ABSTRACT
The Bible was a central part of society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Bible was cited as an ultimate authority in astronomy, medicine, farming, geology, history, politics, economics, and all aspects of the human enterprise. The Bible provided the Western world with much inspiration in developing its modern republics of "liberty and justice for all". William Walwyn, the leading intellectual of the Levellers, rejected a Machiavellian view of the world where evil was an inevitable part of our corporate life and the government was severed from the moral goodness of the Christian gospel. The reason that the church and its ideology were so significant in the process relates to its position in the center of society during the formative years. The place of the church was marginated beginning in the eighteenth century by forces that blamed its dogmatism for all the evils and strife in society.
