A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The parsonage was a new model for Europe’s family life. It was perhaps not the most comfortable place to live, on a modest income and under constant public gaze, but children grew up there surrounded by books and earnest conversation, inheriting the assumption that life was to be lived strenuously for the benefit of an entire community – not least in telling that community what to do, whether the advice was welcome or not. It was not surprising that clerical and academic dynasties quickly grew up in Protestant Europe, and that thoughtful and often troubled, rather self-conscious parsonage children took their place in a wider service. Such personalities as John and Charles Wesley, Gilbert and William Tennent, a trio of Brontë novelists, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Karl Barth and Martin Luther King Jr took their restlessness and driven sense of duty into very varied rebuildings of Western society and consciousness, not all of which their parents might have applauded.