The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
the fictionalised story was less-often used with men as the central character.
Thus, discourses on exemplary men were invariably real-life. Biographical
sketches of one or two column lengths were a favourite device for
portraying heroic men: men of arms, heroes of imperial expansion, missionaries
and scholars. In autobiography, sketches focused heavily on moral
virtues as the crux of ‘rags to riches’ stories. They characteristically concentrated
on the period of youth and poverty where virtue was both most
dissonant with circumstances and most critical to ‘personal progress’.
Chamber’s Journal in 1832 featured Alexander Murray, ‘the son of a poor
Galloway shepherd, who finally died professor of Oriental languages in the
College of Edinburgh’. Born in 1775, his father had only three scree sheep
and four cows: ‘He had no debts, and no money.’ His only possessions
were a catechism and a psalm book his father gave him at six years old,
lighting a thirst for reading which was thwarted when banned from using
the family Bible.
I at length got a New Testament, and read the historical parts with
great curiosity and ardour. But I longed to read the Bible, which
seemed to me a much more pleasant book, and I actually went to
where I knew an old loose-leaved Bible lay, and carried it away piecemeal.
I perfectly remember the strange pleasure I felt in reading the
history of Abraham and of David. I like mournful narratives, and
greatly admired Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Lamentations. I pored on
these pieces of the Bible in secret for many months, for I durst not
shew them openly. 120
Living ‘in a wild glen’ five miles from the nearest village, his father could
not afford to send him to school, but instead worked him as a shepherd
where he scraped money together to buy ballads-sheets and ‘penny histories’:
‘I carried bundles of these in my pockets, and read them when sent
to look for cattle’. At twelve years of age he found work as a private tutor
to young children, at which point the biographical sketch effectively ends
as the ‘hero’ starts on the road to university and academic fame.
The useful and rational use of time was at the crux of the discourse on
the secular hero. Religion and piety were devices of rationality which
furthered learning, skill and self-improvement. Improvement was the
emblem of the democratic free society; wealth was an inhibition to personal
achievement:
. . . there is no condition in which the chance of doing any good is
less than in the condition of leisure. The man fully employed may be
able to gratify his good dispositions by improving himself or his
neighbours, or serving the public in some useful way; but the man
who has all his time to dispose of as he pleases, has but a poor chance,
indeed, of doing so. 121
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