Activity

It is of course easy to fall back on an otiose ‘economist’ explanation, which attributes Luddism to the simple cause and effect of the Orders in Council.

There is a sense in which any religion which places great emphasis on the after-life is the Chiliasm of the defeated and the hopeless.

From both it took over the almost-Manichaean sense of guilt at man’s depravity.

Again and again the penitent in his ‘novitiate’ succumbs to obscurely-indicated ‘temptations’:

Works were the snares of pride and the best works were mingled with the dross of sin;