Religion and faith — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Religion and faith
Themes
What you need to know
How Wells explores faith tested by catastrophe, from the curate's collapse to the narrator's prayers and the question of whether God saved humanity across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'What good is religion if it collapses under calamity?', 'Did you think God had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent', 'The great and terrible day of the Lord!', 'a special prayer for peace', 'a squad of Salvation Army lassies came singing down Waterloo Road', 'a blind man in the uniform of the Salvation Army', 'God have mercy upon us!', 'It is just, O God!', 'Woe unto this unfaithful city!', 'I prayed copiously', 'I had uttered prayers, fetish prayers, had prayed as heathens mutter charms when I was in extremity', 'face to face with the darkness of God', 'Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God', 'the destruction of Sennacherib had been repeated, that God had repented, that the Angel of Death had slain them in the night', 'I extended my hands towards the sky and began thanking God'.
Context: the curate as one of God's ministers, T. H. Huxley, who coined the word agnostic, Wells's own turn away from Christianity as a youth, and the Bible's story of Sennacherib's army destroyed by an angel.
Different readings: the bacteria as the work of 'God, in his wisdom', or as natural selection, and the narrator's prayers as faith or as fear.
OCR's question on this novel is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the novel elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the novel, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts when it is relevant to the question, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
