the heart that epitomized the didactic message of Doddridge’s childhood recollections derived from the conviction that the passions were shaped by the experience of the senses. It developed the argument of the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) that there was a link between aesthetics and virtue, in which the observation of beauty might be a spur to moral self-examination and improvement.11 The idea that the emotions might in some way guide moral choices was older than Shaftesbury. Henry More (1614-87) described ‘the rating of things that are laudable and just according as we find our Passions excited by them, or as they are felt and relished by a sort of Connexion with our Souls’ as ‘the most intimate and immediate Fruit of Life’.12 For More and his Cambridge contemporary, Ralph Cudworth (1617-88), the notion of the activity of the passions in promoting a form of selfreflection that might generate knowledge of the truth was one aspect of the superiority of the philosophy of Plato and Socrates over that of Aristotle and the scholastics.13 The Cambridge Platonists explained the human perception of beauty and divinity through the doctrine of innate ideas, by which the rational power of the soul could be brought to bear on sensation:

Suppose a learned written or printed volume held before the eye of a brute creature or illiterate person. Either of them will passively receive all that is impressed upon sense from those delineations, to whom there willb> be nothing but several scrawls or lines of ink drawn upon white paper. But if a man that hath inward anticipations of learning in him look upon them, he will immediately have another comprehension of them than that of sense, and a strange scene of thoughts presendy represented to his mind from them. He will see heaven, earth, sun, moon and stars, comets, meteors, elements in those inky delineations. He will read profound theorems of philosophy, geometry, astronomy in them, learn a great deal of new knowledge from them that he never understood before, and thereby jusdy admire the wisdom of the composer of them. Not that all this was passively stamped upon his soul by sense from those characters. For sense, as I said before, can perceive nothing here but inky scrawls, and the intelligent reader will many times correct his copy, finding erratas in it.14

Innate ideas allowed human beings to read God’s hand in the book of nature and to tune their behaviour to the path of virtue extolled by Scripture, itself the product of infallible dictation by God. Such moral and emotional certainty came less surely to Doddridge and his contemporaries, though they were students of the Cambridge Platonists as well as of Shaftesbury. The principal reason for that was their acceptance of John Locke’s arguments about the primacy of the experience of the senses and their consequent belief that desire for the good or the beautiful, rather than the operation of the passions, might be the most efficient agent in the construction of a moral consciousness.15

Locke’s arguments about the importance of sense experience derived in part from reflection on the capacities of infants.16 His own suggestions for the education of children drew attention both to the importance of telling examples in generating self-examination and improvement and to the role of delight in exciting imitation and promoting learning. Locke claimed that:

But of all the Ways whereby Children are to be instructed, and their Manners formed, the plainest, easiest and most efficacious, is, to set before their Eyes the Examples of those Things you would have them do, or avoid. Which, when they are pointed out to them, in the Practice of Persons within their Knowledge, with some Reflection on their Beauty or Unbecomingness, are of more force to draw or deterr their Imitation, than any Discourses which can be made to them.17

Locke argued that it was necessary to persuade children to develop a desire for learning, by making it ‘suitable to their particular Tempers’, and suggested that they should ‘be taught to read, without perceiving it to be any thing but a Sport’.18 Locke’s philosophy may have undermined the argument for a physiological process by which reading operated to excite the passions and inculcate virtue.19 In its place, however, readers of Locke who were also students of Shaftesbury substituted a pedagogical method that suggested that delight and the desire for the beautiful might be enough to move the child to a life of religion and virtue.

In a remarkable Fast Sermon that he preached at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, on 31 March 1647, Cudworth attacked ‘our bookish Christians, that have all their religion in writings and papers … as if Religion were nothing but a little Book-craft, a mere paper-skill.’ He particularly criticized ‘the vulgar sort [who] think that they know Christ enough, out of their Creeds and Catechismes, and Confessions of Faith: and if they have but a little acquainted themselves with these, and like Parrets conned the words of them, they doubt not but they are sufficiently instructed in all the mysteries of the Kingdome of Heaven.’20 Cudworth’s sermon explained the importance of spiritual illumination in moving the heart and mind of the Christian to a lively understanding of the Gospel and its meaning for human life.

This stress on inspiration generated anxiety when it appeared to set the interior life of the believer above the lessons to be learned from revelation. Whereas Cudworth held that ‘if we would indeed know Divine Truths, the on ely way to come to this, is by keeping of Christs Commandments’, several of his contemporaries were more radical in the separation that they advocated between the teaching of the spirit and that of the letter.21 Thus the Quaker William Smith (d. 1673) argued that ‘the Scriptures are a true Testimony of what the Saints were made witnesses of; but the Spirit is the Rule from which the Scriptures were given forth; and it was the Rule unto them that gave forth the Scriptures, and they had the Spirit before they spake the Words’.22

Catechizing and the power of memory

Smith’s A New Primmer, which was intended for binding with his New Catechism, represented a deliberate attempt to subvert the contemporary genre of didactic writing that had most to say about the biblical knowledge that was appropriate to children. Smith’s works were begun in prison at Worcester in February 1661 and completed from the county gaol at Nottingham during 1663 and 1664. They used the format of questions and answers ‘as from a Child’s Enquiry after Truth, to be informed by the Father’ to criticize, rather than to inculcate, respect for the Bible as the rule of faith, the learning of set prayers and the singing of psalms, the rendering of hat honour and the swearing of oaths.23 In place of the truths of formal religion, they explained the foundations and principles of ‘the poor affected people of God (called Quakers)’ and set out the doctrine of the inner light.24

Both Smith and Cudworth deplored the reliance in early modern religious education on the rote learning of catechetical texts, or their equivalents, which taught the letter of doctrine, including the basics of scriptural divinity, without inculcating the true spirit of Christian belief. Nevertheless, for many of their seventeenth-century contemporaries, this was the preferred method of introductory biblical instruction. Protestants of almost all persuasions accepted that the Bible represented the ultimate doctrinal foundation for their faith. The most important lessons that it taught, which were necessary for the believer’s understanding of Christian salvation, could be presented in the form of questions and answers arranged according to the main heads of doctrine. Both the Church Catechism and the Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Assembly, which continued to be used by the godly after the Restoration, were organized in this manner. They were designed to provide the religious instruction necessary for admission to communion or the Lord’s Supper. The Shorter Catechism, however, drew on a far greater range of biblical references. It provided a much more extensive guide to reformed teaching about the nature of belief in God and the duties that people owed to him than its rivals. But any gain in theological sophistication carried with it the danger that too great a demand was being made on the concentration, memory, and understanding of the catechumen. The Church Catechism, which in its simplest form was printed as a part of the Book of Common Prayer, dealt briefly with the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and the Sacraments. The absence of a more detailed apparatus of biblical reference helped to make the Church Catechism less contentious, as well as far briefer.25

For many authors, including churchmen such as Edward Fowler (1632-1714), Bishop of Gloucester, who wished to appeal also to dissenters, it was necessary to supplement the Church Catechism with additional scriptural references.26 Others extended the form of the catechism in various ways. Commonly, the catechism was accompanied by texts intended to teach basic literacy or was recommended for use alongside them at home or in school. Its structure was imitated by a variety of confessional authors, notably the Baptist Benjamin Keach (1640-1704).27 Like other texts that were intended for the barely literate, catechisms were often printed wholly or partly in Gothic or black-letter type. Although black-letter copies of the English New Testament continued to be published occasionally in the second half of the seventeenth century, especially in Scotland and the Netherlands, the overwhelming majority of new Bibles were printed exclusively in Roman type from the 1640s.28 There were those for whom an inability to read anything other than black letter represented a significant hurdle to biblical literacy, but the sentiment of Henry Jessey (1601-63), another Baptist author of catechisms, seems to have been more representative. Jessey defended his use of Roman letters in his catechism by arguing that ‘for the Childs far greater profit, and more ease, and for preventing the more toil in reading the Testament, Bible, and any usuall book, it’s put in our most usuallletter; that English Letter being very seldome now in use, may be learned with more ease afterwards.’29

The entrance to reading provided by the catechism was often also a gateway to knowledge of the Bible. Thus Mrs Elizabeth Walker (1623-90), the devout wife of Anthony Walker, rector of Fyfield, Essex, taught her servants using both ‘A short and easie Catechism’ and the Church Catechism. She ‘used to hire them to their own good, giving them Sixpence to accomplish the first Task, then a Shilling, and so on, promising them a Bible when they could use it’.30 The Colchester minister, Owen Stockton (1630-80), composed an elaborate Scriptural Catechism to assist the study of the Bible and argued that illiterate people should ‘Bewail your sin, in neglecting to learn to read your self, and neglecting to cause your Children to learn to read the word of God’.31 Catechetical instruction played an important role in basic education provided by the charity schools sponsored by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in the early eighteenth century. James Talbot (1664-1708), rector of Spofforth in the West Riding and formerly Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge, insisted on the value of twice weekly catechizing, using a suitable exposition of the Church Catechism, for expanding the capacities of those who had recently learned to read. He suggested that the schoolmaster should encourage children to recognize that the foundation of all the moral instruction that they were receiving lay in the text of Scripture.32 Similarly, at the Blue-Coat School in Nottingham, children were exhorted ‘always to have their Bibles and Common-Prayer-Books with them’ to enable them to follow Church services on Sundays and to illustrate their learning of the catechism.33 Knowledge of the catechism and an ability to read the Bible were essential for admission to the more advanced education provided at grammar schools.34

The mode of question and answer that was familiar from the catechism could also be used to present an abridged version of the entire Bible itsel£.35 The aim of this deployment of the catechetical technique was to encourage the memorizing of significant portions of Scripture. Poetic renderings of selected biblical texts often had a similar purpose.36 The godly were famed for their recall of apposite biblical passages. This was a skill cultivated by lay people as well as by divines. Josiah Langdale (b. 1673), who later became a Quaker, remembered that, while he was a servant in husbandry, he used to gad to sermons in the company of a blind thresher who knew many biblical passages by heart. Owen Stockton expected his children and servants ‘to get those Scriptures by heart which they were to keep in memory and repeat to him, as he called for them.’ Theophilus Gale (1628-78), when he was serving as tutor to Thomas and Goodwin, the sons of Philip, Lord Wharton, used to urge his charges ‘to spend their first & most serious thoughts in reading some portion of [th]e Scriptures & some practical divinity, fixing the heads of what they read in their memories, so as to be able to give an account thereof at night’37

The importance to godly and nonconformist readers of memorizing the Bible was in part a reflection on the practical and moral implication that they supposed Scripture to have. Recollection of the promises of the Christian religion provided ‘comforts and encouragements against the feare of death, called the old mans A. B. C.’, according to Simon Wastel (d. 1632), master of the free school at Northampton.38 The memory of personal behaviour, sin, and the experience of divine providence represented the raw material for calculating the state of one’s salvation. This reckoning represented a pale, earthly parallel to the coming judgment to which the soul would be put after death.39 It called to mind the original sin of Adam, with which many catechetical texts began. The example of Christ’s sacrifice, held in the mind of the believer, provided lively evidence for hope when otherwise there might only be despair: ‘Why else were Sacraments ordained by God, but as visible Idea’s of invisible things, whereby he admonisheth us, too forgetful of his benefits?’40 For early modern writers, memory was a faculty of the soul, dependent on sensation or sometimes thought for its existence. The formulation of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was jusdy famous and controversial: ‘when we would express the decay, and signifie that the Sense is fading, old, and past, it is called Memory. So that Imagination and Memory, are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names.’41 More conventional was Thomas Jenner’s sense that memory was ‘the Souls storehouse’ and could be represented as a man dressed in black and writing at a table.42

For many seventeenth-century readers of the Bible, then, one of the principal tasks was to remember what had been read. Very many didactic works sought to supplement the guidance provided by the catechism. They tried to improve on the rather haphazard programme for biblical study provided by the directions for reading through the Old and New Testaments in the Book of Common Prayer. Above all, they looked to generate sensible guidance for the soul, as it tried to recollect what had been read, in the form of marginal notes, digests, and commonplace books. Leonard Hoar (1630?-1675), a Congregationalist who was ejected from the rectory at Wanstead in Essex in 1660 and who later became President of Harvard College, urged his students to read through an epitome of the text before opening their Bibles, and later to learn the epitome by itself. This, he argued, would help them to quote chapter and verse, ‘a thing of very great moment and use’.43 Francis Roberts (1609-75) suggested suitable topics for students of Scripture to note in order to have a better understanding of the sense of the text and a greater chance of remembering it. Readers of his Clavis Bibliorum were warned to approach the Bible ‘with a godly trembling’ and to consult it in a methodical and orderly fashion.44 At the end of his life, the puritan John White (1575-1648), for many yeats pastor at Dorchester, exhorted his parishioners to read Scripture as ‘a kind of holy conference with God’, urging them to prepare carefully for their encounter with the Bible and to study with books to hand to help them work the text into their hearts.45

The Presbyterian Isaac Ambrose (1604-63) echoed White’s phrase about the encounter between God and the believer over the words of the Bible. He drew up a strict calendar for reading Scripture, encouraged his audience to keep an analytical table of contents in mind when consulting the Bible, and pressed them to observe special passages that might be suitable for noting as heads in a commonplace book.46 Ambrose’s work made apparent the emotional and the technical requirements of biblical literacy. For him, reading the Bible was one part of a continuing act of self-analysis that also included the keeping of a personal diary of divine providences. It represented a process of recording and interpreting experience, with a view to extracting the truths that needed to be borne in mind until the soul was interrogated on the Day of Judgment. Ambrose was not the only author to suggest that readers of the Bible should keep systematic notes, either in the text itself or in separate commonplace books. His notion of self-examination was echoed in the practice of the future priest, Isaac Archer (1641-1700), when an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. Archer began keeping a diary in 1659 and later rewrote it, recording that:

I observed that in reading God’s word I could not frame my heart aright, and as I would, nor could I meditate on it, as was my duty, by reason of many idle and evill thoughts which came in, but were very unwelcome. However I was diligent in reading the scriptures every day, and read them once through in a yeare for the 3 first yeares according to Mr Bifield’s directions; yet gate I not much good for want of due meditation. I took notes also out of the Bible and put it under such heads as might suit any state of life what so ever.

Archer’s reading was guided initially by the work of Nicholas Byfield (1579-1622), although he later used A Discourse concerning the Gift of Prayer by John Wilkins (1614-72).47

From the examination of the present to the appeal of the past

Godly and nonconformist readers of the Bible in the seventeenth century, therefore, seem to have concentrated on the extraction of personal meaning from particular texts of Scripture. They searched for evidence of the revelation of divine will in their own lives and in the Bible, both of which gave sensible evidence of providence.48 Marginal notes, bookmarks and entries in commonplace books recorded their findings and encouraged them to remember apposite sentences or verses.49 The poet and canon of Christ Church, Oxford, William Strode (1602-45) summed up many of these sentiments in his verses on ‘A Register for a Bible’:

I your memoryes Recorder

keepe my charge in watchfull order

my strings divide the word aright

pressing the text both day & night

and what the hand of God doth writ

behold my fingers point at it

norr can St. Peter with his keyes

unlock heauen gate so soone as these.50

The emotional power of this form of reading ought not to be underestimated. Numerous writers drew attention to the liberation that they felt when they ceased reading the Bible as a form of history and looked instead for the meaning that it gave to their own lives. The experience of the young Richard Baxter (1615-91) was typical:

At first my Father set me to read the Historical part of the Scripture, which suiting with my Nature gready delighted me; and though all that time I neither understood nor relished much the Doctrinal Part, and Mystery of Redemption, yet it did me good by acquainting me with the Matters of Fact, and drawing me on to love the Bible, and to search by degrees into the rest.51

Other nonconformist autobiographies endorsed this sense that the narrative part of Scripture was a diversion from the doctrinal truths contained in the Bible. The first contact with the Bible that John Bunyan (1628-88) recorded was ‘in company with one poor man, that made profession of religion’. Bunyan wrote that ‘I betook me to my Bible, and began to take great pleasure in reading, but especially with the historical part thereof: for, as for Paul’s episdes, and scriptures of that nature, I could not away with them, being as yet but ignorant either of the corruptions of my nature, or of the want and worth of Jesus Christ to save me.’ As God’s providence began to work on Bunyan’s soul, however, he ‘began to look into the Bible with new eyes, and read as I never did before; and especially the episdes of the aposde Paul were sweet and pleasant to me: and indeed I was then never out of the Bible, either by reading or meditation, still crying out to God, that I might know the truth, and way to heaven and glory.’ Bunyan had discovered the communicative power of individual sentences of Scripture, which was independent of their place in any narrative.52

This awareness of the force of particular verses of the Bible encouraged godly readers to try to make sense of some of the most difficult places in Scripture.53 As a consequence, they placed increasing stress on the interpretation of the written word, in parallel to the power of preaching. Sight displaced hearing as the most important of the senses: ‘The eye taketh in sentiments more effectually than the ears: especially when men can ofter Read than Heare’.54 Yet, moved by the glory of God’s hand in the natural world, William Bilby (1664-1738) found that his ‘Constant Reading of [th]e holy Bible’ was transformed. He no longer searched the Bible ‘as [th]e woman looked for her lost groat or a person looks for his box of evidences in great fears & horr[o]rs of soul’. Instead, he ‘read with new eyes’ in ‘a Cabinet full of [th]e richest Treasure’.55

There were thus nonconformist writers during the late seventeenth century who came to value the written word as a check on the excesses of preaching. Others were sceptical of interpretations of Scripture taken out of context and read through the prism of individual lives and memories. The significance of the passions in striking the heart of the child and encouraging an immediate response in religious sentiment was already apparent to many writers. The schoolmaster Charles Hoole (1610-67) stressed the promotion of delight in the child as a reason for reading the book of Genesis with four-year olds.56 Simon Patrick (1626-1707), later Bishop of Chichester and of Ely, ‘observed young people delight (as it is natural to doe) in reading the Historical Books of the Old Testament. Which truly are writ with such a spirit of piety, as is to be found in no other History’. Indeed he argued that the history of the Old Testament was uniquely suited for communicating the essentials of Christianity: ‘a belief of Divine Providence, which governs all things … And … a sense of the difference of Good and Evil,’57 Richard Lucas (1648-1715) similarly suggested that parents should ‘choose those Chapters to be read oftenest that are easie to be understood, and most practical’. Difficult, doctrinal texts were to be avoided in favour of what was ‘most moving and affecting’.58 Churchmen argued strikingly that harmony of prayer, hymnsinging and biblical readings in the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer ‘exalted’ and ‘delighted’ the soul.59 They even maintained that keeping a commonplace book was bad for the memory.60

One of the clearest expressions of a shift in ideas about the appropriate way to begin the study of the Bible can be found in the advice given by John Locke, who was himself an inveterate compiler of commonplace books, to Edward Clarke in 1686.

As for the Bible, which children are usually employed in, to exercise and improve their talent in reading, I think the promiscuous reading of it, though by chapters as they lie in order, is so far from any advantage to children, either for the pleasure of reading, or principling their religion, that perhaps a worse could not be found … And what an odd jumble of thoughts must a child have in his head concerning religion, who in his tender years reads all the parts of the Bible indifferently, as the word of God, without any other distinction … And now I am by chance fallen on this subject, give me leave to say, that there are some parts of the scripture, which may be proper to put into the hands of a child to engage him to read; such as are the story of Joseph and his brethren, of David and Goliath, of David and Jonathan, etc., and others, that he should be made to read for his instruction … and such other easy and plain moral rules, which, being fitly chosen, might be sometimes made use of both for reading and instruction together.61

Elsewhere, Locke criticized the practice of taking individual biblical verses as units for study ‘whereby they are so chop’d and rninc’d’ that ‘even Men of more advanc’d Knowledge in reading them, lose very much of the strength and force of the Coherence, and the Light that depends on it.’62

In the century that followed the outbreak of the English Civil War, there were a number of important shifts in the way in which people conceived of Scripture and of learning. Many of them reflected practices that had existed before, but some rested on new, theoretical assumptions. There was a general tendency among churchmen to be suspicious of interpretations of the Bible that rested on the authority of individuals. This rapidly spread to anxiety about the wisdom of methods of study that privileged private conscience and fragmented the narrative structure of the text. At the same time, doubts began to develop about the relative value of the critical assessment of divine judgment compared to the positive emulation of fine feeling in promoting moral behaviour. Different ways of thinking about biblical education persisted side-by-side with one another, of course, and could even be found at work in the same individual. The younger Samuel Wesley, for example, experienced an education in the mid-1690s that was both like and quite unlike that recommended by Locke. He was taught the alphabet ‘in a few hours’, and yet ‘as soon as he knew the letters began at the first chapter of Genesis’.63 Nevertheless, moderate dissenters in the eighteenth century like Doddridge or John Collett Ryland owed much to the ideas of Locke and to more orthodox churchmen such as the Cambridge Platonists. Striking evidence for a growing stress on the affective power of biblical stories, however, is provided by the expansion in the publication of narrative histories of the Bible that took place in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This was paralleled by an increasing provision of illustrated biblical texts for children that focused on the most significant stories in Scripture.

The narrative histories that proliferated in the early eighteenth century fell into two distinctive types. The first was clearly aimed by its publishers at a market that included ordinary, household readers of the Bible. It consisted of works like Laurence Howel’s A Compleat History of the Holy Bible (3 volumes, London, 1716), which were profusely illustrated, with pictures that echoed the subjects and sometimes even the designs to be found in separately published illustrations for the Bible and reproduced on tiles and other familiar objects. Howel claimed to be reacting directly against Thomas Ellwood’s Sacred History (2 vols, London, 1705-9), which like several Quaker works used a scholarly apparatus to cast doubt on clerical authority.64 The publications of Hamond, Clarke, and Stackhouse in varying ways built on the example established by Howel. The career of Thomas Stackhouse (?1681-1752), an apologist for impoverished clergymen and a successful exponent of publication by subscription, illustrated the buoyancy of the market for biblical histories. Stackhouse’s initial commission for A Complete History of the Holy Bible had been from a bookseller to whom he owed money and with whom he soon quarrelled. His New History of the Holy Bible came out on the heels of the venture that he had abandoned and quickly superseded it.65 The second type of biblical history whose popularity seems to have increased in the early eighteenth century was far more scholarly and included works like The Old and New Testament Connected (2 volumes, London, 1716-18) by Humphrey Prideaux (1648-1724), Dean of Norwich. Although the impact of such learned works was initially narrower, they helped to encourage and give authority to the growing interest in the Bible as an historical narrative.

Inspired by Continental examples and fuelled in part by the activities of émigré engravers, illustrated versions of the text of the Bible also proliferated in England after the 1670s. Most of these publications drew on existing images that could be reworked and printed either with a perfunctory summary of the content of the relevant chapter of the Bible or with a brief retelling of the scriptural narrative.66 Several of them were based on Continental models, especially the work of the French Jansenist, Nicolas Fontaine (1625-1709).67 The most ambitious, notably some of the illustrated histories published by Richard Blome (d. 1705), reached prices that put them out of the reach of most readers. Blome admitted that his folio publications were ‘chiefly designed for the Curious’ and even the octavo edition of The History of the Old and New Testament that he published in 1691 was sold to subscribers at 25 shillings in sheets.68 Despite such reservations, however, it did become easier to bring together printed pictures and stories when reading the Bible in the early eighteenth century.

The increased awareness of the Bible as a collection of stories that could affect the emotions was paralleled by broader changes in reading habits during the eighteenth century. These included the growth of an appetite for secular narrative history and the development of the novel. Several of the new genres also drew strength from the philosophical and psychological underpinning that helped to explain contemporary attitudes to Scripture.69 For some mature readers, an increased awareness of the similarity of biblical and other narratives may have helped to generate doubts about the special status of the Old and New Testaments, which were already being likened to fables by deist writers.70 For the consumers of didactic literature, on the other hand, history proved a vehicle for spiritual delight. As often as not, its route led away from detailed criticism of the Bible and towards affection for the stories that it told.