ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how these union rituals have been viewed by contemporary opinion, and later historians. It shows the trade unions of the early decades of the nineteenth century probably inherited some of their Christian rhetoric from Biblical terms and references passed down to them by the journeymen fraternities and trade societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The chapter includes order and chaos, the individual and the group, unity and disunity, the inside and the outside, and even the seemingly irreconcilable realms of 'within and without' and 'with and against'. Many workers in this period of unsettling economic and social change looked to scripture and reassuring messages from itinerant preachers to help them make sense of the difficult times, and to find a pathway through the confusion. Pointing up the strong presence of the sacred in the trade union initiation rituals alerts us to another dimension to these rituals.
