“The Elder Brother replies, ‘What, will you be an Atheist, and a factious man, will you not believe God?’
“‘Yes,’ saith the Younger Brother, ‘if I knew God said so, I should believe, for I desire to serve Him.’
“‘Why,’ saith the Elder Brother, ‘this is His Word, and if you will not believe it, you must be damned; but if you will believe it, you will go to Heaven.’
“Well, the Younger Brother, being weak in spirit, and not having a grounded knowledge of the Creation, nor of himself, is terrified, and lets go his hold in the Earth, and submits himself to be a Slave to his Brother, for fear of damnation in Hell after death, and in hopes to get Heaven thereby after he is dead. And so his eyes are put out, and his Reason is blinded. So that this divining spiritual doctrine is a cheat. For while men are gazing up to Heaven, imagining after a happiness, or fearing a Hell after they are dead, their eyes are put out, that they see not what are their Birth-Rights, nor what is to be done by them here on Earth while they are living. This is the filthy Dreamer and the Cloud without rain. And indeed the subtle Clergy do know that if they can but charm the people by this their divining doctrine, to look after riches, Heaven and Glory when they are dead, that then they shall easily be the inheritors of the Earth, and have the deceived people to be their Servants.
“For my own part,” he continues, “my spirit hath waded deep to find the bottom of this divining spiritual Doctrine; and the more I searched, the more I was at a loss. I never came to quiet rest and to know God in my spirit, till I came to the knowledge of the things in this Book. And let me tell you, They who preach this divining doctrine are the murderers of many a poor heart, who is bashful and simple, and who cannot speak for himself, but who keeps his thoughts to himself.”
Such, then, was Winstanley’s final attack on the body of teachings he, rightly or wrongly, hated and despised as the main supporter of the prevailing social injustice. Correct thought he realised to be the necessary precursor of right action; and he knew that correct thought is impossible so long as old, inherited false ideas are unquestioningly accepted and hold undisputed dominion over the human mind. Winstanley seems to us to have realised that it was the ignorance of the many that, in truth, maintained the privileges of the few; that the masses themselves forge the fetters for their own enslavement, which, though apparently as strong as iron bands, are, in truth, but things of gossamer, easily to be broken by those who themselves have forged and who themselves still maintain them.
In the next chapter (chap. v.) Winstanley briefly summarises his views on education, and outlines the means by which he deemed both the production and the distribution of wealth could be carried on without having recourse to “the thieving art of buying and selling.” It commences as follows:
Of Education.
“Mankind in the days of his youth is like a young colt, wanton and foolish, till he be broken in by education and correction; the neglect of this care, or the want of wisdom in the performance of it, hath been and is the cause of much division and trouble in the world. Therefore the Law of a Common-wealth doth require that not only a Father, but that all Overseers and Officers should make it their work to educate children in good manners, and to see them brought up in some trade or other, and to suffer no children in any Parish to live in idleness and youthful pleasures all their days, as many have been; but that they may be brought up like men and not like beasts. That so the Commonwealth may be planted with laborious and wise experienced men, and not with idle fools.”
He continues his reflections as follows: