Peter Sellick,

Thank you for taking the time out to post.If Austen was just an arbitrary choice resulting from the fact that you have just finished one of her books then yes, that does clarify things somewhat.

Are you in fact going to include the emergence of fiction as a contributory cause to the laicism of 18th century clergy? If so, I would still be puzzled if you intended to make reference to Austin in particular. Once education was secularised it was inevitable that the process of which you write should begin even had Henry never set eyes on Ann Boeyn.

The rise of fiction genres by Austen's time, I would have thought important only, as I said before, for its mimetic qualities: by then writers were merely reflecting society. The time for shaping it would, I consider,have begun with Cavendish and Behn, and the influence of Addison and Steele in actually influencing it far more convincing than that of Austen?

Good luck with your thesis and happy times with your research.

Romany
I never meant that Austin was a cause and you are right in that she was mimetic. Addison and Steal were an earlier and more powerful cause. As I perhaps did not indicate to the full, John Locke and his Reasonable Christianity, Newton’s physico- theology, Erasmian and anti Erastian sentiments, Antidogmatism and a whole lot more influenced the English church in the early 18th C. The result was what one author called laicisation of the clergy that is evident in Austin’s novels. Of course any other novelist of the time, or of our time would have done as an example, but Austin, because she is so popular, mainly because she is so good, seemed an apt example.

However, my real point was that Austin’s understanding of virtue gels with our late modernist ethos. It is essentially Pelagianism in nice surroundings and that appeals to us.

Thank you for the interesting article, Peter. I am not sure why so many have considered the article a criticism of Austen. The energetic debate that the article has generated is, however, a good indication that Austen's novels and the existence of god are still , surprisingly, hot topics for debate.

Hi Peter. I see the regulars are bagging you out again. I'd just like to say that your writings have given me a new lease of faith.

You've convinced me not to waste time with natural theology apologetics, and to understand God not as the principal of determinism, but the spiritual ruler of a spiritual Heaven to whom we all should seek for salvation from ourselves.

Sells,

You didn’t to reply to me. Nonetheless, being Humanist, I will “turn the other cheek” and try to help you.

UWA is unlikely allow a dissertation, which is both qualitative and constructionist: Your views on one theme about one author. Herein, I would recommend to compare and strong contrast: Austen visa~a~vis Melville or Dickens.

Melville:

“The Wale” [Moby Dick, MD]:

‘Melville did not take Bible as absolutely infallible, & that anything opposed to it in Science must be wrong .He believes that there are things out of God and independent of Him,—things that would have existed were there no God:—such as that two & two make four; for it is not that God so decrees mathematically, but that in the very nature of things, the fact is thus." – source: Vincent (1952)

“Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages.And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath—O Father!—chiefly known to me by Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die.I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or mine own.Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?" – MD, Melville

- “God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs.He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God. “ – MD, Meville

In Moby Dick [and Captain’s Couragous - Kipling] , Men face a life and death struggle with the sea; not knitting needles and choosing suitors. Austen’s Women are removed from imminent death. Fear is close to religion.

-Continued-

-2-

Dickens:

“ Bring it back, afore the day comes when even his Bible changes in his altered mind, and the words seem to him to read, as they have sometimes read in my own eyes-in Jail: 'Whither thou goest, I can Not go; where thou lodgest, I do Not lodge; thy people are Not my people; Nor thy God my God!'' – CD – The Cricket on the Heath

Above is an allusion to: Nor thy God my God!: Ruth 1: 16. 'And Ruth said for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.'

It was a very Moloch * of a baby, on whose insatiate altar the whole existence of this particular young brother was offered up a daily sacrifice. Its personality may be said to have consisted in its never being quiet, in any one place, for five consecutive minutes, and never going to sleep when required. ' CD – The Haunted Man and the Ghosts Bargain

Above is an allusion to: Moloch: the god of the Ammonites, for whom children were sacraficed. Sells, see 2 Kings 23:10.

Austen writes for a mainly female audience, methinks. Melville, Dickens & Kipling perhaps write a male audience Mediating variable? . Being all-secure in a Manor House does take one as close an alleged God, as would a nineteenth century ship at sea.

- Golgotha in literature? Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities? -Dickens

Alternatively:

What about Austen and Goethe’s Dr Faustus and/or Prometheus? Strong allusions here to courting of a different sort: A different [evil] suitor: Mephistopheles. Likewise, The Devil and the Good Lord – Sartre & Austen ? Sartre’s heroes seem to be peasants, unlike Austen’s English idle rich. Milton’s, Paradise lost?

- Clergy are ordinary any people. What else can they be?

Hope the above helps and I have not wasted my time given you don’t like me, because of my beliefs and advices.

- Good luck with your thesis