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Making a Trade of Preaching: Clergy, Labor, and Political Economy between the Interregnum and Restoration
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 August 2023
Abstract
Many writers of political economy in the 1660s and 1670s agreed that there were too many clergy and divinity students in England. This surplus of ministers and aspiring clerics, they argued, would better contribute to the public if they worked as productive laborers in agriculture and manufacturing. The question of whether preaching constituted labor had been a contentious theological debate in the late years of the Interregnum, and the proposals advanced by commentators like William Petty and Edward Chamberlayne to put ministers to other work assumed that clergy were comparable to profane professionals who labored for their keep. This article traces how this fraught question continued to confront schemes of political economy that otherwise sought to avoid religious controversy. In the 1670s, Christopher Wase responded to calls to limit clergy and free schools with an innovative survey and arguments drawn from empirical evidence, scriptural exegesis, and economic principles. Wase was one among other contemporaries who assigned a productive place for learning despite its irreducibility to a form of labor. His efforts thereby elevated the status of the clergy on a foundation of economic premises arrived at through engagement in theological debate.
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References
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56 Mary Morrissey has found this pneumological homiletics at work in radical accounts of preaching particularly in the Interregnum. Mary Morrissey, “Scripture, Style and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century English Theories of Preaching,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53, no. 4 (2002): 686–706.
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58 [Mary Forster], ed., These Several Papers Was Sent to the Parliament the Twentieth Day of the Fifth Moneth, 1659 [. . .] (London, 1659). For discussion of the demographics and social background of the signatories, see Stephen A. Kent, “‘Hand-Maids and Daughters of the Lord’: Quaker Women, Quaker Families, and Somerset's Anti-Tithe Petition in 1659,” Quaker History 97, no. 1 (2008): 32–63.
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64 Philip Connell attributes the resistance to substantial reform of tithes in the 1659 Rump Parliament to the influence of James Harrington, who argued for the necessity of an established clergy for Erastian reasons of political stability. Philip Connell, Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope (Oxford, 2016), 32–33. See also McCormick, William Petty, 119–20; Frank Amati and Tony Aspromourgos, “Petty Contra Hobbes: A Previously Untranslated Manuscript,” Journal of the History of Ideas 46, no. 1 (1985): 127–32.
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85 Wase, Considerations Concerning Free-Schools, 34.
86 References to the questionnaire as a printed document can be found in the letter of Samuel Moore, 1673, Christopher Wase Papers, MS 391/1, fol. 87, Corpus Christi College Library. For the novelty of printed questionnaires, see Adam Fox, “Printed Questionnaires, Research Networks, and the Discovery of the British Isles, 1650–1800,” Historical Journal 53, no. 3 (2010): 593–621.
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94 Letter from Oliver Doiley, 17 December 1673, Christopher Wase Papers, 391/1, fol. 75, Corpus Christi College Library.
95 Letter from Bradshaw, 9 December 1674, Christopher Wase Papers, MS 390/1, fol. 84v, Corpus Christi College Library.
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97 Wase, 25.
98 Wase, 53.
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106 Wase, 12.
107 Wase, 12.
108 Wase, 17.
109 Wase, 110.
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122 Wase, 17.
123 Wase, 53.
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126 Gordon Graham describes Smith‘s “philosophy of religion” independent of any robust theological commitments, and his reflection on ecclesiology reconstructed here fits that description. Gordon Graham, “Adam Smith and Religion,” in Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy, ed. Ryan Patrick Hanley (Princeton, 2016), 305–20, at 305–8, 312.
127 Wase, Considerations Concerning Free-Schools, 17.
128 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 842–43.
129 Smith, 841.
130 Smith, 846.
131 Smith, 846. For the central place of combatting “superstition” in Smith's advocacy for general education to shape moral sentiments, see Rothschild, Emma, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 98Google Scholar.