For centuries the Established Church had preached to the poor the duties of obedience. But it was so distanced from them – and its distance was rarely greater than in this time of absenteeism and plural livings – that its homilies had ceased to have much effect.

a movement which succeeded, very largely, in extirpating this insidious ‘violation’ of the Lord’s Day

‘in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton’

It is evident that there was, in 1800, casuistry enough in the theology of all the available English churches to reinforce the manufacturer’s own sense of moral self-esteem.

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

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

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

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.

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.

For despite all the homilies addressed to the Luddites (then and subsequently) as to the beneficial consequences of new machinery or of ‘free’ enterprise