God and Mammon

248 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY morbid vein). even his immense reputation for eloquent, varied and sustained swearing is to be measured by mere Victorian standards, or is to be suspected as another myth. If it was so wonderful why did they not write it down at least once? Even the indefatigable Paine sidles off mumbling, "I do not recall his exact words during the performance; I was chiefly concerned in getting out of the wa-y, and those sublime utterances were lost.'·' A sorry confession this, from an official biographer. GOD AND MAMMON'~ ARTHUR BARKER A line frequently taken by critics of the British Empire is that it was founded in hypocrisy and developed in cupidity by men who made vague religious and humanitarian gestures with the left hand while they sedulously filled their money-bags with the right. There is some truth in this; but it is not the whole truth. It has been made to seem almost the whole truth because the unlimited commerciali~m of the nineteenth century has come to represent for so many the chief danger to Western civilization, and because so much brilliant scholarship has consequently been devoted to tracing the rise of its ethic from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritanism. The tendency has been to argue that from the very beginning the white man's burden consisted of nothing but the spoils' he was carrying away. Even of the nineteenth century this is not the whole truth. Of the sixteenth and seventeenth it is considerably less than ~half truth. In the past few years a number of scholars (especially in America) have been re-examining the English Renaissance and English Puritanism; it is significant that many of these-Hailer, Sabine, Jordan, Knappen, Bush, to mention but a few-have been led to insist on· the point repeatedly introduced by Mr Wright in the latest of his contributions to Elizabethan and Jacobean history. It is that we totally misunderstood the period if, assuming that its religion was insincere and inoperative, we read back into it the hypocrisy and sceptical materialism which have been too generally typical of our own time. The historical truth is that the Empire could not have been founded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (nor preserved *Religion and Empire: The Alliance between Piety and Commerce in Englisll Expansion, 1558-1625, by Louts B. WRIGHT. Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1943, $2.00. REVIEWS 249 in the twentieth) without the profound idealism of which religion is the vital source. This is clear from Mr Wright's study of the influence of the clergy upon early expansion and colonization. Not that his lectures (delivered on the Walker-Ames Foundation at the University of Washington) are imperialistic propaganda. On the contrary, the subject is treated with none of the rancour which so often accompanies it but with the sober and exact scholarship one associates with the Huntington Library. Mr Wright has no illusions about the co-operation between the clergy and the merchants in which "the modern cynic is likely to see something cold-bloodedly iniquitous." He does not under-estimate the desire for gain, nor "the Anglo-Saxon genius for discovering high moral reasons to justify doubtful deeds." But his rigorously histo.rical examination of sermons, chaplains' letters, company reports, and accounts of voyages (like those of the clergymen Hakl~yt and Plll·chas), leads to. the conclusion that, "smile as we may at the materialistic application the Puritans made of religion, ... that was only part of the story.') · The lectures are not, of course, much concerned with the adventures of piratical seamen or the trials of colonists. Those stories have often been rousingly told, and the reader may be somewhat disappointed to find so little of their colour here. What interests Mr Wright is the creation of a public sentiment for expansion through the preachjng and writing of the clergy, both Puritan and Anglican-a less exciting story which has, as he says, been very nearly overlooked. There was perhaps more excitement and enthusiasm in this clerical propaganda than Mr Wright's treatment and style would seem to suggest, but he makes abundantly clear its general character...