ABSTRACT
Europeans in the seventeenth century believed in God. His activities were the obvious explanation of the ordinary events of the world. His wishes were the guide to approved human conduct. His purposes were, however mysteriously, fulfilled as much by wars, plagues, and famines as by prosperity. In the twentieth century it is hard to grasp that to all but an eccentric few God was a normal part of life. Harder still is to see how, amid all the religious turmoil and pressures, there began a separation of belief in God from the daily working of a mechanical universe. Imperceptibly it came to be assumed that natural events usually had natural causes; supernatural influences on them could be seen as a supplement – sometimes comforting, more often alarming. Today in every western culture there is a barrier, however shaky, between the normal and the religious. There are other barriers between these and the subdued magic that lingers on in, for instance, popular astrology, numerology, palmistry, and some parts of ‘fringe’ medicine. These separations too were developing slowly in the seventeenth century. Attempts of sociologists, philosophers, psychologists, and historians to elucidate the roles of religion and of the supernatural in human behaviour have not led to very satisfying conclusions. On this, even more than on most other topics, reconstructing the past involves disturbingly indirect use of evidence. All we can investigate confidently is the outward manifestations of religion that everywhere remained an essential part of life. Sunday, the annual Christian festivals, the ceremonies associated with birth, marriage, and death survived, however much the details of their observance were reformed. Parents saw the benefits of teaching their children that religion and virtue were identical and that disobedience would lead to divine punishment. Prayer was a household and personal routine, at least for the higher and middling ranks of society. The law assumed that an oath on the Bible was the best guarantee of truthfulness. In Protestant countries especially the language and anecdotes of the Bible were a necessary part of normal speech; biblical episodes were the commonest subject of artists. Above all there was in every community the Church. Seen from below, the distinction between the Church and other sources of authority was by no means clear. Every established church was in one way or another a law-giving authority. On the whole to the law-abiding peasants or artisans the Church rather than the state represented the organized community. It was the Church that educated them, the Church that laid down codes of moral and social behaviour, the Church that would relieve them in destitution. Maintaining it often added to their poverty. Men might quarrel about the kind of religious organization they wanted; hardly anyone could conceive of a society with no such organization at all. The minorities who broke away from an established church had to set up another, which was likely to have an even firmer hold on the lives of its adherents.
