The Muggletonians

 In his capsule biography of the seventeenth century English preacher and self-declared prophet Lodowicke Muggleton, Lytton Strachey remarks toward the close of the essay that "one would be sorry if the time ever came that there were no more Muggletonians." 

E.P. Thompson, it is known, lived to see that sad era. In his book about William Blake, Witness Against the Beast, he describes his meeting with the last Muggletonian, with whose expiration in 1979 the entire prophetic sect sank into oblivion. 

Strachey's attitude to the Muggletonians was probably the most sympathetic that a morally and spiritually sane person could take: namely, he found them ridiculous, but harmless. 

After quoting a few lines from a hymn the sect had sung for over two centuries—"None salvation-knowledge hath, / But those of Muggleton and Reeve"—he remarks with splendidly benignant contempt: 

"It is an exclusive faith, certainly; and yet, somehow or other, it disarms criticism. Even though one may not be of the elect oneself, one cannot but wish it well[.]"

This is doubtless the sort of "condescension of posterity" from which Thompson proposed to "rescue" his various sectaries and oddballs, by recasting them as unconscious proto-rebels against the English class system and incipient capitalism. 

But it was Thompson here who was really practicing the ultimate form of condescension. For, unlike Strachey, he refused to take the Muggletonians at their word. 

They didn't think they were protesting against poverty and inequality. They thought they had received direct oracles from God, and that all who failed to heed the new dispensation were destined for eternal torture in the afterlife. 

"None salvation-knowledge hath" but Muggleton and Reeve, they declared. 

Better to say, with Hugh MacDiarmid: "It is a God-damned lie to say that these / Saved, or knew, anything worth a man's pride." 

From this standpoint, Strachey's amused contempt seems positively generous. 

Arthur Koestler remarks in one of his essays that it is impossible for a modern person "to believe in a loving God who condemns half his children to eternal damnation without hope of an amnesty[.]"

The problem is all the more acute if we are meant to understand that this loving God condemns all of his children to such a fate, with the exception of a tiny handful of English sectarians, the last of whom died out fifty years ago. 

And yet, the exclusivism and the pathological vindictiveness of the historical Muggleton—who, Strachey tells us, made a point of decreeing eternal damnation as a God-given sentence upon his personal enemies—is but a concentrated version of the problem with Christian doctrine in general. 

Of course, some of the modern theologians will tell us that Hell has been reduced to a metaphor; "that it merely means exclusion from grace without overheating," as Koestler puts it. But that apologia—he adds—seems "hardly on a more adult level" than a belief in devils with pitchforks. 

It is too obviously an intellectualized mystification of a doctrinal point that the Churches cannot overtly reject—without upsetting their whole creed and catechism—but which is obviously untenable for modern consciences. 

Why must we try to "rescue" such absurdities from the "condescension" of anyone? Why not allow them to moulder as the husks of outworn beliefs that they are? 

In his Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy writes at one point of a countryside placard warning passersby that "thy damnation slumbereth not." 

We've all seen the same message—or ones like it—on billboards across the United States. "Hell is real" they declare—and I don't think they mean by that mere "exclusion from grace." 

Hardy called such wayside sentiments "the last grotesque phase of a creed which had served mankind well in its time." 

Condescension? Perhaps—but hardly unmerited. If anything, Hardy here was being—like Strachey—more generous than he had to be. 

People who are fundamentally sectarians at heart; people like Thompson who are rigid and unbending in their sense of moral and ideological correctness, will always have more sympathy for the Muggletons of the world than for the Stracheys and the Hardys. 

Indeed, Strachey has often enough been denounced as a catlike, over-civilized decadent, mocking the Victorians for their moral sincerity and earnestness, from the vantage point of his smug Bloomsbury modernity ("condescension" again). 

Strachey's actual writings reveal something very different, however. They show us a man whose dislike of Victorian piety stemmed from his absolute loathing of cruelty; whose distrust of moral self-righteousness came from his awareness that it is the self-righteous of the world who commit the greatest cruelties. 

(This is why he identifies with Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon—indeed, the whole spirit of the eighteenth century, in preference to the Ruskins and Carlyles and Froudes of the nineteenth.)

The belief, after all, that most of the human race is bound to perdition is a morally serious view. The Muggletonians preached it with absolute earnestness and sincerity. 

It is also, however, an inconceivably, unfathomably cruel and vindictive view—like much of the rest of Christian doctrine, if taken in its literal sense. 

And to such a view, Strachey gave the most moderate and decent response that a morally sane person can offer: he mocked it. And rightly so.