ABSTRACT
In 1817, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham published an attack on the Church’s system of education, singling out for particular criticism the schools sponsored by the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church. Bentham’s objections to the forms of Church teaching and worship were manifold (most notably that liturgical repetition involves insincerity), but he also criticized the use of the Shorter Catechism for pedagogic purposes. According to Bentham, the exposition of the teaching of Jesus in this popular Catechism amounted to a parodic mockery in which the inspired words of the sacred “original” were replaced by a reductive and distinctly non-sacred “copy”: in the Catechism, which purported to reach an extensive popular audience, Christ’s words “are not in effect less truly the objects of … their mockery, than his person was the object of the mockery of those men, by whom, while on the cross, he was hailed ‘King of the Jews.’” Bentham’s concern here was less doctrinal than formal—an anxiety about the relationship between the inspired text and any attempts to translate it, redact it, or amplify it: “be it ever so faithful, where is the advantage that a copy has over the original?” 1 He concluded, “[t]he sacred text ought not to have a substitute.” 2 In other words, even devotional forms intended for teaching and worship could not fully communicate the divine message.
