If you read this essay you will find out about the response of a Puritan, Thomas Vincent, to the suffering unleashed by the plague and fire in London (1665/6); and the response of Voltaire to the suffering of the 18th C through his novella 'Candide'. Then there is a discussion as to which response makes more sense. Voltaire's initially pleases our sense of bewilderment; but there are issues: no meaning, no morality, and no hope. Vincent's stance is difficult, but he leaves us in a world that has meaning, morality, and - if we adjust - hope.
Covid 19 brings centre stage the issue of suffering. The Puritans have one view; the secular sceptics a different one.
Covid 19 brings centre stage the issue of suffering. The Puritans have one view; the secular sceptics a different one.
For the Puritans I read ‘God’s Terrible Voice In The
City’ (1667) by Thomas Vincent and for the sceptics the obvious choice was
Voltaire’s ‘Candide’ (1759)
Thomas Vincent (1634 – 1678) was an ordained Puritan
minister serving in London. While most of the rich fled the capital when the
plague deaths started rising in July 1665, Vincent stayed, preaching in pulpits
to packed churches all over the city. As well as leaving us a detailed account
of the plague – in which eight of his own household died, Vincent has also left
us an eye witness account of the Great Fire which engulfed London in September
1666. His account of these grim events became his book ‘God’s Terrible Voice
In The City’.
The man of letters, Voltaire (1694 – 1778) was one of the
main architects of modern secularism. Throughout his long-life he mocked
Christianity, indeed all religions. Voltaire would sign off his letters ‘Ecrasons
l’infame’ (‘We must crush the vile thing’) and boasted that single handedly
he had dismantled the church. ‘I am tired of hearing it declared’ he
wrote, ‘that twelve men sufficed to establish Christianity, and I want to
prove to them that it only needs one to destroy it.’ In that campaign to
destroy Christianity, perhaps Voltaire’s sharpest weapon was his novella ‘Candide’
(1759), a satire that debunks the idea there is any meaning to suffering.
Vincent’s argument
From
the Bible Vincent first sets out how God speaks to mankind. There is nothing controversial
here. It is normal Christian doctrine. God has spoken through the law, his
prophets, and above all through Jesus Christ. God continues to speak through
Scripture, his ministers, by His Spirit, his creation, and providence. This
brings Vincent nearer his subject: here is ‘merciful providence’, and ‘afflictive
providence’,
Vincent
has plenty of examples of ‘afflictive providence’ from the Bible. The plagues;
the flood of Noah’s time; the fire that fell on Sodom and Gomorrah, and
later Jerusalem. There is war - for God can order the sword to go through a
land (Ezekiel 14:17). And famine: ‘I gave you empty stomachs in every city
and lack of bread in every town.’ (Isaiah 34:11).
All are
terrible, but most terrible of all is when these judgements come together. Not
just the plague, but a plague followed by a fire.
And so we
come to London.
Vincent
is exact and vivid. He tells us that in August there was a steep rise of
fatalities, from 2010 to 6101. Then his pen becomes more dramatic:
‘Now death rides triumphantly on his
pale horse throughout streets; and breaks
into almost every house…. People fall as thick as leaves from the trees in autumn, when they are shaken by a
mighty wind. We would meet many
coffins and see diseased people with sores limping in the streets.’
There was no let-up
in September:
‘The church yards now are so stuffed
with dead corpses that they are in many places
swelled two or three feet higher that they were before.’
In this
sudden deluge of death Vincent was certain about the fate of sinners:
‘The door of mercy is shut…pardon and
salvation (which before they slighted) is
now unattainable: that the grave is opening its mouth to receive their souls…they must now take up their
lodgings in the infernal regions of utter darkness,
with devils, and their fellow-damned sinners…’
As death
approaches the unbeliever was:
‘Filled with inexpressible terror,
through the roarings and tearings of a guilty accusing
conscience…now scaring dreams do terrify them and fearfulness of the bottomless pit…they are utterly consumed
with terrors.’
While the plague
made no distinction between the sinner and saint, Vincent saw the calmness of
the believer when the reaper came.
‘It was generally observed among us
that God’s people who died by the plague,
died with such peace and comfort.’
Vincent’s
description of the great fire is as equally exact and vivid. As the fire takes
hold, so street by street he details the destruction. Here is his description
when St Paul’s cathedral -
‘…yields to the violent assaults of the
conquering flames, and strangely takes fire
at the top; now the lead melts and runs down, as if it had been snow in the sun; and the great beams and massive
stones fall on the pavement with a great
noise and great chunks of stone peel off strangely from the side of the walls’
Like an Old
Testament prophet Vincent is appalled at the devastation:
‘Thus fell great London, that ancient
city! That populous city! London which was
the queen city of the land… And yet, how London is departed like smoke, and her glory laid to the dust!’
The cause of
these grim events is in the title of the book, ‘God’s terrible voice in the
city’, which comes from Psalm 65:5. In the King James Version this
reads:
By terrible things in righteousness wilt thou
answer us, O God of our salvation[1]
The
author of all the death and destruction is God. It is a dreadful punishment. Vincent’s
language is not shy:
‘The Lord has come forth against us
with armed vengeance. Frowns have been
in his brow; death and desolation in his looks; thunder in his voice; flames of fire in his hand!’
But why? What
had London done to deserve such a scourging?
Vincent first
lays down that all of God’s judgements are righteous, because God is righteous
(Romans 3: 5- 6). And many of these judgements are ‘unsearchable’
(Romans 11:33). So, whether we understand or not, the creature’s duty is to
remain silent before his creator.
Vincent
believes there are good reasons why London has provoked the wrath of God. The
over-arching one is that while London – more than any other city in the world –
was full of churches preaching the true Gospel, the people refused to listen.
And so God turned the volume up. When people do not ‘hearken to the voice of lesser
afflictions…he speaks by the rod’[2].
Vincent
also has an entire section where, at length and with dramatic imagery, he
catalogues no less than
twenty-five evils London is guilty of. These are: slighting the Gospel;
unfruitfulness; hypocrisy; formality; division among the clergy; neglect of
reformation; apostasy; refusing to listen to God; profaneness; pride; gluttony;
idleness; unkindness; sexual immorality; drunkenness; perversion of justice;
covetousness; extortion; lying; defrauding; prodigality; envying; backbiting;
murmuring; and finally carnal security.
In this list,
as said, the prime sin is the ‘slighting of the Gospel’, the refusal to
listen to God’s ministers. There are two other sins in the list he underlines
as especially provoking God’s wrath.
One is sexual
immorality:
‘I would hope that this sin of
homosexuality has been little known and practised
in London. But fornication and adultery have been all too common…O the boiling, burning lusts that
have been in London! O the wanton
eyes and looks! O the mental immorality and secret self-pollutions’.
The other is
the defrauding that goes on in trade. ‘The falsifying of weights and
measures’, the deceit about the true price.
After this
long list here is Vincent’s conclusion:
‘God is
righteous in that He has punished London no more than they have deserved for
these sins.’
Vincent’s
penultimate chapter is perhaps the most important for his argument. It is
entitled, ‘Concerning the DESIGN of these judgments.’ It is Vincent who puts
the word ‘design’ in capitals. And this takes us to the heart of the issue.
Whatever one makes of the plague and fire as punishments, whatever one makes of Vincent’s long list of sins, what he is insisting on is that behind events that happen in the world there is design, a plan, a purpose, meaning.
Whatever one makes of the plague and fire as punishments, whatever one makes of Vincent’s long list of sins, what he is insisting on is that behind events that happen in the world there is design, a plan, a purpose, meaning.
This begs the
obvious question, what was the purpose of the plague and fire. Vincent has an
answer: it is for sleepy sinners and saints to awake and be in awe of God and
so be kept ‘from that fearless course of sin’.
This then is
Vincent’s argument in one sentence: the plague and fire were sent by God to
London to punish the city for her sins and bring people back to Him.
Voltaire’s
argument
France’s most
famous 18th writer found all of the above loathsome.
Voltaire
would have reacted with scorn to the premise of Vincent’s argument that God had
spoken through the Bible.
For Voltaire
the Bible was absurd[3]. To
believe that the creator of the heavens and the earth had chosen the Jews, a
small desert tribe; to believe God had spoken through a collection of legends full
of contradictions compiled by ‘barbarian tribes’; to respect people like David,
‘a scoundrel, murderer, and lecher.’ All absurd. And while Voltaire is a little
gentler with the New Testament, according to one biographer he believed it to be
full of ‘the gossipings of illiterate nobodies’.
Scorn – and
revulsion. For at the root of religious fanaticism, the cause of untold terror
and torture, was the belief that a fallible man could know – and so act – in
the name of God.
Voltaire would
have thrown away Vincent’s book, but he could not ignore Vincent’s argument –
that there was a design in the events of the world.
This was of
course the view of Christendom (Protestant and Catholic); and it was the view
of many intellectuals, including the German polymath Gottfried Leibniz (1646 –
1716), an extremely influential mathematician, logician and natural philosopher
in Enlightenment circles.
As a
Christian and philosopher Leibniz had turned his mind to the problem of evil
and God. His answer is in his 1710 publication, ‘Essays on Theodicy on the
Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil’[4] The
conclusion is that God has created, ‘the best of all possible worlds.’
Leibniz’s
work has none of the Puritan rhetoric of Vincent. It is calm philosophy.
However the premise behind his conclusion is the same as the premise behind
Vincent’s response to the suffering of London. There is design.
Voltaire does
not agree. And so we have ‘Candide’. The novella satirizes all
religions; however it is clear Voltaire is specifically taking aim at Leibniz
and his ‘best of all possible worlds’ theodicy.[5]
The novella is a fast-moving roller coaster ride full of shocking
images that poke into your face as you hurtle round yet another unlikely
corner. While the style might suit the end of Brighton pier, underneath there
is painful seriousness. It is there in the outworking of the story (thin though
it is) which connects to dreadful historical events; and it is there in the
philosophical discussion Voltaire puts into the mouths of his three main
characters: Candide our naive hero, Pangloss, Candide’s optimist mentor, and
Martin, the pessimist travelling companion.
The tale begins with Candide living in the castle of Baron
Thunder-ten-Tronckh in Westphalia. Here Leibniz rules supreme. Pangloss, the ‘professor
of metaphhysico-theologico-cosmolonigology’ has proved to Candide ‘that
there is no effect without a cause, and that, in this best of possible worlds,
the Baron’s castle was the most magnificent of castles.
Through the professor Voltaire continues to set up his
target in case the reader has missed it.
‘It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than
as they are; for all being created for an end, all is necessarily for the best
end.’
Things swiftly fall apart.
Seen making advances towards Cunegonde, the Baron’s
daughter, Candide is catapulted out of his Edenic bliss into a world of
barbaric, and almost pornographic cruelty.
Suffering is relentless.
For war we have, ‘the earth strewed with brains, arms,
and legs.’; Cunegonde ‘is ripped open by Bulgarian soldiers after being
violated by many.’ Under siege there is cannibalism. And if defeated, why,
you are executed by your own side - ‘to encourage others…’. That is what
Candide saw happening to an English Admiral[6].
For natural disasters we have a sea storm where a kind
Anabaptist is drowned; a plague, and most famously, the Lisbon earthquake: ‘Thirty
thousand inhabitants of all ages and sexes were crushed under the ruins.’
The response of a sailor to this tragedy was to loot, get drunk and have sex
with a prostitute in the ‘midst of the dead and the dying.’ If the
response of the sinner is sickening, the response of the church is worse. Here
we have Voltaire’s satire at its sharpest.
‘After the earthquake had destroyed three-fourths of
Lisbon the sages of that country could think of no means more effectual to
prevent utter ruin to give the people a beautiful auto-da-fe; for it had been
decided by the University of Coinmbra, that the burning of a few people alive
by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible secret to hinder the
earth from quaking’.
Sadly this actually happened on June 20th, 1756.
Sex is never far from Voltaire’s pen[7].
It is not described in the context of marital love, but rather – as with the
sailor and the prostitute in Lisbon – it usually has a thuggish edge to it. Even
animalistic for there is one scene of naked girls being chased by monkeys, who
are in fact their sweet-hearts[8].
The references to illicit sex are directed against those who
claim they can rise above the passions of the flesh. So priests are sexually active,
seducing servants, spreading venereal disease; we have the daughter of a pope enslaved
and ravished every day. As for our romantic Candide, he ends up betraying the
love of his life for a Paris madame.
The only let up in the rolling imagery of suffering, cruelty
and lust is in a place called El Dorado in South America where there is no
organized religion. Candide though cannot stay there. He must find his
Cunegonde, and so now the story takes us back to Europe and then Turkey.
After all that has happened, the reader is sympathetic to
Candide’s new pessimistic travelling companion Martin who ‘had been robbed
by his wife, beaten by his son and abandoned by his daughter…’. Martin’s observation
– very different to Vincent’s and Leibniz’s (Pangloss) – ‘is that God has
abandoned it (the world) to a malignant being’. To this Candide says, ‘There
are however some things good’. To which Martin replies, ‘I know them
not.’
At the end Candide, married to an ugly Cunegonde, along with
Pangloss, Martin, and an old lady (the daughter of the pope) all settle in a
farm in Turkey. The old lady brings up the question of the whole book.
‘I want to know which is worse, to be ravished a hundred
times by negro pirates, to have a buttock cut off, to run the gauntlet among
the Bulgarians, to be whipped, and hanged at an auto-da fe, to be dissected, to
row in the galleys – in short to go through all the miseries we have undergone
or to stay here and have nothing to do?
Martin says that man was ‘born to live either in a state
of distracting inquietude or of lethargic disgust’; Pangloss, though he no
longer believed it, said ‘everything went wonderfully well.’
The answer Voltaire wants us to go away with is given by a ‘a
good old man taking the fresh air at his door under an orange bowler’.
Asked about horrific events in Constantinople the old man replied he never
worried about such things – ‘I content myself with sending for sale the
fruits of the garden which I cultivate.’
Candide, Pangloss, and Martin are much taken with the old
man’s wisdom and agree to cultivate their garden. ‘The whole little society
entered into this laudable design, according to their abilities.’
In the last paragraph Pangloss tries to show how everything had
eventually worked out for the best.
To which Candide famously replies, ‘All that is very
well, but let us cultivate our garden.’
Voltaire’s argument is there is far too much cruelty and suffering
to conclude that this is the best possible world. There is no discernible
design, no cause and effect. Worse, those like the Inquisition who think they
know about cause and effect end up inflicting terrible suffering on others. So,
the best option is to retreat and cultivate your garden.
Who makes more sense: Vincent or Voltaire?
Two very different men, two very different arguments in
response to suffering.
Who makes more sense?
Voltaire
At an emotional level the answer has to be Voltaire,
especially if you replace the events he refers to with what we have seen since
he died.
Who would want to stand in front of Auschwitz, or Stalin’s
Gulags in Siberia, or Pol Pot’s killing fields and say this was the ‘best of
possible worlds’? Who would want to visit the people of Bam[9]
or Kashmir after their earthquakes and say, ‘This is God’s plan’, or,
with Vincent, ‘This is God’s judgement’?
Our emotions recoil at any attempt to allocate meaning to
such suffering, least of all to drag God into the story. And our mind says. – remember the Lisbon auto de fe. People who
think they know the meaning of suffering have been proved by history to be
dangerous.
And so with Voltaire, it is best to say we do not understand,
withdraw to our garden, and to give the dogmatic views of Vincent a wide berth.
This makes sense.
For a while.
Then the emotions quieten, and the paint on Voltaire’s
argument thins.
It has issues.
Most obvious of all is the solution offered. At the end of
his whirlwind tour of 18th century suffering, Voltaire’s ‘cultivate
your own garden’, is rather an anti-climax. It seems a little trite.
In fact it does not take long to see the saying is useless, wholly
unconnected to at least three obvious facts about human life.
First of all there is no hiding place from suffering. It
finds us whether we are in the garden or the street. The minimum coming our way
is bereavement, disease, and death. Most of us will face a lot more, some of it
cruel and seemingly random. This suffering will push right into our souls,
leaving us bewildered.
How can you say to someone who has just lost their child to
cancer, ‘Go and cultivate your garden’? Refusing to acknowledge the
depth of pain with this superficial quip is just as callous as saying this is God’s
judgement.
Secondly, the demons are within. What good is retreating to
the garden for the depressed, the addict, the shamed? There is no magic healing
in the vegetable leaf. The demons are within and they come with us wherever we
go. That is exactly what Jesus Christ said, ‘For from within, out of the heart of man,
come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness…’.
We might not like this focus on the evil within ourselves, it is much easier to
see ourselves as harmless gardeners, but the fact (not idea) of what Jesus says
is written on every page of history, in every generation, in every country.
And finally what about the reality of our own moral
compass, our own sense of right and wrong? Do we stand in front of Auschwitz
or the Gulags or the Killing Fields or a preventable natural disaster and say,
‘Too much for me, I am off to cultivate my garden?’ Most of us
will see that as irresponsible cowardice, ‘Hakuna Matata’, teenage escapism. Moral action is needed.
To his credit, Voltaire did not follow his own advice. He was a
passionate campaigner for human rights. The names of Calas, Chevalier de la
Barre, Comte de Lolly-Tollendal and no doubt others are all entwined with
Voltaire’s. He was a man who set his face against rank injustice. Given the choice
of staying in his garden or taking on the oppressor, Voltaire blanked Candide
and acted.
And so the whole corny ‘cultivate your garden’
philosophy melts under the reality of human life. It has nothing to say to someone
who is suffering; nothing to say to the struggle with the demons within; and
nothing to say to our own keen sense of right and wrong.
With his piling up of image after image Voltaire has done a
good job of reminding us of the reality of suffering. And he has done a good
job in showing us the cruelty of others, especially the Roman Catholic church.
But that is all he has done. His ‘cultivate your garden’
platitude is really nothing more than what he used to do when playing a game of
chess with a Jesuit friend. If losing, he would turn the board over. This seems
more mature, but really it displays the same attitude. He does not
understand, so he turns the board over and comes up with a platitude. I doubt
if Leibniz would have been impressed.
For anyone caught up in a storm of suffering – as we all
will be – his book is at best a little light relief. Otherwise it is useless.
Candide does not make any sense for life as we know it.
What about our Puritan?
Vincent
Emotionally his book is a disaster. The strident certainty
that the plague and fire were acts of God’s judgement is unnerving.
It is problematic.
The paradigm this dogmatism springs from though is not.
It is a paradigm that says the universe is ruled by a holy
God. Everything that happens is ultimately according to His will (to by-pass
the perfect versus permissive will discussion).
This means everything has a purpose and meaning. And because
God is righteous, morality matters.
Does that then mean that suffering could be God's judgement? The answer of Vincent, and the Bible, is yes it could be. However, contrary to Vincent, it is not necessary to be certain. Whether suffering is sent as a punishment for a particular sin is not for us to know. The point is not whether something is a punishment or not, and this is where Vincent makes sense, but there is significance in what happens to us. There is design, there is purpose. And this gives us significance.
And hope; because in Vincent's view the suffering will end. He believes in life after death. His certainty about hell for the unbeliever is unnerving, but he is not contradicting Jesus Christ. To die in rebellion against God is a terrible fate. However Vincent does not just talk about hell; he talks about heaven and that is a source of tremendous hope.
A part of that hope is that God will right all wrongs; there will be justice. This underlines what most people believe: that morality is important, that there should be accountability. And so the wise man or woman will order their lives to please God. If relating to God is important it is not wild eyed and maniacal to say – as Vincent does in his long chapter about London’s 25 sins – that morality matters and repentance is needed.
Does that then mean that suffering could be God's judgement? The answer of Vincent, and the Bible, is yes it could be. However, contrary to Vincent, it is not necessary to be certain. Whether suffering is sent as a punishment for a particular sin is not for us to know. The point is not whether something is a punishment or not, and this is where Vincent makes sense, but there is significance in what happens to us. There is design, there is purpose. And this gives us significance.
And hope; because in Vincent's view the suffering will end. He believes in life after death. His certainty about hell for the unbeliever is unnerving, but he is not contradicting Jesus Christ. To die in rebellion against God is a terrible fate. However Vincent does not just talk about hell; he talks about heaven and that is a source of tremendous hope.
A part of that hope is that God will right all wrongs; there will be justice. This underlines what most people believe: that morality is important, that there should be accountability. And so the wise man or woman will order their lives to please God. If relating to God is important it is not wild eyed and maniacal to say – as Vincent does in his long chapter about London’s 25 sins – that morality matters and repentance is needed.
It can easily be shown that this paradigm has given dignity,
strength and hope to many who have suffered. Consider the Negroes sweltering
under the heat of injustice of America’s vicious system of slavery. No doubt
some of them agreed with Voltaire: this is the way life is, there is no morality, there
is no meaning, there is no justice, so keep your head down and cultivate the master’s
cotton field.
However we know that many agreed with Vincent. God was sovereign,
there is a plan, their suffering has meaning – and crucially justice would have
the last word. They had hope and this put a song in their hearts. And so we
have over 6,000 Negro spirituals - – full of mourning, full of grief, full of
pain, but under-girded by hope.
In Candide suffering has no meaning, no morality, and brings
no hope
For Vincent suffering has meaning, morality, and points to
hope.
Voltaire’s answer might briefly make sense as the emotions
rage at the seeming pitiless indifference of life as many know it. But then –
nothing.
Vincent’s answer – difficult for the emotions – brings the reassurance that most people yearn for: that their suffering
has meaning; that right and wrong matter; and that for those who turn to God,
‘all will be well’ and one day every tear will be wiped away.
Vincent makes more sense[10].
[1] In modern translations the word for ‘terrible’,
is awesome, even wondrous. Vincent, with only the King James version assumes
God’s answer here is grim. This however is almost certainly incorrect. Old Testament scholar Dr Afshin Latifzadeh explained to me that the emphasis in Psalm 65 is
on creation and a bountiful harvest, so he concludes, ‘I translate verse 5
positively as ‘awe-inspiring works’. It fits well with the flow and logic of
the text.’ This
barely dents Vincent’s
book as virtually every page has supporting verses from the Bible where there
is no misunderstanding, such as the Amos 3:6 with which he opens his first
chapter: ‘Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?
[2] C.S Lewis many years later made the same point: ‘Pain insists upon being
attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences,
but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
[3] Voltaire though knew the
Bible very well. His contributions to the ‘Philosophical Dictionary’ is full of
Bibile references, and at the end of Candide we have a list of all the kings in
the Bible who suffered a bloody end.
[4]
The outline argument is:
1. God has
the idea of infinitely many universes.
2. Only one
of these universes can actually exist.
3. God's
choices are subject to the principle of sufficient reason, that is, God has
reason to choose one thing or another.
4. God is
good.
5. Therefore,
the universe that God chose to exist is the best of all possible worlds
[5] This is probably because
Leibniz was for Voltaire no village priest riddled with superstition but an
intellectual of the highest order. On the enlightenment stage this was
competition. And indeed, Leibniz’s achievements are impressive. He is
considered to be a pioneer in computer science, applied science; psychology;
medical education; and library cataloguing systems. He was a political
theorist, advocating for something similar to today’s European Union. He was
also a philologist, and a student of China. In contrast Voltaire seems rather
light-weight, a Christopher Hitchens standing next to Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
[6] Admiral Byng was executed
by firing squad on March 14th 1757. His crime was failing to do ‘his
utmost’ at the Battle of Minorca.
[7] Given that Voltaire’s
sexual morality was fairly fluid it is not surprising that he wants the reader
to think that this is normal. He had affairs when he was young, then for about
twenty years he was in a relationship with a married woman, Madame de Chatelet.
She eventually left Voltaire for a younger man and died giving birth to his
child. Voltaire then set up home with his niece.
[8] This is Voltaire’s
shocking way of pointing out that Christian sexual morality is not universal,
as his contemporary Diderot had done with his work on the Tahitians.
[9] The author did visit Bam
in the aftermath of the earthquake that swept about 30,000 people into eternity
in a few minutes. His group came across a young boy howling at a grave. Here
lay his entire family. A Christian put his arms round him and hugged him. He
did not say, ‘Now go and cultivate your garden’; instead he prayed for him,
seeking to give the boy some hope.
[10] You could also ask which view has
harmed civilisation more. Sadly for fans of Voltaire that is a no brainer. He
was the patron saint of the French Revolution. And so terror. The first victims
were the clergy who, before the guillotine got slicing, were dragged out of the
prisons and bludgeoned to death. And then about 40,000 others. Wherever
Voltaire’s attack on Christianity and religion has gone it has been the same.
Actually much worse. In the Soviet Union; in China. The record of Puritanical
Christianity is not unblemished. The Salem witch trials immediately spring to
mind. It was a terrible event. However it is difficult to put this alongside
the murderous havoc unleashed by Voltaire’s attack on Christianity. Moreover,
the Puritans and those who rest on their shoulders have often led the charge against oppression (abolition of slavery; civil rights; fight against apartheid) and through education, medicine,
and politics have greatly enriched human history.
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