Laughing at sin

Francis Quarles, An emblem on books

‘The world’s a book, writ by the eternal art
Of the great Maker, printed in man’s heart;
‘Tis falsely printed, though divinely penned,
And all the erratas will appear at the end.’

I like this witty little poem. The idea is simple – just as books have their printing errors listed on the last page, we’ll have all our sins listed to us at the Last Judgement. As a joke, it says a lot about the way seventeenth-century people thought about human nature. Today, I think, the whole Last Judgement thing is a bit off-putting to most people. No-one likes to be told they’re sinful. Except that four hundred year ago it seems they did. Couldn’t get enough of it, in fact.

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Ross Clark

Britain is living beyond its means

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries theology was, like politics today, something about which everybody had an opinion.