34
The mammal and reptile brains seemed totally in control of
Oliver Cromwell's mind. But eventually those animal puppet-masters
would prove useful in the service of a meme.
The times were rife with roiling memes. The Catholic Church
had held Europe in a headlock for over a thousand years. Then in
1517, a discontented priest in Wittenberg, Germany, had nailed a set of
complaints to the door of the castle church. The priest's name was
Martin Luther. Luther's protest against ecclesiastical corruption soon
swelled into a movement. It was called Protestantism.
At the heart of the new movement was a meme that accumulated
human converts at a tumultuous pace. According to the old ideas of
the Church, men could reach God only through the intercession of
Catholicism's priests, bishops and cardinals. But those who embraced
the new meme believed that men could find God in a far easier way.
Printing had recently made the written word available to those who'd
never had access to it before. Now the faithful could find the wisdom
of the Lord by simply flipping open the pages of a Bible.
One country the new meme soon won over was England. Well,
sort of. King Henry VIII, always on the prowl for a wife who would
give him a son, had a problem with Church authorities in Rome. The
Pope would not issue enough divorces. And Henry needed lots of
them. So, taking matters in hand, in 1533 he used the new Protestant
movement as an excuse to set up his own church. Henry hired his
personal substitute for a Pope (the Archbishop of Canterbury), and
ensured a source of divorces on demand. Under the new English
system, God was still available only through a hierarchy of priests.
They just happened to be Anglican priests.
Some Englishmen, infected with Martin Luther's meme, insisted
on a more direct route to the deity. They read their Bibles and came up
with their own ideas of what God might have in mind. Among those
Englishmen were the Puritans. Oliver Cromwell became one of them.
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