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106 David Morgan

Passion of Jesus and not form mental images of it (Luther 1958: 99). John
Calvin regarded images as the traffic of the mind but drew very different
conclusions. Whereas Luther urged his contemporaries to recognize the
value of images for teaching religious stories and precepts, Calvin claimed
that images were unable to teach anything true about the Gospel (Calvin
1989: 90–103). According to Calvin, images are not in the least inclined
to tell the truth because they are the product of the human imagination,
a faculty dedicated to dissimulation. The human mind, he wrote, is a
“perpetual forge of idols” (Calvin 1989: 97): by imagining the divine, the
mind gives it a body the size of an image. The human propensity to lie was
an epistemological issue, residing in the unholy linkage of rebellious will
and creaturely cognition but sloshed over into the messy domain of bodies.
To think was to appropriate the world to one’s interests, carnal and selfish,
and therefore inevitably to limit the inherently transcendent and infinitely
sovereign stature of the divine. If one wishes to know God, Calvin claimed,
one has no choice but to rely faithfully on the medium by which the deity
reveals itself: the Bible. Images were unlike words because they serviced the
human will. The words of the Bible corresponded to those spoken by God
himself, and were therefore privileged to convey divine truth.
Romanticism and the Idealist philosophy that it embraced turned a sharp
corner on Calvinism. Sociologist Colin Campbell has argued in an insightful
study of the broad impact of Romanticism that modern consumerism was
shaped by a hedonism that directed Europeans toward an imaginative pleasure-
seeking (Campbell 1987). Yet Puritanism had also accorded a vital place to
feelings, or affections, as theologians such as Jonathan Edwards referred to
them. Affections, properly evaluated, could be evidence of the movement
of the Holy Spirit—or of a sham undertaken by the wiles of Satan or the
deceiving individual (Edwards 1959). The cultivation of feeling, directed by
the faculty of taste, was Romanticism’s answer to the Calvinist evaluation
of feelings. The legacy of the Puritan doctrine of the affections is evident
in the nineteenth-century evocation of emotions in illustrated children’s
publications. If Edwards debated with his parishioners whether a revived
person’s panting or swooning were an index of spiritual awakening, Victorian
Protestants disagreed over the effects of illustrations as moving or repulsive,
compelling a solemn spirit or causing nightmares. The shift noted by Colin
Campbell was toward the pivotal role of the imagination and the pleasure of
feelings in the consumption of mass-produced goods. Accordingly, religion
was not the victim of modern disenchantment but negotiated the transition
to capitalism and consumption to great advantage. The explosion of mass
print among Protestants and Catholics in the United States and Europe and
among Christian missionaries and colonial governments throughout Asia and
Africa during the nineteenth century and the aggressive use of imagery of all