Today's discussion question

[alice wellintown]

But Fox did not crush his own troubled head with a hammer; he put on
his leather and preached a Puritan's screed against everything: games,
theater, fun, sex, fighting, drink, women, you name it.

Fox spoke out against everyone and everything in England.

Though he was the worst kind of Puritan by Mencken's definition, he
said nearly exactly what Mencken said, only of Englishmen not
Americans.



On 8/16/13, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> So we return to H.L. Mencken's Book of Prefaces and his scathing,
> witty,  and famous definition of Puritanism.
>
> I don't know what Friends or Catholics or Presbyterians or Baptists or
> Lutherans know about the history of Christain idea, doctrines, dogmas,
> let alone the particular and seperate squables that formed, and often
> dismembered these (and the Quakers or Froiends declined in number
> because they were so open to the ideas of others, though we see the
> Readings Out in M&D....), and I imagine that Quakers or Friends,
> though in my experience very knowledgable about history, know less
> than their counterparts who attend sermons on a Sunday and are
> subjected to the history of the churches at least a few times in the
> year.
>
> The Reformation needed, in the minds and hearts of "puritans",
> reform. Puritan, term, long before Mencken abused it,  was a term of
> derision. Often, as is the case with Shakers and Quakers, co-opted,
> but still, as the government continued to hang, jail, and punish, and
> as religious toleration was only something prayed for, the number of
> Puritans ever increased as the violence visited up their covered heads
> increased (How's that for the want of violence?). War, and the fear of
> Rome, or anything Papist, and the attempt to force everyone under one
> tent only increased the anarchy, as more and more, strange
> manifestations of the religion sprang up from the bloody fields. Sects
> multiplied  and then multiplied, some died, some split, some gave
> birth to children they didn't recognize or disowned, cast into the
> river or upon the devil's door. Why Fox's madness spread is hard to
> say. I doubt it has anything to do with what you list in your post,
> Joseph. Fox was, in modern psychological terms, morbid, melancholic,
> over the rainbow, crazy. But the hysterical history that engulfed this
> poor suffering soul was, as fortune's wheel turned, grace. Had the
> madness of history not met the madness of Fox, he would have died,
> probably at his own hand, a Cobbler's hammer to the skull.
>