Tim, On 01 17 96 you say: ...we are for people looking out for Number One, with the expectation that many other people simply won't make it. I'm reading Christopher Hill's The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. At page 270: In 1616 John Rolfe, Secretary to the Virginia Company, attributed to Sir Thomas Dale the view that the English were 'a peculiar people marked and chosen by the finger of God' to possess North America. But the phrase [pecu- liar people] soon ceased to be equivalent to 'the chosen people' and came to be restricted to descriptions of them- selves by the saints. In 1659 Christopher Feake urged 'the real fifth-kingdom men' to 'become a peculiar people (or, as it were, a nation in the midst of the nation) wait- ing for the word of command from their leader [i.e. God] to execute the vengeance against Babylon'. Christ's cause will 'be amiable in the eyes of all the nations in due time'. Quakers and Bunyan also used the phrase. It indicated a group conscious of its superiority but also aware that it was a minority. Time tests prophecy and expectation alike. Hill's book has other pertinent things to say. At p 248: There are two (at least) ways of using the Bible for political controversy, which are not easily separated. First as CODE. When Thomas Goodwin in 1639 asked 'How, by degrees, do these Gentiles win ground upon the outward court in England?' he had already told us that Gentiles mean Papists. 'The outward court' continues a metaphor about the Jewish temple; but it was at Charles I's court that the Papists were making headway. At 249: Secondly, the symbols of the myth can be interpreted to taste. We have seen Cain pass from being all the reprobate to 'all great landlords', Nimrod from a tyrannical king to all kings, all persecutors; Samson from a type of Christ to a freedom fighter or a terrorist. There seemed to be no limits. Cen- sorship had to be restored.... Some of the myths came to be put to secular uses. John Bull with his cudgel, the bully of the waves, the master slave- trader, becomes the symbol of the chosen Anglo-Saxon people, of their manifest destiny to bring the world to protestant Christianity, to civilization, and in our century to 'demo- cracy'. But long before that the Bible had lost its function as final arbiter. At 176: But it is not totally absurd to suggest that the role of the [church] elders who decide and whose decisions are taken over by 'the people' is performed in our [present-day] society by the media. The main difference is in the way in which spokes- men of the latter find their way to such powerful positions: unlike elders, they are not elected. I expect those spokesmen are simply looking out for their Number Ones --their employers. Cordially, Jim NOTE. The first bracketed insertion in the first quotation is mine; the second is not. I capitalized CODE in the second quotation for the minority who can't see all that well. The book was published in 1993 by Allen Lane / The Penguin Press. Its ISBN: 0 713 99078 3. Pages: xiv + 466.