Making a Trade of Preaching: Clergy, Labor, and Political Economy between the Interregnum and Restoration

Abstract Many writers of political economy in the 1660s and 1670s agreed that there were too many clergy and divinity students in England. This surplus of ministers and aspiring clerics, they argued, would better contribute to the public if they worked as productive laborers in agriculture and manufacturing. The question of whether preaching constituted labor had been a contentious theological debate in the late years of the Interregnum, and the proposals advanced by commentators like William Petty and Edward Chamberlayne to put ministers to other work assumed that clergy were comparable to profane professionals who labored for their keep. This article traces how this fraught question continued to confront schemes of political economy that otherwise sought to avoid religious controversy. In the 1670s, Christopher Wase responded to calls to limit clergy and free schools with an innovative survey and arguments drawn from empirical evidence, scriptural exegesis, and economic principles. Wase was one among other contemporaries who assigned a productive place for learning despite its irreducibility to a form of labor. His efforts thereby elevated the status of the clergy on a foundation of economic premises arrived at through engagement in theological debate.