EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

By the Same Author

Patterns in History
Leicester: Inter Varsity Press, 1979

The Nonconformist Conscience

Chapel and Politics, 1870–1914
London: Allen & Unwin, 1982
The Baptists in Scotland
A History
(Editor)
Glasgow: Baptist Union of Scotland, 1988

Victorian Nonconformity
Bangor, Gwynedd: Headstart History, 1992

William Ewart Gladstone

Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain
Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1993

Evangelicalism
Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America,
the British Isles and Beyond, 1700–1990
(Co-editor)
New York: Oxford University Press, 1994
 EVANGELICALISM IN
MODERN BRITAIN
A HISTORY FROM THE 1730s TO
THE 1980s

D.W. Bebbington
Department of History, University of Stirling

London and New York

 First published in 1989 by
Unwin Hyman Ltd
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 1989 D.W.Bebbington
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
Bebbington, D.W. (David W)
Evangelicalism in modern Britain.
1. Great Britain. Christian Church Evangelicalism, 1730–1987
I.Title
274.1′08
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Bebbington, D.W. (David William), 1949–
Evangelicalism in modern Britain: a history from the 1730s to the 1980s /
D.W.Bebbington.
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Evangelicalism—Great Britain—History. 2. Great Britain—Church history. I. Title
BR1642. G7B34 1988. 88–14572
274.1′08 dc19

ISBN 0-203-35990-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-37246-8 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-10464-5 (Print Edition)
 Contents

Preface vi

1 Preaching the Gospel: The Nature of Evangelical Religion 1

2 Knowledge of the Lord: The Early Evangelical Movement 20
3 A Troubling of the Water: Developments in the Early Nineteenth 75
Century
4 The Growth of the Word: Evangelicals and Society in the 105
Nineteenth Century
5 Holiness unto the Lord: Keswick and its Context in the Later 151
Nineteenth Century
6 Walking Apart: Conservative and Liberal Evangelicals in the 180
Early Twentieth Century
7 The Spirit Poured Out: Springs of the Charismatic Movement 227
Into a Broad Place: Evangelical Resurgence in the Later Twentieth 247
Century
8
9 Time and Chance: Evangelicalism and Change 269

Notes 275
Index 353
 Preface

The Evangelicals of Britain have been neglected. A few themes have been
selected for attention by historians—such as John Wesley and the rise of
Methodism, William Wilberforce and the struggle against slavery, Lord
Shaftesbury and the campaigns for social reform—but many aspects of the
movement remain in obscurity. Light has been shed by studies of particular
organisations and denominations, but the development of Evangelicalism as a
whole has been examined very little. That is surprising, because it has been a
major tradition within the Christian churches. In the mid-nineteenth century
it set the tone of British society. In the 1970s both archbishops of the Church
of England were drawn from it. And from the 1790s onwards the missionaries
it despatched did much to mould the Christian faith in many other parts of the
world. The neglect of the Evangelicals is undeserved.
This book attempts to fill a gap by providing an overall survey of the
movement. It therefore has a twofold task. One dimension is to consider the
influence of Evangelicals on society. More research has been done on this
aspect of the movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than on
any other. The dependence of this study on earlier work will be very apparent
here. More attention, however, is paid to how Evangelicalism itself has
changed. Religion, as Edward Gibbon once remarked with tongue in cheek, has
never existcd in the pure form in which it descended from heaven. It has
always been affected by its surroundings at the same time as influencing those
surroundings. Studies of churches founded by missionaries have been well
aware of this principle. Discussion of British Evangelicalism has been much
less alert to the effects of its host culture. So the second main dimension of the
book is an exploration of the ways in which Evangelical religion has been
moulded by its environment.
The movement has been self-consciously distinctive and unitary. It has
consisted of all those strands in Protestantism that have not been either too
high in churchmanship or too broad in theology to qualify for acceptance. It
has spanned the gulf between the Established Church and Nonconformity in
England and Wales and has bound together bodies north and south of the
Scottish border. It has nourished close links with co-religionists abroad,
especially in the English-speaking world. Although this study considers
 vii

influences from overseas, and particularly from America, it concentrates on

developments within Britain. Even Ireland, united constitutionally with
Britain for much of the period, is left out. But it does try to take account of the
remarkable sectarian mosaic that existed alongside the larger churches.
Although much material has been drawn from biographies and other
monographs, research has paid particular attention to some of the immense
number of periodicals generated by Evangelicalism. The secondary literature
is surveyed incidentally in the notes to the chapters, and so no separate
booklist has been included. It should also be noted that research has been
greatly facilitated over the years by participant observation. Services of
worship can reveal a great deal about Christian traditions.
Many debts have been incurred. The draft has been read in whole or in part
by Dr Clyde Binfield, Dr Ken Brown, Professor Roy Campbell, the Rev.
Professor Colin Gunton, Dr David Hempton, Dr lain Hutchison, Dr Neil
Keeble, Mr John McIntosh, Professor Mark Noll, Dr Brian Stanley and Dr
John Walsh. I am extremely grateful for their comments, but none of them
bears responsibility for the text. A pilot essay was read by Dr Sheridan Gilley,
Dr Richard Holt, Dr David Lyon, Professor Arthur Pollard, Professor Andrew
Walls, Professor R.K.Webb, Dr Haddon Willmer and Dr David Wright. I
much appreciated their observations. Members of my family have greatly
helped the process of writing: my mother, Mrs Vera Bebbington, my mother-
in-law, Mrs Margaret Lacey, and especially my wife Eileen, who supplied
constant encouragement. My daughter Anne also helped by urging me to ‘cut
the chapters’.
I have been grateful for access to material in the possession of the Billy
Graham Evangelistic Association, the London City Mission and Church
Society (to which I was guided by Dr Brenda Hough). Most of the research was
done in the British Library, Cambridge University Library, the John Rylands
University Library of Manchester, the National Library of Scotland and
Stirling University Library. I appreciate the help given by their staff, and
especially assistance, following earlier guidance, from Miss Alison Peacock of
the Methodist Church Archives at the John Rylands. Several friends have
generously provided accommodation during research trips, and I want to
express particular gratitude to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, for its warm
hospitality.
The project was originally stimulated by an invitation to give the Trustees’
Lectures at Union Theological College, Belfast, in 1980, and the Laing Lecture
at London Bible College in 1982. Discussion with students in my course at the
University of Stirling on Church, State and Society in Nineteenth-Century
Britain helped to crystallise some of the points, and I am particularly indebted
to one of them, Mr Colin Rogerson, for a remark (which he may have
forgotten) that illuminated a crucial area. Conversation with several friends—
particularly the Rev. Dr Richard Kidd—has been stimulating. Theological
Students’ Fellowships at other Scottish universities forced me to explore
viii

several aspects of the subject by inviting me to speak on them. The University

of Stirling granted a sabbatical semester for the basic research in 1983, and I
am grateful for financial support to the British Academy, the Carnegie Trust
for the Universities of Scotland and the Whitley Lectureship. Miss Margaret
Hendry, assisted by Mrs Margaret Dickson, has word-processed the text with
immense care and skill. The Rev.James Taylor, Minister of Stirling Baptist
Church, has helped the writing of the book by being a distinguished exemplar
of the tradition it discusses. To him the book is dedicated.
David Bebbington
Stirling, February 1988
Note to 1993 printing
A few minor alterations have been made. None of them, however, affects the
substance of the book.
David Bebbington
Stirling, May 1993
EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN
 [1]
Preaching the Gospel: The Nature of
Evangelical Religion

…woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel! (1 Cor. 9:16)

Evangelical religion is a popular Protestant movement that has existed in Britain

since the 1730s. It is not to be equated with any single Christian
denomination, for it influenced the existing churches during the eighteenth
century and generated many more in subsequent years. It has found
expression in a variety of institutional forms, a wine that has been poured into
many bottles. Historians regularly apply the term ‘evangelical’ to the
churches arising from the Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.1 The usage of the period justifies them. Sir Thomas More in 1531
referred to advocates of the Reformation as ‘Evaungelicalles’.2 Yet the normal
meaning of the word, as late as the eighteenth century, was ‘of the gospel’ in a
non-partisan sense. Isaac Watts, for example, writes of an ‘Evangelical Turn of
Thought’ in 1723.3 There was a reluctance, most marked in Scotland, to apply
the word to a particular group, since by implication those outside the group
would be branded as not ‘of the gospel’.4 Other terms were used, especially by
critics. In 1789 Joseph Milner wrote of ‘Evangelical religion, or what is often
called Calvinism or Methodism’.5 Steadily, however, the word ‘Evangelical’
supplanted the others as the standard description of the doctrines or mnisters
of the revival movement, whether inside or outside the Church of England.6 In
1793 The Evangelical Magazine was founded to cater for members of any
denomination dedicated to spreading the gospel. That is the sense in which the
word is employed here. Although ‘evangelical’, with a lower-case initial, is
occasionally used to mean ‘of the gospel’, the term ‘Evangelical’, with a capital
letter, is applied to any aspect of the movement beginning in the 1730s.7 There
was much continuity with earlier Protestant traditions, but, as Chapter 2
contends, Evangelicalism was a new phenomenon of the eighteenth century.
Who was an Evangelical? Sometimes adherents of the movement were in
doubt themselves. ‘I know what constituted an Evangelical in former times’,
wrote Lord Shaftesbury in his later life; ‘I have no clear notion what
constitutes one now.’8 Part of the problem was that, as Shaftesbury implies,
Evangelicalism changed greatly over time. To analyse and explain the changes
2 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

is the main purpose of this book. Yet there are common features that have
lasted from the first half of the eighteenth century to the second half of the
twentieth. It is this continuing set of characteristics that reveals the existencc
of an Evangelical tradition. They need to be examined, for no other criterion
for defining Evangelicalism is satisfactory. An alternative way would be to
appeal to contemporary opinion about who was included within the
movement. That approach, however, risks being ensnared in the narrow
perspective of a particular period. For polemical purposes the right of others to
call themselves Evangelicals has often been denied, particularly in the
twentieth century. The danger is that the historian may be drawn into the
battles of the past. It is therefore preferable to identify adherents of the
movement by certain hallmarks. Evangelicals were those who displayed all the
common features that have pcrsistcd over time.
Evangelical apologists sometimes explained their distinctiveness by laying
claim to particular emphases. The Evangelical clergy differed from others,
according to Henry Venn (later Clerical Secretary of the Church Missionary
Society) in 1835, ‘not so much in their systematic statement of doctrines, as in
the relative importance which they assign to the particular parts of the
Christian System, and in the vital operation of Christian Doctrines upon the
heart and conduct’.9 Likewise Bishop Ryle of Liverpool asserted that it was not
the substance of certain doctrines but the prominent position assigned to only
a few of them that marked out Evangelical Churchmen from others.10 By that
criterion, Ryle was able to distinguish his posirion from that of the great
number of late nineteenth-century High Churchmen whose message was
similar to his own, whose zeal was eqvial to his own and who preached as
much for conversions.11 They elevated certain doctrines surrounding the
church and the sacraments to a standard of importance that he believed to be
untenable. The tone of Evangelicalism permeated nearly the whole of later
Victorian religion outside the Roman Catholic Church, and yet the
Evangelical tradition remained distinct. It gave exclusive pride of place to a
small number of leading principles.

EVANGELICAL CHARACTERISTICS
The main characteristics emerge clearly. The High Churchman G.W.E.
Russell remembered that the Evangelicals of his childhood in the
midnineteenth century divided humanity into two categories: ‘a converted
character’ differed totally from all others. Russell had also been taught to be
active in charity, to read the Bible and to maintain ‘the doctrine of the
Cross’.12 There are the four qualities that have been the special marks
of Evangelical religion: conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed;
activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard
for the Bible; and what may be called crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of
 PREACHING THE GOSPEL 3

Christ on the cross. Together they form a quadrilateral of priorities that is the
basis of Evangelicalism.
In the early days of the revival there was normally a stress in Evangelical
apologetic on the first and the last. John Wesley was willing to describe two
doctrines as fundamental: justification, the forgiving of our sins through the
atoning death of Christ; and the new birth, the renewing of our fallen human
nature at the time of conversion.13 Similarly a group at Cambridge received
the ‘three capital and distinguishing doctrines of the Methodists, viz. Original
Sin, Justification by Faith and the New Birth’.14 Original sin, the condition
from which we are rescued by the other two, was also on Joseph Milner’s
checklist of four doctrines absolutely necessary to salvation: the ‘divine light,
inspiration, or illumination’ of conversion; original sin; justification by faith in
the merits of Christ by which ‘the great transaction of the Cross is
appropriated’; and spiritual renovation, the consequent working out of duty
from the motive of gratitude.15 This final factor implies activism, but in the
eighteenth century Evangelicals rarely spelt out its importance in doctrinal
terms. They nevertheless threw themselves into vigorous attempts to spread
the faith. Likewise they did not normally put the Bible among the most
important features of their religion. The Bible, after all, was professedly held
in high esteem by all Protestants. Yet they were notably devoted in their
searching of the scriptures. The centrality of the Bible could still be taken as
read in the mid-nineteenth century, even when activism was mentioned
explicitly. ‘An Evangelical believer’, according to William Marsh in 1850, ‘is a
man who believes in the fall and its consequences, in the recovery and its
fruits, in the personal application of the recovery by the power of the Spirit of
God, and then the Christian will aim, desire, endeavour, by example, by
exertion, by influence, and by prayer to promote the great salvation of which
he himself is a happy partaker…’16 Thus the earlier phase of Evangelical
history concurred with the late Puritan divine Matthew Henry in dwelling on
three Rs: ruin, redemption and regeneration.17 In practice, however, from its
commencement the movement showed imrnense energy and a steady
devotion to the Bible also.
Later generations, while still displaying the four main characteristics,
tended to present them rather differently. The first leading principle of
Evangelical religion, according to Bishop Ryle, is ‘the absolute supremacy it
assigns to Holy Scripture’. There followed, as other leading principles, the
doctrines of human sinfulness, the work of Christ in salvation, the inward
work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration and his outward work in sanctification.
The primacy of scripture was directed against those who exalted the authority
of either church or reason.18 Other late nineteenth-century writers adopted a
similar defensive posture, particularly against High Church doctrine on the
priesthood and the sacraments. Edward Garbett claimed in 1875 that the three
cardinal Evangelical principles are the direct contact of the individual soul with
God the Father, the freedom and sovereignty of the Holy Ghost and the sole
4 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

High Priesthood of God the Son. His intent is to repudiate High Church
teaching about the role of the priest in mediating the grace of God to the
people.19 Likewise the ministers of the London Baptist Association set about
defining Evangelicalism negatively. ‘In our view’, they announced in 1888, ‘the
word “evangelical” has been adopted by those who have hcld the Deity of our
Lord, in opposition to Socinianism; the substitutionary death of the cross, in
opposition to Sacramentarianism; the simplicity of the communion of the
Lord’s Supper, in opposition to the doctrine of the Real Presence. It certainly
has also further references…in opposition to those who deny the infallibility
of Scripture on the one hand, and who assert another probation for the
irnpenitent dead on the other.’20 One eye is constantly being cast over the
shoulder at the ritualists and the rationalists. Instead of the joy of new
discovery that pervades eighteenth-century lists of distinctives, there is a
resolve to resist an incoming tide of error.
Twentieth-century formulations again put the stress elsewhere. In asking
‘What is an Evangelical?’, in 1944, Max Warren, General Secretary of the
Church Missionary Society, gave priority to evangelism over everything else,
even worship. The need for conversion, trusting the Holy Spirit to sustain the
believer’s new life and the priesthood of all believers were his other three
cardinal principles. Thus activism now comes first, with the centrality of the
cross and the study of the Bible, though both are mentioned, relegated to a
lower place in the scheme of things.21 Warren, however, was not among the
more conservative Evangelicals, whose strength was to grow later in the
century. Conservatives usually attributed most importance to the authority of
the Bible. Once that was granted, they believed, all other features would be
assured. Thus John Stott, in asking Warren’s question, ‘What is an
Evangelical?’, in 1977, replied that two convictions cannot be surrendered.
First, he claimed, ‘We evangelicals are Bible people’. It followed, secondly, that
Evangelicals possesscd a gospel to proclaim. The cross, conversion and effort
for its spread were all placed under that comprehensive heading.22 Similarly
J.I.Packer put the supremacy of scripture first in a list of six Evangelical
fundamentals in 1979. To the familiar categories of the work of Christ, the
necessity of conversion and the priority of evangelism he added the lordship
of the Holy Spirit (in deference to charismatics) and the importance of
fellowship (in deference to Catholics).23 Variations there have certainly been
in statements by Evangelicals about what they regard as basic. There is
nevertheless a common core that has remained remarkably constant down the
centuries. Conversionism, activism, biblicism and crucicentrism forrn the
defining attributes of Evangelical religion. Each characteristic can usefully be
examined in turn.
 PREACHING THE GOSPEL 5

CONVERSIONISM
The call to conversion has been the content of the gospel. Preachers urged
their hearers to turn away from their sins in repentance and to Christ in faith.
G.W.McCree, a London Baptist minister of the mid-nineteenth century, was
typical in holding ‘that conversion was far above, and of greater importance
than, any denominational differences of whatever kind’.24 A vivid account of
conversion, pinpointed by Matthew Arnold as a classic, is given in the
autobiography of Sampson Staniforth, then a soldier on active service and
later one of the Wesley’s early preachers:

As soon as I was alone, I kneeled down, and determined not to rise, but
to continue crying and wrestling with God, till He had mercy on me.
How long I was in that agony I cannot tell; but as I looked up to heaven I
saw the clouds open exceeding bright, and I saw Jesus hanging on the
cross. At the same moment these words were applied to my hcart, ‘Thy
sins are forgiven thee’. My chains fell off; my heart was free. All guilt
was gone, and my soul was filled with unutterable peace.25

Staniforth’s narrative is a classic not only because of its patent sincerity but
also because of its inclusion of agony, guilt and immense relief. The great
crisis of life could stir deep emotion. The experience was often ardently
sought, for others as well as for oneself. Prayer requests for conversion
appeared in the Evangelical press: ‘For a gentleman on the road to destruction,
who fancies he is saved.—For an unconverted brother who is addicted to
excessive drinking—…For my late foreign governess, an avowed Unitarian’.26
Conversions were the goal of personal effort, the collective aim of churches,
the theme of Evangelical literature. They could seem a panacea. ‘Conversions
not only bring prosperity to the Church’, declared the Wesleyan Samuel
Chadwick at about the start of the twentieth century; ‘they solve the social
problem.’27 A converted character would work hard, save money and assist his
neighbour. The line between those who had undergone the experience and those
who had not was the sharpest in the world. It marked the boundary between a
Christian and a pagan.
Preaching the gospel was the chief method of winning converts. Robert
Bickersteth, Bishop of Ripon from 1857 to 1884, held that ‘no sermon was
worthy of the name which did not contain the message of the Gospel, urging
the sinner to be reconciled to God’.28 There was a danger, Evangelical
preachers believed, of offering only comfort from the pulpit. Hearers needed
to be aroused to concern for their spiritual welfare. If the delights of heaven
were described, so were the terrors of hcll. Jonathan Edwards, the American
theologian who stands at the headwaters of Evangelicalism, believed in
insisting on the reality of hell; Joseph Milner, an erudite early Anglican
Evangelical, would preach sermons on topics like ‘The sudden destruction of
6 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

obdurate offenders’; and a Methodist preacher assured a backslider ‘that the

devil would soon toss [him] about in the flames of hell with a pitchfork’.29
Normally, however, there was more circumspection. The minister, according
to an article of 1852 ‘On the method of preaching the doctrine of eternal death’,
should remember ‘that he is sent to be a preacher of the Gospel of the grace of
God, and not to be a preacher of death and ruin’.30 Fear was not neglected as a
motive for conversion, but more emphasis was generally laid on the forgiving
love of God. It was essential, however, that the preacher himself should be
converted. How could he speak of what he had not known? Some ministers
underwent conversion experiences when already in the ministry. Thomas
Chalmers, the Evangelical leader in the early nineteenth-century Church of
Scotland, was among them.31 One clergyman was even converted by his own
sermon. Preaching on the Pharisees in his Cornish parish, William Haslam
realised that he was no better than they, but then felt light and joy coming
into his soul. The cry went up, ‘The parson is converted!’32 The experience
turned him into an Evangelical.
Conversion was bound up with major theological convictions. At that point,
Evangelicals believed, a person is justified by faith. Because human beings are
estranged from God by their sinfulness, there is nothing they can do by
themselves to win salvation. All human actions, even good works, are tainted
by sin, and so there is no possibility of gaining merit in the sight of God.
Hence salvation has to be received, not achieved. Jesus Christ has to be trusted
as Saviour. Acceptance by God, as Luther had insisted, comes through faith,
not works. Justification by faith, as we have seen, was one of the
distinguishing doctrines of Evangelicalism in the eighteenth century. Critics
declared it to be subversive of all morality. To the typical mind of the period it
seemed to destroy the obligation to observe the divine law. If salvarion was
available without good works, the door was opened for any form of profligacy.
Gratitude, replied the Evangelicals, was the strongest motive for moral
behaviour. Henry Venn, the Evangelical Vicar of Huddersfield, declared that
‘faith is not understood, much less possesscd, if it produce not more holiness,
than could possibly be any other way attained’.33 Consequently it was dwelt
on. To the growing son of an Evangelical Anglican home in the mid-
nineteenth century it seemed that the clergy taught nothing else but
justification by faith.34 Although the doctrine was sometimes watered down in
the later nineteenth century,35 it was championed so vigorously by
Evangelicals in the Church of England in the 1980s that it became a central
topic of theological dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church.36 Justification
by faith embodied much that was most precious to them.
Assurance was another doctrine closely connected with conversion. Once a
person has received salvation as a gift of God, he may be assured, according to
Evangelicals, that he possesses it. Not only is he a Christian; he knows he is a
Christian. John Wesley laid great emphasis on this teaching. ‘I never yet knew’,
he told an enquirer in 1740, ‘one soul thus saved, without what you call “the
 PREACHING THE GOSPEL 7

faith of assurance”: I mean a sure confidence, that by the merits of Christ he

was reconciled to the favour of God. ’37 The idea was not distinctive to Wesley
and his followers, for those affected by Evangelicalism in the Calvinist
tradition were equally attached to it. Assurance had been an important theme
of pre-Evangelical Protestant spirituality, but the experience had never been
regarded as the standard possession of all believers. The novelty of Evangelical
religion, as Chapter 2 will show, lay precisely in claiming that assurance
normally accompanies conversion. Other Christians, especially those of more
Catholic traditions, found the expectation of assurance among Evangelicals
eccentric, presumptuous or even pathological.38 Yet it remained characteristic
of them. Max Warren defended the doctrine in 1944 as ‘the here and now
certainty that “I am ‘in Grace’ because I have been converted”’.39 The
confidence of Evangelicals had its roots in the inward persuasion that God was
on their side.
Since conversion was the one gateway to vital Christianity, parents looked
anxiously for signs of it in their growing children. The Scots Evangelical mothcr
of W.E.Gladstone, the future Prime Minister, wrote in a letter when he was
about ten years old that she believed her son to be ‘truly converted to God’.40
Conversion was most common among teenagers, but the average age at the
experience seems to have fallen during the ninetcenth century. In the first
half of the century, a higher proportion of conversions took place in adulthood.
Later on, as churches drew more on Christian homes, the stage of decisive
commitment tended to occur earlier. The mean age at conversion among
future Methodist ministers in the period 1780–1840 was 16.9 years; the mean
age in the period 1841–1900 was 15.8 years.41 Home background clearly
remained an influential factor in the 1960s. An Evangelical Alliance survey of
about 5,000 Christians established that one in six had been converted before
the age of twelve and three in four before the age of twenty.42 Conversion was
statistically less likely the older a person was.43 Among the exccptions,
conviction usually went deep. Sir Wilfrid Lawson, a Cumberland baronet, for
example, underwent a decisive experience while suffering from a dangerous
illness in middle age. Though retaining the sporting interests of his class, he
became a generous patron of local religious services, temperance work and the
whole Evangelical Union denomination.44 For the adult there could be a drastic
reappraisal of life’s priorities.
‘Conversion is a great and glorious work of God’s power’, wrote Jonathan
Edwards, ‘at oncc changing the heart, and infusing life into the dead soul…But
as to fixing on the precise time when they put forth the very first act of grace,
there is a great deal of difference in different persons; in some it seems to be
very discernible when the very time was; but others are more at a loss.’45 The
question of timing was pcrplexing to subsequent generations. Could
conversion sometimes be gradual rather than sudden? Anglican Evangelicals,
commonly more educated, sober and respectable than their brethren in othcr
denominations, never had qualms about accepting the validity of gradual
8 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

conversions. Charles Simeon, their leading spokesman in the early nineteenth

century, was emphatic: ‘we require nothing sudden’.46 Likewise William Jay
of Bath, an Independent minister with a fashionable congregation, could
testify to no ‘distinct and unique experience’.47 Methodists, on the other hand,
usually looked for a datable crisis, though equally they expected it to be
preceded by a long period of ‘awakening’.48 Revivalists in the mid-nineteenth
century stressed the change of a particular moment. Thus, Reginald Radcliffe
sought to impress on Sunday School teachers in 1860 that ‘conversion is an
instantancous work’.49 James Caughey, a vigorous American revivalist in
Methodism, asserted that ‘the work of conversion is so momentous, that no
man can pass through it, and not know it’.50 There was nevertheless an
undoubted drift towards the standard Anglican position as the nineteenth
century wore on. Alexander Raleigh, a distinguished Independent preacher
between the 1840s and the 1870s, made a conscious change of heart central in
his earlier sermons, but later accepted that conversion could be gradual and
unconscious.51 By 1905 only the Baptist contributors to an interd-
enominational symposium on The Child and Religion expected a crisis of
personal religious decision.52 Conservative and sectarian Evangelicals often
continued to think in these terms, but gradualism was stronger among the
more open-minded. Differences of emphasis remained unresolved in the
twentieth century.
Another issue revolved round the means of conversion. The orthodox
teaching was that true conversion is the work of the Holy Spirit.53 Challenges
to trust Christ were thought legitimate human means for bringing about
conversions, but the Spirit was still held to be responsible. In the nineteenth
century, however, some of the more enthusiastic Evangelicals, eager to
maximise conversions, began to teach that the crucial factor is a person’s will
to be saved. Carefully planned methods, such as meetings designed for
anxious enquirers, could encourage the desire to believe. In Lectures on
Revivals of Religion (1835), Charles Finney, the leading American exponent
of this line of thinking, presented revivalism as a science, a powerful technique
for securing mass conversions. It was an immensely popular work, selling 80,
000 copies by 1850 and making a great impact in Britain, not least because it was
adapted for the British market by removing, for example, strictures on
drinking tea. Finney came close to denying the need for the intervention of
the Holy Spirit. Some did draw that inference. J.H.Hinton, later a leading
Baptist minister, wrote in 1830 that ‘a sinner has power to repent without the
Spirit’. He subsequently declared that he had been misunderstood, explaining
that he did believe that the Spirit acts in conversion overall. But others did not
retract. Nine students at Glasgow Congregational Theological Academy were
expelled in 1844 for ‘self-conversionism’. They went on to form part of the
new Evangelical Union, a largcly Scottish denomination committed to
revivalism.54 Eagerness for converts had the effect of modifying the theology
of a section of Evangelicalism. The satne motive operated later in the century
 PREACHING THE GOSPEL 9

on the mind of R.F.Horton, an eminent Congregationalist who reached the

identical conclusion that a person may exercise his will in order to be
converted.55 Such thinkers were trying to reduce the mysterious element in
conversion for the sake of niaking the experience more widely known.
The most celebrated issue raised by conversion was its relation to baptism.
This was the substance of what probably qualified as the chief theological
controversy of the early and mid-nineteenth century. The problem was one of
reconciling the conviction of Evangelicals that conversion is the time when a
person becomes a Christian with two statements in the Book of Common
Prayer of the Church of England. According to the order for baptism, an
infant is declared regenerate at the end of the ceremony; and according to the
catechism, baptism is the occasion of our new birth. Evangelicals who were
also Anglicans had a tangled knot to untie. Furthermore, Anglicans of other
schools were able to claim that Evangelicals were disloyal to the formularies of
their church. The best known incident, remembered as what provoked Henry
Manning’s secession to Rome, was the Gorham case of 1847–51. Bishop
Philpotts of Exeter, a punctilious High Churchman, refused to institute
George Gorham, an Evangelical clergyman, to a living in Devon because he
did not accept the Prayer Book teaching that baptism is the time when a
person is born again. On appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy
Council, Gorham’s right to reject the doctrine of baptismal regeneration was
upheld.56 But this affair was only the tip of an iceberg. Controversy had begun
as early as 1812, when Richard Mant, a traditional High Churchman, had
criticised Evangelicals for rejecting the Prayer Book doctrine of baptismal
regeneration.57 Evangelicals made a variety of replies. The order of infant
baptism, some held, expresses a charitable hope about the future regeneration
of the child; or, according to others, the service is designed for believers who
could pray with confidence for the salvation of the child.58 Others again felt that
they had to embrace a doctrine of baptismal regeneration, going on to redefme
regeneration to mean not ‘becoming a Christian’, but something less decisive.
This was the course taken, for instance, by J.B.Sumner, later Archbishop of
Canterbury.59 It is a shaky answer, a sign that Evangelicals found this
apparent discrepancy between their doctrine and their liturgy embarrassing.
It is not surprising that the question was aired repeatedly. In Scotland, for
example, a leading Episcopalian and later Primus, James Walker, insisted in
1825 that baptismal regeneration was the teaching of his church.60 His
arguments were met by a number of Evangelical clergy, and a spirited
pamphlet war ensued. In England, C.H.Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher of
the Metropolitan Tabernacle, censured the Evangelical Anglican clergy in a
sermon of 1864 for failing to repudiate the principle of baptismal
regeneration. A storm of indignarion burst about him.61 A Prayer Book
Revision Society, guided by Lord Ebury from 1859 to 1889, wished to remove
‘everything which can be held to imply that Regeneration by the Holy Spirit
is inseparably connected with the Rite’ 62 But the anomaly remained to
10 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

trouble twentieth-century Evangelical Anglicans. In 1965 The Church of

England Newspaper asked its largely Evangelical readership whether the
church should cease baptising infants altogether. Of the clergy, 289 replied no,
but 47 replied yes. Of the laity, 455 said no, but a remarkable 268 said yes.63
Clearly a high proportion of the respondents were worried about what infant
baptism was supposed to signify. The problem was perennial because the idea
that infants are regenerate through baptism does appear in the Book of
Common Prayer, whereas Evangelicals have believed that only through
conversion does a person become a Christian. The recurring difficulties on this
subject are a corollary of the centrality of conversion in Evangelical religion.

ACTIVISM
A second leading characteristic of Evangelicals has been their activism. It flows
from the first, as Jonathan Edwards remarked. ‘Persons’, he wrote, ‘after their
own conversion, have commonly expressed an exceeding great desire for the
conversion of others. Some have thought that they should be willing to die for
the conversion of any soul…’64 Henry Venn, by his own computation, was
instrumental in the conversion of some 900 people during three years at
Huddersfield.65 A Methodist missioner of the later nineteenth century claimed
to have seen nearly 90,000 led to Christ at his meetings.66 Wesley’s early
preachers threw themselves into efforts to spread the gospel. A typical one
attended class and band meetings, visited the sick and preached five or six
times a week; another, when stationed at York in 1760, rodc a circuit of 300
miles every six weeks, visiting some sixty societies; a third frequently
managed no more than eight hours of sleep a week.67 Preaching services at 5
a.m. were common.68 Sunday could be immensely demanding, as the
resolutions of a Methodist and his wife in 1774 reveal: ‘We will attend the
preaching at five o’clock in the morning; at eight, go to the prayer meeting; at
ten, to the public worship at the Foundery; hear Mr. Perry at Cripplegate, at
two; be at the preaching at the Foundery, at five; meet with the general
society, at six; meet in the united bands at seven, and again be at the prayer
meeting at eight; and then come home, to read and pray by ourselves’.69 The
dedication of laypeople that was so marked a feature of Methodism was
imitatcd in the Church of England. Paid full-time and voluntary part-time
workers became general in Evangelical parishes. There was a similar
development in the Church of Scotland, where Thomas Chalmers appointed
deacons for parochial visitation.70 ‘The Evangelical saint of to-day’, declared
the Congregationalist R.W.Dale in 1879, ‘is not a man who spends his nights
and days in fasting and prayer, but a man who is a zealous Sunday-school
teacher, holds mission services among the poor, and attends innumerable
committee meetings. “Work” has taken its place side by side with prayer…’71
The result was a transformation in the role of a minister of religion. The
English parish clergyman of the later eighteenth century was very like a
 PREACHING THE GOSPEL 11

member of the gentry in how he spent his time. Duty consisted almost
exclusively in taking services.72 For the Evangelical, however, pastoral work
was laborious. ‘To acquaint ourselves’, ran a clerical manual of 1830, ‘with the
various wants of our people; to win their affections; to give a seasonable
warning, encouragement, instruction, or consolidation; to identify ourselves
with their spiritual interests, in the temper of Christian sympathy, and under
a sense of Ministerial obligation; to do this with the constancy, seriousness,
and fervid energy which the matter requires, is indeed a work of industry,
patience, and self-denial.’73 In the 1840s Spencer Thornton, Rector of
Wendover, each week delivered seven evening lectures, gave two afternoon
readings and conducted four Bible classes; he also held five monthly and three
quarterly meetings.74 At a higher level, Bishop C.R.Sumner of Winchester
wrote more than 3,500 business letters in his last year of office and Bishop
Bickersteth of Ripon excited surprise by choosing to preach three times each
Sunday on his arrival in the diocese.75 At the 1851 census of religion, whereas
Anglican churches overall provided an average of 2.06 services a Sunday, a
sample of churches belonging to the Evangelical Simeon Trust provided 2.52.
An unsympathetic commentator was forced to conclude in 1860 that ‘the
evangelical clergy as a body are indefatigable in ministerial duties’.76
The Methodists were equally exemplary. Wesley was a typhoon of energy,
preaching more than 40,000 sermons and issuing more than 400
publications.77 John Fletcher of Madeley, a clergyman who was Wesley’s
designated successor, was described by his wife as ‘always on the stretch for
God’.78 Adam Clarke gave up tea and coffee on Wesley’s advice in 1782, and
consequently saved several whole years of time over the rest of his life for
devotion to Christian scholarship. ‘For a short time after he left off the use of
those exotics’, according to his biographer, ‘he took in the evenings, a cup of milk
and water, or a cup of weak infusion of camomile’, but as he found that he
gained no time by this means, and the gaining of time was his great object, he
gave that totally up…’79 Time was scarce. A working week of between 90 and
100 hours was expectcd of men in the nineteenth-century Wesleyan
ministry.80 It is hardly surprising that the connexion maintained a ‘Worn-Out
Ministers’ Fund’. An idenrical shift to a new dynamism is apparent in the life
of the Scot, Thomas Chalmers. In his early ministry he was not an
Evangelical. After the satisfactory discharge of his duties, Chalmers
commented at the time, ‘a minister may enjoy five days in the week of
uninterrupted leisure’. After his conversion, by contrast, Chalmers was
reputed to have visited 11,000 homes in his Glasgow parish during a single
year.81 Evangelicalism brought about a striking change of attitude.
There were other effects of the imperative to be up and doing. Learning, for
example, could be regarded as a dispensable luxury. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century Independent ministers were trained not in theology or
Greek, but simply in preaching. It would have been ‘highly improper’,
according to a contributor to their magazine, ‘to spend, in literary
12 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

acquisitions, the time and talents which were so imperiously demanded in the
harvest field’.82 The same factor could inhibit scholarship even at the
universities. It was said of James Scholefield, Regius Professor of Greek at
Cambridge from 1825, that ‘had his other numerous and important duties
allowed sufficient leisure, his Editions of the ancients would doubtless have
exhibited more of original research’.83 As it was, the quest for souls generally
drove Evangelicals out from centres of learning to the parishes and to the
foreign mission field. The missionary movement of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries was the fruit of the Evangelical Revival. That is not to
claim sole credit for the Evangelicals. On the contrary, Roman Catholic
missions had for long put Protestants to shame. Yet a direct result of the
revival was the creation of new missionary societies, beginning with that of
the Baptists in 1792, that did so much to make the Christian faith a worldwide
religion.84 The dedication of the Cambridge Seven, a set of promising young
graduates who entered the China Inland Mission in 1885, was a celebrated
case of Evangelical zeal.85 But activism often spilled over beyond simple gospel
work. ‘Toil, toil, toil’, wrote Lord Shaftesbury in his diary for April 1850, ‘nor
should I lament, could I say fruit, fruit, fruit.’86 Shaftesbury’s efforts in such
causes as public health provided a further outlet for Evangelical energy.
Wilberforce’s campaign against the slave trade and Nonconformist political
crusades around 1900 are but the most famous instances of attempts to
enforce the ethics of the gospel. A host of voluntary societies embodied the
philanthropic urge. Hannah More, the Evangelical authoress of the turn of the
nineteenth century, summed up succinctly the prevailing Evangelical attitude.
‘Action is the life of virtue’, she wrote, ‘and the world is the theatre of action.
’87

BIBLICISM
The third main feature of the Evangelicals, their devotion to the Bible, has
been the result of their belief that all spiritual truth is to be found in its pages.
The Bible alone, John Wesley contended, was the source of his doctrine of
salvation. ‘Let me be homo unius libri [a man of one book]’, he declared in the
preface to his collected sermons of 1746.88 His brother Charles was so
immersed in scripture that in one of his hymns, ‘Lord, and is Thine anger
gone’, twenty-six biblical allusions are crowded into sixty-four lines.89
Opponents of an early Methodist preacher, he reported, ‘said I made my Bible
my god!’90 Another declared that after his conversion the Bible ‘seemed an
entirely new book’.91 This frequent experience among Evangelicals led to
charges by eighteenth-century opponents that they were subjecting the Bible
to arbitrary interpretation under the alleged illumination of the Holy Spirit.
The opponents, often maintaining a doughty tradition of Anglican apologetic,
claimed to be the more scriptural party in appealing to the bare text.92 Yet
Evangelicals were certain they understood the Bible clearly. Hence the
 PREACHING THE GOSPEL 13

nineteenth-century Scottish revivalist Brownlow North ‘spent hours every

day in hard and prayerful study of its pages’.93 A contemporary evangelist,
Henry Moorhouse, was similarly devoted. ‘He would not suffer anything, not
even a sheet of paper, to be laid upon his Bible. There alone, apart, it must lie,
unique, matchless, wonderful, the very mind and presence of the infmite and
eternal God. ’94 Evangelicals revered the Bible.
Respect for the Bible did not necessarily lead them into far-fetched views.
The passage from the first book of Corinthians about a rock following Israel
through the wilderness came up for discussion at a conversation party for
Cambridge undergraduates led by Charles Simeon. Did the rock really move?
‘Oh yes, of course’, replied Simeon, ‘with a hop, skip and a jump!’95 Here was
no wooden literalness. It is true that doctrinal preoccupations often
encouraged an instinct for turning to the New Testament letters in preference
to the gospels.96 Yet Evangelicals did not normally concentrate on obscurities.
For the end of the nineteenth century, when the age of the questionnaire was
just dawning, we possess a detailed breakdown of texts taken by preachers in a
variety of Evangelical pulpits on a Sunday in March 1896. The survey came
about because, intriguingly, the journal Tit-Bits, on receiving a complaint from
a reader about the length of sermons, launched a competition to fmd the
longest—it was, it turned out, a sermon preached at a Primitive Methodist
chapel lasting one hour eighteen minutes. The British Weekly, an
interdenominational paper, repeated the survey and also investigated texts.
Three-quarters were drawn from the New Testament. John’s gospel was the
most popular source, followed closely by the first letter of John and then by
the other three gospels. In the Old Testament, most texts came from Psalms,
Genesis and Isaiah. None was taken from Philemon, 2 or 3 John,
Lamentations, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk or Zephaniah. The single
verse that inspired most sermons was Galatians 2.20 about being crucified
with Christ.97 Certainly there is no evidence here of the deliberate searching
out of obscure texts.
There was agreement among Evangelicals of all generations that the Bible is
inspired by God. When it came to determining the implications of inspiration,
however, there were notable divergences. Henry Venn of Huddersfield
referred incidentally in 1763 to ‘the infallible word of God’ and the Countess
of Huntingdon’s Connexion confessed its belief in 1783 in ‘the infallible truth’
of the scriptures.98 ‘The Bible is altogether TRUE’, wrote Edward Bickersteth
in his extremely popular A Scripture Help (1816). ‘lt is truth without any
mixture of error.’99 Yet in the period up to that date there was no attempt to
elaborate any theory of infallibility or inerrancy. On the contrary, there was
remarkable fluidity in ideas about the effects of inspiration on the text. The
overriding aim of early Evangelicals was to bring home the message of the Bible
and to encourage its devotional use rather than to develop a doctrine of
scripture. A body of Evangelical opinion, however, began to insist from the
1820s onwards on inerrancy, verbal inspiration and the need for literal
14 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

interpretation of the Bible. 100 In reaction against the publication of Essays and
Reviews (1860), a Broad Church manifesto for studying the Bible in the
manner of any other book, the newer dogmatic school of thought became
more vocal.101 To us’, wrote the Baptist C.H.Spurgeon, ‘the plenary verbal
inspiration of the Holy Scripture is a fact and not a hypothesis.’102 From the
chair of the Congregational Union in 1894, by contrast, G.S.Barrett repudiated
the ‘crude and mechanical theory of verbal inspiration’.103 Attitudes to the Bible
drew apart until, in the wake of the First World War, the Evangelical world
divided into conservatives and liberals primarily on that issue. The importance
attributed by Evangelicals to the Bible eventually led to something
approaching schism in their ranks.

CRUCICENTRISM
The doctrine of the cross, fourthly, has been the focus of the gospel. The
Evangelical movement, in the words of Gladstone, ‘aimed at bringing back,
and by an aggressive movement, the Cross, and all that the Cross essentially
implies’.104 Nothing in the Christian system, according to John Wesley, ‘is of
greater consequence than the doctrine of Atonement. It is properly the
distinguishing point between Deism and Christianity.’105 The reconciliation of
humanity to God, that is to say, achieved by Christ on the cross is why the
Christian religion speaks of God as the author of salvation. ‘I am saved’, wrote
an early Methodist preacher, ‘through faith in the blood of the Lamb.’106
There is a cloud of witnesses on the theme. An eighteenth-century Scottish
theologian, John Maclaurin, like many subsequent Evangelicals, preached on
‘Glorying in the cross of Christ’.107 ‘The death of Christ’, according to the
clerical manual of 1830, ‘in this scriptural and comprehensive view, includes
the whole Christian system.’108 Representative twentieth-century Evangelicals
in the Church of England said much the same.109 Theologians elaborated the
point: R.W.Dale, with telling reasonableness in 1875; James Denney, with
scrupulous clarity in 1902; John Stott, with contemporary awareness in 1986;
and, greatest of all, P.T.Forsyth in a series of vibrant treatises in the early
twentieth century.110 Critics deplored what they saw as an obsession. The
Quaker statesman John Bright, having heard G.B. Bubier, a Congregational
divine, is said to have murtnured to himself, ‘The atonement, always the
atonement! Have they nothing else to say?’111 Even those who professed a
liberal version of Evangelical belief in the twentieth century like the
Methodist W.R.Maltby felt compelled to lay great stress on the cross.112 ‘If
men are Evangelical Christians at all’, declared the Congregationalist
Alexander Raleigh in 1879, ‘they can say without a shadow of insincerity,
“God forbid we should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ…”’113
Looking back on an interwar childhood in the Brethren, Anne Arnott
recalled trying on Christmas Day to escape in imagination to Bethlehem from
the rninistry which, as always, centred on the crucifixion.114 The atonement
 PREACHING THE GOSPEL 15

eclipsed even the incarnation among Evangelicals. In 1891 Charles Gore, a

rising young Anglo-Catholic, inaugurated a central tradition in Anglican
thought by arguing in the Bampton Lectures for the incarnation as the heart of
Christian theology.115 The warning issued to Methodists in the following year
is instructive:

We rejoice in the prominence which is being given to the doctrine of the

Incarnation, with all its solemn lessons and inspirations. But we must be
careful lest the Cross passes into the background, from which it is the
glory of our fathers to have drawn it. Give to the death of Christ its true
place in your own experience and in your Christian work—as a witness
to the real and profound evil of sin, as an ovcrwhelming manifestation
of Divine love, as the ground of acceptance with God, as a pattern of
sacrifice to disturb us when life is too easy, to inspire and console us
when life is hard, and as the only effectual appeal to the general heart of
men, and, above all, as the Atonement for our sins.116

To make any theme other than the cross the fulcrum of a theological system
was to take a step away from Evangelicalism. The Congregationalist James
Baldwin Brown, to the dismay of many co-religionists, had already followed
the Broad Churchman F.D.Maurice along that path, and by 1897 a Methodist,
J.Scott Lidgett, was doing the same.117 Christopher Chavasse was still urging
caution on Anglican Evangelicals about this trend of thought in 1939. ‘Let us’,
he told them, ‘keep close to Scripture, and allow the Atonement to explain the
Incarnation—Christ was born in order to die…’118 Michael Ramsey,
Archbishop of Canterbury, showed he knew his Evangelicals when, in
addressing their Keele Congress in 1967, he urged them to recognise that
other Anglicans also upheld, in different ways, the ‘supreme assertion that in
the Cross of Christ alone is our salvation’.119
The standard view of Evangelicals was that Christ died as a substitute for
sinful mankind. Human beings, they held, were so rebellious against God that
a just penalty would have been death. Yet, as Thomas Scott the commentator
discovered to his delight, ‘Christ indeed bore the sins of all who should ever
believe, in all their guilt, condemnation, and deserved punishment, in his own
body on the tree’.120 Belief in a substitutionary atonement originally
distinguished Evangelicals from even the strictest divines of other schools.
William Law, an outstanding devotional writer drawn on by Scott, among
many others, explicitly repudiated the idea that Christ suffered in our stead.121
Probably the greatest sermon by Robert Hall, Baptist minister in Cambridge
at the opening of the nineteenth century and the ablest preacher of his day,
was a defence of the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.122 Its argument
was still being repeated, with due acknowledgement of Hall, in a statement of
Evangelical principles by the Anglican W.R.Fremantle in 1875.123 By the
1870s, however, the fear was expressed that substitution was being discarded,
16 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

and even the leading Wesleyan theologian W.B.Pope was equivocal on the
subject.124 The humanitarian tone of public opinion was veering against this
understanding of the death of Christ. George Bernard Shaw voiced the newer
attitude in characteristically scaring fashion. ‘I detest the doctrine of the
Atonement’, he once wrote, ‘holding that ladies and gcntlemen cannot as such
possibly allow anyone else to expiate their sins by suffering a cruel death.’125
In the early years of the twentieth century the teaching was fading from the
Methodist pulpit.126 It survived nevertheless in conservative Evangelical
circles, enshrined, for instance, in the statement of faith of the Inter-Varsity
Fellowship of Christian Unions. Jesus Christ was there described as dying not
only as our representative but also as our substitute.127 Belief that Christ died
in our stead was not uniform in the Evangelical tradition, but it was nortnal.
The implications of the cross for life were also important for Evangelicals.
There was a bond between the atonement and the quest for sanctification. ‘All
treatises’, wrote Henry Venn,’…written to promote holiness of life, must be
deplorably defective, unless the cross of Christ be laid as the foundation…’128
The motive for spiritual growth was gratitude for Calvary. Preoccupation with
the cross led to some exaggerated forms of spirituality. Mrs Penn-Lewis, an
early twentieth-century holiness advocate, for example, went about teaching
that there must be a decisive experience for the believer of crucifixion of the
self.129 But it was also common for preachers to dwell, as did the
Congregationalist David Thomas in the 1840s, on the ‘relation of the
Atonement to practical righteousness’.130 By 1908 this line of thought had
generated in the mind of the Wesleyan J.E.Rattenbury a sanction for socialism.
The gospel declares that human beings are to be considered not for their
station, rank or riches but for their potential as sons of God. Consequently, he
contended, ‘the theology of the cross…is well fitted to be the soul of the
Collectivist movement’.131 Richard Heath, an extreme proponent of the social
gospel, went further. The vicarious suffering of Christ was for him a symptom
of the never-ceasing fact of human solidarity in adversity. God was suffering
with his creatures.132 Attention to the cross could lead in diverse directions.
The theologia crucis gave rise to debate. For whom did Christ die? For the
elect only, as Calvinist believers in particular redemption affirmed? Or for all,
as Arminian advocates of general redemption insisted? The Evangelical ranks
were riven in the eighteenth century by controversy between Methodists, who
were Arminians, and most others, who were Calvinists. By the beginning of
the nineteenth century, however, this debate was dying down. Most
Evangelicals were content to adopt a ‘moderate Calvinism’ that in terms of
practical pulpit instruction differed only slightly from the Methodist version of
Arminianism. Leading Anglican Evangelicals expressed the view in 1800 that
redemption is both general and particular. Arminians were right to stress
human responsibility to repent and Calvinists right to stress the need for
divine grace.133 ‘I frankly confess’, wrote William Wilberforce, ‘that I myself
am no Calvinist, though I am not either an anti-Calvinist.’134 Discussion of
 PREACHING THE GOSPEL 17

the scope of the atonement became moribund. It was dismissed as mysterious,

impractical, a subject ill suited to bringing about conversions. Hence
denominations that had maintained a separate existence because of the issue
eventually came together. In England the gap between General and Particular
Baptists that went back to the early seventeenth century steadily narrowed
during the nineteenth, and in 1891 the two bodies formally fused. In Scotland,
the Congregational Union, professedly Calvinist, and the Evangelical Union,
revivalist and Arminian in style, united in 1897. What Evangelicals agreed on
seemed of infmitely greater importance than their disagreements, and their
pre-eminent ground of agreement was the cruciality of the cross.

THE BACKGROUND
Evangelical religion displaying these four characteristics burst on western
Christendom at an epoch when the fundamental division between Catholics
and Protestants had become firmly established over two centuries. Although
in 1770 there were some 80,000 Roman Catholics in England,135 the state in
Britain was Protestant. The crown was restricted to Protestants, and so were a
nurnber of other offices of state. The Church of England, the Established
Church of England and Wales, had rctained its bishops at the Reformation but
emerged from the seventeenth century as an unequivocally Protestant body.
Its establishment meant that the Church of England was intertwined with the
state. The monarch was the supreme head of the church. Theoretically, all his
subjects in England and Wales belonged to it. The bishops of the Church of
England sat of right in the House of Lords. Parliament exercised as much
authority in spiritual matters as in temporal affairs. With the decay of church
courts, ecclesiastical cases increasingly came before the secular courts. More
than half the patrons of livings who appointed parish elergymen were
laypcople. For advancement in a clerical career the patronage of some member
of the social elite was essential. Clergymen were expected to display the
manners of the gentry, among whom they were educated at Oxford and
Cambridge. Their pulpit ministry was partly designed to teach the lower
orders their place in the order of things. Conscientious men there were in the
Church of England, notably at episcopal level, but there was little effective
check on clerical negligence. The church played a salient role in everyday life,
but at the expense of imbibing a strong dose of secularity.136
Protestant Dissent, though possessing roots in the sixteenth century and
perhaps earlier, was primarily indebted to the strength of the Puritan
movement in the seventeenth century. In the 1650s, under Cromwell, the
Puritans had enjoyed a brief spell of official favour, but with the Restoration
of Charles II in 1660 their period in the sun came to an abrupt end. Some 2,
000 ministers who refused to accept the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 in
its entirety were expelled from the Church of England. Despite persecution,
the Dissenting congregations survived to enter an era of toleration following
18 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Dissenters were allowed to practise their

religion unmolested, but, with hardly any of the gentry in their ranks, were
reduced to a marginal role in society. Most of them retained the Calvinist
theology in the Reformed tradition of their Puritan forebears, though there
were some General Baptists who held Arminian views and the more
numerous Quakers professed a belief in an ‘inner light’. This credal
difference, together with distinctive clothes, language and even calendar, set
the Quakers apart from their Dissenting brethren. The mainstream consisted
of the ‘three denominations’. Presbyterians, who numbcred many merchants
in their ranks, formed the scction of Dissent that was to be least influenced by
Evangelicalism. Adopting increasingly broad theological views as the
eighteenth century advanced, many of them reached a Unitarian position by
its end. Independents, also known as Congregationalists, believed in the
independence from all external authority of the local congregation. Like the
less numerous Particular Baptists, who were identical apart from holding that
baptism should be by immersion and for believers only, the Independents
generally remained orthodox during the eighteenth century. These bodies
were to be swept along by the Evangelical Revival.137
In Scotland there was an entirely different situation. The
seventeenthcentury kirk had wavered between Episcopalianism and
Presbyterianism, contriving to blend them both after the Restoration. With
the Glorious Revolution, however, the Church of Scotland became definitely
Presbyterian. Bishops were at last repudiated. Episcopalian congregations,
which were numerous in the north-east, began a life outside the Established
Church. The whole population of Scotland belonged in theory to the Church of
Scotland, and in practice an effective form of social discipline was maintained
in many parishes against notorious sins. There was a continuing appreciation
of Puritan classics and every minister had to profess at his ordination an
acceptance of the Reformed theology of the Westminster Confession. The
more rigid adherents of traditional ways and doctrine, however, began to
detect a relaxation of standards. Several were particularly dismayed that,
following the Union of Scotland with England in 1707, lay patronage had been
rcstored to the Church of Scotland. Discontent on this issue induced Ebenezer
Erskine, one of the ministers of Stirling, to lead a sccession from the church in
1733. Presbyterian Dissent became a feature of Scottish church life, and small
Independent and Baptist groups followed soon after. The Puritan legacy in the
eighteenth century was greater in Scotland than in England.138
The changing role of Evangelical religion in modern Britain forms the
theme of the following pages. There is a pattern of overlapping chapters.
Chapter 2 examines the nature of the movement in the first century of its
existence up to about 1830. It enquires why the movement began and
discovers the answer in the cultural mood impinging on the Protestant
tradition. Contrary to the common view, Evangelicalism was allied with the
Enlightenment. Chapter 3 deals with a change of direction in Evangelicalism
 PREACHING THE GOSPEL 19

that occurred in the 1820s and 1830s, tracing the shift of emphasis once more
to its cultural roots—this time in Romanticism—and examining some of the
consequences down to about 1860. In Chapter 4 there is a study of the impact
of Evangelical religion on British society as a whole during the nineteenth
century, when its influcnce was at its peak. Chapter 5 analyses a movement in
late nineteenth-century spirituality that again helped to reorient the
movement. Chapter 6 deals with the effects of earlier factors in dividing
Evangelicals into conservative and liberal camps during the interwar years.
The transforming effect of twentieth-century cultural trends on
Evangelicalism is the subject of Chapter 7. Chapter 8 tries to pick up the
threads by analysing developments since the Second World War and
Chapter 9 reaches some general conclusions. It becomes clear that Evangelical
religion in Britain, despite the four constant elements discussed in this chapter,
has altered enormously over time in response to the changing assumptions of
Western civilisation.
 [2]
Knowledge of the Lord: The Early
Evangelical Movement

And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every
man his brother, saying, know the LORD: for they shall all know
me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the
LORD. (Jer. 31:34)

The decade beginning in 1734 witnessed in the English-speaking world a more

important development than any other, before or after, in the history of
Protestant Christianity: the emergence of the movement that became
Evangelicalism. Priority in the British Isles must go to Wales. A young
schoolmaster living near Brecon, Howel Harris, came to faith during the
spring of 1735. l A few weeks later Daniel Rowland, curate at Llangeitho in
Carmarthenshire, underwent a similar experience of forgiveness. Soon both
began travelling round South Wales, gathering large audiences and preaching
the arresting message that salvation could be known now.2 England followed.
George Whitefield, converted as an Oxford undergraduate in the spring of
1735, stirred both Bristol and London by his oratory two years later,
exhorting his hearers to seek the new birth.3 Charles Wesley, who at Oxford
had been Whitefield’s mentor in his religious quest, did not reach assurance of
faith for himself until 1738. In the same week, on 24 May, his brother John
felt his heart ‘strangely warmed’ as he trusted ‘in Christ, Christ alone for
salvation’. Prompted by Whitefield, John Wesley began his career of open-air
preaching at Bristol in the following year.4 Whitefield roused parts of Scotland
in 1741, and in the next year there broke out at Cambuslang near Glasgow a
revival in which men and women anxiously looked for pardon.5 Already there
had been a comparable phenomenon in the colony of Massachusetts. In 1734–
5, exactly when Harris and Rowland were wrestling with their conviction of
sin in Wales, Jonathan Edwards was involved in a revival in the town of
Northampton, where he was minister. His published analysis of the revival
had impressed Wesley between his experience of trusting Christ and the
inauguration of his travelling ministry and was well known to the Scottish
ministers most involved at Cambuslang.6 The movement in America, which
Whitefield fanned into a larger flame, is usually styled ‘The Great
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 21

Awakening’. But it was part and parcel of The Eighteenth-Century Revival’,7 a

quickening of the spiritual tempo in Britain and beyond.
The quickening seemed desperately needed. The Dissenters, the immediate
inheritors of the Puritan legacy in England, were at a low ebb. In the 1730s
there was a proliferation of writings on ‘the decay of the Dissenting interest’.
Philip Doddridge, writing in 1740, believed that the decline was concentrated
chiefly in the west and south of England,8 but there it was acute. In the samc
year the Western Association of the Particular Baptists urged four fast days to
repent of spiritual declension.9 Fewer new Independent and Baptist places of
worship were registered in the 1730s than in any other decade when the
system of registration was in force.10 Evangelicalism, however, transformed
the situation. Later in the century, when the revival movement impinged
significantly on the Old Dissent, numbers of Independents and Baptists rose
steadily. It has been estimated that in 1750 there were about 15,000
Independent and 10,000 Particular Baptist church members. By 1800 the
respective figures had risen to 35,000 and 24,000.11 Although there was
marked population growth in the period, this rate of church growth
outstripped it. The number of churches in the Particular Baptist Western and
Midland Associations approximately doubled between 1780 and 1820.
Furthermore, the overall increase in membership per church doubled over the
period. And the most spectacular change among Calvinistic Dissenters was a
great rise in the number of those who attended regularly as ‘hearers’ without
becoming members. One church, at Gold Hill in Buckinghamshire, was said in
1818 to have five hearers for every member.12 So the Dissenters touched by
the revival enjoyed far more success afterwards than before.
The Methodists made even greater progrcss. Their membership increased
from 22,410 in 1767, the first year when it was recorded, to 88,334 in 1800
and 232,074 in 1830.13 Round the core of loyal members Methodist ‘hearers’
formed a large penumbra. In the Church of England, by contrast, the number
of communicants seems to have decreased during the eighteenth century. It
continued falling relative to population until the 1830s.14 Evangelicalism had
madc much less impact on the Established Church than among Dissenters. In
the Church of Scotland, whose Evangelical strength was greater than that of
the Church of England, communicant levels probably kept pace with
population during the eighteenth century. But it was Presbyterian Dissent,
much of it fired with evangelistic fervour, that grew most in Scotland. By
1835, only a century after the first secession, it enjoyed the allegiance of
nearly a third of Edinburgh churchgoers.15 It is clear that the appearance of
Evangelicalism was the signal for a major advance by Protestant Christianity
in the ensuing century.
The motor of expansion was the message of justification by faith. Lost
sinners must trust Christ for salvation. In the classic compendium of
Evangelical faith and practice, The Complete Duty of Man (1763),
Henry Venn, Vicar of Huddersfield, defines saving faith as ‘a dependence
22 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

upon Christ for righteousness and strength, as having paid to the justice of
God full satisfaction for his broken law, and obtained acceptance for all
believers in his name, to the reward of eternal life’.16 Christ had done all that
was needed to achieve salvation. It remained only for men and women to
accept forgiveness at his hands. Faith was therefore seen as the gift of grace. It
was ‘simply to hang upon Him’.17 To insist on faith as the way of approaching
God was to reject certain popular alternatives. Venn condemns three. Our
ground of hope, he explains, cannot be works, that is, the performance of good
deeds, for evcn the best actions have flaws and so are unacceptable as an
offering to a God of absolute holiness. Sincerity is equally inadequate. God
expects perfect obedience (which only Christ could perform), not our good
intentions. Nor will a mixture of faith and works help us. If we rely partly on
our good deeds, the grand difficulty of their being tainted by sin remains.18
‘Attempts to complete what grace begins’, according to Venn’s Baptist friend
Abraham Booth, ‘betray our pride and offend the Lord, but cannot promote
our spiritual interest’.19 Thus ordinary Methodists would go about urging that
mere morality was of no avail in justification, for faith alone did everything.20
They would swap texts with broader-minded Bible students. ‘Whenever I read
in St. Paul’s Epistles on justification by faith alone’, recalled James
Lackington, then an apprentice shoemaker, ‘my good mistress would read in
the Epistle of St. James, such passages as suggest a man is not justified by faith
alone, but by faith and works…’21 It was a telling riposte, but scholarly
Evangelicals were able to point out that while Paul writes of the condition of
justification, James is discussing the nature of genuine faith.22 If faith is real,
it will automatically produce good works. Holiness is the fruit of faith. This
explains the apparently paradoxical position of Wesley: ‘we are justified by
faith alone’, he wrote, ‘and yet by such a faith as is not alone…’23 Faith is the
only means by which we are made right with God; but faith, as soon as it
exists, creates an itnpulse towards living a better life. Views differed about
whether or not it was essential to understand the notion of justification by
faith. Joseph Milner, a clergyman near Hull and the leading Evangelical
historian, held the doctrine absolutely necessary to salvation.24 Wesley, with
his customary latitude in matters of opinion, supposed that those ignorant of
the belief, or even hostile to it, might be saved.25 But Evangelicals were united
in holding that the reality of faith—as opposed to belief about it—is the sole
condition of acceptance by God.
The bearers of the message did not always find a ready welcome. To be told
that sincerity in the performance of the religious duties of one’s station did
not command the blessing of God was startling, if not insulring. To be assured
that good works were as filthy rags seemed subversive of all morality. To hear
faith lauded to the skies aroused suspicions of fanaticism, the ‘enthusiasm’
that the eighteenth century shunned because its seventeenth-century version
had killed a king. Polite society was alarmed. It is true that Frederick, Prince of
Wales, was so impressed that he was rumoured to be intending to use his
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 23

powers as monarch to make Whitefield a bishop.26 But Frederick was on bad

terms with his father, George II, and in any case predeceascd him in 1751.
Evangelical penetration of high society, with the notable exceptions of the
Countess of Huntingdon and the Earl of Dartmouth, was deferred until the
aftermath of the French Revolution, when a high religious profile began to
have welcome anti-revolutionary connotations. So the Evangelical movement
laboured under severe disadvantages. Undergraduates were expelled from
Oxford for Methodist practices in 1768;27 young men suspected of Evangelical
views were denied ordination in certain dioceses of the Church of England;28
and unwelcome ministers of more sober outlook were imposed on parishes
with Evangelical preferences in the Church of Scotland.29
There is a vivid fictional portrayal of resistance to Evangelicalism in George
Eliot’s tale, ‘Janet’s repentance’. Mr Tryan, a new Evangelical curate, arrives
at a chapel-of-ease on the outskirts of the parish of Milby. His proposal to
deliver Sunday evening lectures in the parish church of the to vn itself on the
grounds that the resident clergyman does not preach the gospel arouses the ire
of the town lawyer. A petition is organised to oppose the application to
lecture. Tryan, according to the lawyer, preaches against good works. ‘Tell a
man hc is not to be saved by his works’, the lawyer declaims, ‘and you open the
floodgates of all immorality. You see it in all these canting innovators; they’re
all bad ones by the sly; smooth-faced, drawling, hypocritical fellows…’30
When the lecture is eventually established, Tryan has to run the gauntlet of
‘groans, howls, hisses, and hee-haws’ on the way to church. Stories circulate
about the minister and his hearers. Trades people among them are warned
that they will lose good customers. ‘Mr Budd harangued his workmen, and
threatened them with dismissal if they or their families were known to attend
the evening lecture; and Mr Tomlinson, on discovering that his foreman was a
rank Tryanite, blustered to a great extent, and would have cashiered that
valuable functionary on the spot, if such a retributive procedure had not been
inconvenient.’31 The storm subsides precisely because convenience triumphs.
This narrative is set in the 1820s. At an earlier date resistance was commonly
both fiercer and more sustained. Wesley endured mobbing when he first
preachcd in Staffordshire in the 1740s.32 His followers were violently
assaulted. Christopher Hopper was the victim of ‘invectives and lies, dirt,
rotten eggs, brickbats, stones and cudgels’; Peter Jaco ‘was struck so violently
with a brick on the breast that the blood gushed out through my mouth, nose,
and ears’; John Nelson’s wife was beaten by a crowd of women ‘so cruelly that
they killed the child in her womb, and she went home and miscarried
directly’.33 Opposition was sometimes led by members of the elite and had a
measure of local co-ordination. A elergytman fearful for his congregation or
his standing might egg on a crowd to violence. Or else popular resistance
might possess its own dynamic. It was rightly perceived that Evangelicalism
threatened to divide community life. Customary ways were under attack and
24 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

the mob retaliated in the only way available to the plebeian population of the
eighteenth century.34
Evangelicals created their own community life. Methodism was famous—or
notorious—for it. The weekly class meeting for the exchange of spiritual
experience was the essence of Wesley’s system for building up those who had
been awakened by preaching. The pattern began almost accidentally at Bristol
in 1742. A building debt had to be extinguished. Consequently the ‘society’,
the body of all Methodists in the city, was broken down into short lists, to
each of which was assigned a collector of weekly contributions. The collectors
soon developed a pastoral role, and Wesley directed that members on each list
should gather to seek their guidance.35 To possess a quarterly ticket as a class
member was the defining quality of a Methodist; to be noted as having ‘ceased
to meet’ in class was to be no longer a Methodist. By 1783 in Bristol there
were fifty-seven classes, each including from nine to eighteen members. The
allocation to classes was on a purely geographical basis.36 In addition to
classes, however, early Methodism possessed other tight-knit groups. Only
those professing justification were admitted to the bands, which also met
weekly, and which were divided according to sex and marital status. This
arrangement permitted greater intimacy. ‘In the classes’, it was recalled, ‘they
only confessed in general terms, that they have been tempted by the world,
the flesh, and the devil. But in the bands they confessed the particular sins
which they had been tempted to commit, or had actually committed.’37 Those
Methodists judged to be near or in the state of entire sanctification, at least in
the larger societies, assembled in select bands. There were sometimes also
penitents’ meetings for backsliding band-members.38 The plethora of
preaching meetings, watch-nights, covenant services at new year and love-
feasts, that is larger gatherings for the relating of testimonies while buns and
water were handed round—all these bound Methodists strongly together in a
hostile environment. ‘Such was our love to each other’, according to John
Haime, the promoter of a Methodist society in the army, ‘that even the sight
of each other filled our hearts with divine consolation.’39 Visits to the sick and
dying brought genuine sympathy; substantial interest-free loans were
available, at least in London, from a common fiind; and Methodists looked
after the businesses of sick brothers.40
Although the organisational structure was unique to Methodism, the spirit
was characteristic of Evangelicalism as a whole. Jonathan Edwards knew the
value of religious conversation as an antidote to spiritual melancholia.41 The
Yorkshire and Lancashire Particular Baptist Association, perhaps inspired by
the Methodist example, urged in 1764 an increase of ‘private meetings for
mutual conference on the things of God’.42 Samuel Walker, the Evangelical
curate of Truro, organised societies for converts using material drawn from
the Book of Common Prayer, less tightly controlled groups for religious
conversation and a Parsons’ Club, the prototype for many subsequent societies
of Evangelical clergy, from about 1750.43 Societies for prayer were promoted
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 25

in and about Glasgow during the 1740s by John Maclaurin, minister of the
North West Church there, and others.44 Meetings for prayer became the
hallmark of congregations touched by the revival. There was a natural
tendency for Evangelicals to meet for religious purposes. The resulting
fellowship was no ethereal thing but a strongly cemented form of social
solidarity.
Who composed the Evangelical communities? The Methodist membership
list for Bristol in 1783, which includcs occupations, may be taken as an
example. Of 790 names, only 99 are unidentified. The largest occupational
group is the servants, of whom there are 55 of each sex. In addition, 26 women
are concerned with laundry work, 24 with dressmaking—and so in many cases
are probably more specialised servants. Shoemakers and members of related
trades, together with their wives, form a group of 80 names. Apart from 29
gentlemen and gentlewomen and 25 classified as old, poor or almswomen, no
other group contains as many as 20 names. There are only 13 labourers.45 The
list is fairly representative of evidence from elsewhere. The large number of
servants, for example, is repeated in a sample of the converts in the
Cambuslang revival of 1742, although not, apparently, among Evangelical
Nonconformists in England.46 More uniformly, a high proportion of
shoemakers is found in Evangelical communities of the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. The most consistent fmding has been that the artisan
section of society, embracing shoemakers but also including a variety of
tradesmen such as carpenters and coopers, was heavily over-represented in
Evangelical ranks. Such skilled men and their families formed as high as 66
per cent of a Relief Church in Glasgow between 1822 and 1832.47 A thorough
trawl of evidence has shown that this social group was more than twice as
nutnerous in eighteenth-century Methodism, at 47 per cent, as in society at
large.48 Unskilled men were few, at least among committed members of
Evangelical bodies. There may well have been morc of them among the
‘hearers’, the regular attenders who had not actually joined. Although artisans
could be impoverished in bad times for their trade, Evangelicalism was rarely
the religion of the poorest and outcast. Nor was it the religion of the
prosperous and successful in the eighteenth century. The gentry may
sometimes have been marginally over-represented in Methodism,49 as the
Bristol statistics illustrate, but the impact of the Evangelicalism of the Church
of England on the elite was only just beginning when Hannah More and
William Wilberforce composed their appeals to the great in the 1780s and
1790s.50
Women were numerous in the movement. ‘I have heard Mr. Wesley
remark’, reported a rather jaundiced ex-Methodist, ‘that more women are
converted than men; and I believe that by far the greatest part of his people
are females; and not a few of them sour, disappointed old maids…’51 A
measure of confirmation is provided by the discoveries that about 55 per cent
of a sample of East Cheshire Methodists in the later eighteenth century were
26 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

women and that nearly half of them were unmarried.52 Religion may have
provided psychological reassurance, even emotional outlet, for this section of
the population. In any case, women were consistently found in larger numbers
than men. Both Cambuslang converts in 1742 and Bristol Methodists in 1783
included two women for every man.53 Nor were they necessarily kept in the
background. Outside the formal setting of public worship, and evcn
occasionally in it, women found opportunities for self-expression. In the
proliferating cottage meetings of early Evangelicalism it was often women
who took the lead in prayer and praise, counsel and exhortation.54 In 1803
Wesleyans effectively prohibited female preaching for the sake of propriety,
but the custom was restored by the Primitives. The Bible Christians of south-
western England, too, put what they called ‘female brethren’ on the preaching
plan.55 In the upper echelons of society Hannah More, blue-stocking and
Evangelical ideologue, played a no less significant role.56 In an age when
avenues for women into any sphere outside the home were being closed,
Christian zeal brought them into prominence.
The places where Evangelicalism struck deepest root were usually of certain
particular kinds. Where artisans were most numerous, vital religion was most
likely to do well. Therefore, areas springing into life with proto-industrial
employment for the skilled worker, townships like Paddiford Common in
‘Janet’s Repentance’ with weaving and mining as the chief occupations, were
ideal territory.57 Methodism and Calvinistic Dissent as well as the Evangelical
Anglicanism that George Eliot depicts thrived there. Growing industrial areas,
including the big cities, were deliberately targeted by Wesley and his
contemporaries, for there dwelt the most concentrated populations. In the
countryside, patterns of settlement were highly significant determinants of
Evangelical strength. Scattered dwellings of recent erection in large parishes or
on parish boundaries, together with market towns, proved more receptive to
the gospel than ancient nucleated villages of small size.58 It was partly that in
areas of scattered settlement the parish church was often far distant, so that
when travelling preachers arrived they offered a monopoly of religious
provision, whereas tight-knit communities usually clustered round the parish
church. Only on the rare occasions when a clergyman of the Church of
England held Evangelical convictions was this an advantage. Similarly in
Scotland Evangelicals gained most ground in the vast parishes of the Highlands
as well as in the new industrial regions.59 Landownership also played a part. In
so-called close parishes, where land was held by one or at most three proprietors,
penetration by Evangelicalism was rare. Land for erecting a chapel was far
more likely to be available in open parishes where landownership was
fragmented.60 Many of the determinants boil down to the issue of social
control. Wherever authority could be exerted from above to encourage
conformity to established ways, the innovations of popular religion would be
resisted. Squire or parson, or both together, could publicise their distaste for
enthusiasm. The mob would be conscious s of their support—albeit normally
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 27

tacit—for throwing the Methodist preacher in the duckpond.61 Conversely,

where the expectations of squire and parson could be ignored with impunity,
gospel preaching would be sustained. In particular, artisans who prided
themselves on avoiding dependence on the landed order for their daily bread
would assert their self-reliance by giving the new message a hearing—and
perhaps more. Evangelism was most effective where deference was weakest,
whether in town or countryside. It is no accident that Yorkshire and Cornwall,
with their large parishes and numerous artisans, were the fields of the greatest
Methodist harvests.62

VARIETIES OF EVANGELICALISM
Despite its self-conscious unity, the Evangelical movement comprised several
distinct strands. The Methodists were set apart from other groupings by both
doctrine and discipline. They asserted a strong doctrine of assurance that will
call for detailed scrutiny; and they believed in Christian perfection, which
again deserves fuller attention.63 The esscnce of their distinct doctrinal
position, however, was Arminianism. Christ, they claimed, made salvation
available to all who believed, and not just to the litnited number of the elect.
Such a rejection of Calvinism was not quite unique among Evangelicals, for a
few of the clergy unconnected with Wesley shared Arminian beliefs.64 So did
the New Connexion of General Baptists, founded by an ex-Methodist, Dan
Taylor, in 1770.65 But Methodism was the chief bulwark of Arminianism.
Charles Wesley filled many a hymn with anti-Calvinist polemic: The
invitation is to all’; ‘For all, for all, my Saviour died!’; ‘Thy sovereign grace to
all extends’.66 His brother John called the connexional journal The Arminian
Magazine. The first issue carried an article on Jacobus Arminius, the early
seventeenth-century Dutch divine who drastically modified Reformed
theology.67 Yet John Wesley did not adhere closely to the structure of
Arminius’s thought. Nor was his theological system similar to the arid scheme
of those rational Dissenters who treated Arminianism as a staging post to
Unitarianism. Theirs, as Dr Nuttall has pointed out, was an Arminianism of
the head; Wesley’s was a version of the heart.68 It was a dynamic message, a
proclamation that the love of God is vast and free. No fatalism cast a shadow
over the experience God wishes all to enjoy. Any man or woman can receive
saving faith.
Wesley could not tolerate several aspects of the Calvinist scheme of
salvation. It is true that hc sometimes minimised the distance between his own
and the Reformed position. ‘I think on justification’, he wrote to John Newton
in 1765, ‘just as…Mr. Calvin does.’69 But Wesley rejected outright belief in
predestination, the doctrine that some human beings are foreordained to
salvation by God’s decree. It was alien to his upbringing, for both parents
stoutly denied it.70 It was equally far removed from the ethical cast of his
thought. If some are chosen and others are not, so that human beings cannot
28 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

affect their destiny, the sanction for morality disappears. This was what
Wesley meant by claiming that the teaching led to antinomianism. So he
deplored the defection of a Cornish clergyman who had ‘fallen into the Pit of
the Decrees’.71 A related objection was to the Calvinist doctrine of imputed
righteousness. Reformed theologians held that God treats sinners as righteous
by the legal fiction that Christ’s merits are theirs. Wesley again held that this
principle undercut the biblical summons to holy living. According to
Calvinists, believers may commit sins and yet still be accepted by God for
Christ’s sake. According to Wesley, a person ceases to be a Christian as soon
as he performs a sinful act. Calvinism was lulling people into a baseless sense
of their security. Furthermore, Reformed theologians taught that any true
believer would remain one until death—the doctrine of the perseverance of
the saints. God would guarantee their ultimate salvation. Again, Wesley
viewed such teaching as licence for immorality.72
Although he repudiated it, Wesley pursued no vendetta against Calvinism.
Men holding Reformed views were admitted to his annual conference, and
during the 1760s Wesley employed without examination a preacher, Thomas
Taylor, who read little but Calvinist authors and leaned to imputed
righteousness and fmal perseverance.73 There was more eagerness for battle on
the other side. The publication of the minutes of the 1770 Methodist
Conference, referring to good works as a ‘condition’ of salvation, provoked an
outcry by Calvinists such as Rowland Hill and Augustus Toplady. Wesley
scemed to be rejecting no less a doctrine than justification by faith. In reality
he did not. Good works, according to Wesley, were not the way to justification,
but they were essential to fmal salvation. So the ‘Calvinistic Controversy’ of
the 1770s that drove Methodism further apart from other Evangelicals was
based in part on a misunderstanding.74 There was, nevertheless, substantial
theological disagreement between Wesley and the Reformed tradition.
Evangelical Arminianism was a distinct body of thought.
Methodism was also differentiated from other strands of the Evangelical
movement by its discipline. Wesley professed to be a loyal son of the Church
of England, constantly resisting calls for separation.75 Yet Methodism was an
elaborate religious organisation that had no dependence, except for the
sacraments, on existing ecclesiastical structures. Wesley personally supervised
the whole massive machine. All the preachers were his ‘helpers’; membership
lists were revised by his decision, against which there was no appeal. Some
suggested that ‘the love of power seems to have been the main spring of all his
actions’.76 By and large, however, his authority was willingly accepted. The
problems arose with his death in 1791. How was the machine to operate
without Wesley’s guiding hand? Some preachers, led by Alexander Kilham
and inspired in part by the egalitarianism of the French Revolution, pressed
for greater local autonomy and more lay power. They were routed, however,
and forced to leave the Wesleyan body to set up the Methodist New
Connexion in 1797.77 By the 1810s another autocracy had been established.
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 29

Less openly than Wesley but only slightly less firmly, Jabez Bunting shaped
the policies of Wesleyan Methodism until the middle of the nineteenth
century. It was Bunting who ensured, especially during the turbulent years
following the Napoleonic Wars, that radicals were summarily cashiered from
the movement.78 Theoretically, the Wesleyan connexion was ruled after its
founder’s death by the so-called ‘Legal Hundred’ of travelling preachers who
in law formed the conference. The hundred were those named by Wesley in
1784 and, as they died, their successors. In practice, far more of the travelling
preachers participated. Conference was supreme in its decisions and on
occasion it could overrule even Bunting; but the powers of conference were
limited by its being in session for only three weeks or less each summer. It
was conference that allocated preachers to circuits, the parts of the country
where they were to itinerate, raising up and sustaining the societies. By 1791
there were 87 circuits in Britain, each with from one to three travelling
preachers, who were normally changed each year.79 Although under Wesley
most of them were untrained laymen, the travelling preachers gradually
evolved into the Methodist ministry. The title ‘Reverend’ was officially
adopted in 1818.80 Far more of the meetings, however, were conducted by
local preachers. With class leaders and band leaders, stewards in charge of
society funds and trustees in charge of society buildings, they formed a
formidable army of lay workers. Methodism provided a host of opportunities
for laymen to assume prominent public roles. If they lacked power, they
possessed responsibility.
Methodism also arose in several Calvinistic forms. George Whitefield’s
preaching gave rise to societies that, like him, adhered to Reformed teaching.
He establishcd in the capital the Moorfields Tabernacle in 1741 and the
Tottenham Court Chapel in 1756.81 By 1747 there were 31 Whitefieldian
societies and 27 preaching stations.82 Selina, Countess of Huntingdon,
converted in 1739, was sufficiently free of family duties by 1760 to devote
herself largely to organising evangelism. She appointed gospel clergymen as
her chaplains, directing them as firmly as Wesley treated his assistants, and
erected chapels for their eloquence in fashionable resorts such as Brighton
(1760), Bath (1765) and Tunbridge Wells (1765). In 1768 she created at
Trevecca, under the superintendence of Howel Harris, a college to train
candidates for the ministry, and in 1777 a chapel at Spa Fields, London, which
soon attracted a wealthy congregation.83 By her death in 1791 there were
between 55 and 80 congregations supplied with preachers trained at
Trevecca.84 She had already, in 1782, reluctantly seceded from the Church of
England, but she failed to make adequate provision for the government of the
new denomination. Only seven chapels, as her personal property, were
transferred to the continuing Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion.85
Whitefield’s connexion disintegrated even more catastrophically. He had
begun as moderator of a Calvinistic Methodist ‘association’ in 1743, the year
before Wesley held the first meeting of his equivalent conference.86 With
30 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

Whitefield frequently absent in America, however, his place was taken by

John Cennick, but in 1745 he departed to the Moravians. His successor, Howel
Harris, also withdrew in 1749, and central direction of the movement stopped.
Because the Whitefieldian societies (if Moorfields is representative) permitted
congregational decision-making, it was easy for them to develop into
Independent churches.87 Preachers were similarly attracted over the narrow
dividing-line. In 1748, for instance, one Herbert Jenkins ‘went off to the
Independents’.88 In 1764 the Moorfields Tabernacle and Tottenham Court
Chapels were themselves registered as Independent.89 Although a
Gloucestershire Calvinistic Methodist Association was still functioning in
1784,90 the connexion virtually dissolved following Whitefield’s death in
1770. Only in Wales did Calvinistic Methodism become a permanent force.
Howel Harris resumed his organisational work in 1763, but, making no
headway with a plan for a ‘General Union’ etnbracing Wesleyans and
Moravians, concentrated his efforts in the principality.91 His legacy was a body
which in the nineteenth century, as the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist
Connexion, became the strongest single denomination in Wales.
Another strand consisted of Evangelicals in the Church of England, its
ordained clergy and their associates. Few were Methodist converts or even
touched by Calvinistic Methodism. Rather they normally discovered their vital
faith by painful steps in seclusion. Thomas Scott, curate at Ravenstone and
Weston Underwood in Buckinghamshire and subsequently the eighteenth-
century Evangelicals’ greatest commentator on the Bible, has left a classic
account of such a spiritual pilgrimage during the 1770s, The Force of Truth
(1779). Entering the ministry for the sake of preferment, he began with
virtually Socinian views, holding Christ to be nothing but a man proclaiming
enlightened doctrines. Struck by the conscientious pastoral care of the
Evangelical, John Newton, his near neighbour, he was convinced by Bishop
Burnet’s book on the same subject that he must be more attentive to his
duties. A reading of Samuel Clarke, the early eighteenth-century champion of
a more liberal doctrine of the Trinity, paradoxically drew him back from
Socinianism towards orthodoxy. William Law persuaded him to give far more
time to devotion; Hooker attracted him to Reformed divines; from them he
learned justification by faith. Strangely, as he puts it, ‘my faith was now fixed
upon a crucified Saviour (though I dishonoured his person, and denied his
Deity)’.92 Other reading eventually brought him to profess Calvinism. Scott,
as he insists, changed his sentiments ‘very gradually’ and not because of the
teaching of Evangelicals.93 A similar process took place in many parts of the
land. At St Gennys in Cornwall in 1733 or 1734, George Thomson was
awakened by dreams of judgement and gained confidence of salvation through
Romans, Chapter 3.94 At Wintringham in Lincolnshire, Thomas Adam,
though corresponding with the Evangelical Thomas Hartley, was influenced
during a pcrplexing decade chiefly by the mystical writings of Law before he
reached settled convictions in 1748.95 In London around 1750, ‘like most
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 31

others’, according to his biographer, William Romaine probably ‘grew clearer

by degrees, through the word, prayer, and experience’.96 By such means the
number of Evangelical elergy increased. In 1769 Wesley knew of between fifty
and sixty who preached salvation by faith. He wrote to them all inviting co-
operation, but received only three replies. In a phrase long rernembered, he
dismissed them as ‘a rope of sand’.97 Although they were later to consolidate
in clerical societies, in the early years of the revival the Evangelical clergy
were few and scattered.
Respect for church order varied among them. Samuel Walker of Truro was
at one pole of opinion, persuading others ‘to keep close to the discipline of
mother Church’.98 He believed in ‘regularity’, that is, confining his work to
the parish he served. Others, like John Berridge, of Everton, Cambridgeshire,
felt bound to itinerate outside the parish—to ‘go round the neighbourhood,
preaching in the fields, wherever a door is opened, three or four days in every
week’.99 William Grimshaw, at Haworth in the West Riding, even acted as one
of Wesley’s stated ‘helpers’.100 There was a broad range of different degrees of
‘irregularity’, which ensured that the boundary between loyal Churchmen and
their more flexible brethren was blurred. Thomas Haweis, fmding the parish of
Aldwincle, Northamptonshire, too small a sphere for his labours, put himself
at the service of the Countess of Huntingdon from 1774.101 The trend of
opinion, however, was in the opposite direction. As Evangelical clergy became
more numerous, the need for itinerancy seemed to lessen; and as criticism of
Evangelicals mounted, it became valuable to be able to stress loyalty to the
forms of the Church of England. Accordingly, Henry Venn, who at
Huddersfield up to 1771 co-operated with the Wesleyans in field preaching,
later became aware of what his son called ‘the evils of schism’ and dissuaded
others from irregularity.102 The views of Charles Simeon, Vicar of Holy
Trinity, Cambridge, from 1783 to 1836 and mentor to generations of
Evangelical ordinands, were decisive for the future course of the movement. ‘A
Preacher has enough to do in his own parish’, he roundly declared.103
Concentration on a parochial ministry could be highly effective. At
Aldwincle, for example, Haweis found no households maintaining family
prayers, but by never leaving a house without praying soon ensured that
family devotions became the rule.104 The grand difficulty of the Evangelicals
in the Church of England, however, was in sustaining an awakened
congregation when the gospel minister left the parish. The next clergyman
was unlikely to be an Evangelical. The flock might then disperse. More likely,
it would go over to Independency, securing its own building and its own
preacher of the gospel. This happened after Venn’s departure from Huddersfield
(with his sanction), and even in Truro after the death of Walker, the arch-
defender of parish loyalty.105 The problem was a result of the patronage
system that entrusted the choice of a clergyman to laypeople who were rarely
sympathetic to the cause of the gospel. Hence many early Evangelical clergy
were to be found in places of worship outside the normal patronage system: in
32 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

proprietary chapels erected, especially in London, by converted notables; in

daughter chapels where the appointment was in the hands of an Evangelical
minister; and in lectureships, often survivals from Puritan days, where the
choice was by some form of election. But it was Simeon who dealt most
effectively with the problem of continuity. In order to achieve a sucession of
Evangelical clergy in strategic parishes such as Cheltenham, he created, in
1817, a trust to purchase rights of patronage.106 It expanded and was also
imitated by other trusts. In this, as in many other ways, Simeon gave an
assured place to what was becoming an Evangelical party in the Church of
England.
The impact of Evangelicalism on orthodox Dissent in England and Wales did
not become general until the last years of the eighteenth century. The delay is
partly explained by factors that inhibited the effectiveness of Dissenters in
mission. It was prudent for those outside the Established Church to posses
licences for their places of worship, and licences would hardly be granted for
the type of field preaching adopted so powerfully by Methodists, whether
Arminian or Calvinistic. Dissenters in any case suffered from the reputation
of being peculiar people, a disadvantage not shared by those operating at least
nominally under the auspices of the Church of England. And Dissenting
congregations, by and large, were isolated and introspective.107 Non-
involvement in the revival was a matter of deliberate choice. People proud of
their traditions did not wish to associate with those who at best neglected the
niceties of doctrine and discipline and often actually veered into what seemed
to be theological laxity. The foibles and wild ways of the new evangelists
startled and repelled.108 Worst of all, the revival was divisive. Thomas Morgan,
Independent minister at Morley, Yorkshire, lamented in 1765 the ‘unhappy
Divisions almost in all the Congregations in the Kingdom chiefly occasion’d
by Methodistical Delusions’.109
Yet even in the early days inhibitions about the new movement were
overcome by some. Risdon Darracott, Independent minister at Wellington,
Somerset, was in close touch with Evangelical clergymen including Samuel
Walker and Henry Venn. 110 Darracott’s tutor, Philip Doddridge, co-operated
fully with Whitefield.111 Doddridge’s pivotal role in turning orthodox
Dissenters into friends of the revival was subsequently played by Thomas
Gibbons, Independent minister at Haberdashers’ Hall, London, and tutor at
Mile End Academy. 112 Men converted through the Calvinistic Methodists
soon swelled the ranks of Dissent. The Saviour, according to Whitefield, ‘has
inclined many converted unto him thro’ his Grace by us, to join with the
Dissenting Congregations…’113 Baptists profited as well as the Independents.
Henry Philips, converted through Howel Harris and later Baptist minister at
Salisbury, was preaching at Tiverton with ‘freedom and affection’ on the
universality of the gospel invitation in 1765.114 Robert Robinson and John
Fawcett, two of the most influential Baptist ministers of the later eighteenth
century, were both converted under Whitefield.115 Furthermore, whole
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 33

congregations sometimes joined the Dissenters, perhaps on the termination of

an Evangelical ministry at a parish church or when a Wesleyan preacher
turned Calvinist.116 The New Connexion of General Baptists, which remained
Arminian in theology and made marked headway in the East Midlands, was
also the fruit of the revival. Its core churches, based on Barton-in-the-Beans,
Leicestershire, arose from the evangelism of a servant of the Countess of
Huntingdon. Its creation as a separate denomination, by fission from the older
General Baptist Churches that in general had moved to a more liberal
theology, was the work in 1770 of Dan Taylor, an ex-Wesleyan preacher who
shared Wesley’s genius for co-ordination.117 Dissent gained a new vitality
from the infusion of Evangelicalism.
Scotland was home to several strands of the movement. In the Established
Church a substantial section of the ministry—how large we do not know—
held Evangelical views. The leaders of this body of men, John Maclaurin, John
Erskine and John Gillies among them, were highly respected in the Kirk.
Maclaurin, an able Highlander in a Glasgow charge, corresponded with
Jonathan Edwards and others in New England and so learned early of the
revivals there. He urged concerted prayer to stir up similar a wakenings in
Scotland and rejoiced in the events at Cambuslang in 1742.118 Erskine, who
acknowledged his debt to sermons by Maclaurin, became minister of New
Greyfriars Church, Edinburgh. During a long career he gave publicity to
Cambuslang, defended Whitefield and edited some of Edwards’s posthumous
works.119 Gillies, Maclaurin’s son-in-law and a close friend of Erskine, became
Whitefield’s first biographer. 120 Such men identified wholly with the
Evangelical cause. In the second half of the eighteenth century they became
embroiled in party warfare in the Church of Scotland. The problem was
fundamentally the same one that confronted their brethren in the Church of
England: how was continuity of godly ministry to be obtained when parish
ministers were appointed by patronage? Their solution was to join others in
urging that congregations, or at least their leading lights, the elders and
heritors, should have a right of veto over presentees to charges. The so-called
Moderate party, insisting on the letter of church law, resistcd resolutely and
successfully.121 Consequently non-Evangelical ministers were imposed on
unwilling congregations. Quite frequently from 1761 onwards a congregation
would respond by deserting the parish church to form a ‘Relief Church’. So
was born a wholly Evangelical body, Presbyterian in polity but outside the
Established Church, that earned the nickname the ‘Scots Methodists’.122 They
existed alongside the congregations of the Secession that in 1733 had also split
off from the Church of Scotland on the patronage issue. It was the
Secession Church that originally invited Whitefield to Scotland in 1741, and,
despite disillusionment when he would not embrace their distinctive
principles, many of the more open-minded in the Secession remained
Evangelical in thought and practice.123 By the end of the century Presbyterian
Dissent was a powerful force in Scotland, especially in urban Scotland. At
34 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

Jedburgh, admittedly an extreme case, in the 1790s, more than 70 per cent of
the adult population were Dissenters.124 Despite the weakness of Methodism
north of the border, Evangelical religion had put down deep roots there.

CONTINUITY WITH THE PAST

The multi-faceted movement that was the Evangelical Revival was to touch
the lives of millions. But was it nothing new? Was it simply a massive
expansion of pre-existent patterns of faith and practice, a popularisation of
received forms of religion? With meticulous scholarship, Dr Geoffrey Nuttall
has demonstrated that there was a large measure of continuity between
elements of the Reformed tradition embodied in Dissent and the revival. He
singles out a common eagerness for unity in Christian work, a consequent
impatience with divisive doctrinal tests and a stress on personal expericnce in
devotion to Christ. He discerns a tradition that runs from Richard Baxter in the
mid-seventeenth century through Philip Doddridge in the early eighteenth to
Evangelicals such as the Baptist, Andrew Fuller.125 Baxter and Doddridge
certainly fit his specification. So does Whitefield, whose division of opinion
with the Secession in Scotland was the result of the overriding importance he
attached to catholicity, comprehensiveness and heart work. Whitefield was
aware of the affinity. He assured Doddridge that a recently published sermon
of his ‘contains the very life of preaching, I mean sweet invitations to close
with CHRIST’. ‘I do not wonder’, he added, ‘that you are dubbed a Methodist
on account of it.’126 Dr Nuttall can point to the assistance rendered to
Whitefield by Thomas Cole, the Dissenting minister in the evangelist’s home
city of Gloucester, who was already in pastoral charge long before
Whitefield’s conversion.127 He also draws attention to the experimental
devotion of individual Dissenters, both laymen and ministers, especially in the
west of England, in the early eighteenth century. ‘These’, he writes, ‘were
Evangelicals before the Revival…’128 The thesis of continuity from the pre-
revival period can be supported by evidence drawn from the Baptists, from
Scotland and from Wales. Bristol Baptist Academy was producing a stream of
ministers with vital spirituality, evangelistic concerns and a catholic outlook
under the three principals who served from 1720 to 1791, Bernard Foskett,
Hugh Evans and Caleb Evans.129 In Scotland, John Maclaurin and his circle,
those who welcomed the Cambuslang Revival in the 1740s, were already
resisting liberal theological trends in the name of heart religion during the
protracted Simson case of the 1720s.130 And, for Wales, recent scholarship has
stressed the circulation of literature, the Dissenting preaching and the gospel
themes of both that anticipated the emergence of the revival in the 1730s.131 It
is clear that in many respects Evangelical religion prolonged existing lines of
development.
Even Methodism, the new growth on Evangelical soil, had roots in Puritan
tradition. Wesley’s mother, Susanna, herself the daughter of one of the
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 35

ejected divines of 1662, esteemed Baxter highly.132 Although her son John was
deliberately guarded from Dissenting literature when young, Susanna lived
with him in the crucial years 1739–42 when his position was crystallising after
the experiencc of 24 May 1738. Baxter, especially in his Aphorisms of
Justification, became Wesley’s mentor. Baxter’s moderate version of
Puritanism appealed almost as much to him as to Doddridge.133 The fifty-
volume Christian Library published by Wesley for his followers contains far
more literature of a Puritan stamp than of any other ecclesiastical genre.134 A
Methodist convert so devoted to books that he saved money for their purchase
by living on bread and tea assembled a collection overwhelmingly Puritan.135
John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Joseph Alleine’s Alarm to the
Unconverted were particularly prized by the early preachers.136 A clergyman
trying to dissuade a parishioner from attending Methodist meetings had no
doubt of the identification: ‘he showed him several old Puritanical books,
which treated on the new birth, &c., and told him, “It is a false religion,
because it is an old religion!”.’137 The call for conversion, embracing an
expectation of a period of conviction of sin preceding the crisis of the new
birth, was reminiscent of seventeenthcentury Reformed divinity. So was the
constant appeal to scripture and what a visiting Swede noticed as Wesley’s
message of ‘a crucified Saviour and faith in his merits’.138 Three characteristic
marks of Evangelicalism, conversionism, biblicism and crucicentrism, had been
as much a part of Puritanism as they were of Methodism. It has been argued
that the affinities go beyond such theological areas to include aspects of
liturgy, pastoralia, family piety and ethics.139 Although features of Methodism
in these areas also had an ancestry elsewhere, it is true that Wesley originally
met the practice of extempore prayer among Scots in America who were
maintaining earlier Reformed practice; that the Methodist covenant service
owed a great deal to the individual covenants beloved of Puritan authors; that
class meetings resembled the fellowship groups fostered by the godly of the
seventeenth century; that Wesley’s pattern of family prayer was drawn frorn
the Nonconformist Philip Henry; and that Wesley’s rigorism, for all its High
Church ascetic flavour, had parallels in Puritan moral teaching. 140 Methodists
inherited a substantial legacy from the Puritans.

DISCONTINUITY WITH THE REFORMED TRADITION

The Evangelical Revival nevertheless does represent a break with the past.
Apart from the emergence of new denominations, perhaps the most
marked discontinuity was in the Church of England. The doctrine of
justification by faith had well-nigh disappeared. Calvinism was at a discount
after the Restoration. ‘Puritan’ had become a term of abuse. Professor Rupp
has suggested that there must be a thread linking the Reformed tradition of the
seventeenth century with the Evangelicals of the eighteenth.141 Yet there is
scant evidence for so inherently likely a hypothesis. The last Calvinist bishop,
36 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

Hall of Bristol, died in 1710.142 Among the clergy, it was said in the 1730s that
some had abandoned the Reformation teachings of their youth. Richard
Seagrave, an unbeneficed clergyman, was a lonely voice in the 1730s calling for
allegiance to the doctrines of the Thirty-Nine Articles. He had no identifiable
influence in bringing the early Evangelicals to their mature position.143
Thomas Allen of Kettering (1714–55) was exceptional in retaining a Puritan
stance and then being classified (by Simeon, for instance) as an Evangelical.144
James Hervey, Rector of Weston Favell, Northamptonshire, the most popular
littérateur among the first generation of Evangelical clergy, was aware of
likeminded men in an earlier age. ‘Is it Puritanical?’ he asked. ‘Be not ashamed
of the name.’145 But, as was usual, his faith had come independently—in his
case through Oxford Methodism. Other Evangelicals, like James Bean at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, were eager to repudiate all connection
with the Puritans, who were so widely seen as virulent critics of the
constitution of the Church of England. The Reformation he honoured, but not
its dyspeptic successors.146 Occasionally, there are traces of the persistence of
Puritan faith and experience without benefit of clergy. For example, an early
Methodist preacher came on a serious young man at Newark. ‘It was evident
that the Lord had graciously visited his soul, though he had never heard a
gospel sermon in his life, and had solely the Bible, the Common Prayer-Book,
and Milton’s Paradise Lost to read. ’147 Pockets of lay piety were no doubt
sustained in obscurity and nourished by old books. It remains true, however,
that the men of eminence were now in their graves. The tide of Reformed
teaching that continued to flow in the Church of Scotland and in English
Dissent was at an ebb in the Church of England.
There were three significant symptoms of discontinuity. One was the
stimulus given to the rcvival by the alternative High Church tradition of the
Ecclesia Anglicana. The ideal of ‘primitive Christianity’, stripped of the
decadent accretions of later centuries, had been populariscd by William Cave,
Vicar of Islington, in 1673. Five years later, under the guidance of Anthony
Horneck, a German who had become preacher at the Savoy, there was created
the first ‘religious society’. Appealing chiefly to young mcn, the religious
societies soon became the vehicle for spreading ‘primitive Christianity’
throughout the land. Members bound themselves to self-examination,
directed prayer, monthly communion, fasting and the quest for holiness.
Society meetings, normally weekly, were tightly controlled by clergymen,
excluded controversy over theology and church government and were
designed overall to ensure that the members should (as the model rules put it)
‘keep close to the Church of England’. By 1714, 27 per cent of London places
of worship in the Established Church received support from some religious
society.148 It was a body of this type that Wesley gathered round himself at
Oxford from 1729 onwards. Attracting the nickname The Holy Club’, it was
designed to nurture the religious attainments of young men through guided
reading, spiritual exercises and good works. Prison visiting, attendance on the
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 37

sick and help for the poor formed part of the traditional discipline of the
religious societies.149
The decoding of the diaries of Wesley and Benjamin Ingham, one of his
associates, is revealing a more complex organisation in this Oxford Methodism
than had previously been supposed. Wesley’s care group spawned several sub-
groups, which in turn created a number of other groups. The programme of
pursuing the Christian ideal not according to any system of theology but by
imitating the lives of Christlike pcople was evidently enjoying something of a
vogue among successive cohorts of undergraduates.150 Self-examination was
taken to an extreme. Members were encouraged to test themselves hourly on
various aspects of devotion and record their ratings on a scale from one (low)
to nine.151 Wesley carried forward the ascetic temper of the Holy Club into
the mature Methodism of the revival. His followers were exhorted to pursue a
regimen in exactly the manner of Horneck with a dedication to precise self-
scrutiny, works of charity and attendance on the means of grace.152
Methodists were to be found observing Lent and it was a standard practice to
fast before watch-night services.153 Furthermore, the existing religious
societies of the Church of England formed a reservoir of zealots in earnest for
their souls that the early evangelists could tap. Some societies went over
virtually en bloc to the Methodists or the Moravians. Half the Moravian
members in London in 1742 were believed to have come from the religious
societies.154 The revival owed an enormous debt to the mcthods and the
personnel of this set of institutions.
There was also a debt to the teaching of the High Church tradition. The
pursuit of holiness, Wesley’s grand aim, was grounded in a number of
esteemed devotional writers both ancient and modern. Foremost among them
was Jeremy Taylor, once chaplain to Archbishop Laud and Charles I and, after
the Restoration, a bishop in Ireland. His treatise on Holy Living and Dying
(1650–1) made an immediate impact on Wesley in 1725 at the age of twenty-
two. ‘lnstantly’, he recalls, ‘I resolved to dedicate all my life to God, all my
thoughts, and words, and actions, being thoroughly convinced, there was no
medium…’155 Taylor urged a Laudian form of devotion, at once strict and
sacramental. Wesley in his later Evangelical years adopted a rule of life based
on Taylor’s recommendations.156 A year after discovering Jeremy Taylor he
came on Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, the classic of fifteenth-
century picty. Although he felt à Kempis exaggcrates the need for
renunciation, the Imitation illuminated for him what he called ‘the religion of
the heart’.157 In the next couple of years two works by Wesley’s contemporary
William Law, his On Christian Perfection (1726) and A Serious Call to a
Devout and Holy Life (1728), convinced Wesley more than ever (as he put it)
of ‘the absolute impossibility of being half a Christian.158 It was Taylor, à
Kempis and Law who laid the foundation for the rigorism of the Holy Club.
Another strand of influence over Wesley, derived partly from Roman
Catholic authors and in some tension with the teaching on obedicnce to
38 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

constituted authority found in Taylor and Law, was the mystical element in
the Christian inheritance. Wesley’s mother Susanna valued the Pugna
Spiritualis of Lorenzo Scupoli, an Italian work, and The Life of God in the
Soul of Man (1677) by Henry Scougal of Aberdeen almost as highly as
Baxter.159 Growing up in this atmosphere, Wesley was naturally attracted to
John Norris, the last of the Cambridge Platonists, who had contrived to blend
intellectual analysis with mystical apprehension. He read fifteen works by
Norris in the period 1725–35, more than the number from any other
author.160 A range of continental mystics was known and absorbed by Wesley.
The most enduring mark was made by Jean Baptiste de Saint-Jure’s Holy Life
of Monsieur de Renty, a seventeenth-century French aristocrat of mystical
temperament who became Wesley’s most admired model of a Christian.161
After 1736 Wesley turned away from mysticism itself as too passive,
introspective and anti-institutional, but it continued to exercise a lifelong
fascination over his brother Charles.162 Certain eighteenth-century
Evangelicals were drawn back towards the mystical, especially the forms
propagated by Law in his later years, for the Evangelical and the mystic shared
a common attachment to experiencing the divine.163
The patristic and liturgical preoccupations of High Church scholarship had
less in common with the revival, yet they too played a part in preparing its
way. Wesley imbibed a fascination for eastern Orthodoxy that reinvigorated his
ideal of perfection at the fountainhead of monastic spirituality; and his zeal for
the early centuries of the church eventually drove him back to the Bible as a
uniquely authoritative account of primitive Christianity.164 Many an
individual Evangelical, especially among the clergy, had passed through a High
Church phase of some type. It had served, they would later have said, as a
schoolmaster to bring them to Christ.
A second symptom of discontinuity was the assimilation of influences from
continental Protestantism. The decisive impulse to the brothers Wesley came
from Luther: Charles was reading his commentary on Galatians and John was
listening to his preface to the letter to the Romans when they first came to
vital faith.165 Yet neither subsequently rated Luther very highly, so that
Lutherans of their own day came to be more important than the reformer. The
experience of the Protestants in the central European regions where the
Counter-Reformation had gained the upper hand was part of the context in
which revival was born. There were anxieties about the future of the
Protestant cause that encouraged a willingness to experiment with novel
religious methods. In Silesia in particular, Protestants retained fcw places of
public worship and so were forced back on informal techniques of open-air
prcaching and domestic meetings to sustain the faith. Again, in 1731, the
Protestants of Salzburg were expelled by Austrian troops and had to seek
refuge elsewhere. Charity sermons were preached on their behalf in London,
and John Wesley sailed in 1737 alongside a vessel carrying a party of them to
Georgia.166 Their ministers, whom Wesley consulted about their convictions,
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 39

were trained at Halle, which was the centre of the Lutheran movement that
most affected Evangelical origins: Pietism. Philip Spener had written in 1675
the manifesto of the movement, Pia Desideria, urging the need for
repentance, the new birth, putting faith into practice and close fellowship
among true believers.167 His disciple August Francke created at Halle a range
of institutions for embodying and propagating Spener’s vision. Chief among
them was the orphan house, then the biggest building in Europe, with a
medical dispensary attached. It was to inspire both Wesley and Whitefield to
erect their own orphan houses and Howel Harris to establish a community as
a centre of Christian influence at Trevecca. Francke printed Bibles and
spiritual reading in huge quantitics for dissemination in Germany and far
beyond to the south and east, and at Halle there were trained ministers to
carry the gospel even further.168 Under the patronage of the King of
Denmark, a mission was launchcd to India in 1705. Griffith Jones, the creator
of the Welsh circulating schools, and his patron Sir John Philipps, an
influential member of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, were
admirers of Francke who tried to imitate the missionary impetus of Halle in
their native Wales. These two, clergyman and layman, were the closest
approximation to Evangelicals in the Church of England before the revival.
Francke’s writings were to take their place in the spiritual biographies of
Whitefield and both Wesleys.169 Pietism had already achieved in Lutheranism
a great deal of what these men were to undertake in the English-speaking
world.
Even more decisive for the emergence of Evangelicalism were the
Moravians. Beginning as the followers of Jan Hus in Bohemia in the early
fifteenth century, this body, officially the Unitas Fratrum or Unity of the
Brethren, had become accepted as Protestants after the Reformation. Their
popular nickname was the result of their prorninence in Moravia until they
were harried into exile and decline by the advancing Counter-Reformation, A
party of refugees settled in 1722 at Herrnhut in Saxony on the estatc of Count
Nicholas von Zinzendorf, a man who had been touched by Pietism but now
identificd wholly with the Moravians. Under Zinzendorf s guidance they were
reorganised in 1727 as the Renewed Unity of the Brethren and became a
dynamic missionary force.170 Zinzendorf spread the message that true religion
must be a matter of experience, not of speculation. Each for himself must
accept the forgiveness made available by the Lamb of God sacrificed for sins.
The cross, faith, forgiveness and assurance were the keynotes. Intense
devotion, especially to the crucified Christ, was the result.171
Wesley encountered the Brethren on his missionary trip to Georgia. One of
their number, Peter Böhler, was his chief guide in the months following his
retum in 1738 that led to his own experience of forgiveness. For more than
two years Wesley was actually a member of a predominantly Moravian
fellowship in Fetter Lane. Even after his withdrawal there were many comings
and goings between the early Methodists and the Moravians, who developed
40 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

their own itinerant missionary work in England and Wales. There were
negotiations for reunion as late as 1785–6.172 The initial obstacle to combined
work was the common Moravian teaching on ‘stillness’, a denigration of
prayer, Bible-reading, church attendance, receiving the sacrament and good
works, in order ‘wholly to rely on the blood and wounds of the Lamb’.173 It
was an exaggeration of Luther’s insistence on faith alone as the instrument of
salvation. There were other peculiarities caused by the German ethos and
language of the movement, as when it was recorded that the unmarried sisters
held ‘a Heathen Love-Feast’—that is, a tea to encourage support for missions
to the heathen.174 Yet the Moravians had a special appeal for those seeking
‘primitive Christianity’: a threefold pattern of ministry, bishops, priests and
deacons, whose orders were recognised by the Archbishop of Canterbury in
1737; a firm discipline, a warm fellowship and an apostolic zeal for missions;
and, from 1746 at Fulneck in Yorkshire, and soon elsewhere, the community
life of Herrnhut imitated in England.175 Apart from a crucial element of their
teaching whose importance will be discussed shortly, the Moravians
transmitted a substantial legacy to the revival, especially in its Methodist
variety. Their practice of an ecclesiola in ecclesia (a tight-knit religious
fellowship within a broader church), their organisation in bands and their
hyrnn-singing were taken over by Wesley—although each was blended with
the inheritance of the religious societies. Perhaps the watch-night services and
conference of Methodism were imitated from the Moravians; this is certainly
true of the love-feast and the use of the lot for discerning the will of God,
though the latter practice was discontinued by Wesley after the early 1740s.176
Evangelicalism learned much from the Moravians.
The third of the striking symptoms of discontinuity was a new emphasis on
mission. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was rare to fmd a
Protestant divine commending the spread of the gospel beyond the bounds of
Christendom. Richard Baxter was most unusual among the Puritans in
expressing an eagerness for the conversion of the nations.177 There were
efforts during the Commonwealth to propagate the faith in ‘the dark corners
of the land’, which effectively meant Wales, the north and the south-west, and
subsequently certain Independents and Baptists engaged in itinerant
evangelism in their areas.178 But the evangelistic work of John Eliot among the
Iroquois Indians of Massachusetts became celebrated precisely because it was
exceptional. Protestant missionary effort was pitiably weak by comparison
with the Roman Catholic record.179 The Great Commission at the end of
Matthew’s gospel, ‘Go ye therefore, and teach all nations’, was given no
expository comment in the Geneva Bible that was widely used among English-
speaking Protestants of the seventeenth century.180 The text, it was supposed,
applied only to the early church. Cotton Mather, a leading Puritan of the New
World writing early in the eighteenth century, regretted the scandal of so
little having been done by the churches of the Reformation to spread the faith.181
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 41

The activism that, as we have seen, was an enduring hallmark of the

Evangelical movement stood in stark contrast. It was still believed, by
Jonathan Edwards for instance, that God exercises his sovereignty in men’s
salvation by bestowing the means of grace on one people but not on
another.182 Now, however, it was increasingly held that human beings could
be the appointed agents of bringing the gospel to unevangelised nations. We
know, wrote Edwards, ‘that it is God’s manner to make use of means in
carrying on his work in the world…’183 ‘Means’ was the key word signifying
the whole apparatus of human agency. Like Edwards, the Baptist Abraham
Booth argued in 1768 that such means were entirely legitimate in the
furtherance of the purposes of God.184 His co-religionist William Carey put
the case more strongly in 1792 in a work entitled An Enquiry into the
Obligation of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen.
Means were now held to be obligatory, for, as Carey contended, the Great
Commission is still binding on believers.185 The new breed of Evangelicals
practised what they preached. Edwards supported his friend David Brainerd in
a mission to the Indians and at the end of his life undertook the same work
himself.186 Carey established the Baptist Missionary Society, the first foreign
mission to spring from the revival, and by 1793 was pionecring its operations
in India.187 Mission was now held to be essential to Christianity.
The activism was at first most apparent among the Methodists. A Moravian
devotee of stillness reported to Zinzendorf in 1740 that Wesley was ‘resolved
to do all things himself…I will let our Saviour govern this whirlwind’.188
Wesley’s preachers felt a similar gusring impetus from their conversions.
‘Now the same spirit that witnessed my adoption’, according to one of them,
‘cried in me, night and day, “Spend and be spent for God!”’189 The dynamic
was soon equally evident among those Evangelicals who felt in conscience
bound to stick to their parish work. Apart from taking Sunday services,
Walker of Truro conducted prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays together with
burials and baptisms, visited the sick, directed his converts, spent every
evening from Monday to Friday speaking either publicly or privately and
occupied Saturday in preparing Sunday’s scrmon.190 Such men were far from
the normal image of an easy-going eighteenth-century parson with plenty of
time for diverting recreations and ample dinners. As the evangelistic impulse
came to dominate orthodox Dissent in the last two decades of the eighteenth
century it gave rise to a transformation of its organisation. Independents and
Baptists began to imitatc the Methodist itinerancy. In most English
counties ad hoc societies or county unions were created to evangelise the
villages.191 In Scotland the Relief Church led the way and the brothers
Haldane, Robert and James, with Christopher Anderson and others, followed
in despatching travelling preachers to the Highlands.192 Schemes for foreign
missions were likewise in the air. Wesley, after all, had travelled to Georgia
with the aim of evangelising the Indians even before his decisive experience of
1738. Yet in later life he discouraged missions to the heathen by Methodist
42 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

preachers on the grounds that there were more immediate prospects of success
at home. Consequently, no Wesleyan Missionary Society was set up until
1813. The Countess of Huntingdon toyed with the idea of a mission, again to
the Indians of Georgia, and there was a plan for sending men from the Church
of England to Bengal.193 But it was Carey, fired by Captain Cook’s account of
the peoples of the South Seas, who first brought a mission to birth. His example
roused others. In 1795 the London Missionary Society, undenominational at
first but increasingly an Independent body, was set up with the South Seas as
its chief target; in 1796, although the General Assembly of the Church of
Scotland rejected an Evangelical overture for the foundation of a missionary
society, interdenominational missionary bodies were founded in Edinburgh,
Glasgow and elsewhere; and in 1799 the Church Missionary Society was
established to spread the gospel on lines acceptable to the Church of
England.194 Overseas missions were to remain a permanent expression of the
energy that characterised the Evangelical movement.

THE DOCTRINE OF ASSURANCE

The three symptoms of discontinuity in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of
conservative Protestantism should not be seen in isolation from each other.
They are bound together by an underlying factor, a shift in the received
doctrine of assurance with all that it entailed. Those who pursued the High
Church qucst for holiness with single-minded devotion frequently felt a
nagging doubt. For all their self-discipline, were they to be numbered among
those fmaliy saved? Their efforts gave them no certainty; sometimes their
failures heightened their anxiety. So the novel assurance they discovered in
Evangelicalism was greeted with relief. Again, continental Protestantism
exercised its most decisive influence on the origins of Evangelicalism not in
the sphere of practice but in that of doctrine. The Moravians taught that
assurance is of the essence of faith. By embracing this principle for a while and
approximating to it throughout his life, Wesley was one of those responsible
for disseminating a newly enhanced doctrine of assurance.195 And the
dynamism of the Evangelical movement was possible only because its
adherents were assured in their faith. Without assurance, the priority for the
individual in earnest about salvation had to be its acquisition; with it, the
essential task was the propagation of the good news that others, too, could
know the joy of sins forgiven. All this is not to claim that assurance appeared
for the first time in the Evangelical Revival. On the contrary, as Professor
Rupp has pointed out, the doctrine was rooted ‘deep within the Puritan
tradition’.196 There was as much desire for confident knowledge of one’s own
salvation in the seventeenth century as in the eighteenth. But if there was a
common preoccupation with assurance, the content of the doctrine was
transformed. Whereas the Puritans had held that assurance is rare, late and
the fruit of struggle in the experience of believers, the Evangelicals believed it
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 43

to be general, normally given at conversion and the result of simple acceptance

of the gift of God. The consequence of the altered form of the doctrine was a
metamorphosis in the nature of popular Protestantism. There was a change in
pattems of piety, affecting devotional and practical life in all its departments.
The shift, in fact, was responsible for creating in Evangelicalism a new
movement and not merely a variation on themes heard since the Reformation.
For that reason it demands close scrutiny.
Calvinists had faced a problem. They believed in predestination in a strong
sense. God is sovereign in determining who should be saved. A favourite text,
Romans 8:30, teaches that ‘whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and
whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also
glorified’. God’s purpose in predestination would certainly be fulfilled.
Nobody chosen, called and justified by God could fall away so as not to share
in heavenly glory. Yet it frequently happened that men and women professing
to have become true Christians deserted the faith. Experience seemed to
suggest that justification was no guarantee that believers would persevere to
the end. The parable of the sower apparently supports this view by declaring
that some ‘receive the word with joy’ but ‘in time of temptation fall away’
(Luke 8:13). A solution to the dilemma was found by the Elizabethan Puritan
divine William Perkins in the doctrine of temporary faith. It was possible, he
held, for a person numbercd among the non-elect, those not chosen for
salvation, to possess faith for a time but then for it to pass away.197
Consequently, there was a doubt hanging over the faith of any individual. He
could not be confident that he was elect and would therefore be saved.
Ordinary Elizabethan Puritans experienced few difficulties in this area, for in
the sixteenth century the notion of temporary faith held by Perkins had not
yet been popularised.198 But Perkins and a host of seventeenth-century divines
in his wake insisted on its implications. A person, they urged, must question
whether or not his faith is permanent. Already, in the sixteenth century, it
had been mooted among Calvinists that saving faith does not necessarily
include assurance.199 Now it was taught that the lack of assurance is in some
ways an advantage. The ignorance of the believer about his future destiny
would drive him to scrutinise himself for signs of grace. He was told that he
should ‘rest not satisfied without a persuasion from the Spirit of Adoption
that God is your Father’.200 But self-examination was protracted. These
things’, wrote the Scot William Guthrie in his immensely popular The
Christian’s Great Interest (1659), ‘will keep a man in work all his days’.201
Confidence in one’s own salvation was the rare blessing of a mature faith. ‘No
Christian’, wrote Perkins, ‘attaineth to this full assurance at the first, but in
some continuance of time, after that for a long space he hath kept a good
conscience before God, and before men…’202 Many rnight not reach the
expcrience until after death.203 The developed Puritan view of the subject is
formalised in the Westminster Confession. Certainty of being in a state of
grace is attainable in this life. But there is a major reservation. ‘This infallible
44 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

assurance doth not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer
may wait long, and conflict with many difficulties before he be partaker of
it.’204
The difficulties were expccted to be substantial, for the Christian life was
conceived as a constant struggle. The conflict was partly with temptation. The
believer must flee from sin. But equally there was an obsession with doubt.
Perhaps the inclination to sin was itself a sign that God’s grace had not yet
been planted in the heart. The numerous Puritan works of casuistry were
designed to deal with precisely this fear. Thomas Brooks’s Precious Remedies
against Satan’s Devices (1669) enumerated among the diabolical methods for
kceping souls in ‘a sad, doubting, questioning, and uncomfortable condition’
the suggestion that ‘their graces are not true, but counterfeit…faith, is but
fancy’. The remedy was rigorous selfexamination. Brooks offcrs a checklist of
ten particulars for distinguishing between sanctifying and temporary grace.205
Perhaps it is no surprise that scrutiny according to so thorough a catalogue
merely served to intensify the terrors about the fate of his soul felt by William
Grimshaw in 1739, shortly before his conversion to an Evangelical faith.206
Yet Puritans were convinced that this introspective technique was the kernel of
the spiritual life. They appealed to the scriptural injunction to ‘give diligence
to make your calling and election sure’ (2 Peter 1:10). High on the lists of the
signs of grace—of which Baxter alone supplies at least four207—was the
evidence of works. The Reformation had decried all reliance on works as a
means of meriting salvation, but increasingly works were valued as an
indication of the reality of divine grace.208 To do good was a sign of
sanctification, the Spirit’s fruit in the life of the true believer. It was this
concern with works that, according to the sociological pioneer Max Weber,
drove Protestants to ‘worldly asceticism’, the disciplined lives in the secular
world that gave rise to capitalism.209 Certainly the attention paid to works
generated an imperative to godliness. The individual was called upon to
validate his faith by his works; but, finding his works to be imperfect, he was
driven back to reliance on God. The quest for assurance, together with its non-
attainment, created ‘the internal spiritual dynamic of puritan religion’.210 The
style of piety persisted into the eighteenth century wherever Puritan divines
continued in esteem. In 1716 John Willison, Minister of the South Church,
Dundee, urged self-examination on intcnding communicants. ‘I pity those poor
trembling, and doubting souls, who cannot attain to any light or clearness
about their condition’, he declares. ‘To such I would say, that you ought to
wait on God, and hold on in the way of duty to your lives’ end, and whatever
discouragements you may meet with therein, God in his own time will let you
know that your labour is not in vain.’211 A persistent phase of gloom was a
sign of true religion. Assurance was by no means the norm.
The doctrine among Evangelicals was far more robust. ‘I knew’ that I was
His child’, wrote Howel Harris, the emphasis being his own.212 ‘My God! I
know, I feel thee mine’, echoed Charles Wesley.213 His brother John, with
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 45

characteristic thoroughness, set off to Germany shortly after his experience of

24 May 1738 to investigate the authentic Moravian view of the matter at its
source in Herrnhut. His mentor Böhler had taught that a man cannot have
peace with God without knowing that hc has it. Wesley discovered at Herrnhut
that, although certain Moravian leaders concurred with Böhler, others,
including Zinzendorf and Michael Linner, the oldest church member, held
that assurance may come long after justification. More usually, however,
according to Linner, forgiveness and a full assurance of forgiveness come ‘in
onc and the same moment’.214 So Wesley returned from his visit believing that
assurance is not intrinsic to faith but a distinct gift;215 and yet that assurance is
the normal possession of the believer. This position he maintained for life,
though sometimes stressing the one side and sometimes the other.216 Thus the
first Methodist Conference of 1744 announced that no man can be justified
and not know it; yet the Conference of 1745 admitted that there may be cases
where a sense of God’s pardoning love is not a condition of his favour.217 We
preach assurance, explained Wesley in old age, ‘as a common privilege of the
children of God; but we do not enforce it, under the pain of damnation,
denounced on all who enjoy it not.’218 Other Evangelicals likewise taught that
assurance is the ‘common privilege of the children of God’, though the
Calvinists, believing in the perseverance of the saints, necessarily held that the
Christian is sure not only of his present state of grace but also of his future
share in glory. The sermons of Romaine and Hervey scemed to suggest there
is no true faith without assurance, and Grimshaw actually held this
opinion.219 Walker of Truro thought there was a risk in this direction of
identifying faith with feeling, and preferred to rest assurance on the objective
work of Christ.220 The intermediate view that prevailed in the Church of
England was that of Venn. Faith, he taught, must not be based on inward
feeling only. Yet real faith produces a clear and permanent sense of
dependence on Christ. ‘No one can possess it’, he contends, ‘without being
conscious he does so…’221 Later Evangelicals in the Church of England
admitted that the comforts of religion may sometimes be withdrawn, either by
God or by Satan.222 But the eclipse would be temporary and an awareness of
the favour of God would retum. ‘It is not reasonable…to suppose a man to
have the Spirit of God’, according to Joseph Milner, a lcading Evangelical
author, ‘if he have no evidence of it.’223 Assurance, in the teaching of the
fathers of the Evangelical movement, is the normal experience of the believer
from the time of his conversion onwards.
Ordinary Christians touched by the revival enjoyed a new style of piety.
Converts seeing the glory of Christian truths, according to Jonathan Edwards,
could no more doubt them than doubt the existence of a blazing sun in a clear
sky.224 There was no need for a plunge into anxious discouragement, Abraham
Booth declared, for the Christian has as much warrant to believe as the hungry
to feed. Accordingly, for Booth, wrestling was no longer with fears but with
sins alone.225 It is a dangerous error, asserted an early Methodist preacher, to
46 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

suppose that a man may be accepted by God and yet be unaware of it. To be a
real member of Christ’s Church is to feel Christ in us.’226 Doubt over one’s
standing with God could arise only when the sense of pardon was not
incontestably clear.227 For the most part it was banished from Christian
experience. There was still self-examination with a view to discovering the
marks of a real change made by the Spirit of God.228 Now, however, the
process was, as it were, non-recurrent: it was expected that the verdict would
be favourable. If ever there appeared gloom or fear that an individual had no
part in Christ, he would be able ‘to prove his [sic] self a believer, by proving
his whole dependence for salvation is on Christ alone’.229 The difference from
traditional teaching was unmistakable. A Methodist preacher exhorted a
Dissenter not to rest till he was sure that Christ had died for him. ‘I hate to
hear people talk of being assured of any such thing’, was the retort.230
Another Methodist, Thomas Payne, had believed. ‘But’, he recounts, ‘I had a
Calvinian library, which I often read. And hence I imbibed that miserable
notion, that it was absolutely necessary every believer should come down from
the mount. Hence I was persuaded that…I must doubt of my justification,
which those wretched casuists lay down as one mark of sincerity. For want of
knowing better, I listened to these, till I lost the witness of the Spirit.’231 The
age of such Puritan casuists was passing.
There was an important consequence of their supersession by new teaching.
In the devotional life there was bubbling confidence. ‘O! with what joy’,
declared Whitefield, ‘—joy unspeakable—even joy that was full of and big
with glory, was my soul filled, when…a full assurance of faith broke in upon
my disconsolate soul!’232 The radiant spirit was most apparent in adversity.
During the battle of Fontenoy in 1745 wounded Methodist troops rejoiced to
be going to Jesus; a preacher with both his legs taken off by a cannon ball was
laid across a cannon to die, but as long as he could speak was praising God;
another who suffered injuries to both arms announced that he was as happy as
he could be out of paradise and survived to report to Wesley that it was ‘one
of the sweetest days I ever enjoyed’.233 Such striking exuberance was rooted in
a settled inclination to be happy. Sins were certainly forgiven; there could be
delight in fellowship with Jesus. There were, of course, exceptions among
Evangelicals. The hymn-writer William Cowper suffered from inveterate
melancholy.234 But in his case the disposition was a result of anxieties that
sometimes took him over the boundary of insanity. In general, Evangelicals
turned from a spirituality that expected bouts of despondency to a calmer,
sunnier devotional life.
The turning point between the two attitudes to assurance can be located
precisely. It occurreii in the work of Jonathan Edwards at Northampton,
Massachusetts, during the revival of 1734–5. As he was at pains to stress,
there was no novelty in the content of his teaching. His sermons consisted of
‘the common plain Protestant doctrine of the Reformation’.235 Nor was the
phenomenon of revival new. There had been five similar harvests of souls at
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 47

Northampton under his father-in-law and predecessor as minister, Solomon

Stoddard, and another four or five under his own father at East Windsor.236
What was fresh was the pastoral guidance Edwards offered to converts. Those
who claimed to have undergone a decisive spiritual experience were
interviewed by the minister. If he was satisfied that they had truly been
converted, he assured them that they were real Christians. Received Puritan
practice would have been to encourage them to wrestle through their own
doubts and fears over a protracted period. Consequently, Edwards was sharply
criticised for his departure from customary ways. He had two justifications.
Guidance was essential to avoid the sheer distress that some would otherwise
unnecessarily suffer; and the confident avowals of conversion that resulted
from his practice stimulated an awakening of spiritual concern in others.237
Edwards recounts the effect on those who had previously doubted if they were
among the elect:

Grace in many persons, through this ignorance of their state, and their
looking on themselves still as the objects of God’s displeasure, has been
likc the trees in winter, or like seed in the spring suppressed under a
hard clod of earth. Many in such cases have laboured to their utmost to
divert their minds from the pleasing and joyful views they have had, and
to suppress those consolations and gracious affections that arose
thereupon. And when it has once come into their minds to inquire,
whether or not this was true grace, they have been much afraid lest they
should be deceived with common illuminations and flashes of affection,
and eternally undone with a falsc hope. But when they have been better
instructed, and so brought to allow of hope, this has awakened the
gracious disposition of their hearts into life and vigour as the warm
beams of the sun in spring have quickened the seeds and productions of
the earth.238

The better instruction Edwards subsequently systematised in his book The

Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741). He sets out a
checklist of signs that conversion had been valid. Through it others in the
Reformed tradition learned how to hearten new believers rather than throw
them back into painful introspection. Edwards created an Evangelical
framework for interpreting Christian experience.
How could he be so bold? It was because he was far more confident than his
Puritan forefathers of the powers of human knowledge. A person, he held, can
receive a firm understanding of spiritual things through a ‘new sense’ which is
as real as sight or smell. Unbelievers might languish in ignorance of God, but
at conversion the Holy Spirit originates ‘a new inward perception or sensation
of their minds’.239 Assured knowledge of God is therefore possible. This was
the capacity he encouraged among those touched by revival. Edwards’s
attention to epistemology, the theory of knowledge, was typical of his age.
48 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

The emerging Enlightenment was generating an imperativc to enquire into

the nature of things. The philosophically inclined were reflecting in particular
on how human beings acquire knowledge. John Locke was primarily
responsible. In his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) he denies
that the mind possesses innate ideas. Nobody, he teaches, is born with
automatic knowledge, even of morality of God. All we know comes through
the five senses from the external world. Experience is the source of all
understanding.240 Traditionalists were scandalised that the powers of the mind
were held to be so circumscribed. Others felt they could not dispute Locke’s
premisses. But, while accepting his axiom that knowledge comes from
experience, they set about explaining what human beings do know in terms that
modified Locke’s analysis. Thus, for instance, Francis Hutcheson taught that
human beings possess a moral sense for discerning right and wrong.241
Edwards’s ‘new sense’ is analogous to Hutcheson’s moral sense. Responding to
the Lockean spirit of the age, he was postulating a capacity for religious
knowledge acceptable to philosophers of his era.
The determining influence of Locke over Edwards has in the past been
exaggerated.242 He absorbed a variety of other recent authors including the
Platonist Henry More, the scientist Isaac Newton and the French philosopher
Nicolas Malebranche. Edwards’s teaching in moral philosophy, logic and
metaphysics differs from Locke’s.243 Yet it remains true that the debt to Locke
in certain specific fields was substantial.244 And there is a palpably
Enlightenment tone about Edwards’s form of expression. Although he is
prepared to describe the soul’s awareness of God in traditional theological
language as a spiritual infusion or in phraseology derived from the Platonic
tradition as illumination, he is generally eager to translate the older idiom into
up-to-date terminology.245 The new sense, he says, is ‘what some
metaphysicians call a new simple idea’.246 Because philosophical discourse in
his day was shaped so largely by Locke, Edwards inevitably speaks as his
disciple. For Locke, knowledge derived from the senses is certain. Edwards was
simply extending the rangc of senses available to a human being when he put
the capacity to embrace the gospel in that category. Once seen in that light,
knowledge of God is also indubitable. It is something not to be brooded over in
solitude but to be joyously affirmed. Edwards derived his confidence about
salvation from the atmosphere of the English Enlightenment.
The case of Wesley is similar. The issue of whether we can be certain of
being in a state of salvation was raised for him by Jeremy Taylor in 1725. He
found temporary solace in the belief that ‘our sincere endeavours’ guarantee us
present acceptance by God.247 Preoccupation with the question increased in the
1730s. Sincerity, good works and the contempt of the world248 remained the
rather sandy foundation for his hope of salvation. Responsible as he was for
instruction in aspects of philosophy and diligent as he was in his reading,
Wesley necessarily formulated his concern for assurance in intellcctual terms.
How is God known? A variety of sources was available. His favourite John
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 49

Norris, for example, offered a theory of knowledge drawn from a blending of

Platonic and Cartesian sources.249 But Wesley, like Edwards, was affected by
Locke. He read the philosopher in 1725 and gave the Essay concerning Human
Understanding more extensive study in 1727 and 1732.250 He later appealed
explicitly to Locke’s authority, propagated his writings and, while disagreeing
on points like his low valuation of logic, concurred in the thrust of his
argument about the processes of gaining knowledge.251 Certainly Wesley
agreed with Locke in rejecting innate ideas. Infants brought up without
religious instruction, he contended, would have no more knowledge of God
than the beasts of the field.252 Understanding is the fruit of experience.
Probably the largest debt in the field of epistemology was owed by Wesley
to Peter Browne, Bishop of Cork and Ross, whose work The Procedure,
Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding (1728) Wesley abridged during
three months in 1730 and followed closely in his own philosophical
compendium in later life. Browne transposed Locke’s Essay into a theological
key. He also rejected Locke’s doctrine that ideas may come from reflection,
that is, the operation of the human mind on itself. The sole source of ideas is
direct sensation of the external world. It followed, according to Browne, that
knowledge of God, who as spirit is not part of the material external world,
could only be indirect, the result of reasoning about experience.253 The early
influence of Browne upon Wesley was twofold. On the one hand, he was
encouraged to adopt as his enduring point of view the appeal to experience
shared by Browne with Locke. On the other, the tendency of Browne’s
teaching was to distrust any claims to immediate experience of God. But that
was a position in which Wesley could not bear to abide. He craved assurance.
‘I want that faith’, he wrote in his journal early in 1738, ‘which none can have
without knowing that he hath it. ’254 He was driven towards seeking direct
experience of God.
It was the Moravians who taught him that it is possible. One of them in
Georgia enquired whether Wesley had the witness within.255 Peter Böhler
insisted that to know God he must lay aside ‘that philosophy’, no doubt
Wesley’s supposition, buttressed by Browne, that claims to direct contact with
God are a symptom of enthusiastn—the eighteenth-century term for
fanaticism.256 Experience showed Wesley in 1738 that the pardon of God may
be felt. It confirmed the conviction drawn from empiricist writers that
knowledge is a matter of sensation. He characteristically describes faith in
almost identical terms to Edwards. It is ‘a supernatural inward sense, or
sight’.257 Faith in the spiritual world is what sight is in the natural. ‘It is
necessary’, he writes, ‘that you have the hearing ear, and the seeing eye,
emphatically so called; that you have a new class of senses opened in your
soul…’258 Like other Enlightenment thinkers, Wesley teaches that the only
valid source of knowledge is what is experienced by the senses, but he adds, as
it were, a sixth sense. He agrees with Hutcheson, for instance, that there must
be a moral sense for human beings to have awareness of right and wrong; but
50 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

he diverges from Hutcheson in claiming that it is not natural to man. It is

imparted as a supernatural gift of God.259 The basis of Wesley’s doctrine was
still Browne’s epistcmology. Although he now held that direct knowledge of
God is possible, it comes, as Browne claimed, through sensation alone: this he
termed the ‘Direct Witness’. Confirmation of the knowledge can be derived
from reasoning about experiencc, the evaluation of the marks of a true
believer: this he called the ‘Witness of Our Own Spirit’. The two witnesses
agree, but the first, because it is the work of the Spirit of God, is
incontrovertible. Wesley was charged by critics with holding ‘perceptible
inspiration’, the belief that the Spirit communicates his will infallibly to an
individual. Although Wesley rebutted the charge by pointing to the need to
evaluate the evidences of grace, it remains true that he propagated a strong
view of the certainty instilled in the believer by the Spirit.260 It often seemed
the greatest novelty about Methodism. At Leeds, uproar was caused by a
convert claiming to know that his sins were forgiven.261 When Charles Wesley
preachcd that ‘we might know our sins forgiven in this life, yea, this very
moment’, an early Methodist recalled, ‘it seemed to me new doctrine, and I
could not believe it at all’.262 The Methodist teaching about assurance was new
because it was part and parcel of the rising Enlightenment. It was a
consequence of Wesley’s application of an empiricist philosophy to religious
experience.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

To recognise the alignment of Edwards, Wesley and the revival with the
Enlightenment has not been customary. The whole movement of eighteenth-
century thought has been depicted as irreligious in tendency. Voltaire’s
assault on revealed and organised religion has been taken to be typical.263 The
trends within the Enlightenment, on this view, necessarily acted as a solvent
of Christian orthodoxy. Reason was banishing superstition. The new prestige
of science associated with the name of Isaac Newton inspired the ambition to
investigatc all aspects of the world with the aim of dispassionately establishing
truth. As wisdom spread from the enlightened elite, it was believed, tyranny
in church and state would be put down and humanity would progress towards
a happier future. It is generally acknowledged that the temper of the age
affected religion in Britain. Deists put themselves beyond the bounds of the
churches by rejecting the very notion of revealed religion. Their slogan was the
title of one of the chief works produced by this school of thought, Christianity
not Mysterious (1695) by John Toland.264 Within the Church of England the
Latitudinarians attempted to meet the Deists on their own ground of reason.
The clergyman cast by many in the role of Locke’s successor as England’s
leading philosopher, Samuel Clarke, gained a Cambridge DD by arguing that
‘no article of the Christian faith is opposed to right reason’.265 Clarke’s Scripture
Doctrine of the Trinity (1712), though not endorsing unorthodoxy, contended
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 51

that received Trinitarian doctrine had no explicit biblical sanction either. He

persuaded many that Trinitarianism was a matter of abstruse metaphysics
alien to the spirit of primitive Christianity.266 John Simson, professor of
divinity at Glasgow, taking his signal from Clarke, adopted a similarly liberal
—though biblicist—position in theology.267 Later in the century the Church
of Scotland was to produce a crop of distinguished scholars who stood in the
vanguard of the Scottish Enlightenment.268 The intellectual leaders of English
Dissent, nourished in their academies, were similarly swayed by the secular
learning of the day. Unrestrained by subscription to articles or a confession of
faith, they moved less equivocally towards the Socinian heresy that denies the
divinity of Christ. Joseph Priestley, chemist as well as theologian, was perhaps
the most eminent of these ‘rational Dissenters’.269 The effect of the
Enlightenment on the churches was undoubtedly to liberalise thought. The
Evangelicals, by contrast, were wedded to orthodoxy. It is hardly surprising
that they should be supposed to have been exempt firom the influence of the
Enlightenment.
The revival, furthermore, has often been treated as a reaction against the
tide of rationalism.270 Certainly, Evangelicals treated reliance on reason as a
grand cause of spiritual deadness. The gospel, according to the Baptist
Abraham Booth, is ‘contrary to every scheme of salvation which human
reason suggests’.271 Evangelicals in Scotland dismissed those influenced by
Hutcheson as ‘paganized’ divines.272 Learning could appear a dangerous snare.
To one early Methodist the study of Latin and other scholarly languages was
firmly set down as an alternative to Christian devotedness.273 To another, the
pursuit of education seemed the high road to heresy. ‘I hoped my
acquaintance with authors on most subjects might be of some use to me’, he
reflected; ‘but I was greatly mistaken…If I attempted any such thing, I was
instantly filled with my old deistical ideas again.’274 Accordingly some seemed
to turn from reason to ernotion. One Methodist became ‘the weeping
prophet’, another ‘the damnation preacher,275 Conversion, according to an ex-
Methodist, could be a matter of psychological self-indulgence. ‘At last’, he
recalled, ‘by singing and repeating enthusiastic amorous hymns, and
ignorantly applying particular texts of scripture, I got my imagination to the
proper pitch, and thus I was born again in an instant…’276 Wesley himself
appeared to encourage this withdrawal frotn the world of the intellect to the
dispositions of the heart. In the preface to his Sermons of 1746 he famously
remarked, ‘I design plain truth for plain people’. He therefore avoided, he
continued, philosophical speculations, intricate reasonings, show of learning,
difficult words, technical terms and an educated manner of speaking.277
Wesley can plausibly be represented as no more than a popular propagandist—
or, if anything more, then as a ‘believer in dreams, visions, immediate
revelations, miraculous cures, witchcraft, and many other ridiculous
absurdities, as appears from many passages of his Journal, to the great disgrace
of his abilities and learning…’278 This contemporary estimate has often been
52 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

echoed subsequently. It is easy to depict Wesley the pedlar of quack medical

cures such as marigold flowers for the plague279 as credulous, uncritical, a
champion of the ancients against the modems. Voltaire seemed to him a
‘consummate coxcomb’.280 Wesley, together with the whole revival
movement, can appear to be devoted to resisting the Enlightenment’s march
of mind.
This was not, however, Wesley’s own estimate of the matter. ‘It is a
fundamental principle with us’, he claimed, ‘that to renounce reason is to
renounce religion, that religion and reason go hand in hand, and that all
irrational religion is false religion. ’281 On 11 June 1738, less than a month
after the turning point of his life, he preached before the University of Oxford
on ‘Salvation by Faith’. There was no ranting or hectoring, but instead logical
order, careful argument and a nearly total absence of exhortation.282
Increasingly, Wesley is being recognised as an Enlightenment thinker in his
own right.283 The sceptical Enlightenment of the continent he certainly
rejected, but the whole cast of his mind was moulded by the new intellectual
currents of his time. Supremely he was an empiricist. He drew out the
implicarions of his position in many fields alongside the area of epistemology
that has already been examined. His beliefs in religious tolerance, freewill and
anti-slavery have rightly been identified as Enlightenment affinities.284 So
was his antipathy to ‘enthusiasm’. He spelt out his attitude in a letter to Thomas
Maxfield, an early preacher who eventually led a sccession from Methodism
that laid extravagant claims to special revelations. ‘I dislike something that has
the appearance of enthusiasm’, wrote Wesley: ‘overvaluing feelings and
inward impressions: mistaking the mere work of imagination for the voice of
the Spirit: expecting the end without the means, and undervaluing reason,
knowledge and wisdom in general.’285 Likewise Wesley’s loyal followers could
appeal to ‘rational, scriptural evidence’; favour a rational religion that
deprecated visions and revelations; incur censure from Moravians for being ‘so
full of law and reason’; and accord the highest praise to a society by calling its
members ‘sincere, peaceable, humble, and rational Christians’.286
Other Evangelicals spoke in similar vein. Joseph Milner defended Adam of
Winteringham as a teacher of divinity properly called rational; Walker of
Truro advised his young converts to take a course in logic.287 The Independent
Thomas Gibbons published verse entitled, ‘A Religious, the only Reasonable
Life; or Reason and Religion the Same’; the Baptist Abraham Booth
condemned Socinianism as ‘unphilosophical’.288 Preachers on the Evangelical
fringe could lapse into rationalist heresies that drifted towards
Unitarianism.289 Seceders from Wesley’s connexion in north-east Lancashire
actually formed a Methodist Unitarian movement.290 Among the great
majority who retained their orthodoxy, Evangelical religion was rarely chosen
as an escape-route from the fearful illumination of modern thought. Only in
upper social circles did a number of people, swayed by Latitudinarianism or
Deism, begin to doubt the evidences of Christianity before embracing the
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 53

gospel.291 Rather, Evangelicalism was accepted along with many characteristic

traits of the Enlightenment. Its emergence was itself an expression of the age
of reason.
To recognise the early phase of Evangelicalism as an adaptation of the
Protestant tradition through contact with the Enlightenment helps explain its
timing, a problem that has baffled many commentators. Why should the
revival have begun in the 1730s? The great French historian Elie Halévy
offered the fullest proposed answer in 1906. The fusion of traditional
Protestant piety with High Church loyalties, the achievement of the Wesleys,
was possible, according to Halévy, because of the continental influencc that led
to their conversion and the Welsh example that stimulated field preaching.
But an essenrial third condition explaining the warm reception given to the
message was an industrial crisis in 1739 creating popular unrest that was
directed into religious channels.292 The problem with this hypothesis (apart
from doubts about the extent of the alleged 1739 crisis) is that the economic
conditions of the industrialising parts of England where distress prevailed
were totally different from those in the backwoods of New England; and yet
there, too, sustained revivalism broke out.
It is far more convincing to hold the high cultural environment to be the
essential novel ingredient. Between 1727 and 1760 Locke’s Essay appeared in
nine separate English editions and four collected editions. Although it would
be an error to identify the English Enlightenment with the philosophical
influence of John Locke alone, these figures form one index of the rising
ascendancy of a ncw idiom in the intellectual world. Before this period, Locke
had been championed only by forward spirits like Joseph Addison in 1711;293
from about 1730 an empiricism owing a great debt to Newton as well as Locke
became the prevailing philosophical temper. In the 1730s both George
Berkeley, with his Theory of Vision (1733), and David Hume, with his
Treatise of Human Nature (1739), were pressing empiricist thinking towards
more drastic conclusions. Classicism had made corresponding progress in the
arts. Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism of 1711 had been a radical summons
to rigorous observance of classical literary models. By the 1730s his Essay on
Man (1733–4), conforming to the ideals he had announced two decades before,
enjoyed a great vogue. The Enlightenment approach, whether in matter or
manner, was becoming more general, at least among the educated. The
Lockean mode in political theory may havc been less prominent during the
eighteenth century than was once supposed,294 but in philosophy, and
especially in epistemology, a fresh era was opening. It is hardly surprising that
men immersed in the learning of the age such as Edwards and Wesley should
recast Protestant thought in the new style and set about persuading others to
do the same. The timing of their remoulding of the doctrine of assurance
according to empiricist canons has to be understood as a result of the spread of
a new cultural mood.
54 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

This analysis is confirmed by the attitude of those in the Reformed tradition

who most welcomed the revival. They too were men of the Enlightenment.
Although he held reservations about Whitefield, the Independent divine Isaac
Watts was eager to promote a renewal of religious vitality. In 1737 he
arranged the first publication of Edwards’s Narrative of the revival in his
parish; he had already begun corresponding with Walker of Truro following
the clergyman’s conversion.295 Watts held Locke to be ‘the ingenious Director
of modern Philosophy’ and many truths of his Essay to be ‘worthy of Letters
of Gold’.296 Although he rejected Locke’s opinion that matter may think and
even his repudiation of innate ideas, Watts followed his method in its
essentials.297 The norion of relying on a’clear and distinct idea’, for example, is
drawn direct from Locke.298 He was persuaded by Locke to embrace universal
religious toleration.299 Watts shares the characteristic ideals of the avant-
garde of his day: moderation, a concern for utility and an admiration for the
classical in art. The obscure he could not abide, whether in philosophy or
literature. His achievement in the modification of the Psalms for public
worship he succinctly described as ‘dark expressions enlightened’.300 Likewise
his friend Philip Doddridge made constant appeal to Locke in his lectures to
students for the Dissenting ministry.301 Doddridge was opposed to
subscription to any creed for the sake of free enquiry; he used English rather
than Latin as the medium of instruction for the sake of clarity.302 The great
seventeenth-century Puritan divines John Goodwin and John Owen he
dismissed with the comment that he was not very fond of ‘such mysterious
men’.303 Doddridge can appear a conundrum for having both favoured the
revival and trained ministers who carried freedom of thought to new lengths.
The conundrum is resolved, however, when it is recognised that Doddridge
was as much an Enlightenment thinker as a Calvinist theologian. The
‘enlightened’ tone of his teaching could lead students either towards
unorthodoxy or towards gospel preaching.—for both were rooted in the
Enlightenment. Men training for the ministry in contemporary Edinburgh,
where Locke’s Essay appeared in the curriculum in the 1730s, could similarly
emerge either as Moderate literati or as Evangelical leaders like John Erskine
and John Witherspoon.304 When the Enlightenment impinged on Calvinism,
the result was not necessarily a doctrinal downgrade. From the 1730s onwards
it could generate the new light of the gospel.

RESISTANCE TO ENLIGHTENMENT
Since the adoption of revivalism was bound up with a whole new cultural
mood, it is no wonder that it encountered deep-rooted resistance in the
Reformed tradition. In America, as is well known, opponents of Whitefield in
Presbyterianism denounced the new-fangled ways so vehemently that a
schism occurred. The Old Side wished to reject candidates for the ministry
infected by Whitefield’s indiscriminate zeal or his neglect of traditional points
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 55

of church order and, significantly, accused the New Side of holding over-rigid
views of assurance.305 Similar happenings in Scotland have been less noticed.
The Seceders who had left the Established Church over patronage in the 1730s
welcomed Whitefield to Scotland in 1741. But they were not content with
hearing plain preaching of the gospel. They wished, as Whitefield complained,
‘to set me right about the matter of church government and the solemn league
and covenant’. The evangelist would not turn rigid Presbyterian or confine
himself to Secession pulpits. He was ‘determined to go out into the highways
and hedges’.306 The Seceders rated ecclesiastical punctilio above gospel
outreach in the manner of the seventeenth century. Their ethos, even in the
later eighteenth century, was that of the Puritans. They maintained
terminological exactitude in doctrine, intense self-scrutiny in devotion.
Conscious of their own imperfections and depravities, they frequently fcll into
doubts about their salvation. ‘Hence they were often sorrowful, when they
might have been glad…’307 Yet there were signs of change. Some of their
ministers began to pay less attention to approved patterns of piety from the
past and turned to their own independent researches. New light, as it was
actually called, was dawning. Both branches of the Secession, the Anti-Burghers
and the Burghers, split as a result of the New Light controversies of the 1790s.
The occasion for debate was whether ministers were still bound to hold,
following the Westminster Confession, that the secular ruler had power over
the church and that the solemn league and covenant taken by Scots in the
seventeenth century was still binding. But the underlying issue was whether
they should embrace Enlightenment attitudes. Knowledge, held the
progressives, advances over time. Consciences should not be tied to earlier
statements of faith. The Westminster Confession might err. They claimed
that ‘no human composition…can be supposed to contain a full and
comprehensive view of divine truth; so…we are not precluded from
embracing…any further light which may afterward arise frotn the word of
God…’308 They were rejecting, like Doddridge, the principle of subscription.
The ranks of the ‘New Lichts’ swelled in the early nineteenth century, for
they were active in evangelism. But a dwindling minority of Seceders
continued in the traditional ways, faithful to their archaic testimony as the
‘Auld Lichts’, long into the nineteenth century.
The introspective piety of pre-Evangelical days lingered on elsewhere. Its
strongest bastion was the Highlands of Scotland. On their fringe, at Rhu in
Dumbartonshire, McLeod Campbell discovered this apparently joyless form of
religion in the 1820s.309 It was to survive into the late twentieth century in the
Gaelic-speaking territory of the north-western coastline and the Western Isles.
In the mid-nineteenth century, its heartland was still Ross-shire. Lowlanders
criticised Highland religion for its expectation of a fictitiously high standard of
spiritual experience. The Christian Highlander, they say, is employed in
determining whether he is a true servant of Christ or not, when hc should be
proving that he is so by being “up and doing”.’3l0 Conversely, the Highlander
56 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

was astonished at the ease with which the Lowlander adopted the language of
assurance: ‘he thinks the confidence with which his brother speaks cannot
always be in his heart, and if it is not there, he cannot, he thinks, be right in
using words which express it’.311 Highland religion seemed marked by gloom
and an extraordinary inhibition about receiving communion until the believer
attained the rare confidence that hc was a child of God.
Among the Calvinist Dissenters south of the border the old ways tended to
pass away more rapidly. In 1814 a traditionalist was larnenting their loss of
‘peculiarity of character’ through ‘laxity of principle, and indiscriminate zeal
which distinguished the Methodists’.312 Yet there was resistance among them
to itinerancy as an unwarranted instance of being ‘up and doing’.313 In Wales
‘the strange fire’ of Evangelical preaching was held at bay by Baptists until
late in the eighteenth century.314 And in East Anglia tensions in the Norfolk
and Suffolk Baptist Association culminated in schism in 1830.315 The issues
were closely related to those in America which in the 1820s spread an anti-
mission movement among Baptists.316 The evangelistic imperative was felt to
be less important than testimony to the truth. For Baptists this meant an
insistence on believer’s baptism as a condition of communion. William
Gadsby, minister at Manchester from 1805 to 1844, provided a rallying-point
for those who adhered to this principle, the Strict Baptists.317 As the
nineteenth century wore on, this minority of Calvinistic Baptists emerged as a
separate denomination. Their piety remained modelled on pre-Enlightenment
patterns. The title of the biography of their minister at Trowbridge who died
in 1857 is eloquent of an earlier world: Mercies of a Covenant God, being an
Account of Some of the Lord’s Dealings in Providence and Grace with John
Warburton. It is replete with accounts of soul-searching anxieties, ‘Where is
your good hope now, that you have talked about?…O how I sank down into
the very pit of despair, and could only whisper, “Let not the pit shut her
mouth upon me”.’318 Frowning on decadent times, the Strict Baptists maintain
their witness down to the present, chiefly in the rural nooks of the south-
east.319 In the 1970s their publications were on sale in the Free Presbyterian
book-room in Inverness. Although the Strict Baptists were touched by later
Evangelical influcnces, the core of the religion they shared with the most
traditional of Highland Christians was still the Puritan divinity of the
seventeenth century.

ENLIGHTENMENT ASSUMPTIONS
The Evangelical movement, however, was permeated by Enlightenment
influences. Its leaders would casually refer to the opinion of Locke as settling
an issue or to his Essay as providing the best account of the human mind.320
The empiricist method learned by the eighteenth century from Locke became
equally habitual. Thomas Scott appealed to the joint authority of ‘the
Scriptures and universal experience and observation’; Henry Venn put
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 57

together experience and scripture, in that order.321 Edwards rejected all views
built upon ‘what our reason would lead us to suppose without, or before
experience’.322 This was to adopt the inductive method of science. Isaac
Newton had shown the eighteenth century the power of scientific
investigation to discover truth. Why should its methods not be applied
elsewhere? Hypotheses should be put to the test of the facts. Moving from the
particular to the general, the investigator could establish general laws. Thus
Wesley was rductantly forced to admit that errors about the Trinity could
accompany real piety when he came across an instance of it because, he
declared, ‘I cannot argue against matter of fact’.323 Consequently, there was in
the eighteenth century and long into the nineteenth no hint of a clash between
Evangelical religion and science. ‘We can make no progress in any science’,
wrote Venn, ‘till we understand its first principles. In religion it is the same,
that science, in which we all are most deeply interested. ’324 Admittedly a few
Evangelicals in the Church of England were attracted by Hutchinsonianism, a
system of belief rejecting Newton’s views on the ground that the Bible
contains a complete system of natural philosophy. T.T.Biddulph of Bristol held
this position, as did William Romaine in his earlier years. But it is significant
that Romaine was weaned from Hutchinsonianism as his Evangelical
convictions deepened and Walker of Truro tried to guard Oxford
undergraduates against imbibing the system.325 Far more common was a warm
appreciation of Newton, such as that of Joseph Milner.326 It is the context of a
fascination with science that explains much of Wesley’s apparent credulity. He
actually published a book on electricity, a field then on the borders of
knowledge, as a curative agency.327 It was impossible to distinguish in advance
between promising and unpromising areas for exploration, but investigation,
he held, is essential. Experiments, he urged, were the foundation of success in
medicine.328 In the light of these assumptions, it is not surprising that
Evangelicals frequently spoke of true Christianity as ‘experimental religion’.
It must be tried by experience. Wesley called his 1780 hymn book ‘a
little body of experimental and practical divinity’.329 Edwards summed up the
attitudes of his co-religionists. ‘As that is called experimental philosophy’, he
wrote, ‘which brings opinions and notions to the test of fact; so is that
properly called experimental religion, which brings religious affections and
intentions, to the like test.’330 Evangelicals held Newtonian method in high
esteem.
A number of consequences flowed from this position. Early Evangelicals,
like their educated contemporaries, had an anti-metaphysical bent. In the past,
it was generally hcld, philosophers, especially of the scholastic camp, had spent
their time spinning cobwebs of discourse that obscured reality. Now
investigarion of the facts made antiquated theories superfluous. Thus John
Witherspoon, the organiser of the Evangelical party in the Church of Scotland
who crossed the Atlantic to become Principal of Princeton, found there that
teaching was ‘tinctured with the dry and unedifying forms of the schools…He
58 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

introduced into their philosophy all the most liberal and modern
improvements of Europe’.331 Venn, by concentration on observation and
scripture, avoided ‘all abstract reasoning about the nature of the soul’.332
Josiah Conder, a learned and highly orthodox Congregationalist of the early
nineteenth century, preferred plain scripture language to what he called the
‘vain philosophy’ of the Westminster Assembly’s catechism, by which he
meant Puritan technical terms like ‘effectual calling’.333 ‘Keep off
metaphysical ground’, declared Richard Cecil, probably the leading thinker
among Evangelicals in the Church of England at the turn of the nineteenth
century.334 A version to imposing theoretical structures on scripture probably
grew over time, culminating in Simeon’s dictum, ‘Be Bible Christians, not
system Christians’.335 Systems were not only distant from the facts; they were
also bound to generate differences of opinion. Enlightenment Evangelicals
were eager to avoid disputation. Biddulph steered clear of ‘controverted points
of doctrine’.336 One of two grand criticisms made by Wesiey against the
Puritans was that ‘they drag in controversy on every occasion, nay, without
any occasion or pretence at all’.337 His desire for peace was echoed by an early
follower. ‘I have always been averse to disputing’, wrote John Mason. ‘I
remember how much I suffered thereby in the beginning of my turning to
God. And I believe it would be happy if all the children of God would strive to
agree as far as possible…’338 Methodism, it has been pointed out, was
remarkably free in its earlier years from intemal doctrinal controversy.339 It
was a symptom of a principled preference for harmony over exact theological
definition.
The devotion to science, experiment and investigation nevertheless did not
lead to a rejection of all philosophy. On the contrary, it generated its own
philosophical stance. Like their contemporaries, Evangelicals saw a law-
governed universe around them. Order had been established by the Creator.
The natural world furnished material for praise. Thus once at the seaside
William Wilberforce broke out into exuberant delight that God, far from
erecting a granite wall to prevent incursions by the sea, appointed its bounds
by means of mere grains of sand.340 Natural theology was important. There
were abundant evidences in the world of God’s design. The chief role of
reason, according to the Evangelical leaders as much as their orthodox
contemporaries, was to weigh up the evidences in the way popularised by
William Paley.341 Reason must conclude in favour of the existence of a God
who could reveal his will. This was no mere hope: James Lackington, a
bookseller who deserted Methodism for freethinking, was restored to his faith
by a battery of books on the evidences.342 In the early nineteenth century the
task of welding this scientific apologetic into the body of Christian theology
was triumphantly achieved by Thomas Chalmers.343
Chalmers built on a class of writing increasingly regarded as the foundation
of Evangelical thinking, the works of the Scottish commonsense school of
philosophers. The founder of the school, Thomas Reid, argued in his Inquiry
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 59

into the Human Mind (1764) that human beings perceive not ideas, as Locke
had supposed, but the real world direct. This realism, or common-sense view,
allowed that certain basic axioms of thought are grasped intuitively.344 It
enabled Evangelicals to express in a fresh way their belief in the accessibility
of God. Defenders of the validity of conversions at Cambuslang anticipated an
aspect of Reid in asserting the trustworthiness of the senses.345 In fact, John
Witherspoon, the organiser of Scottish Evangelicals before his departure to
Princeton, claimed to have done battle for the philosophy of common sense for
a decade before Reid published his treatise.346 Certainly Witherspoon
expounded the views of Reid and his circle, ‘some late writers’, once he
reached America: ‘there are certain first principles, or dictates of common
sense, which are either simple perceptions, or seen with intuitive evidence.
These are the foundation of all reasoning, and without them to reason is a
word without a meaning. They can no more be proved than you can prove an
axiom in mathematical science…’347 Like Reid, Witherspoon uses this premiss
as a ground for repudiating unwelcome elements in the thought of Locke and
Hume. He regards Locke’s objections to innate ideas as ‘wholly frivolous’:
human beings do possess, for example, a moral sense. Again, Hume had
contended that, since all we know is in the form of ideas, there can be no
guarantee that our ideas correspond to reality. His scepticism extended to
questioning the very existence of causation. Witherspoon insists on the
contrary that the condition of all understanding of the world is the belief that
everything must have a cause.348 The conviction that the pattern of cause and
effect, the scientist’s natural assumption, underlies all phenomena was to
pervade Evangelical thinking long into the nineteenth century and, in many
quarters, beyond that.349 The academic citadel of such an approach was
Scotland, but, as common-sense philosophy spread through the propagandism
of Dugald Stewart and the Edinburgh reviewers, it increasingly became the
standard supposition of the educated Englishman as well.350 Evangelicals were
integrating their faith with the rising philosophy of the later Enlightenment.
They were in harmony with the spirit of the age.

OPTIMISM
Likewise Evangelicals reflected the later Enlightenment in their optimistic
temper. The eighteenth century, and especially its second half,
characteristically believed that humanity enjoyed great potential for
improvement. It was the later eighteenth century that witnessed the
emergence of the idea of progress, the conviction that human beings are
steadily becoming wiser and therefore better.351 The Arminianism of the
Methodists can be seen as an equivalent ‘optimism of grace’, a theology that
does not limit the possibility of Christian renewal to the narrow company of
the elect.352 There was also greater hope about the human condition among
the Reformed who learned from Edwards to trust their quickened religious
60 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

affections. One of Edwards’s American disciples calculated that the proportion

of the lost to the saved would eventually be in the ratio of 1 to 17,456 1/3.353
All Evangelicals were animated in their outreach by the expectation that
salvation was widely available.
They were also convinced that God wished human beings to be happy.
‘Holiness is happiness’ has been seen as the fundamental principle of Wesley’s
theology.354 Many of his followers behaved as though it were. ‘I was still
happy’, wrote one; ‘but found a strong desire to be more holy that I might be
more happy. ’355 But identification of happiness as the grand goal of humanity,
a typical theme of more liberal moralists such as Hutcheson, was shared by
Calvinists as well as Methodists. Maclaurin wrote a ‘Philosophical Inquiry into
the Nature of Happiness’; Venn contended that the children of God ‘know
more pleasure than any people on earth’; Wilberforce described happiness as
the end of civil society.356 Yet Methodists went further in embracing the
perfectibility of man. Wesley disagreed with those enlightened thinkers who
supposed that all human beings might attain perfection. For Wesley, only the
regenerate possess the essential qualification. Experience taught him,
however, as he explains in his Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766),
that believers may progress to a state in which they are free from all known
sin. No aspect of Methodist teaching gave more openings for ridicule, There
was much glee when a ‘perfect’ sister was detected stealing coal from a
‘sanctified’ brother.357 Wesley sorrowfully noted such cases, concluding that
the state could readily be lost, but he nevertheless insisted on its reality.358 He
criticised the Puritans for holding so low and imperfect a view of
sanctification.359 In this area, Calvinist Evangelicals remained loyal to their
Puritan forefathers. Their arguments could nevertheless be cast in a new
form. Walker of Truro, for instance, laid down that perfect holiness is
necessary for perfect happiness; the perfect can be a work of God alone; it
cannot be expected in this life; there can be progress only in the perfccting of
the believer.360 Even in rejecting Wesley’s teaching, Walker commended
progress towards the goal of happiness. As much as the Utilitarian school,
Evangelicals elevated happiness into the primary place among human
objectives. In seeing vital Christianity as the way to achieve it, they were
differing from the Utilitarians about means, not ends.
The basis for optimism was the doctrine of providence. God, Evangelicals
believed, is in active control of the world. Confidence in his government
formed a larger part of their creed than might be supposed. For Biddulph,
providence was pre-eminent among doctrines.361 John Newton’s hymns are
full of the theme. There is no such thing as accident’, he declared.362 A
distinction was normally drawn between general providence, the overall
superintendence of the earth by its Creator, and particular providences, direct
divine interventions in the course of evcnts. Particular providences were of
two kinds, displaying either the judgement or the mercy of God. In the first
category were put such incidents as when the town clerk of Wincanton, after
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 61

reading the Riot Act to disperse the hearers of a Methodist preacher,

immediately started to bleed copiously frotn the nostrils, became a lunatic and
soon afterwards died.363 Judgement was expected on nations as well as
individuals if they persisted in corporate sins like tolerating the slave trade.364
Likewise mercies could be individual or national. Thomas Scott believed that
God ‘always steps in just at the crisis…I never prayed for money but I got
it’.365 One Methodist was brought to conviction of sin by deliverance from an
overturning wagon; another saw divine mercy in a narrow escape from the fall
of a building; another, in being preserved from the collapse of a roof in a
Cornish tin mine.366 The Eclectic Society of London ministers spent a meeting
in 1801 cataloguing ‘the signal interpositions of providence in favour of
Britain during the late war’. The death of the Czar of Russia shortly after he
had turned from opposing to supporting France was cited as one of many
wonderful examples.367
If particular providences were sometimes dwelt on at the Eclectic, however,
there was also a tendency to caution. In accordance with the canons of
scientific investigation, alleged instances of special divine interference contrary
to the course of nature should be treated with ‘the most rigid suspicion’. The
providential government was normally maintained by ‘second causes’, that is,
through the regular course of events.368 The very order of the Newtonian
universe, in history as well as nature, glorified its divine architect. ‘God has so
assigned to things their general tendencies’, according to Wilberforce, ‘and
established such an order of causes and effects, as…loudly proclaim the
principles of his moral government…’369 If Evangelicals were sometimes more
forward than their contemporaries in detecting the hand of God in particular
events, their general attitude to providence was close to that taught by central
eighteenth-century thinkers such as Joseph Butler and Edmund Burke.370 All
alike saw the historical process as subject to the divine sovereignty. That was
why all alike could look with confidence to the future.
Optimism was expressed in doctrinal form through belief in a millennium.
In the eighteenth century millenarianism was no fanatical aberration of the
social outcast but a common preoccupation of the intellectual. Expectation of a
future state of unblemished happiness on earth was widely held by
philosophically inclined theologians of the time.371 Many Evangelicals shared
the belief. It appeared to be founded on the statement in Revelation, chapter
20, that Satan would be bound for a thousand years. It drew extra support
from passages predicting a future outpouring of the Spirit in the latter days.
The particular version of the belief held in the Enlightenment era was uniformly
postmillennial: the second coming of Christ, that is to say, would not take
place until after the millennium. There would therefore be no sharp break
frorn preccding history. Rather, the millennium would be the result of
gradual improvement—a belief that shaded into the idea of progress.
Evangelicals identified the future epoch as a time of peace and glory for the
church that would follow on persistent mission.
62 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

They could draw on earlier Reformed writers who cherished a similar

hope.372 The outbreak of revival, however, quickened expectations of the
imrninent approach of the latter days. Erskine expressed such anticipations in
his work on Cambuslang, The Signs of the Times Consider’d (1742).373 More
famously Edwards announced the same, but added, in a work of 1743, the
speculation that the millennium would come to birth in America. The new
world’, he wrote, ‘is probably now discovered, that the new and most glorious
state of God’s church on earth might commence there…’374 Perhaps more
congenial to British readers was his subsequent argument, in An Humble
Attempt (1747), that unfulfilled prophecy is an incentive to prayer.375 This
work, influcntial in Britain after its republication in 1784, did much to foster
millennial expectations. Its editor, the Baptist John Sutcliff, nevertheless
expressed the hope that if a reader held different views of prophecy he would
not withhold prayer for revival.376 Doddridge had rejected the very notion of a
millennium; Erskine’s biographer excused him for his apocalyptic guesswork
on the score of youth; and Conder, writing in 1838, treated millenarianism as
an aberration.377 It is clear that the Evangelical world was far from unanimous
on the matter. Yet William Carey, explicitly appealing to Edwards, held that
no fulfilment of prophecy would intervene before the conversion of the
heathen that would usher in the millennium.378 Similar expectations
surrounded the foundation of the London Missionary Society.379 John Venn,
son of Henry, told the Eclectic Society that a future period of peace and glory
for the church is clearly predicted in scripture. Scott and Cecil concurred.380 A
Scottish Secession Presbytery minuted in 1787 its anticipation of ‘the iminent
[sic] glory of the latter days’.381 Thomas Chalmers wrote of ‘that universal
reign of truth and of righteousness which is coming’.382 The postmillennial
theory was evidently widespread. Evangelicals shared high hopes for the
future with their contemporaries.

MODERATE CALVINISM
The substance of Reformed doctrine was also remodelled under
Enlightenment influence. Apart from Methodists, General Baptists and a few
avowedly Arminian clergy, some of the other Evangelical Anglicans, especially
by the start of the nineteenth century, were beginning to disclaim Calvinist
tenets.383 The remainder of the Evangelical world, however, was professedly
Calvinist. Yet there was also a certain reserve in their allegiance. Edwards was
content to be called a Calvinist, ‘for distinction’s sake: though I utterly
disclaim a dependence on Calvin’.384 The influential Baptist Andrew Fuller
similarly declared, ‘I do not believe every thing that Calvin taught, nor any
thing because he taught it’.385 John Erskine was Calvinistic in doctrine, but his
version, according to his biographer, was ‘not the vulgar Calvinism, which
exhausts itself on intricate and mysterious dogmas’.386 In 1808 an Evangelical
clergyman claimed to have heard only one sermon on predestination in
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 63

twenty years.387 ‘Calvinism’, according to John Newton, ‘should be, in our

general religious instructions, like a lump of sugar in a cup of tea; all should taste
of it, but it should not be met with in a separate form.’388 This diffuse doctrinal
system was sometimes labelled ‘moderate Calvinism.’389 In its refusal to
subordinate free inquiry to the authority of one man, in its repudiation of
mysterious dogma, in its very moderation, it was a typical product of the
eighteenth century.
This was supremely true of its moralistic tone. Because Evangelicals
preached salvation by faith, they could on occasion be heard teaching that
obedience to the divine law is humanly impossible or dismissing
misrepresentations of Christianity as a ‘mere system of ethics’.390 A small
nutnber like Romaine so exalted faith that they seemed to depreciate law.
Romaine was said to have made many antinomians—that is, to have
propagated the view that the believer is not bound by the moral law.391 This was
the central charge thrown in the face of Evangelicals as a whole by their
critics. They were condemned for subverting morality, at least at the
theoretical level. But it was a judgement wide of the mark in nearly every case.
With the possible exccption of Romaine and a few others, Evangelicals urged
only that obedience to the law will not avail for salvation unless preceded by
faith. ‘Christ the lawgiver’, declares Venn, ‘will always speak in vain, without
Christ the Saviour is first known.’392 Venn’s Complete Duty of Man insists that
faith is essential if the law is to be obeyed. Equally, however, it teaches that
the law does apply to the believer.393 Hence Evangelicals concentrated on
ethical themes. Venn dwells on family duties. Of Erskine’s publishcd sermons
it was noted that sound morality occupied by far the greatest part.394 All true
faith, according to a central plank of Scott’s teaching, ‘must and will prove
itself by its fruits’.395 The summons to holiness was constantly heard in the
Evangelical pulpit. A preoccupation with moral instruction was quite as
characteristic of Evangelicals as of other theological parties of the period.
Evangelical Calvinism was also moderate in that it rejected stronger views
of God’s control of human destiny. Evangelicals were not fatalists. Human
beings, they emphatically taught, are responsible agents. Edwards supplied the
intellectual tools for their approach in his treatise on Freedom of the Will
(1754). He distinguishes between the natural necessity of human actions,
which he rejects, and their moral necessity, which he commends. He means
that human beings are not compelled by God to behave contrary to their wills.
Rather, the freedom they possess to follow their wills is compatible with their
actions being determined by preceding conditions. Free acts are not forced,
though they are caused. This was to contend that human beings are part of an
ordered universe, but to hold that they are nevertheless responsible for what
they do.396 Edwards was reinterpreting the sovereignty of God as an
expression of the law of cause and effect. He was echoed in England by Scott,
according to whom divine sovereignty is ‘in perfect consistency with…free
agency and accountableness’.397 Hence human beings, not God, are responsible
64 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

for their own damnation. Scott laid down, in the words of his biographer, ‘that
nonc fail of being saved…except by their own fault’.398 Evangelicals generally
repudiated the traditional Calvinist doctrine of reprobation, that God had
destined certain souls to hell. Instead human beings were considered guilty of
causing their own perdition by failing to respond to the gospel.399
A cardinal principle of the Evangelical scheme was ‘duty faith’. ‘lt is the
duty of men to believe’, declared William Goode at the Eclectic.400 Debate
between Calvinists touched by enlightened thought and those who clung to
older forms oftcn revolved round whether believing in Christ can be
considered a moral obligarion. It was the so-called ‘modem question’. The
controversy first arose among Northamptonshire Independents in the late
1730s. It drew in John Gill, the Baptist systematic theologian, on the side of the
traditionalists, while Doddridge supported the promoters of ‘modern’
thought.401 Strict Baptists continued to repudiate duty faith in the following
century.402 The issue proved the dividing line between Evangelicals and
unreconstructed Calvinists partly because it was highly practical. If believing
was an obligation, preachers could press it on whole congregations. If it was
not, they could merely describe it in the hope that God would rouse certain
predetermined hearers to faith. Those on the modern side had a rationale for
urgent evangelism, the so-called invitation system.403 The logic of Evangelical
activism was founded on the doctrine of duty faith. It was most systematically
expounded by Andrew Fuller, the Baptist theologian who put his convictions
into practice by becoming the first secretary of the Baptist Missionary
Society. Fuller’s The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation (1785) is the classic
statement of eighteenth-century Evangelical Calvinism. But the inspiration
for Fuller’s thinking can be traced back to Edwards, and especially his
formulation of the distinction between moral and natural necessity. 404 Edward
Williams, the Independents’ equivalent of Fuller, owed the same debt to
Edwards; Milner refers to Edwards’s ‘masterly treatise on Free-will’; and in
Scotland Chalmers declared, ‘My Theology is that of Jonathan Edwards’.405
There can be no doubt that Edwards was the chief architect of the theological
structures erected by Evangelicals in the Reformed tradition. That was
sufficient to ensure that they were built on Enlightenment foundations.

PRAGMATISM
The spirit of the age—flexible, tolerant, utilitarian—affected Evangelicals as
much in practice as in thought. Field preaching, an activity that lay near the
heart of the revival, was an embodiment of the pragmatic temper. If people
would not come to church, they must be won for Christ in the open air.
Wesley was content to flout parish boundaries for the sake of souls. His
justification was the effectiveness of open-air preaching in attracting large
numbers, inducing conviction of sin and bringing about conversions.406 His
utilitarian approach to religious practice helps explain why Wesley quotes
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 65

Proverbs and Ecclesiastes more than any other biblical books.407 The same
temper informed other Evangelicals. Typical was Charles Simeon’s attitude to
church buildings. Having acquired the living of Cheltenham in 1817, he set
about planning a new church. It must be severely functional, like a Methodist
chapel rather than a traditional parish church. In the style of Bentham’s
Panopticon, it was to be cheap and there were to be no obstaclcs to clear vision
such as pillars. Supremely it was designed for preaching. Old churches, he
wrote, were not built to preach in; ‘and after the experience we have had of
them it is folly & madness to raise for preaching any further edifices after
their model’.408
Likewise the priorities of the gospel dictated the deployment of manpower.
Although the most rigid of Evangelical churchmen remonstrated with Wesley
on the matter,409 the existence of Methodism depended on the use of
preachers who were layrnen. Their employment in church work became a
hallmark of Evangelicals in the Church of England, so that their creation in
1836, the Church Pastoral Aid Society, was intended (to the disgust of High
Churchmen) to support lay parish workers as much as additional parish
clergy.410 In the Church of Scotland, Chalmers’s ministry was notable for the
revival of the lay office of deacon;411 and in English Dissent laymen were sent
out in large numbers as preachers, either voluntary or salaried.412 Justification
for female preaching was expressed in terms of gospel pragmatism. ‘If persons
who exercise in the ministry are of good report’, wrote the Primitive
Methodist leader Hugh Bourne with particular reference to women, ‘and the
Lord owns their labours by turning sinners to righteousness, we do not think
it our duty to endeavour to hinder them…’413 It was an argument from
success characteristic of Evangelicals in their Enlightenment era.
The relegation of principle relative to pragmatism was evident in church
order. Methodism, as some of its nineteenth-century defenders delighted to
insist, was totally flexible on this subject.414 Wesley and his adjutants initially
had ‘no plan at all’.415 He approved of bishops, but could see no reason for
restricting certain powers to their office and so was prepared, in 1784, to
ordain presbyters for America himself.416 The Plan of Pacification of 1795 that
settled connexional practice after Wesley’s death was an avowed compromise
between contesting parties.417 Above all, Methodists did not have to be
Christians. Admission as full class members was open to all who sought the
forgiveness of sins and not just to those already converted. Thus a preacher
could report 38 new members of a group of classes at the same time as 23
additions ‘to the church of the living God’.418 There was no correspondence
between joining the Methodist organisation and entering the true church. The
organisation was merely an environment suitable for gaining converts.
A similar utilitarian spirit modified ecclesiastical order among Dissenters,
whose raison d’être had originally been the creation of church structures of
pristine purity. The New Connexion of General Baptists could not
contemplate merger with the Old partly because the traditionalists insisted on
66 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

the imposition of hands at baptism and the obligation of abstaining from

blood.419 For the Evangelicals of the New Connexion these were matters of no
importance. Particular Baptists shifted towards opening the Lord’s Table to
those not baptised as believers when Evangelicalism moderated their views.420
Likewise, in the ecclesiastical strife of Scotland over patronage in the later
eighteenth century, the Evangelicals of the Popular party, unlike their
Moderate opponents, thought little of the letter of church law.421 In England
churchmen were prepared to co-operate with Dissenters. ‘ln this day of
darkness and licentiousness’, according to Walker of Truro, ‘it becomes all the
friends of the Gospel to bear with one another; and while they differ in
opinion and denomination, to unite together in heart and endeavour for the
support of the common cause.’422 Although it has recently been pointed out
that modern denominations were themselves the fruit of the revival,
essentially agencies to promote evangelism,423 it is nevertheless true that what
Whitefield called a ‘catholic spirit’424 was generated among Evangelicals. This
was perhaps most true in the late 1790s when home mission was at its most
vigorous. The interdenorninational temper led to the establishment of a
variety of organisations for joint endeavour, including the London Missionary
Society, which drew supporters from many denominations in the early years,
and the British and Foreign Bible Society, an enduring monument to the
possibilities of co-operation.425 Such bodies exemplified an abandonment of
exclusive denominationalism, a certain practical empiricism.

LITERATURE
The Enlightenment mood affected the taste of Evangelicals. It is a mistake to
suppose that they shunned literature. Theatrical performances they did
deplore as tending to demoralise, but many of them enjoyed reading selected
dramatic works in the privacy of their own homes. Fiction, a recent art form,
was sometimes suspect, although Wesley abridged a novel for publication.
Almost the whole Evangelical world read poetry.426 Even among Dissenters
there was an elite devoted to literature. The Pattisson family of Witham in
Essex eagerly discussed the latest publications in the years round 1800.427
After ordination to the ministry of the Church of Scotland in 1742, according
to his biographer, John Gillies’s ‘fondness for literary amusements still
continued’.428 Taste was formed by the classics. Gillies could quote appositely
(and ‘sometimes with pleasantry and humour’) from Horace and Virgil;
Horace was likewise Wesley’s favourite.429 The Baptist divine Robert Hall
declared’ that we should gain nothing by neglecting the unrivalled
productions of genius left us by the ancients, but a deterioration of taste…’430
Hence classical canons of literary decorum prevailed. ‘“What is it”, asked
Wesley, “that constitutes a good style? ”Perspicuity and purity, propriety,
strength, and easiness, joined together.’431 Wesley commended Swift, with his
ability to wield language like a rapier, as a model for imitation.432 Swift’s
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 67

favourite genre, satire, was indulged in by Evangelicals, for were there not
classical precedents? The most telling published assault on the Moderates in
the Church of Scotland, John Witherspoon’s Ecclesiastical Characteristics
(1753), was no reasoned argument, but rather an unrestrained ridiculing of
their legalistic zeal for church discipline.433 Charles Wesley incorporated
satirical sallies against Calvinism in many of his hymns.434 It was all entirely
in accordance with the temper of an age that regarded ridicule as the test of
truth. Protestantism had passed through a Baroque phase but had emerged, in
its Evangelical form, in the Augustan atmosphere of the Enlightenment.
There is a host of other symptoms. The prolix scholarship of the earlier era
was no longer congenial. Although John Wesley prepared for the press his
father’s discursive Studies in the Book of job (1735), he later commented that
it ‘certainly contains immense Learning, but of a kind which I do not
admire’.435 The number of headings in Independent sermons plummeted from
the twenties or thirties to two or three.436 Erotic themes, common in the
religious verse of the Metaphysical school and still present in Watts, were
eliminated by Charles Wesley and censured by his brother.437 The
Evangelicals were deeply imbued with the classicism of Pope. Thus, when
their Unitarian friend Crabb Robinson tried to interest the Pattissons of
Witham in Kant and Wordsworth, they resolutely adhered to a preference for
Locke and Pope.438 Reading as much as thinking was conditioned by the
Enlightenment.
The Augustan tone is evident in the greatest literary achievement of the
revival, the hymnody of Charles Wesley. Because his hymns express
feeling in common vocabulary, they have sometimes been classified as
anticipations of the Romantic era. The content and the manner, however, both
bear testimony to their being characteristic expressions of Augustanism.439 The
themes are often the standard ones of the classical lyric poet. There is, for
example, material on melancholy and pastoral retirement.440 Because content
is primarily dictated by Christian purpose, however, the manner is where the
spirit of the age is most obvious. Classical metrical forms are drawn from near
contemporaries. Dryden, Pope and Prior are the models for diction, and
Cowley, the pioneer of classical correctness in verse, is admired.441 While also
esteeming poets of more traditional idiom such as Milton and Young, Charles
Wesley is therefore a disciple of the avant-garde of the litcrary
Enlightenment in its displacement of the Baroque. Emotion is present, but
always carefully controlled, as in his meditations on the passion of Christ. The
hymns are didactic, for their aim is to transmit doctrine to their singers. Yet
this quality is as much a feature of the age as a consequence of their purpose.
The language is clear, precise and succinct. Latin-derived words are
strategically placed to embody a depth of meaning in a short space. In one line
profundity can be mingled with paradox: ‘Impassive He suffers, immortal He
dies’.442 John Wesley supplied the most apt comment on his brother’s verse in
his preface to the 1780 Collection of Hymns for Methodist use: ‘Here are
68 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

(allow me to say) both the purity, the strength, and the elegance of the English
language—and at the same time the utmost simplicity and plainness, suited to
every capacity’.443 It was a fair statement of the Augustan ideal.
Hymns were part of a vasteducational campaign undertaken by the
Wesleys. As much as the circle around The Edinburgh Review, they aimed for
the diffusion of useful knowledge. ‘Reading Christians’, according to John
Wesley, ‘will be knowing Christians.’444 He designed The Christian Library
(1749–55) in fifty volumes to convey practical divinity to his followers. It
consisted of a range of spiritual classics, many of them abridged by the editor.
In conformity with his canons of taste, Wesley believed in brevity: ‘if Angels
were to write books’, he remarked, ‘we should have very few Folios’.445
Conciseness would increase circulation. His preachers dutifully absorbed the
series, and in the 1820s there still existed sufficient demand to call for the reprint
of one of the volumes every two months.446 From 1778 Wesley issued the
monthly Arminian Magazine to encourage the reading habit. By his death its
monthly circulation was about 7,000.447 One Methodist father presented each
of his children with a copy of the magazine bound in calf.448 Wesley tried to
maintain a tight control over ideas circulating in the connexion. No preacher,
on pain of expulsion, was to go into print without his approval, or, after 1781,
without his correction.449 ‘There are thousands in this society’, wrote a critic
in 1795, ‘who will never read anything besides the Bible, and books published
by Mr Wesley.’450 All preachers were to carry a stock of his writings to sell or
give away; they must spend at least five hours a day in study; they were to
ride with a slack rein so that, in imitation of Wesley himself, they could read
on horseback; and when staying in a household above an hour, they should
take out a book to read as a good example.451 Wesley expected high standards
of his men. In 1764 he read through the first edition of his work on
philosophy with the London preachers.452 Through the efforts of the
preachers, through class mcetings and reading circles, learning spread among
the rank and file of his followers. Because they wasted little time but regularly
heard sermons, poor Methodists, it was said, possessed far more knowledge
than the poor in general.453
What was systematically organised in Methodism was pursued ad hoc in
other branches of Evangelicalism. Yet a zest for understanding the faith, often
nourished on libraries in church or chapel, did much to foster
selfimprovement. Dissenting colleges modelled on Trevecca multiplied, and
their products, though rarely distinguished academically, at least imbibed a
respect for knowledge.454 From 1783 the Sunday School movement expanded
rapidly, bringing basic instruction to thousands.455 Tracts were distributed in
huge quantities. From 1799 there existed the Religious Tract Society for their
production.456 In 1841 alone the Methodist Book Room sold 1,326,049 of
them.457 Evangelical religion was a force dedicated to the advance of education.
The imperative of spreading Bible knowledge demanded it. But the fulfilment
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 69

of religious duty was entirely in harmony with the goal of eighteenth-century

progressive thinkers: the enlightenment of the masses.

HUMANITARIANISM
The Evangelical education enterprise has often been seen as a masked attempt
at social control. The bulk of the population, growing in numbers and entering
a phase of rapid social change induced by industrialisation, had to be kept in its
place. Evangelical teaching was a suitable tool. Especially in the wake of the
French Revolution, submission to the existing order was given a divine
sanction.458 A variant of the argument is the thesis of Ford K. Brown that
Evangelicals with Wilberforce at their head were concerned to seize control of
church and state in order to seek power through enforcing their own values on
the narion at large.459 It is true that the ‘reformation of manners’ was an
Evangelical preoccupation. Wilberforce and his circle secured in 1787 a royal
proclamation against crime and public immorality and formed a Proclamation
Society to prod backward magistrates into enforcing it.460 But this was not
primarily designed to enhance the power of the rulers. Significantly, the
measure came before the French Revolution had broken out. It was an
expression of Evangelical hostility to sin coupled with a pragmatic
preparedness to employ state power, as much as private exhortation or pulpit
admonition, to do battle with it. Wilberforce’s friend Hannah More composed
a series of tracts in the 1790s that were intended to repress revolutionary
tendencies and were circulated at government expense. Village Politics (1792),
the first in the series, presents the homely counsel of Jack Anvil, the village
blacksmith, to live contentedly in a well-ordered England under the wise
dispensations of providence. But if Hannah More insisted on the duties of the
poor, she had already written on the obligations of their superiors. In
Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great (1788) she had
castigated the gentry for neglect of their paternalist role.461 Like many others
in the eighteenth century, Evangelicals put the emphasis in social teaching on
reciprocal duties, not exclusively on passive acceptance of their lot by the
worse off.
Traditionalist they were, by and large, but Evangelicals believed in a
conscientious performance of traditional responsibilities. With the growth of
their influence in the following century, a much higher proportion of the
gentry resided on their estates in order to take a personal interest in their
tenants. It has been suggested that Evangelicalism is a cause and greater
residence the effect.462 Likewise ministers of religion were roused to greater
zeal in the performance of their duties. Although in Scotland the custom of
visiting the flock had been generally maintained, in England, as the clergy rose
in income and social status during the eighteenth century, mixing with their
inferiors became less expected of them. The hunting, shooting and fishing
parson was a common type. It was the Evangelical movement that prompted
70 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

the clergy to greater diligence, especially in cottage visiting.463 Stirring the

elite in church and state to care for the poor may have had the effect of
reinforcing the social order, but its primary purpose was to ensure that the
privileged took a humane interest in the welfare, secular and spiritual, of those
committed to their charge.
Philanthropy was actively promoted by Evangelicals from the beginning of
the movement. Wesley’s generosity was legendary. He would scatter coins to
beggars, he waded through snow in old age to raise money for the relief of the
poor and hc died worth virtually nothing because his considerable income from
publications was given away.464 Evangelicalism as a whole taught that good
works are a fundamental element of Christian duty.465 There was continuity
between traditional teaching on concern for the poor, as expressed for instance
in the religious societies of the Church of England, and the charitable work of
Evangelicals. What the revival added was its characteristic zeal. There was a
proliferation of local schemes for doing good. Wesley encouraged his followers
to visit the sick, going in pairs.466 The Calvinistic Methodist London
Tabernacle ran a workshop for a while and later an employment exchange.467
Perhaps most strikingly, there were the orphan houses. Halle provided the
model. Both Whitefield and Wesley lavished their care on similar institutions,
iri Georgia and Newcastle respectively. Whitefield expended enormous energy
on planning, organising, supporting and defending his orphanage. ‘I called it
Bethesda’, he wrote, ‘that is, the House of Mercy; for I hope many acts of
mercy will be shewn there…’468 The Evangelical impulse was to give rise to an
empire of philanthropy in the nineteenth century,469 but already before the
eighteenth was over almsgiving was becoming systematically organised.
Methodism gave rise to a number of Strangers’ Friend Societies. The first
existed in London by 1784. ‘A few poor men’, according to Wesley, ’…agreed
to pay each a penny a week in order to relieve strangers who had no habitation
—no clothes—no food—no friends. They met once a week, and assigned to
each his share of the work for the ensuing week; to discover proper objects
(who, indeed, were easily found); and to relieve them according to their several
necessities.’470 Such charitable work can hardly be attributed to the
Enlightenment. It was the spontaneous expression of a Christian movement.
Yet it was entirely in harmony with the spirit of an age that set benevolence
among its highest values.
On the other hand, the greatest example of Evangelical humanitarianism,
the anti-slavery campaign, was undoubtedly the fruit of the Enlightenment.
Anti-slavery was not intrinsic to Evangelicalism: some of the stoutest
defenders of slavery in the American South were preachers of the gospel.471 It
was the tide of opinion running against slavery among the philosophical
luminaries of the eighteenth century that prepared the way for British
abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the extinction of the institution in
British dominions under an act of 1833. Benevolence, happiness and liberty,
three leading principles of the time, all created a presumption in favour of
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 71

abolition. Unless they had been thoroughly imbued with these values
themselves, Evangelicals would not have taken up the cause. As it was,
however, Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, overwhelmingly though not
exclusively Evangelicals of the Church of England, dedicated themselves to the
elimination of what, with other progressive thinkers, they condemned out of
hand. What Evangelicals brought to the campaign was not a fresh theoretical
perspective but the dedication that compelled them to act.472
The ending of the slave trade did not come about (as was once held) because
it had ceased to be profitable to Britain. Evangelicals were by no means pawns
in the hands of economic interests.473 There is nevertheless a tendency in
contemporary historiography to play down the Evangelical contribution to
anti-slavery. It is true that other groups took important parts. The Quakers,
only beginning to be touched by Evangelical religion, supplied money,
manpower and ideas, moving into action before the Evangelicals.474 There was
popular radical participation in anti-slavery from the 1790s onwards.475 The
slaves, by their frequent rebellions that created problems of colonial
administration, helped free themselves.476 Yet Evangelicals were central to the
whole enterprise. Wilberforce contributed able leadership, his college
friendship with Pitt, the Prime Minister, proving a huge advantage to the
cause; information was assiduously collected by Thomas Clarkson and the
James Stephens, father and son; missionaries fostered sympathy for the
oppressed blacks; and in 1831–3 there was a mighty upsurge of Evangelical
public opinion in favour of ending slavery.477 A number equivalent to ninety-
five per cent of the connexion’s membership signed Wesleyan anti-slavery
parliamentary petitions in those years.478 It has been suggested that mass
abolitionism was created not by Evangelicalism but by the vision of artisans
whose ambience was also favourable to Evangelical Nonconformity. Yet
contemporaries were in no doubt that arguments based on biblical principle
did most to rouse anti-slavery feeling.479 Although favourable parliamentary
circumstances must also be taken into account—the Talents administration of
1806–7 was more sympathetic to abolition than its Pittite predecessor and the
extension of the franchise in 1832 sounded the death-knell of slavery—it
remains true that the main impetus against both trade and institution came
from the religious public. Evangelicalism cannot be given all the credit for the
humanitarian victory over slavery, but it must be accorded a large share.

POLITICS
Although anti-slavery swept a large proportion of the Evangelical public into
exerting pressure on government, in general its leaders discouraged
involvement in the political sphere. Here was an area of sharp contrast with
their Puritan forebears, who for the most part saw the achievement of a holy
commonwealth as one of their grand aims. Partisan endeavour now seemed a
diversion from the one essential task of preaching the gospel. ‘Politics’,
72 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

declared Thomas Jones of Creaton, a leading Evangelical clergyman, ‘are Satan’s

most tempting and alluring baits.’480 It is sinful, according to John
Witherspoon in Scotland in 1758, for a minister ‘to desire or claim the
direction of such matters as fall within the province of the civil magistrate’.481
Even Dissenters, who operatcd largely as a united political phalanx in the
interest of civil and religious liberty, began to have doubts about the wisdom
of pressing their cause. It is true that in the early 1790s Robert Hall was
defending the freedom of the press and his fellowBaptist William
Winterbotham was imprisoned for preaching sermons allegedly sympathetic
to the French Revolution.482 Political activity in the wartime years that
followed, however, was minimal. The Baptist Western Association, for
instance, did little more than announce its opposition to military training on
the sabbath.483 Hall became so indifferent to political concerns that he scarcely
ever read a newspaper.484 Fuller was typical of the Evangelical sector of
Dissent in deprecating strife between Whigs and Tories: ‘it is not for the wise
and the good to enlist themselves under their respective standards, or to
believe half what they say’.485 Wesley’s legacy to his followers was a ‘no
politics’ rule that forbade the agitation of controverted questions within the
connexion.486 It is clear that Wesleyan voters took no common line. At Bristol
in 1784, for instance, they divided in approximately the same proportions as
the electors at large.487
What vital Christianity entailed, according to many Evangelicals, was a
blend of quietism and loyalism. ‘I meddle not with the disputes of
party’, wrote John Newton, ‘nor concern myself about any political maxims,
but such as are laid down in scripture. ’488 He was no doubt thinking chiefly,
as did Wesley, about commands to respect those in authority and pay taxes.489
Wesley lamented popular participation in politics, discouraged sympathy for
the Americans in the 1770s and helped ensure that after his death official
Methodism steered a steady patriotic course.490 Wilberforce eulogised ‘the
unrivalled excellence’ of the British constitution.491 Alongside his friends with
reforming objectives in the Clapham Sect, there was a much larger bloc of
Evangelical MPs from 1784 onwards with unqualified Tory views.492 Likewise,
after the French Revolution the Evangelical clergy were overwhelmingly
Tory.493 Most enfranchised Dissenters continued to prefer the Whigs.
Nevertheless, attachment to the existing political order was the most
prominent feature of attitudes to public affairs among all sections of
Evangelical opinion down to the end of the French Wars.
There were, however, two areas apart from anti-slavery in which sections of
the Evangelical world were more liberal. One was the American Revolution.
Dissenters and the Popular party in the Church of Scotland generally backed
the American cause. Caleb Evans of the Baptist College at Bristol rebutted
Wesley’s attack on the colonists as a revival of ‘the good old Jacobite doctrine
of hereditary, indefensible, divine right and of passive obedience and non-
resistance’.494 Most Baptist ministers in the provinces and all but two of them
 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN 73

in London were believed to have taken the American side.495 Scottish

Evangelicals similarly upheld the colonists’ case. John Erskine warned against
conflict with the colonies as early as 1769 and in 1776 called for a compromise
settlement.496 John Witherspoon, the Scottish Evangelical who had become
Principal of Princeton, so far forgot his earlier objections to ministers dabbling
in politics as to be the only one to sign the Declaration of Independence.497
The bonds between Presbyterians on the two sides of the Atlantic helped
foster the sympathy for American resistance to George III. So did a dislike for
oppression and a fear that true religion was under threat in North America
from Catholics and Episcopalians.
Similar motives induced many Evangelicals to adopt another liberal stance
in the era of toleration. It was to be expected that Dissenters such as Hall
would approve of the principle of religious liberty.498 But so did others.
Thomas Scott wrote of ‘the vast obligation’ owed to Locke for his Letters
Concerning Toleration.499 Adam Clarke, admittedly the most Whiggish of
Methodist leaders, broadened the principle into an Arminian constitutional
axiom. ‘Of all forms of government’, he commented, ‘that which provides the
greatest portion of civil liberty to the subject, must be most pleasing to God,
because most like his own. ‘500 Wesley himself favoured religious tolerance.
He opposed the removal of Catholic disabilities, it is true, but on the ground
that the Roman Catholic Church was itself theoretically committed to
persecution. He was not prepared to tolerate intolerance. Otherwise he was
the foe of bigotry, the champion of entire liberty of conscience.501 Scottish
Evangelicals, though convinced in the same way as Wesley that concessions to
Catholics were too much of a gamble,502 shared a favourable disposition
towards religious toleration. It was part of that broad, humane, pragmatic
outlook that characterised their attitudes in so many spheres.

THE RISE OF EVANGELICALISM

The Evangelical Revival represents a sharp discontinuity in the Protestant
tradition. It was formed by a cultural shift in the English-speaking world, the
transition from the Baroque era to the Enlightenment. In most spheres of
taste and fancy a new phase opened early in the eighteenth century. The
philosophy of Locke was the greatest motor of change, but litcrature and art,
all forms of human expression, were affected. The prose of Addison and the
verse of Pope marked a breakthrough to severe classicism from the greater
exuberance of the previous age. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury censured
Wren, an architect recently venerated, for having failed to follow classical or
Italian models and so ruining the skyline of the City of London with buildings
tainted by the Gothic.503 Religion could not go unscathed by such a revolution
in taste. It is a commonplace that much Protestant thought follo wed a path of
religious liberalism that led through Latitudinarianism and Socinianism
towards a Unitarian destination, though sometimes stopping far short of that
74 KNOWLEDGE OFTHE LORD

goal. What has rarely been perceived is that other strands of Protestantism,
despite being tenaciously orthodox, were equally affected by the
Enlightenment atmosphere. The legacy of the Puritans, in both faith and
practice, was modified by the temper of the new era without losing its grasp of
central Christian tenets. The old introspective picty, with its casuistry and
reflex syllogisms, and the old polemical divinity, with its metaphysical
distinctions and ecclesiastical preoccupations, faded away before the preaching
of a simple gospel. A rearguard action was fought by men like Adam Gib, the
theologian of the Anti-Burgher Seceders in Scotland, who suffered from
gloomy spiritual apprehensions, split his denomination on a fine point of
principle and published in his seventy-third year a rambling theological work
entitled Sacred Contemplations in Three Parts (1786).504 But the future lay
with those who heard or read Whitefield, Harris, Edwards or Wesley. The
fulcrum of change was the doctrine of assurance. Those who knew their sins
forgiven were freed from debilitating anxieties for Christian mission. Typical
was Abigail Hutchinson, a young girl whose experience of conversion Edwards
related. ‘She felt a strong inclination immediately to go forth to warn sinners’,
according to Edwards; ‘and proposed it the next day to her brother to assist her
in going firom house to house…’505 The activism of the Evangelical
movement sprang from its strong teaching on assurance. That, in turn, was a
product of the confidence of the new age about the validity of experience. The
Evangelical version of Protestantism was created by the Enlightenment.
 [3]
A Troubling of the Water: Developments in
the Early Nineteenth Century

…an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and
troubled the water. (John 5:4)

In the years around 1830 there was a change of direction in Evangelicalism.

Not all sections of the Evangelical community were equally affected, but those
that took the new path entered a phase in which many of their previous
assumptions were superseded. It was not that their most fundamental
convictions altered. Evangelicals continued to preach for conversions, to
engage in ceaseless activity, to respect the Bible and to dwell on the theme of
the cross. But fresh attitudes became characteristic of the movement—towards
the church and the world, towards public issues and even towards the purposes
of God. A different mood was abroad. It was partly because a new generation
was coming to the fore. The old leaders were going to their reward: Robert
Hall, Adam Clarke, William Wilberforce, Hannah More, Rowland Hill and
Charles Simeon all died between 1831 and 1836.1 Their successors had risen
within an Evangelicalism whose place in the world was assured. They were
much less inclined towards a careful pragmatism that would recommend the
movement to suspicious onlookers. Rather they expected their views to be
given a hearing. They were more confident, more outspoken, more assertive.
But the altered tone of much of the Evangelical world was far more than a
matter of changing personnel. New influences and fresh circumstances
directed currents of opinion into different channels. The shift of mood has
often been detected but little analysed. Ford K. Brown notices the change, but
his explanation hardly goes beyond the break between the generations.2 Ian
Bradley censures ‘a new obscurantism and fanaticism’ without diagnosing it
further.3 Alec Vidler, like many others, treats the shift as partly a reaction
against the Oxford Movement.4 In fact, however, the process was well under
way before the Oxford Movement began; and the new Evangelical mood
shared a great deal in common with the Oxford Movement. The fresh trends
have recently been valuably summarised,5 but they call for more detailed
examination. Evangelicalism, it becomes clear, was far from a static creed.
76 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

THE STRATEGY OF MISSION

One of the reasons for the emergence of new views was doubt about existing
methods of spreading the gospel. Organisations like the Bible Society might be
at work, but were they proving sufficiently effective? Churchgoing was not
improving significantly, if at all. During the decade 1811–21 population
growth was extremely rapid. In those ten years, in fact, demographic
expansion was at its highest rate in British history. Although Dissent was
spreading, attendance at the parish churches was falling relative to population,
espccially in the developing urban areas.6 Attention was drawn to the gulf
yawning between the Church of England and the labouring masses by Richard
Yates, chaplain to the Chelsea Hospital, with two works on the need for
church extension published in 1815 and 1817. The public disorder provoked by
economic troubles in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars induced politicians to
take note. Church building was seen as the antidote to revolution, and so in
1818 parliament voted £1 million for new churches.7 In this context
Evangelicals were acutely conscious of the challenge to their strategy of
mission. The people had not yet been won for Christ. Thomas Chalmers,
serving as a parish minister in Glasgow from 1815, recommended fresh
methods of re-Christianising the urban poor in a series of quarterly papers on
the Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns (1819–23). His technique
concentrated on administering poor relief only through the churches.8 Some
of his proposals were to be widely heeded in subsequent decades.
Others were driven to believe that the sole remedy lay in an appeal for
divine assistance. In 1821, James Haldane Stewart, a respected London
Evangelical clergyman, issued a call to prayer for a special effusion of the Holy
Spirit. The societies designed to advance the kingdom of Christ, he argued, had
managed to achieve much less than they desired. That showed ‘the inadequacy
of means, even of divine appointment, without a peculiar divine agency
accompanying these means’.9 Stewart’s summons, although in no sense
hostile to the religious societies, was the first public questioning of their
potential from within the Evangelical camp. Later in the decade, stimulated by
news of awakenings in America, there was much prayer for revival.10 Cries for
supernatural aid began to seem preferable to the plodding methods of the
societies. Foreign missions seemed no more effective than those working at
home. The sharpest challenge to the existing approach came in a sermon
preached before the London Missionary Society in 1824. Edward Irving, a
celebrated young Scottish minister in London, urged that missionaries, like
the earliest apostles, should be sent forth ‘destitute of all visible sustenance,
and of all human support’.11 They should be compelled to rely on God alone.
Why should they need the bureaucratic organisation of a missionary society
to back them? Spurning the hospitality of the LMS, Irving created a great stir
by denouncing its system of operation. The circle of radicals that gathered
round Irving went on to develop a coherent critique of religious societies in
 A TROUBLING OF THE WATER 77

general as embodiments of worldly expediency. Pressure from Irving’s party

induced a number of organisations to symbolise the fact that they were more
than business enterprises by opening their meetings with prayer. The Jews’
Society first adopted the practice in 1828.12 There was a powerful onslaught on
existing patterns of mission.

THE REVIVAL OF CALVINISM

A second factor that contributed to altering the face of Evangelicalism in this
period was renewed interest in Calvinism. In part this movement derived from
contacts with Geneva. With the reopening of the continent to British
travellers after the defeat of Napoleon, visitors were attracted to the city of
Calvin. There, a revival was springing up from roots in Moravian piety. Robert
Haldane, a Scottish Evangelical who had launched extensive home missionary
work in his native land, turned his attention to Europe in 1816. He settled in
Geneva, delivering regular lectures on the letter to the Romans with the
intention of re-establishing Calvin’s leading doctrines. The depth of conviction
and the obvious vitality of the Genevan revival helped create in Britain an
idealised vision of the meaning of Calvinism. It was less specific doctrines than
‘a way of thinking and a quality of life’ that inspired certain British
Evangelicals.13 The man most affected by Geneva was Henry Drummond, a
banker who was to become closely associated with Irving, Drummond
followed Haldane as spiritual mentor to the Evangelical community in Geneva
and, when the state church looked askance on their new-found opinions,
encouraged certain ministers to secede. In 1819 Drummond created a
Continental Society to employ some of those who withdrew as itinerant
missionaries, particularly in France.14 These roving figures became the
exemplars of the new style of missionary envisaged by Irving in his LMS
sermon—men relying on providence for their support, spreading gospcl light
in a dark land. The separation of the Genevan Evangelicals from the state
church prepared Drummond and ultimately others to contemplate the same
step. And ‘Calvinism’ became the label for the ideal of a primitive, apostolic
Christianity. ‘I saw also in the history of the church’, declared a speaker
invented by Drummond as a vehicle for his own views, ‘that in proportion as
she became Arminian she relapsed into the world, and that in proportion as
she became Calvinistic she came up out of the world.’15 As in the early years of
Elizabeth I, the example of Geneva stirred up reformers of the church in
Britain to push ahead with their task.
Native traditions exercised a similar influence. A handful of champions of
Calvinism survived from the controversies of the 1770s to sway the minds of
the next generation but one. Chief among them was Robert Hawker, a
redoubtable clergyman who had laboured at Plymouth since 1778.16 Another
high Calvinist, but in this case an eccentric Dissenter, was William
Huntington, an ex-coalheaver who delighted to place the letters ‘S. S.’ after
78 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

his name to indicate that he was a ‘Sinner Saved’.17 These were the men
alluded to by Simeon in 1815 when he lamented, ‘Five pious young men are
running into Huntingdon’s [sic] and Dr. Hawker’s principles, and are leaving
the Church’.18 Simeon was referring to the so-called ‘Western Schism’. A
number of clergymen in the West Country, led by George Baring, seceded
from the Church of England on rcaching the conclusion that its principles
were incompatible with their Calvinist views. One of them, James Harington
Evans, was provided in 1818 with a London chapel by the munificence of
Drummond, who no doubt saw this as a parallel enterprise to his efforts in
Geneva. Evans had come to see, he wrote, that ‘salvation is not of debt but of
grace’.19 Like Hawker, he held that since flawed human works can form no
test of the reality of acceptance with God, faith is its sole evidence. Faith was
exalted at the expense of works. Dismayed by teaching that he knew would
open Evangelicals to censure and alarmed by its disruptive consequences,
Simeon preached a sermon in Dublin condemning the Calvinist system as
‘unfair and unscriptural’.20 But the trend of the times was away from the views
of men of the older generation like Simeon. In 1811 it was guessed that there
were not as many as ten full-blooded Calvinists in the ministry of the Church
of England.21 By the late 1820s, however, Calvinism was the religious vogue
among the young at Oxford. Their pulpit idol was Henry Bulteel, Curate of St
Ebbe’s from 1826, who had been influenced by Hawker.22 He was in touch
with Irving, who was calling his own convictions ‘Calvinistical’ and teaching
that God’s sovereignty is so absolute that he was responsible for the fall of
man.23 Simeon’s repudiation of human systems was on the decline; there was
a growing yearning after the primitive convictions of the Reformation divines.

EDWARD IRVING
Already it has emerged that the central figure in the ferment of the period was
Edward Irving. His personal charisma played a remarkable part in changing
the direction of Evangelicalism, even if his tragic career ended in an early
death. In 1822 at the age of twenty-nine he arrived as minister of the Church
of Scotland congregation in Hatton Garden, London. His capacity for self-
dramatisation was enhanced by a striking physical presence—an athletic
figure standing six feet two inches, with a strong, rich bass voice. In his later
years the hair, in the manner of an artistic genius, was parted right and left so
as to hang down on his shoulders ‘in affected disorder’.24 During 1823 his
eloquence attracted the cream of fashionable society, so that on one Sunday no
fewer than thirty-five carriages bearing aristocratic coronets were counted
outside his church. Fame changed to notoriety in 1824 with his sermon before
the London Missionary Society denouncing its own missionary methods.
Irving’s reputation for erratic ways increased when, two years later, in
Babylon and Infidelity Foredoomed of God, he announced his adoption of
distinctive prophetic beliefs. Christ would soon return, he went on to declare,
 A TROUBLING OF THE WATER 79

in glory and majesty. Suspicious eyes were turned in Irving’s direction. Soon
he was teaching that Christ at the incarnation assumed not human nature per
se but fallen human nature. He continued to assert the sinlessness of Christ
(the result of the power of the Holy Spirit), but charges were laid against him
which culminated, in 1833, in his deposition from the ministry of the Church
of Scotland for heresy on this question. Already the most controversial phase
of his life had begun. In 1830 speaking in tongues was heard in two parishes in
the west of Scotland, often identified as the first modern instance of the
Pentecostal gift. Irving accepted the cases as genuine, and in the following
year strange tongues were heard in his own congregation. The scandalised
trustees excluded Irving from his own church, and so he established the so-
called Catholic Apostolic Church, purveying a strange blend of adventism,
tongues, elaborate liturgy and punctilio over ecclesiastical order. Its mentor,
though remaining the ‘angel’ (minister) of a London congregation, lost
control over the course of events when a prophet debarred him from
appointment as an apostle.25 Irving fell ill and died in Glasgow in December
1834 when still only forty-two.
What is the explanation of Irving’s quixotic career? He was eager to present
the full orbit of Christian doctrine in a fresh guise. ‘We feel’, he wrote in his
first work, ‘that questions touching the truths of revelation have been too long
treated in a logical or scholastic method, which doth address itself to I know
not what fraction of the mind; and not finding this used in Scripture, or
successful in practice, we are disposed to try another method, and appeal our
cause to every sympathy of the soul which it doth naturally bear upon.’26 He
intended to appeal to the heart. There was therefore a need to rouse his
hearers by vigorous declamation on vivid themes. In the years of Walter
Scott’s greatest vogue, it helped if Irving’s subject-matter could be tinctured
by the atmosphere of an age gone by. ‘He affected the Miltonic or Old-English
Puritan style’, recalled his friend Thomas Carlyle.27 Anything venerable
warranted his respect; anything modern was suspected of degeneracy. The
ideal in oratory was not the recent notion of Augustan economy but rhetorical
extravagance. The sermon before the LMS was so long that he had to pause twice
during its delivery for a hymn to be sung.28 Contemporary German thought
held attractions. Although he disliked the infidelity of Schiller and Goethe,
Irving encouraged Carlyle in his study of Schiller and would allude as a matter
of course to Goethe’s Faust.29 It was Germany, he held, ‘where alone any
powerful poetry exists’.30 Nevertheless he was eager to discover any sign that
Wordsworth was appreciated.31 Irving was being swept along by the spirit of
the age in its reaction against the manner of the Enlightenment. Bentham, the
toast of recent ‘enlightened’ opinion, was dismissed as ‘the apostle of
expediency’, perhaps the most limited philosopher of the day.32 Like the
young John Stuart Mill in the same decade, Irving was freeing himself from
the ascendancy of the Utilitarian mode of thinking; but his liberation was
more complete than that of Mill. In short, Irving was a Romantic. He owed his
80 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

celebrity to a capacity for blending Evangelical religion with the latest

intellectual fashions.

THE INFLUENCE OF ROMANTICISM

The chief agent of Irving’s liberation was S.T.Coleridge. Again like Mill,
Irving discovered in Coleridge a new world of thought and feeling. The
ripening friendship of the two men from 1823 to 1826, when, despite
continuing mutual esteem, they diverged on account of Irving’s prophetic
studies, can be traced in Coleridge’s correspondence. Coleridge adjudged Irving
‘the greatest Orator, I ever heard’.33 For his part, Irving counted Coleridge (as
he declared to a surprised religious world) ‘more profitable to my faith in
orthodox doctrine, to my spiritual understanding of the Word of God…than
any or all of the men with whom I have entertained friendship and
conversation…’34 When taken by Irving to meet Coleridge, a bewildered
Thomas Chalmers discovered that there was ‘a secret and to me as yet
unintelligible communion of spirit betwixt them, on the ground of a certain
German mysticism and transcendental lake-poetry which I am not yet up
to’.35 From this intimacy Irving derived a Coleridgean reverence for the ideal.
The poet also confirmed in the preacher a developing contempt for the
expediency of the age that was to be the germ of much subsequent Evangelical
socio-political thought.36 But most of all, as the Scotsman avowed, Coleridge
taught him a ‘right conception of the Christian Church’. By 1825 Irving was
laying great stress on proper ecclesiastical order and appealing to a typical
Coleridgean rationale. The twofold nature of man, body and spirit’, he
asserted, ‘maketh it necessary that every thing by which he is to be moved
should have an outward form.’ Thus ‘the visible Church is the sensible form
of the heavenly communion’.37 The substance of his exalted ecclesiology was
Coleridgean. Deep draughts of the teaching of Coleridge fortified Irving to
lead the adaptation of Evangelicalism into the Romantic idiom of the day.
Romanticism was well fitted to be a vehicle for religious thought. The term
is used here not in the narrow sense of the literary generation that was fading
by the 1820s but in the much broader sense of the whole mood that was
inaugurated by that generation and lasted throughout the nineteenth century
and beyond. This was the movement of taste that stressed, against the
mechanism and classicism of the Enlightenment, the place of feeling and
intuition in human perception, the importance of nature and history for
human experience. Goethe embodied the Romantic spirit in Germany, where
the initial impact of the movement was strongest, while Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron represented its various expressions in
English verse. Its quintessence was what has been called ‘natural
supernaturalism’, the ability to discern spiritual significance in the everyday
world.38 Awe before the numinous in nature is the hallmark of Wordsworth’s
poetry, and a revelling in the strange, the uncanny and the mysterious runs
 A TROUBLING OF THE WATER 81

like a thread through Romantic art and literature. There was immense
potential affinity for religion. Broad and High Churchmanship in Britain were
both deeply affected during the nineteenth century,39 but the Evangelical
tradition was no less touched by the new cultural style. This is not to argue
that there was an intrinsic bond between the Romantic and the Evangelical. It
has frequently been held that such a connection did in fact subsist. ‘Now
Evangelical Christianity’, writes Dr Kitson Clark, ‘seems to satisfy all the
categories of romanticism, except the love of fancy dress.’ The leading
Romantic characteristics, as expounded by Dr Kitson Clark, were the
importance of emotion and imagination, with a consequent emphasis on
moments of intensc experience, a profounder appreciation of the values of the
past and a spirit of escape and revolt from present conditions.40 All these,
however, far from being part and parcel of the Evangelical Revival, were
novelties in the years around 1830. Reason, not emotion, had been the
lodestar of the Evangelicals; many of them looked to the millennium of the
future, not to the past, for their ideal of a Christian society; and far from
wishing to flee from existing conditions, they used normal contemporary
methods, whether in business, politics or religion, to accomplish their aims. So
the outburst of imaginative energy represented by Irving constituted a revolt
against the conventions of the Evangelical world. There was a new
appreciation of the dramatic, the extraordinary and the otherworldly element
in religion. That is the key to the thought of Edward Irving. His mind bore the
impress of a heightened supernaturalism.

MILLENARIANISM
A distinguishing feature of Irving and his circle was the advent hope. Many
Evangelicals, as the previous chapter has illustrated, were expecting the
millennium to be attained through the preaching of the gospel. Only after this
period of prosperity for the church would Christ come again.41 But an
alternative millenarian view had frequently been held in Christian history.
Christ would return, according to this alternative version, before the
commencement of the millennium. The second advent, far from
being deferred to the distant future beyond the triumph of Christ’s earthly
church, was to be expected imminently. This form of prophetic interpretation
is usually called premillennialism (since Christ is to come before the
millennium) to distinguish it from the postmillennial view (according to which
Christ is to be expected after the millennium). Premillennialism was taken up
by Irving’s new school of Evangelicals. They believed, as their prophetic
journal The Morning Watch put it in 1830, ‘that our Lord Jesus Christ will
return to this earth in person before the Millennium’.42 J.F.C.Harrison has
recently attributed this premillennial view to the largely self-educated,
characterising postmillennialism, by contrast, as a more intellectually
sophisticated belief. Yet, as Professor Harrison himself admits, the distinction
82 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

cannot be drawn rigidly along these lines. The premillennialists numbered the
highly literate and extremely sophisticated Irving in their ranks. The
postmillennialists had no monopoly on respectability or scholarship.43 The
distinction was not so much one of educational attainment as of period.
Whereas in the first three decades after the French Revolution it was normal
among students of prophecy to expect a steady spread of Christian truth, frorn
the 1820s onwards there was a growth of the premillennial advent hope.
The seminal influence in drawing the attention of the Evangelical world to
this alternative approach to prophecy was James Hatley Frere, with his work A
Combined View of the Prophecies of Daniel, Esdras, and St. John (1815).
William Cuninghame, a Scottish Presbyterian, had published a premillennial
work two years earlier, and was to continue propagating his views in the
1830s,44 but Frere enjoyed the prestige of predicting, shortly before Waterloo,
the downfall of Napoleon. The second coming, he argued, would take place at
the start of a phase in the millennium that would occur in 1822–3. In Frere,
however, the second coming is treated merely as a metaphor—‘some
extraordinary manifestation of the power of Christ’.45 It is to be a spiritual,
not a literal, event. Irving, who imbibed his opinions from Frere, agreed in a
publication of 1826 that the advent is imminent, but not literal.46 In the same
year, however, Irving fell to translating from Spanish a strange work by a
Chilean Jesuit masquerading as a converted Jew (‘Ben-Ezra’) entitled The
Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty, It drove its translator to the
conclusion that Christ would certainly return in person.47 The publication of
this book in 1827 marked the decisive re-emergence of the premillennialist
tradition.
A receptive audience for ‘Ben-Ezra’ had been created by the growing desire
for the conversion of the Jews. Organised missionary work concentrating on
the Jews alone was a novelty of the early nineteenth century. The London
Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews was established in 1809 as
an interdenominational body and in 1815 was reconstituted as an Anglican
organisation.48 Its prime mover, Lewis Way, was inspired by the prophecies of
the return of the Jewish people to their own land and, noticing the connection
drawn in the Bible between this event and the last things, came to believe in
the nearness of Christ’s coming again. Between 1820 and 1822, under the
pseudonym ‘Basilicus’, Way ventured a series of speculations on the ftiture
prospects of the Jews in the society’s journal The Jewish Expositor. Christ, he
claimed in the course of the letters, would soon return in person.49 Four years
later the majority of the committee believed the doctrine of the imminent
second coming.50 Most crucially, Way’s views had spread to Henry
Drummond, who became a Vice-President of the Jews’ Society in 1823. It was
Drummond, ‘abundant in speculations as well as money’,51 who set about
exploring prophetic views in depth. He assembled twenty or so people,
including Way and Irving, at his country estate in Surrey, Albury Park, for
eight days during Advent 1826. It was the first of an annual series of prophetic
 A TROUBLING OF THE WATER 83

conferences at Albury that lasted until 1830.52 If the return of the Messiah is
to be associated with the restoration of the Jews, they concluded, the
millennium can be located only after the second coming. Conversation ranged
over a variety of other topics—the dignity of the church, the iniquities of the
religious societies, the political implications of these doctrines—but two of the
six major points of agreement at the 1829 conference still concerned the Jews:
the Christian dispensation, like the Jewish, would be terminated suddenly in
judgements; and the Jews would be restored to their land during the
judgements.53 The gloomy expectations of the Albury participants grew out of
their more sanguine hopes for the Jews.

THE ADVENT HOPE

The significance of the emerging premillennial position lay less in its
expectation of a coming millennium than in its confidence in the imminent
return of Christ. There was little, if any, dwelling on the status reversal of the
millennium, whereby the great of the earth would be subject to the authority
of the humblest believer. In that respect, the radical eschatology of the
nineteenth century differed from what was typical of most millenarian
movements.54 It was, in fact, more concerned with the coming achievement of
Christ than with any state of earthly beatitude, more adventist than
millenarian. The kernel was what Irving called Christ’s ‘own personal
appearance in flatning fire’. The return, it was often stressed, would be a
literal coming. The reason is that previously belief in a visible return by
Christ in the flesh had been no part of accepted doctrine. Many Protestants,
Irving observed, ‘start when you say that Christ will appear again in personal
and bodily presence upon the earth’.55 Like Frere when he wrote A Combined
View, the most respected Evangelicals did not believe it. Thomas Scott declared
in 1802 that in the future there would be ‘no visible appearance of Christ’; and
in 1830 Charles Simeon assured a correspondent that it was a matter with
which he had not the slightest concern.56 Certain early advocates of a
premillennial eschatology spelt out the novelty of their belief in the return of
Christ in the flesh.57 Other writers like Haldane Stewart can be detected
hesitating on the brink of deciding in favour of a personal advent.58 The
doctrine long continued to be rejected by the Evangelical mainstream. In a
prize essay on missionary work selected by a panel of adjudicators drawn from
five denominations in 1842, John Harris, President of Cheshunt College,
contended that the coming of Christ would be ‘in strange providences, and at
critical junctures’.59 Although he explicitly set aside discussion of whether the
coming would be personal, he evidently did not believe it. In the 1840s, in
fact, premillennialists sometimes claimed that expectation of a personal advent
was confined to their ranks.60 They were mistaken, but their case was
plausible. The belief that Christ would come again in person was an
innovation in the Evangelical world of the 1820s.
84 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

It was part of the Romantic inflow into Evangelicalism. Christ the coming
king could readily be pictured by poetic imaginations fascinated by the strange,
the awesome and the supernatural. ‘To such minds’, a critic of
premillennialism argued, ‘any other view of the subject is perfectly bald and
repulsive, while theirs is encircled with the glory that excelleth. To them it
carries the force of intuitive perception; they feel—they know it to be true.’
The advent hope was far more than a bare doctrine. Because the content of the
expectation was Jesus Christ himself, the hope became an object of devotion.
‘Souls that burn with love for Christ’ were ‘ready to embrace it almost
immediately con amore’.61 To Lord Shaftesbury, for instance, it was
something to ‘delight in’, ‘a moving principle in my life’. His close friend
Alexander Haldane, according to Shaftesbury himself, ‘intensely loved’
Christ, ‘and ever talked with a holy relish and a full desire for the Second
Advent’.62 There was nothing anomalous, according to the new way of looking
at the world, in expecting a divine figure to appear suddenly in the midst of
the affairs of the nations. To minds nurtured on earlier ideas of cause, effect,
order and gradualness, however, there was little appeal: ‘whatever Scripture
intimations regarding the future destinies of the Church and of the world
involve events out of the usual range of human occurrences, or exceeding the
anticipations of enlightened Christian sagacity, are almost instinctively
overlooked or softened down’.63 So the expectation of Christ’s personal return
attracted younger men in tune with the rising temper of the age, who were
prepared to break with part of the legacy of the Enlightenment. But it was left
to one member of the younger generation to incorporate the advent hope into
an Enlightenment framework. David Brown, once Irving’s assistant minister
in London and eventually Principal of the Aberdeen Free Church College,
published the most popular nineteenth-century restatement of the
postmillennial scheme, Christ’s Second Coming: Will it be Premillennial?
(1846). Brown was a man of ‘a poetical nature’ who wrote verse in his youth,
carried about with him a copy of Keble’s Christian Year and had once been a
premillennialist himself.64 His book was persuasive precisely because, unlike
earlier postmillennial advocates, his Romantic temperament led him to
commend the personal return.65 Brown constitutes an exception to the normal
rule of the association of this doctrine with the premillennial position. But he
well illustrates the cultural affinities of the reviving belief in the second
coming as a personal event. Adventism was a symptom of Romanticism.

VARIETIES OF PREMILLENNIALISM
As prophetic interpretation settled into established grooves during the 1830s
and 1840s, two schools of thought emerged. The dominant school was that
normally called ‘historicist’, although at the time, because of its origins in
Reformation polemic, its advocates usually preferred to style it ‘the Protestant
view’.66 With this approach the book of Revelation and the prophecies of
 A TROUBLING OF THE WATER 85

Daniel were to be interpreted as narratives that could be decoded by pairing

symbols such as vials of wrath with remarkable historical events. The basic
premiss was that prophetic references to days should be understood as years.
There was great scope for debate about the proper starting point for
calculation, but most commentators pointed to 1866–8 as the likely date for
the second coming. A chart in Horae Apocalypticae (1844), a four-volume
work of scholarly prophetic studies published by E.B.Elliott, a Fellow of
Trinity College, Cambridge, clearly depicts the beginning of the millennium
at a point two-thirds of the way through the nineteenth century.67 After 1868
commentators nevertheless took the need for recalculation in their stride.68
Although one of the best known exponents of historicist premillennialism was
a Presbyterian, John Cumming, a self-professed populariser of the work of
Elliott,69 this form of the advent hope became most entrcnched in the Church
of England. It was propagated through the twice-yearly meetings of the
Prophecy Investigation Society, begun in November 1842 at St George’s,
Bloomsbury.70 H.M.Villiers, the Rector of St George’s, promoted an annual
series of published lectures that spread the message far and wide.71 By 1854
the new prophetic convictions were sufficiently common to provoke a
systematic rebuttal in the Bampton Lectures by Samuel Waldegrave, himself
an Evangelical and shortly to become Bishop of Carlisle.72 In the following
year it was thought that probably a majority of the Evangelical clergy
favoured premillennial views.73 The great majority had embraced a version of
prophetic interpretation that drove them to scan their newspapers for
indications of ‘the signs of the times’. Historicist premillennialism, as we shall
see, was to encourage specific attitudes to the public affairs of the day.
The second school of thought, by contrast, fostered withdrawal from public
concerns into an esoteric world of speculation about supernatural events still
to come. This, the futurist school, held that the book of Revelation depicts not
the course of history but the great happenings of the future. In 1826 there
appeared a book arguing strongly for a futurist interpretation of Revelation in
order to undermine all millenarian notions. The unintended effect of this work
by S.R.Maitland, the future historian, was to inspire an alternative tradition
of millennial thought.74 At Albury, Maitland’s theory that Revelation was yet
to be fulfilled was already being canvassed, and by 1843 half a dozen other
writers had taken the field in favour of the same principle.75 Irving’s Catholic
Apostolic Church embraced a moderate type of futurism, teaching that many
of the events predicted in Revelation were still to come.76 But the most
significant figure to adopt a form of futurist premillennialism was J.N.Darby,
the fertile mind behind another adventist sect, the Brethren. Darby was an
Irish ex-clergyman, originally trained as a lawyer, who in the late 1820s and
early 1830s was a leading participant in a series of conferences held in
imitation of Albury under the sponsorship of Lady Powerscourt near Dublin.
He steadily elaborated the view that the predictions of Revelation would be
fulfilled after believers had been caught up to meet Christ in the air, the so-
86 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

called ‘rapture’. No events in prophecy were to precede the rapture. In

particular, the period of judgements on Christendom expected by other
premillennialists, the ‘great tribulation’, would take place only after the true
church had been mysteriously translated to the skies. The second coming, on
this view, was divided into two parts: the secret coming of Christ for his saints
at the rapture; and the public coming with his saints to reign over the earth
after the tribulation. Darby’s teaching is often termed ‘dispensationalism’
because it sharply distinguishes between different dispensations, or periods of
divine dealings with mankind.77 Although never the unanimous view among
Brethren, dispensationalism spread beyond their ranks and gradually became
the most popular version of futurism. In the nineteenth century it remained a
minority view among premillennialists, but this intense form of apocalyptic
expectation was to achieve much greater salience in the twentieth.

THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE

In addition to the advent hope, the radical Evangelicals of the 1820s
bequeathed another enduring legacy to their successors, a more exalted estimate
of scripture. In the earliest years of the nineteenth century Evangelicals shared
the standard attitude of contemporary theologians to the Bible. Henry Martyn,
the distinguished Cambridge scholar who abandoned his academic career to
travel as a missionary to the East, was at one point closely questioned by a
high-ranking official in Persia. Believing in the verbal inspiration of the Koran,
the Persian enquired whether Martyn considered the New Testament to be
the word spoken by God. The sense from God’, Martyn replied, ‘but the
expression from the different writers of it. ‘78 Martyn did not believe in verbal
inspiration. Simeon, Martyn’s mentor, while sometimes using language
suggesting a strong view of inspiration, could also maintain that scripture
contains ‘inexactnesses in reference to philosophical and scientific matters’.79
Similarly, Daniel Wilson, Vicar of Islington and subsequently Bishop of
Calcutta, supposed that the Bible had been preserved only from ‘every kind and
degree of error relating to religion’;80 and T.H.Horne, the author of a four-
volume Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy
Scriptures (1818), freely admitted that there are discrepancies in the text of
scripture.81 The chief court of appeal on the question of inspiration and its effects
was Philip Doddridge.82 Even the high Calvinist Robert Hawker treated the
opinion of Doddridge on this subject as decisive.83 Doddridge distinguished
between different modes of inspiration, so that some passages were held to
afford greater insight than others into the divine mind. It was Doddridge’s
view that predominated in the discussion of inspiration in 1800 by the Eclectic
Society, the body consisting of London Evangelical leaders. Richard Cecil
declared that ‘there is some danger in considering all Scripture as equally
inspired’. Although Henry Foster (‘a plain and deeply pious man’) propounded
a theory of verbal inspiration, John Davies argued that the ideas, and not the
 A TROUBLING OF THE WATER 87

words, of scripture are inspired.84 Here were sober, experimentally minded

men concerned to invesrigate the nature of the scriptures.
Such views began to be challenged by a much more robust attitude. It
originated with Robert Haldane, the Scottish Evangelical who in 1816 found
vital religion at a low ebb in Geneva. The Bible was neglected there, he soon
concluded, because of misty Romantic notions to the effect that scripture is
inspired in the same sense in which poctry is inspired. In reaction, Haldane
contended for a much higher view of biblical inspiration. Parts of the Bible could
not be accepted or rejected according to the judgement of human reason, he
argued, for the whole, containing ‘things evidently mysterious’, was to be
revered as divine teaching. This was to counter one Romantic attitude with
another—the assertion that mcn should ‘receive with adoring faith and love
what they could not comprehend’.85 Haldane had elaborated his case in The
Evidence and Authority of Divine Revelation, first published in the same
year. The scriptures, he taught, make ‘a claim of infallibility and of perfection’
for their own inspiration. The Doddridgean view of different degrees of
inspiration was dismissed as sophistry.86
Haldane’s ideas might have made little impression but for the Apocrypha
controversy that embroiled the British and Foreign Bible Society in the 1820s.
For many years the society had been sponsoring versions containing the
Apocrypha for use on the continent, where its inclusion was normal among
Catholics and Protestants alike. Haldane protested that this policy was an
adulteration of the pure word of God. Uninspired material was being mingled
with inspired scripture. The secretaries of the society, supported by Simeon
and others who held the traditional lower views of inspiration, were reluctant
to abandon a means of increasing the acceptability of the Bible. It was a clash
of principle against expediency. Although by 1826 the society had gone a long
way towards meeting the demand for change (even agreeing to remove
exisring Bibles containing the Apocrypha from stock), the Edinburgh and
Glasgow auxiliaries remained dissatisfied and withdrew.87 The fundamental
issue, the nature of inspiration, was raised explicitly when, in 1826, John Pye
Smith, tutor at the Independent Homerton College, referred favourably to a
preface inserted in Bibles furnished by the British and Foreign. The preface, by
a French theologian, Dr Haffner, treated inspiration in the way that had so
disgusted Haldane in Geneva: Ezekiel, for instance, was said to have possessed
‘a very lively imagination’.88 Pye Smith pointed out that there was nothing
explicitly erroneous about Haffner’s opinions and added a statement of his
own views on inspiration, which closely resembled those of Doddridge.
Haldane arranged foran impoverished Baptist pastor in Ulster, a man of strong
dogmatic views, Dr Alexander Carson, to assault Pye Smith’s position.
Haldane himself threw in a treatise On the Inspiration of Scripture in 1828.
Although the extremely able Pye Smith had the best of the arguments, the
effect was to publicise the views of Haldane.89 A new and stronger
understanding of inspiration had been broached.
88 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

BIBLICAL LITERALISM
One of the chief reasons for the spread of the new attitude was its association
with premillennialism. Haldane did not toy with prophetic speculation, but
many of those who fought the Apocrypha battle at his side were among those
whose concern for the Jews blossomed into expectation of the advent. There
was a tight logicai connection between high hopes for the Jews and a new
estimate of scripture. Those who looked for indications in the Bible that God’s
chosen people would be gathered into his fold were inclined to take Old
Testament prophecies literally.90 By contrast, Evangelical commentators had
customarily argued that the prophecies of the Old Testament should be read
spiritually, not literally: they should be applied to the Christian church. The
beginning of the innovatory interpretation can be located precisely. In a
pamphlet called The Latter Rain (1821) Lewis Way, the sponsor of the Jews’
Society, urged special prayer for the children of Israel on the ground that Old
Testament prophecies had a ‘primary and literal reference to the Jews’.91 The
literal interpretation of scripture became a battle-cry of the radical
Evangelicals of Albury. One anonymous student of prophecy was soon to
assert that the highway of Isaiah and the chariots of Ezekiel were to be
construed literally as having reference to ‘railroads and railway conveyance by
locomotive carriages’.92 Literalism did not imply restraining the imagination.
It is not surprising that, in the opinion of a contributor to The Eclectic Review,
‘the most dangerous feature of Millenarian theology, is the erroneous method
of Biblical interpretation…’93 Innovations in the fields of prophecy and the
understanding of scripture went hand in hand.
Different views of what literalism implied jostled each other during the
1830s and 1840s. Horatius Bonar, the chief Scottish premillennial
champion, conceded that, ‘No one maintains that all Scripture is literal, or
that all is figurative’.94 Historicists found it hard to be thoroughgoing
advocates of literal interpretation. There was too great a gulf between the
detail of biblical images and their alleged historical fulfilment to make any
such claim plausible. Futurists did not suffer from this handicap.
Consequently, they shouted louder for literalism—and, among the futurists,
the dispensationalists shouted loudest of all. J.N.Darby was contending as
early as 1829 that prophecy relating to the Jews would be fulfilled literally.95
As his thought developed during the 1830s, this principle of interpretation
became the lynchpin of his system. Because Darby’s opinions were most
wedded to literalism, his distinctive scheme enjoyed the advantage of taking
what seemed the most rigorist view of scripture. Conversely, the prefercnce for
the literal over the figurative approach to biblical exposition drew growing
popular support from the advance of millenarianism.96 The rising prestige of
biblical literalism in turn reinforced the stronger convictions about scripture
propounded by Haldane and his circle.
 A TROUBLING OF THE WATER 89

TOWARDS FUNDAMENTALISM
The classic text setting out the new and more exalted doctrine of scripture was
Louis Gaussen’s Theopneustia (1841). Gaussen was a professor of theology at
Geneva whose high doctrine of inspiration was originally derived from
Haldane.97 His book was directed against Schleiermacher and others who
denied miraculous inspiration in whole or in part, but also against English
authors influenced by Doddridge, such as Pye Smith. The English theologians,
hc points out, admitted the existence of unique divine in-breathing (the
‘theopneustia’ of the title) in the Bible, but not to the same degree in all
parts.98 Gaussen, by contrast, asserts the plenary inspiration of the whole
Bible. The word ‘plenary’ was subsequently adopted by many advocates of his
case, but its use was not confined to the new school. Followers of Doddridge
employed it freely.99 The distinctiveness of Gaussen’s position can be
characterised more accurately by two other terms—verbal inspiration and
inerrancy. Verbal inspiration is professed in a section of his book directed to
meeting what he calls an ‘evasion’, the belief that the ideas rather than the
words of the Bible are inspired. He also offers a precise statement of
inerrancy. ‘Theopneustia’ he defines as ‘that inexplicable power which the
Divine Spirit, aforetime, exercised upon the authors of Holy Scripture, to
guide them even to the words which they have employed, and to preserve
them from all error, as well as from any omission.’100 He did not support any
theory of divine dictation, as critics both at the time and subsequently have
alleged. 101 On the subject of inspirarion, he remarks in the book, ‘Scripture
never prescnts to us either its mode or its measure, as an object of study’.102 It
seems clear that he would have agreed with Haldane that full inspiration did
not imply that ‘the ordinary exercise of the faculties of the writers was
counteracted or suspended’.103 The verbal inspirationists, that is to say,
believed in the possibility of simultaneous divine and human agency. If God
gave the words, there is no implication that the human mind did not also give
them. So Gaussen provided, for the first time, a carefully argued defence of
the inerrancy of the Bible.
His effort was part of the intensified supernaturalism of the times. Gaussen
was jealous for the divine honour. ‘Is the Bible from God?’ he demanded in
the preface. ‘Or, is it true (as has been affirmed) that it contains sentences
purely human, inaccurate narratives, vulgar conceits, defective arguments…?’
The approach of Doddridge, and most contemporary British Evangelicals, was
degrading to the miraculous documents provided by God. ‘According to their
view’, he wrote, ‘inspiration…would be unequal, often imperfect, accompanied
with harmlcss errors, and meted out according to the nature of the passages, in
very different measure, of which they constitute themselves more or less the
judges.’104 Such theologians were guilty of pitting their own reason against
God’s revelation. Gaussen’s target is essentially the inductive method, the
critical sifting of evidence to discover the nature of inspiration in any
90 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

particular book. By this means, observing ‘the Baconian rules of inductive

reasoning’, Pye Smith had concluded that the Song of Songs and Esther
should probably be rejected from the canon.105 So unpalatable a conclusion
confirmed the diagnosis in the circles of Gaussen and Haldane that there was a
flaw in the method. They therefore adopted what has justly been styled a
deductive approach to the doctrine of inspiration. Beginning with the axiom
that God in his perfect wisdom had inspired the writing of the Bible, they
went on to deduce its qualities and then tried to match the results of empirical
examination of the text with their a priori assumptions.106
It was too much for many who had been schooled to the Enlightenment
values of free inquiry. Pye Smith’s views did not change, although he knew
Gaussen’s book; his fellow-Congregationalist John Harris, lecturing as
principal on The Inspiration of the Scriptures’ at the opening of New College,
London, in 1851, pointed out that ‘the sacred writers nowhere claim for
themselves immediate and universal verbal inspiration’; and two years latcr
T.R.Birks, then a trusted leader of the Evangelical clergy, explicitly rejected
dogmatic inerrancy on the ground that we should engagc in inquiry into the
mode of inspiration.107 But the deductive method soon won converts. William
Steadman at Bradford Baptist Academy abandoned Doddridge’s system in
favour of Haldane’s, and Thomas Chalmers at Edinburgh used Haldane and
even Carson as class-books on inspiration.108 James Bannerman, who later
wrote a treatise on Inspiration (1865), and Alexander Black, a colleague at New
College, Edinburgh, both held by 1850 the new view that the whole Bible is
‘fully and verbally inspired’.109 There was a clear division of Evangelical
opinion. With the backing of The Record,110 inerrantism made progress among
the Anglican clergy. Nevertheless, at a representative clerical meeting in 1861
a majority still favoured the traditional view that there might be biblical
inaccuracies on non-religious topics.111 If Fundamentalism as a theological
phcnornenon is defined as belief in the inerrancy of scripture, Fundamentalism
had not prevailed among Evangelicals by this date. The common supposition
of historians that Evangelicals of the mid-nineteenth century and before held,
as a deduction from the doctrine of inspiration, that the Bible must necessarily
contain no error is quite mistaken. This conviction was a novelty, a Romantic
innovation. In the middle years of the century there was no more than a rising
tide of Fundamentalist opinion.

SUPERNATURAL INTERVENTION
The most vivid instance of the increasing supernaturalism that marked the
Evangelical world of the 1820s and 1830s was the appearance of speaking in
tongues. The traditional view was that such miraculous signs had been
withdrawn from the church after its early years. At Albury it was suggested
that they ended solely because faith had grown cold.112 It followed that, as
faith was rekindled, the gifts might be restored. A.J.Scott, Irving’s assistant
 A TROUBLING OF THE WATER 91

minister, reached this conclusion and, on holiday on the Clyde in 1830, opened
his mind to Mary Campbell of Roseneath. It was she who, a few months later,
first spoke in tongues. News of the manifestations in Scotland led to intense
expectancy in London, where the earliest instance occurred in April 1831. By
October Irving was permitting the exercise of tongues inspired by the Spirit in
public worship. ‘An awful stillness prevailed for about five minutes’, wrote a
critical visitor. ‘Suddenly an appalling shriek seemed to rend the roof, which
was repeated with heart-chilling effect. I grasped involuntarily the bookdesk
before me; and then, suddenly, a torrent of unintelligible words, for about five
minutes, followed by—“When will ye rcpent? Why will ye not repent?”’113
Prophecies in English and miraculous healings were also known. In one year
forty-six spiritual cures were reported among the Irvingites of England alone.
These unfamiliar proto-Pentecostal happenings soon became confined to
Irving’s Catholic Apostolic Church, which, despite erecting some magnificent
placcs of worship, never became a power in the land. Its numbers in the United
Kingdom were estimated in 1878 to be under six thousand.114 But for a while—
probably significantly, in the years during and immediately after the great
cholera outbreak of 1831–2—the revival of spiritual gifts in the church was a
subject of widespread attention among Evangelicals. It was an extreme sign of
the new craving for the divine to break into the world.
A complementary tendency was the downgrading of natural theology.
Evangelicals, as we have seen, had previously delighted in the scientific
arguments that defended the faith on the basis of the Newtonian
cosmology.115 Now the radicals began to feel that their theology had been
too strongly marked by natural philosophy. They had left little or no room for
divine intervention in the present or future. Prejudice, confessed the respected
G.T.Noel, had previously prevented him from accepting the possibility of
miraculous intercourse between heaven and earth in a millennial state.116 The
prejudice was identified and condemned at Albury as a habitual looking at
second causes rather than at first. ‘Nothing can be so opposed to the
disposition of faith’, ran the first conference report, ‘as that which is only to be
convinced by external evidences. It is, in fact, saying that we will not believe
God unless He can bring a voucher for the truth of what He says. ‘117 The
demolition of the structure of natural theology would leave the way clear for
the bare trust in divine revelation characteristically urged by Irving and his
friends. But to those who continued to see ‘the mechanical philosophy’ as the
main buttress of Christian truth it was highly alarming. They remained
convinced, as the Congregational theologian John Harris put it, that ‘the
moral department of the Divine government is conducted on a plan equally
with the natural or the physical; that in the world of mind, as well as of
matter, certain causes produce certain effects’.118 It was a clash between those
who inherited the eighteenth-century beliefs in order, design and gradualness
and those who, in the iconoclastic spirit of the nineteenth century, wished to
substitute the free, the dynamic and the cataclysmic. The older school was to
92 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

retain its hegcmony at least until the debates stirred up by Darwinism from
the 1860s onwards.119 But from as early as the 1820s a new force was in the
field.

DOCTRINAL REFORMULATION
The same novel influences were affecting central doctrines. One of the most
significant developments was a reaction against Calvinism in favour of the
belief that the atonement was general in its scope. A landmark was the
publication, in 1828, of The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel by Thomas
Erskine, a Scottish Episcopal layman whose Romantic sensibility was
nourished by a love for works of art.120 The Gospel’, he writes, ‘reveals to us
the existence of a fund of divine love containing in it a propitiation for all sins,
and this fund is general to the whole race…,’121 His views received a warmer
welcome than might have been expectcd: Henry Drummond approved the
book, and even Chalmers, though dissenting from its main conclusion, ‘went
cordially with its leading principles’.122 Most crucially, a Church of Scotland
minister in the west of Scotland, John McLeod Campbell, concurred
wholeheartedly. McLeod Campbell, who in 1856 was to publish a treatise on
general redemption entitled The Nature of the Atonement, was deposed from
the ministry of the Church of Scotland in 1831 for departing from Reformed
orthodoxy. It was McLeod Campbell who, in 1828, persuaded Irving of the
truth of these views.123 It seems strange at first sight that Irving, who gloried
in what he called Calvinism, should adopt this anti-Calvinist kernel of an
alternative scheme of theology. The apparent contradiction is resolved when it
is recognised that Irving perceived an inadequate doctrine of redemption as the
root problem of contemporary Evangelical thought.124 If God is sovereign, he
held, then his redeeming power must be totally effective and therefore
encompass the whole of humanity. The conviction of Erskine, McLeod
Campbell and Irving that Christ died for all rested on a sense of the
absoluteness of divine authority. It was newly held that humanity enjoys a
solidarity—a typical theme of nineteenth-ccntury thought—because it is
subject as a whole to Christ. Such themes were to be propagated by A.J. Scott,
once Irving’s assistant and later the first Principal of Owen’s College,
Manchester, and by F.D.Maurice, the leading Broad Church theologian of the
mid-nineteenth century, who professed a deep debt to Erskine and Irving.125 If
it was formally condemned at the time, the broader view of the atonement
adumbrated by Erskine was to enjoy increasing favour among Evangelicals
and non-Evangelicals alike as the century advanced.
Another doctrinal field marked by innovation in the 1820s was Christology.
Irving propounded the belief that at the incarnation Christ assumed not just
humanity but sinful humanity. The point at issue is simply this’, he
explained: ‘whether Christ’s flesh had the grace of sinlessness and
incorruption from its proper nature, or from the indwelling of the Holy Ghost.
 A TROUBLING OF THE WATER 93

I say the latter.’126 It was for liis book arguing this case, The Orthodox and
Catholic Doctrine ofour Lord’s Human Nature (1830), that Irving was
excludcd from the ministry of the Church of Scotland. The condemnation
rested on the received doctrine of the union of the two natures of Christ in
one pcrson. If God and man were united, Irving’s claim amounted to the
assertion that a person who was God was capable of sin—a conclusion of
definite unorthodoxy. Irving, however, insisted that hc was speaking not of
Christ as a person but of the humanity he assumed.l27 It is clear that Irving
was not wishing to deviate from the mainstream of Christian teaching. He
wished to contend that Christ was subject to all the influences of his day
without in some sense being guarded by the coat-of-mail of intrinsic
sinlessness. The incarnation was utterly real. This aligned Irving with
tendencies gaining momentum in the early nineteenth century making for
greater emphasis on the doctrine of the incarnation that, once again, came to
fruition in the thought of Maurice. It was a distinctly Romantic trend.128 To
claim that the Holy Spirit was responsible for preserving Christ’s sinlessness
was to exalt the work of the third person of the Trinity, just as Irving did in
explaining the manifestations in his congregation. He was contending once
more for a higher estimate of divine involvement in the contemporary world.
Underlying the Christology was his central preoccupation with the irruption of
the supernatural into the human sphere.
For the discernment of the supernatural, faith was essential. One of the
most enduring legacies of the ferment surrounding Irving was the idea that
faith must be magnified if God is to be served aright. This, according to Irving,
is to be the governing principle of Christian mission. ‘lt was Faith they had to
plant’, he declared of the earliest apostles in his LMS sermon of 1824;
‘therefore he made his missionaries men of Faith, that they might plant Faith,
and Faith alone.’ Faith entailed reliance on God for material as well as spiritual
needs. Today’s missionaries should therefore imitate the apostles in going out
‘destitute of all visible sustenance, and of all human help’.129 Similar
convictions were maturing in other minds. A.N.Groves, an Exeter dentist,
both preached and practised entire dependence on God in missionary
service.130 His brother-in-law, George Müller, established an orphanage at
Bristol in 1835 on the same principles. Whenever money was exhausted,
‘prayer and faith were again resorted to’. Part of Müller’s inspiration derived
from the example of August Francke,131 but part was drawn from the
atmosphere of radical devotion to God that Müller discovered in the circles
around Groves that were developing into the Brethren movcment. Müller’s
principle of living by faith was taken up later in the century by J.Hudson
Taylor, another adherent of Brethren, and made the basis of his China Inland
Mission in 1865. The CIM differed from previous missionary societies in
possessing no structure of home support. Its backing came simply from those
committed to praying for its agents in the field, who were thrown into
dependence on God for their needs.132 Hudson Taylor vividly illustrated an
94 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

extreme version of this attitude to mission when, at a time when shipwreck

seemed imminent on his first voyage to China in 1853, he gave away his life
belt to assure himself that his trust was in God alone.133 ‘Living by faith’ was
to become the practice of an increasing proportion of full-time workers in the
Evangelical world in later years. The origins of the policy can be traced back to
the new desire to rely wholly on God that marked the juncture around 1830.
If faith was strong, the reality of God’s involvement in his world would be
evident in the care he exercised over his servants.

HIGH CHURCHMANSHIP
A further feature of the new mood around 1830 was a stronger sense of
churchmanship. It came to rapid fruition in the Albury circle, which hoped
that a corporate awareness, ‘a catholic, and universal spirit’, would rescue
Evangelicals from individualism. Churchmanship had suffered: ‘we have
almost forgotten that there is a church at all;…Christ, and the believer; that is
all.’134 Irving set out to retrieve the situation. He even claimed to doubt whether
those who failed to give ‘due reverence’ to the church would reach the heaven
that it symbolised.135 But Irving and his immediate friends were not alone in
publicising a higher view of the church. A.S.Thelwall, a young clerical
graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, was publishing similar ideas in his
sermons.136 It was also the burden of Henry Budd, the clerical secretary of the
Prayer Book and Homily Society. ‘Our Church is a glorious Church’, he wrote
in 1827, ‘if it had but a soul.’137 A sense of corporate solidarity had come into
vogue. Coleridge, as we have seen, was a primary source. The whole
movement of opinion was Romantic in inspiration.
The new school was also coming to fresh conclusions as a result of
exatnining ecclesiastical tradition with more care. Irving derived something of
his corporate sense from the seventeenth-century Scottish heritage of a
covenanted nation.138 Budd identified with ‘the design of our Reformers’,
many of whose works he was responsible for reissuing.139 There were appeals
to the Thirty-Nine Articles and to the formularies.140 This was part and parcel
of the growing historical awareness of the age. Irving was glad the Church of
England retained ‘Baptismal and communion services, comminations, fastings,
and festivals, ordinations, and all the other revered forms of the Latin
Church’. They constituted a monument to past glories: ‘like the ancient
armour of our fathers, they mock their puny children’.141 There was value as
well in the church year, ‘the various anniversaries which were instituted by the
first Christians, in commemoration of different important events’.142 By 1828
Drummond had reached the striking conclusion ‘that the Popish practice of
praying from a liturgy…without preaching, is nearer being a proper
ceremonial for God’s house, than making it a mere preaching house without
prayer, as it is gcnerally considered now’.143 The whole trend culminated in
the elaborate liturgy of the Catholic Apostolic Church, which moved ahead of
 A TROUBLING OF THE WATER 95

all but the most advanced ritualists in the Church of England by introducing
reservation of the consecrated elements in 1850, altar lights and incensc in
1852, the mixed chalice in 1854 and holy water in 1868.144 In this case High
Churchmanship could hardly be higher.
There was a corresponding rise in the value attached to the sacraments.
Drummond affirmed in 1828 that Catholic estimates of baptism and the Lord’s
Supper were nearer the truth than the idea that these sacraments ‘are mere
signs, as held by all the Dissenters, and by most of the Church of England
Evangelicals’.145 Drawing on such writers as Hugh of St Victor, a copy of
whose medieval treatise on the sacraments he gave to Coleridge in 1829,146
Irving adopted the same position. A sacrament, he held, is a ‘sign containing
the grace signified’. He scolded the church for its neglect of the Lord’s Supper,
which revealed, he contended, its unholy state.147 Other Evangelicals were just
beginning to adopt a loftier view of the sacrament. W.A.Shirley, who was
eventually to become a bishop, commenced a Church Communion Society at
about the same time.148 The Brethren from their beginnings believed that the
Christian community was constituted by its meeting to ‘break bread’ every
week.149 There was a growing appreciation of the holy communion in certain
Evangelical circles.
In general, however, more attention was paid to baptism by the radicals. ‘I
know’, wrote Irving, ‘that amongst no class of the Church doth so much
darkness and indifference exist upon the subject of baptism, as amongst the
Evangelical, amongst whom I have hardly found one who hath even an idea of
what is meant by this most excellent service of the Church.’150 His Homilies
on the Sacraments of 1828, in fact concerned entirely with baptism, were
designed to make good the deficiency. Baptism, he teaches, ‘involves a real
ingrafting into Christ’.151 It may well be that he adopted so strong a view
partly because of emotional stress following the death of two infant children.
Certainly he derived comfort from the doctrine in his affliction.152 But it
became a foundation stone of Irving’s ecclesiology, ‘the boundary of
separation between the creature regenerate, and the creature unregenerate’.153
Irving did not stand alone in magnifying the effects of baptism. Henry Budd,
from the ranks of the Church of England, composed a thorough study of Infant
Baptism (1827). Budd argues that infant baptism highlights the principle that
God graciously fulfils his prornises and therefore exalts the need for faith.
‘We may then hope’, he writes, ‘that as faith pleads and acts on the
PROMISE, God will bless his own mode of ameliorating the human character,
and that our population shall not be a community of mere natural men, but a
Communion of the Saints of God.’154 Budd gained the approval of Shirley, of
Drummond and, in some measure, of Maurice.155 It was a time when, it has
been suggested, belief in the innocence of childhood generated sentiment that
could readily be transferred to the baptismal service.156 Something of this kind
was occurring among advanced Evangelicals.
96 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

Such developments, though highly reminiscent of the Tractarians, were

proceeding before the Tractarian movement began at Oxford in 1833. The
radical Evangelicals held in the 1820s views that sound characteristic of
Newman, Pusey, Keble and their circle in the following decade. The
communion of saints and the holy catholic church’, recorded Drummond in
1827, ‘are grown to be dead letters in the creed; their meaning is understood,
their comfort felt, no more.’157 Irving was using the phrase ‘the idea of the
Christian church’ as early as 1825.158 At Albury in 1827 the mark of unity in
the church was valued so highly that attenders believed they had a duty to
prove the Roman Catholic Church to be apostate in order to clear themselves
of the sin of schism.159 There was an associated high doctrine of the ministry.
Irving was prepared to use the word ‘priesthood’ in 1828 when lamenting the
growing disrespect for it. 160 ‘The interference of laymcn in ecclesiastical
affairs is arrived at a fearful height’, wrote Drummond (paradoxically a
layman himself) in the same year.161 He was glad to appeal to the Fathers.162
The first Albury report concludes with a quotation from Keble, whose
Christian Year is described as ‘exquisite poetry’.163 It becomes apparent that
the radical Evangelicals were not just similar to the Tractarians but were
actually an earlier phase of the same movemcnt that in the 1830s proliferated
into many strands—including Brethren and the Catholic Apostolic Church as
well as Tractarianism.
Newman is a bond between the earlier phase and the Oxford Movement
proper. During the 1820s, already a Fellow of Oriel, Newman was an
Evangelical. He dabbled in prophecy, and as late as 1829 was elected co-
secretary of the CMS auxiliary at Oxford.164 He came to accept, like Irving,
the doctrine of baptismal rcgcneration, and in 1826 noted in his diary that
‘Pusey accused mc the other day of becoming more High Church’.165
Increasingly, Newman diverged from the extrcmists at Oxford around Bulteel,
but he fully shared their heightened supernaturalism. Late in 1833 he
published five letters in The Record urging Evangelicals to support the Oxford
Movement.166 The hope that they might rally to the cause was no chimera, for
the influcnces affecting Newman were also playing on them. Similarly, the
sons of William Wilberforce, with Henry Manning, found the transition from
Evangelicalism to a much higher churchmanship a natural evolution.167 Later,
when the battle lines were drawn between Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic, the
affinity was forgotten, but at the time it was substantial. Suspicion of the
Tractarians soon arose among Evangelicals, and in 1838 it hardened into
hostility on the publication of Hurrell Froude’s Remains with its repudiation
of Protestantism.168 Admissions of links between the two sides became
guarded. Budd’s Infant Baptism, according to his biographer in 1855, ‘gave the
first hints of several rcforms in the Church, which the Tractarians have caught
up, and distorted’.169 But when, in the second half of the century, the first
wave of alarm at Tractarian innovation passed, many Evangelicals, as will
appear, were prepared to alter their thinking, and especially their practice, in a
 A TROUBLING OF THE WATER 97

more churchly direction.170 They were returning to a tendency already

marked in the Evangelical ferment of the later 1820s.

CHURCH AND DISSENT

Not all the changes that marked the period round 1830 can be attributed
primarily to the changing cultural context. The diverging paths taken by
Anglicans and Dissenters is an instance where other circumstances were more
decisive. The increasingly secure position of Evangelicals in the Church of
England was a factor distancing them from Dissent. There was a growing
commitment to the Church of England as an institution. Edward Bickersteth,
for instance, encouraged Evangelical churchpeople to make a point of
attending the ministry of their parochial clergymen, in his Christian Hearer
of 1826.171 There were fewer scruples about the liturgy, and younger men
were beginning to regard it as close to perfection, J.E. Gordon, an earnest
Evangelical who entered parliament in 1831, was to praise its order of service
as sublimely devotional.172 It is not surprising that Gordon and many of his
contemporaries displayed a higher regard for the establishment principle than
had been customary among their predecessors.173 The relations between
church and state, furthermore, were brought to public attention by the so-
called ‘constitutional revolution’ of 1828–32. With the national legislature no
longer expressly Protestant and the church notoriously riddled with abuses,
ecclesiastical reform seemed likely to come next after parliamentary reform.
Lord Henley, an Evangelical, put forward his own proposals for church reform
in 1832,174 but, especially when the Whig government set out to restructure
the Church of Ireland in the following year, the more wary began to fear the
spectre of disestablishment.
The intellectual atmosphere, though undoubtedly secondary, did play its
part in encouraging Evangelicals to a stouter defence of the Church of England
as established. The radical Evangelicals were beginning to think, like Coleridge
in Church and State (1830), about the complementarity of church and nation.
‘lt is the duty of the State to establish the Christian religion’, declares an
Albury conference report.175 The rationale was that, just as the church
represents Christ’s priestly office, so the state represents his kingly office. In
Parliament during 1831–2 Spencer Perceval, the son of the assassinated Prime
Minister and later an apostle of the Catholic Apostolic Church, rose several
times, Bible in hand, to summon the nation to greater dependence on God.176
In 1834, R.B.Seeley, an Evangelical publisher, issued a set of Essays on the
Church in which he contends, in anticipation of Gladstone’s book on The State
in its Relations with the Church (1838), that the corporate personality of the
state makes it competent to honour God by establishing the church.177 Already
William Dealtry had published The Importance of the Established Church
(1832) and James Scholefield An Argument for a Church Establishment
(1833). The Record gave its loud support to the establishmentarian position;
98 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

groups of Evangelicals founded a Christian Influence Society and an

Established Church Society in 1832 and 1834 respectively.178 Under the
auspices of the Christian Influence Society, in 1838 Thomas Chalmers
delivered the most popular defence of the establishment of the decade to
crowded audiences in London.179 There was a marked trend of Evangelical
opinion in the Established Churches in favour of active support for the union
of church and state.
Naturally, the same trend was not apparent in the Dissenting churches. The
repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 was the result of their
pressure. Dissenters had proved themselves to be loyal subjects of the crown
for nearly a century and a half. Why, they asked, should they continue to be
defined as unworthy of holding office in town corporations? Although in
practice the legislation was virtually a dead letter, Dissenters felt that it made
them the victims of social discrimination. So they successfully demanded that
government should remove one of the leading stigmas of Dissent. 180 With the
reform of Parliament enfranchising many Dissenters four years later, there
was bound to be pressure for an end to their other grievances. In the winter of
1833–4 there was a remarkable upsurge of Dissenting feeling that adopted the
disestablishment cry.181 Permanent damage was done to relations between
Evangelicals in church and chapel. It was long recalled (when his qualifications
of the statement were forgotten) that Thomas Binney, a leading
Congregationalist, had declared that the Established Church destroyed more
souls than it saved.182 Political battles over church rates and other questions of
religious equality multiplied during the 1830s and 1840s. Co-operation in
evangelism, as in the foundation of the interdenominationai London City
Mission in 1835, and in public work, as in the Evangelical Alliance from 1845,
was fraught with bickering.183 The Christian Observer, representing moderate
Anglican Evangelicalism, claimed in 1843, a little disingenuously, not to have
changed its former sympathetic attitude to Dissenters. Yet the Dissenters were
showing a less kind spirit towards the Evangelicals of the Established Church
than earlier in the century.184 From the 1830s onwards, despite
rapprochements from time to time, the gulf between church and chapel
gencrally yawned much wider than before.

A DEFENSIVE POSTURE
Within the Church of England there developed a sense of being a bastion
under assault. Like continental conservatives or Newman, Anglican
Evangelicals identified the hostile force as Liberalism. They shared Newman’s
diagnosis of its primary assertion: ‘No religious tenet is important, unless
reason shows it to be so.’185 Liberalism was any philosophy of life not built on
divine revelation. Its adherents were called the ‘lnfidel, or indifferent party of
our politicians…who separate the Policy of the state from the Supremacy of
religion’.186 The grand crime of the Dissenters was entering a coalition with
 A TROUBLING OF THE WATER 99

such men and worshipping ‘their idol liberalism’.187 There were serious
secular implications. Liberalism attacked primogeniture, the basis of landed
property, and so threatened the social order with the ‘evils of democracy’.188 It
insinuated that ‘the people, and not God, are the source of legitimate
power’.189 The true foundation of political authority was, on the contrary, that
kings hold power delegated by Christ. And political economy, fostered by
Liberalism, denied the paternalist responsibility of Christian governments to
care for the poor and oppressed.190 So the effect of Liberalism was socially and
politically disastrous. ‘Liberalism’, according to a report of Albury, ‘is a system
of unbindings, of setting free from all ties’.191 Its anarchic individualism
betokened revolution in the pattern of things ordained by God. Hence it was
at all costs to be opposed. It is no wonder that exponents of such views turned
towards whatever promised to resist the advances of Liberalism. During the
1830s most Evangelicals in the Church of England severed any previous links
they might have had with Whiggery. The Christian Observer never supported
the Whigs after 1834. Remaining Evangelical Whigs, in fact, became
suspect.192 Peelite Conservatism seemed a bulwark of true religion.
Infidelity, the apparent premise of Liberalism, seemed to be on the increase.
The grand sin of these days, according to an Albury report, was ‘scepticism,
infidelity, the deification of the intellect of man, reasoning pride, disbelief in
the Word of God’.193 The tide of unbelief had swept in since the French
Revolution; Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Condorcet and other free-thinking
writers were selling well in France; Tom Paine was influencing even the
Reformed religion in Britain.l94 There had been an outburst of infidel
propaganda during the Queen Caroline affair of 1820–1, some of it
blasphemous and much of it scurrilous, that must have troubled
Evangelicals.195 Increasingly they lumped together what others naturally
contrasted—the highly respectable Utilitarian body of social thought
stemming from the Enlightenment and the popular printed material that
poured scorn on the existing order in church and state. The former, whose
advance was celebrated in the 1820s as ‘the march of mind’, was as much an
expression of irreligion as the latter. Satan was manipulating both to ensure
that people would accept nothing on the bare testimony of God’s word, but
only with reasons. ‘This is the natural and inevitable consequence’, it was
said, ‘of all education which is not founded upon the doctrines of
Christianity…’196 Hence the radical Evangelicals were vocal opponents of the
creation in 1828 of London University, the institution that became University
College, London. Nobody denounced this ‘godless institution in Gower Street’
where there was to be no religious instruction more vigorously than did Irving
and Drummond. The Bible’, wrote Drummond, ‘does prescribe the mode in
which youth shall be trained, namely, in the nurture and admonition of the
Lord; and a system founded on the intentional neglect of, and disobedience to,
that command, is an infidel system, or rather a system of premeditated and
obstinate rebellion against God.’197 The need to preserve the religious element
100 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

in education became a standard characteristic of Evangelicals in the Established

Church.
A corollary of this stance was that, even before the rupture between church
and chapel, the circle around Irving and Drummond became fiercely hostile to
co-operation with Unitarians. Evangelical Dissenters had retained their
traditional links with the English Presbyterians who had adopted lower, more
rationalist, ‘Socinian’ views of the person of Christ. William Smith, the
leading Dissenting MP, shared these views and yet was a close colleague of
Wilberforce and his parliamentary friends.198 The new Evangelical school,
however, regarded Unitarians with distaste as a species of infidel within the
professing church. Socinianism, for Irving, was a form of apostasy.199 Joint
activities with Unitarians rnust therefore cease. In 1830–1 an attempt was
made, with followers of Irving and Haldane in the van, to purge the Bible
Society of its Socinian supporters.200 In 1836 the orthodox Dissenters
similarly determined to end their alliance with Unitarians, who were forced to
withdraw from the representative General Body of Protestant Dissenting
Ministers.201 Orthodoxy was coming to be seen as a condition of co-
operation.

ANTI-CATHOLICISM
The other grand threat to Evangelical values came from Roman Catholicism.
Although its numbers had grown during the eighteenth century, the Catholic
Church in Britain remained in the 1820s a docile, unassertive body, eager to
demonstrate the qualification of its members for the parliamentary
franchise.202 Evangelicals shared the common British aversion to popery as a
compendium of all that was alien to national life, whether religious, political
or moral. They inherited the Reformation identification of the papacy as
Antichrist, the seventeenth-century fears that linked popery with continental
autocracy and the popular suspicions that hovered round celibacy and the
confessional. They added their own specific sense of the spiritual deprivation of
Catholics. Yet the unobtrusiveness of the Catholic population and the
predisposition to toleration of the early Evangelicals meant that virulent anti-
popery was remarkably rare in the first three decades of the century. It was,
after all, supposed that popery was a spent force, already tottering (since the
French Revolution) to its ultimate fall, and so it seemed no threat.
Developments in the 1820s, however, began to point towards a more
wholehearted anti-Catholicism. In Ireland Protestant-Catholic controversy
took on a sharper edge following the provocative primary charge by William
Magee, Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, in 1822.203 Methodists were arousing
Catholic resentment in Ireland by their evangelism and fuelling the growth of
anti-Catholic feeling among their English coreligionists.204 And in Britain the
intense public discussion of the 1820s over whether or not to concede political
rights to Catholics stirred up the ashes of ancient disputes.205 Dissenters were
 A TROUBLING OF THE WATER 101

divided among themselves on the question of Catholic emancipation, the more

educated seeing the analogy with their own case against civil discrimination on
grounds of religion, the rank and file a prey to traditional suspicions.206 A
similar fissure ran through the ranks of Evangelical Anglicans, though there
were sophisticated figures such as Sir Robert Inglis and William Marsh who
were devotedly opposed to the Catholic claims.207 Irving was at first neutral,
but later decided that a concession to Catholics would infringe his ideal of a
state professing the true religion.208 It was in his circle that the strongest anti-
Catholic attitudes sprang up. In 1827, a Reformation Society for anti-Catholic
propaganda was set up, with J.E.Gordon as secretary.209 The church of Rome
might be apostate, but its power to deceive had not disappeared. Catholicism was
once more seen as a deadly foe.
The strongest stimulus to anti-Catholicism was the influx of Catholic Irish.
Even before the famine of the mid-1840s brought a vast torrent from Ireland,
the trickle of immigrants had swelled into a substantial flow. By the 1820s the
pressures of over-population and cheaper rates for the passage to England
stimulated a large-scale exodus. By 1851 half a million Irish-born had settled
in England and Wales.210 Apart from traditional disdain for the Irish, anti-
Catholicism was fostered by fears of their revolutionary tendencies and a
stereotype of poverty and laziness, barbarism and ignorance, which came close
to the reality of immigrant existence in the urban ‘rookeries’.211 When these
attitudes were mingled with inherited anxieties and enhanced by Evangelical
fervour, the result was a heady and distasteful brew.212
It was most potent in the Anglican circles where premillennialism had taken
hold. In the historicist schcme, there was no doubt that Antichrist was Rome.
Thus the chief practical application of E.B.Elliott’s massive four-volume work
on the interpretation of Revelation was a warning that we should not ‘seek
nationally to identify ourselves with the Papal antichristian religion’ or to
‘abandon our distinctive Protestant character’.213 But others untouched by the
new prophetic movement also succumbed to a virulent anti-popery. Hugh
Miller, editor of the newspaper of the Free Church of Scotland and a literary
figure of some standing, was alarmed by the hordes of impoverished Irishmen
crowding into the Edinburgh slums. ‘We must employ betimes more
missionaries and Bibles soon’, he wrote, ‘or we shall soon have to employ
soldiers and cannon.’214 The most politicised version of anti-Catholicism was
the Protestant Association, founded in 1835 by J.E.Gordon. Its greatest
strength was in Lancashire, where popular apprehensions about immigration
were most intcnse, since Liverpool was the chief port of entry from Ireland.
Hugh McNeile, once Drummond’s vicar at Albury and now in Liverpool, set
up in 1839 a Protestant Operative Society linked with the Association.215
McNeile treated the Protestant cause as the defence of his country, argued
explicitly for ‘Nationalism in Religion’ and declared that ‘we cannot allow our
spirituality as Christians entirely to supersede our patriotism as Britons’.216
Inevitably, the Protestant Association and the strongest of the other anti-
102 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

Catholics were firmly aligned with the Conservatives. Therefore the apparent
betrayal of the Protestant cause by Peel in 1845, when he increased the
government grant to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth, was an immense
shock,217 It provoked an upsurge of angry protest in the whole Evangelical
community that was to be surpassed only once in the subsequent history of
anti-Catholic opinion—the levée en masse in 1850–1 against the so-called
papal aggression, when Pius IX restored the hierarchy of the Catholic Church
in England and Wales.218 By the middle of the century hatred of the papacy
and all its works had. been powerfully reinforced in the Evangelical mentality.

AN OUTLOOK OF PESSIMISM
The assaults by infidcls and papists on the truth of God and, for an increasing
number, the onslaught by Dissenters on the establishment, made the
prospects for Christianity seem dark. Expectations that the gospel would usher
in a superior world order were dismissed by the new school as a sinister
deception. ‘Fye, oh, fye upon it!’ exclaimed Irving, ‘ye Christians have
fathered upon the scriptures the optimisrn of the German and French
infidels!’219 Dreams of human improvement without decisive divine
intervention were chimerical. The Brethren produced the most extreme
version of the new pessimism with their assertions that the whole professing
church, Protestant as well as Catholic, had lapsed into apostasy so that security
lay in ‘gathering to the name alone’, that is, in withdrawing from existing
ecclesiastical organisations to worship Christ in seclusion and simplicity.220
Fears for the future were aggravated when the bastion of the Church of
England turned out to be harbouring a fifth column. When, in the late 1830s,
the Tractarians were perccived as crypto-Romanists, alarm scaled ncw heights.
A typical comment was that Tractarians were ‘working to poison’ the
education of the national church at its source in Oxford.221 Prophecy added its
seal by announcing the last days. Symptoms were all around. The prophetic
writer J.W.Brooks censured ‘the depraved taste of the age’, citing ‘Nicholas
Nickleby, abounding with the lowest vulgarity’ as a good example.222 The
world seemed degenerate.
Resistance to the upsurge of gloom came from those who rejected
premillennialism. Samuel Waldegrave still held in 1854 that the Old
Testament predicted the blessings of gospel days. 223 John Harris, representing
the predominant school of opinion among Dissenters, argued that hopes for the
spread of the gospcl must be sustained for the sake of encouraging support for
foreign missions,224 But the newer and darker view, propagated especially by
The Record, was making headway. At some distance, The Christian Observer
followed in its tracks. By 1844 this journal that had once been renowned for
its humanitarianism was expressing doubts about the potential for reform.
Social improvement through legislation and popular institutions was limited
by the fallen state of man. Education might do something, but only
 A TROUBLING OF THE WATER 103

regeneration could supply the remedy. In the field of social reform, ‘men
begin with expecting too much; and conclude with hoping for nothing’.225
Francis Close, Vicar of Cheltenham and a leading exponent of the new
attitudes, voiced the political implications of pessimism. ‘ln my humble
opinion’, he declared, ‘the Bible is conservative, the Prayer Book conservative,
the Liturgy conservative, the Church conservative, and it is impossible for a
minister to open his mouth without being conservative. ’226 Evangelicals in the
Church of England were turning into embattled defenders of the existing
order.
The chief explanation for the transformation of Evangelicalism in the years
around 1830 is the spread of Romanticism. Much must be attributed to the
alarming political events of the times. The constitutional revolution in
particular precipitated a revision of Evangelical attitudes. The changing
religious situation, encompassing the immigration of the Catholic Irish, the
rise of the Oxford Movement and the growing strength of Evangelicalism
itself, played an essential part. But Evangelicals were most affected by the new
cultural mood that in the 1820s spread beyond the small literary caste to a
wider public. Before any of the shock-waves of repeal, emancipation and
reform, a new world-view for Evangelicals had been fashioned by the radical
coterie of Albury. Despite the retreat of Irving and Drummond to the private
world of the Catholic Apostolic Church, they had already injected most of
their attitudes into the mainstream of Evangelical life. An intensified sense of
the supernatural spread in many forms and in many ways, revolutionising the
inherited outlook.
Those who responded to the new ideas tended to be the young, and so they
lived long to propagate their views. They were also drawn primarily from the
social elite. The students of prophecy, it was noted as late as 1864, ‘are not
mere ignorant enthusiasts, but belong in considerable numbers to the
respectable and educated classes of society’.227 The Catholic Apostolic Church,
embodying the full range of the new views, included in its ranks the seventh
Duke of Northumberland, a viscount and four baronets; it was also
disproportionately supported by lawyers, ex-clergymen, bankers, businessmen
and physicians.228 Likewise the well-to-do, including several peers, were
attracted into the Brethren.229 Because the new opinions had greater appeal for
the upper and professional classes, they were much more widespread in the
Church of England than outside. Dissenters were acting on the very Liberalism
that Anglicans deplored, and so remaining loyal to the Enlightenment
heritage. In the long run the new opinions of the years around 1830, and
espccially the prophetic and biblical convictions, were to reach a broader
audience, percolating down eventually to the lower-class sectarian fringe. But
in the middle third of the nineteenth century it was a section of the educated
world that embraced the innovations. That is precisely because it was educated:
it was more familiar with fresh ideas and more willing to accept them. The
leaders of Evangelical opinion were swayed by the fashionable Romantic
104 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

leaders of Evangelical opinion were swayed by the fashionable Romantic

assumptions of their day. The gospel was being remoulded by the spirit of the
age.
 [4]
The Growth of the Word: Evangelicals and
Society in the Nineteenth Century

But the word oj God grew and multiplied. (Acts 12:24)

‘Miss Drusilla Fawley was of her date, Evangelical.’1 So Thomas Hardy

describes the elderly aunt of the protagonist in his last novel, Jude the
Obscure. While acidly implying that Evangelicalism, for all its claims to
represent eternal truth, is entirely transient, Hardy incidentally points us to
the period of Evangelical ascendancy in Britain. His novel, after publication in
parts, appeared complete in 1895: the prime of Miss Drusilla Fawley must
have been thirty to forty years before, that is, in the 1850s and 1860s. The cult
of duty, self-discipline and high seriousness was at its peak in those decades. In
1850 the Lord Lieutenant of a Midland shire remembered a time when only
two landed gentlemen in the county had held family prayers, but by that year
only two did not.2 When fast days were carefully observed during the
Crimean War, there was satisfaction at the ‘improved religious tone’ of the
age.3 And sabbatarian opinion, a useful gauge of Evangelical social influence,
reached its apogee in the campaigns of the 1850s to ensure the Sunday closure
of the Crystal Palace and British Museum.4 Evangelical attitudes were
characteristic of the times as never before or since. The earliest favourable
appreciation of Victorian civilisation, swimming against the tide of previous
hostility to all things Victorian, G.M.Young’s Portrait of an Age, fully
recognised this broad ascendancy: ‘Evangelicalism had imposed on society,
even on classes which were indifferent to its religious basis and unaffected by
its economic appeal, its code of Sabbath observance, responsibility, and
philanthropy; of discipline in the home, regularity in affairs; it had created a
most effective technique of agitation, of private persuasion and social
persecution.’5 Such ‘Victorian values’ should perhaps more accurately be
styled ‘high Victorian values’, the social norms of the years immediately
following the middle of the nineteenth century. Their dominance was
primarily the fruit of Evangelical religion.
Not all mid-Victorians welcomed this development. To some more
venturesome spirits the yoke of high Victorian values was irksome. A person,
lamented J.S.Mill, ‘who can be accused either of doing “what nobody does”, or
106 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

of not doing “what everybody does”, is the subject of as much depreciatory

remark as if he or she had committed some grave moral delinquency’.6 Mill’s
Essay on Liberty, from which this quotation is taken, was an eloquent protest
by the most distinguished English philosopher of his century against the
forces making for conformity. It is the classic text of nineteenth-century
Liberalism. But its shafts are directed less against the oppressive authority of
the state than against what Mill calls ‘the despotism of custom’. Completed in
1857 and publishcd in 1859, the book is a condemnation of social pressures,
and only secondarily of state interference. Mill was objccting to the power of
opinion to wear down creative individuality to a uniform level of mediocrity.
Although he never uses the word, Evangelicalism is his chief target. He
criticises what he calls the theory of Calvinism, which is held, he suggests, by
many who do not consider themselves Calvinists. According to Mill’s
caricature of the theory, human beings have but to submit to the divine will.
All must bow to the samc purposes, and so all must behave alike. The ‘stricter
Calvinists and Methodists…these intrusively pious members of society’, in
their passion for the improvement of morals, may well attempt the prohibition
of popular amusements. Already they havc launched three efforts to abridge
personal liberty. There has been formed a United Kingdom Alliance to obtain
the prohibition of the sale of liquor; there are outbreaks of sabbatarianism; and
there is open hostility to Mormons.7 All three of Mill’s instanccs can be laid at
the door of Evangelicals and their associates. Mill’s powerful onslaught
illustrates the extent to which popular Protestantism was (as it saw the
matter) trying to be its brother’s kecper. It is testimony to the mid-Victorian
social influence of Evangelicalism.
Within the Church of England, as Gladstone pointed out in 1879, the
Evangelical movement never became dominant, yet ‘it did by infusion
profoundly alter the general tone and tendency of the preaching of the clergy;
not, however, at the close of the last or the beginning of the present century,
but after the Tractarian movement had begun, and, indeed, mainly when it
had reached that forward stage…of Ritualism’.8 If the initiative had passed to
the Oxford Movement and its offspring, the greatest influence of the
Evangelicals as an Anglican party came in the period just after the middle of
the century. The number of Evangelical clergy had been estimated in 1803 at
five hundred.9 In 1823 there had been 1,600 clerical subscribers to the Church
Missionary Society.10 By 1853 the Evangelical clergy were judged to embrace
6,500, that is, well over a third of the whole number.11 The pace of change had
increased in the 1830s and 1840s as a higher proportion of ordinands was
drawn from the Evangelical camp. More young men were offering themselves
for ministry, so that the balance of allegiance within the profession altered the
more rapidly. By 1854 a majority of clergy had been ordained in the previous
twenty years.12 The younger men, even if outside the party boundary of
Evangelicalism, had grown up in a world more favourable to vital religion, and
its idiotn, as Gladstone suggested, affected their preaching in particular.
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 107

The rising Evangelical tide was also evident in the episcopate. The first
Evangelical bishop, Henry Ryder, was appointed to Gloucester in 1815 (and to
Lichfield in 1824). The second and third, the brothers C.R. and J.B. Sumner,
were elevated to Llandaff in 1826 (Winchester in 1827) and to Chester in 1828
respectively. Several clergy of Evangelical sympathies, if not firm party men,
were consecrated during the 1830s.13 In 1846 and 1848 W.A.Shirley and John
Graham became Bishops of Sodor and Man and of Chester.14 Between 1856
and 1860 six more Evangelicals were added to the bench: H.M.Villiers went to
Carlisle (and later Durham), Charles Baring to Gloucester, Robert Bickersteth
to Ripon, J.T.Pelham to Norwich, J.C.Wigram to Rochester and Samuel
Waldegrave to Carlisle. This flurry of appointments owed more, it was said, to
Shaftesbury’s influence with Palmerston than to the candidates’ merits. But
that was unfair: Palmerston, like Shaftesbury, was looking for conscientious
pastoral bishops and, not surprisingly, found suitable men among the enlarged
ranks of the Evangelicals.15 By this time, furthermore, there was an
Evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury inj. B. Sumner (1848–62), who, if no
striking personality, was as hard-working as his colleagues. The Evangelical
school, dominant in the churches of Scotland and the chapels of England and
Wales, had come into its own even in the Church of England.

THE 1851 RELIGIOUS CENSUS

It so happens that the Evangelical ascendancy coincided with the only official
census of religion ever taken in Britain. It was calculated at the time that, of
the population of England and Wales over the age of ten that could have
attended, 54 per cent chose to be in church on census Sunday. A more recent
recalculation has suggested that a minimum of 35 per cent of the total
population attended church, or 47 per cent of the total population over the age
of ten.16 We can safely conclude that about half the available adult population
went to church. Contemporaries were dismayed that attendance figures turned
out to be so low, and historians have tended to echo them. In particular, they
havc drawn attention to the disparity between rural and urban churchgoing.
The index of attendance (total attendances as a percentage of the population)
was 71.4 for rural areas and small towns; but for large towns with a population
of more than 10,000 it was 49.7. All eight London boroughs and Birmingham,
Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford recorded an index of
attendance below 49.7. The figure for Preston was as low as 25.5. The cities of
Victorian England seemed to be weak spots for the churches.17 In the relatively
static countryside they might have retained their hold on the population, but
in the growing urban centres they appeared to be failing in their mission.
Population growth, industrialisation and urbanisation had transformed the
face of much of the country, and the churches had not adjusted to altered
circumstances.
108 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

There is good reason, however, to call in question so pessimistic a verdict on

the impact of the churches. For only half the available population to be
churchgoers might trouble those mid-Victorians who assumed the whole
nation should conform to religious worship. Yet that figure compares
favourably with the statistics of the late twentieth century. In 1979 adult
church attendance as a proportion of the adult population of England was 11
per cent.18 By that yardstick mid-nineteenth-century congregations were
flourishing. Furthermore, scattered evidence from the eighteenth century
suggests that attendance was often low in a period long before the census. In
thirty Oxfordshire parishes between 1738 and 1811 the number of
communicants formed less than 5 per cent of the population. Likewise,
communicant levels were poor in late eighteenth-century Cheshire.19 Such
fmdings are congruent with the torpor that commonly gripped the Georgian
Church of England. Consequently, it is certain that the churches were facing
no novel problem in the levels of abstention from worship in 1851.
On the contrary, the rates of attendance in that year represented a
significant improvement on the pattern prevailing in the previous century.
The churches had managed to recruit more effectively despite the immense
growth in population of the early nineteenth century, despite industrialisation
and urbanisation. Their success can confidently be attributed primarily to the
hunger for souls of Evangelicalism. In the case of Methodism the process of
growth can be documented from the careful membership statistics kept by the
connexions. In 1801 Methodists formed 1.5 per cent of the adult English
population; in 1851, 4.4 per cent.20 Similarly, Congregationalists in England
grew from an estimated 35,000 in 1800 to 165,000 in 1851 while population
merely doubled.21 In Scotland, the proportion of churchgoers in 1851 at
congregations of the Free and United Presbyterian Churches, both wholly
Evangelical bodies, was 51 per cent, and at the much more mixed Church of
Scotland it was 32 per cent.22 It can also be shown from the 1851 census that
the Evangelicals of the Church of England had achieved more than their
contemporaries of the same communion. Returns for a sample of Evangelical
parishes belonging to the Simeon Trust have been compared with those for a
sample of equivalent nearby parishes of unknown churchmanship. The index
of attendance for the Simeon Trust parishes turned out to be 44, whereas for
the equivalent parishes it was only 25.23 Evidently Evangelical Anglicans
shared fully in the large-scale recruitment of the early nineteenth century.
Massive church growth underlay the Evangelical social influence of the mid-
century.
If the 1851 religious census reveals overall success by the churches in
winning men and women to Christian practice, it also shows great
geographical variation in their support. A broad regional contrast existed
between the south-east, where the Church of England was generally stronger,
and the north-west, where it was weaker. The contrast reflected the division of
England and Wales into a lowland arable zone, where greater prosperity had
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 109

created smaller parishes and richer endowmcnts centuries before, and an

upland pastoral zone, where larger, less sought-after parishes had received less
intensive pastoral care. The Old Dissent was most powerful in its historic
heartland, a swathe of territory embracing East Anglia, the South Midlands
and the West Country, together with Wales. The strength of Methodism lay
primarily in the upland zone of the north and west where the Church of
England had been least efficient. Local diversity was immense, having a great
deal to do with how effective squire and parson could be in excluding
Nonconformity frotn the parish.24 Consequently rural churchgoing varied
between an index of attendance of 104.6 in Bedfordshire (a result of frequent
multiple attendances) and one of 37.3 in Cumberland. It is entirely mistaken
to suppose that there was anything like monolithic religious conformity in the
countryside.
The level and denominational balance of churchgoing in large towns
resembled, though usually at a lower level, the pattern of the surrounding
countryside. Migrants to the towns were preponderantly drawn from the
adjacent villages and brought their religious preferences with them.25 Urban
churchgoing also tended to be lower where the town was larger and its
economy morc industrialised. The three large towns possessing an index of
attendance above the rural average of 71.4, Bath, Colchester and Exeter, were
centres of administration, commerce and leisurc rather than of industry. There
can be no doubt about where the greatest strength of Evangelicalism lay. The
Methodists, far more numerous than the other Nonconformist bodies,
gathered throngs of worshippers in several of the northern counties. In Stoke-
on-Trent they actually attracted more attendances than all the other
denominations put together. In Yorkshire they did almost as well, achieving a
percentage share of attendances of 47.3 in the East Riding, 45.4 in the North
Riding and 42.3 in the West Riding.26 It is possible to assess the strength of
Evangelicalism within the Church of England according to the percentage of
congregations in a county supporting the Church Missionary Society. By far
the highest figures relate to Yorkshire: 42.5 for the East Riding, 40.2 for the
North Riding and 39.7 for the West Riding. The adjacent counties of Durham
(27.2), Derbyshire (26.0) and Lancashire (25.3) come next on the list.27 It is
plain that the combined forces of Methodism and Evangelical Anglicanism had
become firmly entrenched in the north of England, with Yorkshire as a huge
bastion. There were many remote rural nooks in the county, but equally it
contained several of the most important industrial cities. The gospel did not
lack appeal in an urban, industrial environment.

SOCIAL CLASS
In addition, the religious census lays bare a correlation between churchgoing
and social class. Large towns with a similar class structure possessed similar
rates of churchgoing. Again, more detailed analysis of the returns has shown
110 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

that where middle-class inhabitants were numerous, church attendance was

higher. Conversely, in the poorer parishes, attendance was lower.28 It seems
that this pattern was general. Only in Liverpool, where some Catholic Irish
showed conspicuous loyalty to their church, did predominantly working-class
parishes record higher attendances than predominantly middle-class
parishes.29 The growth of class-specific suburbs in the later ninetcenth century
accentuated the tendency. By 1902 in London there was a close
correspondence between levels of churchgoing and the position of a suburb in
the social hierarchy. Thus, in Ealing, near the top of the social scale, 47 per
cent of the population was in church, while in Fulham, near the bottom, only
12 per cent.30 Where the social mix was more varied, the parish church might
draw in different grades—though not necessarily to the same service. But this
principle did not apply to Nonconformists. ‘Class position amongst the
Nonconformists goes very much by congregations’, concluded an observer in
1902, ‘the worshippers sorting themselves in this way much more than do
those who attend parish churches.’31 Throughout the century church
attendance was most common at the highest social levels. The ability of the
churches to attract those possessing wealth and power, it has been justly
observed, was a significant achievement, a sign of the importance of religion in
society.32
A consequence, however, was that some denominations were almost
entirely rniddle-class in composition. Although this was truest of the non-
Evangelical Unitarians and the only partly Evangelical Quakers, it was also
commonly the case among Congregationalists. Their denomination, according
to the same observer of London in 1902, was ‘more than any other the Church
of the middle classes, its membership being practically confined within the
limits of the upper and lower sections of those included under that
comprehensive title’.33 During the second half of the century the middle-class
proportion of the worshipping community increased, not least because of the
growth in size of the lower middle classes in society at large. Between 1851
and 1911 the proportion of occupied males over 15 in clerical and similar posts
increased from 2.5 per cent to 7.1 per cent.34 Children from churchgoing
families in the working classes, often giving promise of steadiness and
reliability, thronged into this emerging sector. In 1902, even in predominantly
working-class Bethnal Green, 34.6 per cent of worshippers in Congregational
chapels and 24.0 per cent of those in their Baptist equivalents were clerical
workers.35 Nor were the Primitive Methodists, with their proletarian image,
exempt. At Ashton-under-Lyne, between 1850 and 1870, 4 per cent of their
worshippers were lower middle-class; for the period between 1890 and 1910
the proportion had risen to 21 per cent.36 The process of embourgeoisement
reinforced over time the tendency of the churches to be more successful
further up the social scale.
This feature of churchgoing was so marked that it is sometimes suggested
that the working classes abstained from Christian worship altogether. A
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 111

pioneer historian of the subject has written of ‘the general widespread

alienation of the artisan classes from the churches’.37 It is easy, especially on
the hypothesis of urbanisation being intrinsically unfavourable to
churchgoing, to reach too blanket a conclusion. In reality, the figures for the
1851 census show that there must havc been extcnsive working-class
attendance. Too many people went to church for religious practice to have
been confined to the middle classes, which accounted for less than a quarter of
the population. A majority of the working people did not attend, but a
significant proportion did. More detailed research has shown that skilled
workers, the artisans proper, were far more likely to enter a place of worship
than unskilled labourers. In the early nineteenth century it was the skilled
who were overwhclmingly attracted to Evangelical Nonconformity. Whereas
artisans constituted some 23 per cent of society at large, they composed 59 per
cent of Evangelical Nonconformist congregations.38 The Secession churches of
Glasgow made a parallel appeal to the skilled men of the city.39 The great
number of tiny contributions to the CMS suggests that Evangelicalism in the
Church of England drew heavily on the sarne constituency.40 Artisans were
commonly to be found in church.
Unskilled workers, usually the majority and in some areas the great
majority of the working classes, were drawn into places of worship in much
smaller numbers. The case of the Primitive Methodists, normally supposed to
have provided a religion for the poor, is instructive. It is true that in some
areas they did penetrate the unskilled working classes. In part of Lincolnshire,
for instance, 51 per cent of identified Primitive lay preachers in the mid-
nineteenth century were agricultural labourers.41 Generally, however,
Primitive Methodist chapels catered for the skilled much more than for the
unskilled. In a national sample of Primitive congregations in the first third of
the century 16 per cent were labourers and another 12 per cent were miners,
most of them unskilled; but 48 per cent were artisans.42 An exhaustive study
has shown that, although between 80 per cent and 100 per cent of nineteenth-
century Primitive Methodists were manual workers, they were much more
likely to be semi-skilled or craftsmen than labourers.43 There was, of course, a
natural tendency for converted characters to gain skills, find regular
employment and so rise out of the lowest ranks of society. Evangelical religion,
as many commented at the time, was itself an avenue of upward social
mobility. Yet this process meant that the gospel abstracted individuals from
their original setting rather than mingling with the lifestyle of the poor. So it
can be concluded that although Evangelicalism enjoyed substantial working-
class support it never secured the allegiance of the masscs of the labouring
population.
112 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

NON-CHURCHGOING
Why was there widespread alienation among the lower working classes from
the churches? A primary factor was sheer poverty. Even at the end of the
century, by which time the working-class standard of living had risen
significantly, the family income could often be too low to buy the essentials of
existence such as shoes and clothes. To appear at church was to court the
contempt of neighbours for not being able to dress the family adequately. Nor
could many families afford pennies for the offering.44 And one of the chief
deterrents was the pew rent system. Most nineteenth-century places of
worship, apart from older parish churches, were financed at least in part by
hiring out particular pews to those who would pay for them. Grades of
comfort dictated price differentials. Consequently, variations in social status
were imported into church. Cheap or free seating was normally made available
for the poor, but often in inconvenient corners behind pillars. A working-class
newcomer would be assigned what an Evangelical clergyman condemned in
1859 as ‘a pauper’s post outside the well-cushioned pew’.45 Despite a chorus of
criticism from many quarters, the system persisted in places long into the
twentieth century. It was symptomatic of the barriers to church attendance
erected by what a leading Congregational minister called ‘the English caste
system’.46
Unskilled workers outside Methodism, with its plethora of official posts,
rarely found themselves involved in church administration or exercising
church discipline. Conversely, discipline, as enforccd by Nonconformists and
all Scottish Presbyterians, tended to bear more heavily on the poorer section
of the working classes whose offences were normally more public.47 This
factor should not be exaggerated, for discipline was exercised over even the
eminent and prosperous: the affairs of Sir Morton Peto, a bankrupt building
and railway contractor, were fully investigated and partly censured in 1867 by
the Baptist church he had founded.48 Furthermore, vigilance in excrcising
discipline declined in all churches during the last third of the century, so that
by its end the practice could hardly be a grievance.49 Although working-class
resentment of failure by the churches to criticise the class system existed, it
seems not to have been a major reason for absence from worship until the end
of the century. Only then did wholesale condemnation of the churches for
ignorance of industrial questions and contempt for the working people affect
more than a small proportion of the population.50 Class consciousness had by
that time reachcd new heights. Yet a certain ecclesiastical insensitivity to
proletarian self-respect had previously caused a diffuse but powerful
indignation among the working classes. ‘Let the poor learn’, Bishop Robert
Bickersteth declared in 1860, ‘that there is a sympathy felt for them amongst
the classes which, in social rank, are above them.’51 Although the intention
was kindly, a tone so patently de haut en bas was noticed and, by some,
resented. The result was a reinforcement of traditional anticlericalism,
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 113

‘antagonism…to the parson as a paid teacher of religion’.52 Dislike for lazy

clergy, incomprehensible worship and overbearing class assumptions could
combine with the expense of involvement to deter many of the poor from
churchgoing.
Perhaps the most widespread explanation within Evangelical churches for
working-class non-attendance in the late nineteenth century was what the
Congregational minister already quoted called ‘the drink habit’.53 Alcohol
clouded the spiritual faculties, and its purchase (it was commonly held) was
responsible for the poverty that kept people outside the church doors.
Simplistic as this analysis undoubtedly was, it held a measure of truth. The
consumption of alcohol probably mounted steadily until 1876 and, although it
fell thereafter, it remained at high levels.54 Alcoholwas available from a vast
array of outlets. In 1854 in Merthyr Tydfil there were 506 licensed drinking
places, that is, one for every 93 of the population, and the town was not
exceptional.55 The public house, as it had done down the centuries, formed the
chief alternative centre of community life to the church. ‘Pub-going’ was the
only social activity to attract more people than churchgoing. So it represented
a different use of leisure time that constantly posed a threat to the churches.
From the years around 1870 onwards, furthermore, there was a great
expansion in organised leisure activities that rivalled the churches in drawing
power. Traditional recreations had probably suffered less in the early
industrial period than has been supposed, but now, with increasing middle-
class patronage, they were turned into disciplined, rule-governed games that
harnessed extensive popular enthusiasm. The general adoption of the Saturday
half-holiday permitted a great expansion of football and cricket clubs in the
1870s. The churches, sensitive to the popular mood, realised the need to
provide recreational facilities. At Bolton a third of the cricket clubs and a
quarter of the football clubs had a religious connection; and in Birmingham at
least a fifth of the cricket clubs and a quarter of the football clubs.56 Although
such agencies retained the allegiance of some young men, their creation was
evidence of a recognition by churchcs of their potential power to draw away.
Like the contemporary working men’s clubs and music halls, they supplied
communal enjoymcnts that an earlier generation might have found through
religious outlets.
The counter-attraction of organised atheism was much lcss potent.
Committed secularists numbered no morc than about twenty thousand at any
time in Victorian Britain, with the National Secular Society in 1880, near its
peak, claiming only six thousand members.57 Agnosticism was as yet merely a
fashion of the intelligentsia. It may well be, however, that a stronger influence
on the lower working classes was a folk religion heavily indebted to paganism.
The survival of rural witchcraft is vividly illustrated in the novels of Hardy,
but there is also a growing body of evidence suggesting widespread popular
belief in esoteric retnedies for misfortune, the sacredness of nature and the
importance of ritual observances at turning points in personal life and the
114 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

annual cycle. Such notions were not confined to the countryside. City churches,
as in Lambeth, were thronged with working-class attenders at harvest festival
and on New Year’s Eve, the two occasions when church services regularly
marked events in nature rather than in Christian story.58 A deep-rooted
though residual nature religion could only hamper the evangelism of the
churches. But when all the obstacles to churchgoing have been reviewed, there
remains a fundamental explanation for the alienation from the churches. As a
recent historian has put it, the otherworldly preoccupations of the churches
were too distant from the needs of day-to-day living.59 Evangelicals were
making a similar point when they contended that the heart of man is not
naturally sympathetic to the truth of God. In view of this inevitable gulf, the
wonder of the nineteenth-century Evangelical record is not its shortcomings
but its degree of success.

REVIVALISM
Church growth was partly a steady, sustained process and partly a matter of
short, sharp increases. The bursts of revival were most marked in Methodism,
but also affected other denominations in some parts of Britain. In Wales, for
example, there was a rhythm of booms and slumps in recruitment, with good
periods in 1807–9, 1815–20, 1828–30, 1839–43 and 1849.60 Such variations
invite interpretation in terms of factors external to the life of the churchcs.
The trade cycle, itself a sequence of booms and slumps, is an obvious
explanatory candidate. There is evidence that economic adversity sometimes
coincided with falls in Nonconformist recruitment rates.61 Inability to make
financial contributions may well have enhanced inhibitions about chapel-
going at such times. On the other hand, during the cotton famine of the 1860s
that blighted Lancashire’s industrial heartland with depression, its Wesleyan
circuits achieved remarkable results. The average recruitment rate for the whole
connexion was 2.6 pcr cent, but for ten cotton towns it was 15.1 per cent.62 At
times, acute hardship could encourage resort to supernatural aid. No
consistent correlation between economic and religious cycles emerges.
Discussion of an alternative hypothesis explaining patterns of church
growth has emerged from E.P. Thompson’s contention that popular religion
was a form of stunted radicalism. Periods of religious revival, he argues,
followed socio-political excitements.63 Supporting evidence comes from the
aftermath of the so-called Captain Swing riots, outbreaks of rural incendiarism
in 1830–2. Primitive Methodist expansion was immediate and striking in the
affected areas.64 In other cases, however, political agitation and evangelism
were rival activities (as in the north of England following the French wars) or
else Evangelical religion dampened the potential for radical politics (as in
Cornwall in the Chartist years).65 The commonest relationship, it has been
suggested, was that religious and political ferment were simultaneous. When
religious and political issues became intenvoven, churches could be mobilised
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 115

for vigorous evangelism and political assertion at the same time.66 The clearest
instance is a late one, the upsurge of Nonconformist membership in 1902–6,
when the chapels were roused to political indignation against the Conservative
Education Act of 1902.67 Other alleged instances, however, turn out to be
invalid: there was no such thing as ‘a massive popular disestablishment
campaign’ in 1875–6 to explain the high Nonconformist recruitment rate of
those years.68 So it appears that political stimuli could bring church growth
either at the time or in their wake, but that there was no necessary
connection.
Death has been proposed as another precipitant of large-scale recruitment.
‘Terrible accidents and fearful deaths’, it was said of South Wales, ’[are] not
uncommon in these iron and coal districts…[H]ence funeral sermons are
frequent, and are often attended with good moral and religious effect.’69 The
most obvious spur to revival of the nineteenth century was the cholera epidemic
of 1832 that killcd thousands. The twelve months up to March 1833 saw the
largest mcmbership increase ever recorded in Wesleyan history, and other
denominations also rcaped a harvest.70 In the most popular Evangelical tract,
Legh Richmond’s The Dairyman’s Daughter, the heroine dies of
consumption; and diaries regularly turn to spiritual issues on the death of
friends and relations. The fall of the death rate in the later nineteenth century
and its greater fall in the twentieth century must have been disadvantageous
for recruitment. If it seems clear that the pattern of church growth was not
controlled by external determinants, it seems equally clear that crises—
whether economic, political or, most insistent of all, the crisis of death—could
provide a favourable context for the propagation of the faith.71
A revival could be a form of spontaneous combustion. Typical was an
outbreak at Burslem reported by a Wesleyan preacher in 1832:

Two colliers had been playing at cards all the night, and were…cursing
and swearing in a dreadful manner; when as they thought lightnings
began to dart upon them with a strong smell of brimston[e]. They began
to cry for mercy. The neighbourhood was all alarmed…For several days
and nights, nearly the whole population of the place which is
considerable, were engaged in incessant prayer…,72

Such currents of feeling could readily overflow the official channels dug by
denominational functionaries and, for that reason, the Wesleyan authorities
often looked askance on the more exuberant displays. In particular, they
discountenanced the camp meeting, a technique of American frontier religion
at which open-air preaching and prayer would go on deep into the night. The
Wesleyan condemnation of a camp meeting held in 1807 on Mow Cop, a hill
overlooking Stoke-on-Trent, led to the emergence in the Potteries of a new
connexion, the Primitive Methodists, committed to revivalism.73 The early
years of the Primitives were marked by loud cries of emotion, exorcisms of the
116 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

devil and vivid dreams. Women saw visions in which was revealed a sort of
celestial pecking order of the leading revivalists of the day, with individuals
rnoving up or down the league table: ‘the head of the Church’, it was recorded
in 1811, ‘now stands as follows: James Crawford 1, Lorenzo Dow 2, Mary
Dunnel 3…’74 Strange new ways were part and parcel of the uninhibited
expression of a spontaneous revival.
As the century wore on, however, spontaneity gradually gave way to
arranged revivals. A landmark was the appearance in 1839 of Charles Finney’s
Lectures on Revivals of Religion, originally published in America in 1835,
with its argument that conversions could be encouraged by the adoption of
certain techniques—such as the isolated ‘anxious seat’ for the troubled sinner
in search of salvation. Although the book was a major stimulus in 1839–43 to
traditional, uncontrived revivals in Wales, it heralded a new age of revival
planning.75 In Scotland a wave of revivalism beginning at Kilsyth in 1839 led
to enthusiasm for Finney’s methods among young men, the expulsion of
candidates for the ministry from the Congregational theological academy for
‘self-conversionism’ and the creation in 1843 of a new denomination, the
Evangelical Union, designed to foment revivals. An American evangelist,
James Caughey, toured British Methodism in the 1840s, relying on well-tried
techniques to obtain converts.76 It was but a short step to the end-of-century
trumpeter-revivalist with his carefully contrived performance depicted by
Arnold Bennett in Anna of the Five Towns.77 By 1860, when revival broke out
at Hopeman on the Moray Firth, the local newspaper felt bound to state that
‘no attempts were made to “get up” this movement’.78 There was a gradual
transition during the century from folksy outbursts of anguished guilt to
professionally planned occasions for much more conventional ‘decisions for
Christ’.
This distinction is the key to understanding what happened to British
Evangelicalism in 1859–60. It has been argued by Edwin Orr, himself a
distinguished evangelist, that in those years there began a nationwide and
sustained revival, ‘the second Evangelical awakening in Britain’. He adduces
evidence from all over the country of revival activities in those years.79 What
he does not attempt, however, is to discriminate between spontaneous popular
revival, deeply rooted in the community, and meetings carefully designed to
prornote the work of the gospel. His case faithfully reflects his chief source,
The Revival magazine, set up by R.C.Morgan in 1859 to foster the cause.
Morgan deliberately created the impression that a single phenomenon,
revival, was already aflame throughout Britain. He was eager to extend the
traditional variety to untouched areas.
In reality, however, its range was severely limited. The movement began in
America in 1857–8, breaking out in Ulster early in 1859. It made a powerful
impact, bringing about mass conversions and physical prostrations of a kind
that would have been familiar to Wesley or the early Primitives. It was greatly
hoped that revival, perhaps without the prostrations, would reach Britain.
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 117

Parts of Scotland were affected. Scarcely a town or village between Aberdeen

and Inverness, it was said early in 1860, had not been visited by the Spirit.80 At
Portessie in Banffshire for nearly three days and nights there was continuous
praying, singing and exhortation of neighbours. ‘Labour is totally suspended’,
it was reported. ‘Even the cooking of victuals is much neglected…’81 Revival was
general in the Isle of Lewis, and at Greenock in Renfrewshire a thousand,
chiefly working people, were said to have been converted in less than six
months.82 It is significant that the centre of revival meetings in Greenock was
the Seamen’s Chapel, for repeatedly fishermen were chiefly involved. At
Portassie the five hundred engaged in religious exercises were ‘purely
seafaring’ and at neighbouring Buckie crews came to shore already
converted.83 Fishing communities were tightly knit, often isolated and well
aware of the high risk of death at sea. They were particularly likely to retain
corporate expectations of turning to God. In Wales, too, there were similar
outbreaks, beginning in remote Cardiganshire.84 In England, however,
instances were rare. One researcher has discovered only three.85 There were
more, but almost entirely in Cornwall and north Devon, where, again,
fishermen were concentrated.86 Community revivals in Britain, it is clear,
were virtually confined to the periphery and were most likely within a single
occupational group.
The hope that such movements would spread, on the other hand, was an
inducement to redouble organised efforts for the spread of the gospel. The
Revival was itself a novel technique, a magazine devoted to spreading
information about the movement. Open-air preaching, already being adopted
by Evangelical clergy in the 1850s, became common again. Iron rnission halls
were erected. Laymen entered careers as full-time popular evangelists, whether
gentlemen like Brownlow North or working-class characters like Richard
Weaver, ‘the converted collier’. Even female ministry, justified as an
exceptional measure for exceptional times, became common, just as it had
done among the early Primitives.87 The Methodist spirit of pragmatic,
aggressive evangelism was spreading beyond the bounds of Methodism. A new
ethos, negligent of denominational forms, emerged. The Brethren sect created
much of the network responsible for the new temper and drew in many of the
converts.88 All the Evangelical denominations nevertheless felt the new winds,
and the way was prepared for the arrival of the enormously influential
undenominational evangelists Moody and Sankey in the 1870s.89 It is
therefore quite just to see 1859–60 as the threshold of a fresh phase in
organised evangelism; but events of those years show that revival of the
spontaneous variety was becoming marginal in Britain.

METHODS OF EVANGELISM
Most of the nineteenth-century impact of Evangelicalism, however, was
achieved not through revivals but through regular methods of
118 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

mission. Ordinary Sunday services were fundamental. At the evening service,

normally the second or third of the day, the pattern of worship and the style
of preaching were adapted to the supreme task of implanting the gospel in the
hearers, who by that hour would include domestic servants and (in the
countryside) agricultural labourers. In the less inhibited denominations,
evening service would be followed by a prayer meeting or after-meeting
where a significant proportion of conversions would take place. Beyond
Sunday gatherings, however, there was a battery of other activities designed
to convince or sustain converts. Weekly prayer meetings, often on a Friday or
Saturday evening, were intended primarily to seek God’s blessing on the
Sunday services. Two or three individuals might be asked by the minister to
lead the prayer, or else free prayer might be permitted, the minister closing
the proceedings.90 A midweek preaching service, or else in the Church of
England a meeting for communicants, would supplement the instruction given
on Sunday. Cottage meetings, often in remoter parts of the district, would
provide opportunities for guidance to smaller groups. Bible classes were held
for special sections of the congregation: female servants, mothers from the
working classes, working men, ladies, young men, candidates for confirmation
or church membership and children.91 Other gatherings such as monthly
sewing meetings for the poor could subserve spiritual purposes. ‘Associations
of the protnising young females of the higher or middle rank in our parishes
are very desirable.’ 92 Ideally each social group was catered for.
Perhaps most important, Evangelicals did not wait for people to come to
their places of worship; Evangelicals went to the people. House-to-house
visitation began on a significant scale with the formation of the Strangers’
Friend Society in London in the 1780s,93 but it received an immense fillip from
the publication of the first volume of Thomas Chalmers’s Christian and Civic
Economy of Large Towns in 1821. Chalmers described the system of lay
visitation he had set in motion in the inner-city parish of St John’s, Glasgow,
and soon he was widely imitated.94 In 1825 London Nonconformists
established the Christian Instruction Society. By 1832 it had assembled about
1,150 members who paid a Christian visit once a fortnight to nearly 32,000
families.95 Its success made it a model for further similar efforts. Voluntary
visitors, most of them women, would call on perhaps twenty families at
frequent intervals, always delivering tracts, encouraging attendance at worship
and reporting cases of need to the minister. There were risks of petty
officiousness: district visitors were warned ‘never to indulge in culinary
curiosity and peep in the pot’.96 Yet the technique ensured that there was a
point of contact between the church and non-attendcrs. It was supplemented
from 1857 by Mrs Ranyard’s Bible women, full-time paid visitors of a lowcr
social class.97 With a multitude of organisations, subordinate clergy and
district visitors to co-ordinate, the incumbent of a large urban parish could
have charge of a huge administrative machinery. As Rector of St George’s,
Southwark, William Cadman assembled nearly 200 voluntary parish workers
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 119

in 1850.98 Sustained evangelistic activity on such a scale could hardly fail to

make inroads on religious indifference.
Local effort was supported by a large and heterogeneous machinery of
organisations. Official structures could help. A sympathetic bishop such as
C.R.Sumner of Winchester could back the exhortations to mission of his
pastoral charges with bodies like the diocesan Church Building Society,
founded in 1837.99 The London Diocesan Home Mission, set up by A.C. Tait,
provided special preachers of varied churchmanship, yet was valued by many
Evangelicals. 100 Among Nonconformists, the Congregational and Baptist
Home Missionary Societies placed evangelists in neglected areas or decayed
causes.101 The Baptists also operated a national Building Fund and a
Metropolitan Chapel Building Fund that contributed greatly to their enduring
strength in the capital.102 The Methodists led the way in the central allocation
of funds and were followed in Scotland by the Free Church, which defied
prophets of financial disaster for the new denomination with its rapidly
created and generously supported Sustentation Fund for ministers.103 In the
sccond half of the century the Congregational and Baptist Unions, though
serving independent congregations, developed a central apparatus for
augmenting stipends.104 Foreign missionary societies stimulated evangelism at
home not by fiancial backing but by providing an object lesson. Interest in
foreign missions, it was cogently argued, ‘stimulates, encourages, directs
Christian life by calling attention to the example of converts from
heathenism’.105
Much of the home missionary work was designed to grapple with the
growing nineteenth-century problem of neglected inner-city areas where the
non-churchgoing masses increasingly congregated. The difficultics of
Manchester incumbents were becoming greater year by year, it was reported
in 1858, because the more respectable parishioners were moving to the
outskirts.106 Similarly, the Minister of Shoreditch Baptist Tabernacle in East
London recalled that his church possessed its share of the well-to-do until the
mid-1890s, but then, because it was continually feeding suburban
congregations, found it difficult to maintain its work on the offerings of the
poor.107 The Church Pastoral Aid Society, launched in 1836, came to the relief
of Evangelical clergy by supporting extra staff in needy parishes. Though
incurring High Church frowns for fiancing non-clerical workers and operating
beyond episcopal control, the society expanded so that in 1858 it paid for 378
curates and 162 lay agents.108 Its work was supplemented by the Scripture
Readers’ Association, begun in 1844 and consolidated as an Anglican body in
1849, supporting men who neither preached nor distributed literature.109 Lay
agents were also provided by the interdenominational city missions of which
the largest and most successful was the London City Mission, founded in 1835.
The LCM financed evangelists who were normally attached to particular
congregations, but who sometimes ministered to particular ethnic groups like
the Welsh or particular industrial occupations like the dockers. After half a
120 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

century its staff reached 460. A slightly higher social group, consisting of shop
assistants and their peers, was the special target of the Young Men’s Christian
Association, founded in London in 1844 and soon possessing branches in most
cities.110 A broad range of other bodies, similar but smaller, often local or
specialised, existed to help with evangelism: the Evangelization Society
(1864), the Christian Colportage Association (1874) and the Missions to
Seamen (1856) are but three examples.111 Behind them all stood the
munificence of men such as Samuel Morley, a millionaire hosiery
manufacturer who was a broad-minded Congregationalist. ‘The distribution of
his money’, according to his biographer, ‘was…the main business of his
life.’112 Christian mission benefited hugely from the organisations that
brought to it some of the fruits of British economic prosperity.

PHILANTHROPY
The poor who were not attracted to church by the gospel were sometimes
drawn in by charity. ‘Neither Jesus nor his apostles’, according to The
Christian in 1880, ‘ever separated the physical from the spiritual well-being of
men. He and they fed and healed the bodies of the people, and the sympathy
thus manifested won their attention, and enabled them to impart food and
healing to their souls.’113 The gospel and humanitarianism, even in this rather
pietistic joumal, were seen not as rivals but as complementary. Because God
had created the body as well as the soul, argued the prince of philanthropists,
Lord Shaftesbury, each body must be ‘cared for according to the end for which
it was formed—fitness for His service’.114 Although the career of Shaftesbury
was never forgotten, it is remarkable that the charitable theory and practice of
the mass of nineteenth-century Evangelicals were to be minimised by many
later commentators.115 Probably the chief explanation is that Evangelicals of
the nineteenth century have been tainted by the repudiation of Christian social
obligation that marked certain of their successors in the following century.116
In the nineteenth century, however, even if private philanthropy was common
in all religious bodies and beyond, Evangelicals led the way. Among charitable
organisations of the second half of the century, for instance, it has been
estimated that three-quarters were Evangelical in character and control.117 The
prison reform work of Elizabeth Fry, a Quaker of Evangelical inclination, early
in the century became celebrated precisely because it was held up as an
inspiration to subsequent generations.118 Dr Barnardo of the Brethren earned
equivalent fame in caring for orphans later in the century.119 The sick in body
and mind, the blind, the deaf, the infirm, the elderly, vagrants, navvies,
soldiers, prostitutes, and above all the poor receivcd attention according to
their particular needs. Evangelical activism carried over into social concern as
an end in itself.
There was, however, a diffidence among many Evangelicals about certain
aspects of relief work. Not all the needy deserved help; if at all possible, the
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 121

poor should help themselves; and public assistance was to be rejected out of
hand. This cluster of tenets flowed from the general acceptance, at least by the
upper and middle classes, of the teachings of political economy. The great
masters in the tradition of Adam Smith held that no disincentive to hard work
could be permittcd in a well-ordered society. Lesser figures such as Samuel
Smiles in the mid-nineteenth century sang the praises of self-help. Christians
of all traditions assimilated these opinions to a greater or lesser extent. 120 The
result was a tight circumscription of the bounds of charity that sometimes has
a harsh ring. Chalmers insisted that in no circumstances, high unemployment
included, should the able-bodied poor have a right to relief. Poverty, following
Malthus, he held to be the great spur to industry. Financial assistance for the
destitute, furthermore, must never be the result of compulsory exactions. The
poor should rely on the generosity of the better-off.121 A leading exponent of
similar, though marginally less rigid, views in the Church of England was
J.B.Sumner, subsequently the first Evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury.
Charity, he contended, should consist of private benevolence. Only in very
rare instances where social evils were so deeply seated as to frustrate private
action, should the state intervene.122
A leading Evangelical clergyman who later became a Dissenter, Baptist
Noel, reveals the ambiguity that was the result. He urged the Christian duty of
relieving those in need, but he also warned that the charitably disposed might
turn the poor into greedy mendicants. Requests for money must be rejected
because the worth of applicants could not be ascertained. ‘lt is painful’, he
admitted, ‘to turn away from the request of those who may be suffering from
extreme want…’123 It became accepted wisdom that the poor should not be
helped unless they were known to be ‘deserving’ and then only in kind, not in
cash. ‘lndiscriminate almsgiving is a great curse’, declared John Clifford, a
Baptist who was later to modify his views, ‘Government relief is mostly lifting
a man up by dropping him into a deeper abyss.’124 Ideas shaped by political
economy probably made greater progress among Evangelicals outside the
Established Churches, for within them there were countervailing traditions of
parochial responsibility for the poor. The most influential Evangelical clerical
handbook nevertheless recommended giving only partial relief, leaving to the
poor a stimulus to their own exertions.125 There giment of seven clergy and
eleven scripture readers or city missionaries operating during the 1850s in the
Evangelical parish of St Giles, Bloomsbury, was enjoined to concentrate on
spiritual objects and so give no charity.126 Resentment spread among the poor
when they were spurned. The Evangelical record in the philanthropic field was
not an unqualified asset for evangelism.
Yet there is no doubt that social concern did bring some of the less
advantaged within the sphere of Christian influence. The
philanthropic machinery of an individual congregation could be huge,
especially as the century advanced. Kensington Congregational Church
already possessed by the early 1820s, apart from schools and evangelistic
122 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

agencies, a Benevolent Society run by ladies for visiting, instructing and

relieving the sick poor; a Blanket Society, making free distributions in winter;
an Infants’ Friendly Society, through which ladies provided clothes and food
for poor mothers and their children during their confinement; and collections
in severe winters for the poor of the area.127 A well equipped urban parish
church at mid-century was expected to have a District Visiting Society, whose
members could issuc tickets for obtaining relief in kind from local tradesmen;
a Provident Fund, collecting sums of not more than sixpence weekly, adding
interest and returning coals or clothing in June or December; soup distribution
at a penny a quart in winter; Maternal Charity tin boxes containing a Bible,
Prayer Book, oatmeal, sugar, soap and sometimes linen for pregnant mothers;
and (rather less popular) a Lending Library.128 At Reading in the 1890s the
various churches and chapels provided similar but even more numerous
agencies: a Poor Fund in most chapels, Ladies’ Visiting Associations, perhaps
with paid sick visitors, Sunshine Funds attached to most Christian Endeavour
groups, Dorcas Societies encouraging sewing for the poor, Soup Kitchens,
Mothers’ Meetings on behalf of the poor, Provident Clubs, Coal and Clothing
Clubs, Loan Blanket Societies, Infants’ Friends Societies, Penny Banks,
maternity groups and much else. 129 All this battery of assistance amounted to
far more than a minor palliative. Apart from the heartily disliked Poor Law,
the churches were the most obvious source of help in a society which, until
shortly before the First World War, lacked a state welfare system.
Local ecclesiastical provision was supplemented by the various societies that
sprang up to channel funds from generous to the needy. Organisations like
the Indigent Blind Visitation Society and the Destitute Children’s Dinner
Society proliferated. In the first half of the nineteenth century, it has been
calculated, new philanthropic bodies were founded at an average rate of six a
year. 130 With their annual gatherings entrenched among the May Meetings
of the Exeter Hall, they held an honoured place in the Evangelical world. It
was easy to satirise their blend of earnestness, business sense and bureaucratic
officiousness. The annual meeting of the fictitious Society for the Distribution
of Moral Pocket Handkerchiefs (Secretary: Soapy Bareface, Esq. Committee
members: the Rev. Augustus Cant and the Rev. Nasal Whine) was gleefully
chronicled by a High Church journal in 1860. The society’s purpose was
purchasing handkerchiefs, printing moral maxims on both sides and selling
them to the poor. The annual accounts recorded committee expenses of £640,
not entirely balanced by receipts from the sale of handkerchiefs: 3s. 4 1/2d.131
Self-importance, incompetence and fraud were by no means absent from these
bodies, but they did make inroads on the mass of deprivation, redistributing
some of the country’s wealth to those in most need. Whether locally or
nationally organised, voluntary philanthropic societies were a monument to
the activist temper of Evangelical religion.
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 123

EDUCATION
The traditional assumption that education fell within the provincc of the
churches was reinforced among Evangelicals by an awareness of its moral value.
Although it was no substitute for the gospel, it could subserve the gospel.
‘Man’, wrote John Venn in 1804, ’…cannot by education be made a real
Christian; but by education he may be freed from prejudices and delivered
from the dominion of dispositions highly favourable to temptation and sin.’132
Even more important, literacy was a precondition for reading the Bible.
Reading skills had long been fostered primarily for that purpose throughout
Protestant northern Europe, often by informal methods outside schools. By
the mid-eighteenth century some 60 per cent of men in England and 65 per
cent in Scotland were literate according to the gauge of the ability to sign their
names, together with some 40 per cent of women in England and 15 per cent
in Scotland.133 Reading ability, however, was probably more widespread than
ability to sign one’s name. Certainly converts in the Cambuslang revival of
1742 for whom evidence survives could all read, male and female alike.134
Around the year 1800 signing ability decreased in certain regions, often the
most industrialised,135 and so there was an extra reason for organised
Christian effort to promote literacy.
Once reading skills had been achieved, they were used to promote
understanding of the faith. The accepted method was catechising. Children and
young people were required to learn their catechism (that of the Church of
England or the Westminster Assembly), or else some equivalent, and were
examined on their prowess, often in the afternoon service. Catechising,
however, was steadily supplanted during the first half of the century by a
combination of Sunday and day schooling,136 though it was to survive long
into the twentieth century in the Scottish Highlands. Sunday Schools had
occasionally existed in earlier years, but it was in the 1780s that they became
fashionable. Originally they were agencies for mass schooling largely
independent of particular congregations, and their immcnse appeal was
grounded on their free teaching of reading. Writing skills were sometimes
taught as well, though stricter sabbatarians looked askance on the practice.
Increasingly, Sunday Schools were attached to particular places of worship,
the curriculum became more exclusively religious and general education was
left to the better-trained day-school teachers.137 In 1859 a typical Anglican
Sunday School would meet twice, perhaps from 9.15 to 10.15 and from 3.00 to
4.30. In the morning the lesson would be the repetition of a hymn and text; in
the afternoon, when attendance was normally higher, it would consist of the
recitation of a collect, a New Testament passage and an oral examination of
the whole school by the superintendent.138 The attenders were chiefly
working-class, the teachers, at least in the first half of the century, often being
the epitome of working-class respectability. Although children, especially the
boys, rarely remained after the day-school leaving age of about 11, so that the
124 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

Sunday School was inefficient as a direct recruiting agency, the proportion of

the poptdation reached was remarkably high. Of those aged 15 and above at
twelve Manchester cotton mills in 1852, 90 per cent had at some time been to
Sunday School.139 And the legacy was lasting. According to a 1957 Gallup
Survey of adults, 73 per cent had once attended Sunday School regularly.140
The Sunday School established a point of contact with the working-class
population at large that could sometimes be enlarged by subsequent
evangelism.
Other branches of education also formed a bridge between the churches and
the working people. Employers of strong Christian conviction sometimes
provided a school for their own workers, as, for instance, did J.J. Colman, the
Nonconformist mustard manufacturer of Norwich.141 Night schools for adult
workers on the pattern of Mechanics’ Institutes but run by the churches drew
significant numbers: in the heavily industrial diocese of Ripon there were 8,
131 such attenders in 1870.142 The Ragged Schools for the children of the
streets, whose Union was founded under Shaftesbury’s presidency in 1844,
gave a rudimentary training to some of the most destitute.143 More important
in terms of the proportion of the population influenced were the elementary
schools. At mid-century, the religious bodies sponsored schools providing for
1,049,000 out of the overall total of 2,109,000 pupils in day schools. Pride of
place among the organisations promoting public education along Christian
lines went to the National Society of the Church of England. In 1851, when
other Anglican schools contained 336,000 pupils, National Schools educated
465,000. Launched in 1811 to propagate the schemes of Andrew Bell for cheap
popular training in basic skills through monitors (senior pupils who passed on
their lessons to the younger ones), the society relied entirely on local
initiative. Evangelicals played a disproportionate part in the early years, but in
1853, dismayed by High Church leanings in its policy, a body of Evangelicals
left to form a separate Church Education Society. Although it continued to
function for many years, the new society never flourished, and Evangelical
influence in the central counsels of the National Society was shattered.144
A parallel organisation was the British and Foreign School Society, founded
in 1814 to support educational plans already begun by Joseph Lancaster, a
Quaker. British Schools also initially adopted the monitorial system, but
differed from National Schools in giving undenominational rather than
distinctively Anglican instruction. Often attached to Nonconformist places of
worship, British Schools nevertheless enjoyed the support of some
Churchmen.145 In 1851 they trained 123,000 pupils. The Congregationalists
with 47,000 pupils and the Wesleyans with 37,000 also made valiant
educational efforts,146 but it was clear by the 1860s that voluntary schemes were
failing to keep pace with population growth. The 1870 Education Act was the
remedy, providing for rate-supported schools under local boards wherever
there was a gap in voluntary facilities. Board Schools, like those set up under
the equivalent 1872 act consolidating the various Presbyterian schools in
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 125

Scotland, did not exclude religious training, but concentrated on Bible

teaching. There was less Christian content in the curriculum than in the first
half of the century, when religious topics were introduced on every page of
readers used in National Schools, but the Board Schools at the end of the
century still exerted a diffuse influence in the direction of biblical religion on
the whole of the rising generation.147 In rural Church schools the clergy would
still regularly appear, sometimes to teach the first half-hour’s lesson every
day.148 The nature of public elementary education, even as it gradually came
under state inspection and control, helps explain the continuing esteem for
Christianity in the non-churchgoing population.

SOCIAL PRESSURES
Attendance at a place of worship was a public act open to scrutiny by social
superiors, In the countryside an awesome power was potentially wielded by
many landlords. Those not seen in church on Sunday, whether farmers or
labourers, could face the displeasure of the squire and, ultimately, eviction. This
power was ambiguous in its effects on Evangelical religion. On the one hand,
where the incumbent clergyman was himself an Evangelical, the landlord’s
expectations could help create larger congregations under the sound of the
gospel. Only when squire and parson fcll out would parish discord be likely to
weaken religious practice.149 On the other hand, the hostility of landlords,
who overwhelmingly adhered to the Established Churches, could imperil
Evangelical Nonconformity. When the Ecclesiastical Commissioners acquired
a Lincolnshire parish in 1862, the four chief tenants were evicted as
Methodists.150 In England Lord Salisbury’s refusal to sell land for the
Wesleyans to build a chapel at Hatfield was but one instance of a serious
obstacle that in Scotland the Free Church also encountered in its early
years.151 Decisive opposition of this kind by landlords, however, was relatively
rare. More common was traditional deference by country folk to the wishes of
the gentry, a factor that tended to strengthen whatever churchmanship was on
offer in the parish. Although deference was reinforced by ‘attentions’ like
Christmas coal and summer treats, the extent of rural paternalism has
probably been exaggerated in the past. Only 17 per cent of a sample of
National Schools was found to have a landlord patron, and clergymen were
usually left to their own efforts to raise money for church building.152
Landlords frequently preferred their own pleasures to supervising the people
of their parishes.
Yet if rural pressures making for social and therefore religious conformity
have often been overstated, the equivalent urban pressures have sometimes
been understated. The nineteenth-century city was no more a place of freedom
from a sense of social obligation than a scene of constant industrial
oppression. Employers in later Victorian Lancashire, it has been shown,
fostered a community spirit of devoted loyalty among their workforce.
126 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

Deference was willingly given.153 In this setting, the social leaders were
divided approximately equally between Church and Dissent.154
Neighbourhoods took their religious tone from the leading local industrialist.
Churchgoing offered prospects of employment or promotion. Thus, at
Monkwearmouth it was known to be an asset when applying for work in the
shipyards to be a member of the local Wesleyan Hall, for its leading spirit had
built up the shipbuilding industry.155 Some captains of industry, such as Sir
Titus Salt at Saltaire or Lord Leverhulme at Port Sunlight, prided themselves
on exerting no compulsion over their workers to attend the churches they had
erected. But in both cases the silent example of the social leader ensured that his
own Congregational church was packed.156 Ona smaller scale, an apprentice
might be expected to attend the place of worship of his master. Thus the son
of a Baptist deacon was temporarily compelled to conform to the Established
Church when apprenticed to a Monmouthshire chemist in the 1850s.157 And
domestic servants were oftcn denied independent religious choice. A Durham
brewer and colliery owner, for instance, insisted that his servants, including
the Methodists, should attend the Church of England.158 Although such
pressure might take employees away from a gospel ministry, its effect was
equally commonly to strengthen the Evangelical cause.
Influence could be exerted more subtly but hardly less effectively by social
peers. The wish for acceptance and esteem from one’s fellows—in a word,
respectability—was a powerful force in nineteenth-century Britain, closely
bound up with Christian practice. Respectability, it was remarked in 1854, was
to be found among the ‘religious public’.159 It was the kernel of high Victorian
values—what Edward Baines, the Congregationalist newspaper proprietor of
Leeds, itemised as education, religion, virtue, industry, sobriety and frugality. 160
Respectability remained the lodestar in the 1890s of Charles Pooter, the
archetypal City clerk with social pretensions portrayed only a little larger than
life in the classic satire by George and Weedon Grossmith. For Pooter, two
peaks of beatitude were acting as a sidesman in the parish church and holding
a conversation after morning service with the curate.161
Respectability, however, was no mere preoccupation of the greater and
lesser bourgeoisie. It was an element in the artisan culture, an outward
expression of economic and intellectual independence that permeated the
working-class movements of the times.162 It encouraged the adoption of
personal conviction and, frequently in consequence, alignment with some
branch of organised religion. To join a Dissenting church, it has been
suggested, was to acquire a badge of social standing, not least because the
congruence of daily practice with Christian profession was made the subject of
inquiry.163 Avoidance of drunkenness, gambling, debt and sabbath-breaking
were the hallmarks of a disciplined life. Careful observance of such
prohibitions inevitably permitted higher standards of clothing, better quality
furniture and, for some, more commodious homes.164 Upward social mobility
was the reward of prudencc. Working people of London who joined a church
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 127

at the end of the century, it was noted, ‘become almost indistinguishable from
the class with which they then mix’ and so there was a change ‘not so much of
as out of the class to which they have belonged’.165 This was the goal of many,
the fruit of perseverance in a policy of self-help. The Congregationalist
Thomas Binney published a book for young men entitled Is it Possible to
make the Best of Both Worlds? and gave a resoundingly affirmative answer.
He set out his leading contentions in a logical train: ‘the Evangelical form of
Christian ideas,—best produces that religious faith,—which most efficiently
sustains those virtues,—which, by way of natural consequence, secure those
things,—which contribute to the satisfaction and embellishment of life’.166
Many were swayed by such reasonings. Evangelicalism seemed to offer a
passport to advancement in life.

ATTRACTIONS OF CHURCHGOING
The churches had other benefits to offer. Rites of passage were particularly
important. Human societies in general create ceremonies to mark the great
turning points of life—birth, marriage and death. In nineteenth-ccntury
Britain the churches held a virtual monopoly in this field. Infant baptisms
were performed, especially in the Established Churches, even for children of
families that had no previous church connection. In England and Wales
between 1753 and 1836 no marriage was legally valid (Quakers and Jews
apart) unless solemnised by the Church of England. Civil marriage was
available from 1836, but, in 1851, 84.9 per cent of marriages were still
conducted by the Church of England.167 And although burial according to
other rites in private grounds was legitimate, the Established Church
possessed the sole right of interment in parish graveyards down to 1880.
Custom, respectability and a popular association of church ceremonies with
good luck ensured that each of these services was a regular part of the
experience of all sections of the community.168 A sense of church connection
was created that an astute clergyman or district visitor could build on.
Furthermore, the churches could offer a great deal by way of fellowship to
those who ventured within their doors. The dislocations created by
demographic, industrial and urban development meant that the churches
provided friendship and security at a time when traditional landmarks were
being removed. The regular round of tea meerings, so characteristic of the
chapels and so despised by Matthew Arnold, fulfilled an important need. Even
in the countryside, compensation for increasing social distance stemming from
agricultural prosperity could be discovered in the Methodist chapel.169
Methodism, in fact, delighted in supplying a happy family atmosphere.170 The
Congregationalists, though more dignified in their ways, also created a
community life for their members. Their very foundation principle of
congregational independency demanded it.171 And the strength of communal
ties surrounding a Baptist chapel can be illustrated by a Sunday School
128 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

reunion service at Bacup that attracted well over two thousand people.172
Nonconformity fostered the spirit of fellowship much more consciously and
much more effectively than most Anglican churches. Steadily, however, the
clergy came to realise the importance of social activities, and by 1890 one
Evangelical was recommending a village library with a club-room containing
games, especially bagatelle, a temperance society and Band of Hope, a coffee or
cocoa room, a recreation ground, a school treat, harvest home, choir supper, a
parochial or communicants’ tea—but not entertainments or any concession
that would further ‘the prescnt mania for theatricals’.173 A similar penumbra
of facilities was created round congregations in Lowland Scotland.174 Clearly
the auxiliary side of church life was popular. The churches were catering for a
substantial demand.
Women were undoubtedly attracted in greater numbers than men.
Nonconformist membcrship statistics usually reveal disproportionate female
strength. Between 58 and 68 per cent of nineteenth-century Cumbrian
Congregationalists in different churches were women.175 Nevertheless the
proportions among churchgoers were normally much nearer equality in
Nonconformity than in the Church of England. At York in 1901 there were 49
men for every 51 women in the chapels, but only 35 men for every 65 women
in the parish churches.176 In the borough of Lambeth at morning service in
1902 there were 1.2 adult women for every adult man among Nonconformists
compared with 1.7 among the Anglicans, and in the evening 1.6 women per
man compared with 2.0. The disparity was not, as some complained at the
time, because Anglo-Catholics preyed on weak women with their parade of
aesthetic delights and ecclesiastical milliery. In Lambeth, Evangelical parish
churches on average attracted a higher proportion of women than those
celebrating a more elaborate liturgy. The differential seems to have been more
related to class than to theology. In places of worship that catered for working
people, whereas men were numerous in morning congregations they were
strikingly few in the evening.177 This was partly because female domestic
servants were generally released only in the evening, and partly because many
mothers and housewives were effectively prevented by domestic
responsibilities from attending in the morning.
Whatever the explanation, working-class women seem to have been more
inclined to religious involvemcnt than their menfolk. Religion was often
regarded as part of the mythical world of childhood and so appropriate for
women, the guardians of the young. Men, after all, had their own foci of
sociability in the public houses and sport. Churches provided virtually the
only equivalent for women. At a time when respectability (often reinforced by
Evangelical arguments) closely circumscribed the role of women,178 church
work was one of their few outlets. Although Sunday School teachers were
overwhelmingly male in the early nineteenth century, they were chiefly
female by its end.179 Philanthropy was a major channel for women’s energies.
Missionary support work, the YWCA, Christian Endeavour and the Student
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 129

Volunteer Movement all springing from Evangelical soil, contributed to what

one writer called the ‘Epiphany of Women’.180 Women could even occupy
official positions—as deaconesses in the Church of England from 1862, as
preachers among the Quakers, the Primitive Methodists and the Bible
Christians and as officers in the Salvation Army.181 It has been persuasively
argued that Evangelical religion, despite its emphasis on the domestic role of
women, was more important than feministn in enlarging their sphere during
the nineteenth century.182 In the churches women of all classes found much to
satisfy their aspirations.

A STYLE OF LIVING
When, for all these reasons, Evangelicalism made its vast impact on British
society, the strongest influence was felt in the home. Ronald Knox, the Roman
Catholic son of an Evangelical bishop, recalled being brought up at the very
end of the nineteenth century in an old-fashioncd form of Protestant piety.
Apart from its devotion to scripture, it was marked by ‘a careful observance of
Sunday; firamed texts, family prayers, and something indefmably patriarchal
about the ordering of the household’.183 Prayers presided over by the
paterfamilias erected the framework, morning and evening, within which life
was lived. Henry Thornton of the Clapham Sect compiled one of the volumes
most widely used on these occasions.184 It was against such a hothouse
atmosphere that those who discarded their Evangelical upbringing rebelled.
Samuel Butler and Edmund Gosse, who wrote two celebrated accounts of
rebellion, found it all too constricting. The problems of Butler and Gosse,
however, seem to have derived more from their parents’ personal
idiosyncrasies than from anything intrinsic to Evangelicalism.185 A pile of
testimony can be put in the opposite scale. The most influential Evangelical
handbooks on childcare, those written by Louisa Hoare, a sister of Elizabeth
Fry, were full of sanity, warmth and affection. And she practised what she
preached. One of her sons recalled the scripture readings at 7.15 each
morning. ‘Nothing can efface the lovely impression made on those occasions.
There she used to be by a bright fire in her little room, in her snow-white
dressing-gown…’186 Evangelical homes were often happy homes.
The Evangelicals nevertheless attracted a disproportionate volume of
contemporary criticism. Aristocrats might disdain their intensity, as
when Lady Palmerston, Shaftesbury’s mother-in-law, ‘spoke scornfully of
everyone and everything which bordered in the least on serious views’.187
Working-class radicals might hold that ‘all Christians are sad bigots;
Churchmen are among the worst, and Evangelicals are worst of all’.188 Writers
singled out hypocrisy for censure, whether through Dickens’s shallow
caricature of Chadband in Bleak House or George Eliot’s devastating portrayal
of Bulstrode in Middlemarch.189 Such criticisms are inevitable, it has been
pointed out by Professor Best, against those setting high standards of conduct;
130 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

certain aspects of regularity of life were commercial virtues predating

Evangelicalism; and the maintenance of a respectable public front was as
general among High Churchmen or non-churchmen. Only in the unnecessary
use of religious jargon, according to Professor Best, does the censure stick.190
Even ministers at the time felt the satne. Dr David Thomas, Congregational
minister at Stockwell, inspired in 1880 the writing of a protracted satire of the
Evangelical sub-culture, The World of Cant. ‘Mr. Crayford’, runs a typical
passage, ‘talked continually to Lorraine of the “light” that his wife enjoyed,
and begged him in the most unctuous terms to accept her faith and to be
“converted”.’191 Language once densely loaded with spiritual experience could
be debased by over-use. Evangelicals were not immune to the risk of all tight-
knit groups of generating their own argot that was well-nigh impenetrable to
outsiders.
Criticism was also directed at Evangelicals as killjoys. There was no
antagonism, according to Wilberforce, between religion and any amusement
that was really innocent. The question, however, of its innocence’, he went
on, ‘must not be tried by the loose maxims of worldly morality, but by the
spirit of the injunctions of the word of God…’192 Behaviour not itself sinful
could be dangerous if it diverted a believer from faithful religious practice, led
him into bad company or gave any appearance of evil. Deciding what fell into
any of these categories was no easy task. It is not surprising either that
Evangelicals tended to shelter behind blanket prohibitions that avoided the
need for careful evaluation in doubtful cases, or that the list of taboos varied
over time. Evangelicals in the Church of England seem to have become more
rigid during the early nineteenth century. Henry Venn, the secretary of the
CMS at mid-century, excluded all but one novel from his house, whereas his
father, John Venn of Clapham, had devoured Scott’s novels avidly.193 Among
those influenced by premillennialism, it was axiomatic that there should be no
trifling with the vain things of a world about to perish.
Other Anglicans, and Nonconformists generally, tended to broaden in their
views in the later part of the century. Thus, when the theatre was condemned
by members of the Eclectic Society in 1800, they were reflecting the
unanimous opinion of the Evangelical community. The profaneness on stage,
the low moral reputation of actresses and the specious appeal to the senses
were the worst offences of the drama.194 At mid-century it was still held that
‘to sanction the representation of sin, is surely equivalent to mocking at it’.195
When a United Presbyterian minister startled Edinburgh in 1883 by claiming
that the drama could in principle be ‘an educative force’, he nevertheless
conceded that its present unreformed state had prevented him from setting
foot in a theatre.196 But in 1894 the Chairman of the Congregational Union
denied that it was wrong to see a play.197 Resistance to the theatre was
beginning to crumble.
A change of mind about musical pcrformances took place more rapidly. The
1805 Wesleyan Conference prohibited recitatives and solos, but even at the
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 131

start of the century it was recognised that music, as the handmaid of worship,
had a certain value.198 In the 1840s a young Congregational minister declined
to attend a concert in deference to the convictions of others, but later in his
career he felt no qualms of conscience on the point.199 By the end of the
century the chapels of Wales and the north had begun their tradition of
regular choir festivals. Only rarely were there relics of resistance, as when in
1898 an ‘ultra-Baptist’ on a school board near Llandovery objected on
principle to school concerts.200
To novels there was probably always more opposition in theory than in
practice. The elite of Congregationalism gossiped to each other about their
latest reading in the 1810s even though John Angell James, minister at
Birmingham until 1859, ‘could notendure fiction’.201 The Christian Observer
was urging resistance to novel-reading (fiction made light of sin, wasted time
and had worldly associations) at a time when Sir Walter Scott was making
inroads into pious households.202 Attitudes broadened over time. The first
Congregational novelist was probably Sarah Stickney, with her Pictures of
Private Life (1833); by 1876 a Methodist novel was published and fiction was
being serialised in The Wesleyan Methodist Magazine.203 At the end of the
century, a whole fictional genre, the so-called Scottish ‘Kailyard School’,
existed to convey a Christian message, and the most popular novelist was Silas
K.Hocking, a Methodist.204 Like the concert, though unlike the theatre, the
novel was Christianised.
Recreation was even more of a moral minefield than the arts.
Contamination by associating with the unconverted was a greater risk.
Although dinner partics were least suspect because restrained by the
conventions of the home, they had their dangers—drowsiness after wine,
splendid displays of plate and so on. The friend of a correspondent of The
Christian Observer consequently abandoned ‘the dinner system’ as a violation
of the moral law, ‘pure Antinomianism’.205 Balls could stir preachers to a
frenzy of denunciation. Charles Clayton, Vicar of Holy Trinity, Cambridge,
declaimed against the university Bachelors’ Ball of 1857, contending that a
murderer had once been prompted to his reckless crime by the sight of six
elergymen at a ball.206 Clerical standards of behaviour were fixcd particularly
high. J.C.Wigram, the Evangelical Bishop of Rochester, attracted some ridicule
when, apart from censuring their beards and whiskers, he reprimandcd his
clergy for attending cricket clubs and archery meetings.207 Henry Venn gavc
up cricket on his ordination in 1820, and football played by candidates for the
Wesleyan ministry at Didsbury College attracted censure in the early
1860s.208 Marbles might be less fraught with danger: the venerable Methodist
Adam Clarke enjoyed playing—and winning—the game.209 Yet a boy in a
Calvinistic Methodist home in Merthyr Tydfil in the 1820s could have
qualms:
132 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

One of his schoolfellows remembers how wistfully he stood, on one

occasion, watching the other boys as they played at marbles, a game
which had much fascination for him, but in which, being perhaps at that
time a Church member, or about to become such, he did not feel at
liberty to indulge…210

A similar sensitive conscience fashioned the Evangelicals into opponents of

many forms of popular recreation. At Derby, pressure by Evangelicals led to
the abandonment of the races in 1835 and the suppression (by the use of troops)
of football in the streets in 1845 and the succeeding years; at Cheltenham,
Francis Close led a campaign directed impartially against the theatre,
undesirable literature, any breach of the sabbath and the local races; at Bolton,
the clergy sustained demands for the withdrawal of a licence for a ‘singing
saloon’.211 Such efforts were repeated all over Britain. ‘Evangelicalism’,
George Eliot observes of the early nineteenth century, ‘had cast a certain
suspicion as of plague-infection over the few amusements which survived in
the provinces.’212 It was not simply a middlc-class affair, as the unyielding
Primitive Methodist hostility to popular sport in the Potteries illustrates.213
Nor was it merely an expression of the killjoy spirit, for a strong element in
the movement was opposition to cruelty, whether to animals (as in cock-
fighting) or to human beings (as in prize fighting).214 The essence of the
campaigns was the belief that various forms of popular recreation were
occasions of sin. By the last thirty years of the century, however, Evangelicals
were to the fore in the general shift in favour of providing organised leisure
facilities for the working people. Suspicion of amusements melted away as
they came to be seen as valuable adjuncts of church life.215 It was another
instance of a sphere that early nineteenth-century Evangelicals had seen as
worldly coming to be recognised as having potential in the mission of the
church.

PRESSURE FOR REFORM

The approach of Evangelicals to politics was also marked by a parade of
conscience. Some supposed political activity to be so corrupt as to exclude
Christians from participaring. Thinks it wicked to vote’, ran a note on an
elector in a mid-century Norwich canvassing book,’—Leaves politics to the
world.’216 Quietism of this order, though it persisted in some quarters such as
the Brethren movement, was a declining force among Evangelicals as the
century advanced. Increasingly, Evangelicals were drawn into mass crusades
against social evils. Only govemments or local authorities held sufficient
power to remedy the moral blots on national life. By the 1832 Reform Act and
the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act a large section of the Evangelical public
was given a share in determining who held the power. Accordingly, beginning
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 133

with the campaign for the emancipation of colonial slaves in 1832–3,217 there
were regular forays into public life.
There was a remarkable measure of consistency in the features of reform
movements mounted by Evangelicals. It sprang primarily from their
possessing a common target for attack: sin. George Stephen, the chief anti-
slavery lecturer in the years 1830–3, found that he could best rouse the
religious public against colonial slavery by branding it as ‘criminal before
God’.218 Again and again in the rhetoric of subsequent crusades the object of
attack was wickedness. This fundamental feature of the political campaigns
should cause no surprise, for Evangelicals were, by definition, opposed to sin.
As soon as they became convinced that they were responsible as citizens for a
state of affairs that necessarily entailed sin, they considered themselves bound
to act. Because the target was outright evil, the crusades cannot properly be
labelled ‘humanitarian’, the traditional term used by historians to describe
Evangelical socio-political attitudes.219 It is true that the leaders often wished
to eliminate suffering: Shaftesbury, with his strong sense of aristocratic
responsibility for the poor, is a good example. It is also true, as in the case of
anti-slavery, that the mass campaigns frequently had the effect of reducing
suffering. That, however, was not their raison d’être. The Evangelical public was
aware of the cruelties perpetrated by slaveholders long before the sudden
upsurge of demands for the termination of slavery. Inhumanity in itself did
not prod their consciences. Evangelicals did not display a blanket
humanitarianism in politics. Rather, they mounted periodic campaigns against
particular evils.
Three broad classes of wickedness stirred them into political action. The
first is what may be called obstacles to the gospel. Anything that prevented
human beings from hearing the gospel was a threat to their salvation that
must be hateful to God. Slavery became the target of Evangelical assault in the
early 1830s because it began to be seen, for the first time, as an absolute
barrier to missionary progress in the Caribbean. Slaveowners suspected
missionaries of having fomented the Jamaica slave rebellion of 1831 and
determined to harry them from the island. Evangelicals concluded, in the
words of John Dyer, secretary of the BMS, that ‘either Christianity or slavery
must fall’.220 The ‘Ten Hours’ movement that campaigned to restrict the
working day in the mills of the West Riding had a similar inspiration. Parson
Bull of Byerley, an Evangelical, perceived that because the hands had too much
work to attend religious meetings, the factory system must be subject to
parliamentary regulation. It had become an obstacle to the gospel.221
A second class of evils attacked by Evangelicals consisted of what they saw as
substitutes for the gospel. Alternative systems of belief, religious or secular,
were condemned as affronts to the God who had revealed his truth in the
Bible. Most threatening because most powerful was the Roman Catholic
Church. Many of them did not scruple to label Catholic worship ‘idolatry’.222
The anti-Maynooth outburst of 1845 expressed the anxiety of Evangelicals
134 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

that they, as taxpayers, would be promoting the soul-destroying errors of

popery.223 Likewise paganism, though normally less alarming, was an
alternative to Christianity in the mission field. The British government was
therefore successfully pressed to end official concessions to forms of Hindu
worship in India.224 Conflict about education was similarly fuelled by fears of
forces hostile to Christianity in state schools. On the one hand, Anglican
Evangelicals were anxious lest the Bible should be excluded from schools. ‘I
believe it were better almost for man that [education] were crushed’, declared
Hugh Stowell, ‘than it were given unless it were christianised. ’225 On the
other hand, Nonconformists were fearful of religious teaching with an Anglo-
Catholic flavour, what they saw as indoctrination in sacerdotalism, as well as
state support for the errors of Catholicism itself. ‘Rome on the rates’ was the
war-cry of their opposition to the 1902 Education Act.226 Doctrines alien to
scriptural religion seemed to be preying on young minds, and their public
endorsement made Evangelicals responsible for them.
Sins—in the most usual sense of the word—formed the third class of
targets for Evangelical crusades. This is the category of infringements of the
gospel code for living. Sexual wrongdoing came high on the list. In the 1870s
even Christians who normally steered clear of politics—including
undenominational evangelists and the Wesleyan authorities—were roused to
agitate for the ending of health inspcction of prostitutes under the Contagious
Diseases Acts on the ground that it implied public sanction for sexual
immorality.227 Worries about sexual misbehaviour often turn out to underlie
what at first sight were entirely different concerns. In 1842 there was an
outcry by the religious public against conditions in the mining industry that
enabled Shaftesbury to promote a bill prohibiting the employment of women
and children underground. The cause of the high feeling, rather than being
simple outrage at the inhuman treatment of the weak, was shock at the
discovery, from an illustration in a Royal Commission report, that male and
fcmale children were being lowered to work together half-naked.228 In the
1880s a chorus of voices, predominantly Evangelical, protested against
overcrowded housing conditions in London. The explanation is that the
Christian public had just been made aware that families living in single rooms
were prone to incest.229
Next to sexual lapses as an object of attack was drunkenness. Although total
abstinence became much more widespread among Nonconformists than
among Anglicans, restriction of licensing hours and regulation of drink outlets
were shared aims in national and local campaigns of the late nineteenth
century. Associated with Hurdsfield Parish Church, near Macclesfield, the
Evangelical vicar organised a Band of Hope for children, a Temperance Society
for adults, a Teetotal Club with skittle alley and a Coffee Tavem.230 From such
agencies committed to ‘moral suasion’ of the population sprang hosts of
dedicated workers eager to support any political measure tending towards
prohibition.231 Then there was a series of campaigns against cases of sabbath-
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 135

breaking. So central was this issue to the Evangelical mind that when Henry
Martyn undertook his missionary venture to India and Persia he set himself
two objectives. He was intending to teach, together with the gospel of Christ,
the observance of the sabbath.232 In the mid-nineteenth century Sunday trains
ran at their peril, proposals for the Sunday opening of the Crystal Palace met a
wall of resistance and Shaftesbury secured, if only briefly, a cessation of Post
Office work on the sabbath.233 The dynamic of the Evangelical approach to
politics was hostility to sin.
One consequence was that Evangelicals were committed to a negative policy
of reform. Their proposals were regularly for the elimination of what was
wrong, not for the achievement of some alternative goal. Their campaigns
were often explicitly ‘anti’, as in the anti-slavery and the anti-Contagious
Diseases Acts movements. Other pressure groups might advocate an
innovation (like the six points of the Charter) or represent an interest (like the
Trades Union Council), but Evangelical reform movements were designed to
condemn features of existing policy. ‘lt was not his business’, announced
Arthur Guttery, the leading Primitive Methodist campaigner of the turn of
the century, ‘to propose schemes of redress or to suggest legislative measures.
That was the duty of Statesmen and Cabinets. It was his business to denounce
abuses and wrongs and shams…’234 The campaigns were essentially protest
movements. Their negative stance could in some cases be their strength: it is
frequently easier for governments to abandon an old policy than to commence
a new one. Slavery was abolished and the Contagious Diseases Acts were
repealed. And even when the chief objcctive was not reached, the existence of
mobilised Evangelical opinion sometimes prevcnted authorities from taking
further steps in undesired directions. Repeatedly governmcnts deferred
proposals for a Catholic university in Ireland for fear of the reaction.235
Governments had no desire to stir up a hornets’ nest.
The policy of protest dictated a method of agitation. If the authorities were
to be impressed by the strength of the movement, protest must be outspoken
and widespread. Paid lecturers (‘agitators’) or voluntary speakers would
address a series of public meetings up and down the country in an attempt to
whip up a maximum pitch of outrage. William Knibb, a returned Jamaica
missionary, carried round from gathering to gathering in 1832 a spiked iron
collar to brandish in illustration of the punishmcnt meted out to the slaves.236
The grand ‘indignation meetings’, frequently the settings for the launching of
petitions to Parliament or the approval of lctters to MPs, constituted a
spectacular form of entertainment. Furious denunciation of sin commonly
degenerated into distasteful personal censure. This was (among other things) a
poor political tactic, as Hugh Price Hughes, an embodiment of the late
nineteenth-century ‘Nonconformist Conscience’, discovered when he tried to
enlist the support of Lord Rosebery, the Liberal leader, for one cause after
castigating him for backwardness in another. Rosebery refused because of
136 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

Hughes’s previous lack of charity.237 Clamour could be counter ter-

productive.
Another handicap was the stern moral absolutism of the crusades. Their
demands were immutable, sacrosanct, certainly not open to negotiation. They
were marked by an intransigence that is well illustrated by the policy of the
United Kingdom Alliance, the chief prohibitionist pressure group. When a
governmcnt offered legislation to restrict the consumption of alcohol that fell
short of the Alliance’s goal, the organisations condemned the proposals
outright.238 Half a loaf was often refused. While continuing to demand a
whole loaf, Evangelicals commonly found themselves with no bread. Again,
the same absolutism showed itself over the timing of reform. Change,
Evangelicals regularly argued, must come urgently. Hence orators of the
1830s called for the immediate termination of slavery.239 Sin, once identified,
must not be tolerated. Policy, technique and style were all determined by the
fundamental characteristic of mass Evangelical politics as a crusade against
wrong.
The sharpest fissure that divided Evangelicals one from another during the
nineteenth century and on into the twentieth was largely political. Church and
chapel were at odds with each other on the establishment issue.
Nonconformists felt branded as inferior by the alliance of the Church of
England with the state. In the earlier days of the disestablishment movement
they were roused because they saw the cause as another struggle for right
against wrong on the pattern of the anti-slavery campaign. The union of
church and state was condemned because it encouraged idle, unconverted men
to enter the ministry of the Church of England for the sake of financial
security and a certain social standing. Soon the development of the Oxford
Movement raised the additional spectre of Romanising clergy within the
Established Church. Furthermore, state aid for religion implied that the gospel
could not bring in converts by itself—which scemed nothing less than an
insult to the powcr of Christ.240 So the disestablishment movement, organised
from 1844 as the Anti-State Church Association and from 1853 as the
Liberation Society, assumed the features of an Evangelical crusade.
In the same period the defence of the church as established was increasingly
seen as a duty of Evangelical Anglicans. By 1856 a Committee of Laymen of
Protestant inclinations was operating at Westminster to resist Nonconformist
claims, and from 1859 the Church Institution, later the Church Defence
Institution, existed to counteract the work of the Liberation Society.241 The
issue of the establishment principle was kept to the fore by the agitation of a
variety of grievances by Nonconformists. They were compelled to pay any
local rates that were levied for the upkeep of parish churches until 1868,
excluded from degrees at Oxford and Cambridge until changes in the 1850s
and 1871, and prevented from using their own forms of service in parish
graveyards until 1880. Broader experience of social discrimination also helped
to consolidate the traditional support of Nonconformists for the Liberal
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 137

Party.242 Celebrations in 1862 of the bicentenary of the Great Ejection and the
controversy over Irish disestablishment during the 1868 election campaign
drove church and chapel further apart.243 In most parts of England, and even
more fiercely in Wales, elections up to the First World War were commonly
referendums on the relative strength of the Church of England and
Nonconformity.244 In Scotland too the disestablishment issue between 1874
and 1895 deeply divided the United Presbyterian and Free Churches on the
one hand from the established Church of Scotland on the other.245 Within the
Free Church and the Church of Scotland there were significant minorities of
Conservatives and Liberals respectively,246 but in England and Wales
polarisation was more complete. A handful of Evangelical Churchmen,
including J.C.Miller and Robert Bickersteth, were Liberals, 247 and a small
group of prosperous Conservatives existed among the Wesleyans and
Presbyterians, strengthened after 1886 by opponcnts of Home Rule.248 But the
basic pattern was one in which political and denominational allegiance went
hand in hand. Rivalry may have spurred the two sides to outdo each other in
church growth. In general, however, the energy diverted into political feuding
must have weakened the religious impact of Evangelicalism on society.

INTELLECTUAL ACHIEVEMENT
It is commonly supposed that there was little or no Evangelical scholarship.
Newman in his Apologia remarked that the Evangelical party ‘at no time has
been conspicuous, as a party, for talent or learning’.249 John Foster, a Baptist
minister who retired to literary seclusion, penned an essay ‘On some of the
causes by which Evangelical religion has been rendered less acceptable to
persons of cultivated taste’ (1805), depicting and deploring the gulf between
learning and gospel truth.250 Contemporary opinion was certainly not wholly
mistaken. It was a basic premiss of Evangelicalism that, in the last resort,
scholarship must be counted as nothing when compared with the one thing
needful. ‘Without this knowledge of our want of Christ’, an early Yorkshire
Evangelical had declared, ‘all human learning, all other knowledge whatever,
is no better than florid nonsense and polite foolishness.’251 The acquisition of
human wisdom would not bring a person to heaven. On the other hand, it
might so inflate his pride as to turn him aside from the heavenly path. It might
even (especially if derived from Germany) be subversive of Christian truth.
The time of the believer, furthermore, had other calls upon it. Practical
work so occupied Shaftesbury, who had gained a first-class degree, that he
‘lost the art’ of reading.252 A zealous clergyman in particular, as
an Evangelical reminded a clerical audience in 1838, had more immediate
duties: ‘the Christian minister who can, in the present day, spend much time
in the fields of literature and science, must either be ignorant of the dangers
by which the flock is threatened, or heedless of the responsibilities by which
he himself is bound.’253 Many young Evangelicals fresh from achieving
138 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

university laurels followed the example of Henry Martyn (senior wrangler at

Cambridge in 1801) in devoting themselves to missionary work. Of forty-two
Cambridge men enrolled by the CMS in the period 1841–61, twenty-eight had
taken honours and nine had been wranglers (the equivalent of the first class in
mathematics). R.B.Batty (second wrangler in 1852, Fellow of Emmanuel from
1853) took service with the CMS in 1860, only to die at Amritsar the
following year.254 Likewise F.W. Kellett (Fellow of Sidney Sussex, an able
historian) abandoned the prospect of academic honours in England to join the
Wesleyan Missionary Society in India.255 Their distinction came not through
scholarship but through service. Again, the Evangelical party could boast a
fine array of colonial bishops, men such as Charles Perry, Bishop of
Melbourne (1847–76), W.S.Smith, Bishop then first Archbishop of Sydney
(1890–1909), and Robert Machray, Bishop then first Archbishop of Rupert’s
Land (1865–1904). But the fostering of the churches in the growing colonies was
achieved at the expense of diverting such figures from the field of learning.
Perry had been summoned to Trinity College, Cambridge, to assist Whewell,
the Master, in his teaching; Smith had been a Fellow of Trinity as well as
President of the Union; Machray had been Dean of Sidney Sussex.256 The
characteristic activism of Evangelicals made them chafe at the bit of reclusive
scholarship.
Yet within Evangelicalism there was a leaven conducive to intellectual
endeavour. The doctrinal preoccupations incumbent on a believer stimulated
an early, sometimes precocious, capacity for abstract thought. The imperative
to Bible study similarly accustomed him to reading. The role of Protestantism
in encouraging popular literacy over the centuries has already been noted,257
but it is important to insist that it could give rise to an intense bookishness. A
rural Aberdeenshire ministcr of the Free Church possessing slender means
was capable of purchasing, in a single and far frorn exceptional year, 518
volumes and 12 pamphlets and of reading 58 books in their entirety, with
much of several others and 17 pamphlets.258 It was impossible for a child
reared in such an environment to avoid a taste for leaming. Mill Hill, the
Nonconformist boarding school, under the headship of Dr Weymouth,
himself a translator of the New Testament, from 1869 to 1886, had twenty-
three former pupils gain first-class degrees.259 Even before Oxford and
Cambridge opcned their master’s degrees to Dissenters in 1871, some
Evangelical Nonconformists were entering Cambridge (as they were permitted
to do) and carrying off academic honours including the senior wranglership.260
Higher education was a preoccupation of many Evangelicals.
The University of Cambridge, or parts of it, became something of an
Evangelical citadel. Trinity maintained a strong Evangelical presence from
Simeon’s day onwards. St John’s was a particular resort of impoverished
young men of ill breeding—called ‘Sims’ after Simeon—eking out their
pittance in order to qualify for the ministry.261 Other colleges served
successively as havens for the sons of Evangelical parents, and consequently
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 139

were bursting at the seams—Magdalene, Queens’, Caius and Corpus

Christi.262 Simeon at Holy Trinity was assisted by eight wranglers, including
James Scholefield, subsequently Regius Professor of Greek. The first three
Jacksonian Professors of Natural and Experimental Philosophy (1783–1836)
were Evangelicals: Isaac Milner, Francis Wollaston and William Farish.263
There were distinguished men of the same party in the second half of the
century including Edwin Guest, President of the Society of Antiquaries, chief
founder of the Philological Society and Master of Caius (1852–80); and
G.G.Stokes, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (1849–1903), Master of
Pembroke (1902–3), MP for the University and President of the Royal
Society.264
Oxford, though much less fertile ground for Evangelicals, could boast a few
men such as John Conington, Corpus Professor of Latin Literature (1854–69),
who underwent a striking conversion from infidelity, and Sir Monier Monier-
Williams, Boden Professor of Sanskrit (1860–87), who opened his home to
undergraduates on Sunday evenings.265 At London the first Professor of
Divinity at King’s College (from 1846) was Alexander McCaul, an Evangelical
clergyman who had served the Jews’ Society and had been offered the
bishopric of Jerusalem; and the first Professor of History at University College
(1834–43) was Robert Vaughan, afterwards Principal of the Lancashire
Independent College.266 The Scottish universities and theological colleges were
replete with men of Evangelical conviction, of whom Robertson Smith, later
Professor of Arabic at Cambridge (frorn 1889), is merely the best known.267
There were Dissenters of high intellectual calibre outside the universities such
as Robert Hall or John Pye Smith, and learned clergymen pursuing their
studies in parish work such as Josiah Allport, of St James’s, Ashted, near
Birmingham, who translated the works of Bishop Davenant.268 Ability, the
spirit of inquiry and high attainments in the arts and sciences were by no
means foreign to the Evangelical temper.
What was achieved in theology? The standard view, expressed equally by
the German authority Otto Pfleiderer in 1890 and the most recent historian of
ninetecnth-ccntury doctrine, Bernard Reardon, is that the Evangelical
contribution was tiny. Only Thomas Erskine and McLeod Campbell among
theologians drawn from any Evangelical tradition qualify for more than a
sentence from Pfleiderer, and Reardon’s survey follows broadly similar
lines.269 It was said at the time that there was a lack of Evangelicals qualified
by their learning for the episcopal bench. Yet J.B.Sumner, who became
Archbishop of Canterbury in 1848, had published A Treatise on the Records
of the Creation (1816) which (before Chalmers’s synthesis) reconciled the new
learning of Malthus and the political economists with the teaching of
scripture.270 Both Charles Baring and Samuel Waldegrave held Oxford double
firsts, and Waldegrave had delivered the Bampton Lectures in 1854.271 So
academic ability was by no means entirely absent from the Evangelical
episcopate.
140 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

On the publication of Essays and Reviews, a correspondent of The Record

suggested a counterblast from the Evangelical party. It is instructive to
examine the names of established scholars that sprang to his mind as potcntial
contributors.272 Some, though advanced in years, had once made their mark.
T.H.Horne had written the standard work on biblical criticism, Alexander
McCaul had composed the most esteemed apologetic directed towards Jews, and
Christopher Benson, the first Hulsean Lecturer at Cambridge in 1820, had
published A Chronology of Our Saviour’s Life in the previous year.273 Joseph
Baylee issued a privately printed work on the principles of scriptural
interpretation, and J.B. Marsden, a student of Puritanism, had published a
more gcneral History of Christian Churches (1856).274 T.R.Birks, who had
been second wrangler in 1834, wrote The Bible and Modern Thought (1861), a
single-handed riposte to Essays and Reviews, and later a series of solid works
on ethics following his election to the Knightbridge Chair of Moral Philosophy
at Cambridge in 1872.275 William Goode, Dean of Ripon, though specialising
in controversial theology, was undoubtedly a thinker of the first rank. His
great assault on the Tractarians, The Divine Rule of Faith and Practice (1842),
was argued, as an obituarist remarked, with ‘logical justness’.276 The final
Evangelical notable, E.A.Litton, had shared the Oriel Senior Common Room
with Newman in the 1830s and so was well qualified for his major work, The
Church of Christ (1851), again a repudiation of Tractarian teaching.277Judged
by the yardstick of this list of potential defenders of the faith, Evangelicals could
justly claim to muster considerable intellectual power.
If the net is cast wider, the verdict is confirmed. Another Evangelical
Anglican, Edward Garbett, delivered, as the Boyle Lectures for 1861, a lucid
defence of Christianity as a body of revealed truth. As Bampton Lecturer for
1867 he took a similar theme, though admittedly making little impact on
Oxford.278 Robert Payne Smith, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford (1865–
70) and Dean of Canterbury (1870–95), was an erudite Syriac scholar who
worked on a thesaurus of the languagc for the last thirty-one years of his
life.279 Equally learned was Nathaniel Dimock, whosefield was historical
theology. His work on The Doctrine of the Sacraments (1871) was a particularly
telling statement of an Evangelical position.280 In Scotland there was much
able scholarship. Patrick Fairbairn, Principal of the Free Church College,
Glasgow, is a representative figure. Although his chief work was on the
apparently pietistic theme of The Typology of Scripture (1845–7), it gave him
an intemational reputation. He also ventured into the contested field of the
interpretation of prophecy (1856) and wrote illuminatingly on the still vexed
subject of biblical hermeneutics (1858). His academic reputation ensured him a
place among those who translated the Revised Version of the Old
Testament.281
There were many other unreconstructed Evangelicals in the Presbyterian
north—men such as James Orr and James Denney.282 One of the Scots whose
theology was reconstructed on a Hegelian basis, and therefore hovers on the
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 141

edge of the Evangelical category, was A.M.Fairbairn, who eventually became

the founding Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford.283 And the Evangelical
world embraced two other Congregationalists of great distinction. The oeuvre
of R.W.Dale, minister at Carr’s Lane, Birmingham (1853–95), contains some
slight pieces, but his work on The Atonement (1875) was a masterly
restatement that was widely adopted for use in Anglican seminaries,284
P.T.Forsyth, eventually Principal of Hackney College (1901–21), passed
through a phase in which Evangelical formulations were irksome to another in
which they formed the raw material for a series of passionately felt works on
central theological topics—Christology, authority, theodicy and so on.
Drawing on German sources far more than his contemporaries, Forsyth was a
patently original thinker.285 Originality, it must be admitted, was not the forte
of most Evangelical theologians, who from the 1830s normally saw their task
as essentially defensive. Yet Evangelicalism did generate academic theology.
Its adherents did not spurn the task of reflecting on their faith.

THE DECAY OF EVANGELICAL ASCENDANCY

The prominence of Evangelicals in society shortly after the middle of the
nineteenth century was never again to be repeated. Already by 1864
Shaftesbury was lamenting that the Protestant feeling of the nation was not
what it was,286 but the contraction of Evangelical influence was more marked
from the 1870s. It was the era of the so-called ‘Victorian crisis of faith’ when
young men began to discern insuperable objections to Christian belief. The
proportion of graduates proceeding to ordination, and especially of first-class
men, registered a sharp down-turn.287 At Cambridge the characteristic attitude
of the new academic vanguard to religion was ‘indifference’.288 An index of
the changing national mood was its literature. In 1870 most new books were
on religion, with fiction in fifth place; in 1886 most new books were fiction,
with religion behind it in second place.289 The belief was spreading that the
greatest need of humanity was not rescue from its futile ways through
salvation, but effort that would apply knowledge for the betterment of the
world. The resulting stance has been labelled ‘meliorism’, the belief that, if
only skills were exerted, the human race would make rapid progress. This
widely diffused offspring of Enlightenment optimism seemed to fit the
experience of industrial growth in the mid-Victorian years. It was
systematised in a number of theories of which Herbert Spencer’s so-called
‘Social Darwinism’ was the most popular.290 A range of alternative worldviews
to the Christian faith became available. At the same period several explicit
assaults on Christianity were published. W.E.H.Lecky, for instance, depicted
the steady advance of rationalism in European history as a dimension of
human progress. Certain natural scientists of a polemical bent—T.H.Huxley
and John Tyndall were prominent—did their best to show that science and
religion were inveterate foes.291
142 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

The challenge of Darwin was part of the ferment. It is easy to mistake the
consequences of the appearance of The Origin of Species in 1859. It did not
give rise to immediate and sustained debate over the veracity of the early
chapters of Genesis. The issue rarely resolved itself into a question of
‘evolution or the Bible’ until the following century. Rather, Darwin subverted
what had seemed the most assured argument for Christian belief, the
contention that the adaptation of particular species for their mode of life was
evidence of a beneficent Creator. ‘The old argument of design in nature, as given
by Paley’, wrote Darwin himself, ‘which formerly seemed to me so
conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered.’ 292
Animals and plants appeared to care for themselves. The divine hypothesis
seemed redundant. To many Evangelical leaders trained up in Paley’s
apologetic, acceptance of evolution entailed rejecting a Guiding Intelligence.
‘Then the universe will exhibit to us’, wrote T.R.Birks, ‘nothing but a Proteus
without reason or intclligence, going through a series of endless changes,
without conscious design, or any intelligible end or purpose in those
changes.’293 Other Evangelicals, however, willingly embraced the idea of
evolution. Henry Drummond, a professor at the Glasgow Free Church
College, even turned evolution into a vehicle for evangelism.294 There was
certainly no serious alarm among the occupants of the pews, but Darwinism
did contribute to the shift in the fulcrum of educated opinion away from
Christian belief. At least among the intellectual aristocracy, Evangelicalism
was giving way to ‘honest doubt’.
More widespread in their effects were changes in social circumstances. The
second half of the nineteenth century was marked by an acceleration in the
improvement of the standard of living. Between 1860 and 1900 there was an
increase of some 60 per cent in the real wages of the average urban worker.295
The quality and variety of food, longevity and health conditions all changed
significantly for the better. With higher disposable income, the working
population was able to turn to new activities outside the churches, ranging
from cycling to the music hall. The provision of state education after 1870
meant that the churches rapidly lost their ascendancy in popular education.
The new Board Schools might spread a general body of Bible teachings, but
parents were less inclined to feel a need for churches as civilising agencies for
their children. The creation of public welfare facilities had a comparable result.
Libraries, baths and open spaces were provided by local authorities in the
decades before the First World War. Liberal legislation after 1906 made more
elaborate provision, especially old age pensions and health insurance, that
effectively superseded equivalent services previously offered by the churches.
District visiting fell into decay.296
Paternalism was likewise’becoming a thing of the past. With enlargement
of company size, the end of family control and the appointment of anonymous
managers, especially from the 1890s onwards, the solidarity of employer and
workforce crumbled. No longer were employees at particular factories looked
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 143

for at particular places of worship.297 The other side of the coin was an
upsurge of working-class consciousness. Better times fostered demands for
higher wages, and in a series of waves—the early 1870s, 1888–92 and 1910–14
—working people increasingly banded together in trade unions to press their
claims. Versions of socialism began to take root and the seeds of the Labour
Party were sown.298 The visionary idealism of the Independent Labour Party
was far from anti-religious—indecd, it was an amalgam of the religious and the
political—but the churches often seemed an irrelevance. ‘I claim for
Socialism’, wrote Keir Hardie, the chairman of the ILP, ‘that it is the
embodiment of Christianity in our industrial system.’299 All too often,
according to a swelling chorus of working-class opinion, the churches ignored
the appalling conditions of the poor along with ‘the evils of competitive
middle-class society’.300 In these circumstances churchgoing was steadily
eroded. By 1902 in London only 19 per cent of the population attended
worship.301 Some of the consequences will call for examination in Chapter 6,
but it is clear that the churches were swimming against the social ride.

THEOLOGICAL CHANGE
At the same time the message of some of the churches was becoming less
sharply defined. Despite the innovations of Irving’s circle, the bulk of
Evangelicals at mid-century retained their confidence in the Enlightenment
appeal to evidenccs, scientific mcthod and an orderly universe governed by
cause and effect. At the beginning of 1863 The Record announced that ‘the
good sense of LOCKE, the analogics of BUTLER, and the “Common Sense” of
REID, will preserve us from the vagaries of Prussian or German
Rationalists…’302 It was devotion to ‘the inductive principles of the philosophy
of Bacon and Newton’ that buttressed T.R.Birks against Darwin.303 The
leaders of Evangelical Anglicanism were staunchly resistant to newer
intellectual fashions. The Record saw Dr John Campbell, Minister of
Whitefield’s Tabernacle until 1866, as standing for the same traditional
orthodoxies in Nonconformity.304 Henry Rogers, author of The Eclipse of
Faith (1852) and President of Lancashire Independent College from 1857 to
1864, was probably a more effective apologist in the traditional mould.305 It
was common, however, to draw a contrast: ‘conservation is the objcct of
Evangelical Episcopalians, progress of Evangelical Dissenters’.306 The inherited
aversion of Nonconformists to creeds imposed by law predisposed them to
look for fresh ways of stating Christian truth. The methods of science enjoyed
particular prestige. And the idea of progress, so much in the air, became a
normal assumption, especially among the better educated Congregationalists.
Accordingly their organ, The British Quarterly Review, wished to adhere to
orthodox truth and yet ‘to encourage free and reverent enquiry’.307
Investigation was seen as the motor of the advance of knowledge.
144 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

Devotion to this principle, itself an Enlightenment tenet, was,

paradoxically, a corrosive of the Enlightenment version of Evangelicalism that
prevailed among Nonconformists. At first it was held that research would not
alter the framework of belief. Joseph Angus, Principal of Regent’s Park Baptist
College, taught in the 1860s that theology is an inductive science, with the
texts of scripture as its facts and the rules of Francis Bacon as its method.
Progress is possible, not through the appearance of new truth, but through
better understanding of the old.308 But by 1873, starting from the same
premiss of the importance of inductive method in theology, it was being
argued by a Nonconformist that no doctrines could be regarded as permanent.
Any credal statement is an obstacle in the path to truth.309 The implication
was that, as Alexander Raleigh, a leading Congregational divine, put it in 1879,
‘religious people have left the principle of authority, and have begun free
inquiry, and the use of private judgment, and the practice of complete
toleration’.310 Fixed doctrines seemed outmoded. Starting with the same
Enlightenment legacy as Evangelical Anglicans, several leadcrs in
Congregationalism dwelt on its imperative to seek new knowledge, and so
moved far along the path towards theological liberalism.
A second solvent of received theological opinion was Romanticism. Its
influence was felt not only on particular doctrines, as the last chapter has
shown, but also in due course on the whole temper of theology. German
theology, the neology that Shaftesbury branded ‘Christianity without
Christ’,311 was one source. At the Congregational Spring Hill College,
Birmingham, for example, D.W. Simon, who had spent ten years in Germany,
dropped the traditional study of Christian evidences from the curriculum.312
Another source was the English school of poetry. The feeling of one
Congregational minister for Wordsworth ‘amounted almost to a passion’.313
Browning, himself brought up in Congregationalism, exercised an even
stronger fascination.314 Broad Churchmen, of whom F.D. Maurice and Charles
Kingsley were chief, mediatcd the same influences. Some Evangelical
Churchmen were affected, but, partly because of their inclination to free
enquiry, Nonconformists irnbibed Maurice more readily.315 The blurring of
the edges of doctrine, a characteristic symptom of the sub-Romantic
influences, caused more than one stir in Congregationalism. In 1856 a
collection of hymns entitled The Rivulet was condemned by John Campbell and
other conservatives for its doctrinal vagueness. In 1877 a conference at
Leicester of the most advanced ministers, men holding that religious
communion depended on spiritual sympathy rather than theological
agreement, provoked further alarm.316 James Baldwin Brown, who defended
the liberal stance in both these clashes, was the Congregationalist who did
most to popularise Maurice in his denomination.317
Members of the new school, it was said in 1879, apart from treating all
spheres of life as sacred, were distinguished ‘by the milder views they take of
the character of God; by the disuse of terror as an instrument of persuasion;
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 145

by a timid denial of miracles; or, short of denial (which is a strong step), by

keeping judicious silence about them…’318 The Fatherhood of God was a
typical theme, eternal punishment a typical omission. No specific doctrinal
change was more marked than the decline of hell. Humble Methodist
preachers might continue to excel in the 1870s at ‘holding them over the pit’,
but even eminent Evangelicals in the Established Church, Birks and Samuel
Garratt among them, departed from belief in everlasting retribution for the
lost.319 Edward White had led the way among the Congregationalists by
arguing in Life in Christ (1846) that immortality is conditional on faith in
Christ. The fmally impenitent, on this view, face extinction, not punishment.
Baldwin Brown went as far as the belief that all will ultimately be saved.320 No
consensus emerged within Congregationalism, let alone in the wider
Evangelical community, but there can be no doubt that, under the sway of the
sentiment of the age, opinion had been transformed.321 A ‘Christian
humanitarianism’ had come to dominate at least one denomination, the
Congregationalists,322 and sections of other bodies were not far behind.
Something of the incisiveness of Evangelical theology had been lost.
The drift of opinion was sharply challenged in the Down Grade Controversy
of 1887–8. C.H.Spurgeon, the pastor of the Baptist Metropolitan Tabernacle
and by far the most popular preacher of the day, condemned the tendency to
theological vapidity. In 1876 he had been dismayed to hear of a Congregational
minister who did not preach the gospel. Modern culture, intellectual preaching
and aesthetic taste, he claimed, were obscuring the truth.323 He warned the
Baptist Union in 1881 that some sermons were leaving out the atonement
—‘and, if you leave out the atonement, what Christianity have you got to
preach?’324 Spurgeon’s growing despondency about current trends culminated
in 1887. He gave his backing to a series of anonymous articles appearing in his
widely circulated church magazine under the heading ‘The Down Grade’.
Gaining little support, he withdrew from the Baptist Union, stigmatising such
bodies that bound together the unorthodox with the orthodox as
‘Confederacies in Evil’. His refusal to name individuals as guilty of error, as a
result, probably, of earlier undertakings, aroused great resentment and few
Baptist ministers followed him into isolation.325
Spurgeon was resisting the currents of thought that were running over from
Congregationalism into Baptist territory. Theological investigarions that might
remould doctrine did not attract him. ‘Rest assured’, he wrote, ‘that there is
nothing new in theology except that which is false; and the facts of theology
are today what they were eighteen hundred years ago.’326 Hence he approved
having creeds. In his scrapbook Spurgeon underlined two offending sentences
in a sermon by J.G.Greenhough: ‘Our preaching of hell wins none but the
base and cowardly…Hopes are much larger than creeds.’327 Another young
minister whose utterances alarmed him, W.E. Blomfield, had been censured for
appealing to non-Evangelical authorities like Maurice and Kingsley.328
Spurgeon’sprotest against emerging liberal tendencies may not have carried
146 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

many with him at the time, but the enduring esteem in which he was held in
the whole Evangelical world ensured a wider hearing for conservative opinion
in subsequent generations. He was widely applauded by Evangelical
Anglicans, and his influence remained particularly powerful among the
Baptists through men trained for the ministry at his college. The Down Grade
Controversy helped prepare the way for sharper divisions among Evangelicals
in the following century.

THE IMPACT OF HIGH CHURCHMANSHIP

The influence of the Evangelicals on society also suffered because of their
displacement within the Church of England by men of higher churchmanship.
Between 1865 and 1900 only six outright Evangelicals became bishops,329 but
moderate High Churchmen, heirs of Pusey’s sober devotion to the forms of the
Church of England, crowded on to the bench. Evangelicals themselves were
more troubled by the ‘advanced High Churchmen’, the ritualists who indulged
their Romantic taste by imitating the more elaborate features of medieval or
contemporary Catholic practice. In the 1840s ritualism meant little more than
intoning prayers, lighting candles on the communion table and preaching in a
surplice. But bolder spirits steadily raised the level of display, adding full
vestments, choral music and evcn incense, together with wafer or unleavened
bread and a mixed chalice containing water as well as wine. To symbolise their
status as priests, the clergy adopted the eastward position at communion,
standing with their backs to the people so as to face the God who was believed
to enter the elements. They began to hear confessions and declare
absolution.330
Ritualism touched a raw nerve in Evangelicalism. Rome was within the
gates. Acts like the elevation of the bread and wine for adoration seemed, in the
full sense of the word, ‘idolatrous’.331 A service at St Alban’s, Holborn,
according to Shaftesbury, was outwardly ‘the worship of Jupiter or Juno’.332
Here was an outstanding target for a crusade. Ritual prosecutions in the
ecclesiastical courts began in 1853 with an unsuccessful attempt to remove a
high altar, its cross, candlesticks, coloured cloths and credence table from St
Paul’s, Knightsbridge. Protests against vestments at St George’s-in-the-East in
1859–60 degenerated into brawls.333 From 1865 there was an Evangelical
organisarion, the Church Association, designed to conduct legal cases against
ritualists, and from 1874, under the Public Worship Regulation Act, there was
a clear mode of procedure. Prosecution, however, failed to stem the advancing
tide of ritual practices. Many blamed the bishops, who were permitted under
the act to forbid the commencement of a case. When, in consequence, the
wrath of the Church Association was turned in 1888 against the bishop
observing the most advanced form of liturgy, the saintly Edward King of
Lincoln, the result was an ignorninious failure that convinced most respectable
Evangelicals of the furility of legal action.334 Only the Protestant Truth
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 147

Society, founded in 1890 by John Kensit, sustained a continuing campaign,

often taking direct action to disrupt obnoxious services. At All Saints, East
Clevedon, the ritualist vicar issued brass knuckle-dusters so that members of
his congregation could resist the Kensitites.335
It should not be supposed that the Church Association, let alone the
Protestant Truth Society, enjoyed the support of all Anglican Evangelicals.
Although J.C.Ryle, their leading figure, was a Vice-President of the
Association until his elevation to the see of Liverpool in 1880,336 many others
agreed with Samuel Garratt, writing in the following year, that ‘if there is one
thing which, more than another, has injured the estimation in which
Evangelical truth is regarded, by thoughtful and religious men, it is these
prosecutions’. Yet the Evangelical body in the Church of England was so
preoccupied with the ritualist menace that it neglected what Garratt called ‘its
old crusade against public evils’.337 It was left largely to Nonconformists in
these years to pursue campaigns on social questions. Anti-ritualism was an
alternative form of an agitation against perceived evil. The energy poured into
it was diverted away from other channels.
On the other hand, a higher churchmanship proved attractive to many
Evangelicals. Their clergy, as Samuel Butler illustrates in The Way of all
Flesh, discarded the old-fashioned gown and bands in the pulpit and
introduced choral music into the service.338 ‘Churches now deemed decidedly
Evangelical’, it was remarkcd in 1883, ‘would, thirty years ago, have been
regarded as High Church.’339 There are several reasons. For one thing,
Evangelicals had never been uniformly Low Church in practice. Daniel Wilson
introduced 8 a.m. communion, often thought a uniquely High Church
practice, in 1824.340 John Bickersteth, who always had salt fish on his table on
Fridays, introduced a new organ, a choral service and the Te Deum after
evening prayer soon after going to Sapcote, Leicestershire, in 1837.341 There was
therefore no entrenched bar to a higher liturgical pattern. For another, loyalty
to the Book of Common Prayer could induce a punctilious observance of the
rubrics. Thus from 1859 William Cadman obeyed the directive to daily prayer
and weekly communion.342 Again, Evangelicals participating in the life of the
same church as High Churchmen could hardly avoid being affected by their
attitudes. Clergy in particular necessarily rubbed shoulders from time to time.
High Churchmen shared a similar spiritual discipline, often an identical
religious vocabulary, There were men in the late nineteenth century such as
G.H.Wilkinson who professed ‘Evangelical-Catholic’ principles, and by 1869
they were promoting a form of Anglo-Catholic revivalism.343 Such High
Churchmen were acceptable in certain Evangelical pulpits. Holding that the two
parties had been moving together in belief ever since the Gorham Judgement,
Edward Garbett announced in 1871 his conviction that they should actually
combine.344 Evangelicals had neglected the doctrine of the church ‘as a visible
organised society’, he held, and the Tracts for the Times had done some
148 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

good.345 Copying High Church practice where it seemed to involve no sacrifice

of principle was the result.
More elaborate services, furthermore, were partly a matter of following
public taste. With all their poetic associations, flowers came back into use at
funerals in the later nineteenth century. High Churchmen also used them to
decorate their churches.346 Evangelicals resisted for a while, the more
conservative among them for a long while. In 1880, floral decorations lavished
on altars, together with flower services, flower festivals and sepulchral flowers,
were still being condemned as having a ‘Pagan purpose’.347 But most
Evangelicals eventually succumbed. Again, they tried for a while to withstand
the introduction of anthems, musical services and robed choirs. Bishop
Waldegrave sternly insisted in 1868 that a service he was to attend should be
‘of the simplest character—hymns or psalms (mctrical) and chanting of the
canticles—but no monotones, the rest of the service, both reading and
responding, unmusical…’348 It was in vain, however, and many Evangelicals
gradually fell into line. By the early 1880s William Cadman at Holy Trinity,
Marylebone, had extended the music to the responses and psalms and the
choir was surpliced. He was ready to advance ‘with the tastes of the times’.349
It is clear that this is the fundamental explanation of the process, for similar
developments were beginning to take place among the Presbyterians of
Scotland and the Nonconformists of England. The pioneer of worship reform
in Scotland, Dr Robert Lee, was at the broad end of the range of theological
opinion, but through the Church Service Society, founded in 1865,
Evangelicals were affected.350 Chanting was begun at Union Chapel, Islington,
in 1856 or 1857, F.B. Meyer was observing communion weekly before the end
of the century and by 1906 one Congregational minister was even wearing a
surplice.351 So even where there was no heritage of liturgical worship, no
Prayer Book and no Oxford Movement, the form and setting of the service
were swayed by the Romantic temper of the age.
Change entailed friction. In Nonconformity there was some difference of
opinion about architectural styles. Dissenting Gothic made swift strides in the
later nineteenth century, especially in the suburbs.352 Spurgeon, by contrast,
erected his Metropolitan Tabernacle in the Grecian style of architecture. That,
he believed, was the appropriate setting for the exposition of a New Testament
written in Greek. He castigated congregations that put ‘hobgoblins and
monsters on the outside of their preaching houses’.353 The loudest uproar in
Methodism was about organs. The installation of an organ at Brunswick
Chapel, Leeds, in the 1820s to meet the taste of a middle-class congregation
actually precipitated the creation of a separate denomination, the Protestant
Methodists.354 Resistance to organs was also substantial in Scotland until the
1860s.355
In the Church of England, however, the great division of opinion among
Evangelicals was over the surplice. Wearing the surplice to preach represented
a preparedness to conform to the prevailing mode in the church. Evangelicals
 THE GROWTH OF THE WORD 149

in the early nineteenth century ordinarily followed the customary procedure

of discarding the surplice on entering the pulpit in order to preach in a black
gown. Preaching in a surplice, however, was laid down in the Book of
Common Prayer, and from the 1840s disciples of the Oxford Movement began
to uphold the practice as a sign of submission to the authority of the church.
The issue could generate enormous feeling, for it was a very visible shift in
the ‘popish’ direction. When the High Church Bishop Philpotts directed the
clergy of his diocese to adopt the surplice for preaching in 1844 there was
serious rioting in Exeter.356 Opposition was not merely a matter of vulgar
prejudice. In 1867 Bishop Waldegrave was still describing wearing the surplice
in the pulpit as ‘in many cases but the first of a series of Romeward
movements’.357 The gown became the public badge of the Evangelical school.
In 1871, however, the decision of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council
in the Purchas case was that the surplice must be worn in all ministrations.
Evangelicals faced a dilemma. They wished to uphold the law in order to
restrain ritualism; and yet the law commanded preaching in the surplice. A
hardier soul like Garratt might persist in wearing the gown to the end of his
parochial ministry,358 but others wavered. In 1887 the surplice was introduced
at Holy Trinity, Cambridge.359 As in other respects, the trend was towards
accommodation with the dominant practice of the Church of England. But the
process divided the Evangelical party. When Ryle preached in a surplice while
on holiday without his gown in 1876, hc was much censured.360 The tensions
resulting from the growing preference for the decorous and the aesthetic in
worship helped to blunt the impact of Evangelicalism as the century wore on.
They also, once more, prefigured the division of the following century.

THE EVANGELICAL CENTURY

The hundred years or so before the First World War nevertheless deserve to
be called the Evangelical century. In that period the activism of the movement
enabled it to permeatc British society. Righteousness, as Evangelicals might
have put it, abounded in the land. Major inroads were made on the existing
mass of religious indifference. Less impact was made on the lower working
classes than on higher social groups, but it is quite mistaken to hold that the
working classes as a whole were largely untouched by the gospel. Manners
and politics were transformed; even intellectual life was affected far more than
is normally admitted. If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, then the
undoubted existence of hypocrisy is a sign of the Evangelical achievement in
setting new standards of behaviour. Historians have sometimes been misled
into minimising the role of popular Protestantism by the very omnipresence of
an Evangelical atmosphere. The gospel conditioned unspoken assumptions.
Historians have also been deceived by contemporary comments lamenting the
scarcity of godliness. Shaftesbury’s writings are full of them. Apart from
Shaftesbury’s dyspeptic temperament, the phenomenon can be explained by
150 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

the scale of Evangelical ambitions. Nothing short of a nation united in the fear
of the Lord was their aim. If achievements were great, expectations were
always greater. Outsiders like Mill are the safer witnesses. So are those who
broke away from the constraints of a pious home. The mind of Leslie Stephen,
for instance, is inexplicable without analysis of his Evangelical inheritance.361
Earnestness remained when Christianity faded.
The enduring power of the satne legacy is evident in the group that
gathered round Leslie Stephen’s daughter, Virginia Woolf. The creed of
Bloomsbury was a new revelation, a substitute for the gospel, but very similar
to old-titne religion in some of its characteristics. ‘We are the mysterious
priests of a new and amazing civilisation’, wrote Lytton Strachey to Virginia’s
future husband, Leonard Woolf. ‘We have abolished religion, we have founded
ethics, we have established philosophy, we have sown our strange illumination
in every province of thought, we have conquered art, we have liberated
love.’362 Strachey knew what their new set of values had to replace. His
pungent polemic Eminent Victorians represents, according to his biographer,
an ‘onslaught upon the evangelicalism that was the defining characteristic of
Victorian culture’.363 Bloomsbury’s attack was launched when Evangelicalism
was well past its zenith. Social change, shifts within theology and alterations
in the pattern of worship were already sapping the foundations of its
ascendancy. Like British overseas trade or British power abroad in the same
period, it stood so high relative to its rivals at mid-century that the only way
was down. The initiative passed to other hands. But, at least for a while,
Evangelicals had remoulded British society in their own image.
 [5]
Holiness unto the Lord: Keswick and its
Context in the Later Nineteenth Century

In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses, HOLINESS
UNTO THE LORD. (Zech. 14:20)

From the 1870s onwards Evangelicalism was deeply influenced by a new

movement. Advocates of holiness teaching urged that Christians should aim
for a second decisive experience beyond conversion. Afterwards they would
live on a more elevated plane. No longer would they feel themselves ensnared
by wrongdoing, for they would have victory over sin. They would possess
holiness, enjoying ‘the higher life’. Initiates spoke ‘a new spiritual language’.1
They shared the belief that holiness comes by faith. Effort, conflict, endeavour
were rejected as the path of sanctification. ‘There is a mighty struggle going
on in the Church of God between two doctrines’, declared one advocate of the
new views in 1874. ‘Which will you have—sanctification by works or
sanctification by faith?’2 The sound Reformation principle, they could point
out, was that salvation is the gift of God to the person who trusts him. They were
simply pressing the principle further by contending that progress in the
Christian life as well as its commencement can be had for the asking. God is as
willing to give holiness as he is to confer salvation. The apostles of the new
teaching were Robert and Hannah Pearsall Smith, an American couple who
addressed gatherings ‘for the promotion of scriptural holiness’ at Oxford in
1874 and Brighton in 1875. In 1875 also there was held the first of the
conventions at Keswick, in the Lake District, that were to become the focal
point of the new spirituality. The message was taken up by many other
bodies, including the Salvation Army, but the Keswick idiom became dominant.
It shaped the prevailing pattern of Evangelical piety for much of the twentieth
century.
The new style of devotion laid stress on ‘the rest of faith’. With spiritual
struggle over, trust brought calm to the soul. This attitude was clearly of a
piece with the conviction of those who ran organisations or missions on the
faith principle. As much as George Müller of the orphanage or Hudson Taylor
of the China Inland Mission, the advocates of holiness by faith appealed to the
trustworthiness of God. Just as human means must be laid aside in Christian
152 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

mission, so human effort must be abandoned in the Christian life. Defence

against temptation would be granted by a God who ensured a supply of funds.
Hudson Taylor fitted naturally into the new world of holiness by faith,
testifying that he had enjoyed the experience before it was widely
proclaimed.3 Furthermore, the new doctrine, with its strong dimension of
supernaturalism, had a ready affinity for premillennialism. Those who
believed in the imminence of the second advent, the decisive divine entry into
history, were attracted by the idea that the power of God could already break
into human lives. And when Christ returned, he would surely expect his
people to be pure. Advent teaching was heard on its platform from the very
first Keswick Convention, achieving greater prominence in the 1880s.4 The
consonance of the new teaching about sanctification with the faith mission
principle and premillennialism betrays its origins. The holiness movement
was another expression of the permeation of Evangelicalism by Romantic
thought. The sensibility of the age (as it will appear) lay behind the new
spiritual language.
The movement was partly a response to the circumstances outlined at the
end of the previous chapter. By the early 1870s Evangelicalism was on the
ebb. The rise in the standard of living was allowing the working classes to turn
away from the churches for their leisure activities. Vital religion seemed
threatened at the same time by the twin foes of rationalism and ritualism.
When confronted with the choice of swimming with the tide or resisting it,
some Evangelicals wished to escape from the dilemma. Accommodation to
social trends by providing sport or entertainment for the masses was to erode
the distinction between the church and the world. Watering down belief to
make it acceptable to the contemporary mind was worse, Yet blank resistance
to the social and intellectual currents of the times in the manner of Spurgeon
seemed just as unacceptable. It stirred up controversy without achieving
anything concrete. What was to be done? ‘I came here’, announced a
clergyman at the Oxford holiness conference, ‘because I felt a great want in
my ministry. Crowds came and went, and yet with small result. I could not
believe that all was right, and I came to see what was the secret of the spiritual
power which some of my brethren possess. ’5 A more intense form of piety
offered a fresh dynamic. A spirituality that harmonised with the thought of
the age promised to reinvigorate evangelisrn. ‘Above all’, a historian of late
antiquity has concluded, ‘the holy man is a man of power. ’6 Rising above
circumstance, he can control his destiny. Repeatedly, holiness advocates
emphasised the availability of power. The attenders of the Oxford conference,
it was said, had discovered ‘a secret of power in service’.7 The holiness
movement offered what many late nineteenth-century Evangelicals wanted: a
means of coping with the challenges of their era.
 HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD 153

THE METHODIST HOLINESS TRADITION

The way was prepared for the assimilation of the fresh thinking by a wide
range of background factors. There was, in the first place, the tradition in
Methodism that Christian perfection is attainable on earth. John Wesley had
taught that there is a second stage beyond justification in the Christian life
when a believer ‘experiences a total death to sin, and an entire renewal in the
love, and image of God. so as to rejoice evermore, to pray without ceasing, and
in everything give thanks’.8 No Christian, Wesley held, commits sinful acts,
but the perfect Christian is also frced from evil thoughts or tempers. He still
makes mistakes for which Christ’s atoning work is necessary, but involuntary
mistakes of this kind are not properly sins. The only type of action that can
reasonably be classified as a sin Wesley calls (in a phrase much quoted in later
holiness debates) ‘a voluntary transgression of a known law’.9 So restricted a
definition made it plausible for a number of the early Methodists, though not
Wesley himself, to claim the state of Christian perfection or, as they usually
preferred to call it, ‘perfect love’. It was held to be gained instantaneously,
although progress in holiness normally preceded and followed it; and it was
received, Wesley insisted, by faith.10 Here were many of the materials out of
which the late nineteenth-century holiness movement was to forge its
teachings. Before the 1870s, however, at least in Britain, these doctrines were
almost entirely restricted to Methodism. After Wesley’s death some of the
preachers prized them as the sacred deposit of the connexion. Perfection,
Disney Alexander pointed out at Halifax in 1800, is a divine command. ‘If God
gives us laws’, he contended with a strict Enlightenment logic that Wesley had
used in the same way, ‘he gives us likewise an ability to keep them…’11 But
the tradition fell into decay. The more respectable in the connexion turned to a
watered-down version of the tradition rendered by William Arthur in The
Tongue of Fire (1856). In elegant phraseology the author, a Secretary of the
Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, urged his readers to pray for a
richer experience of the Holy Spirit. He tones down, however, the idea of a
‘second blessing’. ‘The difference between receiving the Spirit and being filled
with the Spirit’, he writes, ‘is a difference not of kind, but of degree.’12 This
was to empty Wesleyan entire sanctification of its distinctiveness: indeed, one
of Arthur’s motives appears to have been to enhance the standing of the
Wesleyans in the eyes of other denominations. Arthur’s book gained
considerable popularity and assisted in the natural process whereby the sharp
outlines of Wesley’s teachings were forgotten. By the 1860s the idea that
there is a decisive second stage in Christian sanctification was at a low ebb
among the generality of Wesleyans.
Yet in these years the legacy of Wesley’s ideas continued to have an effect
on Methodism. His Plain Account of Christian Perfection, a lucid apologetic
work, encouraged some to seek the blessing.13 The writings of John Fletcher of
Madeley, Wesley’s coadjutor and a claimant to the experience, were another
154 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

source.14 The lives of earlier Methodist preachers were similarly influential.15

All these literary influences surrounded those growing up in the
denomination in their most impressionable years. Candidates for the ministry
were questioned as a matter of course on Christian perfection, and Wesley’s
sermons, including expositions of the subject, functioned as the subordinate
standard of belief in the connexion.16 Wesleyan theologians remained
formally committed to their founder’s doctrine. Agar Beet, who was to be
appointed a tutor at Richmond College in 1885, published a book asserting
instantaneous and entire sanctification by faith in 1880 despite remaining
outside the reviving holiness movement; and W.B.Pope, the author of the
magisterial Compendium of Christian Theology (1875), taught the possibility
of the ‘extinction of sin’.17 Here and there entire sanctification retained
zealous advocates. James Carr was still preaching it at Wesley Chapel,
Nottingham, in the mid-1850s so that the young men fell to earnest
discussion of the topic and some in the congregation, including the father of
the founder of Boot’s the Chemists, entered the experience.18 A few well-
placed men claimed ‘full salvation’. Benjamin Hellier, classical tutor at
Richmond between 1857 and 1868 and subsequently at Headingley College,
was both an exponcnt and seemed an embodiment of the teaching.19 Benjamin
Gregory, who long before had startled those examining him as a candidate for
the ministry by professing the experience, continued to testify to it as a
connexional editor.20 And Alexander McAulay, who was to become President
of Conference in 1876 and Secretary of the Home Missions Department from
then until 1885, was prepared to speak of his ‘entire surrender to Christ’ and,
as though to substantiate it, was marked by a certain ‘apartness’.21 Such men
were eager to welcome any sign of a revitalisation of the decaying tradition.
The thirst for holiness was rcsuscitated in Methodism by a small group of
relatively obscure younger ministers. J.Clapham Greaves, W.G.Pascoe,
I.E.Page and John Brash were drawn together in 1870 by a common experience
of ‘perfect love’. In 1871 they held several mectings to promote scriptural
holiness in New Street Chapel, York, and during Conference that year there
were informal discussions on the theme.22 These were followed in 1872 by the
first of an annual series of public mcerings at Conference sponsored by
Cuthbert Bainbridge, a wealthy Newcastle warehouse-owner. Bainbridge also
provided the money to launch, in January 1872, The King’s Highway, a
substantial monthly periodical. The journal established a healthy circulation,
secured more than seventy Wesleyan contributors in its first twelve years and
was to last, under the care of Page and Brash, for twenty-eight years. It had
some impact on other Methodist denominations, whose representatives were
admitted to a share in its management.23 Its influence extended evcn beyond
Methodism. ‘I have just got two copies of The King’s Highway’, reported a
hyper-enthusiastic Baptist minister in 1872, ‘and am eating them’.24 By 1874
it was possible for the promoters to hold a conference devoted to holiness
alone. Gathering at Wakefield, it attracted about fifty ministers and laymen.25
 HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD 155

By this point, however, a great deal of the eagerness to learn about the ways
of holiness clearly derived from the stir made by the Pearsall Smiths, whose
Oxford conference had just taken place. Robert Pearsall Smith, while still in
America, had explained to the editor of The King’s Highway that they had to
be so careful not to confuse non-Methodists when talking of the experience
‘that we may sometimes seem as though we did not mean the same thing
practically as our dear Methodist brethren’. Nevertheless, he wanted to insist,
their differences were no more than verbal.26 In reviewing Pearsall Smith’s
new periodical, The Christian’s Pathway of Power, soon to become the official
organ of Keswick, the Methodist contributor agreed: ‘THE CHRISTIAN’S
PATHWAY and THE KING’S HIGHWAY are different names for the same
divine road to heaven—the old way of holiness. ’27 Consequently, it is not
surprising that the new wind blowing from America gave fresh impetus to the
holiness movement in Methodism. But it is equally clear that the
reinvigoration of the Methodist inheritance was under way before the
American breeze was felt. The wider holiness revival of the 1870s drew
strength from the narive tradition of British Methodism.

QUAKER SPIRITUALITY
Another indigenous influence was exerted by the Society of Friends. The
Society, standing apart even from the Dissenting mainstream in the
eighteenth century, had cherished its own highly distinctive spirituality,
drawing heavily on earlier mystical and hermetic strands in European
thought. The central notion in the early nineteenth century remained ‘the
light within’, the guiding principle, to be distinguished from reason or
conscience, that is given to each human being. Salvation depended on response
to its illumination. As the Evangelical Revival remoulded Quaker life,
however, doubts began to arise about the received spirituality. Could it be
squared with belief in salvation through the atoning death of Christ as taught
in the Bible? In 1835 Isaac Crewdson, a Manchester Evangelical Quaker, issucd
A Beacon to the Society of Friends to declare that it could not. He entirely
repudiated ‘the inward light’, arguing that it was a barrier to the
understanding of scriptural truth.28 Although Crewdson left the Society in the
following year, it became plain in the controversy surrounding the Beacon that
the new generation of Quaker leaders was in fundamental sympathy with
him.29 J.J.Gurney, a Norwich banker and probably the chief figure in the
Society in the 1830s and 1840s, found it hard to fit the idea of ‘universal light’
into his Evangelical way of thinking.30 Evangelicalism became dominant in the
Society, so that, for instance, from the 1870s Sunday evening home mission
meetings, with hymn singing and an evangelistic address, were introduced
alongside the traditional Sunday morning meetings for worship, with their
silence punctuated by contributions made under a sense of compulsion by the
Holy Spirit.31 Sharing in interdenominational work through agencies such as
156 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

the Bible Society and the British and Foreign School Society, the Quakers had
become accepted as part of the Evangelical world.
The older style of spirituality nevertheless lived on among Friends, an
undercurrent or perhaps a backwater of Quietism. God, held the
traditionalists, is to be discovered through passive acceptance of the influences
he brings to play on the soul, through nature, humanity and interior
reflection. They looked for their inspiration to the writings of the early
Friends, and particularly those of George Fox, the founder of the Society, and
Robert Barclay, the author of An Apology for the True Christian Divinity
(1676). There they found extensive teaching about the development of the
spiritual life. ‘For looking down at sin, and corruption, and distraction, you are
swallowed up in it’, wrote Fox; ‘but looking at the light which discovers them,
you will see over them. That will give victory; and you will find grace and
strength: and there is the first step of peace. ’32 The message of victory over
sin bringing peace was to be the keynote of the Keswick Convention.
Likewise, Barclay expounded the doctrine of Christian perfection. It is possible,
he contended, ‘to be free from actual sinning and transgressing of the law of
God, in that respect perfect: yet doth this perfection still admit of a growth;
and there remaineth always in some part a possibility of sinning…’33 Both
principle and qualifications would have found favour with the editors of The
King’s Highway. Such texts continued to mould nineteenth-century
Quietists.
Much of the Quaker phraseology was to be taken up by the holiness
movement. The ‘baptism of the Holy Ghost’, ‘full surrender’ and ‘rest’ were
terms bandied around in holiness circles after 1870, but had long been in
frequent use among Friends. There was often, however, some difference in
meaning. Whereas the later movement used ‘the baptism of/with the Holy
Ghost’ and ‘full surrender’ as descriptions of the moment of entire
sanctification (or even of a subsequent experience), the Quaker practice was to
apply them to a person’s initial conversion. Similarly, ‘rest’ appears in an
official Quaker statement of 1862 as a term describing the life of any true
believer, not as a depiction of the state of someone who has received a second
blessing.34 For Quakers there was no decisive second stage in Christian
experience, but it was certainly expectcd that believers would enjoy the
condition of holiness. The whole Society, Hannah Pearsall Smith was to
conclude, formed a sort of holiness organisation.35 Evangelicals among the
Friends, far from repudiating the call to advance in the spiritual life, were eager
to endorse it. Their only wariness was that spiritual experience should be, as a
Pastoral Epistle of the Yearly Meeting put it in 1883, ‘grounded upon genuine
conversion’.36 With that assured, Evangelicals in the Society accepted much of
the Quietist legacy of holiness teaching. They saw great value not only in
Quaker texts but also in sources esteemed among Quietists like those by
Fénelon and Mme Guyon—works that were to have a vogue in the holiness
movement.37 The assimilation of Quietist influences by Evangelicals within the
 HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD 157

Society of Friends was one of the ways in which alien ideas were sanitised, as
it were, before reception by the broader Evangelical community.
Many of the Quaker influences were transmitted through the Pearsall
Smiths. Hannah was brought up among Friends falling under the jurisdiction
of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which sustained distinctive Quaker
customs and the Quietist spirituality with more natural vigour than in
England. Despite a complicated subsequent history of religious exploration,
Hannah was very much the Quaker on her arrival in Britain. Apart from
retaining distinctive dress, she used ‘thee’ in correspondence, even to her
husband, and insisted on receiving the approval of English Friends before
undertaking public ministry.38 Robert professed to be undenominational, but,
as his critics noted, he too betrayed his Quaker background. The undogmatic
call to holiness of living (‘We did not come to Oxford…to discuss doctrines’)
bore the hallmark of Quakerism. So did the occasional unguarded idiom
(‘upon my light and guidance’) and, most of all, the pivotal points in his
teaching like ‘the Rest of Faith’. The Quaker practice of meditation in stillness
came over with the Pearsall Smiths. The Oxford conference included regular
times of silence, ‘an exercise which, as the congregations became more and more
accustomed to it, proved increasingly acceptable’.39 Quakers were naturally
drawn to the ministry of the American visitors. During the communion
service at the Brighton conference, about a hundred held their own ‘spiritual
observance’ at the local meeting house; other less strict Friends were willing to
participate in the communion.40 One of the Quakers present was Robert
Wilson, a gentleman from Broughton Grange, near Cockermouth in
Cumberland. Together with T.D.Harford-Battersby, Vicar of St John’s,
Keswick, Wilson went on to organise the Keswick Convention. Although he
took no part in public teaching, he chose the conference motto, ‘All one in Christ
Jesus’, and set much of the tone.41 Quaker spirituality was one of the
foundations of the holiness movement.

BRETHREN TEACHING
A third Christian body, the Brethren, shared in the creation of the new ethos.
Several strands in Brethren teaching contributed, There was the insistence on
the ‘heavenly calling’ of the church. If true believers were about to be
snatched away to meet the Lord in the air, the great task of the church was to
prepare for that event. Holiness was one of the requirements taught in
scripture for those who lived in the shadow of the second coming.42 There was
also the idea that underlay the whole movement of ‘gathering to the Lord
only’. Existing churches were condemned as organisations of human
contrivance whose systems of government were a hindrance to the work of
God. True assemblies, by contrast, were gathered by the Holy Ghost to Jesus
as the only centre.43 Brethren assemblies were therefore marked by a certain
apartness that tended to encourage a desire for holiness by withdrawal.
158 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

Furthermore, the main line of Brethren teaching on sanctification could

readily lead on to a Keswick stance. Sanctification, according to the chief
Brethren authorities, takes place in principle at conversion. What follows in the
Christian life is merely the working out in experience of the reality already
givcn. Hence, when seen from the point of view of the standing of the believer,
sanctification is not progressive, but the immediate result of faith.44 Both the
immediacy and the stress on faith were to be characteristic of the holiness
movement, especially in its earlier phases. The difference, however, is that
whereas Brethren placed the crucial stage of sanctification at conversion,
Keswick put it at a subsequent stage of ‘full surrender’. Keswick teaching did
enter Brethren circles, but it never became their orthodoxy. On the contrary,
as late as 1919 the Brethren standpoint expressed in their most respected
journal was that the second decisive experience taught at Keswick was
illusory. ‘When we hear of believers making a full surrender’, ran the reply to
a reader’s question on consecration,’…it gcnerally means that they have by
the Spirit been taught their sanctification through the blood…’45 That is to
say, they nierely perceive that they have been wholly sanctified beforehand,
at conversion. The difference between the dominant Brethren doctrine and the
notions of the holiness movement was substanrial. Yet the affinities were real.
Already in the 1860s among Brethren the idea of instant and entire
sanctification by faith was abroad.
Some were prepared to claim a distinctive spiritual experience. During the
Oxford conference on scriptural holiness in 1874, one of the Brethren from
George Müller’s Bethesda Chapel, Bristol, rose at a communion service ‘to say
that he had lived in unbroken unclouded communion with Jesus for very
many years’.46 Others were ready to preach it. John Hambleton, ‘the
converted actor’, one of the most popular Brethren evangelists of the 1860s,
was propagating what has been identified as Keswick teaching in 1861.47 In
fact, it must have been the rathcr different holiness teaching of the Brethren,
but holiness teaching it was. Consequently it is not surprising that critics should
have seen Robert Pearsall Smith as having been ‘led astray by Plymouth
Brethren and other ill-instructed Christians’.48 Pearsall Smith repudiated the
charge, pointing out that ‘the Plymouth Brethren or Exclusives’ (he must have
mcant the Exclusives alone) had met his views with decided opposition.49 Yet
the Brethren of Philadelphia had been a significant influence on the
developing thought of his wife. Although they were responsible chiefly for
insisting on the importance of firm doctrinal convictions, they also asserted
the centrality of faith as the way of justification—and, no doubt, in view of
standard Brethren views, of sanctification.50 So there was an element, albeit a
small one, of Brethren teaching behind the Pearsall Smiths’ doctrine of
holiness by faith. Far more important, however, was the wider Brethren role
in fostering expectations of higher attainments in practical holiness. In the
wake of the 1859–60 revival they were expanding in numbers and seemed to be
the avant-garde of keen Evangelicalism.51 Consequently, they were heeded
 HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD 159

when they spoke about what one of their leading teachers called ‘the blessed
possibility of living in such unbroken communion with God…as that the flesh
or the old man may not appear’.52 Brethren influence helped cultivate the
belief that entire consecration is possible.

THE MILDMAY CIRCLE

The Church of England, which was to be far more affected by Keswick ideas
than the other denominations, had also anticipated aspects of the new wave of
holiness convictions. Since 1856 there had been held, first at Barnet and then
at Mildmay Park in north London, an annual (except in 1857) conference for
Christian workers. William Pennefather summoned the conference while
incumbent of Christ Church, Barnet, and transferred it to Mildmay Park when
he moved to St Jude’s there in 1864. Pennefather combined devotional
intensity with remarkable energy: he also pioneered a number of other
enterprises including an orphanage and the work of deaconesses in the Church
of England. The conferences drew large numbers—some 1,000 by 186953—to
hear addresses from the leading evangelists of the day. Personal holiness was
one of the central themes from the first; others, receiving varying degrees of
emphasis from year to year, were foreign missions, home missions and the
Lord’s coming. The conferences were open to all who were in sympathy with
these concerns. They were, in fact, assertively undenominational, designed as
expressions of ‘the great principle, often slighted, sometimes positively
disowned by the Church of Christ, that her union in Christ, the living,
glorified Head of all His members, is a spiritual union’.54 Although the chief
constituency always consisted of revivalist-inclined Evangelical Anglicans,
likeminded groups were also represented. Outside influences spread into the
Church of England at Barnet and Mildmay. Pennefather himself, who wrote
of ‘my love for Friends’, drew a number of Quakers into the conference.
Brethren also joined in.55 And a third influence, usually repudiated by
Evangelicals, probably left its trace on the conferences. William Haslam,
Rector of Curzon Chapel, Mayfair, a regular speaker at Mildmay and an early
promoter of the other holiness meetings, had once been caught up in the
Tractarian movement, with its yearnings for holiness, until his dramatic
conversion.56 The High Church devotion to the holy life persisted in him.
Mildmay introduced a section of the Evangelical party in the Church of
England to higher spiritual aspirations than were normally entertained in the
middle years of the century.
The tone of the Barnet and Mildmay conferences was set by Pennefather,
who chose the speakers, and by his flock, who arranged hospitality. At Barnet,
Pennefather wrote to a friend, ‘the Church is very separate from the world’. He
would rebuke worldly conformity from the pulpit. ‘It was at a time when very
small bonnets were in fashion’, recalled a member of the congregation.
‘Pausing and looking round the church, he said, with all the energy he could
160 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

command, “Where is the shamefacedness of our daughters?”’ But for all his
attention to details of dress, Pennefather, unlike the Keswick school of the
future, taught no particular path of consecration. The distinctive note in his
instruction was the stress on the work of the Holy Spirit. The Saviour had
promised to send the Comforter. ‘Are we not then to look for the power of the
Holy Ghost?’57 Quite characteristically he opened the 1868 Mildmay
Conference with an exhortation to seek the Holy Spirit.58 All this was well
calculated to stir up expectations that the holiness movement was later to
satisfy. Furthermore, although Pennefather said nothing about a second
blessing as such, his guidance could lead enquirers towards a decisive stage in
Christian experience beyond conversion. One lady learned from him about
what she called ‘a second step of my Christian life…entire consecration to
Christ’.59 This was but a short distance from fully-blown holiness teaching.
Nevertheless, Mildmay, which continued meeting into the twentieth century,
long after Pennefather’s death in 1873, never capitulated wholly to the
characteristic message of the post-Pearsall Smith era. It permitted speakers on
its platform who expounded holiness by faith, but, under the chairmanship of
Stevenson Blackwood, it also invited speakers opposed to the new teaching—
Grattan Guinness at a special conference in 1874 and Horatius Bonar at the
regular one in 1875.60 It never achieved the singleness of purpose of the
Keswick Convention, and, though its attendance rose to 3,000,61 it was
destined to have a lesser sway than Keswick. But its role as a precursor was
crucial. It injectcd a more intense form of piety into the bloodstream of
Evangelical Anglicanism.
Mildmay quickened the zeal for holiness in the circle that was to sponsor
the Pearsall Smiths. William Haslam gave Pearsall Smith his first public
speaking opportunity in Britain in 1873; T.B.Smithies, the Primitive
Methodist editor of The British Workman, was a Mildmay speaker who ran
breakfast meetings for Nonconformists to hear Pearsall Smith; Stevenson
Blackwood, later chairman of Mildmay, had been converted.under
Pennefather and proposed the Oxford conference of 1874; Alfred Christopher,
Rector of St Aldate’s, Oxford, and a close friend of Pennefather’s, organised
the Oxford conference; T.D.Harford-Battersby, who called together the early
meetings of the Keswick Convention, had been a host to Pennefather in 1868;
Admiral E.G.Fishbourne, a gentleman-evangelist and Pennefather’s ‘valued
friend and constant counsellor’, became Pearsall Smith’s lieutenant in his
work during 1875.62 The Mildmay circle provided the core of personnel for the
new movement of the 1870s. The chief institutional framework of the new
phase also derived firom this source. Barnet and Mildmay pioneered annual
convention-going. Even before the advent of the Pearsall Smiths, imitations
sprang up. By 1869 it was already being noted that certain villages had their
annual gatherings.63 But the chief conferences on the Mildmay pattern were
at Perth and Clifton, both founded in 1863. The Perth conferences laid a
foundation for the acceptance of convention-going in Scotland.64 It was easy
 HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD 161

for Admiral Fishbourne to bring the views of Pearsall Smith to the Clifton
platform in 1874.65 From 1873 onwards, holiness conventions mushroomed—
at Dover and Bath, Gloucester (moving to Salisbury) and Bristol, Aberdeen
and Birmingham.66 The distinctive message of holiness by faith usually
rubbed shoulders with more traditional Mildmay views on sanctification.
Keswick, unusual in insisting on holiness by faith alone, was but a drop in a
mighty flood. The network of conventions was essential to the dissemination
of the new ideas. They looked to Pennefather’s conference as their model.

THE REVIVALIST BACKGROUND

The Christian workers drawn to Mildmay were usually part of the revivalist
world. The heightened spiritual atmosphere of 1859–60 left a legacy of urgent
evangelistic concern that prepared the way for the holiness movement. The
work of laymen in preaching the gospel created a precedent for the ministry of
the unordained Robert Pearsall Smith. Without the toleration of female
preaching that emerged in the 1860s the role of Robert’s wife Hannah would
have been unthinkable.67 The playing down of denominational allegiance, what
one revivalist called ‘the spirit of loving union of the present day’,68 led on to
the undenominational temper of Keswick. The newspaper of popular
evangelism, The Revival, carried articles by the Pearsall Smiths on holiness
from 1867 onwards.69 Its editor, R.C.Morgan, travelled in 1869 to America,
attending one of the meetings of the burgeoning holiness movement there.70
He republished a variety of works on ‘the higher Christian life’.71 From 1873
to 1875 all the events featuring the Pearsall Smiths were faithfully related in
the newspaper, now called The Christian. The world of the revivalists provided
a natural constituency for the assimilation of sanctification by faith. Their
ideas also cleared a path for the new teaching. Their theological stance
increasingly approximated in practice to Arminianism. The constant text of
Henry Moorhouse, a leading revivalist, was John 3:16 and his message was
summarised in the chorus ‘Whosoever will may come’.72 Calvinists remained
Calvinists, but their version was no longer so high. William Pennefather, for
instance, unconsciously influenced another clergyman, Clarmont Skrine, to
modify his views on election. ‘I found he was as strongly attached as I was to
the doctrines of grace’, wrote Skrine, ‘but was not led to make them, as I
believe I had done, a barrier to the free proclamation of Christ’s gospel to the
poor sinner. ’73 Calvinists were lcss prepared to look askance at Arminians. ‘If
a Methodist has begun work in a court’, declared Reginald Radcliffe, ‘and a
Calvinist comes to the same place, let him ask for a blessing on his brother,
and go on to the next court…’74 There was less of a doctrinal barrier to co-
operation. Consequently, too, Calvinists of the revivalist stamp had fewer
inhibirions about embracing teaching that rejected traditional Reformed
convictions on sanctification. The lower version of Calvinism in vogue among
them was a more elastic worldview.
162 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

At the same time there was a shift of emphasis among revivalists away from
theology towards ethics. Basic doctrine alone was important for evangelism.
‘But if good is to be done’, declared Baptist Noel in 1861, ‘we must be holy
ourselves.’75 Manner of life impinged directly on the effectiveness of witness.
With the burning low of revival fires that warmed the early 1860s, there was a
widespread longing in the following years to recover the earlier intensity of
religious experience. ‘My heart has often been stirred with desires for
holiness’, R.C.Morgan confided to his diary in 1868, ‘but the pressure of
earthly cares seems to choke the Word, and it becomes unfruitful. Lord,
cleanse me!’76 The Pearsall Smiths spoke to this mood. They seemed to offer a
short cut to a state of moral elation that would guarantee evangelistic success.
‘Let us notice God’s own way of revival’, observed Pearsall Smith at Oxford.
‘It did not commence with effort…but with cleansing. ’77 The ethical note of
revivalism gave the message of sanctification by faith an immediate appeal.
Likewise the very language of the revivalists pointed forward to a fulfilment in
the holiness movement. They spoke freely of being ‘filled with the Holy
Spirit’, usually of times when Christians were aware of converting power in
their midst, but also of the state of believers who had made moral growth.78
During the Evangelical Alliance week of prayer in 1860 there were petitions
for ‘our own entire sanctification’ and ‘an entire consecration of ourselves to
God’.79 The technical terms that would be employed in the new teaching of
the 1870s were already in use during the revival period. In many ways the
quickened tempo of revivalist religion in the 1860s was a precondition for the
new frame of mind of the following decade.
Another expression of revivalism that favoured the reception of holiness
teaching was the evangclistic work of the Americans Dwight L. Moody and his
singing colleague, Ira D.Sankey. Moody and Sankey carried a simple gospel
message round the British Isles between June 1873 and August 1875. Moody,
who had spoken at Mildmay in 1872, was invited to Britain by William
Pennefather and by Cuthbert Bainbridge, but both died before he arrived.
Without official sponsors, campaigns in York, Sunderland and Jarrow turned
out rather unspectacular affairs. In Newcastle, however, there was a
breakthrough in attendances, conversions and popularity; success was far
greater in Edinburgh; and the climax came with a stay in Glasgow from
February to April 1874 that was to have enduring consequences for the life of
the city. After an Irish interlude, Moody and Sankey returned to visit English
cities, reaching London for a campaign from March to July 1874.80 Moody’s
preaching has been adjudged ‘Calvinist if anything’.81 The Sunderland
Wesleyan ministers withheld support because he seemed Calvinistic, while
champions of Reformation orthodoxy in the Church of England rallied to his
defence.82 Moody preached the same brand of homely divinity, spiritual yet
practical, that Pennefather had commended—entirely consonant with
Calvinism, but erecting no barriers to free offers of the gospel. His anecdotal
style, like the paraphernalia of inquiry rooms and all-day meetings, seemed
 HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD 163

excitingly unconventional. Even his sermon on the solemn theme of ‘The

Blood’ was punctuated by illustrative stories in everyday speech: ‘You go to a
railway station, and you buy a ticket…There is a story told of the great
Napoleon…A good many years ago, when the Californian gold-fever broke
out…’83 He cultivated the commercial image that came naturally to one who
had originally been a shoe salesman. Sankey’s singing drew in the crowds.
Harmonium, solos, singalong choruses that stuck in the memory—all were
new.84 Evangelistic success gave the pair and their rnethods enormous
prestige. Moody and Sankey encouraged an openness to novel techniques for
wielding spiritual power.
According to Robert Pearsall Smith early in 1874, Moody was now
preaching entire sanctification as definitely as the forgiveness of sins.85
Pearsall Smith’s over-cager temperament was leading him astray, for at no
point did Moody endorse distinctive holiness teaching, let alone proclaim it.
He stood close to it in his tendency to asceticism, which usually emerged not
in his preaching but in his answers to questions at Christian conventions. ‘A
true Christian had no taste and desire for the world and its amusements’, he
declared at one of these; ‘he was crucified to it, and it to him.’86 But his
conviction of the need for separation from the world was merely received
Evangelical opinion, not a belief that carried him into the holiness camp.
Again, he had enjoyed an experience in 1871 not unlike a second conversion,
‘the conscious incoming to his Soul of a presence and power of His Spirit such
as he had never known before’.87 Thereafter he emphasised the importance of
seeking such an ‘enduement with power’, publishing while in Britain a study
called Power from on High.88 Although this way of describing a second (or
subsequent) blessing was common in holiness circles, it did not necessarily set
its users within them. Moody could be found deprecating obsession with the
higher Christian life, rebuking those who held (with extreme holiness
teachers) that they had passed beyond a life of moral struggle and (in his
farewell address at Liverpool) advising young converts that they would not
lose their sinful natures until the end of their earthly pilgrimage.89 In later
years, although he welcomed Keswick teachers to America and spoke from the
Keswick platform in 1892, he was to deny teaching entire sanctification as
such.90 It is clear that, though touched by currents of opinion similar to those
that created the holiness movement, at no stage—least of all when in Britain—
did he identify with it. Nor, however, did he condemn it; and he went out of
his way to send a telegram to the Brighton convention of 1875 expressing the
hope that great results would follow.91 In such circumstances it was easy to
suppose that the two pairs of visiting Americans were carrying the same—or
at least complementary—teaching. Hence critics of the Pearsall Smiths, such
as J.C.Ryle and Dean Close, were at pains to distinguish one pair firom the
other.92 There can be no doubt that they were fighting an uphill battle. The
Moody and Sankey campaigns greatly assisted the arrival of holiness teaching
164 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

in Britain by making it generally believed for the first time among

Evangelicals that sound innovations could come from America.

THE AMERICAN INFLUENCE

Stronger than any one of the native influcnces, and probably stronger than all
of them put together, was what one Methodist holiness leader called ‘the great
wave from America’.93 Its origins in the United States went back to the 1830s,
when the Methodist doctrine of sanctification suddenly achieved
unprecedented respectability. At Oberlin College, Ohio, Charles Finney, the
leading revivalist of his day, and the principal, Asa Mahan, both claimed to
pass through the crisis of sanctification in 1836. A furious controversy broke
out as the various defenders of Calvinist orthodoxy vied with each other in
condemning ‘Oberlin heresy’. The advance of holiness teaching beyond the
bounds of Methodism profited from the enormous publicity given by its
opponents. It became one of the widespread features of mid-century American
Protestantism.94 Finney’s Views on Sanctification (1840) achieved less
circulation in Britain than his prestige as a revivalist might lead one to expect,
but Mahan’s Scripture Doctrine of Christian Perfection (1844) exercised more
influence, chiefly (it seems) among Methodists.95 The breakthrough into the
non-Methodist world came with W.E.Boardman’s work, The Higher Christian
Life (1858). It was republished in London at a propitious time, when revival
excitement was at its height in 1860, and it achieved considerable success in
commending full salvation to the Reformed tradition.96 Boardman brought his
message to Mildmay in 1869, and, with Mahan, helped propagate holiness
views in Britain during 1873–5.97 Perhaps the most significant American
before the Pearsall Smiths, however, was Phoebe Palmer, who taught ‘a
shorter way’ to holiness. Christ, according to Mrs Palmer, is the altar that
immediately cleanses anyone touching it in simple faith. Her writings and a
protracted visit in 1859–64 rooted her message in British Methodism.98 There
were also to be echoes of her ‘altar theology’ in the teachings of the Pearsall
Smiths.99 Most important, she recruited to the holiness cause William and
Catherine Booth, still a minister and his wife in the Methodist New
Connexion but later the creators of the Salvation Army. Sanctification
understood in Mrs Palmer’s fashion was duly embodied in the Army’s
doctrinal standards. In the early phase following its emergence in the 1870s,
the Salvation Army was a vigorous holiness organisation, concerned to carry
‘the fire of the Holy Ghost’ into all its work. 100 Its message reflected the
American influence on Britain.
The shock of the Civil War, supplemented by the centenary of American
Methodism in 1866, drove Methodists in the United States to examine their
basic convictions. Many of them saw in scriptural holiness, as interpreted by
nineteenth-century commentators like Mrs Palmer, their raison d’être. John
S.Inskip, a senior minister in New York City, received sanctification in 1864
 HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD 165

and three years later launched a series of annual holiness camp meetings. Such
outdoor gatherings, usually lasting several days, had long been a feature of
frontier Methodism, but Inskip and his friends ran them near cities and gave
holiness teaching only. It was the beginning of a vast expansion of the
holiness movement that was to transform American religion.101 The stir in
America, Methodist-dominated but not wholly Methodist, played its part in
rousing British Methodists to greater zeal in the cause of holiness.102 The
camp meetings provided a model for the British holiness gatherings. The Oxford
meetings, the Americans were told, ‘more nearly approach one of your
National Camp Meetings than anything we have hitherto seen in England’.103
The climate dictated the fundamental difference that British gatherings should
be held indoors, but the camp meeting style stamped its mark on Keswick.
Most important, however, was the effect of the holiness upsurge on the
Pearsall Smiths. Hannah trusted for sanctification at a small-town Methodist
meeting, Robert at a camp meeting in 1867. ‘Suddenly’, recalled his wife,
‘from head to foot he had been shaken with what seemed like a magnetic thrill
of heavenly delight, and floods of glory seemed to pour through him, soul and
body, with the inward assurance that this was the longed-for Baptism of the
Holy Spirit.’104 The ideas that the Pearsall Smiths set out in the articles they
transmitted to Britain and that were crystallised supremely in Hannah’s
Holiness through Faith (1870) and The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life
(1875) were essentially those of the camp meetings in America. The British
holiness movement depended for its very existence on the contribution of the
United States.

THE CULTURAL CONTEXT

The movement has been seen as a religious equivalent of the secular cult of
self-improvement.105 Its classic embodiment was in Self-Help (1859) by
Samuel Smiles. ‘The highest object of life we take to be, to form a manly
character’, he declares, ‘and to work out the best development possible, of
body and spirit—of mind, conscience, heart, and soul.’ Individuals, from
whatever class they might originate, could rise to higher degrees of
respectability and independence. To draw a parallel between self-help
and holiness tendencies, however, would be mistaken. The summons of
Samuel Smiles was to persevering effort. The battle of life’, he writes,’…must
must necessarily be fought uphill; and to win it without a struggle were
perhaps to win it without honour.’106 The holiness movement, in total
contrast, encouraged its adherents to turn aside from struggle as a futile
assertion of the self in order to discover the rest of faith. The secret of the way
of holiness, according to an early exponent, was ‘simply in ceasing from all
efforts of our own, and trusting Jesus’.107 Again, self-improvement normally
entailed the provident laying aside of small sums of money on a regular basis
over many years. The prospect of reward had to be deferred to the distant future.
166 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

Holiness teachers, on the other hand, spoke of a crisis followed directly by the
gratifications of the higher life. D.B.Hankin, Vicar of Christ Church, Ware, and
one of the leading Anglican exponents of the holiness message in the 1870s,
urged his hearers at the Oxford conference to ‘an immediate and complete
surrender of self-will and unbelief ,108 The holiness movement represents a
break with the spirit of self-help, not its expression in the religious sphere.
The critics of ‘Pearsall Smithism’, in fact, had far more in common with the
ethos of self-improvement. Bishop Perry of Melbourne, addressing the 1875
Islington Clerical Meeting after Hankin, explained his difference from the
preceding speaker. ‘He believed that the Christian life was one of progress,
advance, step after step onwards; but Mr Hankin seemed to speak of
something into which a believer might pass, as by a jump, all at once.’109
Perry’s belief seems an echo of Samuel Smiles. ‘Great results’, asserts Smiles,
‘cannot be achieved at once; and we must be satisfied to advance in life as we
walk, step by step.’110 There is an evident affinity between the traditional
Evangelical doctrine of sanctification and the contemporary spirit of self-help.
The explanation is not far to seek. The primary intellectual source of the
notions about effort, improvement and the goal of independence was the
Enlightenment.111 These notions constituted a variant, forged by the
experience of industrialisation, of the idea of progress. Likewise the opponents
of Pearsall Smith were defending an Enlightenment inheritance: the belief
that sanctification is slow, steady, progressive.112 Gradualism was the ideology
of the social consensus of the high Victorian years, and it was this bastion that
Pearsall Smith assaulted.
The kinship of the holiness movement was not with the legacy of the
Enlightenment, but with the reaction against it that was gathering force at the
time. Convictions were starting to be remoulded in many fields. In law, social
theory and political economy there were shifts towards forms of
developmental and organic thought, in response, largely, to the defects of the
Utilitarian school. There was a new sense of historical relativism abroad.
Patterns of evolutionary thinking, often crudely summarised as ‘Social
Darwinism’, were coming into play.113 There was ‘a counterrevolution of
values’ stemming from dissatisfaction with simplistic notions of progress.
Enterprise, technology and economic growth were seen as false idols whose
veneration had led to the sacrifice of the aesthetic and the humane. Industrial
success had been purchased at too great a price. A point of view that in the
first half of the century had been associated with a few names of brilliant but
erratic genius—Carlyle and Pugin among them—became the orthodoxy of the
educated. The mood is evident in Ruskin, Dickens’s later novels, Mill’s works
of the 1850s and 1860s and, perhaps as obviously as anywhere, in Matthew
Arnold.114 ‘The idea of perfection as an inward condition of mind and spirit’,
he argues in Culture and Anarchy, ‘is at variance with the mechanical and
material civilization in esteem with us…’115 The holiness movement in
America has rightly been diagnosed as an expression of the same cultural
 HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD 167

tendencies that generated the sentimentalised moralism of the New England

Unitarian elite known as Transcendentalism. Emerson, its foremost exponent,
taught the idea of ‘communion with the oversoul’, a milk-and-water version
of the orthodox notion of fellowship with God described in language
reminiscent of Mrs Palmer on entire sanctification.116 Transcendentalism was
the core of American Romanticism. All the currents of thought germane to
the holiness movement—the relativism of social theory, the aestheticism of
Matthew Arnold and the Transcendentalism of Emerson—were Romantic in
form and substance. It is not surprising that holiness teaching bears the
hallmark of Romanticism.

A ROMANTIC MOVEMENT
This is evident, first of all, in its atmosphere and associations. Critics over the
years made great play with the charge that the holiness movement was all
gush and no sinew. Pearsall Smith’s strength, commented The Record
disparagingly in 1875, lay in the ‘emotional and sentimental’; a Scottish
opponent in 1892 condemned its ‘dreamy sentimental piety which only befits
the cloister’; and the spirituality of Bishop Moule of Durham, the Keswick
figure to rise highest in the ecclesiastical world, was said to be marked by ‘a
flavour of the sorry, syrupy stuff the world calls “pietism”’.117 Many of the
habitues of Keswick delighted in poetry. C.A.Fox, Pennefather’s last curate, the
most gifted orator of the Keswick platform, a devotee of Wordsworth and
himself a poet with a special love for waterfalls, conferred on verse a high
theological function. ‘I believe the poetry of the spiritual’, he wrote to another
Keswick speaker, ‘is one of the most purifying and elevating forces God has
given us to lift us to Himself and out of self. ’118 When Wordsworth’s pocm
The Excursion had been published in 1814, the Dissenting poet James
Montgomery had contemptuously dismissed its portrayal of ‘the study of
nature as a sanctifying process’,119 but now Wordsworth was appreciated for
this very quality. ‘lt was his interpretation of nature as a revelation of God’,
observed the biographer of J.B.Figgis, another leading Keswick figure, ‘that
inspired him to pen several verses of poetry.’120 The great Mecca of the
movement, Keswick, could not have been better placed to blend all the
attractions of mountains and lakes, remoteness and grandeur, artistic
associations and memories of Lake Poets. The setting was essential to the
experience. The lovely face of nature’s panorama in this valley’, ran a report
of the 1895 convention, ‘if gazed upon with eyes sanctified by thankfulness to
God for the gift and the vision to appreciate its charms, must ever have a
chastening and purifying effect. The consecrated Christian of all men has a
right to enjoy these outer garments of creation that speak so eloquently of
God’s power, and wish to make all things of the soul beautiful as well as
new.’121 It was as though Wordsworthian pantheism had become an additional
article of the Evangelical creed. All was of a piece with the contemporary
168 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

idealisation of the countryside in Thomas Hardy’s early novels or Norman

Shaw’s ‘Old English’ architecture.122 The educated public was turning to
Romantic sensibilities as an escape-route from the urban, industrial present,
and the holiness movement was part of the process.
Many of the leitmotifs normally found in Romantic thought were present
in holiness teaching. There was, for instance, a stress on the power of the
individual will, the force that according to many a Romantic such as Carlyle
rules the world. Pearsall Smith was unusually explicit on this point,
disagreeing with Jonathan Edwards’s Enlightenment analysis of human
psychology. ‘President Edwards’ teaching of the affections governing the will I
believe to be untrue’, he explained. ‘The will governs the affections.’123 A
believer, according to Evan Hopkins, the chief mentor of Keswick, is placed in
a state of perfect holiness ‘by a decisive act of will’.124 From the centrality
assigned to the will, there followed a limited doctrine of sin. Only willed
disobedience is sin. What Pearsall Smith calls ‘an undesigned sin of ignorance’
is not properly sin. That type of error cannot be escaped. Hence we, no more
than the apostles, can claim ‘an absolute holiness’.125 This restriction of sin to
particular known instances (a point on which he agreed with Wesley) enabled
Pearsall Smith to rebut the charge of teaching sinless perfection. ‘Faith’s
victory over known sin’, he wrote, ‘is not “Perfectionism”.’126 But there were
other implications. The human capacity to commit sins is on this view
conditioned by the extent of the individual’s knowledge. Pearsall Smith
offered the illustration of a newly converted heathen who may be observing
the standards of morality to which he is accustomed and so, at one and the
same time, be living in full communion with God and yet following practices
that he will abandon through further knowledge of God’s will.127 The
consequence is that there can be no objective morality. The standard for
behaviour varies according to circumstances. Prebendary H.W.Webb-Peploe,
one of the central circle of Keswick, declared that the rule for the man of God
is ‘the measure of light he had received’.128 Suchethical relativism sounds
strange on the lips of men professing new attainments in the paths of
holiness, but in its context it is entirely comprehensible. Just as social theorists
were concluding that the values of human groups vary according to their
historical experience, so Evangelical teachers were reaching the position that
duty depends on knowledge. Both views bear the stamp of the historical
relativism associated with Romanticism that had come to dominate Germany
and was spreading slowly into the Anglo-Saxon world.129 The holiness
movement was part of the most far-reaching cultural shift of the century.

OVERCOMING THE CALVINIST CRITIQUE

The contrast between the new holiness teaching and traditional views was
probably most marked on the issue of whether sanctification is sudden or
gradual. The distinctive note of the new school, as we have seen, was that it is
 HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD 169

sudden. They had come together, announced Pearsall Smith on the first day of
the Oxford conference, ‘to bring you to a crisis of faith’. 130 Such teaching was
a world away from Hannah More’s measured exhortation to sanctification
from early in the century. ‘Let us be solicitous that no day pass without some
augmentation of our holiness’, she writes, ‘some added height to our
aspirations, some wider expansion in the compass of our virtues. Let us strive
every day for some superiority to the preceding day, something that shall
distinctly mark the passing scene with progress.’131 Such steady plodding was
the received Evangelical view, hallowed by a long tradition of Reformed
exposition. Hence it was the immediatism of holiness doctrine that drew the
strongest fire. G.T.Fox, Vicar of St Nicholas, Durham, fulminated against
instant sanctification in Perfectionism (1873); Horatius Bonar denounced it in
The Rent Veil (1875). God is glorified, he argued in a subsequent letter, ‘not in
the instantaneous perfection of his redeemed, but in their gradual deliverance
from imperfection’.132 The whole idea of immediate sanctification seemed
alien to minds nurtured on a belief in the orderly operation of a mechanistic
universe: ‘the notion of full consecration per saltum’, wrote another
Presbyterian critic in 1892, ‘is inconsistent with the natural law of gradual
development, which is the prevailing method in all the various departments of
Divine activity. It were as reasonable that an acorn should all at once become a
majestic oak…’133 In the face of the barrage from Calvinist opponents, there was
an increasing tendency to play down the crisis dimension until ‘a manual of
Keswick teaching’ published in 1906 included scarcely a mention of the
immediacy of receiving sanctification.134 Outside Keswick circles there was
less need to mollify critics, and in the Methodist and sectarian dimensions of
the holiness movement the insistence on a moment of consecration retained
its hold. Thomas Cook, for instance, the chief holiness preacher among the
Methodists at the turn of the century, pressed believers to accept fidl salvation
‘now’.135 The explanation of the initial popularity of sudden sanctification is
an increasing acceptance that dramatic moments form a part of normal
experience. That is simply another way of saying that the holiness movement
appealed to spreading Romantic sensibilities.
Another battleground was the nature of Christian experience. Traditionally
it was seen as a constant struggle against sin. One of the strongest selling points
of the new teaching, by contrast, was its prornise of rest for the weary. Christ
has won our sanctification for us; our response is to accept it by faith; then we
shall enjoy a calm repose. The catchphrase ‘the Rest of Faith’, though dating
back to the Wesleys,136 became a slogan of the holiness movement. It was part
and parcel of the characteristic Romantic urge to escape—to flee the everyday
world of strife in order to discover the secret of harmony. In literature the
motif might find expression in fresh versions of the legend of the Holy Grail
(discovered, significantly, by the pure). On the lips of Pearsall Smith it meant
the continuing experience of the consecrated believer.137 The champions of
traditional Calvinism would have none of this. Bishop Perry repeatedly
170 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

warned an Islington Clerical Meeting against the present-day danger of

ignoring the fact that the life of the believer is ‘a continual conflict’.138
J.C.Ryle hammered away at the same theme by letter, pamphlet and,
eventually, the treatise on Holiness (1877).139 The theological issue, according
to the traditionalists, was also a practical one. It was a favourite gibe that belief
in the cessation of wrestling against sin was a sure path to the neglect of moral
duties. 140 Rumours about the downfall of Robert Pearsall Smith seemed to
vindicate the charge. During the Brighton Convention the apostle of purity
allowed himself to whisper indiscretions to a young woman in his hotel
bedroom. Although the matter was hushed up, his sponsors immediately
packed him off to America.141 Alarm spread again in 1884–6 about instruction
given by two young men, Messrs Pigott and Oliphant, to the Cambridge Inter-
Collegiate Christian Union during an outburst of holiness enthusiasm. Pigott
eventually joined the notorious Agepomonites, who practised something
approaching firee love in a remote Somerset community, and was venerated
there as Messiah.142 The criticism that it encouraged antinomianism. troubled
the holiness school. The life of faith, its defenders increasingly conceded, is a
matter of conflict, but whereas before full surrender defeat is a likelihood,
afterwards victory is virtually assured. Moment-by-moment trust in Christ, it
was explained, is the way to triumph over temptation. ‘Victory’ became
probably the best known Keswick catchword. So the need for a measure of
effort was introduced into the teaching of the holiness movement. Yet ‘resting
and rejoicing’ remained the normative experience commended to the
believer.143 Even though the new school gradually came to accommodate the
convictions of the old, the original debate between the two represented a
fundamental clash of cultural styles.
Traditional Calvinists, especially in the Church of England, were equally
critical of what they called the anti-doctrinal cast of holiness teaching. J.C.
Ryle delivered a crisp paper to the 1878 Islington Meeting on The Importance
of the Clear Enunciation of Dogma in dispensing the Word, with reference to
Instability among Modern Christians’. The Pearsall Smiths, he contended, had
disparaged theology.144 The indictment was entirely just: ‘We did not come to
Oxford to set each other right’, Pearsall Smith had declared, ‘or to discuss
doctrines…’145 The difference between Moody and the Oxford conference,
according to Ryle, was the difference between sunshine and fog.146 The
tradition stemming from the conference was markedly less concerned with
didactic theology than Ryle and his school. The essence of Christianity seems
to lie’, wrote A.T.Pierson, a leading Keswick speaker, in 1900, ‘not so much in
doctrine, even historical, as in the surrender of the will…‘147 The Keswick
stress on experience made dogmatic formulae remote and, to some, otiose. At
the annual Broadlands conference, which began in 1873 and ran in parallel
with Keswick until 1888, there was no dogmatism, but ‘a gracious freedom
that was like the air of open fields’.148 Evan Hopkins, who did more to shape
Keswick teaching than any other man, was drawn to Broadlands in Hampshire
 HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD 171

year after year.149 There was no identity, but there was an affinity, between
Broadlands and Keswick. William Cowper-Temple, the host at Broadlands,
was seen as a Broad Churchman, 150 and other figures round and about the
holiness movement were marked by a similar breadth of outlook. Hannah
Pearsall Smith was a known universalist; Boardman and John Brash, an editor
of The King’s Highway, had both once been pantheists; Brash was an admirer
of F.D.Maurice; and Harford-Battersby, not originally a professed Evangelical,
had been chosen to go as curate to Keswick by a predecessor described as ‘the
Maurice of the north’ who was ‘dreamy, mystical, fond of German
speculations’.151 There is a danger, wrote Harford-Battersby himself, of
‘leaving out too much the mystical element, if I may so call it, in our teaching
and keeping to the hard, dry lines of scientific theology’.152 Pearsall Smith
spoke favourably of Roman Catholic mystics and published a selection of
hymns by F.W.Faber, the Catholic convert and polemicist.153 Pearsall Smith’s
eulogy of Faber, remarked Horatius Bonar, ‘had introduced the whole of his
idolatrous volumes into Protestant families, and…they lie side by side with
Perfectionist works in London drawing-rooms. There must be some affinity
between these hymns and Mr Smith’s teaching…’154 There was indeed, but it
was not between Pearsall Smith and Faber’s Catholicism. Rather it was
between Pearsall Smith and Faber’s tone, what Smith calls in the preface his
‘sweet breathings’.155 Any expression of Romantic devotion to God secured
his approval. In a similar way the holiness school was drawn towards any
version of intense piety, whether liberal or mystical. It is no wonder that
many touched by Keswick were to move on in the years around the First
World War towards a liberal form of Evangelicalism.156

REMODELLING THE METHODIST TRADITION

Perhaps what most troubled Calvinist critics of the holiness movement was
that it might be nothing but Methodism renewed. They suspected that the
holiness teachers would follow Wesley on the question of eternal security.
Once a real Christian, stated the Reformed tradition, always a Christian. But
Wesley had argued that someone performing a known sinful action forthwith
ceases to be a Christian. Salvation can be lost.157 At the Brighton conference,
when a Methodist minister told people that if they were in a certain condition
it was time to ask if they were Christians at all, a Calvinist jumped up to
correct him by claiming that their Christian standing might be right even if they
were in that condition. Care was taken to guard the movement against similar
infringements of Reformed orthodoxy at Keswick.158 The divergence in this
area between the new holiness teaching and the Methodist tradition becomes
apparent in their different interpretations of Romans 7. Here the apostle Paul
laments his inability to do right. Whereas Calvinists never had difficulty in
seeing this as a description of the lifelong struggle of the believer, Methodists
argued that it must refer to Paul’s sinful condition before his conversion.
172 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

Pearsall Smith and the Keswick school adopted a third view. Paul recounts his
own experience as a believer, according to Harford-Battersby, ‘but not as one
using and applying the all-conquering might of Christ, but rather as he is in
himself, apart from Christ’.159 The condition described is that of someone who
has received justification but not sanctification. In reviewing these three
positions, the Methodist learned journal concluded that its own stance was as
different from the new holiness interpretation as it was from the old Calvinist
opinion.160 Although, as we have seen, the holiness movement was heavily
indebted to Methodism, in no sense did it simply resuscitate the connexion’s
established opinions. John Brash had imbibed his holiness convictions from
traditional Methodist sources, but later had been swept into the stream of the
new movement. At Southampton a Methodist who stuck to the older
presentation told him bluntly that he was ‘very modern’, meaning that he was
not sufficiently definite. Looking back on his own early teaching, Brash found
it ‘very mechanical’. After prolonged exposure to Keswick, his view of
sanctification became much more organic: ‘the one central thought to me is
living union with the living Saviour’.161 The shift was therefore from the
specific to the indefmite, from the mechanical to the organic—terms
standardly applied to the transition from the classical to the Romantic. The
Methodist tradition drew its sustenance from Enlightenment sources, but the
new movement was shaped by Romantic sensibilities.
More specifically, how did the new school break the mould of the Arminian
Enlightenment? In the first place, whereas Methodists had traditionally
taught that the crisis of sanctification comes at the end of a long quest, the new
view was that it is just the beginning of the qucst. After justification,
according to Wesley, a protracted period of self-discipline is necessary before
death to sin comes.162 In the era of Mrs Palmer, however, there was a
reworking of the tradition. Sanctification, Catherine Booth came to believe, is
not a matter of waiting for ‘a great and mighty work’ but an act of ‘simple
reception’.163 God will give the needed faith whenever we want it;
consequently holiness is available without waiting for it. Similarly, at Oxford
and Brighton it was taught that sanctification is not a terminus but a
departure. He proclaimed a crisis experience, declared Pearsall Smith, ‘not as a
finality, but as the only true commencement of a life of progress’.164 The
contrast between the older and the newer views reflects their cultural settings.
The traditional Wesleyan position adopted the typical Enlightenment idea that
there is a goal for humanity. We must struggle upwards towards holiness. The
newer position assumed, with the Romantic age, that the crucial experience of
life is possible here and now, with no delay. In the second place, whereas
Wesley had expected very few to reach the goal,165 the holiness school of the
late nineteenth century believed the experience should be general among
believers. It soon became fashionable to reject the phrase ‘the higher Christian
life’ on the ground that the experience should be normal for the Christian.
Webb-Peploe, who early in 1874 was content to use the term, repudiated it
 HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD 173

twenty years later for this very reason.166 Holiness was being democratised. If
(as Romanticism dictated) the experience of restful faith is immediately
available to all, then it becomes ‘the normal Christian life’ from which
anything inferior is an unnecessary declension.
In the third place, there was a shift from the established Methodist
conviction that sin can be totally removed from the believer’s heart to the view
that in a holy life its operation is merely suspended. Although Wesley, in the
empirical spirit of the eighteenth century, was not troubled about whether sin
was described as suspended or destroyed so long as its absence was truly
experienced, one of his conferences pronounced in favour of the eradication of
sin at entire sanctification.167 Methodists were properly called perfectionists,
believing that perfection is possible before death. The chief holiness teachers,
however, were eager to repudiate perfectionist views.168 As Keswick teaching
crystallised, it was most insistent that sin is never eradicated frorn human life
on earth. Sinful tendencies always remain, even when they are repressed by
the power of Christ.169 Keswick was sensitive to the risk that eradicationism
might lead to professions of sinlessness that would discredit the whole
movement. It had to be on its guard because many Methodists, the Salvation
Army and a number of fringe sectaries continued to uphold the belief that (as
they put it) salvarion is from all sin. In 1895 one of the sectarian leaders, Reader
Harris of the Pentecostal League, rather melodramatically offered £100 if any
Keswick speaker could supply scripture proof of ‘the necessity of sin in the
Spirit-filled believer’. Sin, replied R.C.Morgan in The Christian, is ‘a fact in
the Spirit-filled man…[but] sinning is not a necessity in a Spirit-filled man’. 170
Eradicationism was put to flight. The triumph of the idea of suspension,
however, was not simply the result of guarding the flank against extretne
teaching. It was also inherent in the logic of the mainstream holiness
movement, for the notion that sin can be ‘kept under’ or ‘repressed’ (rather
than excised or discarded) was bound up with a dynamic psychology, implying
constant process in the human mind. Such a view fitted naturally into a
Romantic estimate of the importance of the interior life, the growing, organic
world within.171 The favourite image of Keswick teachers to express the idea was
significantly the organic one of the branch abiding in the vine of Christ.172
Thus the Methodist inheritance was remoulded—and the process was one
whereby Enlightenment assumptions gave way to those of the Romantic age.

AFFINITIES OF HOLINESS
Music bears its testimony to the same transformation. The holiness
movement was bound up with a significant shift in musical taste. The primary
symptom was simply that music was given unprecedented prominence. The
Salvation Army had its marching bands and ‘Hallelujah lasses’ with
tambourines.173 Holiness Methodists stirred to mission work entered villages
led by a singing band with ‘an English concertina’.l74 There was large-scale
174 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

hymn singing at the Brighton conference and it became a valued feature of the
Keswick conventions.175 The holincss movement, furthermore, became closely
identified with the techniques of Sankey, Moody’s singing companion. The
revivalism that preceded the holiness era in the 1860s had already brought
forth ‘Richard Weaver’s artless but powerful rendering of Revival melodies’
and the similar style of Philip Phillips, the ‘Singing Pilgrim’,176 yet it was
Sankey who took the religious world by storm with his Sacred Songs and
Solos. He filled a vacuum for popular participation in church music recently
created by the abolition of traditional bands and folk choirs, a process just
about complete by the 1870s.177 The enthusiastic welcome for his style was a
popular revolt against the respectability of the elaborate hymns and tunes
preferred by organists. ‘People want to sing, not what they think’, argued
R.W.Dale, ‘but what they feel’.178 Sankey catered for their taste. His style was
valued by Moody because it was so close to that of the music hall.179 Sankey’s
compositions were celebrated for their tunes, not their harmonies, as even
their staunchest defenders were bound to admit. 180 But the melodious was
what Romantic taste required. It also called for a devotional atmosphere.
Consequently the settings for Hymns of Consecration and Faith, the Keswick
hymn book, were ‘generally soft and low’.181 The new phase of piety adopted a
musical idiom suited to the spirit of the age.
Something of the new ethos was a result of the larger part played by women
in this stage of popular Protestantism. Keswick was seen as a landmark in the
emancipation of women, at least in the religious sphere. Until the creation of
the convention, it was claimed in 1907, few women had accepted the
commission entrusted by Christ to Mary to deliver his message openly.182
This was certainly a misrepresentation, both of the extent of female public
ministry beforehand and of the degree of freedom given to women at Keswick.
The growth of female preaching in the revivalist atmosphere of the 1860s and
separate ladies’ meeting at Mildmay from 1862 had created precedents.183 At
Keswick ladies were permitted to address female gatherings only, though at
several subsidiary conventions the gender bar was abolished.184 The Salvation
Army went further, establishing equality of the sexes among its officers. By
1915 at least half were women.185 Keswick definitely attracted women. Their
proportion of the convention-goers increased over the years, and when a
missionary call was first given at Keswick, it was women who were first to
respond.186 To a critic (albeit a friendly Methodist), the piety of the Oxford
conference of 1874 ‘could have been more robust and manly’.187 Women
contributed a significant proportion of the hymnody of the holiness
movement. Apart from Frances Havergal (who wrote more hymns in the
Keswick collection than any other), there were Miss C.May Grimes, Fanny
Crosby, Charlotte Elliott and Jean Sophia Pigott, who actually came in person
to the convention.188 What was the connection between Keswick spirituality
and the larger share of female involvement? Romantic sentiment dictated that
purity and love should be staple themes of the convention, and according to
 HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD 175

the stereotypes of the day, these were female qualities. Their prominence may
owe a debt to female participation; and in turn the themes must have made an
appeal to women. More concretely, the call to total surrender undoubtedly had
attractions in an age when female submission was axiomatic. Frances Havergal
liked thinking of Christ as ‘Master’. ‘lt is perhaps my favourite title’, she
wrote, ‘because it implies rule and submission; and this is what love craves.
Men may feel differently, but a true woman’s submission is inseparable from
deep love.’ A female friend concurred in preferring the title ‘Master’ and so
did Jessie Penn-Lewis, the most accomplished lady speaker associated with
Keswick.189 This form of female piety was almost certainly the root of the
growing practice at the end of the century of addressing public prayer to the
Lord Jesus rather than to the Father through him.190 Women were
refashioning devotional practice through the holiness movement.
Patterns of behaviour were altered less. Holiness was so much an internal
matter of personal consciousness, a trysting of the elevated soul with its God,
that the practicalities of everyday living were generally passed over in silence.
Dozens of Keswick addresses can be scanned in vain without discovering any
detailed guidance. The rationale was that ‘the teaching deals with great
general principles rather than specific practices’.191 When holiness teachers did
descend from the highest planes, they would normally dwell on the need to
abandon ‘all doubtful things’.192 This grey area contained every practice over
which a question mark lingered in the mind. Its definition must have led to
bouts of anguish for sensitive consciences. A barrier was effectively erected
against playing cards for money, patronising the theatre, opera or ballroom and
attending horse races (except to distribute tracts).193 It was very rare for
anyone in the circle of readers of The Christian to raise a voice in favour of
any of these activities, but in 1885 there was an isolated letter, emanating
(significantly) from Grosvenor Mansions, Westminster, contending that at
some theatres there was legitimate entertainment without any suggestion of
evil.194 In general, however, traditional Evangelical prohibitions were
reinforced. Was it right, a perplexed enquirer asked H.F.Bowker at the 1880
Keswick, to play croquet, bagatelle, cards and so on to kill time? ‘Shall I sit
with Christ to judge the world’, came the stern reply, ‘and see anyone whom I
have helped to kill time?’ His partner on the platform, Pastor Stockmeyer, felt
it necessary to add that an exception must be made for play with children.195
Recreation was just about legitimate, but not in a state of heedlessness.
‘Natural necessity’, declared Page in The King’s Highway, ‘and the example of
St John, who recreated himself with sporting with a tame partridge, teach us
that it is lawful to relax and unbend our bow, but not to suffer it to be unready
or unstrung.’196 For all its emphasis on the inner life, holiness teaching did not
blunt the Evangelical imperative to be prepared for action.
The chief innovation was the strengthening of temperance opinion. The
coming of the American influences in 1873–5 coincided with an upsurge in
temperance enthusiasm in the churches, at least in Nonconformity and
176 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

Scotland, following the licensing legislation of Gladstone’s governmcnt in

1872.l97 Pearsall Smith was very hot on this question. Should every Christian,
he was asked at the Brighton conference, abandon alcohol? ‘A thousand times,
yes’, he answered.198 Moody also cast the mantle of his prestige over total
abstinence.199 A.T.Pierson, another American, was equally insistent that ‘the
wine-cup’ bears the stamp of this world.200 American revivalist opinion was
more advanced on this question than British and through the holiness
incursion of the 1870s reinforced incipient tendencies towards rejection of
alcohol and, indeed, prohibitionism. The most borderline issue was smoking.
There was relatively little thought in the nineteenth century of injury to
health, or else the fringe of the holiness movement that took up faith healing
might have created a stir over tobacco.201 Pierson claimed ‘that those who
accept Keswick teaching practically abandon tobacco, from an inward sense of
its being promotive of carnal self-indulgence’, but in 1892 one Keswick
speaker commented that there had been smokers about, for he had noticed a
great deal of odour that was not of sanctity.202 Those who liked their pipe
could appeal to the example of Spurgeon, who had declared that he smoked to
the glory of God, and in the 1920s there were still vain attempts by
enthusiasts to exhort convention-goers to perceive an inconsistency between
smoking and holiness.203 Over tobacco there was more resistance than over
alcohol. So it was chiefly temperance attitudes that were fostered by the
movement.204 Previous taboos were undoubtedly reinforced, and that strongly,
by the holiness impulse; but on the whole Evangelical attitudes to the world
were not transformed by what was intrinsically an otherworldly movement.

THE BRITISH HOLINESS MOVEMENT

The appeal of the holiness message, notwithstanding the emergence of the
Salvation Army and a number of other popular bodies, was overwhelmingly
to the upper middle classes. The revivalist world that initially received it had
an upper-middle-class, even an aristocratic, tinge. Pennefather, for instance,
found on coming to his Barnet congregation ‘many true Christians here
among the upper classes’;205 gentry patronised full-time evangelists; peers
even acted as revivalists themselves. Pearsall Smith’s original entrte was to
West End drawing rooms and country house parties. The sins he condemned
were peculiarly suited to his audiences. ‘Does the sudden pull of the bell’, he
asked, ‘ever give notice in the kitchen that a good temper has been lost by the
head of the household?’206 In the years around 1870 the middle classes
generally enjoyed longer hours of leisure, the fruit of economic prosperity. A
whole literature sprang up discussing how it could legitimately be used.207
Attendance at the conventions, which necessarily implied the possession of a
good deal of leisure, provided a congenial answer for the conscientious
Christian. It was sometimes claimed that Keswick attracted a wide social cross-
section, but the resort was one that deliberately catered for the elite of
 HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD 177

Lakeland visitors.208 Those who were of lower social standing were very
obvious and called forth comment—like the camp of sixty to seventy who
were ‘mainly factory-workers, clerks and artizans’ at the beginning of the
twentieth century and the twenty from the Barnsley collieries in 1912.209 In
1895 Keswick was criticised for becoming ‘a Convention for the rich alone’.210
The explanation of its social appeal is to be found in the nature of its message.
The greater educational opportunities of the upper middle classes meant that
they had commonly acquired a taste for Wordsworth, the poetic temper and
elevating spiritual influences. The call to holiness, with all its Romantic
affinities, was bound to have far more impact on them than on lower social
groups. Although Keswick teaching was later to spread to a wider public, its
initial constituency was drawn very largely from the well-to-do.
The varying attractions of sanctification by faith to different sectors of society
help explain the denominational pattern of support. The new teaching made
far more inroads among Evangelical Anglicans, with their higher average
social standing, than among Evangelical Nonconformists. From the start the
Church of England supplied the bulk of the convention speakers. Resistance at
the Islington Clerical Meetings to Keswick teaching on sanctification was
steadily eroded. In 1892 its doctrine was still being repudiated at Islington by
Canon Hoare, but in that year Ryle, long an unyielding opponent and now
Bishop of Liverpool, gave the movement a qualified imprimatur by offering
prayer on its platform when Moody was the speaker.211 By the dawning of the
new century Keswick teaching went unchallenged at Islington and so had
clearly triumphed in Anglican Evangelicalism.212 Within the other
denominations it did not achieve the same sway. Among Scottish
Presbyterians there were house-parties including some fifteen to twenty
ministers frotn each of the three main denominations at Keswick in 1900, but
the overall contingent was not large.213 Congregational and Baptist ministers
had managed to muster a meeting of between fifty and sixty during the
Brighton conference,214 but Congregationalism was not to be deeply affected.
Pearsall Smith was proud to have influenced a number of Baptists, including
some members of Spurgeon’s congregation,215 but the only Baptist speaker to
gain prominence on the Keswick platform before 1900 was F.B.Meyer,
significantly the most urbane minister of his denomination. John Brash became
a Keswick teacher and claimed that lots of Methodists attended, but even he
felt rather out of place in so Anglican a gathering.216 One Methodist minister
who received the blessing at Keswick, W.H.Tindall, founded in 1885 a
Methodist holiness convention at Southport, and one of its most incisive
speakers, Dr E.E.Jenkins, had received entire sanctification at Brighton.217 But
Southport, while becoming a focus for holiness teaching in Methodism, had
the effect of diverting members of the denomination away from Keswick.
Apart from considerations such as time, Southport tolerated the eradicationism
that Keswick ruled out of court.218 So Anglican dominance in the mainstream
of the holiness movement was assured.
178 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

Yet, as in America, the movement also created a tendency to separate from

existing churches in order to teach holiness without reserve. ‘Soon’, wrote
Page of the Methodist holiness movement in the early 1870s, ‘the difficulty
was to check the disposition to form separate organizations, and to discourage
all movements which tended to the formation of a “Church within a
Church”…’219 The crucial decision, never rescinded, not to form a Methodist
holiness organisation was taken at a conference at Wakefield in 1874.220 To a
large extent holiness enthusiasm was contained. The original ardour of the
Salvation Army for ‘the fire of the Holy Ghost’ cooled. By the early years of
the twentieth century, when General Booth was asked whether the Army
taught entire sanctification as earnestly as formerly, he replied, ‘When a man
talks about full consecration, we say to him, “Go and do something”’.221 The
Army had none the less brought the experience of sanctification to the
founders of two lesser holiness bodies, the Faith Mission in Scotland and the
Star Hall in Manchester. But the Faith Mission was careful not to draw
members away from their own churches, preferring to set up undenominational
halls that would act as feeders for local congregations.222 A similar policy was
pursued by the Pentecostal League of Reader Harris, formed in 1891 ‘to spread
Scriptural Holiness by unsectarian methods’ from a London base, and later by
the Overcomer League of Jessie Penn-Lewis. Both had their own magazines,
Tongues of Fire and The Overcomer (founded 1909).223 Yet the fissiparity of
the American holiness movement that created twenty-five denominations by
1907224 was also a British phenomcnon. Already by 1884 there were thirteen
independent congregations with their own magazine, The Holiness
Advocate.225 The International Holiness Mission (1906) broke away from the
Pentecostal League to set up separate churches; the Calvary Holiness Church
separated (1934) frotn the IHM because it wished to permit faith healing; the
Pentecostal Church of Scotland (1906) divided from the Parkhead
Congregational Church over entire sanctification; and the Emmanuel Holiness
Church (1916) was set up by an individual holiness teacher in Birkenhead.226
This sectarian fringe was the context in which the Pentecostal movement was
to spring to life in the first decade of the twentieth century.227 Consequently,
it was more important than it rnay appear. In itself, however, this
phenomenon was remarkably small-scale. The strongest (apart from the
Salvation Army) of the separatist bodies, the IHM, had only twenty-seven
churches with about one thousand members when it merged with the Church
of the Nazarene, based in America, in 1952.228 Holiness separatism was weak
in Britain both because the Methodists deliberately set their face against it and
because of the remarkable hegemony of Keswick.
The holiness movement ushered in a new phase in Evangelical history.
There was, it was said, between 1870 and 1876 ‘a change of religious
climate’.229 The holiness teaching that caught on in these years, though having
many and various antecedents, was primarily an expression of the spirit of the
age. It was a Romantic impulse, harmonising with the premillennialism and
 HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD 179

faith mission principle that had similar origins. It challenged the beliefs about
sanctification held by both Calvinists and Arminians, creating a common
Christianity of experience. The fresh spirituality revitalised congregations and
induced many to offer for missionary service. In 1885 some 1,500 to 2,000
people attended the Keswick Convention; by 1907 there were between 5,000
and 6,000. 230 The success of Keswick led to a host of imitations, including
Bridge of Allan as the main convention for Scotland and Llandrindod Wells
for Wales. The message was spread by a battery of publications including
Keswick’s own journal, The Life of Faith. New Evangelical agencies of the late
nineteenth century naturally took their colour from the movement. The
Christian Unions at Cambridge and Oxford, the Bible Training Institute,
Glasgow, for preparing Christian workers, and many obscure mission halls
had intimate links with Keswick.231 The undenominational tone they shared
was to exercise a powerful influence on twentieth-century Evangelicalism. In
part, the holiness movement exerted a broadening tendency. By shifting the
fulcrum of Christianity from the head to the heart, it blurred ecclesiastical
boundaries and softened the doctrinal inheritance. It is consequently not
surprising that it was one of the forces behind the ecumenical movement of
the twentieth century.232 Yet at the same time it was a narrowing force. There
was created, it was said, ‘a new sect of “undenominationalists”’.233 Keswick in
particular fits all the standard criteria of a sect—a voluntary association,
exclusiveness, personal perfection as the aim, and so on—and especially of a
conversionist sect.234 In no sense, as in the case of most sects, was it a refuge
for the socially deprived, but otherwise the sectarian tendency was marked. It
formed, wrote Webb-Peploe to Hopkins, ‘a spiritual freemasonry which the
outer world cannot apprehend’.235 Secular society, and even the generality of
torpid Christians, formed an alien and often hostile world. The adherents of
Keswick were turning in on a shared but private experience. They were
accepting that Evangelicalism, which had come so near to dominating the
national culture at mid-century, was on the way to becoming an introverted
subculture.
 [6]
Walking Apart: Conservative and Liberal
Evangelicals in the Early Twentieth Century

Can two walk together, except they be agreed? (Amos 3:3)

The unity of Evangelicalism was broken during the 1920s. The movement had
always been marked by variety in doctrine, attitude and social composition, but
in the years after the First World War it became so sharply divided that some
members of one party did not recognise the other as Evangelical—or even,
sometimes, as Christian. Polarisation was by no means total, for co-operation
between the two wings, liberal and conservative, continued in a number of
organisations. Yet disagreement was sufficiently acute to cause schism in
several Evangelical institutions including the Church Missionary Society.
Many deeply regretted the partisanship. J.E. Watts-Ditchfield, Bishop of
Chelmsford, wished to hear less and less of ‘Evangelicals with a label’,
whether conservative or liberal.1 But it was not to be. When a similar hope
was expressed by a writer to The Record in 1934, another correspondent
pointed out the scriptural injunction to withdraw from those teaching other
than the truth. Only lately, he continued in disgust, an Evangelical in the daily
press had urged that the feeding of the five thousand was merely a sharing of
lunches.2 Conservatives could not tolerate liberal views of this kind. The split
became deep and permanent.
In the United States at the same period there was a comparable division.
The Evangelical world erupted into violent polemic between Fundamentalists
and Modernists. Both terms were used in Britain. Charges of Modernism were
lcvelled in 1913 against George Jackson, a candidate for a theological chair, by
his conservative opponents in Methodism. The word had already become
familiar, not least because the Vatican had suppressed what was styled
Modernism in the previous decade. Modernism, whether Protestant or
Catholic, was an attempt to present Christianity in terms of modem thought,
to translate traditional doctrines into a contemporary idiom. The word
‘Fundamentalism’ emerged later. It originated in America to describe the
position of those who wished to defend the fundamentals of the faith. A series
of booklets called The Fundamentals had been issued between 1910 and 1915
to affirm basic beliefs. Although a few of the authors were British, the
 WALKING APART 181

booklets were an American venture that created far more of a stir on the other
side of the Atlantic. In 1920 an American Baptist newspaper editor called for a
conference of those ready ‘to do battle royal for the Fundamentals’ and the word
Fundamentalism entered standard usage.3 Four years later, as a Scottish
commentator noted, the term was not yet naturalised in Britain. ‘Yet’, he
went on, ‘the thing which the uncomely word describes is not unfamiliar to us
here. It denotes the position of those who tenaciously cling to traditional
views of Bible inspiration, and who by the intensity of their convictions are
compelled to oppose to the uttermost the more elastic teachings of many
modem Biblical critics.’4 There was some reluctance to employ the term in
Britain, for it was felt to be alien, uncouth and pejorative. Yet some were
prepared to wear the label. The journal of the Wesley Bible Union, for
instance, changed its title in 1927 to The Fundamentalist.5 There was
sympathy for the American Fundamentalist struggle and some exchange of
personnel. It is therefore quite mistaken to hold (as it sometimes has been
held) that Britain escaped a Fundamentalist controversy. Evangelicalism in
Britain as well as in America suffered from fiercely contested debates in the
1920s.
The issues, furthermore, were very similar. The conservatives made the
status of the Bible central. Although, as will appear, they differed among
themselves in their views of the inspiration and interpretation of scripture,
they were united in treating it as uniquely trustworthy and authoritative.
Many spoke of the verbal inspiration of the Bible and stressed its literal
interpretation. They were concerned to defend certain doctrines, among which
they normally placed the imminence of the second coming. Nearly all
conservatives also embraced holiness teaching, generally in its Keswick form.
Liberals, on the other hand, wished to be able to reinterpret theology in fresh
terms. One of them pleadedin 1913 for ‘the development of thought and
doctrine’.6 They were often eager to bring greater beauty and dignity into
worship. Churchmanship in general, they considered, had been too much
neglected in the past. Battle lines between conservatives and liberals stretched
across a wide terrain of thought and action. Conservatives often saw the
scientific principle of evolution as a threat to the proper interpretation of the
Bible, whereas liberals dismissed their reservations as obscurantism.
Conservatives blamed modern entertainmcnts, particularly on church
prernises, for the decline in religious practice, but liberals saw theatricals,
sport and the like as wholesome incentives to churchgoing. The ‘social gospel’
was condemned by conservatives as a diversion from the gospel for individuals
at a time when liberals wanted to demonstrate their sense of responsibility for
society. Each of these questions also divided American Evangelicals. Although
the balance of contentious issues was rather different—evolution, for
example, being more prominent in the United States—the occasions of
controversy in themselves were identical.
182 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

The rift in the Evangelical ranks appeared because of different responses to

the same cultural mood. The liberals were rightly perceived at the time to be
innovators. They wished to modify received theology and churchmanship in
the light of current thought. Inevitably their ideas were swept along by the
Romantic currents that had already been flowing powerfully in the later
nineteenth century. Biblical inspiration, for example, was reinterpreted as of a
piece with the uplifting power of the arts. It was defined by a Methodist
college tutor as ‘that which yields insight into beauty, truth, and goodness,
and God.’ Inspiration was said to make an impact comparable to that of
Wordsworth’s poetry, Bach’s Mass in B Minor or the view of the Langdale
Pikes.7 In similar fashion, age-encrusted doctrine was to be recast in dynamic
form, preferably with a scientific gloss. ‘The unfolding purpose of
redemption’, the Dean of Manchester told a liberal Evangelical devotional
conference, ‘is also the unfolding purpose of creation. It is evolution on the
highest and grandest scale. ’8 Leading Methodists, like their liberal Anglican
contemporaries, were imbued with a new sacramental spirit as they realised
they were the heirs of the treasury of Catholic practice. ‘The past’, wrote one
of them, ‘with its conquests, its fragrance, its saints, its immortal splendour, is
ours…’9 It was all consonant with the trends towards greater theological
breadth and greater liturgical height that had begun to gather force before
1900. By the 1920s a Romantic gale was blowing across the Evangelical
landscape.
Conservatives were by no means secure from the winds of change. It was
supposed at the time, by friend and foe alike, that conservatives stood for
traditional, received views. In Letters to a Fundamentalist, published in 1930
by the Student Christian Movement Press, Percy Austin confidently identifies
his own Modernist position as ‘the newer view-point’, and his imaginary
Fundamentalist correspondent as an upholder of ‘the traditional interpretation
of Christian truth’. ‘In effect’, he goes on, ‘you say that what has been handed
down to us from our forbears is truth, and we must cherish it, and pass it on
unaltered to those who shall come after us.’10 This estimate of the debate,
however, was a total misperception. So-called ‘conservatives’ were in fact
advancing causes of recent growth. Their views on verbal inspiration and
literal biblical interpretation were derived, as Chapter 3 has shown, by the
impinging of Romanticism on a section of Evangelical opinion in the early
nineteenth century. Occasionally somebody would point out that conservative
views of the Bible did not have a long ancestry. When in 1911 the issues
surrounding inerrancy were given a protracted airing, one contributor
reminded the participants that in 1853 only the Recordites, a minority of
Evangelicals in the Church of England, believed in verbal inspiration.11 Such
voices were drowned in the welter of controversy. Conservatives maintaining
premillennialism likewise supposed that their tenets were traditional. ‘There
has been’, complained one, ‘a removal of the Evangelical centre of vision from
the expectation of the personal return of the King…,’12 In rcality it was the
 WALKING APART 183

doctrine of the personal return that was the novelty among Evangelicals,
going back only to the knot of innovators around Irving. Belief in inerrancy may
have been spreading in the 1920s; premillennialism certainly was.
Conservative Evangelicals were as much swayed by Romantic attitudes as
were their opponents. The only contrast was that the conservatives were
affected in different ways.

THE RISE OF BIBLICAL CRITICISM

Among the causes of the divisions of the 1920s, a primary place must be given
to the emergence of conflicting estimates of the Bible. The rise of the higher
criticism—that is, broad analysis of the development of the text, as opposed to
the lower criticism, the close study of details such as particular words—has
usually been seen as the new factor in the late nineteenth-century
understanding of scripture. In reality, as will appear, the progress of stronger
views of inspiration, bolstering conservative opinion, was of equal importance.
Yet it is true that the importation of German critical views by the more
advanced scholars did much to foster liberal Evangelicalism. In 1861, when
Essays and Reviews first drew widespread attention in the Church of England
to critical methods and conclusions, Evangelicals were numbered among the
book’s most convinced opponents. Anyone leaning to its approach was by
definition Broad Church.13 The premisses of critics were, after all, rooted in
the intellectual milieu of German philosophy. Nations, it was assumed,
develop their distinctive values gradually over time. When the principle was
applied to the history of Israel, it could only be supposed that the noble
monothcism of the Pentateuch arose at a late stage. The compilation of the
first five books of the Old Testament was therefore assigned to the seventh
century BC at the earliest. Analysis that distinguished different sources in the
text underpinned the theory. All this remained bound up, in the British view
of the 1860s, with the sceptical tendencies in religion that were summed up as
German neology.14 It was foreign to Evangelicalism.
The contented sense that Britain was a bastion of reverence for the Bible
was first undermined in the later 1870s. William Robertson Smith, the
brilliant young Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament in the Free Church
College at Aberdeen, wrote an article on ‘The Bible’ for the Encyclopaedia
Britannica which assumed the validity of the most recent German
scholarship. His views attracted much uncomprehending censure. Most
serious, in the eyes of the Free Church committee that examined his position,
was his attitude to Deuteronomy. Sayings attributed there to Moses were,
according to Smith, the inventions of a later age. His sole innovation, Smith
submitted in his own defence, was to hold that scripture ‘makes use of certain
forms of literary presentation which have always been thought legitimate in
ordinary composition, but which were not always understood to be used in the
Bible’. The investigating sub-committee believed that the resort to a theory of
184 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

‘dramatic personations, appropriate in poetry and parable’ was too improbable

in the case of Deuteronomy to be ‘a safe position from which to defend the
historical truth and inspired authority of the Bible’. The committee concluded
that, although there was some cause for grave concern, there were no grounds
for a charge of heresy.15 After three years during which the issue rumbled
through the complex Presbyterian legal machinery, the General Assembly in
1880 determined, by 299 votes to 292, that Smith should still be permitted to
teach for the Free Church. A further Encyclopaedia Britannica article,
however, appeared to be a flouting of the church’s solemnly expressed concern
over critical questions and in 1881 Smith was dismissed by a large majority.
Two years later he found asylum as Reader in Arabic at Cambridge.16
Smith’s purpose was clear. He was intending to remould the study of the
Bible according to the Romantic canons generally accepted in Germany. As he
testified, he was trying to reintroduce what had been lost in ‘the epoch of
Rationalism’. He believed that the loss had been the notion of revelation,
which was ‘never a mechanical, dead, unintelligible thing’. Rather ‘the Biblical
Literature’ was ‘an organic part of the history of the church in the ages of
revelation’.17 Religious truth, that is to say, had gradually been perceived
through the ongoing experience of the people of God. His Evangelical
contemporaries who had been brought up in an intellectual framework
deriving from the Enlightenment, Smith’s ‘epoch of Rationalism’, found the
theoretical gulf from the young scholar’s premisses too wide to bridge. Even
the most thorough antagonist of Smith’s views among English
Nonconformists, Alfred Cave, did no justice to his views. The explanation is to
be found in the title of one of Cave’s later books: The Inspiration of the Old
Testament Inductively Considered (1888). Cave was tied to Enlightenment
categories such as induction that made constructive engagement with Smith
impossible.18 The appeal of the up-to-date approach to Old Testament
scholarship was, however, irresistible. Smith himself was so patently free of
scepticism and unorthodoxy as to inspire others to tread the same path.
Already his teacher, A.B.Davidson, had taken some steps in that direction.
Two further cases debated by the Free Church Assembly in 1890 raised
questions of biblical criticism as well as of theological orthodoxy, and in both
instances charges were dropped after investigation. In 1902 George Adam
Smith, whose position on Old Testament criticism was substantially identical
to that of Robertson Smith, was likewise effectively acquitted. In a solidly
Evangelical denomination biblical criticism had become accepted.19 In the
Church of Scotland its inroads were just as great by the end of the century.
John McMurtrie, editor of its magazine Life and Work and a noted
Evangelical, would point to his extensive collection of German critical
literature as ‘my wicked library’.20 At least among the ministers in Scotland,
the new approach had come to stay.
The same was true in England. Fears that criticism was close to unbelief
were allayed by the magisterial work of the so-called ‘Cambridge Trio’.
 WALKING APART 185

A.J.Hort, J.B.Lightfoot and B.F.Westcott, each in a different way, applied

rigorous scholarly standards to the establishment and exegesis of the New
Testament text, reaching conclusions that Evangelicals found generally
unexceptionable—and even spiritually helpful.21 The publication of Lux
Mundi in 1889 announced the conversion of younger Anglo-Catholics to
moderate critical opinions.22 Two years later, S.R.Driver, Regius Professor of
Hebrew at Oxford, presented a summary of recent Old Testament studies as
entirely compatible with orthodoxy.23 It was all reassuring to Evangelicals
with intellectual aspirations. Congregationalists, with their predisposition to
free inquiry, were foremost in the field. In 1893 a collection of essays by
Congregationalists called Faith and Criticism was published. W.H.Bennett of
Hackney and New Colleges unreservedly accepted the late dating of the
Pentateuch in his Old Testament essay. If W.F. Adeney of New College was
much more conservative in his study of the New Testament, the flair of
P.T.Forsyth combined a zealous delineation of the person of Christ as
redeemer with clear reservations about the ‘old-Protestant theory of a book-
revelation’.24 Despite the best efforts of Alfred Cave, Congregationalists were
evidently abandoning resistance to the modern approach. From 1892 summer
schools held at their Mansfield College, Oxford, began to disseminate the new
learning.25 By 1895 the higher criticism had likewise been generally, though
not universally, accepted by Wesleyan theological tutors, and had attracted a
significant recruit in Driver’s Primitive Methodist pupil, A.S.Peake.26 It was
surprising how rapidly Methodist ministers accepted critical conclusions. The
trouble will come’, it was rightly prophesied a few years later, ‘when
preachers are so absolutely honest as to say in the pulpit all they say to one
another, and tell out all they believe and disbelieve.’27 The first of the classic
Fundamentalist controversies in Britain was to erupt when a Methodist did
speak out.

OPPOSITION TO BIBLICAL CRITICISM

There were earlier signs of the coming storm. Spurgeon’s charge that many
ministers were on the Down Grade included, as a minor dimension, a protest
against novel ideas about the Bible.28 F.B.Meyer, then a rising Baptist,
reviewed Faith and Criticism with expressions of dismay about the influence
of its teachings on the next generation of Congregational ministers.29 With
certain exceptions, Baptists were certainly less inclined to critical innovations
than other Nonconformists. Fringe Evangelical groups were most hostile. The
tiny International Christian Mission, a holiness body based exclusively at 83–
5 Queen’s Road, Brighton, lamented among the signs of the times for 1898
that, The Word of God is assailed by professing Christians’.30 This, more
significantly, was the painful charge levelled against R.F.Horton, the cultured
and spiritually minded minister of Lyndhurst Road Congregational Church,
Hampstead, when he published Inspiration and the Bible in 1888. He had
186 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

imbibed Driver’s views at Oxford, where he had become the first

Nonconformist to hold a fellowship. For his pains he was denounced by a host
of assailants including Spurgeon and Joseph Parker of the City Temple. Even
the aunt with whom he lived withdrew from his ministry in protest.31 Among
the Evangelicals of the Church of England there was an ominous calm. The
standard case heard on their platforms was that the Christian estimate of
scripture should be that of Christ himself.32 Occasionally an adventurous
analysis was put forward. As early as 1878 Edward Batty, of St John’s, Fulham,
declared at the Islington Clerical Meeting that they ought ‘to admit that
certain historical parts of the Bible were allegorical or open to different
interpretations, and to show that they were fiilly alive to the importance of
the claims of just, honest, reverential, and scholarly criticism’. But the cries of
‘No, no’ that greeted his suggestion that the authority of a passage in the gospel
of John was open to challenge showed where majority feeling lay.33 There was
likely to be heavy weather ahead.
Opposition to the higher criticism first became organised in 1892. A Bible
League was created, according to its object, ‘to promote the Reverent Study of
the Holy Scriptures, and to resist the varied attacks made upon their
Inspirarion, Infallibility, and Sole Sufficiency as the Word of God. ’34 Its
immediate occasion seems to have been the appearance of The Inspiration and
Authority of the Bible by John Clifford, a Baptist leader strikingly open to
modern trends of thought, who, like Horton but more guardedly, was trying
to popularise a newer understanding of the Bible.35 Resistance was initially
located on the Baptist fringe, around Spurgeon and the boundary with
undenominational revivalism. Successive secretaries were John Tuckwell, a
London Baptist minister; A.H.Carter, later Minister of Hounslow
Undenominational Church and editor of the League’s Bible Witness’, and
(from 1912) Robert Wright Hay, a former BMS missionary, Minister of Talbot
Tabernacle, Notting Hill (an ‘energetic Gospel centre’) and an intimate friend
of R.C.Morgan, editor of The Christian.36 It was originally a small-scale affair,
holding occasional rallies where Tuckwell might lecture on ‘The Bible Right:
confirmed by Babylonian archaeology’,37 but it gradually drew in more
eminent figures from a wider range of denominations. Dinsdale Young, a well-
known Methodist preacher, Dr C.H.Waller, a tutor in the CMS college at
Highbury, and, crucially, Prebendary H.E.Fox, clerical secretary of the CMS
from 1895 to 1910, were induced to identify with the organisation.38 It was
sufficiently strong by 1914 to hold a summer school at Littlehampton
addressed by a dozen speakers.39 Its essential message is summed up by the
title of a publication three years later: Christ or the Higher Critics.40
The Bible League did much to stiffen opinion. Frequently its influence can
be detected behind outbursts of opposition to the higher criticism. At
Cambridge, for instance, a Bible League conference immediately preceded a
schism in the Evangelical student movement in 1909–10 that anticipated the
divisions in the wider ecclesiastical world fifteen or so years later.41 A
 WALKING APART 187

Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU) had existed since 1877

for the promotion of evangelism, prayer and missionary commitment. A
British College Christian Union had emerged in the 1890s to co-ordinate such
bodies in higher education, taking the name of Student Christian Movement
(SCM) in 1905. In the next two years the General Secretary of the SCM,
Tissington Tatlow, received letters from Cambridge protesting against
speakers in whom higher critical opinions blended with broader doctrinal
views than were desired.42 Nothing was done, for the settled policy of the SCM
was to accept the new approach to the Bible. A great number of other issues,
which were also to arise again on the wider scene in the 1920s, complicated the
ensuing discussions within and around the CICCU. At the root of the debate,
however, was the status of the Bible. When the CICCU disaffiliated from the
SCM in 1910, it declared ‘its first and final reference to the authority of Holy
Scripture as its inerrant guide in all matters concerned with faith and
morals’.43 There were similar secessions from the other movements for young
people. In 1916 the Aldersgate Street Young Men’s Christian Association left
its parent body and in 1921 a number of groups previously affiliated to the
Young Women’s Christian Association came together as the Christian
Alliance of Women and Girls, standing for ‘full allegiance to the Word of God
and separation for His work’.44 Strongly held views about the Bible were
beginning to create institutional divisions.

VERBAL INSPIRATION AND INERRANCY

The strong views commonly included a belief in verbal inspiration. Critics
might suppose that the Bible is merely the record of revelation, wrote Meyer
in 1893, but ‘we believe that God revealed Himself in the words of Scripture…’45
Meyer stood in the verbal inspirationist tradition that went back to Robert
Haldane and Louis Gaussen in the early nineteenth century. The Brethren, a
body moulded at that time by the same influences that affected Haldane,
formed a continuing citadel of the stronger view of inspiration. In an article
published during 1921 in their magazine The Witness, its editor, Henry
Pickering, enquired, ‘Have we an inspired Word of God?’ The answer was a
ringing affirmative. The very letters, even the Hebrew punctuation marks,
were inspired: had not Jesus confirmed that every jot and tittle of the law was
eternal?46 The cause had advanced steadily among the Evangelical clergy in
the Church of England. J.C. Ryle, Bishop of Liverpool from 1880 to 1900,
imdoubtedly represented the majority of clerical opinion in the party of which
he was a trusted leader when he declared his unhesitating belief in verbal
inspiration.47 The same view was widespread in popular Evangelical
apologetics. It was usually qualified by the statement that only the original
documents were inspired in this way—a convenient proviso that made the
hypothesis untestable.48 The qualification, if sometimes securing greater
intellectual respectability, could itself lead on to some strange inferences. It
188 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

was held by one defender of plenary inspiration that every one of the original
inspired words exists somewhere in the world, often in very ancient
manuscripts.49 There can be no doubt that belief in verbal inspiration had
become common by the early twentieth century.
Yet it was rare for spokesmen, let alone scholars, in the Evangelical
community to claim that the Bible is free from error. A.H.Burton, a non-
practising doctor with a private income and a Brethren background, was one of
the few to do so. In an article on ‘The inerrancy of the Bible’ he set out a
simple antithesis between those who affirmed it and the higher critics who
denied it.50 An examination of the chief statements about scripture by
Evangelicals in the first half of the twentieth century has revealed a
remarkable absence of assertions of inerrancy. Only a couple, by
D.M.McIntyre, later Principal of the Bible Training Institute, Glasgow, and
W.E.Vine, a Brethren leader, were discovered. Even W.H.Griffith Thomas,
Principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, from 1905 to 1910, and a wellknown
Evangelical Anglican champion of a conservative view of scripture in the early
twentieth century, though inclining towards inerrancy, avoided any explicit
endorsement. Likewise G.T.Manley and T.C.Hammond, the leading exponents
of the conservative position after the divergence of the 1920s, did not assert
the inerrancy of the Bible. The problem, of course, was that the apparent
discrepancies of scripture had been thoroughly canvassed for centuries and it
was hard to fly in the face of them. Yet in America at the same time a stern
repudiation of the possibility of error in a book given by a God of truth was
massively elaborated by B.B.Warfield, so that the sparseness of British
statements to the same effect is matter for comment.51 Why did Evangelical
leaders in Britain take this course?
One of the explanations is the restraining influence of Henry Wace. As a
former Professor of Ecclesiastical History and then Principal at King’s College,
London, from 1875 to 1897, Wace was a scholar and ecclesiastical statesman of
some weight. As Dean of Canterbury from 1903 until his death in 1924, he
played a leading part in Evangelical counsels. At the Islington Clerical Meeting
of 1911 he provoked considerable dissent among the more liberally inclined by
avowing what he called the traditional theory of scripture. It included the
axiom that in history as well as doctrine the Bible is free from error. Yet, for
all the apparent conservatism of his position, he admitted there might be
trivial mistakes of the text.52 He held, as he often put it, the ‘substantial truth’
of scripture—and that fell short of absolute inerrancy. ‘Are there a few
inaccuracies of detail?’ he asked at a conference in 1921. ‘How could it be
otherwise in a short sketch of so many ages of development?’53 The Journal of
the Wesley Bible Union noted with disappointment his willingness to
surrender the detailed accuracy of Genesis.54 To his friends he would
commend Luther’s attitude to the Bible, an eagerness to grasp the leading
truths ‘without becoming a slave to verbal inspiration’.55 He had originally
been no party man, being drawn into the Evangelical ranks by a shared
 WALKING APART 189

hostility to ritualism at the turn of the century, and so he felt no initial

sympathy for Ryle’s rigidity about the words of scripture. Rather the
foundation of his position was a scholar’s disdain for what he saw as the
aberrations of recent German study of the Old Testament. His remedy for
erroneous criticism was better criticism.56 By involvement with the Bible
League, whose vice-president he became,57 he made it impossible to identify
the conservative position on the Bible with wilder denunciations of the higher
criticism or rigid statements about inerrancy. Furthermore, his intellectual
premisses reveal a deeper reason why it was uncommon to deduce inerrancy
from the trustworthiness of God. Whether the substantial truth of the Old
Testament, he wrote, ‘involved minute exactitude in all details is a matter
partly for common sense, but chiefly for determination by the facts…,’58
Appeal to common sense and the facts was the stock in trade of a thinker
whose mind was shaped by the familiar Anglo-Saxon empiricism stemming
from the Enlightenment. Wace was as wedded to this tradition as was the
Congregationalist Alfred Cave. The resistance to the higher criticism was not
grounded in a doctrine of inerrancy because, at least among the educated,
inerrancy held no more attractions than the conclusions of the higher critics.
The motive force for the anti-critical movement came primarily, as in
America, from individuals and groups holding the advent hope. This was no
more an absolute rule than it was in America.59 Nevertheless there was a tight
link between the premillennialist movement and the defence of the Bible.
‘Those who stood by the great truth of the Lord’s retum’, it was said at an
Advent Testimony meeting in 1921, ‘were firm on the authority and
infallibility of the Scriptures as the actual Word of God. ’60 The link was
literal interpretation. ‘It is a principle of vital importance to the study of
Scripture’, declared Fuller Gooch, a leading exponent of prophecy, in 1886,
‘that the literal signification of words should be accepted in all cases except
where the obvious nature of the language employed necessitates a figurative
or symbolic sense. Only by a continuous violation of this principle can the
personal reign of Christ during the millennial era be eliminated from
revelation. ’61 Those who were tied to literalism could hardly avoid believing
in verbal inspiration. That is why the two trends had grown up together
during the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, the
denominations most affected by Fundamentalism were those most touched by
adventism—the Brethren, Anglican Evangelicals and the Baptists. Conversely,
Congregationalism was almost immune to both. W.B.Selbie could be heard
warning his fellow-Congregationalists in 1922 against the literal
interpretation of scripture,62 but his effort was hardly necessary. The case of
Methodism is the exception that proves the rule. As will be seen, it was hardly
touched by adventism. Yet the leader of the Fundamentalist party in Wesleyan
Methodism, H.C.Morton, was by 1918 preaching the second coming.63 In
Morton’s case, Bible defence came before adventism, but the association
190 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

between the two is once more clear. The primary impetus for militancy on
behalf of the Bible came from those who had embraced the advent hope.

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE

Another reason for the Evangelical divisions of the 1920s is therefore the rise
of premillennialism. The rival version of the Christian hope, postmillennialism,
had gone into serious decline. A few still held in the early years of the
twentieth century that Christ would retum in person once the preaching of
the gospel had established his reign in all lands.64 But interpretations of
postmillennialism had commonly broadened with the years. ‘Modern
Methodism’, it was said just after the opening of the twentieth century, ‘has
deliberately projected the second Advent into so distant a future that it is
scarcely even named. ‘65 High hopes for the far-off future merged
imperceptibly with the idea of progress. By 1916 a leading Methodist was
prepared to state that ‘no visible return of Christ to the earth is to be
expected’.66 It was not only Methodists who followed this course. The editor
of Life and Work, the magazine of the Church of Scotland, reaffirmed a
Christian belief in progress despite the horrors of the First World War.
Although apocalyptic speculation is fruitless, he claimed, ‘there can be but one
“evolution of society”, one “social development”; it is the coming of the
Kingdom of God’.67 Likewise at Cromer, the devotional conference for liberal
Evangelicals of the Church of England, a verse of a popular hymn was changed
from:

Brothers, this Lord Jesus shall rcturn again

With His Father’s glory, with His angel train.

It appeared as:

Brothers, this Lord Jesus dwells with us again

In His Father’s wisdom, o’er the earth to reign.68

Postmillennialism had become little more than an aspiration after the spread of
Christian values.
Premillennialism, however, had made steady progress in the later
nineteenth century. There was an annual conference for the Study of
Prophetic Truth at Clapham from 1884, and in the same year a session of the
devotional Mildmay Conference was given over to the subject for the first
time.69 Crucially, advent teaching had early become intertwined with the
Keswick message.70 Association with the flowing tide of the holiness
movement ensured that prophecy swept along increasing numbers. It became
popular with the young. The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign
Missions, an international body launched in 1886 with the motto ‘The
 WALKING APART 191

Evangelisation of the world in this generation’, gathered strength from the

Keswick fringe.71 Although there was no time for the conversion of the world,
its members held, it was necessary to preach the gospel to every nation. That
done, Christ would return. Missionary work would bring back the King. The
Church Missionary Society was among the bodies feeling the benefit in a fresh
wave of recruits.72 Keswick and the new missionary enthusiasm alike
disproportionately affected the Church of England. By 1901 a speaker at the
Islington Clerical Meeting felt able to assume that all his hearers believed in
the premillennial advent.73 At least in the Church of England, prophetic
teaching had become firmly established by the dawn of the new century.
The form of prophetic teaching making most headway was the futurist
version. All the predictions of Daniel and Revelation, its advocates argued,
were still to be fulfilled. The dispensationalism of J.N.Darby, the most
systematic brand of futurism, captured many minds with its vision of a
coming rapture of the church. It was the view generally accepted by
Evangelical Churchmen who attended Keswick. ‘Every day’, remarked an
incredulous Methodist, ‘they are waiting for the saints to be caught up—the
captain from his ship, the engine-driver from his locomotive, the mother from
her family, &c.’74 By 1892, the editor of The Christian, who had previously
maintained neutrality between different schools, came down on the side of
‘dispensational truth’.75 Probably the greatest factor in favour of
dispensationalism was the publication in 1909 of the Scofield Bible with
footnotes expounding a Darbyite interpretation. Already four years later it was
said to be ‘so largely used by students and Christian workers’.76 It accustomed
its readers to seeing the biblical text through dispensationalist eyes. Although
the writings of Henry Grattan Guinness, such as The Approaching End of the
Age (1878), sustained the vitality of the alternative historicist version of
premillennial teaching,77 there can be no doubt that dispensationalism was the
predominant form of the advent hope by the First World War.
The apocalyptic atmosphere of wartime encouraged prophetic speculation. At
the outbreak of the First World War the only premillennialist organisation in
Britain was the Prophecy Investigation Society, which exuded an air of rather
musty erudition. About a hundred devotees assembled twice a year for the
reading of arcane papers.78 The war livened it up. ‘The Rev. F.L.Denman’, it
was reported of one meeting, ‘directed the attention of the members to the
striking way in which several passages in Daniel xi. fit the character and
conduct of the Kaiser.’79 Hostilities in the Middle East created expectations in
a wider constituency. The Jews might soon return to the Promised Land, a
sure sign of the second coming. With British troops massing in Sinai for an
advance on Jerusalem in the autumn of 1917, two ministers suggested to
F.B.Meyer that there should be an effort to awaken Christians to the
fulfilment of prophecy around them. Meyer secured the endorsement of other
ministers known to be premillennialists, approached the Prophecy
Investigation Society for its backing and launched the first of what was to be a
192 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

permanent series of monthly London public meetings on 13 December. While

preparations were going ahead, the government issued the Balfour Declaration
announcing British support for the retum of the Jews to Palestine. Four days
after the first public meeting General Allenby received the surrender of
Jerusalem.80 The Advent Testimony and Preparation Movement enjoyed an
auspicious beginning.
The message spread by a variety of means. Advent Testimony monthly
meetings were widely reported in the Christian press; its magazine, Advent
Witness, circulated extensively; and several of its members wrote books, of
which E.L.Langston’s How God is Working to a Plan (1933) was one of the
most popular. The greatest publicity coup, however, was the conversion to the
cause of Christabel Pankhurst, the ex-suffragette, who published a number of
premillennialist works beginning with The Lord Cometh in 1923. In the
autumn of 1926 she undertook a campaign tour for Advent Testimony,
bringing, it was said, ‘fresh inspiration’ to the movement.81 Douglas Brown,
Baptist minister at Balham and a member of the Advent Testimony council,
did a great deal to propagate premillennial teaching. In 1921 there broke out in
East Anglia, especially among the fishermen, one of the last mainland revivals
of the old-fashioned spontaneous type. Brown was the pivotal figure,
delivering gospel addresses at Lowestoft and in the vicinity. The ingathering
of converts, he reported to an Advent Testimony meeting, was ‘largely
through the preaching of the truth of the Lord’s coming’. On thirty-one
consecutive afternoons he spoke for fifty minutes on the second advent.82
Others similarly discovered that premillennial enthusiasm helped evangelistic
endeavour. The Pilgrim Preachers, for instance, a band of travelling young
men drawn from the Brethren, proclaimed (according to their leader) ”‘the
coming of the Lord draweth nigh”, and that it is a case of now or never with
the unsaved to decide for Christ’.83 Association with gospel zeal helped in turn
to propagate prophetic views. For the first time in many quarters they were
being accepted as the orthodoxy of popular Evangelicalism.
The spread of the futurist version of the advent hope in the 1920s had
important implications. By contrast with historicists, who paid a great deal of
attention to public affairs, past and present, for the vindication of their views,
futurists concentrated on the intricacies of scripture to the virtual exclusion of
issues in the world. The sermons of Fuller Gooch on adventist themes were so
incomprehensible to newspaper reporters that their accounts became
gibberish.84 There was little point in trying to identify the figures of prophecy
since by definition they were future. At its fullest, interest in contemporary
events was therefore a matter of looking out for signs of the emergence of a
pattern of affairs similar to that predicted for the last days—like the
combination of ten powers within the territory of the former Roman Empire
to play the part of the toes of the statue in Daniel 2. Futurism encouraged the
introversion that was a hallmark of interwar conservative Evangelicalism.
There was another significant divergence of futurists from historicists in the
 WALKING APART 193

identification of Antichrist. Historicists followed Protestant tradition in

casting the papacy in that role. The Roman Catholic Church represented the
great apostasy from the true faith predicted in scripture.85 Futurists, on the
other hand, believed that the Antichrist was still to come. They were
consequently less inclined to militant anti-Catholicism. At the same time,
however, they were expecting the Protestant world to lapse into unbelief on a
vast scale. Higher criticism seemed a sinister symptom of the anti-Christian
teaching subverting Christendom that had to be stoutly resisted. ‘A falsely
called Christian charity’, declared an adventist magazine in 1919, ‘has led
many to temporize with these deadly doctrines, so that some have become
swamped by the rising tide of apostasy. ’86 The fierce, denunciatory tone of
Fundamentalism—in so far as it was heard in Britain—was largely spawned
by the futurist prophetic school.
Futurism also created a gloomy worldview. Already, before the war, a
Methodist had remarked that adventist clergymen were deeply pessimistic.
‘Looking for our Lord’s speedy coming’, he explained, ‘they expect things to
go from bad to worse, and frankly tell me they have no hope of
amelioration.’87 The war and its aftermath confirmed and extended such
attitudes. Premillennialists rejected the vision of ‘the rosy Christian idealist—
that honest, earnest, believer in the essential goodness of Humanity, who
supposes that the Millennium is to be the automatic result of a gradual
improvement in men and things’. God had revealed otherwise. ‘He tells us
plainly, not that the development of the Kingdom will bring the King, but that
the King Himself must come to establish the Kingdom; and that He, not man,
is to make the Kingdom fit for men to live in.’88 Effort to reform the world
was pointless, even perhaps an impious attempt to frustrate the purposes of
God. Sympathy for progressive politics waned. Organised labour seemed a
sinister force in both industry and politics. In the wake of the General Strike
of 1926 readers of The Life of Faith were assured that this ‘revolutionary plot…
being hatched against the British Constitution…was the rising of an Anti-
Christ’. ‘I am not discussing politics’, insisted the contributor, ‘but as one who
loves his Lord…I believe the time has come for Christians…to prepare
themselves and their land for that which the Bible prophesies shall come to
pass.’89 Premillennialists, as in this case, normally proclaimed their distance
from politics, yet rallied to the defence of the established order. Pessimism
readily passed over into conservatism.

HEIGHTENED SPIRITUALITY
A further factor behind the interwar Evangelical schism was the holiness
movement that has been discussed in Chapter 5. Its effects were ambiguous.
The spirituality of the movement, as the Broadlands conference illustrates,
could reinforce the trend towards softening doctrinal definitions. Keswick, as
will be seen, was the setting for a tussle between more liberal and more
194 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

conservative elements.90 The outcome, however, could be in little doubt, for

Keswick teaching was in general strongly associated with a non-critical
understanding of the Bible and the advent hope. Its exponents, according to
conservative Evangelicals, were beacons in the gathering gloom. ‘I travel from
Land’s End to the Shetland Isles’, wrote one in 1925, ‘and I find wherever
there is a real Keswick school minister there one finds the ungodly being
awakened and led to Christ…’91 More critical observers noticed the cultivation
of the internal life, the camaraderie with the likeminded symbolised by the
use of the adjective ‘dear’ in reference to Christian colleagues and commented
that this ethos encouraged a narrowing of horizons.92 The Keswick movement
was still growing in size and influence in the 1920s, its message of ‘fuller
consecration’ being disseminated by literature, lesser conventions and a
variety of organisations. Its essentially Romantic spirituality was in itself too
irenical to provoke adherents into militant Fundamentalism, but the Keswick
allegiance did a great deal to glue together the conservative coalition.
The Methodist version of the holiness tradition played a similar role within
the Wesleyan denomination. Its embodiment was Samuel Chadwick, a gifted
devotional writer and from 1913 Principal of Cliff College, a denominational
centre in Derbyshire for training lay workers. ‘There is no Methodist doctrine
of Inspiration, or of the Second Coming’, he reminded a holiness meeting at
the 1912 conference. ‘But there is a distinctively Methodist doctrine of
holiness.’93 Among Wesleyans, therefore, entire sanctification was the
potential rallying ground of theological conservatives. It had already been
noticed that the holiness people for the most part did not embrace the higher
criticism.94 The leaders of the Fundamentalist faction that emerged in the
Jackson affair of 1913, George Armstrong Bennetts and Harold Morton, were
both advocates of entire sanctification.95 So was Dinsdale Young, the most
eminent Methodist to be drawn into the faction.96 Samuel Chadwick,
however, stood apart from the Fundamentalist campaign against individuals
judged to hold erroneous views. In 1919 he called for an end to the ‘wrangling
and haggling’ of the heresy hunt, condemning the ‘heterodoxy of temper’
displayed by the militant Wesley Bible Union a year later.97 He ensured that
Joyful News, the widely circulating weekly associated with Cliff College,
remained aloof from controversy. Dinsdale Young was kept at a distance from
the college and the Southport Convention, the main holiness platform.98
Chadwick and his circle believed in the positive work of preaching the gospel,
not in negative campaigns that aroused animosity.99 The mildness and self-
restraint of this approach were the natural fruit of teaching on personal
sanctification. The Methodist holiness tradition, with a few exceptions,
generated conservative Evangelicalism rather than Fundamentalism.
Other movements of opinion on the fringe of the holiness movement
tended to stoke up spiritual fires to a more intense heat. From the early days
there was a section, drawing inspiration from the American Dr Cullis, that
believed physical healing, as well as victory over sin, to be available through
 WALKING APART 195

faith in Christ. 100 ‘When He has complete control in the fully surrendered
life’, it was said in 1921, ‘He is responsible for directing our bodily lives—and
is responsible for our health.’101 This writer, like several others, did not shrink
from the implication that illness is the result of sin. Only in exceptional cases,
he contended when challenged by many dismayed correspondents, are the
consecrated allowed to be invalids.102 It was more normal to hold that sickness
is not necessarily the result of want of faith, but occasional talk of ‘bondage
about doctors and nurses’ was a sign of the anti-modern disposition of
Fundamentalism.103
Another intensified version of holiness teaching pointed in the same
direction. Some began to talk of a baptism of the Holy Ghost distinct from the
experience of entire consecration. One source was the Pentecostal League of
Reader Harris. Its leadership was taken over after his death in 1909 by Oswald
Chambers, who a few years before had entered ‘years of heaven on earth’
through the baptism of the Holy Ghost.104 Another source was the Japan
Evangelistic Band, established in 1903, whose founder, A. Paget Wilkes,
taught that sanctification is twofold, entailing cleansing from indwelling sin
and then ‘an incoming and indwelling of the Holy Ghost’.105 But the chief
source was the Welsh Revival of 1904–5. Spreading through much of Wales
and affecting churches elsewhere in Britain, ordinary church life was
suspended, whole communities anxiously sought salvation and some 100,000
people professed conversion.106 A young candidate for the Calvinistic
Methodist ministry, Evan Roberts, underwent a vivid spiritual experience that
made him the central figure of the revival. Twelve years later he expounded
his experience in a work written jointly with Jessie Penn-Lewis of the
Overcomer League, War on the Saints. The remedy for the assault of
deceiving spirits on the children of God was to be found in ‘the Baptism of the
Holy Spirit’.107 Although such teaching was suspect at Keswick, from which
Jessie Penn-Lewis had withdrawn in 1909, it was disseminated by fringe
periodicals like The Overcomer and minor conventions at Matlock and
elsewhere.108 It helped ensure that a section of Evangelicalism, albeit a small
one, remained firmly committed to the conservative side in the years after the
First World War.
It was also in this atmosphere that Pentecostalism was born. Talk of the
‘baptism of the Holy Ghost’ in the holiness movement prepared the way.
There were even thoughts of the possibility of the restoration of the gift of
tongues, which was understood as the ability to speak other languages and so
to evangelise the world.109 The Welsh revival created fresh longings after the
dynamic of the first-century church. The early leaders of two of the
Pentecostal denominations, Daniel Powell Williams of the Apostolic Church
and George and Stephen Jeffreys of Elim, were converted then together with
many of the early rank and file.110 A report on the Welsh Revival by
F.B.Meyer contributed to the beginnings of Pentecostalism in Los Angeles in
1905. Although there were earlier manifestations in the American mid-west,
196 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

the movement usually traces the origin of its worldwide spread to what
followed in Los Angeles. Revival broke out in Azusa Street and speaking in
tongues was heard. 111 Belief that a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit had
begun soon reached Norway, where ecstatic utterances were witnessed early in
1907 by A.A.Boddy, Vicar of All Saints’, Sunderland. At Boddy’s request,
T.B.Barratt, the Methodist minister who had brought the dramatic
manifestations to Norway, now carried them to Sunderland, which became a
major centre for their dissemination in the years up to the First World War.
There were similar outbreaks elsewhere, and from 1909 Cecil Polhill, one of
the ‘Cambridge Seven’ who had gone out as missionaries to China in 1885,
organised regular meetings in Sion College, on the Thames Embankment in
London, for ‘all seeking Salvation, Sanctification, the Baptism of the Holy
Spirit and Divine Healing’.112 By July 1908 there were already thirty-two
known centres in Britain where Pentecostal gifts were exercised.113 A new
dimension was added to the Evangelical world.
The pioneers Boddy and Polhill, as loyal Anglicans, tried to discourage the
tendencies to separatism that soon appeared, particularly in Wales. The
‘spoken word’ movement began to teach that scriptural church government
was through an elaborate hierarchy of apostles, prophets and others appointed
through ecstatic utterance. Daniel Powell Williams, who received a call to
apostleship in 1913, set about consolidating the Pentecostal assemblies that were
springing up within this pattern. They became the Apostolic Church.114
Another growing organisation was the Elim Evangelistic Band, led by the
energetic George Jeffreys. First formed in Ulster in 1915, its work spread
through Britain in the interwar years until, by 1939, the Elim Foursquare
Gospel Alliance, as it had become known, claimed to have established 280
churches. Jeffreys, who was to leave Elim in a dispute in 1939–41, was the
driving force. He would hold evangelistic and healing campaigns, usually in
significant centres of population, and the converts would be gathered into a
new cause.115 Its connexional structure resembled the polity of Methodism.
The Assemblies of God, by contrast, upheld the autonomy of local churches. It
was formed in 1924 by small bodies eager to remain independent of the
encroachments of the Apostolic Church.116 It differed also from Elim in
asserting that speaking in tongues is always the initial evidence of baptism in
the Holy Spirit.117
Pentecostalism was united, however, in its advent teaching, which was often
more prominent than its advocacy of tongues, and its summons ‘back to the
Bible’. ‘This book, neglected by so many pulpits today’, declared a short
account of the denomination, ‘is the basis of Elim’s Fundamentalism.’118 Yet
ordinary conservative Evangelicals, and even other self-professed
Fundamentalists, repudiated the whole movement. ‘The question’, announced
The Life of Faith in answer to queries in 1922, ‘as to the possibility of the
periodical appearance of miraculous gifts during the course of this dispensation
is one which still gives rise to acute differences of opinion. Fortunately, there
 WALKING APART 197

is no need for us to come to any definite conclusion on this point in order to

see how unscriptural, and, indeed, how utterly subversive of genuine
spirituality, are the corybantic exhibitions associated with particular types of
present-day “Pentecostalism”.’119 The position of the Pentecostalists in
relation to Fundamentalism, it has been suggested, was similar to the position
of the Quakers in relation to Puritanism: having similar origins, occupying
much common ground and yet totally repudiated by the larger body.120
Although spurned by others, Pentecostalists brought vigorous reinforcement
to the conservative wing of Evangelicalism.

BROADENING THEOLOGY
The slackening doctrinal standards on the liberal wing also help explain the
divisions of the 1920s. The principle of free inquiry coupled with a taste for
the Romantic had begun to broaden the theology of Nonconformists in the
later nineteenth century.121 By the interwar years a typical publication of
Congregationalists was The Religion of Wordsworth (1936), by the
scholarminister, A.D.Martin. It taught the religion of gratitude as illustrated
by the poet.122 Among younger Methodists such as Robert Newton Flew there
were similar trends of thought. In 1918 Flew criticised the narrowness of the
early Methodist preachers, who, he claimed, ‘had not seen a vision of God
affirming the world as good, as delighting in the colour and gaiety and many-
sidedness of human life, ceaselessly operative as in Nature…,’123 A
comparable widening of horizons is apparent in Changing Creeds and Social
Struggles (1893) by Charles Aked, a Baptist minister at Liverpool eventually
to be translated to the United States. But Aked was unusually broad for a
Baptist, and Meyer was in due course to point out to him the limits of
orthodoxy.124
The drift of opinion led to the New Theology controversy of 1907–10.
R.J.Campbell, occupant of Congregationalism’s premier pulpit at the City
Temple, shocked the religious public with opinions so immersed in
philosophical idealism as to verge on pantheism. Deity and humanity, he held
in The New Theology (1907), are ‘fundamentally and essentially one’.125 The
implications, worked out in a supplementary volume on Christianity and the
Social Order, were no less alarming. ‘The churches’, he wrote, ‘have nothing
to do with getting men into heaven.’ Their task was rather to hasten the
kingdom of God, which was equated with the socialist order being championed
by the Independent Labour Party.126 As his leading opponent, P.T.Forsyth,
insisted, Campbell had broken entirely with any theology of the cross. To the
Evangelical press, the New Theology seemed so nonsensical—an
‘extraordinary farrago’—as to pose little threat.127 Campbell’s supporters
rallied in a Liberal Christian League, but by 1915 even ardent opponents could
scent out few continuing followers.128 In that year Campbell renounced his
theology and was received into the Church of England.129 While ministers
198 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

who had abandoned Evangelical belief persisted in Congregationalism—indeed

Bernard Snell of Brixton became Chairman of the Congregational Union in
1917 and T.Rhondda Williams of Brighton followed him in 1929130—by and
large the Nonconformist denominations remained within the bounds of
Evangelicalism.
There were comparable doctrinal developments in the Evangelical party of
the Church of England. The time was fast passing, declared C.J.Procter, Vicar
of Islington, in 1905, when religious people distrusted the increase of
knowledge. ‘Theological interpretation’, he went on, ‘like every other branch
of knowledge, is a progressive science…,’131 When such sentiments were
uttered from the chair of the Islington Clerical Meeting, very much the
magisterium of the party, it is not surprising that others went further. In
1912, at the Ridley Hall reunion of old members, the vice-principal of the
college, J.R.Darbyshire, delivered what was long remembered as ‘that famous
address’ on ‘Gospel and Culture’.132 Darbyshire, then in his early thirties,
voiced opinions in public that were held by many younger Evangelical clergy
in private. An adequate philosophical basis for Evangelicalism was called for.
The need was pressing because of the gathering strength of the Anglo-
Catholic party, confident in its assertion of the authority of the church.
Evangelicals sometimes appealed to the principles of the Reformation, ‘but it
is hard to see exactly to what this talk amounts’ and Calvinism was not
essential to Evangelicalism in any case. To claim authority for an infallible
book was unacceptable, because (here Darbyshire follows the standard Anglo-
Catholic case) it leads to individualism: each reader makes his own
interpretation the final court of appeal. The proper Evangelical attitude is
‘Experimentalism’. Theory is to be tested by religious experience through
history. Thus the inspiration of the Bible ‘lies in the intensity of the spiritual
expcriences recorded therein’. Varieties of religious experience (here the
speaker echoes William James) must be recognised as valid. At present
Evangelicals had fallen into the snare of renouncing the world. ‘We must be
for ever so presenting the Gospel to the unlearned in terms of a traditional
phraseology if we are to be recognized as Evangelical, that we have no time to
feed the thoughtful, inspire the ambitious, and shew the glory of consecrating
the secular.’ The remedy was a rapprochement between gospel and culture.
There must be Evangelical church music and belles lettres.133 Darbyshire’s
views were eventually to take him beyond Evangelicalism and to the
Archbishopric of Cape Town, but at the time he caught the mood of his
hearers. Experience, not dogma, was to be exalted. The ablest young
Evangelicals, swayed by the taste of the times, were looking for fresh ground
to occupy.
Theological change at a popular level was accelerated by the First World
War. The question of prayers for the dead, which had already been agitated in
peacetime,134 suddenly became a matter of pressing pastoral importance. The
bereaved yearned to pray for those lost in the carnage. Public prayer for the
 WALKING APART 199

departed, rare in 1914 in the Church of England, was sanctioned by authority

in 1917.l35 Preaching at a united Free Church memorial service in the same
year, a Wesleyan minister pronounced the practice legitimate.136 Hopes about
the eternal destiny of those who had died for their country fiirthered the
erosion of the demarcation between heaven and hell. As early as 1914 Dean
Wace, with studied ambiguity, wrote in The Record that ‘we may confidently
be assured that those who meet their death on the battlefields of this war in the
spirit of faith in Christ, and in simple devotion to duty, will be received by
Him in the sense of those gracious words, “Well done, good and faithful
servant”, and may hope to be admitted in some degree into the joy of their
Lord’.137 Salvation by death in battle was endorsed by many others in much
less cautious terms.138 The idea of a second chance of salvation after death
entered Evangelical thinking. J.D.Jones endorsed the doctrine of probation in
the after-life at the Congregational Union assembly in 1916 and published a
book that teetered on the brink of belief in universal salvation.139 The
availability of salvation for those dying impenitent was rumoured to be
preached in a few Wesleyan pulpits.140 In a more general way, the war
dissolved reservations about expressing views previously judged unorthodox.
Speaking one’s mind seemed to be a duty to the dead. Traditionalists were
alarmed by daring opinions spelt out in the pulpit in the wake of the war.141 In
exactly the same way, traditionalists themselves felt bound to battle for the
truth, especially against errors supposedly concocted by the theological
professors of Germany.142 Polarisation was encouraged by the war.
Doctrinal debate between the wings of Evangelical opinion centred on two
areas, atonement and Christology. The understanding of the atonement
handed down from the Evangelical fathers was expounded in a paper by
Bishop Moule at the 1904 Islington Clerical Meeting. ‘Substitution’ and
‘vicarious punishment’, words expressing the belief that Christ took the place
of guilty sinners at his death, were not in the Bible, Moule admitted, yet
various passages left him wondering how else to articulate their meaning.143 It
was claimed by conservatives such as Langston in the 1920s that their
opponents supposed the death of Christ to be ‘not substitutionary, but
exemplary’.144 The more liberal usually preferred to describe the death of
Christ as representative: his suffering was in some sense on our behalf. They
wished to deny a whole series of notions surrounding substitution. Canon de
Candole, a liberal Anglican leader, declared in a sermon in 1921 that God’s
anger was not appeased by the offering of his Son. The idea was revolting.145
Likewise Leslie Weatherhead, then a Methodist enfant terrible, wished to
deny the axiom stated in the Book of Hebrews that ‘without the shedding of
blood there is no forgiveness of sins’. ‘In our modern view’, he boldly
asserted, ‘this is simply not true.’146 Conservatives insisted that the cross
rnust be seen as a sacrifice in which the justice of God was satisfied; liberals
wished to discard legalistic interpretations in which the love of God was
obscured. For many of the more conservative including E.A.Knox, who retired
200 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

as Bishop of Manchester in 1921, and Albert Mitchell, the leading lay

liturgiologist among the Evangelicals, the doctrine of the cross was the heart
of the debate between the two sides.147
Christology was also divisive. Again the more liberal made the running.
Some contended that the omniscience of Christ must be given up.148 That,
however, was far from radical since it was a tenet championed by P.T. Forsyth,
the foe of R.J.Campbell’s New Theology. Others went further and treated
Christ as primarily an example. If Christ were presented as the greatest
exemplar, declared Canon Storr in 1933, people would be shamed into
recognising their shortcomings.149 Some were prepared to recast the
traditional understanding of the person of Christ. Frank Lenwood disturbed
Congregationalism with his avowal in Jesus: Lord or Leader? (1930) that he
could not accept the divinity of Christ.150 Weatherhead was barely less drastic.
‘I think Christ’s divinity’, he wrote in 1932, ‘was not endowed, but achieved
by His moral reactions, so that He climbed to an eminence of character which
the word human was not big enough to describe.’151 The virgin birth, to many
a buttress of the orthodox doctrine of the incarnation, was specifically
assailed. Congregationalism had been troubled by this issue before the war,152
and in 1935 Donald Soper, a young Methodist famous for his open-air
speaking, was accused of denying that Christ was born of a virgin.153
Evangelical Anglicanism was hardly afflicted with outright rejections, but it
was thought worthwhile for The Record to carry a sermon devoted to the
subject in 1925.154 To the conservative, such vagaries were not mere
theological speculations. They were a betrayal of the Christian faith itself.
The spread of liberal theology among Anglican Evangelicals had a measure
of institutional support. A number of Merseyside clergy created in 1906 the
Group Brotherhood for private discussion. Other groups were formed in
imitation and from 1908 there was an annual conference. At first it was not
specifically liberal. Rather its purpose was study and, it was hoped, the
publication of books to inculcate Evangelical teaching.155 Numbers grew
following the war and in 1923 it was reconstructed as the Anglican Evangelical
Group Movement (AEGM). Although it still deliberately avoided adopting the
word ‘liberal’ in its title for fear of causing offence,156 the movement was
associated with a collection of essays entitled Liberal Evangelicalism and
issued a set of fifty-three pamphlets to publicise the same position.157 ‘It is the
mind of Christ, not the letter of Holy Scripture, which is authoritative’, runs
the introduction to Liberal Evangelicalism, ‘The modern Evangelical is
dissatisfied with some of the older and cruder penal substitutionary theories
of the Atonement.’158 At this stage Canon Vernon Storr was drawn into the
organisation. Storr became its driving force and, from 1930, its president. He
had not previously been identified with the Evangelical party, but the
combination of intellectual breadth and spiritual experience that became the
hallmark of the movement was very much Storr’s creation. From 1928 it ran
its own equivalent of Keswick, an annual devotional conference at Cromer
 WALKING APART 201

that from the first year attracted more than a thousand.159 In the 1930s it also
planned its own retreats.160 The movement was always largely clerical, never
seeking to draw in the laity, but it achieved significant membership: some 200
clergy by 1923 and 1,500 by 1935.161 Although certain members were
connected with the Modern Churchmen’s Union, an explicitly Modernist
body,162 it adopted a basis of recognisably Evangelical belief. Its members
naturally attracted the criticism that they were ‘claiming to be Evangelicals
while wishing to enthrone Reason in place of Divine Revelation’.163 It
nevertheless did much to provide progressive clergymen with a shield of
fellowship to defend them against the darts of enraged parishioners.
A parallel body called the Fellowship of the Kingdom emerged in
Methodism. In 1917 a group of younger Wesleyan ministers in London began
to meet for discussion and prayer. They discovered a number of like-minded
cells, some of which went back as far as 1908. Groups sprang up elsewhere
during 1919 and in the following year the first annual conference was held at
Swanwick. Although non-Wesleyans were admitted and there were groups for
lay preachers, the bulk of support, as in the AEGM, came from ministers.164
The movement had three watchwords: Quest, Crusade and Fellowship. Quest
was a desire for valid spiritual experience. The members felt the Methodist
holiness tradition, with its particular jargon and shibboleths, to have ‘passed
beyond our horizon’.165 A fresh start had to be made in the discovery of Jesus
as a companion in the modern world. Crusade was the novel name for an
evangelistic campaign. The organisation specialised in missions conducted by
several ministers together. Fellowship was the mutual support of members in
the groups meeting fortnightly. No group was permitted to have more than
fifteen attenders because intimacy was essential.166 Inspiration was drawn
from W.Russell Maltby, Warden of the Wesley Deaconess Order, and J.A.
Findlay, tutor in New Testament at Didsbury College.167 Canon E.A.
Burroughs, a leading figure in the AEGM, also provided some of the early
vision through his book, The Valley of Decision (1916).168 Bonds were forged
with the AEGM from 1930 onwards.169 The Fellowship of the Kingdom was
the crucible in which was forged what the denominational history calls ‘the
typical “Jesus religion” school of recent Methodism’.170 It was one of the chief
expressions of liberal Evangelicalism.

RISING CHURCHMANSHIP
The parting of the ways between Evangelicals was hastened by the continued
growth among some of High Church sympathies, attention to the eucharist
and a desire ‘for beauty in worship. Tensions in this area were already
apparent at the Islington Clerical Meeting in 1883. P.F. Eliot, later Dean of
Windsor, remarked that there was sometimes ‘too much coquetting with
Dissent’. He would not move an inch from ‘Church principles’ for the sake of
co-operating with Dissent and there must be an end to the Evangelical neglect
202 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

of sacramental teaching.171 Others, on the other hand, felt that a common

allegiance to the gospel made united work with Nonconformists advisable, a
view often subsequently repeated at Islington.172 The attractions of tradition
nevertheless continued to draw erstwhile Evangelicals towards the High
Church school. E.H.Pearce, Bishop of Worcester, who after an upbringing at All
Souls’, Langham Place, had taken that path, declared in 1924 that his
generation had inadequately appreciated the ‘spiritual procession that paces all
down the ages’.173 The centre of gravity within the Evangelical school
undoubtedly shifted upwards. By 1909 it was noticed that a new Evangelical
party was forming, which, apart from giving time to study, refused to stress
ritual differences and firmly believed in church order.174 The tendency
crystallised in support for the idea of ‘Central Churchmanship’ propounded by
J.Denton Thompson, shortly to be Bishop of Sodor and Man, in a book of that
title in 1911. The AEGM entered into part of this heritage. That organisation,
according to Storr, saw a larger place for ritual and held a greater sense of
churchmanship than its Evangelical predecessors.175 Loyalty to the forms of
the Church of England was increasing.
The most tangible aspect was the trend towards more elaborate church
decorations and tolerance of ritual practices once judged to be High Church.
By the start of the twentieth century, the use of the surplice for preaching,
though still resisted by a handful of diehards, had been accepted even by rigid
opponents of ritualism.176 At this stage to call a clergyman a liberal Evangelical
was to refer to his views not on inspiration or theology, but on liturgical
arrangements. On entering the church of such a liberal Evangelical in 1904, a
correspondent of The Record discovered ‘cross and flowers on the Table,
Eastward Position adopted, Litany Desk and intoned service, black stoles with
gold crosses’.177 All was alien to Evangelical custom, but progressives were
wishing to end the assumption that Evangelical theology and Low Church
practice necessarily went together. Another correspondent reported that her
church had the eastward position, flowers, a cross on the communion table and
a surpliced choir, but sound teaching. Since homes were now ‘more artistically
beautiful’ than in the past, why should not churches be so too?178 Seventeen
years further on the same issues were still under debate, but now for liberal
Evangelicals it was the norm rather than the exception to wear white stoles at
weddings and turn east for the creed. They might be willing to have candles lit
for 8 a.m. celebration, to speak readily of ‘altar’ and ‘eucharist’ and to use the
word ‘Catholic’ freely.179 As Anglo-Catholics were pressing forward with
liturgical innovations such as incense and Italianate robes, they dragged
progressive Evangelicals—at a very great distance—behind them. In the
remoter parishes of Herefordshire it was still customary in the late 1930s to
hold services without a surpliced choir, with prayers said rather than intoned
and the ‘Protestant type’ of churchmanship firmly in place.180 Such practices
had by no means been banished from the city churches of conservative clergy
either, but they had come to have something of a curiosity appeal.
 WALKING APART 203

The fiercest wrangling within Evangelicalism on a point of ritual was about

the position adopted by the officiating clergyman at holy communion. The
position that was to triumph in the later twentieth century, in which the
clergyman faces the congregation from behind the holy table, was rare before
the Second World War.181 In most buildings it was physically impossible since
the table stood against the east wall. A High Churchman would use the
eastward position in which he stood with his back to the congregation facing
the altar. It was intended to symbolise his role as a priest offering sacrifice to
God on behalf of the people. Such an understanding was anathema to
Evangelicals, for whom the sacrifice of Calvary could in no sense be re-enacted
in the communion service. Hence, Evangelicals officiated at the north side of
the communion table, the position that had been general before the
innovations of the mid-nineteenth-century ritualists. Congregations were able
to observe the clergyman’s manual acts from the side so as to ensure that
there was no sacerdotal mumbo-jumbo. For an Evangelical to employ the
eastward position was ‘a hoisting of the enemy’s colours’.182 Whenever the
liberally inclined expressed a willingness to use the eastward position it caused
a furore. To declare the practice allowable, as was done by Guy Rogers in a
liberal manifesto of 1917, was to throw down the gauntlet.183 For the Cromer
convention communion services to employ the eastward position, as they did
from 1935, was almost an act of secession from the Evangelical body.184 The
controversy was particularly troublesome to the Church Pastoral Aid Society.
Conservatives constantly feared that its prohibition of grants to parishes
adopting the eastward position would be rescinded. Its chairman and secretary
nervously confirmed in 1917 that the society’s views had not changed; the
conservatives registered their satisfaction that the rule was being maintained
in 1935; and debate on the question of a change of policy rumbled on even in
the dark days of 1941. 185 The liturgical issue divided Evangelicals on
substantially the same lines as the theological issue, though, if anything,
liturgical conservatism was more powerful.
Public alarm at the ritual innovations of advanced Anglo-Catholics had led
to the appointment of a Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline which
sat from 1904 to 1906. It was Dean Wace who chose the ground on which
Evangelicals were to rally in defence of Protestantism. There was no hope of
persuading the Royal Commission to recommend the enforcement of the
rubrics of the existing Book of Common Prayer. There was doubt about their
interpretation. In any case most Evangelicals were less than scrupulous in
observing their provisions: few held services on holy days or used the prayer
for the church militant on days when there was no holy communion.186 Wace
moreover wished to secure the support of moderates of all schools. He
therefore appealed to the practice of the first six centuries of the church,
urging that later developments such as the eastward position and the use of
incense should be banned from the Church of England.187 Despite protests
from diehards like Samuel Garratt, who regarded certain sixth-century
204 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

ceremonies with horror,188 Wace attracted the signatures of most leading

Evangelicals and more than 4,000 clergy altogether.189 The division over the
proper extent of opposition to ritual innovation was ominous for Evangelical
unity.
A more serious division came later. Among the recommendations of the
Royal Commission was the revision of the Book of Common Prayer to
accommodate the more general High Church practices. In the decade after the
First World War the final stages of the protracted process caused serious
strains. Evangelicals were particularly dismayed at provisions for the
reservation of the consecrated elements, since Anglo-Catholics would wish to
worship them as the body and blood of Christ. They mounted a sustained
campaign against the Revised Prayer Book, which will need to be considered
again shortly. Most Evangelicals felt the issue intensely: how could loyal sons
of the Reformation, asked one conservative, be accessories to ‘an Act of
National Apostasy’?190 They demanded that the church, and subsequently
Parliament, should reject the innovation. Once the new Prayer Book was
officially endorsed by the convocation of the Church of England, however, the
Evangelical representatives there accepted that the battle had been lost.191
There was no question of asking Parliament to overturn the decision of the
church. The AEGM concurred, holding a conference on how to come to terms
with the new book.192 The main body of Evangelicals, on the other hand, felt
betrayed by the liberal wing.193 The fact that several of the turncoats, but no
continuing opponents of the Revised Prayer Book, were elevated to the
episcopal bench in the years up to the Second World War kept the grievance
fresh. The question of how far to go in resisting the Anglo-Catholic
ascendancy in the Church of England fractured the Evangelical party.
The Free Churches, as Nonconformity now liked to be called, could not
remain immune to the rising standard of churchmanship. The example of the
Church of England, the attractions posed to educated young people by
Anglican ceremony and the persistent Romantic atmosphere of middle-brow
culture all dictated change in that direction. The phrase ‘Lord’s Supper’ was
discarded in favour of ‘Sacrament of Holy Communion’, the rationale being
that the former pointed merely to the circumstances of its institution but the
latter identified its nature.194 The Fellowship of the Kingdom helped spread an
appreciation of eucharistic worship. The Methodist Sacramental Fellowship,
launched in 1935, encouraged the same trend.195 More frequent communion,
the use of service books and the observance of the Christian year were making
headway among the Presbyterians of Scotland,196 but some of the most
significant liturgical developments there were undertaken by the
Congregationalist John Hunter, Minister of Trinity Church, Glasgow. He
loved to speak of ‘the Holy Catholic Church’, administered communion in
Anglican style and compiled the often reprinted Devotional Services for Public
Worship.197 By 1925 another Congregationalist, W.E.Orchard, was conducting
mass with wafers, incense and Catholic punctilio at the King’s Weigh House in
 WALKING APART 205

London.198 He preached on how to make the most of Lent. ‘On Ash

Wednesday morning’, he recommended, ‘say to your wife, “My dear, is there
any virtue you would like me to acquire?”’199 Orchard was one of the Free
Churchmen who took the path to Rome.200 If such aberrations fed the flames
of conservative Evangelical anger, they were infrequent. Far more typical of
progressive interwar Nonconformity was the worship at Ealing Green
Congregational Church under Wilton Rix. The minister wore cassock and gown
and, like many of his congregation, preferred kneeling for prayer. Choir stalls
for robed singers were introduced, the pulpit was balanced on one side by a
lectern on the other, a communion table was central and eventually, in 1936, a
cross was added.201 It was a world apart from the plain unpolished services
that were still usual among the more traditional.
The divergence between liberals and conservatives was apparent on a
number of points of church order. One was the ministry of women. The
spread of female higher education and the successful campaign seeking votes
for women meant that demands were heard in the early twentieth century for
female ordination. In the mainstream denominations it was permitted by 1930
only among Congregationalists and Baptists, whose decentralised polity would
have made prohibition virtually impossible. The Wesleyan Conference
determined in 1926 to accept female candidates for the ministry, but deferred
action until later—which turned out to be 1973.202 In the Church of England
women could serve as deaconesses and, from the creation of the Church
Assembly in 1920, could share in some aspects of the government of the
church. Sterner Evangelicals such as Wace had resolutely opposed this
development, arguing that the apostle Paul’s prohibition of women speaking
in church was ‘absolutely decisive for Christian men’.203 Prejudice against
female ministry was said to be strongest ‘in old-fashioned circles where the
literalist doctrine of Scriptural inspiration still holds the field’.204 On the other
side, Hatty Baker, a Congregationalist who had acted as a minister without
official recognition, argued that the churches should not bind themselves to
Paul’s pre-Christian rabbinic thought-world. It was wrong to discriminate
against women, relegating them to the teapots, bread and butter; male and
female qualities were both needed in the ministry; and ‘none but a woman can
understand the agony of a woman’s heart’.205 Guy Rogers, a leader of the
AEGM, put forward a comparable, though less distinctly feminist, case in the
1930s.206 In general the tension was the usual conservative/liberal one, with a
large body of uncommitted opinion in the middle. The question rarely
pressed. It might be right in pure logic that women should be allowed to enter
the ministry of the church, said The Record in 1936, but there was no demand
for it.207 The question of female ordination reflected rather than created the
tendency to polarisation in the Evangelical world.
206 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

A factor that played a more active part in encouraging division was debate on
the relation of science to religion. The focus was almost exclusively on
evolution. Evangelicals had rapidly learned to live with Darwin’s discoveries.
Theologians took account of it in their schemes; scientists treated it as an
assumption in their work. The Wesleyan W.H.Dallinger and the Anglican
G.T.Manley both held that recent scientific developments that took evolution
for granted tended to undercut the materialist philosophies of Spencer and
Haeckel.208 Evolution was by no means a bogey to the popular Evangelical
press.209 Only isolated individuals occasionally protested that Darwin’s
unproved views did contradict Christian teaching on the special creation of
humanity.210 In 1924 A.C.Dixon, the Baptist son of a frontier farmer-preacher
in the American South who had risen to become one of Spurgeon’s successors
as the Minister of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, delivered a ninety-minute
harangue against evolutionary theory under the auspices of the Bible League.
The Record expected its readers to think Dixon was flogging a dead horse.211 In
the following year, when the anti-evolution campaign in the United States
reached its climax, a spokesman for the Christian Evidence Society commented
that, by contrast, there was now less interest in Europe in the relations of
science and religion, ‘owing to the fact that religious people do not oppose the
findings of natural science to-day; and men of science do not attack
religion’.212 In 1926 The Christian deplored the foundation of an anti-
evolution society in Georgia designed, intriguingly, to banish every teacher in
the world who expounded Darwinism.213 Many Evangelicals had no qualms
about evolution.
Certain liberals went further, wishing to remould theology around the new
scientific truth. The chief exponent of the need for doctrinal reconstruction in
the light of evolution was Canon E.W.Barnes, a mathematician, sometime
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He
had been brought up to accept evolution as scientific fact, and, lacking
ecclesiastical party loyalties, had little regard for Evangelical susceptibilities.
Human evolution, he believed, meant steady development. The fall of man, he
roundly declared in a sermon at the 1920 British Association meetings, was not
a historical event but a parable explaining the origin of sin. Interpretation of
biblical passages like the Genesis account of the fall, he explained in a
subsequent sermon, must be revised in the light of scientific discoveries.214
Bramwell Booth, who associated evolution with T.H.Huxley and his hostility
to the Salvation Army, denounced Barnes’s view unsparingly.215 W.St Clair
Tidsall, a supporter of the Bible League, criticised the sermons in two leading
articles in The Record, and The Christian weighed in with the claim that
Barnes ‘not only surrenders the Fall but with it the doctrine of the vicarious
Atonement’.216 Here was the nub of the objections. It was feared that if
humanity was not understood as fallen, there was no need for redemption.
 WALKING APART 207

The Evangelical panorama of salvation was at risk. Barnes’s critics were not so
much defending the text of scripture as perceiving the thin end of a
theological wedge. Evolution was not condemned outright. The first of a series
of articles dealing with the subject in The Christian distinguished sharply
between creative evolution, the validity of which was left to Barnes and his
fellow-scientists, and moral evolution, the idea that human character makes
progress over time.217 Nevertheless, the ‘monkey sermons’ had made Barnes a
symbolic figure, a champion of modern thought. Progressive Evangelicals
eagerly co-opted him into the team that wrote Liberal Evangelicalism and had
him address the AEGM.218 Conservatives vigorously denounced his
appointment as Bishop of Birmingham in 1924.219 Barnes provoked a novel
degree of polarisation on evolution.
After 1920 the undercurrent of popular hostility to evolution surfaced more
frequently. Some conservatives were careful to go no further than a general
wariness of evolutionary theory. It was still, according to Samuel Chadwick of
the Methodist holiness tradition, no more than a hypothesis.220 Others were
far less reserved. Harold Morton of the Wesley Bible Union obtained an MA
from the Intercollegiate University of Britain and America for a thesis
published as The Bankruptcy of Evolution.221 The Union’s Journal was the
periodical most committed in the 1920s to the anti-evolution cause, but the
new antagonism spread to others. It was the opinion of a leading conservative
Evangelical Anglican in 1933 that ‘our Lord’s personality, by its uniqueness,
thrust evolution on to the dust-heap’.222 Basil Atkinson, a Cambridge librarian
and a rather eccentric champion of most conservative Evangelical causes, put
forward a more popular apologetic line. The polar bear’, he observed, ‘has
small hairs on its feet which prevent it from slipping on the ice. How could
they have possibly evolved?’223 He also insisted that no species had been known
to pass over the border into another.224 The contention that there was a
missing link in the evolutionary chain separating humanity from the animal
kingdom was frequently heard.225 A small group including Basil Atkinson set
up in 1935 an Evolution Protest Movement. Its figurehead was Sir Ambrose
Fleming, Professor of Electrical Engineering at University College, London,
and author of a number of anti-evolution books, and it set about
corresponding with the Board of Education and the BBC about official
endorsements of Darwinism.226 That it existed is evidence for an element of
anti-evolutionary thinking in conservative Evangelicalism; that it remained
small is evidence for the weakness of the cause, even among conservatives.

THE USE OF LEISURE

Divergence between liberals and conservatives extended to the question of
leisure. Wherever the influence of Keswick was felt, there was a tendency to
reduce the circle of permitted activities. ‘God was calling them’, it was said at
the 1930 convention, ‘to an utter separation from everything that was
208 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

questionable.’227 Novelties such as the wireless were particularly suspect.

Undesirable plays and operas were broadcast; there was little distinctive about
Sunday programmes; and listening-in wasted time. On the other hand it was a
blessing to the bed-ridden. ‘Speaking generally’, said one mediating
contributor to a spirited debate in the weekly associated with Keswick,
‘syncopated music, and programmes labelled “variety”, are usually items that
may well be excluded by the child of God, but much of the music of the old
masters broadcast is sweet and ennobling…’228 Cinema created wider
differences. A contributor to The British Weekly reported in 1921 that news
coverage had improved and the long ‘film-story’ had become customary.
There was no hint of criticism, except that American films had virtually
displaced domestic products.229 To others, however, the cinema was simply a
more alluring form of the theatre. Conservatives let loose a tirade of invective,
There should be a crusade against ‘nasty pictures in picturedromes’. The
people should not be evangelised by Christian films, because the cinema is
‘one of the devil’s chief agencies for keeping them away from the Cross’. ‘ln
many districts the cinema is synonymous with sin…’230 Evangelicals divided
between those who gave a discriminating welcome to new agencies of popular
culture and those who viewed them with horror.
‘Many look with dismay’, commented a rather smug Brethren observer,
‘upon young people flocking to the Theatre, Picture Palaces, and other places
of amusement, yet at the same time are associated with the same in miniature
in Churches and Chapels.’231 No popular entertainments might sully the
purity of a Brethren assembly, but it is true that they were becoming common
on other church premises. The attempt to grapple with declining attendances
by providing what the people wanted had gathered force with the years.232
The First World War accelerated the trend. Returning troops demanded the
use of premises for the dancing and other entertainments they had grown to
expect on active service.233 Since ‘lads and lasses will want to meet each other
while the world lasts’, according to the magazine of the Church of Scotland, it
was good that the church, rather than the streets or the picture houses,
should provide their ‘opportunities for harmless pleasure’.234 Regular
members of congregations, furthermore, wanted to use church facilities for
their recreation. South London churches between the wars provided facilities
for tennis, badminton and athletics, discussion, singing and drama, though
churches in the Evangelical tradition normally drew the line at the whist
drives promoted elsewhere.235 There was always the evangelistic motive to
supply justification. At mission services in the Brighouse United Methodist
circuit, ‘One pleasing feature has been the number of converts from the
football teams associated with the three churches’.236 Even churches in the
Keswick orbit were advised that church sports clubs were appropriate if the aim
was right.237 Church-sponsored recreation was common across a broad
Evangelical spectrum.
 WALKING APART 209

Yet worries were abroad. In 1912 H.C.Morton, later of the Wesley Bible
Union, saw the decline in Methodist membership as a consequence of giving
the young people amusements rather than training them in main church
activities.238 By 1935 a triumph had been won by the grumblers at
denominational level, for the Methodist Conference passed a resolution
against dramatic entertainment on church premises not in accordance with the
spiritual life of the church.239 For the tighter sects dancing was anathema and
sport irrelevant.240 Similar attitudes were promulgated by Advent Testimony.
‘Antics of various kinds, such as smoking, drinking, dancing, theatricals, etc.’,
the vain efforts to fill the churches, were contrasted with the ‘faithful
preaching of the word’, which alone brought people to Christ.241 Most
disturbingly, the worldliness of bazaars, concerts, clubs and billiards was
ousting prayer. For about twenty years, it was said in 1932, weekly prayer
meetings had become rare in Methodism. In nine months of regular preaching,
a missionary deputation speaker had to announce only two week-night prayer
meetings.242 ‘Restore the Prayer Meeting!’, urged a Life of Faith leading
article in 1926.243 One method of recovering a spiritual atmosphere was to
exclude the fun of entertainment from the duty of Christian giving. At
Toxteth Tabernacle, Liverpool, for example, ‘No bazaars, concerts, or other
questionable methods of raising funds are countenanced.’244 The same attitude,
assisted by Keswick’s influence and favourable treasurer’s reports, spread
through many Evangelical Anglican congregations during the 1930s.245
Conservative opinion increasingly understood the world in dualistic terms.
Entertainment was of the darkness, not of the light.
Darkest of all, in the eyes of many, was recreation that desecrated the
sabbath. The Presbyterian churches appealed in 1919 to the people of Scotland
for the observance of the weekly day of rest,246 and in general sabbatarianism
was stronger north of the border. Evangelicals throughout Britain, however,
normally remained strict, refusing to take a Sunday newspaper (‘the worst of
all secularising influences’).247 The churches themselves deplored the decision
of the London County Council in 1922 to open public parks for games on
Sundays,248 but it was the Lord’s Day Observance Society that led the battle
against infringements of the sabbath. It protested against a Sunday evening
radio debate between Bernard Shaw and Miss Madeleine Carroll on ‘sex-
appeal in cinematograph films’ and achieved some minor successes like the
suppression of a rodeo at the White City Stadium.249 Divergence came over
Sunday cinema opening. The Lord’s Day Observance Society, supported by
bodies such as the Evangelical Alliance, resisted a Sunday Entertainments Bill
designed to legalise the showing of films.250 The Council of Christian
Churches on Social Questions, however, had declared in favour of localities
being able to decide for or against Sunday opening, and the bill passed into law
with that provision.251 The liberal Evangelical Bishop of Croydon, E.S. Woods,
gained a certain fame—which was notoriety among Evangelicals—by
supporting Sunday opening locally, and was soon chairing a committee that
210 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

selected films for showing on Sunday evenings.252 He was almost alone in public
advocacy of breaking with this Evangelical shibboleth, but there were other
signs of greater flexibility on the question among the more progressive. One
Bradford Wesleyan minister held that Christ intended much more latitude
than the Old Testament on sabbath observance, and another that there would
have to be give and take on its enforcement.253 If sabbatarianism was still
general, it was becoming more diluted in some quarters.

THE SOCIAL GOSPEL

A further cause of division among interwar Evangelicals lay in different
attitudes to social reform. Many of the more conservative believed that
liberals had turned aside from the true gospel to a ‘social gospel’.254 The
impression was given at the time, and has often persisted down to the present,
that the social gospel was an alternative to the Evangelical approach, an
attempt to change human beings by transforming their environment rather
than by touching their hearts. In reality, however, the social gospel was
grounded in Evangelicalism. It was an application of the crusading style of
reform (discussed in Chapter 4) to society overall. Sin was diagnosed in social
structures, which therefore must be remodelled. Occasional social gospellers,
such as the Congregationalist Fleming Williams, did profess to have
abandoned (as he put it) ‘theological metaphysics’ for the sake of ‘altering the
condition of things’, but men who thus departed from Evangelical belief were
rare.255 Scott Matheson, the United Presbyterian author of The Church and
Social Problems (1893), was adamant in his priorities. ‘Social reform’, he
declared, ‘ought never to draw the Church aside from her proper work of
saving men.’256 Campbell Morgan, known for his biblical exposition at
Westminster Chapel, was quite prepared to devote a sermon on the eve of a
London County Council election in 1919 to the need for the regulation of the
drainage, atmosphere, smoke and traffic of the capital.257 For the generation of
Scottish and Nonconformist ministers at the height of their powers between
the early 1890s and about 1920 a combination of social concern and
evangelistic zeal came naturally.
The social gospel was generated primarily by practical experience of
Christian work. It was a response to the difficulties of mission, particularly
inthecities. Thus Hugh Price Hughes, its leading Methodist exponent, argued
that ‘evangelistic work has been too exclusively individualistic…we must do
our utmost to promote the social welfare of the people’.258 Likewise, Richard
Mudie-Smith, a Baptist deacon and social investigator, contended that the
gospel must affect the environment. ‘If cleaner streets, better housing, sweeter
homes do not come within the scope of our aim’, he wrote, ‘neither will those
who are convinced that they have a right to these things come within the
shadow of our places of worship.’259 The social gospel was an evangelistic
strategy for reaching the working classes. Intellectual influences naturally
 WALKING APART 211

played a part in its formation too. The theology of F.D.Maurice stirred some
to contemplate the divine pattern for the nation.260 The teaching of T.H.Green
and other idealist philosophers that the state has a duty to promote the moral
development of its members had some effect.261 Social Darwinism and the
Romantic critique of industrialism in John Ruskin and William Morris,
powerful intellectual currents of the time, swept along many in the
Nonconformist ministry.262 The challenge, real and imaginary, of
revolutionary socialism also stirred greater attention to the welfare of the
masses. ‘There are two alternatives before us to-day’, announced Hughes in
1887, ’—Christianity or revolution. ‘263 John Clifford, the other leading
exponent of a Christian message for society, was taking up a phrase from The
Communist Manifesto when in 1888 he launched the ‘social gospel’ as a
campaigning slogan in an address to the Baptist Union.264 The movement
therefore represented a broadening of the horizons of Nonconformists, but it
did not cut them off from their Evangelical roots.
An equivalent tendency existed among Evangelicals in the Church of
England, but it remained weak. The participation of Evangelicals in the
Christian Social Union, the Anglican body that took up social questions, was
largely nominal: a few bishops and other dignitaries acted as presidents and
vice-presidents of branches.265 The predominant attitude, expressed in an
editorial in The Record in 1904, was that social conditions might be important,
but that conversion was the great remedy: ‘surroundings will not save a
soul’.266 Few criticisms of the social structure, to which most were firmly
wedded, entered their minds. Attitudes nevertheless partially altered during
the first decade of the twentieth century, an unavoidable consequence of the
greater attention paid by the public at large to social questions. An address on
pastoral work by Denton Thompson to the Islington Clerical Meeting in 1898
had been fairly narrow in scope, but on the same subject in 1910 he gave much
of his space to social problems.267 At Islington in 1913 Guy Rogers, a leading
spirit of liberal Evangelicalism, cited Maurice’s condemnation of capitalist
competition with approval and looked forward to a more even distribution of
wealth.268 Most prominent among Evangelical Anglicans committed to social
reform was J.E.Watts-Ditchfield, first Bishop of Chelmsford from 1914.
Organised labour and organised Christianity, he contended in 1918, must
combine to end preventible poverty, and his political sympathies had long
been with Labour.269 Significantly, however, Watts-Ditchfield’s background
was in Lancashire Wesleyanism, and he was ordained an Anglican clergyman
only when the door to the Methodist ministry was closed.270 When, in 1908,
the Islington Clerical Meeting was devoted to social problems, it is equally
significant that some of the speakers had to be drawn from outside the
Evangelicals’ ranks: George Lansbury, the Labour politician from Poplar, and
A.J.Carlyle, Secretary of the Christian Social Union.271 After Islington,
correspondents of The Record expressed rank-and-file opinion: ‘A Country
Incumbent’asked why the clergy should take more interest now, when
212 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

conditions were better, than they had in social questions twenty years ago;
another opposed the stance of the Islington speakers, fearing that the church
was being duped by the enemy of God into alliances inimical to
Christianity.272 The social gospel was not for them.
In the interwar years liberal Evangelicals in all denominations commonly
believed that concern with social questions was a dimension of Christian
mission. In a manifesto of ‘Neo-Evangelicalism’ in 1921, Frank Mellows, Vicar
of Sparkhill, declared that its adherents preached a social as well as an individual
gospel, attacking the evils of bad housing, inadequate wages and commercial
tyranny as frequently as personal ones.273 In Congregationalism, the
venerable A.E.Garvie, Principal of Hackney and New College, took a leading
part in interdenominational discussion of social issues, published a treatise on
The Christian Ideal for Human Society (1930) and issued the more popular
Can Christ save Society? (1933).274 Methodism regularly made official
pronouncements on social questions.275 The Church of Scotland was
responsible for an impressive array of institutions for orphans, the destitute
and the elderly.276 Yet even among the more liberal there was a tendency to
withdraw somewhat from the vanguard of reform. The Methodist George
Jackson believed that Christianity has social implications, but felt that the
church should work at a deeper level than creating programmes for change. It
should provide ‘not so much the machinery of social reforrn as the spiritual
driving power without which the best machinery is no better than so much
scrap iron’.277 Neither the Fellowship of the Kingdom nor the AEGM was
forward with schemes of reconstruction. The initiative passed from the
Nonconformist Conscience of prewar days to the Anglican heavyweights,
Charles Gore, William Temple and R.H.Tawney. The Industrial Christian
Fellowship, a drastic remodelling of the Christian Social Union, had the
support of a number of Evangelicals including Guy Rogers, but they were
overshadowed by others.278 Evangelicals in gencral were keeping their distance
from the pressing domestic public issues of the day.
The tendency to withdrawal was most marked among Evangelicals of a
more conservative stamp. Anglicans of the Keswick school, by and large,
needed little convincing that social reform lay beyond their province. The
process of change was therefore more evident outside the Church of England.
The Salvation Army was exceptional in rcmaining institutionally committed
to a wide variety of social ministries.279 Other bodies of conservative doctrinal
inclinations shifted towards a more conservative stance on social questions.
COPEC, the Conference on Politics, Economics and Citizenship promoted by
Temple in 1924, attracted the sympathy of some conservative Evangelicals,
but no general enthusiasm.280 Instead they concentrated on questions which,
unlike industrial relations or housing, could be analysed in terms of personal
responsibility. In addition to the Sunday question, drunkenness and gambling
were the great bugbears. The temperance campaign of Nonconformity was
sustained after the war even in conservative circles. ‘Alcohol’, stated The
 WALKING APART 213

Journal of the Wesley Bible Union unequivocally, ‘is wholly evil when used as
a beverage.’281 The chief official Baptist social concern was about
intemperance.282 The Brethren were almost solidly teetotal, and some were
even prepared to take political action, shunned by others in the sect, for the
sake of putting down the drink scourge.283 Gambling was also loudly
condemned. Greyhound racing and football pools were the prime targets of
censure.284 Voices were occasionally raised on behalf of the unemployed,285 but
the trend among conservatives to deal with moral questions rather than
broader social problems was a feature of the times. There was in Britain, just
as there was in the United States, what has been called ‘the great reversal’:286 a
repudiation by Evangelicals of their earlier engagement with social issues.

THE GREAT REVERSAL

Why did a great reversal take place? One reason was a disenchantment with
politics. Nonconformity had been highly politicised in the later nineteenth
century. Its identification with the Liberal Party was never closer than at the
1906 election, when anger at a Conservative Education Act led to an
unprecedented degree of electioneering by Nonconformist leaders.
Disappointment followed. The Liberals, despite a huge Commons majority,
failed to repeal the Education Act. Chapel membership began to fall, and some
blamed the loss of spiritual power on over-absorption in public affairs. While
Nonconformity ‘has been making numerous and ardent politicians’, it was
complained, ‘it has made scarce any saints’.287 There was, furthermore, a
growing trend for the most opulent and the most anti-Catholic among the
Nonconformists to go ovcr to the Conservative side.288 Hence by the time of
the 1910 elections many Free Church leaders became wary of close
identification with Liberalism. The trend was encouraged by a parallel sense
on the other side of the ecclesiastical divide that partisanship decreased the
spiritual influence of the clergy.289 The revulsion from politics was for many a
distancing from social reform. ‘Our fathers’, commented The Methodist
Recorder in 1912, ‘were much more concerned about the glory of God and the
dishonour done to him than about any social problems.’ They dwelt on
people’s sins, not their rights. This was the spirit of the New Testament.290
The recoil from politics was noticed and welcomed north of the border.291 The
process was nearly complete before the First World War, so that the accepted
wisdom in the Free Churches in the 1920s was to keep political clamour at arm’s
length. ‘It is not the business of the Christian Church to initiate legislation’,
stated a pamphlet issued by the Fellowship of the Kingdom, ‘but it is the
function of those who would follow Jesus to educate public opinion…’292
The eclipse of the social gospel is also partly explained by the belief that it was
socialist. There was in fact no equivalence between the two. Hugh Price
Hughes offered a social analysis that, when stripped of its bombastic rhetoric,
was quite traditional. At a period when it was beginning to be recognised that
214 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

poverty was more often the result of low pay and irregular work than of
personal irresponsibility, Hughes still attributed it to laziness or vice.293
Clifford, by contrast, was the leader of a short-lived Christian Socialist League
in the mid-1890s294 and wrote two Fabian tracts, Socialism and the Teaching of
Christ (1897) and Socialism and the Churches (1908). From 1907 the
Wesleyan J.E.Rattenbury attracted crowds to the West London Mission to
hear denunciations of capitalist wrongs mingled with gospel addresses.295
Socialism made most headway among the Wesleyans. By 1909 sixty-five of
their rninisters were members of a socialist Sigma Club led by S.E. Keeble, the
author of Industrial Day-Dreams (1896).296 Alarm was sufficient to bring
about the creation of a Nonconformist Anti-Socialistic Union in 1909. It
received little Free Church support, however, and a year later it had turned
into an Anti-Socialist Union of Churches with Anglicans as the main
speakers.297 One of their number, Prebendary Webb-Peploe, represented the
strong hostility to socialism that was the normal stance of Anglican
Evangelicals.298 It savoured too much of revolution, atheism and the
subversion of the family to appear compatible with Christianity. The
turbulence of the war, the Russian Revolution and the aftermaths of both
made many Nonconformists more cautious. Clifford’s own successor at
Westbourne Park Baptist Church, Paddington, preaching in 1921, denounced
materialistic demands for a social utopia that entailed the downgrading of
religion.299 Industrial unrest served to illustrate ‘the subtle influence of
Socialism, syndicalism and Atheism, helped…by funds from Moscow and
elsewhere…’300 The ‘red scare’ so widespread in the early 1920s made many
feel that tampering with the social order was inopportune.
There were theological worries about the social gospel as well. It could seem
over-optimistic about the possibilities of perfecting the human condition.
Hughes, in fact, was swayed both by the Wesleyan tradition and by the
Brighton holiness convention of 1875 towards the belief that human beings
need not sin. Hence it was possible to anticipate a day ‘when justice and love
and peace will reign with unchallenged supremacy in every land; and when
mcn will literally do the will of God on earth as angels do it in heaven’.301
Although Clifford was influenced by the socialist contention that human
beings are moulded by the conditions of their environment, he was careful to
insist that outward changes could not do all for humanity. According to Jesus,
he explaincd, ‘the inward is chief ,302 Critics remained unconvinced by such
reservations. It was folly, declared a Wesleyan before the First World War, to
expect a better social fabric ‘if human nature is to remain what it is’.303 The
social gospel seemed to treat conversion as superfluous. ‘lt treated man’,
declared the conservative Evangelical Prebendary A.W.Gough in 1925, ‘as one
whose life could be made right by the putting right of his circumstances, by the
reordering of society, by the pulling down of the existing structure and the
setting up of something else. ‘304 Conversion, on the other hand, was ‘a short
cut to social reform’.305 Once a person was regenerate, relations with others
 WALKING APART 215

would be changed. Some good might come from COPEC, admitted the editor
of The Life of Faith, but ‘we do not regret being old-fashioned enough to
believe that when once the human heart gets right with God, everything else
falls into line’.306 It followed that Christian effort must be directed into
evangelism rather than social reform.
The most resounding condemnations of the social gospel came from those
with a sharper theological axe to grind. High hopes of reform, it was argued,
were bound up with a false eschatology. Social gospellers, in the broadening
postmillennialist tradition, expected the kingdom of God to be realised on
earth by the steady advance of Christian values. Thus the vision of the
perfected City of God in the Book of Revelation, according to Hughes, would
be realised at Charing Cross.307 The key to the teaching of Jesus, according to
Clifford, is the kingdom of God, which is to be identified with the divine will
for the social order.308 The growing premillennialist school, however, rejected
such ideas out of hand. It looked for a king, not a kingdom. Only with the return
of Christ would human affairs be put right. The dominance of
premillennialism among Anglican Evangelicals goes a long way towards
explaining their immunity to the appeal of the social gospel before the First
World War. The spread of popular adventism from the end of the war was
heavily responsible for the retreat of non-Anglicans from social involvement.
In its initial manifesto, the Advent Testimony Movement asserted that ‘all
human schemes of reconstruction must be subsidiary to the Second Coming
of our Lord, because all nations will then be subject to His rule’.309 E.L.
Langston, a leading Anglican premillennialist, elaborated a critique of COPEC
on precisely this basis.310 Even efforts for international harmony now seemed
futile. The Congregational Union autumn assembly of 1923 declared its faith
in the League of Nations as the only way of securing peace. ‘Students of the
Word of God’, growled the editor of The Advent Witness, ‘have come to a
different conclusion, for, is it not said that when the league of ten kings (Rev.
xvii.12) is formed, their one all-absorbing and united aim will be to make war
with Christ?’311 Premillennialists distrusted the League. The advent hope
supplanted all other Christian hopes for the future. Wherever it was held it
ensured that the ideological gap between liberal and conservative Evangelicals
was a yawning gulf.

FUNDAMENTALIST CONTROVERSIES
The strains within Evangelicalism snapped in a series of crises between 1913
and 1928. Although the various mutual suspicions that have been enumerated
entered into the debates, the central issue in each case was the infallibility of
scripture. Conservatives believed that loyalty to the Bible itself was under
threat. The first crisis contained echoes of the New Theology controversy,
which had been settled only a couple of years before, but it was different in
kind.312 Whereas R.J.Campbell had put himself outside the Evangelical school,
216 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

the battle surrounding George Jackson in 1913 was over the future direction
of Evangelicalism within the Wesleyan denomination. Were higher critical
views acceptable? In 1912 Jackson was designated to occupy a chair at
Didsbury College, Manchester, one of the four Wesleyan theological colleges,
but in the same year he delivered a lecture that was expanded for publication
as The Preacher and the Modern Mind. With the needs of educated young
people in mind, he held that biblical criticism must be respected. Stiff
opposition to the confirmation of his appointment gathered force just before
the Wesleyan Conference of 1913. With masterly skill, Jackson convinced
conference that his views on the Bible were by no means radical or extreme. A
committee report exonerating his book from a charge of doctrinal
unsoundness was accepted by 336 votes to 27. He took up office. That,
however, did not end the debate. Jackson’s opponents joined together as the
Wesley Bible Union, issued a monthly journal and entered on a struggle to
persuade conference to eliminate alleged heresy from the connexion. Their
efforts were fruitless. The chief effect was to ensure that the conservative
cause in Methodism was branded as the obsession of a few ill-tempered
fanatics. The virulence of the Wesley Bible Union was counter-productive.313
Better known is the controversy of 1922 in the Church Missionary Society
(CMS), ‘the barometer of the Evangelical party’.314 Some of its missionaries in
Bengal expressed publicly their disquiet at the spread of higher critical views
as early as 1907.315 Conflict broke out when, in 1917, a party of the liberally
inclincd memorialised the CMS committee to tolerate candidates with broader
opinions on topics including biblical research. The more conservative were
outragcd. Prebendary H.E.Fox, a former Secretary of the CMS and the
President of the Bible League, took decisive action. At his instigation a
counter-memorial was organised and partly through his pressure, a concordat
was reached laying down belief in revelation, inspiration and the authority of
scripture as essential in candidates.316 It was Fox who demanded an
explanation firom a Hong Kong CMS missionary who in 1919 spoke of the
Old Testament stories as myths; and it was Fox who called for action in
solidarity with the Bible Union of China formed by conservative missionaries.
‘Are we to sit still and do nothing?’ he asked. ‘Is respect for the Society to keep
us silent, while its agents are preaching and teaching doctrines altogether
inconsistent with those on which it was founded?’317 Behind the CMS dispute
lay the combative vigour of the Bible League.
Affairs came to a head following an address on the Old Testament at a CMS
summer school in 1921. The earlier concordat, according to the conservatives,
was not being observed. Their campaign was co-ordinated by D.H.C.Bartlett,
Vicar of St Luke’s, Hampstead, who acted as Secretary of the Fellowship of
Evangelical Churchmen (FEC), a body formed in the wake of the 1917–18
debate.318 At the December general committee meeting of the CMS, the
subject of the summer school address was raised by S.H.Gladstone, treasurer
of the society and president of the FEC, but inconclusively.319 At the March
 WALKING APART 217

general committee, Bartlett proposed a motion endorsing the authority of

scripture, but action was deferred until after a private consultative conference
of Evangelical leaders at Coleshill in June. The general committee reconvened
for a trial of strength in July. Because membership was open to any clerical
supporters, there were 614 recorded attenders. An amendment that CMS agents
need adhere only to the Nicene Creed and article VI of the Church of England
was followcd by a compromise amendment suggested by a team of bishops.
Although it was carried, Fox, Bartlett, Gladstone and their circle felt it was
insufficiently firm on Christ’s endorsement of scriptural authority. After
consulting members of the FEC, they determined to set up an alternative to
the CMS, which was dubbed The Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society
(BCMS). A CMS sub-committee, followed by another committee meeting,
failed to heal the breach. By March 1923 seventy-eight clergy had resigned
their membership of the CMS and thirty rcmained undecided.320 By its fourth
anniversary in 1926 the BCMS had ninety missionaries and ten paid home
staff.321 The rift had the effect of weakening the conservative influence in the
original society, but the BCMS, unlike the Wesley Bible Union, pursued a
steady course of constructive work. Several rcdoubtable champions of a high
view of the Bible, including E.L.Langston and G.T.Manley, remained with the
CMS. The schism was caused by biblical conservatives, but the split it created
was not straightforwardly between conservatives and liberals. The division
was within the conservative ranks.
Controversy had already rocked the Keswick Convention, another seasoned
Evangelical vessel. Evan Hopkins, the prophet of sound doctrine at Keswick,
died early in 1919.322 In the same year Bishop Watts-Ditchfield, a believer in
the annihilation rather than the punishment of the wicked after death and so
suspect in more stringent quarters, was a speaker at Keswick, and Cyril
Bardsley and H.L.C.V.de Candole, both broadening Anglicans, had already
been on its platform.323 So it seemed reasonable for R.T. Howard, Principal of
St Aidan’s College, Birkenhead, and a leading light of the body soon to
become the AEGM, to give an address in which he dwelt on the presence of
God at all times, in all places and in everything. A member of the audience
rose indignantly to question whether so pantheistic a talk was in accordance
with the word of God; the Keswick council declined to publish an account of it;
and it was soon assailed in a pamphlet as being little different from
R.J.Campbell’s New Theology.324 The pamphlet’s writer, James Mountain,
was a Keswick veteran in his late seventies who had been in the movement
from its inception, a Baptist who had been Minister of St John’s Free Church,
Tunbridge Wells, and a man of strong, if changeable, opinions.325 Casting
himself as a Mr Valiant-for-Truth, he led a band of folk from in and about
Tunbridge Wells who were disgusted by the declension of the times. ‘Shall the
floods of German criticism’, he asked, ‘overwhclm the ripened fields of
Keswick Truth, even as the hordes of German Huns overran the stricken fields
of Belgium?’326 He was particularly persistent in his hounding of Charles
218 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

Brown and F.C.Spurr, two Baptists who also spoke at the 1920 Keswick, on the
grounds that they had previously toyed with higher critical views.327 It was an
acrimonious affair that subsided only when Mountain turned his attention
elsewhere.
While the consequences of Mountain’s charges rumbled on, the
exChairman of the Keswick council and son of the convention’s founder, John
Battersby Harford, went into print in defence of critical views of the Old
Testament entertained by Herbert Ryle, Dean of Westminster. D.F. Douglas-
Jones, a retired colonel from Worthing and a Vice-President of the Bible
League, was roused to ire, demanding that the other members of the council
should dissociate themselves from such opinions.328 An alarmed council did
so, although pressure—from the Liverpool Keswick auxiliary, for instance—
that Battersby Harford should resign from the council was ignored.329 ‘In view
of the present unsettlement in respect of religious belief, announced the
council, ‘we are impressed with the necessity of maintaining the Keswick
tradition of closest possible loyalty to the Word of God as the fully inspired
and authoritative revelation of His Will, in all the ministry of the platform.’330
There was to be a further crisis in the affairs of Keswick in 1928, when Stuart
Holden was eased out of the chair after he and the council had been charged by
The Life of Faith with going Modernist. That incident, howevcr, was a
response to Holden’s proposal to sever the semi-official relation between The
Life of Faith and the convention, and a reaction against his excessive personal
dominance of the movement.331 There was no chance by that stage of Keswick
being lost to the conservatives. Indeed there never had been. In 1920–1 what
happened was that the boundaries of Keswick were defined so as to exclude a
more advanced section of Evangelical opinion than had hitherto been
tolerated. Keswick perceptibly narrowed so as to become a rallying ground for
conservatives, although conservatives of many shades. The characteristic noise
of Keswick was still what was heard by listeners to a broadcast service in 1933:
‘the sound of the rustling of the Bible leaves’.332
There were other jarrings. A proposal for the merging of Nonconformists
into a Free Church Federation in 1919 was what first prompted James
Mountain into militancy. It was fearcd that the Federation would adopt an
inadequate creed and would lead on to incorporation with Anglican
sacerdotalism.333 Accordingly Mountain launched a Baptist Bible Union, which
was to be his power-base for half a dozen years. In 1922 a body of the same
title was to be formed in America that was eventually to emerge as a separate
denomination.334 Mountain’s organisation showed similar tendencies. In 1923
it was reconstructed as a Bible Baptist Union to which churches could affiliate.
If apostasy spread, it was to be the basis of ‘an out-and-out Biblical
Church’.335 The precipitating factor leading to this development was the
election of T.R.Glover, a Cambridge scholar and supporter of SCM, to be Vice-
President of the Baptist Union in 1923. Glover was best known for his weekly
religious column in The Daily News, in which, according to a Bible League
 WALKING APART 219

speaker, he wrote, ‘with flippant humour and half-contemptuous comment, on

the Holy Scriptures’.336 The election began a spillage of churches out of the
Union that Mountain hoped to mop up. The scheme, however, rapidly fell
apart, and in 1925 the organisation, by a fresh mutation, became the
undenominational Believers’ Bible Union.337 A parallel attempt to create a
Missionary Trust for supporting sound missionaries also collapsed.338 Better
piloted was the plan of E.J.Poole-Connor for a link between various
undenominational mission halls and churches leaving their denominations.
Begun in 1922, this project became the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical
Churches, which was steadily to expand.339 Disagreements also racked the
Churches of Christ, among whom Modernism was sccnted at the new
Overdale College between 1923 and 1927, and the Calvinistic Methodists of
Wales, among whom Tom Nefyn Williams criticised received views in 1927 in
a way more reminiscent of R.J.Campbell than of recent upsets.340 The Baptists
were again disturbed in 1932 by dispute about a booklet issued by Glover, in
which he questioned the substitutionary nature of the atonement.341 Britain
was by no means immune to Fundamentalist controversies.

MODERATION
There is no doubt’, declared The Life of Faith in 1925, ‘that the divergence
between what are known, on the one hand, as the Fundamentalists, and, on
the other, as the Modernists, exceeds, in the United States, anything known in
this country…,’342 Although conservatives and liberals did pull in opposite
directions in Britain, acrimony was less widespread and less drastic in its
consequences than in America. With the exception of the CMS rift,
controversies were contained. One explanation for the relatively moderate
tone of debate is the institutional framework within which Evangelicals
operated. It is true that the theological colleges tended to fragment the
Evangelical school in the Church of England, with Ridley Hall leading the way
in a liberal direction and, in 1929, only St John’s, Highbury, and the BCMS
College in Bristol receiving the approval of The Fundamentalist.343 Yet all
types met at the annual Islington Conference, where conservative and liberal
speakers were often deliberately balanced. Although certain of the local
clerical mcetings fell into the hands of one grouping or another, they
sometimes provided further common ground. The Evangelical Candidates’
Ordination Council, established in 1925 to increase the supply of clergy,
reflected every shade of opinion within the party.344 There was similar
diversity at the annual Conference of Evangelical Churchmen begun at
Cheltenham in 1916 and moved to Oxford in 1929.345 Its chairman at Oxford,
Christopher Chavasse, used his prestige as first Master of St Peter’s Hall, an
Evangelical foundation, to keep the party united. Like certain others, he
consciously adopted a centrist position. At an interdenominational level the
Evangelical Alliance likewise tended to consolidate the tradition. At its
220 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

conferences in the early 1920s eminent Fundamentalists, centrists and

progressives spoke together in defence of the gospel. Among the centrists were
J.D.Jones, the statesmanlike figure who helped hold Congregationalism
together, and M.E.Aubrey, who, as Secretary of the Baptist Union from 1925,
was to oppose tendencies to fissiparity.346 Spurgeon’s College, the one
Nonconformist theological institution approved by The Fundamentalist, was
steered back into Baptist denominational life by its principal, P.W.Evans.347
The circuit system of Methodism meant that it was rarely possible for a
congregation to build up an ethos widely different from the denominational
norm. In Scottish Presbyterianism a conservative like Alexander Frazer of
Tain frowned on anything other than full involvement in the life of the
Kirk.348 Denominational allegiance was a powerful brake on divergence.
In general, the Protestant cause had a similar effect. Anti-Catholicism still
aroused powerful emotions in mainland Britain. The threat to the Protestant
community in Ireland in the convulsions over Home Rule and independence
between 1911 and 1924 tugged at Evangelical heartstrings. The Protestant
Truth Society and its ‘Wycliffe Preachers’ were delighted to fan the flames of
sectarian hatred, not least in Liverpool.349 There was similar populist activity
in Scotland during the interwar years.350 Yet anti-Catholicism was part of the
worldview of the most urbane. C.J.Cadoux, a scholarly Oxford
Congregationalist and avowed Evangelical Modernist, could be contemptuous
about Rome because of her repression of free enquiry.351 The sustained
struggle against the introduction of the Revised Prayer Book bound together
the popular and the educated strands of Protestant passion, eliciting an
enormous volume of support. In 1918 a memorial against changes in the
communion service was presented to the Archbishop of Canterbury signed by
nine bishops, 3,000 clergy and 100,000 laymen.352 The Church Association
sprang into life, holding rallies and trying to co-ordinate political opposition.
The National Church League, the result of a merger of smaller Protestant
bodies in 1906, concentrated chiefly on issuing literature. The campaign
proved victorious when, in December 1927, the House of Commons refused
its sanction for the use of the Prayer Book and repeated its decision in the
following year. Another bout of railing against Romish practices followed in
1932–3 with the denunciation of celebrations of the centenary of the Oxford
Movement. Evangelical Churchmen in successive dioceses went into
opposition to any official countenancing of the events.353 The effect of all this
rousing of the latent spirit of Protestant defence is clear. The attempt to turn
the Church of England into ‘an annexe of Rome’, declared The Record in
1924, must lead all Evangelicals, whatever adjective they would insert before
Evangelical, to make common cause against medievalising obscurantism.354 In
the following year the same newspaper ended a correspondence on the higher
criticism because, it said, Evangelicals must unite against the sacerdotal
challenge.355 Notwithstanding the defection of the AEGM in 1927, the
tendency of militant Protestantism was to inhibit divisions on other issues.
 WALKING APART 221

Another factor that minimised acrimony and schism was the restraint of the
conservative Evangelicals as opposed to the Fundamentalists. Graham
Scroggie, Minister of Charlotte Baptist Chapel, Edinburgh, was at pains to
differentiate between the two. Apart from Modernists and the worldly, he
argued, Christians could be divided into Fundamentalists and another class who,
though sympathising with Fundamentalists, would not accept the label or
‘contend for truth at the expense of charity’.356 These, the moderate
conservatives in the Evangelical range of opinion, included Scroggie and many
others who would not reject biblical criticism out of hand. J.Russell Howden,
one of the numerous Anglican clergymen in this category, used to distinguish
between the right and the wrong kinds of criticism.357 Likewise the Wesleyan
Samuel Chadwick, guardian of the Methodist holiness tradition, believed that
biblical criticism could not be ignored.358 Several of these men—Stuart
Holden, F.B.Meyer, Campbell Morgan and Scroggie himself—visited America
and returned deploring the damage done to the gospel by raging
Fundamentalism.359 Scroggie insisted that premillennialism, although a tenet
he embraced himself, should never become a condition of fellowship in Britain
and thought the Apostles’ Creed a sufficient declaration of orthodoxy.360
Whereas in America the premillennial hope was the rallying cry of the
Fundamentalists associated with the Bible Institutes, Principal McIntyre of the
only fully fledged Bible Institute in Britain (in Glasgow) was not himself a
committed premillennialist and, accordingly, his college lost favour with
extremists.361 When The Life of Faith wished to resist the tide of liberalism,
its answer was not vituperation but a weekly Bible School article contributed
by McIntyre.362 Of McIntyre it was later complained, ‘We could never get him
to denounce any one’.363
Most tellingly, the moderate conservatives struck at the power base of the
militants, the Bible League. Its ex-secretary and editor, A.H.Carter, came back
from the United States in 1923 breathing fire and brimstone, determined to
imitate the tactics of American Fundamentalists.364 The moderates pre-empted
a fresh Bible League campaign by backing a new Fraternal Union for Bible
Testimony. The committee, it was announced, felt strongly that ‘it is futile to
engage in mere declamation and denunciation, and that error can only be
effectively countered by an intelligent and positivepresentation of the
Evangelical position’.365 Annual Albert Hall rallies were supplemented by
meetings up and down the country. Their organiser, a young Baptist minister
named C.T.Cook, deplored the ‘poisonous cloud of suspicion’ emitted by
irresponsible opponents of liberal theology.366 The out-flanked Bible League
vainly pointed to its thirty years of experience in the field, and Carter, on
another visit to the United States, contented himself with lashing the
Fraternal Union as open to Modernists.367 The manoeuvre was decisive for the
future course of Evangelicalism in Britain: moderates, not Fundamentalists,
henceforward held the initiative on the conservative wing.
222 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

THE ANATOMY OF CONSERVATIVE

EVANGELICALISM
What was the strength of conservative Evangelicalism? Snippets of local news
reveal that enthusiasts could gather audiences in many parts of England. An
interdenominational committee in Manchester held a convention on ‘The
Fundamentals of Bible Truth’; a similar convention was held at Uttoxeter,
although all its attenders were contained in a garden; at Kingston upon
Thames for sixteen days a local pastor conducted a campaign that began with a
parade of scripture text carriers through the market square; Walworth Road
Baptist Church in London held daily prayer meetings under the banner of the
Sound Gospel Movement; and a Liverpool and Merseyside Fundamentals
Fellowship held meetings in the 1930s.368 Yet many of the attenders of these
gatherings probably had only the haziest notions of whether their faith
demanded vocal defence. A better gauge of commitment is the support for the
various societies. The Advent Testimony Movement published a useful
breakdown of its 1,103 members in September 1919, rather under two years
from its inception; of these, 395 were male, 708 female. Two were bishops, 132
other clergy and ministers, and eighteen were military and naval officers; 367
lived in Greater London and 234 in the Home Counties, which together
account for more than half the members.369 The south coast resorts, perhaps
Britain’s Bible belt, contributed a particularly large number of supporters.370
Membership figures were given for the last time in December 1922—possibly
because afterwards they fell—as 2,361.371 The impression is of a small band of
the well-to-do pursuing a good cause. Another body, the Fellowship of
Evangelical Churchmen, had about 700 members in 1922 and 1,400 in 1934. In
1924 about ninety assembled for its annual conference.372 Its supporters felt
themselves to be isolated figures.
Neither Advent Testimony nor the FEC, however, were solidly
Fundamentalist bodies, for both attracted numbers of the more moderate
conservatives. The three most Fundamentalist organisations, enjoying mutual
recognition, were the Bible League, the Wesley Bible Union and the Baptist
Bible Union. Membership figures are available for none of them. At its height,
in 1923–4, the Bible League was holding 330 meetings a year, but that gives
little indication of committed support.373 The Wesley Bible Union could
muster only ten or twelve backers for its heresy hunts in the Wesleyan
Conference. Although it reported the addition of 1,600 new members during
1930, its strength before that was not large and many of its supporters were
elderly.374 When the Believers’ Bible Union, as the Baptist Bible Union had
become, was wound up in 1928, a mere 130 subscribers to its magazine
transferred, as recommended, to the Wesley Bible Union.375 It seems clear
that organised Fundamentalism in Britain was a weak force.
Financial stringency was both cause and effect of low membership. The
collections at Advent Testimony monthly meetings, it was announced by
 WALKING APART 223

Meyer in 1921, did not cover the costs. ‘As believers in the Second Advent’, he
commented, ‘they could not, of course, get into debt.’376 Mountain’s wife paid
off the losses on the Believers’ Bible Union Bible Call in its latter years, and
Prebendary Fox enjoyed private means that may well have been channelled
into the Bible League.377 The Wesley Bible Union received a meagre regular
income in 1917–18 and 1918–19: £258 and £382 respectively.378 For a special
venture the Union was able to secure promises of £1,000 and £500 from two
members of the committee, one of them probably the wealthy businessman
and ex-MP R.W.Perks.379 This venture, however, was not pursued, and
substantial sums were hard for any organisation to come by. Sometimes they
came with strings attached. For example, £100 was given to the London City
Mission to pay for evangelists on condition that they would proclaim ‘Advent
Truth and Testimony’.380 The largest donor to Fundamentalist funds may well
have been John Bolton, a Leicester manufacturer of children’s wear whose
advertisements for ‘Chilprufe’ studded the Evangelical press. His giving was
the mainstay of the Baptist Bible Union and it is significant that he was
invited to join the committee of the Wesley Bible Union at a time when it was
looking for fresh injections of funds.381 Noting the large gifts made to
Fundamentalism in America, Morton complained in 1926 that the great need
in England was money.382 He was right: the contrast in this area goes a long way
towards explaining the different trajectories of the Evangelical communities in
the two countries. In Britain the extremists were starved of funds.
The conservatives, whether Fundamentalist or moderate, put their energies
into a host of causes. The various faith missions provided an outlet for
separatist tendencies without disturbing the peace of the existing
denominations. Bodies imitating Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission
(1865) had multiplied. Missionaries were despatched without guaranteed
stipends, relying in faith on the generosity of the Christian public. Grattan
Guinness’s Regions Beyond Missionary Union (1872) was followed by the
Egypt General Mission (1897), the Sudan United Mission (1903), the
Evangelical Union of South America (1911) and many others.383
Undenominational missionary colleges sprang up to serve them, such as All
Nations and Ridgelands. Other Bible colleges, primarily equipping Christians
for service at home, also emerged, often ephemerally. One of the permanent
institutions was the Bible College of Wales (1924), ‘founded on faith and
carried on by faith’.384 There were also conference centres, like Slavanka,
opened in Bournemouth in 1921 in connection with the Russian Missionary
Society, which was to be the scene of many gatherings of keen Evangelicals.385
Other causes channelled their enthusiasms. There was the British Israel
Movement, convinced that the ten lost tribes of Israel were to be identified
with the Anglo-Saxon race. The esoteric ‘science’ of pyramidology was a
fascinating occupation for leisure hours. It was supposed that the Great Pyramid
of Egypt, built as it was by Hebrew slave labour, incorporated in its dimensions
a prediction of the fortunes of the British Empire. An astonishing number of
224 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

Evangelicals gave credence to this peculiar quasireligious expression of

imperial pride. They includcd James Mountain, Dinsdale Young and the Elim
leader George Jeffreys.386 Anti-semitism also fed on the Fundamentalist
fringe. J.J.R.Armitage, a Liverpool incumbent and a British Israelite, was
particularly virulent, supporting the driving of Einstein out of Germany
because he was a Jew.387 In a few isolated cases anti-semitism actually blended
with fascism. G.H. Woods, a member of the Wesley Bible Union, was also a
Divisional Officer of the British Fascists.388 In general, however, the efforts of
the International Hebrew Christian Alliance and sympathisers with the Jewish
people minimised the growth of popular anti-semitism.389 All these causes had
the effect of turning conservative Evangelicals away from assaults on their
liberal brethren. The diversity of the Evangelical mosaic inhibited the growth
of power blocs.
If the liberals had gained the ascendancy in certain areas in the present, the
conservatives adopted a grand strategy designed to give them control of the
future. Mission to youth was a priority, often the overriding priority.
‘Concentrate on young people’, said Bishop Taylor Smith, an indefatigable
conservative platform speaker, ‘they will bring you in the biggest
dividends…‘390 There were, of course, many long-standing
youth organisations. In several cases, such as Christian Endeavour, they
trained young people already associated with the churches.391 The pressing
need was now for pioneering evangelism to the unchurched. One of the chief
organisations in the field was the Young Life Campaign begun in 1911 by
Frederick and Arthur Wood. It specialised in missions for teenagers in towns
where members of several churches co-operated. At Nottingham in 1921 there
were reports of hundreds of decisions for Christ, more than four hundred new
members and a continuing prayer fellowship with nine subsidiary district
circles left behind.392 The Children’s Special Service Mission (1867) dealt with
a younger age group, particularly through the seaside missions. Its offshoot
the Scripture Union (1897) provided daily Bible reading notes for all ages.393
Varsities and Public School Camps were another branch, catering for potential
leaders. Eric Nash, a pertinacious bachelor clergyman always known as ‘Bash’,
devoted himself to implementing his own prayer, ‘Lord, we claim the leading
public schools for your kingdom’.394 Other bodies expanded in the interwar
years: the undenominational Crusaders’ classes (1906), providing camps and
weekly Christian instruction for the children of the middle classes; the
Covenanters, a rough equivalent normally aiming for a lower social grade and
usually linked with the Brethren (1930); the Campaigners (1922), a
conservative Evangelical version of Scouting based loosely on the Scottish clan
system; and the Boys’ Life Brigade (1899), rather lcss military in ethos than
the Boys’ Brigade.395 There was dissatisfaction with other youth movements.
Why, it was asked, should the church introduce ‘the co-worship of Mars, Diana
and the fairies through the formation of Boys’ Brigades, Boy Scouts, Wolf
Cubs, Girls Guildries, Girl Guides and Brownies’?396 Organisations for the
 WALKING APART 225

young had to be single-eyed. That was true also of the Inter-Varsity

Fellowship (IVF), a body linking the university Christian Unions that will
need further attention. To win a student for Christ’, an IVF meeting was told
in 1934, ‘is to win what might be called “a keyman”.’397 That was the essence
of the moderate conservatives’ response to the defection from the truth, as
they saw it, of the liberals in the interwar period. There was little point in
denouncing their opponents. The task was to win the next generation for the
truth.

THE INTERWAR DIVERGENCE

The disagreements of the interwar period had their roots in the impact of
Romantic thought on Evangelicalism. Conservatives might appeal to the facts
of common sense and reject the theories of the liberals as speculative,398 but in
reality their views were just as much affected by Romantic currents as those
of their opponents. The liberals, on the other hand, might dismiss the ideas of
the conservatives as outmoded notions unworthy of consideration by the
educated, but the conservatives held their convictions precisely because they
were influcnced by movements of opinion within the intelligentsia over the
previous century or so. If the broadening theology and heightened
churchmanship of the progressives owed a debt to Romantic thought and taste,
the crucial beliefs in verbal inspiration, the premillennial advent and holiness
by faith held by the so-called traditionalists were of the same intellectual
provenance. The divergence, however, was not solely a consequence of
changing ideas. It also sprang from contrasting reactions to circumstances.
How should the churches respond to the growing availability of leisure
activities and social benefits and the resultant decline in churchgoing? The
liberal formula was to follow the trends of secular society, to provide
entertainments and promote reform, to insist on the relevance of the churches
to everyday life. Guy Rogers, speaking in 1933, declared ‘the Liberal
Evangelical was interested in housing, whether cinemas should be opened on
Sundays,…the perils facing the League of Nations…the establishment of a
Christian civilisation’. He rejected ‘the narrow views of the Gospel which
thought of it simply in terms of individual life’.399 Conservatives, it was true,
took some pride in holding to a narrower view of the gospel, refusing to follow
contemporary taste and being prepared to go into the wilderness for the sake of
truth. Liberals clung to the integration of Evangelical religion with society
that was the legacy of the nineteenth century; conservatives changed their
approach because they judged society to have moved too far away from
Christian values. In one sense, therefore, the liberals were traditionalists and
the conservatives were radicals. In any case, from the blend of intellectual and
practical influences there emerged alternative strategies: accommodation to
the trends of secular society or resistance to them.400
226 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

Friction between the two parties, however, was less acute than it might have
been. Fundamentalist controversies did exist in Britain, but they were storms
in a teacup when compared with the blizzards of invectivc that swept
contemporary America. Centrists helped to hold Evangelicalism together with
the arguments of institutional loyalty and Protestant defence. Moderate
conservatives, such as Russell Howden, Samuel Chadwick and Graham
Scroggie, exerted a restraining influencc. Energies were channelled into
foreign missions and youth evangelism as well as into more recondite causes.
Obsessional theories about conspiracies of Jews, Jesuits or Bolsheviks to
corrupt civilisation through the spread of picture palaces, subversive literature
and the teaching of evolution are to be found in the magazines of the
Fundamentalist bodies,401 but they were effectively marginalised. Those who
believed that charity is Laodicaean lukewarmness were not allowed to
dominate. Despite the divergence, crises were relatively few. A basic
explanation is to be found in the nature of the fissures that appeared. The
cleavage between conservatives and liberals was far from absolute. On
different issues it was at different places along the Evangelical spectrum. Few
believed in biblical inerrancy or opposed Darwinism outright, but many
adhered to holiness teaching and retreated from the political implications of the
social gospel. There was therefore a broadening continuum of Evangelical
opinion in this period, rather than a simple separation into two camps. The
denominations can usefully be located on the continuum. The Brethren,
among whom there was no thought of a liberal pressure group and no need
for a conservative one, were to be found near the Fundamentalist pole, along
with several smaller sects. The Baptists, posscssing no liberal group but having
a conservative Bible Union, came next. The Church of England’s Evangelical
party, torn between the AEGM and the FEC but also having much centrist
opinion, was in the middle. Methodism had an increasingly powerful
progressive body, the Fellowship of the Kingdom, together with a weak Bible
Union, and so stood marginally nearer the liberal pole. Congregationalism,
with no need of a liberal group and no conservative one until after the Second
World War, was closer to that point. The Presbyterians of Scotland and the
Calvinistic Methodists of Wales were perhaps near the Church of England and
Methodism. In many instances differences of opinion within the
denominations had become as important as those between them. By the
Second World War, Evangelicalism had become much more fragmented than
it had been a century before.
 [7]
The Spirit Poured Out: Springs of the
Charismatic Movement

And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit
upon all flesh (Joel 2:28)

In 1963 charismatic renewal came to Beckenham. George Forester, Vicar of St

Paul’s, and a group of parishioners received ‘the baptism of the Holy Spirit’,
started speaking in tongues and began to hold weekly fellowship meetings for
the exercise of spiritual gifts. Beckenham was one of the first cases to hit the
headlines, but elsewhere in the Church of England others had already entered
a similar experience.1 Scotland was also affected. ‘Strange new sect in Scottish
kirk’, reported the Glasgow Sunday Mail; the ‘sect’ was said to observe ‘a form
of worship bordering on the supernatural’.2 An unfamiliar phenomenon was
springing up. Speaking in tongues, the practice of glossolalia, had hitherto
been confined to the Pentecostal tradition, but now there were outbreaks
within the mainstream churches. It was not ‘inarticulate gibberish’, according
to one Methodist recipient, but ‘a beautiful flow of words’ that expressed a
sense of joyful praise.3 Speaking in tongues was the most obvious feature of a
movement that was beginning in many parts of the world during the early
1960s. It first received the label ‘charismatic’—that is, ‘of the gifts of the
Spirit’—in the United States in 1962.4 During the next quarter century it was
to become a powerful force in British Christianity.
Its impact was chiefly felt in existing churches. Although from the start
Anglo-Catholics were involved and from 1967 there was a renewal movement
in the Roman Catholic Church, many recruits came from Evangelicalism. The
first charismatic prayer meetings in the Church of England were held by an
Evangelical clergyman in Burslem. The first parish to enjoy corporate renewal
was St Mark’s, Gillingham, served by a vicar who came from the Evangelical
citadel of All Souls’, Langham Place. The main propagator of renewal in the
1960s and early 1970s was Michael Harper, a curate at All Souls’ when he
received the baptism in the Spirit in 1963.5 Renewal gained early footholds in
the Revival Fellowships of the Methodists and the Baptists.6 Harper and his
circle, the leading figures in the early stages of the movement, adopted a
strategy of permearing existing denominations and so were scrupulous to
228 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

avoid appearing to rival old structures. The Fountain Trust, set up with
Harper as general secretary in 1964 and Renewal as its magazine from the
following year, had no membership, held no regular London mcetings and
encouraged people baptised in the Spirit to retum to their own congregations.
The Trust was to close down in 1980 precisely because it had achieved great
success in implanting vigorous renewal movements in each of the main
denominations.7 The spread of renewal was nevertheless a painful business.
Tensions between the renewed and the traditionalists in particular
congregations arose frequently, especially over the conduct of worship. At one
Methodist church in the North-West, when charismatics raised their arms
during a chorus in a characteristic gesture of praise, the preacher stopped the
singing to enquire whether they wished to leave the room. Despite subsequent
discussions, the charismatics seceded from the congregation.8 In other
instances renewal triumphed and the traditionalists departed. By such
adjustments the number of denominational congregations with a charismatic
tone steadily increased.
Alongside renewal in the historic denominations there was a dimension of
the charismatic movement outside them that is coming to be called
Restorationism. Originally known as the ‘house churches’, because they met
for worship in the homes of members, many congregations soon ceased to
match their label when they outgrew private houses and so rented or bought
more substantial accommodation. Some, like the Methodist group in the
North-West, began as breakaway bodies of the charismatics who felt
unwelcome in their previous churches. Yet Restorationism antedates renewal.
Its origins have been traced to groups of independent Evangelicals, mostly
Brethren in background, whose leaders held a series of conferences in Devon
from 1958 to consider how to restore the pattern of church life found in the
New Testament.9 They were anti-denominational by conviction. Their ablest
spokesman, Arthur Wallis, set out their mature views in The Radical
Christian (1981), a denunciation of compromise with existing structures. The
axe’, he writes, ‘is laid to the root of the tree.’10 By the mid-1980s there were
several categories of Restorationists. The churches led by Bryn Jones and
based on Bradford formed probably the largcst connexion, publishing
Restoration magazine, selling Harvestime goods and running Bible Weeks
that attracted thousands from 1976. A looser connexion, with Gerald Coates
and John Noble as leaders and greater strength in the South-East, organised
festivals from 1983.11 Other connexions, sometimes included in the last
category but in fact largely separate, were based on Basingstoke, Aldershot
and elsewhere.12 There were groupings professing distinctive beliefs: churches
associated with Wally North held that the new birth differs in time from
conversion and is to be identified with baptism in the Spirit and the coming of
holiness; churches influenced by South Chard, Somerset, baptised in the name
of Jesus only.13 On the fringe of Restorationism there were other bodies such
 THE SPIRIT POURED OUT 229

as the Icthus Fellowship of South London14 that did not embrace its anti-
denominational stance. It was a fluid pattern of rapidly growing congregations.

CHARISMATIC ORIGINS
Charismatics in the Church of England, according to one of their leaders, are
best defined as those who have been influenced by classical Pentecostal
teaching and practice.15 The existing Pentecostal churches were undoubtedly a
major source of charismatic experience, David du Plessis, a South African
Pentecostalist who travelled the world propagating the baptism in the Spirit in
the older denominations, made effective ecumenical contacts in Britain from
1959 onwards.16 Speaking in tongues had spread from British Pentecostalists
to isolated individuals in other denominations during the years, and the
process seemed to be accelerating in the later 1950s.17 Several of the early
charismatics in the 1960s, including George Forester of Beckenham, received
the baptism in the Spirit through the laying on of hands by Pentecostalists.18
The Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International, an American body
founded by a Pentecostal layman to organise Christian dinner gatherings,
fostered the spread of spiritual gifts by holding a much publicised convention
in London in 1965 and by establishing chapters in many parts of the country
subsequently. David Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade (1963), an
account of his ministry as a Pentecostal pastor among New York drug addicts,
did much to show the power of the baptism in the Spirit in transforming lives.19
Restorationism drew some of its inspiration from the Apostolic Church, the
Pentecostal body that set out to imitate the full range of church offices
mentioned in the New Testament.20 The charismatic movement owed a
substantial debt to classical Pentecostalism.
Nevertheless, a gulf soon opened between the two. The Fountain Trust
never invited Pentecostalists to address its meetings for fear of being tainted
by their reputation for unwise behaviour.21 Conversely, Alfred Missen,
General Secretary of the Assemblies of God, left a Fountain Trust
international conference in 1971 early because he did not feel at one with the
participants. Pentecostalists generally were suspicious that the new movement
emphasised testimonies at the expense of Bible teaching, compromised with
the doctrinal errors of liberals and Roman Catholics and inexplicably failed to
swell their own ranks.22 Charismatics were also virtually unanimous in
denying that speaking in tongues is the indispensable first sign of baptism in
the Spirit, a position upheld by the Assemblies of God, though not by Elim.23
There was even disagreement within the new movement about whether the
breakthrough to a fresh experience of the Holy Spirit can properly be called
‘baptism’. Harper was prepared to drop the term in deference to non-
charismatics who argued that all true Christians are baptised in the Spirit.24
There was a further divergence between charismatics and Pentecostalists
about their attitude to receiving the ‘baptism’. Traditionally, Pentecostalists
230 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

had tarried for the experience with careful self-examination for moral
shortcomings. It was a sign of their rootedness in the holiness tradition.
Charismatics, by contrast, looked for a sudden sense of release rather than for
any moral transformation.25 That was symptomatic of an ethos that stressed
immediacy, the human capacity for instant heightened awareness. For all its
legacy from Pentecostalism, the charismatic movement had different cultural
affinities.
A major influence in the formation of the movement, as part of the
Pentecostal evidence has already illustrated, came from the United States.
There, an initial centre of charismatic renewal was the Episcopal church of St
Mark’s, Van Nuys, California, whose rector received the baptism of the Holy
Spirit in 1959 through two members of the congregation who had Pentecostal
contacts.26 A joumal published by the renewed Episcopalians, Trinity, stirred
interest in Britain, as did a favourable editorial in Churchman for September
1962. Passing visits in the following year by two ministers from California,
Frank Maguire, an Episcopalian, and Larry Christenson, a Lutheran, helped
establish a charismatic nucleus in London.27 Subsequently, a steady stream of
American literature and personnel did much to expand and consolidate the
British movement. The renewal of the congregation at St Margaret’s, Aspley,
in Nottingham, for instance, was brought about in 1973 through an account of
the events at Van Nuys.28 The teaching of the Restorationists was reinforced
between 1975 and 1977 by visits from Ern Baxter, one of the ‘Fort Lauderdale
Five’ who in America asserted the importance of Christians submitting to the
authority of apostolic figures.29 Most significant were the visits in 1984–6 to
England and in 1987 to Scotland by John Wimber, the author of Power
Evangelism (1985). Drawing together denominational charismatics and
Restorationists, Wimber proclaimed that signs and wonders were to be
expected as agents of church growth.30 Although a few drew back, his messagc
gave fresh impetus to the charismatic cause in Britain. Repeatedly the new
world was called in to bring vision to the old.
The charismatic movetnent was moulded most powerfully, however, by its
context. Young people of the 1960s, in Britain as in America, were turning in
large nurnbers to a counter-culture, the world of hippies and drop-outs, drugs
and flower power. ‘Make love not war’ was the slogan of the day. In most
aspects of the counter-culture, such as pop art or rock music, there was a
deliberate violation of ‘good taste’. Although in the 1970s these tendencies
were contained, they were not reversed. Rather what had been fringe concerns
became pervasive, the attitudes fof the counter-culture rapidly infiltrating the
social mainstream. The new stance was in revolt against a technocratic society
dominated by scientific rationality. The traditional, the institutional, the
bureaucratic were rejected for the sake of individual self-expression and
idealised community. Religiosity, particularly with an oriental flavour, played
its part in the revolt.31 The official report on The Charismatic Movement in
the Church of England (1981) pointed out that the rise of the counter-culture
 THE SPIRIT POURED OUT 231

and of the charismatic movement were simultaneous. It diagnosed the

movement as ‘a form of Christianised existentialism’.32 Just as the poet Allen
Ginsberg explored the Eastern way of allowing his voice to utter sounds
beyond his conscious direction, so the hallmark of the charismatic was
glossolalia—’the evangelical answer to mystical ecstasy’.33 The new ethos
formed a hospitable setting for the early days of the charismatic movement.
‘The climate of opinion’, as Harper put it, ‘was against such a movement until
the sixties.’34 In that decade renewal created a Christian version of the counter-
culture.

THE RISE OF CULTURAL MODERNISM

The cultural revolution of the 1960s was made possible by the broader
circumstances of the times. The growth of international trade in the postwar
world had created unprecedented affluence. The young, feeling that prosperity
could be taken for granted, set out on a quest for higher values. Thrown
together in the expanding institutions of higher education, they looked for
something to replace the surrounding materialism. The Vietnam War
increasingly symbolised for them the consequences of the capitalism against
which they were rebelling. A sudden upsurge of radical attitudes was to be
expected. Much of the vocabulary of revolt was supplied by the popular
Marxism of the day. The opinions of the youthful avant-garde, however, drew
their primary inspiration from deeper cultural currents. In the 1960s the ideas
generated by an innovatory elite around the turn of the century began to
impinge on a mass public. Before that decade twentieth-century novelties had
been confined in most spheres to narrow groups of cognoscenti; now there was
a rush by the rebels to embrace them as an alternative to the blended legacy of
the Enlightenment and Romanticism that dominated public taste. The
religious dimension of the counter-culture shared this genealogy. The
charismatic movement was a product of the diffusion of cultural Modernism.
It is unfortunate that the same word ‘Modernism’ is applied to two different
movements of opinion in the early twentieth century, one theological, the
other cultural. Theological Modernism, the position of Bishop Barnes, was a
desire to bring Christian doctrine up to date, an extension of theological
liberalism. Modernism as a cultural phenomenon was something much
broader, the result of a shift of sensibility as major as the transition from the
Enlightenment to Romanticism a century before.35 ‘On or about December
1910 human nature changed’, wrote Virginia Woolf, herself one of the leading
exponents of the new mood. The date, though provocatively precise, refers to
the opening of the first exhibition in London of Post-Impressionist art, one of
the chief symptoms of the transition. ‘All human relations shifted’, Virginia
Woolf went ‘—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives,
parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same
time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.’36 The consequences
232 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

for religion have been examined far less than the consequences for literature,
but it is possible to set out some of the leading characteristics of the Modernist
turn of mind. The movement was centrally concerned with self-expression. In
German-speaking lands the desire to express whatever was in the artist’s mind
led the onset of Modernism to be dubbed ‘Expressionism’, whether in the form
of Kafka’s fiction or the architecture of the Bauhaus. Expressionism believed in
giving vent to the undifferentiated mixture of thought and feeling that is the
normal content of the human mind. It entailed delving beneath the surface of
conscious reflection to explore the depths of the subconscious. Intense
introspection was followed by frank revelation, not least of sexual feelings.
The artistic movement clearly had affinities with the depth psychology of
Freud and Jung that was emerging in precisely the same years.
Modernism, furthermore, delighted in the discovery by Nietzsche, perhaps
the strongest single influence over the whole movement, of the arbitrariness of
language. There is no fixed correspondence, it was beginning to be believed,
between words and things signified. Only convention, for instance, dictates
that verbs should not be used as nouns. All meaning was called into question
and so the normal stood revealed as absurd. It was natural, therefore, for a
theatre of the absurd to develop. Likewise it was thought unnecessary for
there to be any correspondence between art and the external world. The
Bloomsbury Group, the pacesetters of Modernism in Britain, embraced a non-
representational theory of art—which is why they rejoiced over the French
Post-Impressionists. Boundaries between areas of experience were
characteristically dissolved, as in the novels of Virginia Woolf. And there was
a revolutionary temper about Modernism. It believed in defying the
customary, in shocking accepted taste, in destruction as well as in construction.
Its culmination on the Continent was the Dada movemcnt around the end of
the First World War that carried anarchy into art, which was to be a form of
absolute negation. This strain in Modernism could thrive in times of crisis,
almost relishing the economic or military downfall of existing civilisation.
Close human relations alone, many supposed, could be salvaged from the chaos.
So multi-faceted a phenomenon resists definition, but certain common themes
have been summarised: ‘a loss of faith in objective reality and in the “word”,
established language; a fascination with the unconscious; a concern with the
pressures of industrial environment and accelerating change; a desire to discover
significant artistic structure in increasing chaos’.37 From this matrix came the
innovatory attitudes that were to sway youthful minds in the sixties.

THE OXFORD GROUP

Already in the interwar period the influence of cultural Modernism on
Evangelical religion can be detected. There came to prominence in those years
a body known as the Oxford Group. Teams of ‘life-changers’, often consisting
chiefly of Oxford undergraduates, descended on a town or village urging their
 THE SPIRIT POURED OUT 233

hearers to ‘surrender’ to God. Interested individuals were drawn into groups

where there was frank admission of failures to attain the four ethical absolutes
of the movement: absolute honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. Or else
they were invited to ‘house-parties’ where more public ‘sharing’ of sins
pointed them to the change that was possible in their lives also. Adherents
were encouraged to spend ‘quiet times’ in which divine ‘guidance’ was to be
expected in the form of ‘luminous thoughts’ that should be jotted down in a
notebook.38 The animating force was Dr Frank Buchman, a Lutheran minister
from Pennsylvania, ‘tall, upright, stoutish, clean-shaven, spectacled, with that
mien of scrupulous, shampooed, and almost medical cleanness, or freshness,
which is so characteristic of the hygienic American’.39 It was he who directed
the whole operation from small beginnings at Cambridge in 1920–1 until it
made a remarkable impact on Britain in the years of deepest economic
depression in the early 1930s.
The key to understanding the Oxford Group is to see that it was an exercise
in maximum acculturation. Buchman had previously been a college evangelist
in America. As the scope of his work widened to embrace the Far East and then
Britain, he displayed a refined sensitivity to cultural variations. He was
careful, for instance, to use ‘lift’ instead of ‘elevator’ when in Britain.40 He
recommended the young men of his international teams to observe the
customs and social code of the lands they visited.41 Even theological
terminology was discarded because it formed a possible obstacle to
evangelism. Life-changing alone is important, according to a book revised by
Buchman. People needed to pass through the experience, ‘whatever their
various theological inheritance’.42 Although this undoctrinal approach
attracted suspicion from the Evangelical world,43 for a while it held great
appeal for Oxford undergraduates. In the early 1930s lunch-time meetings
drew about a hundred and fifty daily. There were scholars as well as
sportsmen. Three college chaplains gave their support.44 Outside the
university the main impact was on ‘the well-to-do, the cultured, the leisured,
and the intelligent’.45 Indeed the Group earned censure as ‘the Salvation Army
of the upper classes’.46 Buchman consciously aimed for leaders of opinion
whose change of course would guarantee media attention and so fan the flame
of the movement. He formulated a distinctive message that would attract the
elite. Consequently Buchmanism was in the vanguard of the evolution of taste.
It appealed to those who prided themselves on being up-to-date, to ‘us
moderns’.47 The Oxford Group blended Evangelicalism with the first ripples of
twentieth-century high culture. Symptoms of Modernism can be recognised in
many features of the movement.

SELF-EXPRESSION
A vein of joyfiil spontaneity ran through the whole Oxford Group. There was
no observance of the ‘proper thing’. Speakers would lean against the arm of a
234 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

chair or sit on a table.48 Meetings were scenes of ‘laughter and commonplace

speech’.49 ‘It’s such fun’, was a pet phrase.50 The ‘sharing’ that was a feature of
the movcment meant testimony or confession in public or in private. Public
sharing could appear ridiculous. At a house party a woman confessed to
having allowed herself to think, ‘Fancy Mavis coming to communion in an
orange blouse!’51 Yet to a general practitioner who identified himself with the
Group, the mischief of repression could be undone by ‘free and unreserved
self expression.’ 52 The sharing of personal sin was treated as ‘the price of
release’.53 As critics were quick to point out, personal sin was often sexual sin,
especially among young men of undergraduate age.54 The medical practitioner
reported that in an Oxford house-party sex matters had frequently been
discussed, always helpfully.55 One of Buchman’s American aides coined a
phrase that was daring for its day: ‘God-control is the best birth-control’.56
Defenders of the Group might contend that there was no preoccupation with
sex and Beverley Nichols might be disappointed at the reserve shown about
the subject,57 but the eagerness with which prudery was cast to the winds was
shocking in interwar Britain. In its unstuffiness and frankness, the Oxford
Group was an innovative agent of self-expression.
All this was clearly bound up with psychological interests. It might not be
fair, remarked two commentators, to describe Buchman as a ‘Freudian
Psychologist’, but they were inclined to think the judgement not far wide of
the truth.58 Groupers believed they were engaged in a form of therapy. One of
the Oxford chaplains who identified with the movement eulogised ‘the
pastoral side of the work, the process of deep cure, by which a sex complex is
cured, or an inferiority complex released into the perfection of love which
knows no fear’.59 The practice of mutual confession was in fact an anticipation
of the technique of group therapy that developed in the wake of the Second
World War.60 Groupers on the fringe of Buchmanism began to speak of
‘Divine Healing’, pointing out the falsity of the antithesis between soul and
body.61 Confession and reparation in at least one case led to the disappearance
of a nervous ailment.62 The magazine Groups secured for its readers the
services of a consulting psychologist.63 And there was praise for the skills of
Jesus in this field. ‘It is evident’, wrote L.Wyatt Lang, ‘from the meaning
underlying His parables that He had made careful research into psychological
processes, and was a very excellent psychologist. ‘64 The two churchmen of the
day who led the way in a rapprochement between psychology and religion,
L.W.Grensted and Leslie Weatherhead, were both enthusiasts for the Group.65
It was bound up with the rising tide of depth psychology that was a feature of
the interwar period.
The Groupist quest for divine guidance was condemned in some quarters as
another symptom of the supplanting of true religion by psychological
dabbling. Adherents might penetrate only ‘to the mysterious depths of the
subconscious mind by relaxing the watchfulness of reason’.66 Here was the
essential stricture: irrationality. God does guide, argued Bishop Knox, but
 THE SPIRIT POURED OUT 235

there is a need to test for false guidance by using our minds.67 The Group on
the other hand advocated the suspension of rational processes during the quiet
time to ensure ‘our absolute negation’ to everything but the will of God.68 It
was a sign of the Group’s participation in the general trend in European
thought to downgrade reason, to diminish the claims of critical reflection.69
Truth was perceived in moments of disclosure as self-validating as those in
Proust, The age of miracles is still with us’, announces the authoritative
statement of Oxford Group mcthods in the section on ‘Guidance’.70 Hensley
Henson, Bishop of Durham, made the same point in censuring the Group. ‘lt
seeks the proofs of divine action’, he wrote, ‘in what is abnormal, amazing,
even miraculous.’71 Reason could be transcended by direct contact with God.
The appeal of the idea in the early 1930s was an indication of a spreading
attitude in twentieth-century civilisation.

COMMUNITY AND LIFESTYLE

‘The first thing that struck me’, wrote the Bishop of Calcutta about his initial
experience of a house-party, ‘was the wonderful spirit of fellowship which
characterised the Group…’72 It was the camaraderie which, as Grensted
observed, made the movement particularly beneficial to solitary clergy and
which, as others observed, attracted lonely students including isolated Rhodes
scholars from the dominions.73 A distinctive patois bound the Group together.
To detractors it was all too closely related to current American slang.74 Others
noted Buchman’s tendency to coin maxims like ‘revival which continues in
survival’ and ‘sin blinds, sin binds’, reminiscent of American advertising
technique but also of the habit common among Modernist artists of putting
their programmes into slogans.75 Buchmanite usage in everyday language is
best caught by the fictional account of the movement in John Moore’s
Brensham Village, where the new Grouper rector uses expressions like
‘scrumptious’, ‘ripping’, and ‘awfully jolly’. In this context first names were
de rigueur. ‘The Groupers’, comments Moore, ’…would have addressed the
Holy Apostles themselves by their Christian names, or rather they would
have abbreviated them and called Saint Peter Pete.’76 So much help could be
drawn frotn their tight-knit house groups that there were frequent complaints
that Groupers neglected to attend regular church activities.77 Commentators
were right to discern in Group solidarity a reaction against individualism,
although they were divided into those who praised (like Grensted) and those
who deplored (like Henson).78 J.H.Oldham, Secretary of the International
Missionary Council, saw the Groupers as achieving ‘life in community’. ‘May
it not be’, he asked, ‘that they are rediscovering the truth that the meaning of
life is found in relations between persons?’79 It was only with the Bloomsbury
Group that this view became a commonplace in England. For Buchman’s
movement to represent the same principle was to align itself with a
fundamental assumption of progressive thought in its day.
236 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

There was a certain holy worldliness about members of the Oxford Group.
It is false, argued an editorial in Groups, to contrast the sacred and the secular.
Religion is not ‘a separate compartment of life’, distinct from ordinary
experience. On the contrary, Christianity is ‘a way of living life’, so that God
approves of ‘washing steps or keeping ledgers’ as much as religious work. 80
‘Absolute Honesty in business’, explained a Group manual, ‘means our being
level, our playing the game of business as cleanly as we would play any other
game.’ 81 Religion was to be embodied in every human activity, injecting a
strong dose of happiness. Leisure was there to be enjoyed. There were
grumbles about immodesty when a girl Grouper took a sun-bathe, and a
rector reported sternly that the pleasure-loving Groupers desecrated the
Lord’s Day by country rambles and seaside trips at the weekend.82 Smoking,
like drinking, bridge and make-up, was rare in the Group. At a house-party of
some five hundred, only three or four smoked.83 Yet Groupers insisted that such
matters of personal behaviour were left to the individual conscience, or, as
they preferred to say, to guidance. The absence of rigid codes of prohibition is
best illustrated by the Group’s favourable attitude to that old Evangelical
bugbear, the theatre. A girl of about twenty with a Fundamentalist mother
who disapproved of theatres entered the movemcnt. Far from abandoning
theatre-going, the girl leamed from the Group merely how to agree to differ
with her mother.84 By the 1936 national assembly, the Group was itself
mounting a sketch, a minor anticipation of the movemcnt’s postwar purchase
of the Westminster Theatre in order to put on uplifting productions.85 Art could
be God-controlled. In any and every sphere the changed life should reveal
itself. By contrast with the conservative Evangelicals of their day, the
Groupers did not believe in withdrawal. Far from shrinking from the world,
they were out to conquer it.

ORGANISATION AND AUTHORITY

Groupism was a nebulous phenomenon. Membership was undefined by card or
ceremony. A puzzled judge investigating whether the Group was a legal entity
that could receive legacies enquired whether anything happened when a
person joined. ‘No’, replied the ingenious counsel for Buchman, ‘I think it is
as invisible as joining the Church of England.86 The judge went on to hold that
the Oxford Group was so lacking in organisation that in law it did not exist.87
The same unstructured style was reflected in the Group’s worship, or lack of
it. A Methodist was struck by the absence of hymns at a London rally.88 When
Buchman conducted a Sunday morning meeting during a house-party to
replace a church service, it would consist of only a quiet time and a Bible
reading, with possibly a short prayer and a verse of a hymn.89 An anti-
ecclesiastical note crept into the movement’s thinking. By contrast with the
Group, the church seemed ‘stale’.90 Dwelling on this aspect of the movement,
Hensley Henson insisted that, since the Group provided for all the spiritual
 THE SPIRIT POURED OUT 237

needs of its members, other systems were superfluous and would naturally be
abandoned. A sectarian logic was at work.91 Buchman’s aim, however, was
permeation, not replacement. Groupers avoided holding meetings in church
hours, encouraged participation in the sacraments of members’ own churches
and contended that they were not intending to supplant existing
denominations.92 ‘Our only organisation’, declared Buchman, ‘is the
Church.’93 But that stance, while somewhat reassuring to existing churches,
was itself anti-institutional. Ecclesiastical structures were matters of profound
indifference. Planned activity for any purpose other than life-changing,
whether rcgistering members, observing worship or launching a church, was
superfluous. The anti-organisational temper so marked among the Bohemian
creators of Modernist art reappeared in the Oxford Group. It discarded the
prayer and praise, kneeling and standing, of normal religious meetings,
according to an apologist, ‘in line with the present age’,94
So protean was the movement that it had to be held together by firm
discipline. Henson was disgusted with ‘the oracular despotism of “Frank”’.95
Although Buchman often effaced himself at public meetings, he kept the
whole Group on a tight rein. ‘When guided’, and the qualification is
important, ‘he would leave the leadership to another.’96 In order to counter
the charge that guidance was arbitrary, but also in order to control the
movement, Buchman taught that guidance must be ‘checked’ with others—
perhaps with a local group, but if necessary with the ‘Inner Group’. How this
mechanism operated is clear from occasions when it broke down. Methodist
Groupers who undertook campaigns on their own initiative received
correspondence from the leadership containing the repeated phrase ‘You have
not checked your guidance with us’. Dismayed by this ‘new infallibility’, they
dropped the word ‘Oxford’ and developed their work as simple ‘Groupers’.97
Parallels began to be drawn between the Oxford Group and the Continental
dictatorships.98 Some substance was lent to the charge by the presence of two
Nazi Groupers at the 1933 Oxford house-party, a visit by Buchman to the
Berlin Olympics in 1936 and the change of direction in the movement from the
mid-30s.99 Buchman started to pay more attention to Continental Europe and
national flags were carried at Groupist rallies.100 The atmosphere became
highly militaristic. ‘After a silent period of communion’, during the 1936
national assembly at Castle Bromwich, ‘bugles were sounded and drums
beaten as 1,000 young men marched to the front followed by a contingent of
girls.’101 Something verging on a personality cult was grafted on to the
movement, with Buchman being installed in ‘the world centre’ at 45 Berkely
Square, London, and internarional broadcasts by the leader.102 The ethos had
been transformed even before, in May 1938, Buchman announced the slogan
that was to supersede ‘Oxford Group’ as the movernent’s title: ‘Moral Re-
Armament’.103 In the postwar world, up to and beyond Buchman’s death in
1961, it was to continue in its much more politicised form, but in Britain it
would never repeat its impact of the early 1930s. For a while this strange
238 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

chameleon-like body had matched its environment with remarkable success. It

had led the way in absorbing elements of Modernist culture into the
Evangelical bloodstream.

THE CHARISMATIC STYLE

The next radically new variant of Evangelical religion to strike Britain
appeared in the 1960s in the form of charismatic renewal. It showed no
particular awareness of a lineage deriving from the Oxford Group, but
affinities were nevertheless substantial. The charismatic stress on the role of
the Holy Spirit, for example, had been anticipated by the Group. At a
houseparty in 1934, an observer commented, ‘the work of the Third Person of
the Trinity received particular emphasis’.104 ‘One feels’, declared a Groupist
clergyman, ‘the breath of the Spirit sweeping through the meetings,
cleansing, convicting, empowering…’105 The movement seemed in 1931 a
channel for ‘a fresh baptism of the Spirit’.106 Nor did resemblances end there,
for, as will appear, most of the chief characteristics of the Group that reflected
the Modernist idiom were to resurface in the renewal movement. It was not a
matter of continuity of personnel. Although Cuthbert Bardsley, a full-rime
Grouper in the 1930s, gave encouragement to charismatic activities as Bishop
of Coventry in the 1970s, he was exceptional in spanning the chronological
gulf between the popularity of the two movements.107 Because both appealed
particularly to the young, there was a gap of more than a generation between
their chief constituencies. There seems to have been no direct transmission of
influence from the one to the other. The explanation for the similarity is
rather that each movement was closely adapted to its milieu. Although the
cultural setting of the 1960s differed sharply from that of the 1930s, the
relevant change during the intervening years was that an avant-garde outlook
confined before the war to a small number had created by the 1960s an
extensive counter-culture. The ideas of the few had reached a mass audience,
even if in the 1960s it was a youthful minority. The attitudes that clustered
round Expressionism early in the century had by the sixties become an
‘Expressive Revolution’.108 The Oxford Group was an accommodation of
Evangelicalism to the first, the charismatic movement a comparable
accommodation to the second.
The new style was obvious in worship. ‘One of the clearest marks of a true
outpouring of the Spirit’, according to Harper, ‘is the free and spontaneous
worship which those affected offer to God, sometimes for hours on end.’109
Vibrant music, usually played on guitars, repeated choruses, openness to
interruption by worshippers praying, prophesying, speaking in tongues or
interpreting, and sheer length were typical of the charismatic idiom. Loud
celebration was normally varied by ‘periods of deep, soaring silence’ or ‘quiet
verses of commitment’.110 There was a wealth of new songs, many of the
earlier ones being collected in Sound of Living Waters (1974) and Fresh
 THE SPIRIT POURED OUT 239

Sounds (1976). Perhaps the most characteristic feature was the use of the body
in worship. The hands’, it was said, ‘as well as the lips can be so expressive—as
they are raised or clapped…,’111 The lifting of hands in adoration became the
party badge of those affected by renewal, but hands could also be laid on other
worshippers in prayer, arms could be linked for corporate singing, hugs could
show affection and feet could tap. The London leaders of emergent
Restorationism were asked to leave their regular meeting place because of
noise and threatened damage to the floorboards through exuberant leaping
and dancing.112 Headlines were attracted when, at the final eucharist of a pre-
Lambeth charismatic conference in 1978, ‘25 Anglican bishops led a dance
round the communion table half-way up the steps at the east end of the choir
in Canterbury Cathedral’.113 The Oxford Group had delighted in spontaneity,
but, in a liturgically unbending era, had never ventured to carry it over into
public worship. In the more flexible 1960s and 1970s, the charismatic
movement dissolved the familiar contours of church services wherever it
appeared. For charismatics worship was expressive, not functional.114 They
wished to lay bare what they felt for God, and so recovered what had long
been deficient in the Evangelical tradition, the priority of praise. It was a
Christian version of ‘doing your own thing’, a principle near the heart of the
expressive revolution.
The practice of healing, which charismatics saw as a gift of the Spirit,
reveals further affinities with contemporary secular culture. Interest in divine
healing, already fairly widespread, was the avenue for several pioneers into
the charismatic movement.115 Renewal meetings, like one at St Paul’s,
Hainault, in 1974, would sometimes concentrate on therapy. A reporter
described the queue stretching forward to where three clergy offered prayer.
‘A number prayed for keel over backwards. Well-positioned experienced
stewards ease them gently to the floor, where some lie prostrate for five or ten
minutes.’116 Although physical healing was often sought and sometimes
evidently received, ‘inner healing’ was often the focus of attention. This could
sometimes mean deliverance from demonic influence, and certain renewed
churches specialised in exorcism.117 More often it meant prayer counselling of
individuals or else mutual confession reminiscent of the Oxford Group.118 At
Canford Magna Parish Church a team of thirty was set aside as counsellors; the
Crusade for World Revival (1964) launched The Christian Counsellor’s
Journal; and institutions sprang up such as Briercliffe House, Lancashire, ‘a
home which seeks to minister the wholeness of the Lord Jesus Christ to those
who are in need of prayer, Christian love, healing of mind, body or spirit’.119
There was much preoccupation with ‘release from tension and inhibitions’, the
‘shadow side of one’s personality’ and the ‘collective unconscious of the
human racial mind’.120 Taking people deeper and deeper into ‘psychological
healing’, admitted Harper, sometimes diverted the movement from
evangelism. 121 It is clear that renewal was permeated by the assumptions of
240 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

depth psychology, especially of the Jungian variety. It was part of a spreading

tendency in later twentieth-century Britain.

INSIGHT AND EXPERIENCE

Insight was often exalted by charismatics against reason. The finest education,
according to Harper, must yield to ‘the utterance of wisdom or knowledge’
that brings spiritual perception, ‘a flash of inspiration’.122 Just like Groupers,
members of the new movcment believed in direct messages from God. A
Solihull house church was customarily exhorted to ‘listen to what God is
saying’.123 A charismatic, it has been observed, will ‘often confidently assert
that “God told me”’.124 Prophecy, according to the charismatic understanding,
is a result of listening for the voice of God.125 The transcendence of the
rational, so scandalous to church leaders in the 1930s, was once more
condemned by opponents Does ‘the true and living God ever deal with his
people in ways that deliberately bypass their minds?’, demanded a stern
Reformed critic of the movement.126 Charismatics were in no doubt that he
does. There had long been, according to a leading Baptist adherent, an
‘unbalanced emphasis on the intellect and the ability of human reason’.127 The
rationalist bias, Harper asserted, could be traced back to Aquinas, and through
him to Aristotle. Aquinas spent his life showing that man has no direct
contact with immaterial reality. It was reassuring, however, that ‘Aquinas did
have an overwhelming experience of God just before his death, which upset
most of his theories’.128 The Eastern church had avoided this bane of Western
Christendom. The former has allowed much more scope for the Holy Spirit
and His more direct ways of inspiration’, wrote Harper, ‘whereas the latter
has emphasised reason and logic.’ 129 Light could come from the East. The
exaltation of the non-rational was of a piece with the desire for intensified
perception that emerged in the sixties.
Experience was likewise elevated above theology in the charismatic scale of
values. When asked at an Evangelical theological college what renewal was
about, Harper replied, ‘It’s about an experience of God’.130 Theology of itself,
he once wrote, ‘does not provide strength. Bad theology can be more harmful
than no theology at all.’131 One charismatic who did ably undertake the
theological enterprise was the Scot Thomas Smail, Harper’s successor as
Director of the Fountain Trust in 1975 and author of Reflected Glory (1975).
Yet Smail illustrates the point. After four years in office he resigned to
become a lecturer in doctrine132 and eventually, disenchanted with the froth of
the movement, he was to move outside renewal circles entirely. The stress on
experience’, Harper admitted, ‘will not please some. It may be thought too
subjective’.133 That was the main burden of conservative Evangelical criticism,
resulting in sharp polarisation during the 1960s.134 Some kept up the barrage
in the 1980s. Unconcern with theology, it was suggested, led to toleration of
error: ‘modernists and Roman Catholics are drawn in and do not cease to be
 THE SPIRIT POURED OUT 241

modernists and Roman Catholics’.135 Doctrinal diversity, as in the Oxford

Group, had the function of ensuring that the movement was inclusive.
Renewal could justly claim to be a unifying force among the churches. But
avoidance of theological rigidity was more than a chosen policy. It was of the
essence of the movement. Renewal, according to Harper in 1971, ‘has no great
theologians. Its teaching is varied and unsystematic’.136 Dialogue with
traditional Evangelicals later made Anglican charismatics wary of exalting the
emotions at the expense of the intellect, but Restorationists continued to
expect doctrine to be in perpetual flux as God revealed fresh themes.137 Like
the experience-oriented generation of the sixties as a whole, there was a
tendency for charismatics to erect ideological fluidity into a virtue.

COMMUNITY AND CREATIVITY

Community became a watchword of the movement. Experience of the Spirit
brought people together. Harper had previously seen the church as ‘a
collection of individuals…A religious club, if you like’, but he came to
recognise it as ‘a living thing, an organism’.138 David Watson, a powerful
evangelist whose church at St Michael-le-Belfrey, York, became the showpiece
of Anglican renewal, set out an influential communitarian vision in I Believe
in the Church (1978). A high level of commitment to other church members
was expected. It was common for adherents of renewed congregations to move
house in order to be nearer the place of worship and each other.139 Dinners,
parties, picnics, away-days, weekends and church holidays fostered solidarity. 140
House groups for mutual care and evangelism became characteristic, forming
another parallel with the Oxford Group.141 And holism found expression in
the creation of communities. Families would band together, as in the Post
Green Community begun in 1975 in the home of Sir Thomas and Lady Lees
at Lytchett Minster in Dorset.142 A south coast Baptist church established
Hunter’s Moon, a home where six ladies of all ages could live communally;
and the Sisters of the Jesus Way, a Methodist group, held their property in
common.143 Part of the motive for the communitarian approach was a desire to
resist the pressures of a secularising society, and in particular to buttress
Christian family life.144 But it also reflected the paramountcy of personal
relationships that the movement shared with Bloomsbury and the radicals of
the 1960s. ‘Everywhere’, according to a minister of an Exeter house church,
‘everything is based on relationships.’145 Charismatics were aiming for the
characteristic goal of the sixties counter-culture: ‘purified community’.146
The new movement, rejoicing in its spiritual freedom, broke with many a
shibboleth. Harper rejected the rigidity of what he called ‘the evangelical code
of behaviour’.147 Wall is denounced sabbatarianism.148 Members of a house
church scandalised the Christian people of Aberdare by buying ice cream on
Sunday, reading the Sunday newspaper and drinking wine at dinner.149 Gerald
Coates paraded his love of the cinema, the theatre and pop music, openly
242 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

discussed masturbation and wore a canary yellow suit. His meetings at

Cobham were dismissed as ‘just religious show biz’.150 The whole movement
released a surge of creativity that included making banners, designing
graphics, writing songs, playing instruments, moulding pottery and
performing sacred dance.151 Craft and coffee shops became a charismatic
cottage industry.152 Technical skills found an outlet in operating grand public
address systems and the humble overhead projectors that permitted
congregations to worship unencumbered with hymn books.153 Drama, far from
being condemned, was harnessed to Christian purposes, with acted
presentations in worship, mime in the streets and evangelistic puppet shows.
David Watson’s congregation generated a full-time theatre company, Riding
Lights.154 There was an extraordinarily un Evangelical delight in symbol—‘a
love of oil, candles, crosses etc.’155 The resulting artistic efflorescence was very
reasonably labelled ‘inchoate sacramentality’.156 ‘Verbal communication’, a
charismatic folk arts handbook declared, is ‘clumsy and wearying’.157
Although the disintegration of the Protestant tradition embodied in such a
comment was real enough, the prirnary influence at work was not Catholicism.
Rather the uninhibited exuberance, the penchant for the arts and the
downgrading of the verbal all bear the stamp of Modernism.

STRUCTURE AND AUTHORITY

There was an anti-structural bias among charismatics. They reject altogether’,
declared Harper, ‘the concept of the Church as an institution.’158 New
Testament structure, Wallis believed, was not about organisation but about
people. Denominations are contrary to the divine will and worst of all is the
‘religious hotchpotch’ of the World Council of Churches.159
‘Denominationalism’, Coates roundly announced, ‘is sin!’160 Even churches in
historic denominations found that ties with unrenewed congregations
slackened.161 Within the charismatic world informality reigned. As among
Groupers, first names were standard: Lady Lees and her husband Sir Thomas,
a member of the General Synod, became ‘Faith and Tom’.162 What was
sometimes styled ‘holy mirth’ punctuated their meetings. God was saying,
explained Wallis, ‘Let laughter return’.163 ‘Let’s chat a prophecy’, was the
approach of another Restorationist leader.164 Early Fountain Trust conferences
were largely unstructured. ‘We have always found’, wrote Harper, ‘that when
we have not organised, the Holy Spirit has worked more freely.’ Shortly after
his initial experience of the Spirit, Harper dropped the careful planning of
sermons and a giant file of matters pending disappeared into the waste-paper
basket.165 People had to be flexible in the King’s Church, Aldershot, ‘since
constant change is here to stay in our church’.166 The ultimate rationale was
that ‘God is never stationary’.167 Like so many radicals of the period,
charismatics believed in dispensing with landmarks.
 THE SPIRIT POURED OUT 243

The fluidity of charismatic proceedings made it essenrial for leaders to impose

discipline. A person who supposed himself to be prophesying but was in fact
venting his own feelings would be instructed to sit down.168 As leadership
became more demanding, ministry teams emerged. Elders were commonly
appointed in renewed Anglican, Methodist and Baptist congregations to
provide kindly but firm pastoral guidance.169 Harvestime churches regularly
possessed a collective leadership.170 Division arose within charismatic circles,
however, over the role of apostles, that is, travelling teachers with ‘translocal’
responsibilities. Although contemporary figures might in certain respects
exercise apostolic functions, stated the leading Evangelical Anglican
charismatics, ‘the apostles have no successors’.171 The Restorationists around
Bryn Jones, on the other hand, came to believe in the mid-1970s that today’s
apostles possess an authority to which elders of local churches should submit.
From American teachers they learned that there is a ‘structure of authority
directly from the throne of God’, passing down through apostles to elders and
ultimately to ordinary believers.172 Ron Trudinger of Basingstoke expressed a
full-blooded version of this theory in Built to Last (1982). Denominational
charismatics and many in the less tightly organiscd house churches were
alarmed by the abrogation of Christian freedom entailed by the new
‘shepherding principles’, and cases of the abuse of power soon came to light.173
A branch of Restorationism was becoming as authoritarian as the Oxford
Group. Both, while denying legitimacy to existing Christian institutions in the
growing spirit of the twentieth century, erected rigid structures of authority
of their own.

SUPPORT FOR THE CHARISMATIC MOVEMENT

The social composition of the whole charismatic movement also resembled that
of Buchmanism. Charismatics were overwhelmingly young and drawn from
the middle classes. St Margaret’s at Aspley in Nottingham, for example, which
before renewal had few worshippers in the 18–50 age range, afterwards
reflected far more closely the age structure of its parish because it drew in
younger adults.174 Restorationists were predominantly young, the first large
wave of recruits to the house churches in the early 1970s having been mostly
in their early twenties—the teenagers of the 1960s.175 St Michael-le-Belfrey
in York, it was reported, had a high turnover in its congregation because it
‘tends to attract those who are in professions which move them on every few
years’.176 Likewise the arrival of a charismatic vicar in a rural parish in the
Home Counties filled the church with commuters.177 Restorationism also
attracted small businessmen, civil servants, doctors, nurses, solicitors and
accountants in abundance. Elders were commonly graduates, and Bryn Jones’s
church at Bradford included four holders of PhDs.178 The contrast with
Pentecostalism is total. In the 1950s Elim contained virtually no professionals,
in fact few but working-class adherents.179 ‘While the sociological roots of the
244 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

healthy movements of the Spirit in the past have been among the masses’,
admitted a leading Baptist charismatic, ‘this is not so today…it appears we are
largely a middle-class movement…’180 The appeal was predominantly to the
educated young—to those most affected by the new cultural currents flowing
from the 1960s onwards.
The pattem of geographical spread was closely related to the social
composition of the movement. Where young professionals were most
numerous, on the outer rim of London and in the adjacent Home Counties,
charismatics were thickest on the ground. Renewed congregations were also
common on the edge of other cities. In the early stages up to 1965, the
movement was strong relative to population in South-West England and there
were smatterings in the Midlands, Yorkshire and Scotland, but the North-
East, the North-West and Wales were hardly affected.181 The North of
England was still regarded as bleak territory twenty years later.182 Most
denominations were significantly affected by the new religious climate. By
1965 more than a hundred ministers were claimed to have received the
baptism in the Spirit.183 In 1979 it was estimated that 10 per cent of Anglican
clergy, and a rather smaller proportion of the laity, had entered the
experience.184 Promise for the future was guaranteed by the multiplication of
diocesan renewal conferences from 1982 and the increase of charismatic
ordinands—composing some 80 per cent of those in training at St John’s
College, Nottingham, by 1978.185 Richard Hare, the Bishop Suffragan of
Pontefract, an adherent from 1973, was for a long time the only episcopal
charismatic, but in 1986 Michael Whinney, Bishop of Southwell, became an
adviser to the Anglican Renewal Movement, and in the following year George
Carey, already a charismatic, was consecrated Bishop of Bath and Wells.186
The Methodist renewal magazine Dunamis published 6,000 copies by 1976,
and 250 of the recipients were ministers.187 The United Reformed Church,
created by a Congregational—Presbyterian merger in 1972, had its Group for
Evangelism and Renewal, and the Baptists, whose charismatic congregations
expanded markedly, were the most drastically affected of the Free
Churches.188 Alongside the historic denominations there was the rapid growth
of the Restorationists, who by 1985 were guessed to number about 30,000.189
The charismatic movement was poised to become the prevailing form of
Protestantism in twenty-first-century Britain.

CHARISMATICS AND EVANGELICALS

Was the movement a prolongation of the Evangelical tradition? Its impact on
Catholics, in the Roman as well as the Anglican communion, might suggest
otherwise. At Canford Magna Parish Church the charismatic element, it was
said, ‘tends to cover over the more normal divisions of Catholic and
Evangelical’.190 When John Stott publicly disavowed the movement at
Islington in 1964, charismatics were effectively distanced from the main body
 THE SPIRIT POURED OUT 245

of Evangelicals.191 Renewal could be condemned outright, especially for

divisiveness. ‘…I have marked evidence’, wrote a Cheltenham vicar, ‘that
Satan is active in and through it.’192 In 1977 Stott was still doubting whether
prophecy among charismatics was a genuine gift from God.193 In that year,
however, the publication of a report of discussions between charismatics and
non-charismatics called ‘Gospel and Spirit’ reflected a rapprochement in the
Church of England. ‘We share the same evangelical faith’, they declared; and
they recognised that the worship and spirituality of Evangelicals and
charismatics so overlapped already ‘as to be almost indistinguishable’.194 From
1979 Spring Harvest, an annual week-long training conference in evangelism,
brought together keen charismatics and non-charismatics in a way
reminiscent of Keswick in an earlier generation.195 A study of Restorationism
has located it firmly in the Evangelical Protestant tradition.196 Furthermore, as
a Scottish Roman Catholic bishop remarked, the effect of renewal on a
Catholic was usually to give him ‘something of the evangelical emphasis on
Jesus as his personal Saviour’.197 If the charismatic movement brought
Christians of different backgrounds together, it did so on a basis that was
discernibly Evangelical in appearance.
Conversion received fresh emphasis among most charismatics. ‘The
experience of the new birth’, insisted Wallis, ‘is more fundamental, more
radical than that of receiving the Spirit.’198 A Methodist office-holder
explaincd that he was not born again until his contact with the charismatic
movement.199 Although in charismatic hymnody there was some shift away
from concepts like ‘sin’ and ‘salvation’ to less abstract terms like ‘healing’ and
‘life’, an analysis has concluded that there was continuity in essentials between
Evangelical and charismatic vocabulary.200 There was a consequent accent on
activism, especially in evangelism and counselling. ‘Before this blessing’,
recalled a leader at a Bethnal Green mission, ‘the young people would not go
into the open air, but now, praise God, there is hunger for precious souls.’201
There was, admitted Harper, a risk of downgrading the Word of God in the
excitement of seeing ‘spectacular manifestations’.202 In all branches of the
movement, however, a constant appeal to scripture prevented any retreat from
biblicism. Harper also feared the removal of the death of Christ from its
central position in the thought and experience of the believer.203 It was in this
area that some movement from the earlier Evangelical consensus was
discernible, with the new life of the Christian frequently attributed to the
resurrection as well as, or even instead of, the cross. The new emphasis on the
resurrection, however, was just as evident in the non-charismatic as in the
charismatic hymnody of the 1970s.204 George Carey, writing on the atonement
in 1986, reminded charismatics that even spiritual gifts are ‘as much the gifts
of Calvary as they are of Pentecost’.205 Although crucicentrism was a little
sapped, the substance of Evangelicalism found expression in the charismatic
movement. It was altered, not superseded.
246 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

The charismatic upsurge represented another mutation in the Protestant

tradition comparable to that which created Evangelicalism in the eighteenth
century and that which modified it in the nineteenth. Once more a fresh
cultural current impinged on popular religion. This time the spread of
Modernism was behind the growth of renewal and Restorationism.
Charismatics themselves sometimes noticed the affinity. ‘When human words
seem inadequate’, wrote two Methodist adherents, ‘the Holy Spirit inspires
other, ‘seemingly unintelligible words (rather like abstract art, some may say!)
…,’206 The movement was rooted ultimately in the changed mood of the early
twentieth century that gave rise to nonrepresentational art, stream-of-
consciousness literature and a preoccupation with the non-rational in all its
forms. Many of the movement’s features had been anticipated by the Oxford
Group in the 1930s, when Buchman trimmed his sails to catch the new winds
of secular influence. He remoulded Evangelicalism to suit the preferences of an
elite already affected by the twentieth century’s revolution in taste. By the
1960s the assumptions of a mass audience in and about the youth culture were
shaped by Modernist canons. A religious movement sharing its ethos was
likely to grow, and, as the counter-culture was assimilated to the mainstream
culture during the 1970s, to become a major force in popular Christianity.
That is what happened to renewal. Charismatics succeeded where the
Groupers failed because their time had come. Both represented an adaptation
of Evangelical religion to the trends of the twentieth century.
 [8]
Into a Broad Place: Evangelical Resurgence in
the Later Twentieth Century

…out of the strait into a broad place, where there is no straitness.

(Job 36:16)

In 1967 a National Evangelical Anglican Congress was held at the University

of Keele. It was the chief landmark in a postwar Evangelical renaissance that was
gathering momentum well before the charismatic movement reinforced the
process. Numbers, morale and impact all greatly increased. The place of Keele
in the development of Evangelicalism in the Church of England has been
compared to that of the Second Vatican Council in the Roman Catholic
Church shortly before.1 Repercussions were felt among all the Evangelicals of
Britain, in the Anglican communion worldwide and in the whole of
international Protestantism. There was at the time a sense of making history.
The atmosphere’, it was reported, ‘was as exhilarating as on Derby Day.’
Youth and ability were to the fore among ‘the bright, thrusting, unsquashable
men and women…who gave this congress an unmistakable glitter.’2 At a time
when the Church of England was in institutional flux, with canon law, liturgy
and church govemment all in the melting pot, Evangelicals determined to be
involved in its remodelling. The fourth of the six sections of the resulting
Keele statement was devoted to ‘The Church and its Structures’. No longer
would other traditions be able to determine the terms of debate within the
church. There was also a declaration that Evangelical Anglicans would
participate in the church unity movement. ‘We desire’, announced the
statement, ‘to enter this ecumenical dialogue fully.’ As subsequent letters to
the press made plain, Evangelicals accepted that there was something for them
to learn through ecumenism. It was an admission that they did not possess a
monopoly of truth.3 Perhaps most important, the statement endorsed social
involvement. ‘Evangelism and compassionate service’, it said, ‘belong together
in the mission of God.’ There was a commitment to give serious attention to
the problems of society.4 No longer would Evangelicals be able to regard their
task as withdrawal from the world in the company, if possible, of other souls
to be snatched from it. A decade later the significance of Keele was summed up
as a symptom of a ‘release from the ghetto’.5
248 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

It was no more than a symptom, for the trends consolidated at Keele had
already been emerging beforehand. Ten years earlier, at the Islington Clerical
Conference of 1957, Maurice Wood as chairman pointed out that Evangelicals
were producing more ordination candidates than any other party: ‘the future
is ours’, he concluded.6 An Eclectic Society of younger Evangelical clergy
existed from 1955 as a ginger group with growing influence.7 There was a small
number of Evangelical laymen who were prepared to give rime to the Church
Assembly.8 One of their chief concerns was with church relations in the light
of ecumenical progress. Social involvement was less prominent before Keele,
but the Independent Evangelical Frederick Catherwood had already published
The Christian in Industrial Society (1964). There was a steady widening of
horizons that was sustained and accelerated after Keele. The process was
unnecessary among liberal Evangelicals, who in general had long been
committed to participation in the institutional life of their denominations, to
advocacy of church unity and to concern with social issues. Rather, it was a
broadening of the conservative Evangelical tradition. The postwar Evangelical
renaissance was in fact a movement among those of firmly orthodox belief.
Keele represents the triumph of the conservatives in the Evangelical party of
the Church of England. Its chairman, John Stott, the Rector of All Souls’,
Langham Place, in central London, could draw attention afterwards to the fact
that all its speakers were conservatives.9 Although the most striking
resurgence of the traditionalists was in the Church of England, there were
similar developments in other existing denominations and in new church
groupings. Those with attitudes to the Bible that had come to be labelled
conservative in the interwar period gained greater prominence. They were
responsible for something approaching an Evangelical Revival.
It seemed called for in the later twentieth century. However difficult it may
be to conceptualise, secularisation was a stark reality. Church membership had
been falling since the 1920s, and, although the process was arrested in the wake
of the Second World War, there was a catastrophic collapse in the 1960s.10
Adult church attendance dropped to a mere 11 per cent of the English
population by 1979, to 13 per cent of the Welsh population by 1982 and to 17
per cent of the Scottish population by 1984.11 Religion was increasingly
marginal in people’s lives. In 1966 two-thirds of marriages in England and
Wales still took place in church; by 1980, the figure was fewer than a half.12
The 1944 Education Act decreed that religious instruction and a daily act of
worship should be compulsory in state schools.13 By the 1970s both provisions
were widely ignored with itnpunity. The television and the motor car dealt a
drastic blow to Sunday School attendance in the 1950s.14 Christian practice was
ceasing to be buttressed by custom. Religious change was followed by moral
change. In the 1960s traditional moral values based on the Christian ethic
disintegrated. The pill heralded the permissive society in the field of sexual
morality. The statute book was liberalised. Homosexual practice and abortion
ceased to be crimes in 1967 and divorce by consent was permitted from 1969.15
 INTO A BROAD PLACE 249

Even if church leaders often saw reason to condone or applaud such

developments in the name of a more humane society, it was hard to disguise
the shrinking of Christianity and its influence. A demanding task faced the
churches: the turning of the religious tide.

THE RANGE OF EVANGELICAL OPINION

Four schools of thought coexisted in British Evangelicalism at the time of the
Second World War. Although they shaded into each other, the bodies of
opinion are clearly distinguishable. The liberal school, eager to welcome fresh
light from modern thought and other Christian traditions, was powerful in the
Church of England and Methodism, finding expression in the Anglican
Evangelical Group Movement (AEGM) and the Fellowship of the Kingdom.16
It was stronger in Congregationalism, weaker in the Church of Scotland and
so weak as to be virtually absent from the Baptists. A second, centrist school
tried to minimise the divide that had opened in the 1920s between liberals and
conservatives. Typically, like Max Warren, General Secretary of the Church
Missionary Society from 1942 to 1963, the centrists wished to hyphenate no
word like liberal or conservative with Evangelical.17 In the Church of England
it was also the position of men such as Bryan Green, who was prepared to
ignore differences of opinion with other Christians in his zeal for evangelism,
and Bishop Christopher Chavasse, who wished to hold Evangelicals together
for the defence of Protestantism.18 This was the prevailing stance in the
Church of Scotland and Methodism, while the influential ‘Genevan school’ of
Congregationalists led by Nathaniel Micklem, orthodox, scholarly and
liturgically minded, falls into the same category.19 Ernest Payne, subsequently
General Secretary of the Baptist Union, was one of a smaller number of
Baptists who hcld similar views.20 The liberals and the centrists together
supplied the leadership in all the denominations except the smallest.
The third body of opinion inherited its moderate conservatism from the
interwar debates. In the Church of England the bastion of conservatism,
whether moderate or otherwise, was the Fellowship of Evangelical Churchmen,
but, since the Anglican school was defined partly in terms of its liturgical
practice, the Church Pastoral Aid Society, which still made grants only to
parishes adhering to the north side position, must also be reckoned a
conservative institution.21 The Revival Fellowships of the Free Churches were
soon to rally similar opinion: the Baptist body, formed in the 1930s, gathered
strength and began annual conferences in 1954; the much smaller
Congregational and Methodist equivalents began in 1947 and 1952
respectively.22 ‘Definite’ Evangelicals, as the moderate conservatives
sometimes preferred to call themselves, also existed outside such
organisations. Equally these bodies included some who should be located in
the fourth category, the Fundamentalists. The Advent Testimony Movement
was one of several interdenominational organisations that contained a
250 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

significant number of this persuasion, but articulate Fundamentalism

remained weak in Britain. Conservatives like Stott were eager to repudiate the
label when it became a matter of public debate in the mid-1950s.23 They
themselves, however, were by no means influential, The conservatives as a
whole formed the obscurer section of a community that had been marginalised
by the Catholic drift of religious life and the secular drift of national life
during the earlier twentieth century. Despite numbering extremely powerful
preachers such as the Methodist W.E.Sangster in their ranks, in the years
around 1940 the conservative Evangelicals were probably at their nadir.24 The
remarkable resurgence symbolised by Keele demands explanation.

LIBERALS AND CENTRISTS

One factor is that the liberal impulse represented by the AEGM steadily lost
its vigour. After the war it was regretfully recalled that Vernon Storr, ‘our
master’, had died in 1940,25 and no comparable figure took his place. The
Cromer Convention, suspended in wartime, was revived in 1947 and 1948,
only to fall victim to the rising costs of the period.26 Steadily ‘a less
evangelical liberalism gained control’.27 The movement became largely
cerebral, issuing study outlines for group meetings and holding conferences.
Numbers fell away, though there were still some 1,000 clerical members in
1950 and annual conferences were still being organised in the 1960s. The
Methodist Fellowship of the Kingdom remained stronger, with about 1,800
members in 1950, and maintained more of a devotional temper.28 The Union of
Modern Free Churchmen, on the other hand, a preponderantly Congregational
body, struck out on more advanced lines of thought and kept up something of
its impetus into the 1960s.29 The decay of organised liberalism was most
marked in the Anglican body. It was partly a consequence of success. AEGM
members were elevated to ecclesiastical office—in the single year 1946 the
movement provided three diocesan bishops, one dean and at least three
archdeacons—and so had less time or enthusiasm for sectional organisations.
But it was also because its message was hardly electrifying: R.R.Williams,
later Bishop of Leicester, declared in 1947 that its first purpose was to be a
support of ‘sober, central, Anglican churchmanship’.30 In the 1950s one of its
few advantages was that the editor of The Church of England Newspaper and
the Record, formed by a merger of its two constituents in 1949, was a steady
supporter—as well as being, from 1954, secretary of the Modern
Churchmen’s Union.31 With his termination of office in 1959, the transfer of
ownership to new hands in the following year and the appointment of a
conservative as editor, liberalism lost one of its chief remaining props.32
During the 1960s liberal Evangelicalism finally dissolved into the broad
middle way of the Church of England.
Centrist Evangelicals possessed great dynamic in the later 1940s. Max
Warren masterminded a series of schemes for putting Evangelicalism more
 INTO A BROAD PLACE 251

obviously on the ecclesiastical map. In 1942 he launched the Evangelical

Fellowship for Theological Literature (EFTL), a body designed to foster serious
scholarship by younger members of the party in the Church of England.
Numbering about 200 at its peak, it was by no means simply a liberal body,
for its ranks in 1950 included conservatives such as T.C.Hammond and
J.W.Wenham. From its membership were drawn the contributors to a series
called the St Paul’s Library, the first publicarion being The Ministry of the
Word by Donald Coggan, subsequently Archbishop of Canterbury. Many
EFTL members rose to the episcopal bench or theological chairs.33 Warren was
likewise behind a conference whose papers were published under the title
Evangelicals Affirm (1948), urging the central importance of evangelism on
the bishops of the Lambeth Conference, and a team statement of the
Evangelical Anglican position, The Fulness of Christ (1950).34 Warren’s aim of
welding together Evangelicals of all shades enjoyed some success. In 1951, for
instance, it was agreed that the AEGM proctors in the Church Assembly
should join the other group of Evangelicals for united action.35 As time went
by, however, there was a tendency for EFTL members to loosen their
Evangelical moorings and sail off in a liberal direction.36 A similar process took
place in the interdenominational Student Christian Movement (SCM), which
in the 1950s successfully continued its interwar role of drawing together
speakers and students holding many types of theological opinion. In 1957 it
had more than 7,000 members. In the 1960s, however, it became increasingly
identified with radical stances and support melted away.37 Centrism was
probably most successful in Scotland, where D.P.Thomson and Tom Allan
were leaders of an effective movement of co-ordinated lay evangelism, which
began in 1947 and was known in the later 1950s as the ‘Tell Scotland’
campaign. Although the Church of Scotland took the lead, most of the other
Protestant denominations participated. In the practical work of evangelism
theological differences were ignored. Thomson, for instance, delighted in
drawing personnel from both the SCM and the Inter-Varsity Fellowship.38
Confidence in evangelistic campaigns, however, waned among the less
conservative in the Scottish churches during the 1960s. In Britain as a whole,
as the distance between the poles of theological opinion widened, the scope for
centrist enterprise declined.

A CLIMATE OF SERIOUSNESS
Circumstances favoured conservative Evangelical growth much more than in
the interwar period, The war itself was strangely beneficial. It is true, of
course, that the churches suffered losses of manpower, premises and, in many
cases, surrounding homes. On the other hand, the war generated an idealism
of hope for the future, blended with a dedication to turning the dream into
reality. The Dunkirk spirit had a spiritual dimension.39 The amazing heroism’,
wrote a contributor to The Advent Witness, ‘which has been displayed daily at
252 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

sea, on land and in the air by those in the war makes us wonder whether we
sacrifice enough for Christ in our war.’40 In the ideological conflict of wartime
and the ensuing Cold War, conservatives knew where they stood. If sin was the
enemy within, according to Alan Redpath, Minister of Duke Street Baptist
Church, Richmond, in 1953, ‘Communism was the enemy without’.41
Conviction ran deep and evangelism was in the air. In 1945 the Church of
England published Towards the Conversion of England, the report to the
Church Assembly of a commission on evangelism chaired by Bishop
Chavasse. Although little official action followed, there was at least a London
diocesan mission in 1949 42 Maurice Wood believed there had been a swing
from the prewar emphasis on pastoral work to a postwar stress on evangelism.43
During his chairmanship of the Islington Conference, from 1952 to 1961, the
theme was usually some aspect of gospel work, and conservatives came
increasingly to the fore. In 1953, when John Stott addressed Islington for the
first time, his subject was training the laity for house-to-house visitation.44 In
Scotland the same atmosphere was the backdrop to the Tom Allan campaigns,
and evangelism received a fresh fillip from the most recent spontaneous
revival movement in British history, the Hebrides Revivals of 1950 and
1952.45 The Methodists organised a series of significantly named ‘Christian
Commando Campaigns’ in the late 1940s; the Baptists sponsored an
evangelistic ‘Baptist Advance’ in 1949–51; and the Congregationalists co-
ordinated a Forward Movement in 1950–3. 46 At the Albert Hall the evangelist
Tom Rees preached to packed audiences on undenominational lines, reaching
his fiftieth rally there in 1955.47 The legacy of war was a willingness to
consider ultimate values in the population at large and a preparedness to
respond on the part of the churches.
The prevailing theological tone of the 1940s and 1950s was also more
sympathetic to conservative Evangelical preoccupations. A disappointed
Congregationalist noted in 1942 the fashion of pronouncing Christian
humanism and liberalism dead.48 The biblical theology associated with
C.H.Dodd, an attempt to think back into the minds of the biblical writers, was
uncongenial to liberals.49 So was the neo-orthodox systematic theology of
Karl Barth. Conservatives could share in its repudiation of liberal nostrums,
but that does not mean they endorsed its whole position. On the contrary, as
J.Stafford Wright, Principal of Tyndale Hall, Bristol, explained in 1957, neo-
orthodoxy seemed to them merely a ‘newer liberalism’. Although rightly
teaching an existential encounter with Christ, it was wrong in failing to base
itself on the New Testament records as written down.50 The divergence was so
sharp as to occasion a schism in the Edinburgh University Christian Union,
which came under the influence of the Barthian theology of Professor
T.F.Torrance and so was disaffiliated in 1953 by the Inter-Varsity
Fellowship.51 Neo-orthodoxy nevertheless provided a context in which
conservative Evangelical opinions were not dismissed out of hand.
 INTO A BROAD PLACE 253

The radical theology that came into vogue in the 1960s also served,
paradoxically, to strengthen the conservative position. Conservative
Evangelicals were more prepared than most to denounce what they saw as
departures from orthodoxy. Honest to God (1963), by J.A.T.Robinson, Bishop
of Woolwich, was mildly deprecated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, but
roundly dismissed by the conservative J.I.Packer as ‘a plateful of mashed-up
Tillich, fried in Bultmann and gamished with Bonhoeffer’.52 An address to the
Baptist Union assembly in 1971 by Michael Taylor, Principal of the Northern
Baptist College, in which he quesrioned the divinity of Christ, led to an
upsurge of conservative opinion that carried in the following year’s assembly
a fuller statement of belief than the Union had ever previously professed.53 The
views of Don Cupitt, Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, especially in
The Myth of God Incarnate (1975), and of David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham
from 1984, were controverted equally firmly by Evangelicals with traditional
beliefs. Conservatives gained credit for standing up for received Christian
convictions.

THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT

One of the chief developments in the world church after the Second World
War was the accelerating momentum of the unity movement. Its effects on
Evangelicals were ambiguous, but they could not avoid it. The standard
Evangelical view had been that external uniformity was unimportant and so
there were risks of being too involved in the quest for reunion.54 Students of
prophecy were positively hostile. When the World Council of Churches
(WCC) was set up in 1948, its purpose was to include all shades of thought,
according to an editorial in The Advent Witness, and it would even welcome
Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox. Hence it was ‘but a shadow of mystery
Babylon, that great apostate body typified by the great whore of Revelation
17’.55 Such attitudes were common on the Baptist fringe, racking the
denomination in Scotland during the 1950s and leading the more conservative
in England and Wales to demand the withdrawal of the Baptist Union from
the WCC during the 1960s.56 Principled opposition to ecumenical involvement
led, as we shall see, to a schism in conservative Evangelical ranks in the late
1960s.57 By 1974 disquiet had spread more widely at the interpretation by the
WCC of the gospel in socio-political terms, particularly through the fund to
combat racism,58 and subsequently the Salvation Army actually ceased to be a
full member. But the most outspoken opposition to the ecumenical trend was
aroused by the scheme for Anglican-Methodist reunion put forward in 1963.
It was to be expected that some Methodists would be unhappy, especially with
the proposal that their ministers should submit to what could be interpreted as
episcopal reordination. The validity of their earlier ministry was being
slighted. Equally intransigent, however, was the bulk of the conservative
Evangelicals in the Church of England, who objccted not only to apparent
254 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

reordination, but also to their exclusion from the commission that had drawn
up the proposals. In alliance with Anglo-Catholics they ensured that the
scheme was inadequately supported in 1969, 1971 and 1972, and so lapsed.59
Conservative Evangelicals gained a reputation for opposing the ecumenical
movemcnt.
Those in the Church of England nevertheless insisted that they were far
from being outright opponents of church unity. They wished to reunite with
the Free Churches, but only on acceptable terms such as those that had created
the Church of South India in 1947.60 From 1955 many conservative
Evangelicals joined the Weeks of Prayer for Christian Unity that sprang up
around the country and usually participated in the local Councils of Churches
that sponsored them. Growing contact with other Christians did a great deal to
moderate their traditional anti-Catholicism. The changes of the Second
Vatican Council made Rome less fearsome, and charismatic fellowship began
to break down the Protestant-Catholic divide. Keele welcomed the possibility
of dialogue with Roman Catholics on the basis of scripture; a decade later
David Watson, to the scandal of some, was describing the Reformation as a
tragedy.61 Among Evangelical Anglicans, it was said in 1977, ‘old-fashioned
Protestants have died out’.62 That was an exaggeration, for, especially in the
Church Society that resulted from the merger of the Church Association and
National Church League in 1950, there remained a phalanx for whom the
defence of Reformation principles was the overriding priority. As high-level
consultations between Anglicans and Roman Catholics steadily demarcated
increasing common ground between the churches, Church Society threatened
in 1986 that there would be a secession from the Church of England if it
continued moving towards Rome.63 Majority opinion had nevertheless shifted
a long way. In 1970 leading Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics were able to
present a joint scheme for reunion in England.64 The popular Protestantism
that had made possible the defeat of the Revised Prayer Book in 1927–8 was in
sharp decline.
Hence the traditional defiance of Anglo-Catholic liturgical practices faded
away. During the 1950s there remained parishes such as St Mary-le-Port,
Bristol, where the black gown was still worn for preaching, the sternly
Calvinist Hymns of Grace and Glory were sung and collections went to the
Irish Church Missions, the Trinitarian Bible Society and the Sovereign Grace
Union. In 1952–3 there was a cause célèbre when the Bishop of London
refused to ordain two Evangelicals who felt bound in conscience not to wear
the white stole at the service.65 North side celebration of communion was
a conservative party badge; matins and evensong, which was often the better
attended, were the main Sunday services; and there was strong attachment to
the text of the 1662 Prayer Book interpreted in a Protestant sense. The 1961
Islington Conference was warned by its chairman of the perils of parish
communion, which had already become normal outside conservative
Evangelical circles.66 During the 1960s, however, the new wave of Evangelical
 INTO A BROAD PLACE 255

clergy was spilling out beyond the party’s previous parishes, and some of them
began to tolerate customary practices. At youth services there were concessions
to modern language. And a number of junior clergy, with Colin Buchanan at
their head, were beginning to contribute to the issues of liturgical revision in
the church. In 1965 Series II was published as a modern alternative to the
Prayer Book, and soon the more progressive Evangelical parishes were
experimenting with it.67 Even before the publication of The Alternative
Service Book in 1980, most Evangelicals had ceased to use the 1662 order
except for an early morning communion service. Keele went so far as to declare
—though this was its most controversial pronouncement that Evangelicals
would ‘work towards weekly communion as the central corporate service of
the church’.68 So drastic a reversal of policy represented a major
rapprochement with the Anglo-Catholics. It issued in co-operation rather than
conflict over liturgical matters in the General Synod during the 1970s.69 More
charitable church relations, both between and within denominations, were an
important dimension of the increasing confidence of mainstream
Evangelicalism during the period.

CONSERVATIVE EVANGELICAL STRENGTHS

Keswick remained a potent source of inspiration for conservative Evangelicals.
At first after the Second World War its style did not change. ‘It has been truly
said’, wrote a commentator in 1949, ‘that the Keswick Convention is not a
preaching festival. Its main purpose is to show from the scriptures how
Christians may experience the full salvation which may be theirs in Christ.’70
The message, however, was challenged from within conservative Evangelical
circles during the 1950s. Leaders of the Rwanda Revival, a vigorous phase of
African Christianity that attracted much attention, testified that there was no
once-for-all experience of sanctification such as Keswick proclaimed.71 In the
manner of an angry young man of the time, J.I.Packer, from a Reformed
standpoint, argued in 1955 that ‘Keswick teaching is Pelagian through and
through’.72 Probably in response, ‘a new breadth of vision’ was evident at
Keswick by 1960, with attention to the sins of the church, the role of the
unconscious and the need for discipline as well as rest in the spiritual life.73 By
1972 John Stott was delivering Bible ‘studies’ rather than the less expository
Bible ‘readings’ that were traditional.74 Keswick was becoming a preaching
festival. The charismatic movement supplied an alternative mode of
spirituality in keeping with the times. The Life of Faith, the newspaper
associated with the convention, lost readers steadily until, in 1980, it was
transformed into a magazine for Christian families without the note of victory
by faith.75 A devotional temper expressed in diffuse Romantic terms no longer
appealed to the young. Keswick in its new form still helped to glue together
Evangelicals from different denominations, but its most influential days as the
power-house of the movement were over.
256 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

The conservative Evangelical tradition benefited from a range of other

organisations. Youth work was maintained, not least because the interwar
strategy of sowing seed for the fiiture was showing its value by yielding a rich
crop of leaders. In particular, the ‘Bash Camps’ for public schoolboys produced,
among others, Michael Green, an able writer and evangelist, Dick Lucas, a
powerful London preacher, and John Stott.76 Scripture Union expanded its
range of literature and activities, and an Inter-School Christian Fellowship was
launched in 1947 to co-ordinate Evangelical groups in the education system.77
To the interdenominational Crusaders, there was added, from 1953, a similar
national youth organisation catering for Anglicans, the Pathfinder
Movement.78 From 1956 there was an annual ‘Christian Holiday Crusade’ at
Butlin’s Camp in Filey, beamed particularly at young people,79 A resoundingly
successful venture was the publication, in 1966, of Youth Praise, a collection
of modern choruses designed to appeal to the burgeoning ‘pop culture’. The
undenominational missionary societies such as the Overseas Missionary
Fellowship—the former China Inland Mission—did much to channel youthful
enthusiasms into dedicated service. By their networks of officials, missionaries,
literature and meetings they reinforced the zeal of conservative Christians. To
their nutnber was added, from 1962, Operation Mobilisation, an international
body with roots in Spain designed to train and deploy young people in short-
term evangelistic ventures.80 For mission at home the Evangelical Alliance
began to adopt a more active role. It produced an innovative glossy magazine,
Crusade, from 1955; it issued a thorough study of evangelistic strategy, On
the Other Side (1968); and it sponsored a short-lived annual assembly for
Evangelicals of all denominations in 1965 and 1966.81 All these activities
expressed the evangelistic vitality of conservative Evangelicalism. They help
explain both its effective recruitment and its acquisition of an increasingly up-
to-date image.
Probably the most important factor in both these respects, however, was the
impact of Billy Graham. In 1954–5, 1966–7 and 1984–5 the American
evangelist held mass crusades in Britain. From the beginning huge numbers
thronged in—80,500 of them in the first week at Harringay in 1954.82
Although there were widespread initial reservations, even among conservative
Evangelicals, about importing an American with his razzamatazz, vast choirs
and banks of technical equipment, Graham was brilliantly disarming. On
arrival at Southampton in 1954, holding up a Morocco-bound Bible, he said, ‘I
am here to preach nothing but what is in this book, and to apply it to our
everyday lives. I am not going to talk about your national problems or
transgressions, as we have 10 times more in the United States.’83 There were
indeed criticisms, especially on his visits in the 1960s, that Graham failed to
address public questions, including the Vietnam War.84 There was also
censure, normally rejected by actual attenders, on the ground that he was
using techniques of mass suggestion.85 Supposed converts, it was alleged, soon
gave up church attendance. Ten months after the Harringay crusade,
 INTO A BROAD PLACE 257

however, 64 per cent of the previous non-churchgoers who had come forward
as ‘enquirers’ were still attending.86 It was also asserted that ‘the working
classes…responded very little’,87 An analysis of 1,317 enquirers in 1966,
however, showed that 360 were unskilled or semi-skilled industrial workers. If
skilled working people and members of working-class households are added, it
is plain that Billy Graham was reaching extensively beyond the middle
classes.88 The crusades had enormous knock-on effects. ‘Church life has been
quickened’, reported a Berkshire rector in 1955, ‘several converts are
worshipping keenly and winning others, finance has increased, study groups
are thriving, and my own vision widened.’89 Graham’s imitators in mass
evangelism—Eric Hutchings, Dick Saunders and Luis Palau among them—
offered him the sincerest form of flattery. By declining to support him, many
liberals eliminated themselves from the mainstream of Evangelical life in
Britain. To those who supported him, a category extending beyond the
conservative Evangelicals but having them as its core, he administered a
powerful tonic.

THE REALM OF SCHOLARSHIP

More significant even than the Billy Graham crusades as an explanation for the
advance of conservative Evangelicalism in the postwar period was the
InterVarsity Fellowship (IVF). It had emerged during the 1920s and had been
formally established in 1928 as a body linking the university students who
followed the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union in separation from
the Student Christian Movement. Its basis of faith was resolutely conservative
but by no means extreme: the first clause, for example, affirmed not the
inerrancy of the Bible but the ‘infallibility of Holy Scripture, as originally
given’.90 Students of diverse backgrounds, though few in most universities
before the Second World War, were welded into tight-knit Christian Unions
dedicated to zealous propagation of the faith under the watchful eyes of IVF
travelling secretaries. The organising genius at the hub of the IVF for forty
years from 1924 was Douglas Johnson, a London medical student of retiring
disposition and studious habits who was particularly devoted to the weighty
Reformed theologians of America. With the postwar expansion of higher
education, the bodies affiliated to the IVF grew in numbers, scale and
confidence. The collapse of the SCM gave them a clear field in the 1970s, by
which time the title of the umbrella organisation was changed to
‘Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship’ to mark its expanding role
outside the university sector. Christian Union members naturally rose to
positions of leadership in the various denominations. Thus, as Bishop of
Barking, Hugh Gough, who had been a travelling secretary in 1927, gave
crucial episcopal support to Billy Graham’s first visit; J.Ithel Jones, IVF
representative for Wales from 1933, became Principal of the South Wales
Baptist College twenty-five years later; and Howard Belben, a CICCU
258 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

member in the early 1930s, went on to be Principal of the Methodist Cliff

College.91 The Graduates’ Fellowship (GF), consisting of ex-CU members,
helped sustain their conservative theological convictions and encouraged them
to express the faith in their professional lives. The proliferating branch
organisations included the particularly large Christian Medical Fellowship
(1949) and Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship (1944), whose members,
swayed by the distinguished Brethren surgeon A. Rendle Short, took the lead
in repudiating interwar conservative suspicions of evolution.92 As early as
1948 a GF member, D.R.Denman, later Professor of Land Economy at
Cambridge, was eager to study the problems raised by the social sciences for
‘the Christian mind’.93 The IVF was broadening the horizons of those with
conservative theological views.
The work of the IVF was particularly noteworthy in biblical and related
studies. So sparse did contemporary scholarship on acceptable lines seem in
this field that, in 1943, the publishing arm of IVF was reissuing a work by the
deceased D.M.McIntyre.94 Already, in 1938, the IVF had formed a Biblical
Research Committee designed to remove ‘the reproach of obscurantism and
anti-intellectual prejudice’ from Evangelical Christianity. From 1942 there
were academic Tyndale Lectures at the IVF’s annual conference for theological
students, in 1945 Tyndale House in Cambridge was opened as a centre for
biblical studies and from the same year there was a Tyndale Fellowship for
Biblical Research.95 Thirty years later, between twenty-five and thirty of its
members held teaching posts in British universities. The Old Testament
specialist in the early years was W.J.Martin, Rankin Lecturer in Semitic
Studies at Liverpool; his New Testament equivalent was F.F.Bruce, from 1959
to be Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at Manchester. Both
were Brethren.96 ‘There is nothing’, Bruce assured younger scholars in 1948,
‘in the pursuit of source-criticism in the Biblical field which is necessarily
incompatible with the outlook of the I.V.F.…’97 Another enterprise,
spearheaded by Douglas Johnson of the IVF, was the London Bible College, an
interdenominational body for training graduates in Christian work that
commenced classes in 1943. Like IVF and Tyndale House, the college owed
much of its financial support to John Laing, an enormously successful
Brethren building contractor.98 The result of all these activities revolving in the
orbit of the IVF was a resurgence, on a conservative basis, of Evangelical
scholarship.
The transmission of scholarship to the public was another of Johnson’s
aims. ‘A vital and up-to-date new Evangelical literature’, he wrote in
1948, ‘which will present truly biblical theology in the finest and simplest
possible English style, is an essential need for this generation of Christian
workers.’99 The IVF undertook to fill the gap. It published, in addition to a
growing list of other titles, a set of Bible study notes edited by G.T.Manley,
entitled Search the Scriptures (1934–7); a digest of systematic theology,
Archdeacon T.C.Hammond’s In Understanding be Men (1936); the New Bible
 INTO A BROAD PLACE 259

Handbook (1947), New Bible Commentary (1953) and New Bible Dictionary
(1962); and a series of Tyndale commentaries on individual books of the Bible
(from 1956).100 When the Keele Congress Report recommended study material,
more titles (30) were listed from IVF than from any other publisher. Second
came Hodder and Stoughton (27), whose publications, though not as
exclusively conservative as those of IVF, included many of that stamp. The
Church Pastoral Aid Society issued 21, the Church Book Room Press 12 and
the Marcham Manor Press, a recent firm concentrating on asserting the
Evangelical position in Anglican debates, nine.101 The Christian Brethren
Research Fellowship, a group in which F.F.Bruce was promincnt, published
from 1963 a series of booklets that did much to stir hitherto rather
introspective assemblies into facing similar issues to those raised at Keele.102
The Evangelical Quarterly, founded in 1929 for the ‘defence of the historic
Christian faith’, and the Journal of the Victoria Institute, a body concentrating
on apologetic questions, especially in the area of science, were other vehicles
for the dissemination of the conservative position. Both were edited for a
while by F.F.Bruce.103 There was a direct effect on the pulpit. The systematic
exposition of the meaning of scripture came into fashion.104 It was partly in
imitation of the pulpit giants, particularly John Stott and Martyn Lloyd-Jones.
But it was also because the intellectual tools were now available. Although the
weightiest theological publishing in Britain remained in the hands of the SCM
Press, it became increasingly difficult to dismiss conservative Evangelicals as
disinclined to thought.

REFORMED AND SECTARIAN WINGS

The IVF graduates’ magazine announced in 1950 that there was to be a
conference at Westminster Chapel on ‘the distinctive theological contribution
of the English Puritans’. It was the beginning of a revival of interest in the
Reformed theological tradition, especially in the seventeenth century. The
prime movers were two Oxford students, one of them J.I.Packer. The Minister
of Westminster Chapel, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, became the enthusiastic
chairman of an annual Puritan Conference.105 A Welshman who left medicine
to enter the ministry, Lloyd-Jones awed packed congregations with his blend
of logic, fire and close attention to the text of scripture. He functioned (in his
own words) as ‘the theologian of the IVF’.106 For Lloyd-Jones the
preoccupation with the Puritans was no reversion to the Baroque, but an
engagement with their thought to discover what was applicable today. He was
not a seventeenth-century man, as he put it, but an eighteenth-century man
who believed in ‘using the seventeenth-century men as the eighteenth-
century men used them’.107 Neo-Puritanism became a potent force. In 1963, at
its height, the Puritan Conference attracted some 350 people, the majority
young.108 To students at the time Reformed doctrine seemed ‘very novel,
intoxicating to some, unnerving to many’.109 It was disseminated by the
260 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

Evangelical Library, an institution built on a collection of Puritan divinity

made by Geoffrey Williams, a Strict Baptist bibliophile.110 The Banner of
Truth, a monthly magazine, was launched in 1955 and a publishing house
under the same name two years later.111 By 1960 there was a warning from
the Islington platform that ultra-Calvinist views were straining the unity of
Anglican Evangelicals.112 With the encouragement of Lloyd-Jones, the
Evangelical Movement of Wales crystallised in 1955 around a magazine and
annual conference to rally individuals disquieted by the theological laxity
within their denominations. Though not unanimously Calvinist, that was its
predominant tone.113 In Scotland another mixed Evangelical circle with
Reformed leadership gathered about the figure of William Still, Minister since
1945 of Gilcomston South Parish Church, Aberdeen, and another protninent
personality in the IVF. Resolutely attached to the Church of Scotland, they
assembled annually at Crieff from 1971. Ten years later 170 attended.114 In its
various forms the Reformed revival was a sign of the theological appetite in
sections of the conservative Evangelical world. It simultaneously bolstered the
strength of the growing conservative movement and injected a divisive
element into its ranks.
Sectarian expressions of Evangelicalism continued to grow in the poslwar
era, though in most cases at a rather slower rate than before the war. By 1979
there were nearly 550 Assemblies of God and 350 Elim churches in England
alone.115 The Apostolic Church, the third force in British Pentecostalism,
enjoyed its greatest support in Wales and Scotland, where its congregations
were more numerous than those of the Assemblies or Elim.116 Ordinary
Evangelicals had normally repudiated the Pentecostalists. ‘The usual line of
attack is to use threadbare illustrations of “unfortunate incidents”…’117 It was
generally held that the supernatural gifts championed by the Pente-costalists
had ceased with the passing of the early church, so that alleged modern
instances were counterfeit. The rise of the charismatic movement made it
difficult—though not impossiblc for the hard-liners—to sustain that line of
argument. Upward social mobility among the Pentecostalists also made their
acceptance into the Evangelical fold smoother during the 1960s and 1970s. A
frcsh Pentecostal sector, however, had risen through immigration from the
West Indies. Few black newcomers found their way into existing
congregations, even Pentecostal churches. Instead, they established their own
sects: the New Testament Church of God (with 23 congregations in 1962), the
Church of God of Prophecy (16), the Church of God in Christ (7) and several
smaller groupings.118 As in many other spheres, there was little integration
into Evangelical church life. The one existing body to recruit heavily among
West Indians, the Seventh-Day Adventists, was generally accepted in
conservative circles, even if some suspected that it should be classified with the
heretical cults.119 Likewise the Church of the Nazarene, an American
denomination which the main holiness churches had joined, shared in local
inter-church activities.120 The sect which gave most to pan-Evangelical work,
 INTO A BROAD PLACE 261

however, was the Brethren. Although its narrowest segment, the Exclusives,
gained notoriety in a succession of scandals,121 the mainstream of the Open
Brethren emerged increasingly as a denomination willing to change with the
times. ‘Assemblies’ transformed themselves into ‘Evangelical Churches’. The
traditional resistance to full-time ministry crumbled, so that by 1980 34 per
cent of 246 churches surveyed thought it a good idea.122 Eminent Brethren, as
we have seen, served and financed the IVF and its satellites. Conservative
Evangelicalism derived a great deal of vitality from its sectarian dimension.

INTO THE WORLD

A consequence of the rise of the conservative Evangelicals was a change in
their habits. Their introverted attitudes in the 1940s cultivated a distinctive
style: ‘unworldly, diligent in attendance at weekly prayer rneetings,
meticulous about quiet times, suspicious of the arts, missionary-minded,
hostile to new liturgical ideas.’123 The decline of the Keswick imperative
gradually opened them to change. In 1947 J.W.Wenham, who was to go on to
teach at Tyndale Hall, Bristol, urged in an IVF newsletter that ministers
should drop their blanket prohibitions on the cinema, the theatre and tobacco.
They were erecting false barriers that hampered the gospel. A wider onslaught
on Evangelical taboos was launched for similar rcasons in a Scripture Union
book, Culture, Class and Christian Beliefs, by John Benington in 1973. Such
criticisms slowly sapped inhibitions, but far more came about through the
social change of the 1960s. Permissiveness was echoed, albeit dimly, among
Evangelicals. At Keele half the congress erupted into laughter about some
indiscreet remarks on contraception; ten years later, young Christian nurses
were sometimes prepared to justify abortion on demand and a few
Evangelicals were arguing that homosexual acts within a stable relationship
are ‘not a contravention of the biblical teaching’.124 The youth culture was
married to the gospel. The Salvation Army’s Joystrings, a group of guitar-
playing girls, led the way in 1964.125 Cliff Richard, a converted pop singer
who contrived to remain at the top of his career for decades, provided
continuing inspiration.126 From 1974 there was an annual Christian rock
festival, Greenbelt. Buzz magazine, begun in 1964, attained a circulation of
more than 30,000 in 1981 by catering for the gospel pop teenage market.127 By
1976 Gavin Reid, evangelistic secretary of the CPAS, was opening a musical
event for youth fellowships with the remark, ‘Let’s have a feeling of wrapped-
around-ness.’128 In the same year, during an Evangelical teaching conference
session on a simpler life-style, a ‘young man with a wispy moustache and tie-
dyed jeans spoke poignantly of collecting waste-paper in Australia’.129 The
gulf that had once yawned between the church and the world had virtually
disappeared.
Until well into the 1960s, social involvement remained under the cloud of
suspicion it had attracted in the 1920s. It was typical that after an innovatory
262 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

paper on the social implications of the gospel at the National Assembly of

Evangelicals in 1966, ‘some members were suspicious of a return to “the social
gospel” and called for a more direct “witness”’.130 Yet there were persistent
traditions of social commitment. The Salvation Army, without compromising
its beliefs, resolutely served the needs of the body as well as those of the
soul.131 Organisations with unimpeachable conservative Evangelical
credentials such as the London City Mission maintained a philanthropic
role.132 Archdeacon Hammond, the IVF’s early theologian, also wrote on
social ethics.133 George Duncan of St Thomas’s, Edinburgh, declared in 1948
that some Evangelicals might ‘find a greater place than they do for matters of
social reform, such as housing, etc. Even a casual glance at the Old Testament
prophets shows how clearly God was and is concerned in these matters.’134
The greatest ideological obstacle to the more forthright expression of such
views was adventism. The premillennial teaching so widespread in
conservative Evangelical circles directly inhibited social action. His expectation
of the second event, wrote W.G.Channon, a rising young Baptist minister, in
1949, made him realise that it was not the business of the church to
Christianise society. Rather, the church was to evangelise until, when God had
called out his people, Christ would return.135 In succeeding decades, however,
premillennialism went into decline. A milestone was the publication in 1971
by lain Murray of The Puritan Hope, a reassertion on historical grounds of the
postmillennial position. The prcmillennial message was already disappearing
from the Keswick platform, and by the 1970s it was ceasing to be a feature
even of the Brethren. Many conservative Evangelicals, while adhering to the
belief in a personal second coming guarded by the IVF basis of faith, moved
more or less unconsciously to an amillennial view. With the fading of the
gloomy opinion that the world was under imminent sentence of death, effort
to improve it seemed more worthwhile. A pent-up potential for social
involvement was released.
The times seemed to call for action. The permissive society challenged
Evangelical Christians at a traditionally sensitive point, their defence of sexual
morality. Many rallied to the support of Mary Whitehouse, whose National
Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association was established in 1965 to stem the tide of
sex and violence that seemed to be overwhelming the media.136 Eddy Stride,
Rector of Spitalfields and a former shop steward, who had long been censuring
the complacency of the ‘middle-class, inward-looking Church’, participated in
several public protests against pornography in 1970.137 Several eminent
Evangelicals were recruited to Lord Longford’s invcstigation of pornography
in the following year,138 a year that witnessed an upsurge of symbolic action
against ‘moral poilution’. Dubbed ‘Festival of Light’ by the recently converted
broadcaster, Malcolm Muggeridge, an embryonic organisation held local
rallies throughout the country to illuminate warning beacons. The
culmination was a rally in Trafalgar Square on 25 September, followed by a
march to Hyde Park. Although not wholly Evangelical in support, its
 INTO A BROAD PLACE 263

orientation is clear from the evidence that 84 per cent of attenders at a follow-
up rally five years later saw evangelism as a better remedy than legislation for
Britain’s moral decline.139 The organisation became permanent as the
Nationwide Festival of Light, which subsequently branched into CARE Trust
(for research) and CARE Campaigns (for pressure group activity). A similar
semi-spontaneous movement arose in 1985–6 to oppose what seemed another
symptom of permissiveness, the deregulation of Sunday shop opening hours.
Support extended well beyond Evangelical ranks and, remarkably, intended
government legislation was defeated by a revolt of backbench Conservative
MPs.140 The widest enthusiasm for public campaigns, as in the nineteenth
century, appeared when the target, in Evangelical eyes, was sin. Much of the
renewed impetus for socio-political action sprang from an eagerness to take up
broadly moral issucs.
Sheer need did, however, play its part in prompting action. The dimensions
of poverty in the Third World led, in 1968, to the creation of The Evangelical
Alliance Relief (TEAR) Fund, which rapidly tapped funds from congregations
that previously might have hesitated to give to Christian Aid. A symptom of
changing attitudes was the supersession, around 1970, of the traditional vast
arrays of produce at harvest festivals by token displays accompanied by
collections for TEAR Fund. The Fund gave rise in 1974 to Tearcraft, an
enterprise marketing goods from less developed countries, and that in turn to
Traidcraft, an independent company with similar aims. Extremely influential
in this field was R.J. Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (1977), a
biblical case for aid to the Third World originally aimed at an American
audience. The multiple deprivation of the inner cities at home acted as a
significant, if lesser, stimulus. David Sheppard, Warden of the Mayflower
Centre in the East End of London and subsequently Bishop of Liverpool, set
up a range of social programmes that he at first conceived as evangelistic
bridges.141 Subsequently his work Built as a City (1974) espouscd and inspired
more adventurous strategies of mission. The Frontier Youth Trust and later
the Evangelical Coalition for Urban Mission pioneered fresh ventures. At the
Nottingham National Evangelical Anglican Congress of 1977 a section not in
the draft was added to the published statement on The gospel in urban
areas’.142 Inner-city issues were sufficiently salient to force themselves on the
attention of at least a section of the Evangelical public.
Overseas influences helped to foster the new social awareness. Participation
in ecumenical life made Evangelicals take up a stance on social questions, even
if at first it was largely a repudiation of the policies publicised by the World
Council of Churches. The 1968 Uppsala assembly of the WCC, by defining the
mission of the church in partly socio-political terms, compelled self-scrutiny
by those propounding an alternative view.143 Dutch Reformed social thought
stemming from Abraham Kuyper and Hermann Dooyeweerd was a morc
constructive factor. Its advocates in Britain were few, but in the late 1960s
included Alan Storkey, a pioneer of Evangelical social analysis and
264 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

subsequently the author of A Christian Social Perspective (1979). Influences

from America were more widespread but more diffuse, tending to reinforce
rather than initiate trends in British opinion. An exception must be made for
writings from the Mennonite tradition. In particular, J.H.Yoder’s work The
Politics of jesus (1972) fostered a new sympathy for a theologically grounded
pacifism among British Evangelicals. The writings of Jim Wallis of the
Sojourners’ Community were also popular. From 1974, furthermore, there
was international sanction for Evangelical social commitment. At Lausanne a
congress on world evangelisation expressed repentance for previous
Evangelical neglect in this field. The statement was partly a British
achievement, a result of a strong rebuke by John Stott. Yet a Radical
Discipleship group wished to go further in stating the social implications of
the gospel. Led by Samuel Escobar, a South American who had grafted elements
of liberation theology on to Evangelicalism, it called for a dedication to
freedom, justice and human fulfilment.144 The relationship between
evangelism and social activity was more closely defined by a conference at
Grand Rapids in 1982. ‘They are like the two blades of a pair of scissors’, its
report declared, ‘or the two wings of a bird.’145 The British experience was part
of a worldwide trend that steadily gathered momentum.
The increased emphasis on social responsibility also possessed its own
national dynamic. The mushrooming of sociology in postwar British
universities was bound to have consequences in a movement so strongly
moulded by graduates. When IVF threw its weight behind social involvement,
the trend was unstoppable. In this process the appearance of Whose World?
(1970), a summons to formulate a Christian mind on all aspects of human
affairs, was crucial. Its author, though cautiously employing a pseudonym,
was Oliver Barclay, the IVF General Secretary. The Shaftesbury Project,
designed to promote thought and action in every sphere of involvement, was
developed by Alan Storkey on the fringe of the IVF from 1969 onwards. Its
third director, John Gladwin, moved directly to become Secretary of the Board
for Social Responsibility of the Church of England in 1982.146 More
systematic training in relating the faith to the forces at work in the modern
world was provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, a
brainchild created by John Stott after his retirement from All Souls’ in 1975.
Unfettered discussion of such questions was found from 1977 in the pages of
Third Way, a fortnightly (then monthly) magazine that reached a circulation
of more than 3,000 ten years later. Its readership breakdown in 1986 is
illuminating: 52 per cent read The Guardian and 32 per cent The Times, By
contrast, at the National Evangelical Anglican Congress in 1977, 60 per cent
took The Daily Telegraph.147 Evangelicals now included a liberally minded
wing bearing no resemblance to the interwar stereotype of their forefathers. In
expanding they had broadened.
 INTO A BROAD PLACE 265

GROWING PAINS
The diversity of the Evangelical movement created tensions. Several
surrounded the figure of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, an Independent by
temperament and conviction.148 He was regularly prepared to pursue a
distinctive line of policy, standing aside, for example, from Billy Graham’s
crusades as a cheapening of the gospel.149 Partly through the Westminster
Fellowship, an interdenominational ministers’ fraternal that met in his chapel
from the end of the war, Lloyd-Jones came to enjoy widespread and deeply
felt respect.150 The tercentenary in 1962 of the Great Ejection of
Nonconformist ministers from the Church of England turned his mind to the
issue of what unity Evangelicals should prize. In 1963 he spoke to the Puritan
Conference about John Owen on schism.151 On 18 October 1966 an incident
took place that was to dramatise a fracture in the Evangelical world. Lloyd-
Jones was invited to speak at the opening public meeting of the National
Assembly of Evangelicals on the issue of unity. To the horror of members of his
audience who valued their existing denominational allegiances, he urged that,
although separation from liberals was no schism, separation from fellow
Evangelicals was. Immediately afterwards John Stott rose from the chair to
voice his belief that scripture was against the speaker—an act, though not an
opinion, he subsequently regretted.152 Lloyd-Jones’s call for Evangelicals to
leave their present churches was dismissed by nearly all those in the Church
of England as being (in the phrase of their newspaper) ‘nothing short of hare-
brained’,153 and in other ‘mixed denominations’ he was little heeded. The
appeal nevertheless reinforced the existing aversion of the Baptist Revival
Fellowship to the ecumenical movement as an engine for compromising the
truth and, during the next few years, just as Lloyd-Jones took Westminster
Chapel out of the Congregational Union, so a number of Baptists withdrew
from their Union. The Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches was
immeasurably strengthened by Lloyd-Jones’s support; the Evangelical
Movement of Wales in 1967 permitted churches disenchanted with their
previous denominations to affiliate direct;154 and The Evangelical Times was
launched in the same year as the monthly organ of principled separatism. A
British Evangelical Council, formed in 1953 and also backed by Lloyd-Jones,
acted as an umbrella organisation for the anti-ecumenical bodies. Enjoying the
membership of the Free Church of Scotland, by 1981 it could claim to
represent more than 2,000 congregations.155 Predominantly but by no means
exclusively Reformed in theological tone, it represented a significant force in
the Evangelical World.
Some of the strains engendered by charismatic renewal have already been
considered. Its separatist wing, the Restorationists, formed a rapidly
expanding Christian presence in the 1980s.156 But the assimilation of the
renewal movement by existing churches was perhaps the more remarkable
development. At Keele in 1967 there was no united opinion about whether
266 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

charismatic manifestations were of the same sort as the New Testament ‘gifts
of the Spirit’.157 By contrast, ten years later at the Nottingham Evangelical
Anglican Congress, hands were raised in worship and charismatic leaders
including Michael Harper and David Watson delivered addresses. Only a few
jarring notes were heard. Gerald Bray, librarian of Tyndale House and
subsequently editor of Churchman, for example, voiced continuing doctrinal
misgivings about the movement. In general, however, as Harper remarked,
‘the charismatic divide was given the last rites’. So deeply enmeshed in
Evangelical Anglican life had the movement become between 1967 and 1977
that one commentator spoke, with perhaps a little exaggeration, of ‘a
dominating position for charismatics’.158 Among Baptists, the Mainstream
organisation formed in 1979 drew together traditional Evangelicals and
charismatics in regular conferences.159 One of its founders, Paul Beasley-
Murray, went on to become Principal of Spurgeon’s, the denomination’s
largest college, in 1986. Although there were many instances of local tension,
overall the Baptists were adapting to the new influences. The British
Evangelical Council could not manage the same feat. Sympathy for renewal
was anathema to hard-line Reformed views, and, after strenuous efforts at
containment, the issue eventually exploded with the seizure of The Evangelical
Times by the anti-charismatics in 1986.160 The new style represented by the
charismatic movement proved acceptable to a majority of Evangelicals in the
older denominations, but not to most of those who frowned on ecumenical
involvement. Were the cultural forms of the twentieth century to be accepted
or rejected? There were the makings of polarisation around this fundamental
question.
There were signs of divergence around another issue, the interpretation of
the Bible. If one consideration had been paramount among interwar
conservative Evangelicals, it was the appeal to the text of scripture. In the
postwar era, however, the proliferation of Bible versions meant that variations
in the text were in widespread circulation. Although more than half the
attenders at a Keswick youth meeting in 1970 still read the Authorised
Version,161 by that date the Revised Standard Version was in general use. The
New English Bible attracted only a small following among Evangelicals, but the
Good News Bible and then the New International Version achieved high
popularity.162 Discrepancies made it harder to settle issues by quoting biblical
texts. Consequently, criteria were needed for establishing what the Bible
meant. As was pointed out in 1974 by Tony Thiselton, subsequently Principal
of St John’s College, Durham, this was the question of hermeneutics. It was
particularly acute when trying to tease out biblical teaching on ethics for
application to the social problems of the day.163 It was also a difficulty for
Evangelicals as they took opposite sides on the question of whether women
should be ordained in the Church of England.164 Opponents pointed to the
letter of scripture about women not having authority over men and keeping
silence in church; supporters suggested that the statement about the barrier
 INTO A BROAD PLACE 267

between male and female having been abolished in Christ took precedence.
Hermeneutics was a pressing matter. The word was bandied about, with much
ribald comment, at Nottingham in 1977.165 Some were alarmed that the
authority of scripture was being undermined. Dick Lucas, Rector of St Helen’s,
Bishopsgate, warned the 1979 Islington Conference that the new hermeneuric
might prepare the way for a fresh bout of liberal scholarship.166 The
threatening storm burst in 1982 over two articles in Churchman by James
Dunn, soon to be Professor of Divinity at Durham, propounding a view of the
Bible that was too liberal for some of the journal’s sponsors.167 In the
succeeding dispute, the editor was dismissed, a new editorial board formed and
the dispossessed party founded a fresh journal, Anvil, in 1984. Thiselton,
significantly, was on the Anvil Trust. In 1986 J.I.Packer was still having to
give a steadying address to the Anglican Evangelical Assembly on
hermeneutics.168 The Bible was no longer treated as a simple unifying force in
the Evangelical world. It had become a bone of contention.
Evangelicals in the Church of England faced another issue around 1980, but
it was less a controversy and more a mood of self-doubt. It was labelled ‘the
Evangelical Anglican identity problem’. By the later 1970s traditional
landmarks had been removed. An attempt by some older Evangelicals at
Nottingham to insert a reference to the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Book of
Common Prayer in the Congress statement came to naught.169 Basics had
already been brought into question. We need to ask, according to a leading
article in The Church of England Newspaper on David Sheppard’s Built as a
City, ‘whether the traditional evangelical understanding of the Gospel is in
fact as biblical as it is often assumed to be’.170 At Nottingham the statement
admitted that ‘we give different emphasis to the various biblical expressions of
atonement’: substitution was no longer central for all.171 The party, as
J.I.Packer commented in a booklet on the identity problem, was less cohesive at
Nottingham than at Keele.172 Although the number of self-professed
Evangelicals in the General Synod increased frorn 1970 to 1980, their
solidarity weakened.173 ‘The great question-mark’, according to Colin
Buchanan, ‘which had to be hung against the proposal that “we” should hold
another Congress in 1977 was whether there existed any identifiable “we” to
do it’.174 John Stott’s answer to such queries was unequivocal. They were
committed to Bible and gospel, and so could not drop the title ‘Evangelical’.175
Yet debate continued for the next couple of years.176 Institutional measures
were taken to consolidate the party. Since 1960 a Church of England
Evangelical Council had brought together representative leaders, and from
1980 there were broader consultations.177 Since 1983 there has been an
Anglican Evangelical Assembly with a combination of elected and nominated
members, which at last supplanted Islington as the party’s main forum.178 The
possibility of merging imperceptibly into the mainstream of church life
seemed to have been averted.
268 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

The heirs of the interwar conservative Evangelical tradition remained a
distinctive movement, cutting across denominational allegiances, after the
time of Keele. Though more fragmented, they were still conscious of an
underlying unity. It is possible to locate their loyalties more precisely. Their
greatcst strength lay in the Anglican and Baptist denominations. At the first
National Assembly of Evangelicals in 1965, Anglicans were reported to be
easily the largest single group amongst them, with Baptists second.179 At the
same event the following year, about a quarter were Anglican and a quarter
Baptist. 180 In 1985–6 readers of Third Way were 49 per cent Anglican and 22
per cent Baptist.181 Attenders at the 1976 Festival of Light rally were 42 per
cent Anglican and 22 per cent Baptist. Pentecostal churches and charismatic
house fellowships contributed 9 per cent, Evangelical or Free Evangelical
churches 6 per cent, Methodists 5 per cent and Brethren 3 per cent to this
gathering.182 All these figures are affected by—among other factors—their
exaggerated reflection of the denominational balance in South-East England. A
northern catchment area might have strengthened the Methodist presence:
there had been since 1970 an organisation called Conservative Evangelicals in
Methodism,183 and many Methodists outside it remained Evangelicals. In
Wales Anglicans would have been far less numerous, and in Scotland
Presbyterians would have been significantly represented. The future of the
Evangelical movement nevertheless lay disproportionately in the hands of two
denominations. In 1986, for the first time, more than half the Anglican
ordinands in residential colleges were said to be Evangelical.184 Alone among
the Free Churches, the Baptists reported growth in 1987.185 The continuing
expansion of the Restorationists would in due course affect the balance, the
Church of Scotland possessed an increasing Evangelical sector, and the
conservative bodies of the British Evangelical Council had emerged with a
ruggcd tenacity. The kaleidoscope of Evangelicalism would turn again to create
a new pattern. But growth was intended and expected. The movement was
likely to occupy a more salient position within British Christianity in the
twenty-first century than in the twentieth.
 [9]
Time and Chance: Evangelicalism and
Change

…time and chance happeneth to them all. (Eccles. 9:11)

Evangelical religion in Britain has changed immensely during the two and a
half centuries of its existence. Its outward expressions, such as its social
composition and political attitudes, have frequently been transformed. Its
inward principles, embracing teaching about Christian theology and
behaviour, have altered hardly less. Nothing could be further from the truth
than the common image of Evangelicalism being ever the same. Yet
Evangelicals themselves have often fostered the image. They have claimed
that their brand of Christianity, the form once delivered to the saints, has
possessed an essentially changeless content so long as it has remained loyal to
its source. In a Commons debate of 1850 a Unitarian referred to discoveries in
theology since the reign of Elizabeth I. ‘Discoveries in theology!’ snorted Sir
Robert Inglis, an Evangelical defender of the Church of England:’…all the
truths of religion are to be found in the blessed Bible; and all “discoveries”
which do not derive from that book their origin and foundation, their
justification and their explanation, are worth neither teaching nor hearing.’1
Such a claim to stability is a common feature of conservative Protestantism.2
It is no wonder that outsiders, taking Evangelicals at their word, have often
treated them as perversely irnpervious to change and so perennially old-
fashioned. The germ of truth in that claim is that Evangelical religion has been
consistently marked by four characteristics. Conversionism, activism, biblicism
and crucicentrism have been transmitted down the generations. They have
formed a permanent deposit of faith. Each of the characteristics, however, has
found expression in many different ways, and one of them, activism, was a
novelty that set Evangelicals apart from earlier Protestantism. Other features
of Evangelical doctrine and piety, opinion and practice, have varied from time
to time. Views on eschatology and spirituality have been particularly subject
to change. So the movement did not manage a total escape to a world of
eternal truths. It was bound up in the flux of events.
The reality was sometimes noticed by evangelicals themselves. The great
nineteenth-century Congregationalist R.W.Dale was acutely aware of the
270 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

changing theological fashions within the movement.3 Occasionally it was

recognised that change was not merely a matter of theology. To say that the
Church has remained unaffected by influences permeating our national life’,
declared the Secretary of the National Sunday School Union in 1900 when
analysing the altered tone of teaching during the previous half-century,
‘would be to assert that we are independent of our social environment’.4 But it
was not until the Lausanne Congress of 1974 that it was commonly admitted
by Evangelicals that the shape of their religion is influenced by the
environment. Evidence from the mission field that the embodiment of the
faith is deeply affected by its cultural setting seemed incontrovertible.5 What
this study has explored is the same interaction between Christianity and its
setting in Britain.
Changing socio-economic and political conditions affected Evangelicalism
and its potential recruits in ways that drastically moulded its size, self-image,
strategy and teaching. When personally controlled firms became large-scale
conglomerates, for example, it was no longer expected that employees would
follow the religious preferences—often Evangelical—of their employers. New
wealth permitted the state to provide educational and philanthropic facilities
that had previously been supplied by the churches, and so to weaken the
bonds between working-class people and evangelistic agencies. Such forces
decreased church attendance around the end of the nineteenth century, sapped
Christian confidence and so encouraged attempts to remodel Evangelicalism
with a view to improving its impact. Again, political crises over Ireland,
conjuring up the spectre of papist oppression, often stirred up the powerful
spirit of anti-Catholicism. The First World War provoked heart-searching
quesrions about doctrines surrounding the fate of the dead. Events in the
public realm necessarily impinged on religious groups. Yet socio-economic and
political developments fashioned Evangelical responses from the raw material
of their existing attitudes. With other opinions they would have reacted
differently. The cultural context, not economics or politics, does most to
explain the shape of Evangelical religion. Conditions and crises in economic
and political life might generate new phases of behaviour and even new
expressions of belief, but rarely did they determine fundamental trends in
Evangelical life. That role was normally reserved for the dominant ideas of the
age.
The most influential bodies of thought were not distinctly religious. It is
frequently assumed, especially by church historians, that theologians were the
crucial innovators. Authors like F.D.Maurice are treated as the trend-setters
for subsequent generations. Theologians, however, have usually been
followers of trends set in other fields. Maurice, for instance, was deeply
swayed by the organic view of society that was the hallmark of Romantic
theorists.6 Lay opinion was more affected by the general cultural atmosphere
than by Maurice’s expression of it. The basic trends in Evangelicalism were
shaped by the shifts in cultural mood that eventually altered the orientation of
 TIME AND CHANCE 271

the whole population. Changes in the intellectual climate have a significant

impact on any social movement setting great store by ideas, whether political,
educational or rcligious. Churches, which usually carry heavy doctrinal
baggage, are particularly susceptible. Hence Christian beliefs and practices have
reflected developments in high culture. The novelties of the philosophers and
creative artists have been transmitted, often after some delay, to the
Evangelical world. The crucial determinants of change in Evangelical religion
have been the successive cultural waves that have broken over Western
civilisation since the late seventeenth century. Popular Protestantism has been
remoulded in turn by the Enlightenment of Locke, the Romanticism of
Coleridge and the Modernism associated with, among others, the Bloomsbury
Group. That is not to suggest that the currents of high cultural ideas have
flowed clear and crystal between Evangelical shores. On the contrary, the
streams have been muddied by other influences and at some stages have even
run underground. The doctrines derived most clearly from shifts in taste in
the intellectual avant-garde have subsequently been modified within
Evangelicalism. Thus the holiness teaching of the later nineteenth century,
very much a symptom of the Romantic inclinations of the period, was adapted
to fit the Calvinist theological inheritance of its Anglican proponents. The
resulting Keswick school was far from being simply a product of the
contemporary intellectual climate. Yet what was distinctive about it did derive
primarily from the spirit of the age, and can be understood only in that light.
The process of change can best be seen as a pattern of diffusion. Ideas
originating in high culture have spread to leaders of Evangelical opinion and
through them to the Evangelical constituency. By this means the novelties of
one age have become the commonplaces of the next. Alongside the secular
press, popular Protestantism has been among the chief agencies for the
transmission of innovating ideas from the tiny cultural elite that forms them
to the mass of the population that embraces them, often unaware of their
origins. The diffusion has had two main dimensions, the social and the spatial.
Ideas, that is to say, have spread downwards frorn the elite to the masses and
outwards from the centre to the periphery. Groups higher in the social scale,
usually enjoying higher standards of education, tend to absorb fresh attitudes
earlier than lower groups.7 They are the ones who usually read books and
magazines first. But then the newer views seep down to lower social groups.
Wilberforce, writing in 1797, recognised that ‘the free and unrestrained
intercourse, subsisting amongst the several ranks and classes of society, so
much favours the general diffusion of the sentiments of the higher orders’.8
The variation according to position on the social scale helps explain why,
within Evangelicalism, Anglicans, with their strong support among the gentry
and professionals, were normally more forward than Nonconformists in
embracing new cultural attitudes. Thus it was Anglicans, together with the
socially superior Brethren and Catholic Apostolic Church, who
disproportionately favoured the novel premillennialism of the nineteenth
272 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

century. But the relation between elite and masses in the churches has never
been founded on class distinctions alone. The ministry constituted a body of
professional opinion-formers. Consequently, ideas would often reach a
congregation first through the minister. Lower-class congregations could
sometimes be charged with fresh enthusiasms before neighbours of more
exalted social standing. Yet the general principle remains valid. Cultural
diffusion within Evangelicalism was normally a matter of the percolation of
ideas down the social scale.
The second dimension was spatial, the spread of new ideas outwards from
cultural centres. Personal contacts, and especially addresses at conferences,
were at least as important as literature in the dissemination of Evangelical
novelties. Hence some areas would adopt new attitudes long before others.
New teaching would normally be welcomed in London long before it was
appreciated in the South-West or the North of England, let alone the remoter
parts of Wales and Scotland. Although the difference between the regions was
partly a matter of ingrained local preferences, which have survived the
industrial and communications revolutions to a far greater extent than is
normally recognised,9 the spatial variation was far more the result of differing
degrees of proximity to the sources of fresh waves of opinion, and especially to
London. Most trends of thought seized the capital and its environs first—
whether Hugh Price Hughes’s social gospel or charismatic renewal.
Metropolitan views took time to spread elsewhere. There was no direct
correlation, however, between distance from London and the rapidity with
which new opinion was taken up. The great cities functioned as subsidiary
cultural centres, radiating outwards to their own hinterlands influences
received from London, supplemented by occasional indigenous developments.
Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh and similar places ensured that trends spread
in their own vicinities before they had affected areas nearer London that
lacked a major urban focus—Suffolk, for example. There were also local
centres of influence, often some sort of Evangelical training college (such as the
Methodist Cliff College in Derbyshire), that spread particular messages in
their own neighbourhoods. The general effect of spatial diffusion was to put
more urbanised areas ahead of more rural parts, but that pattern was far from
absolute since local centres or even individual enthusiasts could propagate new
ideas in unexpected spots.10 National variations were overridden in a pattern
that straddled the boundaries between England, Wales and Scotland, so that
developments usually affected Swansea before Herefordshire and Glasgow
before Westmorland. It was in the periphery of Britain that the old ways
lingered longest.11 Traditional revivals in the twentieth century, for instance,
havc taken place chiefly in Wales, Cornwall, East Anglia, the Moray Firth
coast of Scotland and the Hebrides. Spatial diffusion explains a great deal about
the state of Evangelicalism.
The deepest divisions in the Evangelical world generally arose from the
impact of the cultural waves. Denominational splits form an excellent index to
 TIME AND CHANCE 273

the advance of fresh ideas. Repeatedly, new wine broke old bottles. Methodism,
representing undiluted Enlightenment Protestantism, generated a momentum
that carried it, despite John Wesley’s wishes, beyond the bounds of the Church
of England. The severance between New Lights and Old Lights in Scottish
Presbyterian Dissent showed the impossibility of those who thought like
Jonathan Edwards of remaining in fellowship with those adhering to the
thought-world of the Westminster Confession. The same pre-Evangelical
Calvinism was the ground from which certain Baptists in the South-East of
England and Presbyterians in the North-West of Scotland refused to be
dislodged. Hence there arose the Strict Baptists and the Free Presbyterians. The
initial onset of Romanticism gave rise in the 1830s to two premillennialist
bodies, the Catholic Apostolic Church and the Brethren. Its subsequent impact
in the form of holiness teaching led to the foundation of bodies such as the
Salvation Army and the Pentecostalists. Premillennialism, its associated
attitude to the Bible and the holiness movement together created the matrix of
interwar conservative Evangelicalism with all its tendencies to fission. And
charismatic renewal, so largely an expression of cultural Modernism, could
not be confined within existing structures, but also erected its own. That is not
to say that every denominational split in the period can be traced back to a
clash of cultural styles: on the contrary, several Methodist secessions and the
Disruption of the Church of Scotland were the result of conflicts about control
of institutions. Differences stemming from shifts of cultural mood can
nevertheless be detected within and between congregations of the same
denomination throughout the period. Deep-seated theological debates such as
the Robertson Smith affair or the Down Grade Controversy were usually
about whether truth was being compromised by the intellectual trends of the
times. The assimilation of new ideas was naturally unsettling.
Because Evangelicalism has changed so much over time, any attempt to
equate it with ‘Fundamentalism’ is doomed to failure. It is often assumed that
the equation can be made; and a substantial treatise published by James Barr in
1977 identified the Fundamentalism of its title at least with the conservative
variety of Evangelicalism in the postwar period.12 Evangelicals, including
conservatives, have generally repudiatcd the term in Britain.13 If the word is
used in a precise theological sense, then it defines a deductive approach to
biblical inspiration, the belief that since the Bible is the word of God and God
cannot err, the Bible is inerrant. That has been a current in Evangelicalism
since the 1820s, but it never became unanimous and was weak in the early
twentieth century, even among conservatives. Its greater popularity in the
postwar period has been associated primarily with the esteem of the Reformed
wing of Evangelicalism for B.B.Warfield and it has been treated with reserve
by others.14 If ‘Fundamentalism’ is taken in a social sense to describe a group
so fanatically committed to its religion that it lashes out against opponents in
mindless denunciation, there were only two stages when this unsavoury
attitude disfigured Evangelicalism. Between about 1840 and 1890 many
274 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

Anglican Evangelicals became obsessive in the desire to eliminate Romanising

doctrines and ritual from their church; and in the aftermath of the First World
War an extreme section of Evangelical opinion, though not the conservative
leadership, attempted to take up the fight of their American cousins against
‘Modernist’ theological tendencies. In Britain such Fundamentalism—
Evangelicalism with an inferiority complex—was at most times relatively
weak. Only if Fundamentalism is defined in a third way, as the championing of
fundamental Christian orthodoxies, can the term be applied to the Evangelical
movement as a whole with any degree of plausibility. Even then, some of the
more liberal thinkers within the movement would have been unhappy in that
role. It is best to admit that Fundamentalism in any sense has been merely one
feature among many, at some times and in some places, of Evangelical religion.
Lord Salisbury, the Conservative Prime Minister at the end of the
nineteenth century, entertained a distaste for Evangelicalism. He wrote of its
‘reign of rant’ and ‘nasal accents of devout ejaculation’, and again of its
‘incubus of narrow-mindedness…brooding over English society’.15 The
narrowness of Evangelical life has been a frequent reproach. It is true that its
tendency to erect barriers against worldliness often did make it a restricted
sphere. Its large claims and internal idiosyncrasies made it an easy target for
cheap satire. Yet it has shaped the thought-world of a large proportion of the
population. It has exerted an immense influence both on individuals and on
the course of social and political development, particularly in the later
nineteenth century. And it has shown a receptivity that goes some way
towards modifying the charge of narrowness. Evangelical religion has been in
contact with shifts in the mood of the intellectual elite. Like so many other
aspects of British life, from political rhetoric to wallpaper design, it was
affected by alterations in taste. In mediating high cultural changes to a mass
public it brought its adherents into the mainstream of Western civilisation.
Certainly Evangelicalism created its own backwaters, but overall it was no
stagnant pool. The process of diffusion meant that the world of popular
Protestantism was in flux. There was enormous variation in Evangelicalism
over time; and at any particular moment there was an intricate pattern of
beliefs, attitudes and customs. So there was an element of breadth—a broad
range of opinion—that could be obscure to the eye of the contemporary
observer and has all too frequently been overlooked by the historian. Moulded
and remoulded by its environment, Evangelical religion has been a vital force
in modern Britain.
 Notes

ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES

AFR Anglicans for Renewal

AW The Advent Witness
BC The Bible Call
BW The British Weekly
C The Christian
CEN Church of England Newspaper
CG Christian Graduate
CO The Christian Observer
CW The Christian World
F The Fundamentalist
JEH The Journal of Ecclesiastical History
JWBU The Journal of the Wesley Bible Union (which took the title
TheFundamentalist in 1927)
KH The King's Highway
LCMM The London City Mission Magazine
LE The Liberal Evangelical
LF The Life of Faith
LW Life and Work
MBAPPU The Monthly Bulletin of the Advent Preparation Prayer
Union
MR The Methodist Recorder
MT The Methodist Times
R The Record
T The Times
W The Witness
WV Wesley's Veterans, ed. J. Telford (London, n.d.)
276 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

CHAPTER 1:
PREACHING THE GOSPEL

1 R.T.Jones, The Great Reformation (Leicester, 1985) G.Rupp, Religion in

England, 1688-1791 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 121, 125.
2 G.R.Balleine, A History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England
(London, 1951 edn), p. 40 n. Other general studies of Anglican Evangelicalism
are: G.W.E.Russell, A Short History of the Evangelical Movement (London,
1915); L.Elliott-Binns, The Evangelical Movement in the English Church
(London, 1928); and D.N.Samuel (ed.) The Evangelical Succession in the Church
of England (Cambridge, 1979). On the broader movement there is E.J.Poole-
Connor, Evangelicalism in England (Worthing, 1966 edn),
3 Watts, preface to J.Jennings, Two Discourses (1723), quoted by G.F. Nuttall,
‘Continental Pietism and the Evangelical Movement in Britain’, in J.van den
Berg and J.P.van Dooren (eds), Pietismus and Reveil (Leiden, 1978), p. 226.
4 The term is studiously avoided in Sir H.M.Wellwood, Account of the Life and
Writings of john Erskine, D.D. (Edinburgh, 1818).
5 J. Milner, ‘On Evangelical religion’, The Works of joseph Milner, ed. I. Milner,
Vol. 8 (London, 1810), p. 199.
6 For examplc, T.Haweis to S. Walker, 16 July 1759, in G.C.B.Davies, The Early
Cornish Evangelicals, 1735–60: A Study of Walker of Truro and Others
(London, 1951), p. 174; cf. J.D. Walsh, The Yorkshire Evangelicals in the
eighteenth century: with especial reference to Methodism’, PhD thesis,
University of Cambridge, 1956, appendix D.
7 The alternative usage of applying ‘Evangelical’ to the Anglican party and
‘evangclical’ to others of like mind outside the Church of England can be
misleading. It has been adopted by E.Jay (The Religion of the Heart: Anglican
Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford, 1979), ch. 1, sect. 1,
esp. p. 17) in order to deny the ‘common spiritual parentage’ of Anglicans and
non-Anglicans in the movement. In reality, for all their divergences, their
common inheritance was far more significant than this usage suggests.
8 E.Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G. (London,
1888), p. 738.
9 H.Venn (ed.), The Life and a Selection from the Letters of the late Rev. Henry
Venn, M.A. (London, 1835), pp. vii f.
10 J.C.Ryle, Knots Untied (London, 1896 edn), p. 9.
11 D.Voll, Catholic Evangelicalism: The Acceptance of Evangelical Traditions by the
Oxford Movement during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century (London,
1963).
12 G.W. E.Russell, ‘Recollections ofthc Evangelicals’, The Household of Faith
(London, 1902), pp. 240 f., 245.
13 Wesley, The new birth’, The Works ofjohn Wesley, Vol. 2, ed. A.C.Outler
(Nashville, Tenn., 1985), p. 187.
14 Life of Ann Okely, quoted by J.Walsh, ‘The Cambridge Methodists’, in P.
Brooks (ed.), Christian Spirituality: Essays in Honour of Gordon Rupp (London,
1975), p. 258.
15 Milner, ‘On Evangelical religion’, pp. 201–5.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 277

16 R, 2 May 1850.
17 R.W.Dale, The Old Evangelicalism and the New (London, 1889), p. 13.
18 Ryle, Knots Untied, pp. 4–9.
19 Garbett (ed.), Evangelical Principles (London, 1875), p. xiv.
20 C, 5 October 1888, p. 5.
21 Warren, What is an Evangelical? An Enquiry (London, [1944]), pp. 18–39.
22 J.R.W.Stott, What is an Evangelical? (London, 1977), pp. 5–14.
23 Packer, The Evangelical Anglican Identity Problem, Latimer House Studies, 1
(Oxford, 1978), pp. 20 ff.
24 C.W.McCree, George Wilson McCree (London, 1893), p. 20.
25 WV, Vol. 1, pp. 74 f.
26 C, 15 July 1875, p, 19.
27 N.G.Dunning, Samuel Chadwick (London, 1933), p. 54.
28 M.C.Bickersteth, A Sketch of the Life and Episcopate of the Right Reverend
Robert Bickersteth, D.D., Bishop of Ripon, 1857–1887 (London, 1887), pp. 27 f.
29 Edwards, The distinguishing marks of a work of the true Spirit’, Select Works,
Vol. 1 (London, 1965), p. 106. Walsh, ‘Yorkshire Evangelicals’, p. 290.
J.Lackington, Memoirs of the Forty-Five First Years of the Life of James
Lackington (London, 1795), p. 161.
30 T.D.B. in CO, January 1852, p. 3.
31 W.Hanna, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas Chalmers, D.D., LL.D.,
Vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1851), ch. 8.
32 Haslam, From Death into Life (London, n.d.), p. 48.
33 Venn, The Complete Duty of Man, 3rd edn (London, 1779), p. xi.
34 Russell, ‘Recollections of the Evangelicals’, p. 238.
35 Dale, Old Evangelicalism and the New, pp. 51–7.
36 Evangel, Summer 1987.
37 The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., ed. N. Curnock, Vol. 2 (London,
1911), pp. 333 f. (25 January 1740).
38 R.A.Knox, Enthusiasm (Oxford, 1950), ch. 21.
39 Warren, What is an Evangelical?, p. 26.
40 G.W.E.Russell, Mr Gladstone’s Religious Development (London, 1899), p. 7.
41 C.D.Field, ‘Methodism in Metropolitan London, 1850–1920: a social and
sociological study’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1975, p. 232.
42 On the Other Side: The Report of the Evangelical Alliance’s Commission on
Evangelism (London, 1968), p. 184.
43 A.T.Pierson, Forward Movements of the Last Half Century (New York, 1900), p.
207.
44 G.W.E.Russell, Sir Wilfrid Lawson (London, 1909), pp. 3 f. J.Burgess, The Lake
Counties and Christianity: The Religious History of Cumbria, 1780–1920
(Carlisle, 1984), pp. 88–95.
45 Edwards, ‘A narrative of surprising conversions’, Select Works, Vol. 1, p. 40.
46 Simeon, ‘On the new birth’, in A.Pollard (ed.), Let Wisdom Judge: University
Addresses and Sermon Outlines by Charles Simeon (London, 1959), p. 51.
47 G.Redford and J.A.James (eds), The Autobiography of William Jay, 2nd edn
(London, 1855), p. 22.
48 For example, WV, Vol. 4, p. 19 (J.Pawson).
49 Revival, 21 January 1860, p. 21.
278 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

50 R.Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and

America, 1790–1865 (Westport, Conn., 1978), p. 125.
51 M.Raleigh (ed.), Alexander Raleigh: Records of his Life (Edinburgh, 1881), p.
15.
52 J.Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (New
York, 1982), pp. 248 f.
53 J.Milner, ‘The nature of the Spirit’s influence on the understanding’, Works, ed.
I.Milner, Vol. 8.
54 Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism, pp. xiv, 63, 99.
55 Horton, An Autobiography (London, 1917), p. 37.
56 O.Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Vol. 1, 2nd edn (London, 1970), pp. 250–62.
57 D.M.Thompson, ‘Baptism, Church and Society in Britain since 1800’, Hulsean
Lectures, University of Cambridge, 1984, pp. 12–17.
58 G.Bugg, Spiritual Regeneration Not Necessarily Connected with Baptism
(Kettering, 1816). [C.Marsh], The Life of the Rev.William Marsh, D.D.
(London, 1867), p. 131.
59 Sumner, Apostolical Preaching Considered, in an Examination of St Paul’s
Epistles (London, 1815), p. 137 n.
60 Walker, The Gospel Commission (Edinburgh, 1826).
61 W.Y.Fullerton, C.H.Spurgeon (London, 1920), pp. 305 ff.
62 Auricular Confession and Priestly Absolution: Lord Ebury’s Prayer-Book
Amendment Bill (London, 1880), p. 2.
63 CEN, 5 February 1965, p. 7.
64 Edwards, ‘Narrative’, p. 47.
65 J.Bull, Memorials of the Rev.William Bull (London, 1864), p. 248.
66 T.Waugh, Twenty-Three Years a Missioner (London, n.d.), p. 62.
67 WV, Vol. 1, pp. 99, 233; Vol. 2, p. 91.
68 J.Lawson, The peoplc called Methodists: 2: “Our discipline”’, in R.Davies and
G.Rupp (eds), A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, Vol. 1
(London, 1965), pp. 189, 198.
69 Lackington, Memoirs, pp. 128 f.
70 S.Mechie, The Church and Scottish Social Development, 1780–1870 (London,
1960), pp. 52 ff.
71 Dale, ‘The Evangelical Revival’, The Evangelical Revival and other Sermons
(London, 1880), p. 35.
72 A.Russell, The Clerical Profession (London, 1980), chs 3 and 4.
73 C.Bridges, The Christian Ministry, 3rd edn (London, 1830), p. 477.
74 CO, March 1850, p. 213.
75 G.H.Sumner, Life of Charles Richard Sumner, D.D. (London, 1876), p. 212.
Bickersteth, Bickersteth, p. 153.
76 ‘English Evangelical clergy’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1860, pp. 119f., quoted by
W.D.Balda, ’”Spheres of Influence”: Simeon’s Trust and its implications for
Evangelical patronage’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1981, pp. 196, f.,
199.
77 R.P.Heitzenrater, The Elusive Mr.Wesley: 1: John Wesley his Own Biographer
(Nashville, Tenn., 1984), p. 21.
78 H.Moore, The Life of Mrs Mary Fletcher, 11th edn (London, 1844), p. 150.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 279

79 J.B.B.Clarke (ed.), An Account of the Infancy, Religious and Literary Life of

Adam Clarke, LL.D., F.A.S., &c., &c., &c., Vol. 1 (London, 1833), p. 191.
80 Field, ‘Methodism in Metropolitan London’, p. 46.
81 [Chalmers,] Observations on a Passage in Mr Playfair’s Letter (Cupar, Fife,
1805), p. 10. I.H.Murray, Thomas Chalmers and the revival of the church’,
Banner of Truth, March 1980, p. 16.
82 Evangelical Magazine, 1803, p. 203, quoted by G.F.Nuttall, The Significance of
Trevecca College, 1768–91 (London, 1969), p. 7.
83 W.Selwyn, in H.Scholefield, Memoir of the late Rev.James Scholefield, M.A.
(London, 1855), p. 335.
84 S.Neill, A History of Christian Missions, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth, Middlesex,
1986), pp. 213–16.
85 J.C.Pollock, The Cambridge Seven (London, 1955).
86 G.B.A.M.Finlayson, The Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, 1801–1885 (London,
1981), p. 322.
87 More, An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (London, 1808
edn), p. 146.
88 Heitzenrater, Wesley, Vol. 1, p. 149.
89 J.Dale, ‘The theological and literary qualities of the poetry of Charles Wesley in
relation to the standards of his age’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1961,
p. 145.
90 WV, Vol. 3, p. 57 (John Nelson).
91 ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 183 f. (George Shadford).
92 W. and T.Ludlam, Essays Scriptural, Moral and Logical, Vol.2 (London, 1817),
p. 99, quoted by Walsh, ‘Yorkshire Evangelicals’, p. 14; cf. G. Reedy, The Bible
and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth-Century England
(Philadelphia, 1985), ch. 5, pt III.
93 K.Moody-Stuart, Brownlow North: The Story ofhis Life and Work (Kilmarnock,
[1904]), p. 185.
94 J.Macpherson, Henry Moorhouse: The English Evangelist (London, n.d.), p. 94.
95 H.E.Hopkins, Charles Simeon of Cambridge (London, 1977), p. 161.
96 For example, N.Anderson, An Adopted Son (Leicester, 1985), p. 289.
97 BW, 5 March 1896, p. 325; 26 March 1896, p. 379.
98 Venn, Complete Duty, p. 51. ‘The fifteen articles of the Countess of Huntingdon’s
Connexion’, in E, Welch (ed.), Two Calvinistic Methodist Chapels, 1743–1811
(London, 1975), p. 88.
99 Bickersteth, A Scripture Help Designed to Assist in Reading the Bible Profitably,
17th edn (London, 1838), p. 2.
100 W.J.C. Ervine, ‘Doctrine and diplomacy: some aspects of the life and thought of
the Anglican Evangelical elergy, 1797–1837’, PhD thesis, University of
Cambridge, 1979, ch. 3; cf. below, pp. 86–91.
101 On Anglicans, cf. J.L.Altholz, ‘The mind of Victorian orthodoxy: Anglican
responses to “Essays and Reviews”, 1860–1864’, Church History, vol. 51, no. 2
(1982).
102 Spurgeon, The Greatest Fight in the World (London, 1896), p. 27, quoted by
P.S.Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon: A Preacher’s Progress (New York,
1982), p. 374.
280 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

103 Barrett, The secularisation of the pulpit’, in Congregational Year Book, 1895, p.
27.
104 Gladstone, ‘The Evangelical movement: its parentage, progress, and issue’,
Gleanings from Past Years, Vol. 7 (London, 1879), p. 207.
105 Wesley to Mary Bishop, 7 February 1778, The Letters of the Rev.John Wesley,
A.M., ed. J.Telford, Vol. 6 (London, 1931), pp. 297 f.
106 WV, Vol. 1, p. 118 (Christopher Hopper).
107 W.H.Goold (ed.), The Works of the Rev.John Maclaurin, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh,
1860), pp. 63–102.
108 Bridges, Christian Ministry, p. 320.
109 R, 12 January 1934, p. 15 (Stephen Neill). CEN, 5 March 1954, p. 8 (Bishop
Joost de Blank).
110 Dale, The Atonement (London, 1875). Denney, The Death of Christ (London,
1902). Stott, The Cross of Christ (Leicester, 1986). Forsyth, The Cruciality of the
Cross (London, 1909); Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind (London, 1907);
The Work of Christ (London, 1910).
111 A.J.Davidson (ed.), The Autobiography and Diary of Samuel Davidson, D.D.,
LL.D. (Edinburgh, 1899), p. 64.
112 Maltby, Christ and his Cross (London, 1935); cf. W.Strawson, ‘Methodist
theology, 1850–1950’, in R.Davies et al. (eds), A History of the Methodist
Church in Great Britain, Vol. 3 (London, 1983), pp. 217 f.
113 Raleigh (ed), Raleigh, p. 281.
114 Arnott, The Brethren (London, 1970 edn), p. 17.
115 Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God (London, 1891); cf. A.M.Ramsey, From
Gore to Temple: The Development of Anglican Theology between ‘Lux Mundi’
and the Second World War, 1889–1939 (London, 1960).
116 ‘Annual address to the Methodist Societies’, Minutes of Several Conversations
…ofthe People called Methodists (London, 1892), pp. 374 f.
117 Baldwin Brown, The Divine Life in Man (London, [1860]). See also C. Binfield,
“‘No quest, no conquest.” Baldwin Brown and Silvester Horne’, So Down to
Prayers: Studies in English Nonconformity, 1780–1920 (London, 1977), p. 195.
Scott Lidgett, The Spiritual Principle of the Atonement (London, 1897); cf. Scott
Lidgett, My Guided Life (London, 1936), pp. 149–58.
118 R, 13 January 1939, p. 26.
119 CEN, 7 April 1967, p. 3.
120 Scott, The Force of Truth (Edinburgh, 1984 edn), p. 65.
121 Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, 20th edn (Romsey, 1816), p. 266.
122 Hall, ‘On the substitution of the innocent for the guilty’, in O.Gregory (ed.),
The Works of Robert Hall, A.M., Vol. 5 (London, 1839), pp. 73–103.
123 Fremantle, ‘Atonement’, in Garbett (ed.), Evangelical Principles, pp. 86–92.
124 E.Steane, The Doctrine of Christ developed by the Apostles (Edinburgh, 1872),
p. viii. Pope, The Person of Christ (London, 1875), p. 51.
125 Shaw, ‘What is my religious faith?’, Sixteen Self Sketches (London, 1949), p. 79.
126 I.E.Page (ed.), John Brash: Memorials and Correspondence (London, 1912), p. 95.
Strawson, ‘Methodist theology’, pp. 202, 215 ff.
127 D.Johnson, Contending for the Faith: A History of the Evangelical Movement in
the Universities and Colleges (Leicester, 1979), p. 359.
128 Venn, Complete Duty, p. xiii.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 281

129 M.N.Garrard, Mrs Penn-Lewis: A Memoir (London, 1930), pp. 26, 168, 197.
130 H.A.Thomas (ed.), Memorials of the Rev.David Thomas, B.A. (London, 1876),
p. 37.
131 Rattenbury, ‘Socialism and the old theology’, Six Sermons on Social Subjects
(London, [1908]), pp. 82 f.
132 M.R.Pease, Richard Heath, 1831–1912 (n.p., [1922]), pp. 48 ff.
133 J.H.Pratt (ed.), The Thought of the Evangelical Leaders: Notes of the Discussions
of The Eclectic Society, London, during the Years 1798–1814 (Edinburgh, 1978),
pp, 165 ff., 505 ff. For the background, see A.P.F.Sell, The Great Debate:
Calvinism, Arminianism and Salvation (Worthing, 1982).
134 Wilberforce to Robert Southey, 5 December [?], 2519/63, National Library of
Scotland, quoted by P.F.Dixon, The politics of emancipation: the movement for
the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies, 1807–33’, DPhil thesis,
University of Oxford, 1971, p. 86.
135 J. Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975), pp. 184
ff.
136 N.Sykes, Church and State in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1954).
G.F.A.Best, Temporal Pillars: Queen Anne’s Bounty, the Ecclesiastical
Commissioners, and the Church of England (Cambridge, 1964). J.C.D. Clark,
English Society, 1688–1832 (Cambridge, 1985).
137 M.R.Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution
(Oxford, 1978).
138 A.L.Drummond and J.Bulloch, The Scottish Church, 1688–1843 (Edinburgh,
1973). C.G.Brown, The Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730
(London, 1987).

CHAPTER 2:
KNOWLEDGE OF THE LORD

1 H.J.Hughes, Life of Howell Harris, the Welsh Reformer (London, 1892), p. 10;
cf. G.F.Nuttall, Howel Harris, 1714–1773: The Last Enthusiast (Cardiff, 1965).
2 G.E.Jones, Modern Wales: A Concise History, c. 1485–1979 (Cambridge, 1984),
p. 130. There is now D.L.Morgan, The Great Awakening in Wales (London,
1988).
3 A.Dallimore, George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of
the Eighteenth-Century Revival, Vol. 1 (London, 1970), chs 3–7.
4 L.Tyerman, The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., Vol. 1 (London,
1871), pp. 179 f., 233. Tyerman’s is still the most authoritative biography.
S.Ayling, John Wesley (London, 1979) is the most recent reliable study.
5 Dallimore, Whitefield, Vol. 2 (Edinburgh, 1980), chs 5, 8. A.Fawcett, The
Cambuslang Revival: The Scottish Evangelical Revival of the Eighteenth
Century (London, 1971).
6 Edwards, ‘A narrative of surprising conversions’ [1737], Select Works, Vol. 1
(London, 1965). The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., ed. N.Curnock,
Vol. 1 (London, 1909), pp. 83 f. (9 October l738). G.D.Henderson, ‘Jonathan
Edwards and Scotland’, The Burning Bush: Studies in Scottish Church History
282 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

(Edinburgh, 1957), pp. 151–5. See also I.H.Murray, Jonathan Edwards: A New
Biography (Edinburgh, 1987).
7 Dallimore, Whitefield, Vol. 1, p. 14.
8 Doddridge to Daniel Wadsworth, 6 March 1741, in G.F.Nuttall, Calendar of the
Correspondence of Philip Doddridge, D.D. (1702–1751), Historical Manuscripts
Commission JP 26 (London, 1979), p. 130.
9 R.Brown, The English Baptists of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1986), p, 77.
10 D.W.Lovegrove, ‘The practice ofitinerant evangelism in English Calvinistic
Dissent, 1780–1830’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1980, p. 54.
11 R.Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the
British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 147, 151.
12 Lovegrove, ‘Itinerant evangelism’, pp. 247 f., 252.
13 Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 139 f.
14 ibid., pp. 21 ff. A.D.Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church,
Chapel and Social Change, 1740–1914 (London, 1976), pp. 28 f.
15 C.G.Brown, The Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730 (London,
1987), p. 61. Baptists and Congregationalists, wrongly classified by Brown as
Presbyterian Dissenters, are excluded from this proportion.
16 H.Venn, The Complete Duty of Man, 3rd edn (London, 1779), p. iii.
17 Wesley to Ann Bolton, 15 April 1771, The Letters of the Rev.John Wesley,
A.M., ed. J.Telford, Vol. 5 (London, 1931), p. 238.
18 Venn, Complete Duty, pp. vii ff.
19 A.Booth, The Reign of Grace from its Rise to its Consummation [1768], 8th edn
(London, 1807), p. 17.
20 J.Lackington, Memoirs of the Forty-Five First Years of the Life ofjames
Lackington (London, 1795), p. 48. Lackington’s Memoirs are particularly
revealing because their author had been zealous but had lapsed. He subsequently
returned to the Methodist fold, as recounted in The Confessions of j.Lackington
(London, 1804).
21 Lackington, Memoirs, p. 61,
22 [J.Bean], Zeal without Innovation: Or the Present State of Religion and Morals
Considered (London, 1808), p. 87.
23 Wesley to Dr George Horne, 19 March 1762, Letters, ed. Telford, Vol. 4, p. 175.
24 Milner, ‘On Evangelical religion’ [1789], The Works of joseph Milner, ed. I.
Milner, Vol. 8 (London, 1810), pp. 203 f.
25 The Journal of the Rev.John Wesley, A.M., ed. N. Curnock, Vol. 5 (London,
[1913?]), p. 244 (1 December 1767).
26 Dallimore, Whitefield, Vol. 2, pp. 544 f.
27 S.L.Ollard, The Six Students of St Edmund Hall Expelled from the University of
Oxford in 1768 (London, 1911).
28 For example, F.K.Brown, Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce
(Cambridge, 1961), p. 310.
29 R.Sher and A.Murdoch, ‘Patronage and party in the Church of Scotland, 1750–
1800’, in N.Macdougall (ed.), Church, Politics and Society: Scotland, 1408–1929
(Edinburgh, 1983), pp. 203–7.
30 G.Eliot, ‘Janet’s repentance’, Scenes of Clerical Life [1858], ed. T.A.Noble
(Oxford, 1985), p. 194.
31 ibid., p. 252.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 283

32 Tyerman, Wesley, Vol. 1, pp. 406–15.

33 WV, Vol. 1, p. 121; Vol. 2, p. 12; Vol. 3, p. 86.
34 J.Walsh, ‘Methodism and the mob in the eighteenth century’, Popular Belief and
Practice, Studies in Church History, vol. 8, ed. G.J.Cuming and Derek Baker
(Cambridge, 1972). Lovegrove, ‘ltinerant evangelism’, ch. 5.
35 F.Baker, ‘The pcoplc called Methodists: 3: Polity’, in R.Davies and G.Rupp (eds),
A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, Vol. 1 (London, 1965), pp.
222 f.
36 J.Kent, ‘Wesleyan membership in Bristol, 1783’, in An Ecclesiastical Miscellany,
Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society Records Section, vol. 11, ed.
D.Walker et al (Bristol, 1976), p. 106.
37 Lackington, Memoirs, p. 70,
38 Baker, ‘Polity’, pp. 224 f.
39 WV, Vol. 1, pp. 25 f.
40 Lackington, Confessions, pp. 190 ff.; Memoirs, pp, 129, 149.
41 Edwards, ‘Narrative’, p. 50.
42 Brown, Baptists, pp. 87 ff.
43 G.C.B. Davies, The Early Cornish Evangelicals, 1735–60: A Study of Walker of
Truro and Others (London, 1951), pp. 66–70, ch. 4.
44 W.H.Goold (ed.), The Works of the Rev.John Maclaurin (Edinburgh, 1860), p.
xvii.
45 Kent, ‘Wesleyan membership’, pp. 107–11.
46 T.C.Smout, ‘Born again at Cambuslang: new evidence on popular religion and
literacy in eighteenth-century Scotland’, Past & Present, no 97 (1982), p. 117.
Gilbert, Religion and Society, p, 67.
47 Brown, Religion in Scotland, p. 150. The proportion should perhaps be higher,
because textile trades are excluded. Artisan prominence here and elsewhere is
clear despite such problems of definition. See also below, p. 111.
48 C.D.Field, The social structure of English Methodism: eighteenth-twentieth
centuries’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 28, no. 2 (1977), p. 202.
49 ibid.
50 H. More, Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great (London,
1788). W. Wilberforce, A Practical View ofthe Prevailing Religious System of
Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country
Contrasted with Real Christianity (London, 1797).
51 Lackington, Memoirs, p. 72.
52 G.Malmgreen, ‘Domestic discords: women and the family in East Cheshire
Methodism, 1750–1830’, in J.Obelkevich et al. (ed.), Disciplines of Faith: Studies
in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy (London, 1987), p. 60.
53 Smout, ‘Born again’, p. 116. Kent, ‘Wesleyan membership’, p. 107,
54 D.M.Valenze, Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular
Religion in Industrial England (Princeton, NJ, 1985).
55 W.F.Swift, ‘The women itinerant preachers of early Methodism’, Proceedings of
the Wesley Historical Society, vol. 28, no. 5 (1952), and vol. 29, no. 4 (1953).
56 M.G.Jones, Hannah More (Cambridge, 1952).
57 Eliot, ‘Janet’s repentance’, pp. 205 f.
58 A.Everitt, The Pattern of Rural Dissent: The Nineteenth Century (Leicester,
1972), ch. 2.
284 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

59 J.Macinnes, The Evangelical Movement in the Highlands of Scotland, 1688 to

1800 (Aberdeen, 1951).
60 Everitt, Rural Dissent, pp. 20 ff.
61 For example, WV, Vol. 1, p. 184.
62 On regional distribution, see p. 109.
63 See pp. 42, 45–6, 48–50, 60, 153–5, 171–4.
64 J.D.Walsh, ‘The Yorkshire Evangelicals in the eighteenth century: with especial
reference to Methodism’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1956, pp. 33 ff.,
314.
65 Brown, Baptists, pp. 68 ff.
66 ‘A collection of hymns for the use of the people called Methodists’, The Works
of john Wesley, Vol. 7, ed. F.Hildebrandt et al (Oxford, 1983), pp. 81, 123, 338.
67 Arminian Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1 (1778), pp. 9–17.
68 G.F.Nuttall, ‘The influence of Arminianism in England’, in G.O.McCulloh (ed.),
Man’s Faith and Freedom: The Theological Influence ofjacobus Arminius (New
York, 1962), pp. 60 f.
69 Wesley to Newton, 14 May 1765, Letters, ed. Telford, Vol. 4, p. 298.
70 Nuttall, ‘Influence’, pp. 56 f.
71 Wesley on T.Vivian to Wesley, 10 October 1748, in Davies, Cornish
Evangelicals, p. 85.
72 R.Davies, The people called Methodists: 1: “Our doctrines’”, in Davies and Rupp
(eds), Methodist Church, Vol. 1, pp. 167 f.
73 For example, Tyerman, Wesley, Vol. 1, p. 551. WV, Vol. 7, pp. 24 ff., 39, 66.
74 Davies, ‘“Our doctrines”’, pp. 176–9.
75 F.Baker, John Wesley and the Church of England (London, 1970), esp, chs 10,
17.
76 Lackington, Memoirs, p. 179.
77 Hempton, Methodism and Politics, ch. 3.
78 W.R.Ward, Religion and Society in England, 1790–1850 (London, 1972), chs 4,
6. W.R.Ward (ed.), The Early Correspondence of Jabez Bunting, 1820–1829,
Camden Fourth Series, vol. 11 (London, 1972). W.R.Ward, Early Victorian
Methodism: The Correspondence of Jabez Bunting, 1830–1858 (Oxford, 1976).
79 Baker, ‘Polity’, p. 232.
80 Valenze, Prophetic Sons and Daughters, p. 20. See also J.C.Bowmer, Pastor and
People: A Study of Church and Ministry in Wesleyan Methodism from the
Death of John Wesley (1791) to the Death of Jabez Bunting (1858) (London,
1975).
81 E.Welch (ed.), Two Calvinistic Methodist Chapels, 1743–1811 (London, 1975),
pp. xiii f.
82 C.E.Watson, ‘Whitefield and Congregationalism’, Transactions of the
Congregational Historical Society, vol. 8, no. 4 (1922), p. 175.
83 Welch (ed.), Calvinistic Methodist Chapels, pp. xi f., xvi. G.F.Nuttall, The
Significance of Trevecca College, 1768–91 (London, 1969), pp. 4 ff.
84 J.Walsh, ‘Methodism at the end of the eighteenth century’, in Davies and Rupp
(eds), Methodist Church, Vol. 1, p. 292.
85 ibid. Welch (ed.), Calvinistic Methodist Chapels, p. xvii.
86 Dallimore, Whitefield, Vol. 2, pp. 157 f.
87 Welch (ed.), Calvinistic Methodist Chapels, pp. x f., xiv, 22, 45.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 285

88 ibid., p. 18.
89 C.E.Watson, ‘Whitefield and Congregationalism’, p. 242.
90 Welch (ed.), Calvinistic Methodist Chapels, p. xi.
91 T.Beynon (ed.), Howell Harris, Reformer and Soldier (1714–1773) (Caernarvon,
1958), e.g. p. 168 (19 April 1763).
92 T.Scott, The Force of Truth [1779] (Edinburgh, 1984), pp. 27, 33, 44–8, 51, 52, 61,
66.
93 ibid., pp. 75, 100, 102 f.
94 Davies, Cornish Evangelicals, pp. 31 f.
95 Walsh, ‘Yorkshire Evangelicals’, pp. 117 ff.
96 T.Haweis, The Life of William Romaine, M.A. (London, 1797), p. 27.
97 Tyerman, Wesley, Vol. 3, p. 49.
98 Walker to Thomas Adam, 11 October 1759, in Davies, Cornish Evangelicals, p.
176.
99 Berridge to [Mrs Blackwell], n.d., in C.Smyth, Simeon and Church Order
(Cambridge, 1940), p. 169.
100 F.Baker, William Grimshaw, 1708–1763 (London, 1963), esp. ch. 17.
101 A.S.Wood, Thomas Haweis, 1734–1820 (London, 1957), pp. 149 ff.
102 J.Venn, in H.Venn (ed.), The Life and a Selection from the Letters of the Rev.
Henry Venn, M.A. (London, 1834), p. 171.
103 A.W.Brown, Recollections of the Conversation Parties of the Rev.Charles
Simeon, M.A, (London, 1863), p. 107. See also Smyth, Simeon and Church
Order, ch. 6.
104 Wood, Haweis, p, 115.
105 Smith, Simeon and Church Order, pp. 240–3. Davies, Cornish Evangelicals, pp.
212 f.
106 W.D.Balda, ‘“Spheres of influence”: Simeon’s Trust and its implications for
Evangelical patronage’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1981, esp. ch. 3.
107 M.R.Watts, The Dissenters: Front the Reformation to the French Revolution
(Oxford, 1978), pp. 436 ff.
108 G.F.Nuttall, ‘Methodism and the older Dissent: some perspectives’, Journal of the
United Reformed Church Historical Society, vol. 2, no. 8 (1981), pp. 272 f.
109 Letter of 22 February 1765, National Library of Wales MS 5453C, in R.T. Jones,
Congregationalism ‘m England, 1662–1962 (London, 1962), p. 161.
110 Davies, Cornish Evangelicals, pp. 75, 171 ff. 198.
111 Nuttall, Correspondence of Philip Doddridge, p. xxxv.
112 Nuttall, ‘Methodism and the older Dissent’, pp. 271 f.
113 Preface to The Experience of Mr. R.Cruttenden (London, 1744), p. vii.
114 K.R.Manley, ‘The making of an Evangelical Baptist leader’, Baptist Quarterly,
vol. 26, no. 6 (1976), p. 259.
115 Brown, Baptists, pp. 79, 81.
116 Watts, Dissenters, pp. 451 f.
117 Brown, Baptists, pp. 67–70, 109–12.
118 J.Gillies, ‘Memoir’, in Goold (ed.), Works of Maclaurin, pp. xv ff. Sir
H.W.Moncrieff Wellwood, Account of the Life and Writings of John Erskine,
D.D. (Edinburgh, 1818), pp. 144, 113, 134, 225.
286 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

120 J.Erskine, ‘Memoir’, in Extracts from an Exhortation to the Inhabitants of the

South Parish of Glasgow by the late Rev, Dr John Gillies (Glasgow, 1819), pp. 9,
17, 14.
121 Sher and Murdoch, ‘Patronage and party’.
122 G.Struthers, The History of the Rise, Progress and Principles of the Relief
Church (Glasgow, 1843), p. 254.
123 Dallimore, Whitefield, Vol. 2, pp. 86–90.
124 Brown, Religion in Scotland, p. 31,
125 Especially in G.F.Nuttall, Richard Baxter and Philip Doddridge: A Study in a
Tradition, Friends of Dr Williams’s Library Fifth Lecture (London, 1951), p. 19.
See also Nuttall, Richard Baxter (London, 1965); Nuttall (ed.), Philip Doddridge,
1702–51: His Contribution to English Religion (London, 1951); Nuttall,
Correspondence of Philip Doddridge.
126 Whitefield to Doddridge, 21 December 1748, in J.Gillies (ed.), The Works of the
Reverend George Whitefield, M.A., Vol. 2 (London, 1771), p. 216.
127 Nuttall, ‘George Whitefield’s “Curate”: Gloucestershire Dissent and the
revival’, JEH, vol. 27, no. 4 (1976).
128 Nuttall, ‘Methodism and the older Dissent’, p. 261.
129 Nuttall, ‘Questions and answers: an eighteenth-century correspondence’,
Baptist Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 2 (1977). Manley, ‘An Evangelical Baptist lcadcr’,
pp. 260–9.
130 R.Wodrow, Analecta, Vol. 3 (Edinburgh, 1843), pp. 342, 379. Wodrow to Mrs
Wodrow, 12 May 1727, The Correspondence, ed. T.M’Crie, Vol. 3 (Edinburgh,
1843), pp. 302 f.
131 G.H.Jenkins, Literature, Religion and Society in Wales, 1660–1730 (Cardiff,
1978), esp. pp. 306–9. Jones, Modern Wales, pp. 128 ff.
132 J.A.Newton, Susanna Wesley and the Puritan Tradition in Methodism (London,
1968), pp. 138 f.
133 F.Baker, ‘Wesley’s Puritan ancestry’, London Quarterly and Holborn Review,
vol. 187, no. 3 (1962). R.C.Monk, John Wesley: His Puritan Heritage (London,
1966), pp. 245 f.
134 Monk, Wesley, pp. 36–41,
135 Lackington, Memoirs, pp. 94 f.
136 WV, Vol. 1, pp. 16, 212; Vol. 2, p. 22; Vol. 4, pp. 9, 242; Vol. 7, pp. 14, 17. See
also I. Rivers, ‘“Strangers and pilgrims”: sources and patterns of Methodist
narrative’, in J.C.Hilson et al. (ed.), Augustan Worlds (Leicester, 1978), p. 195.
137 WV, Vol. 2, p. 54.
138 Professor J.H.Liden of Uppsala in his journal, 2 November 1769, quoted by
R.P.Heitzenrater, The Elusive Mr Wesley: 2: John Wesley as seen by
Contemporaries and Biographers (Nashville, Tenn., 1984), p. 89.
139 J.A.Newton, Methodism and the Puritans, Friends of Dr Williams’s Library
Eighteenth Lecture (London, 1964), pp. 9–17.
140 Baker, Wesley and the Church of England, p. 52. Monk, Wesley, pp. 216, 182–5.
P. Collinson, ‘The English conventicle’, in Voluntary Religion, Studies in
Church History, vol. 23, ed. W.J.Sheils and D.Wood (Oxford, 1986). J. Lawson,
‘The people called Methodists: 2: “Our discipline”’, in Davies and Rupp (eds),
Methodist Church, Vol. 1.
141 G.Rupp. Religion in England (1688–1791) (Oxford, 1986), pp. 111, 326.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 287

142 C.J.Abbey, The English Church and its Bishops, 1700–1800, Vol. 1 (London,
1887), pp. 151 ff.
143 J.Walsh, ‘Origins of the Evangelical Revival’, in G.V.Bennett and J.D. Walsh
(eds), Essays in Modern English Church History in Memory of Norman Sykes
(London, 1966), p. 156. Walsh, ‘Yorkshire Evangelicals’, p, 53 n.
144 ibid. Brown, Simeon, p. 70.
145 Hervey, Letter of 12 January 1748, The Works ofthe late Reverend James
Hervey, A.M., Vol. 6 (London, 1807), p. 11.
146 [Bean], Zeal without Innovation, ch. 3, sect. V.
147 WV, Vol. 4, p. 38.
148 E.Duffy, ‘Primitive Christianity revived: religious renewal in Augustan
England’, in Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History, Studies in Church
History, vol. 14, ed. D.Baker (Oxford, 1977), p. 291. See also J.S.Simon, John
Wesley and the Religious Societies (London, 1921), ch. 1.
149 M.Schmidt, John Wesley: A Theological Biography, Vol. 1 (London 1962), p. 99.
150 R.P.Heitzenrater (ed.), Diary of an Oxford Methodist: Benjamin Ingham,
1733–1734 (Durham, NC, 1985), pp. 8 f., 37 f.
151 R.P.Heitzenrater, The Elusive Mr Wesley: 1: John Wesley his oum Biographer
(Nashville, Tenn., 1984), p. 58.
152 Lawson, ‘“Our discipline’”, pp. 190–6.
153 ibid., p. 194 n. Lackington, Memoirs, p. 67.
154 Walsh, ‘Origins’, pp. 146 ff. See also H.D.Rack, ‘Religious societies and the
origins of Methodism’, JEH, vol. 38, no. 4 (1987), which points out the
inconsistent relationship between Methodism and the older societies.
155 Wesley, ‘A plain account of Christian perfection’, in F.Whaling (ed.), John and
Charles Wesley, The Classics of Western Spirituality (London, 1981), p. 299.
156 H.T.Hughes, ‘Jeremy Taylor and John Wesley’, London Quarterly and Holborn
Review, vol. 174, no. 4 (1949), pp. 303 f. Schmidt, Wesley, Vol. 1, pp. 73–81.
157 Wesley, ‘Christian perfection’, p. 299; cf. Schmidt, Wesley, Vol. 1, pp. 82–5.
158 Wesley, ‘Christian perfection’, p. 299; cf. J.G.Green, John Wesley and William
Law (London, 1945); E.W.Baker, A Herald of the Evangelical Revival (London,
1948).
159 Schmidt, Wesley, Vol. 1, pp. 48–57.
160 R.P.Heitrenrater, ‘John Wesley and the Oxford Methodists, 1725–35’, PhD
thesis, Duke University, NC, 1972, pp. 513 f. See also J.Hoyles, The Waning of
the Renaissance, 1640–1740: Studies in the Thought and Poetry of Henry More,
John Norris and Isaac Watts (The Hague, 1971), pt 2.
161 Schmidt, Wesley, Vol. 1, pp. 213–17. J. Orcibal, The theological originality of
John Wesley and continental spirituality’, in Davies and Rupp (eds), Methodist
Church, Vol. 1, p. 90.
162 ibid., pp. 90 f.
163 J.Walsh, The Cambridge Methodists’, in Peter Brooks (ed.), Christian
Spirituality: Essays in Honour of Gordon Rupp (London, 1975), pp. 278–82.
164 A.C.Outler (ed.), John Wesley (New York, 1964), pp. 9 f. Baker, Wesley and the
Church of England, pp. 32–50.
165 G.Rupp, ‘lntroductory essay’, in Davies and Rupp (eds), Methodist Church, Vol.
1, p. xxxiv.
288 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

166 W.R.Ward, ‘Power and piety: the origins of the religious revival in the early
eighteenth century’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of
Manchester, vol. 63, no. 1 (1980), pp. 237–48.
167 P.C.Erb (ed.), Pietists: Selected Writings, The Classics of Western Spirituality
(London, 1983), pp. 1–96.
168 Ward, ‘Power and piety’, pp. 232–7.
169 Nuttall, ‘Continental pietism and the Evangelical Movement in Britain’, in J. van
den Berg and J.P.van Dooren (eds), Pietismus and Reveil (Leiden, 1978),
pp. 209–19; cf. W.M. Williams, The Friends of Griffith Jones, Y Cymmrodor,
vol. 46 (London, 1939).
170 W.G.Addison, The Renewed Church of the United Brethren, 1722–1930
(London, 1932).
171 Erb (ed), Pietists, pp. 291–330.
172 C.W.Towlson, Moravian and Methodist (London, 1957), chs 3–6.
173 WV, Vol. 3, p. 31.
174 R.T.Jenkins, The Moravian Brethren in North Wales, Y Cymmrodor, vol. 45
(London, 1938), p. 9.
175 Walsh, ‘Cambridge Methodists’, pp. 263 f.
176 Towlson, Moravian and Methodist, ch. 7.
177 Nuttall, Baxter and Doddridge, p. 19; ‘Influence of Arminianism’, p. 60.
178 C.Hill, ‘Puritans and “the dark corners of the land”’, in Change and Continuity
in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1974). G.F.Nuttall,
‘Northamptonshire and The Modern Question: a turning-point in eighteenth-
century Dissent’, Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., vol. 16, no. 1 (1965), pp.
104 f. B.R. White, The English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century (London,
1983), p. 74.
179 S.Neill, A History of Christian Missions, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth, Middlesex,
1986), pp. 187–92.
180 W.T.Whitley, Calvinism and Evangelism in England especially in Baptist
Circles (London, [1933]), p. 4.
181 E.Benz, ‘The Pietist and Puritan sources of early Protestant world mission
(Cotton Mather and A.H.Francke)’, Church History, vol. 20, no. 2 (1951), p. 43.
182 Edwards, ‘God’s sovereignty in the salvation of men’. Select Works, Vol. 1, p.
233.
183 Edwards, ‘The distinguishing marks of a work of the true Spirit’, Select
184 Works, Vol. 1, p. 98. Booth, Reign of Grace, pp. 59 ff.
185 Carey, Enquiry (London, 1961), sect. 1.
186 Edwards, An Account of the Life of the late Rev. Mr.David Brainerd… (Boston,
Mass., 1749). R.T.Handy, A History of the Churches in the United States and
Canada (Oxford, 1976), pp. 89, 92.
187 E.D.Potts, British Baptist Missionaries in India, 1793–1837: The History of
Serampore and its Missions (Cambridge, 1967), p. 13.
188 James Hutton to Zinzendorf, 14 March 1740, in Heitzenrater, Wesley, Vol. 2, pp.
69 f.
189 WV, vol. 4, p. 228.
190 Walker to Thomas Adam, 2 October 1755, in Davies, Cornish Evangelicals, p.
134.
191 Lovegrove, ‘Itinerant evangelism’.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 289

192 D.E.Meek, ‘Evangelical missionaries in the early nineteenth-century Highlands’,

Scottish Studies, 28 (1987), esp. p. 20.
193 Walsh, ‘Methodism at the end of the eighteenth century’, pp. 299 f.
194 R.H.Martin, Evangelicals United: Ecumenical Stirrings in Pre-Victorian Britain,
1795–1830 (Metuchen, NJ, 1983), pt 2. A.L.Drummond and J.Bulloch, The
Scottish Church, 1688–1843 (Edinburgh, 1973), pp. 151 f. E.Stock, The History
of the Church Missionary Society, Vol. 1 (London, 1899), pt. 2.
195 Although this view is at variance with that expressed by C.W.Towlson
(Moravian and Methodist, p. 175), it is partly indicated by his ch. 3. See below,
pp. 45, 49–50.
196 Rupp, Religion in England, p. 422.
197 R.T.Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford, 1979), pt 2.
198 M.M.Knappen (ed.), Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries (Chicago, 1933), pp. 14 f.
199 Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism, ch. 3. M.C.Bell, Calvin and Scottish
Theology: The Doctrine of Assurance (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 45 ff.
200 S.Petto, The Voyce of the Spirit, 1654, epistle dedicatory, quoted by G.F.Nuttall,
The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford, 1946), p. 58.
201 Guthrie, The Christian’s Great Interest (London, 1901), pp. 195 f.
202 Perkins, ‘A treatise tending unto a declaration whether a man be in the estate of
damnation or in the estate of grace’ [1589], The Works of… W.Perkins, Vol. 1
(Cambridge, 1608), p. 367.
203 For example, Bell, Calvin and Scottish Theology, p. 81.
204 The Confession of Faith (Edinburgh, 1810), ch. 18/3, p. 106.
205 Brooks, Precious Remedies (Evesham, 1792), pp. 189, 211 f., 213–22.
206 Baker, Grimshaw, p. 43.
207 O.C.Watkins, The Puritan Experience (London, 1972), p. 11. Baxter nevertheless
treats the evidence of works as inconclusive. N.H.Keeble, Richard Baxter:
Puritan Man of Letters (Oxford, 1982), pp. 134 ff.
208 For example, Bell, Calvin and Scottish Theology, p. 82.
209 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London, 1930), ch. 4A.
210 P.G.Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), p.
159.
211 Willison, ‘A sacramental directory’ [1716] in W.M.Hetherington (ed.), The
Practical Works of the Rev. John Willison (Glasgow, [1844]), pp. 166 f. Willison
was later to support the revival. Henderson, ‘Edwards and Scotland’, p. 154.
212 Hughes, Harris, p. 12.
213 ‘Collection of hymns’, ed. Hildebrandt et al., p. 517.
214 Journal of John Wesley, Vol. 2, pp. 13 (12 July 1738), 37 (August 1738).
Schmidt, Wesley, Vol. 1, pp. 286–96, discusses the Moravian testimonies without
pointing out that Wesley’s concern was with the relation of justification to
assurance, not with justification only. See also A.S. Yates, The Doctrine of
Assurance with Special Reference to John Wesley (London, 1952), ch. 4.
215 Wesley to Rev.Arthur Bedford, 28 September 1738, Works of John Wesley, Vol.
25, ed. F.Baker (Oxford, 1980), pp. 562 ff.
216 Yates’s suggestion (Doctrine of Assurance, p. 72) that there is gradual
development away from regarding assurance as essential to salvation is belied by
his own evidence, not least the letter to Bedford (cf. n. 215).
217 Yates, Doctrine of Assurance, pp. 63 ff.
290 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

218 R.Southey, The Life of Wesley (London, 1820), Vol. 1, p. 295.

219 Brown, Simeon, p. 320. W.Myles, The Life and Writings of the late Reverend
William Grimshaw, 2nd edn (London, 1813), pp. 109 f.
220 Davies, Cornish Evangelicals, pp. 153 f.
221 Venn, Complete Duty, p. 126.
222 [Bean], Zeal without Innovation, p. 158.
223 Milner, The Essentials of Christianity Theoretically and Practically Considered
(London, 1855), p. 189.
224 Edwards, ‘Narrative’, p. 42.
225 Booth, Reign of Grace, pp. 55 f., 239 f.
226 WV, Vol. 2, p. 145; Vol. 3, p. 125.
227 WV, Vol. 6, p. 22.
228 WV, Vol. 3, p. 173; vol. 6, p. 41. Edwards, ‘Distinguishing marks’, Select Works,
Vol. 1.
229 Venn, Complete Duty, p. 127.
230 WV, Vol. 3, pp. 97 f.
231 T.Jackson (ed.), The Lives of Early Methodist Preachers, 5th edn, Vol. 2 (London,
n.d.), p. 283.
232 Whitefield, Journals, p. 57.
233 WV, Vol. 1, p. 33.
234 For example, ‘The contrite heart’, no. IX of the Olney hymns. M.F. Marshall and
J.Todd, English Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth Century (Lexington,
Ky, 1982), p. 131.
235 Edwards, ‘Narrative’, p. 3.
236 ibid., pp. 8, 17.
237 ibid., pp. 38 ff.
238 ibid., p. 39.
239 Edwards, Religious Affections [1746] (Works, Vol. 2), ed. J.E.Smith (New Haven,
Conn,, 1959), p. 205.
240 R.I.Aaron, John Locke, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1971).
241 Hutcheson, Illustrations on the Moral Sense [1728], ed. B. Peach (Cambridge,
Mass., 1971).
242 Especially by Perry Miller mjonathan Edwards (n.p., 1949).
243 N, Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought in its British Context (Chapel
Hill, NC, 1981), pp. 35–40.
244 Edwards, Freedom of the Will [1754] (Works, Vol. 1), ed. P.Ramsey (New
Haven, Conn., 1957), ch. 4.
245 ibid., p. 43.
246 Edwards, Religious Affections, p. 205.
247 Hughes, ‘Taylor and Wesley’, pp. 298 f.
248 Wesley to Samuel Wesley, 10 December 1734, Works of John Wesley, Vol. 25,
p. 407.
249 Hoyles, Waning of the Renaissance, pp. 101, 105.
250 Heitzenrater, ‘Wesley and the Oxford Methodists’, p. 511. V.H.H.Green, Young
Mr Wesley: A Study of John Wesley and Oxford (London, 1961), pp. 116 n.,
315.
251 R.E.Brantley, Locke, Wesley, and the Method of English Romanticism
(Gainesville, Fla, 1984), pp. 68, 113, 83 f.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 291

252 E.H.Sugden(ed.), Wesley’s Standard Sermons, Vol. 2(London, 1921), pp. 216f.
253 A.R.Winnett, Peter Browne: Provost, Bishop, Metaphysician (London, 1974), pp.
108 f. See also Brantley, Locke, Wesley, ch. 1; J.C.Hindley, The philosophy of
enthusiasm’, London Quarterly and Holbom Review, vol. 182, no. 2 (1957),
254 Journal of John Wesley, Vol. 1, p. 424 (29 January 1738).
255 ibid., Vol. 1, p. 151 (8 February 1736).
256 Hindley, ‘Philosophy of enthusiasm’, p. 106.
257 1744 Methodist Conference minutes, quoted by Simon, Wesley and the
Methodist Societies, p. 207.
258 Wesley, ‘An earnest appeal to men of reason and religion’ [1743], Works of John
Wesley, Vol. 11, ed. G.R, Cragg (Oxford, 1975), pp. 46, 56.
259 Wesley, ‘On conscience’, Works (London, 1872), Vol 7, pp. 188 f.
260 Hindley, ‘Philosophy of enthusiasm’, London Quarterly and Holborn Review,
vol. 182, no. 3 (1957), pp. 204–7.
261 WV, Vol. 3, p. 65.
262 ibid., Vol. 1, p. 177.
263 P.Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (London, 1967), is a classic
statement of this view. Donald Davie is an honourable exception in contending
for the alignment of Methodism and the orthodox Old Dissent with the
Enlightenment: see especially his Dissentient Voice (Notre Dame, Ind., 1982), chs
1 and 2.
264 Toland, Christianity not Mysterious (London, 1695); cf. R.E.Sullivan, John
Toland and the Deist Controversy (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
265 R.N.Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England (London,
1954), p. 43.
266 ibid., pp. 44 ff.; cf. J.P.Ferguson, An Eighteenth Century Heretic: Dr Samuel
Clarke (Kineton, Warwickshire, 1976).
267 Drummond and Bulloch, Scottish Church, pp. 31–4.
268 R.B.Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate
Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1985).
269 Watts, Dissenters, pp. 464–78.
270 L.Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd edn
(London, 1881), Vol. 2, ch. 12, pts 5 and 6.
271 Booth, Reign of Grace, p. 9.
272 Wellwood, Erskine, pp. 55, 59.
273 WV, Vol. 2, p. 116.
274 WV, Vol. 2, p. 247.
275 WV, Vol. 2, p. 168. Lackington, Memoirs, p. 50.
276 Lockington, Memoirs, p. 51.
277 Works of John Wesley, Vol. 1, ed. A.C.Outler (Abingdon, Tenn., 1984), p. 104.
278 Lackington, Memoirs, p. 179.
279 Wesley, Primitive Physic [1747], ed. A.W.Hill (London, 1960), p. 94.
280 Journal of John Wesley, Vol. 7, p. 13 (26 August 1784).
281 Wesley to Dr Thomas Rutherforth, 28 March 1768, Letters, ed. Telford, Vol. 5,
p. 364.
282 Schmidt, Wesley, Vol. 1, p. 272.
292 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

283 F.Dreyer, ‘Faith and experience in the thought of John Wesley’, American
Historical Review, vol. 88, no. 1 (1983). Brantley, Locke, Wesley, esp. chs 1 and
2.
284 B.Semmel, The Methodist Revolution (London, 1974), pp. 87–96.
285 Wesley to Maxfield in T.Coke and H.Moore, The Life of the Rev, John Wesley,
A.M. (London, 1792), p. 337.
286 WV, Vol. 1, pp. 123, 210; Vol. 3, p. 69; Vol. 4, p. 239.
287 Milner, The treatment which Methodism, so called, has received firom the
critical and monthly reviewers’, Works, Vol. 8, p. 214. Davies, Cornish
Evangelicals, p. 140.
288 Nuttall, ‘Methodism and the older Dissent’, p. 271. Booth, Reign of Grace, p.
271.
289 S.Mews, ‘Reason and emotion in working-class religion, 1794–1824’, Schism,
Heresy and Religious Protest, Studies in Church History, vol. 9, ed. D. Baker
(Cambridge, 1972).
290 H.McLachlan, The Methodist Unitarian Movement (Manchester, 1919).
291 Walsh, ‘Origins’, pp. 148–53. Dr Walsh tells me that he has altered his view to
that expressed in the text.
292 E.Halévy, The Birth of Methodism in England, ed. B.Semmel (Chicago, 1971).
293 K.MacLean, John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New
Haven, Conn., 1936), pp. 2 f, 11.
294 J.C.D.Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (Cambridge, 1985), esp. ch. 2, pt 1.
295 Edwards, The Great Awakening (Works, Vol. 4), ed. C.C.Goen (New Haven,
Conn., 1972), p. 38. Davies, Cornish Evangelicals, p. 32.
296 Watts, Philosophical Essays (1733), Essay 6 introductory paragraph, and
preface, quoted by MacLean, Locke and Literature, pp. 1, 15.
297 ibid., pp. 15, 23, 124.
298 Watts, Logick (London, 1725), p. 505, quoted by W.S.Howell,
EighteenthCentury British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton, NJ, 1971), p. 336.
299 Hoyles, Waning of the Renaissance, p. 176.
300 ibid., p. 162, and pt 3 generally.
301 Doddridge, A Course of Lectures on the Principal Subjects in Pneumatology,
Ethics and Divinity (London, 1763).
302 M.Deacon, Philip Doddridge of Northampton (Northampton, 1980), p. 99,
303 Doddridge to John Nettleton, [February] 1721, in Nuttall, Correspondence of
Philip Doddridge, p. 2.
304 Wellwood, Erskine, p. 20. V.L.Collins, President Witherspoon: A Biography
(Princeton, NJ, 1925), Vol. 1, p. 16.
305 Handy, United States and Canada, p. 83.
306 Dallimore, Whitefield, Vol. 2, pp. 88 ff.
307 D.Scott, Annals and Statistics of the Original Secession Church (Edinburgh,
[1886]), p. 16.
308 Narrative and Testimony (1804) of the Anti-Burghers quoted by J.M’Kerrow,
History of the Secession Church (Glasgow, 1841), p. 443.
309 J.McL.Campbell, Reminiscences and Reflections, ed. D.Campbell (London,
1873), chs 2–4.
310 J.Kennedy, The Days of the Fathers in Ross-shire (Inverness, 1897), p. 114.
311 ibid., p, 116.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 293

312 W.Wilson, The History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches and Meeting
Houses in London, Westminster and Southwark, Vol. 4 (London, 1814), p. 550.
313 Lovegrove, ‘Itinerant evangelism’, p. 184.
314 T.M.Bassett, The Welsh Baptists (Swansea, 1977), pp. 95 ff.
315 Brown, Baptists, pp. 129 f.
316 Handy, United States and Canada, p. 179.
317 Whitley, Calvinism and Evangelism, p. 38.
318 Warburton, Mercies, 2nd pt, 4th edn (London, 1859), p. 41.
319 R.C.Chambers and R.W.Olver, The Strict Baptist Chapels of England, 5 vols
(London, 1952–68).
320 T.Scott in J.H.Pratt (ed.), The Thought of the Evangelical Leaders: Notes of the
Discussions of The Eclectic Society, London, during the years 1798–1814
(Edinburgh, 1978), p. 231. Milner, ‘Scriptural proof of the influence of the Holy
Spirit on the understanding’, Works, Vol. 8, p. 258.
321 Scott, Force of Truth, p. 26. Venn, Complete Duty, pp. 48, 152.
322 Miller, Edwards, p. 45.
323 Arminian Magazine, May 1786, p. 253.
324 Venn, Complete Duty, p. 48.
325 L.P.Fox, ‘The work of the Rev.Thomas Tregenna Biddulph, with special
reference to his influence on the Evangelical movement in the west of England’,
PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1953, pp. 67–73. Haweis, Romaine, pp. 18,
27, 46, 61, 54. Davies, Cornish Evangelicals, p. 207.
326 Milner, The trial of prophets’, Works, Vol. 8, p. 285.
327 W.J.Turrell, John Wesley, Physician and Electrotherapist (Oxford, 1938),
pp. 18–24.
328 Wesley, Primitive Physic, p. 25.
329 ‘Collection of hymns’, ed. Hildebrandt et al., p. 74.
330 Edwards, Religious Affections, p. 452.
331 ‘Account of the life of the Rev.John Witherspoon, D.D., LL.D.’, The Works of
John Witherspoon, D.D. (Edinburgh, 1804), Vol. 1, p. xvii.
332 Venn, Complete Duty, p. 2.
333 Conder to Rev.H.March, 2 July 1824, in E.R.Conder, Josiah Conder: A Memoir
(London, 1857), pp. 246 f.
334 Pratt (ed.), Evangelical Leaders, p. 231.
335 Brown, Simeon, p. 269.
336 Fox, ‘Biddulph’, p. 66.
337 Wesley, Preface to Bishop Hall, ‘Meditations and vows, divine and moral’, in
J.Wesley (ed.), A Christian Library, Vol. 4 (London, 1819), p. 106.
338 WV, Vol. 5, p. 249.
339 Walsh, ‘Methodism at the end of the eighteenth century’, p. 287.
340 D.Newsome, The Parting of Friends: A Study of the Wilberforces and Henry
Manning (London, 1966), p. 51.
341 Pratt (ed), Evangelical Leaders, pp. 230 ff; cf. M.L.Clarke, Paley: The Evidence
for the Man (London, 1974); D.L.LeMahieu, The Mind of William Paley
(Lincoln, Neb., 1976).
342 Lackington, Confessions, p. 35.
343 D.F.Rice, ‘Natural theology and the Scottish philosophy in the thought of
Thomas Chalmers’, Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 24, no. 1 (1971).
294 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

344 S.A.Grave, The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense (Oxford, 1960).

345 J.Walker, The Theology and Theologians of Scotland, chiefly of the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries (Edinburgh, 1872), p. 73.
346 Collins, Witherspoon, Vol. 1, p. 41.
347 Witherspoon, ‘Lectures on moral philosophy’, Works, Vol. 7 (Edinburgh, 1805),
p. 47.
348 ibid., pp. 25, 46.
349 The legacy in American Evangelical thought is well documented: T.D. Bozeman,
Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum Religious
Thought (Chapel Hill, NC, 1977); G.M.Marsden, Fundamentalism and
American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–
1925 (New York, 1980), pp. 14–17. On Britain, cf. R. Anstey, The Atlantic Slave
Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (London, 1975), pp. 177 f.
350 A.C.Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment and Early Victorian English Society
(London, 1986).
351 D.W.Bebbington, Patterns in History (Leicester, 1979), ch. 4.
352 Semmel, Methodist Revolution, takes up this theme.
353 J. Bellamy, The millennium’, Sermons, ed. J.Sutcliff (Northampton, 1783), p. 51,
cited by W.R.Ward, ‘The Baptists and the transformation of the church,
1780–1830’, Baptist Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 4 (1973), p. 171.
354 Schmidt, Wesley, Vol. 1, p. 101 n.
355 WV, Vol. 1, p. 76.
356 Goold (ed.), Works of Maclaurin, Vol. 2. Venn, Complete Duty, p. 423.
Wilberforce, Practical View, p. 402.
357 Lackington, Memoirs, p. 70.
358 Wesley, ‘A plain account of Christian perfection’, in Outler (ed.), John and
Charles Wesley, p. 359. See also pp. 153–5, 171–4.
359 Newton, Wesley and the Puritans, p. 11.
360 Davies, Cornish Evangelicals, p. 158; cf. Booth, Reign of Grace, pp. 213 f.
361 Fox, ‘Biddulph’, p. 54.
362 Marshall and Todd, Congregational Hymns, pp. 102–13. Pratt (ed.), Evangelical
Leaders, p. 77,
363 WV, Vol. 5, pp. 217 f.
364 Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade, pp. 193–8.
365 Pratt (ed.), Evangelical Leaders, p. 77.
366 WV, Vol. 1, pp. 113, 96; Vol. 4, pp. 203 ff.
367 Pratt (ed.), Evangelical Leaders, pp. 236 f.
368 ibid., p. 468.
369 Wilberforce, Practical View, p. 48.
370 Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade, pp. 128–39, 159. B.Hilton, The role of providence
in Evangelical social thought’, in D.Beales and G.Best (eds) History, Society and
the Churches (Cambridge, 1985), esp. pp. 223 f.
371 E, L.Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia (Berkeley, Calif., 1949).
372 I.H.Murray, The Puritan Hope (Edinburgh, 1971).
373 Wellwood, Erskine, pp. 125 f.
374 Edwards, ‘Some thoughts concerning the present revival of religion in New
England’ [1743], Great Awakening, p. 354; cf. E.L.Tuveson, Redeemer Nation:
The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago, 1968).
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 295

375 Edwards, ‘An humble attempt to promote explicit agreement and visible union
of God’s people in extraordinary prayer’, Apocalyptic Writings (Works, Vol. 5),
ed. S.S.Steen (New Haven, Conn., 1977).
376 ibid., p. 88.
377 Doddridge, Lectures, p. 584. Wellwood, Erskine, pp. 126 f., 501. J.Conder, An
Analytical and Comparative View of All Religions (London, 1838), pp. 584–92.
378 Carey, Enquiry, p. 12. Carey’s endorsement of Edwards is mistaken for
disagreement by the editor (pp. xii f,).
379 W.H.Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in
England from the 1790s to the 1840s (Auckland, 1978), pp. 86 f.
380 Pratt (ed.), Evangelical Leaders, pp. 256 ff.
381 Stirling General Associate (Anti-Burgher) Presbytery Minutes, 9 January 1781,
Central Regional Archives, CH 3/286/1, quotcd by Brown, Religion in Scotland,
p. 35.
382 Chalmers, The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns, Vol. 1 (Glasgow,
1821), p. 168.
383 [Bean], Zeal without Innovation, ch. 3, sect. I. See also p. 78.
384 Edwards, Freedom of the Will, p. 131.
385 A.G. Fuller, ‘Memoirs of the Rev. Andrew Fuller’, in The Complete Works of
the Rev. Andrew Fuller, Vol. 1 (London, 1831), p. cxv. Fuller disclaimed ‘moderate
Calvinism’, which he identified with Richard Baxter’s position. He called his own
system ‘strict Calvinism’.
386 Wellwood, Erskine, p. 380.
387 [Bean], Zeal without Innovation, p. 56.
388 J.Scott, The Life of the Rev.Thomas Scott, 6th edn (London, 1824), p. 446.
389 The classic exposition of moderate Calvinism remains Walsh, ‘Yorkshire
Evangelicals’, ch. 1; cf. Davies, Cornish Evangelicals, pp. 154 ff.
390 [Bean], Zeal without Innovation, p. 53.
391 R.I. and S.Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce, 2nd edn, Vol. 2
(London, 1839), p. 136.
392 Venn, Complete Duty, p. xiii.
393 ibid., ch. 10.
394 Wellwood, Erskine, p. 381.
395 Scott, Scott, p. 664.
396 Edwards, Freedom of the Will, esp. pp. 35–40, 360.
397 Scott, Force of Truth, p. 78.
398 Scott, Scott, p. 664.
399 For example, Fuller in 1783, quoted by Whitley, Calvinism and Evangelism, p.
33.
400 Pratt (ed.), Evangelical Leaders, p. 223.
401 Nuttall, ‘Northamptonshire and The Modern Question’.
402 J.Gadsby, A Memoir of William Gadsby (Manchester, 1842), p. 50.
403 Pratt (ed.), Evangelical Leaders, pp. 222 ff.
404 E.F.Clipsham, ‘Andrew Fuller and Fullerism: a study in Evangelical Calvinism’,
Baptist Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 3 (1963), pp. 110–13.
405 W.T.Owen, Edward Williams, D.D., 1750–1813: His Life, Thought and
Influence (Cardiff, 1963), p. 97 n. J.Milner, The History of the Church of Christ,
296 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

2nd edn, Vol. 2 (London, 1810), p. 386 n. Henderson, ‘Jonathan Edwards and
Scotland’, p. 159.
406 Tyerman, Wesley, Vol. 2, p. 339.
407 G.Lawton, John Wesley’s English: A Study of his Literary Style (London, 1962),
p. 291.
408 Simeon to G.A.Underwood, 2 October 1817, Cheltenham File, Simeon Trust
MSS, quoted by Balda, ‘“Spheres of influence”’, pp. 76 f.
409 Davies, Cornish Evangelicals, ch. 5.
410 Chadwick, Victorian Church, Vol. 1, pp. 449 f.
411 S.J.Brown, Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland
(Oxford, 1982), pp. 132 f.
412 Lovegrove, ‘Itinerant evangelism’, ch. 2.
413 J.Walford, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Late Venerable Hugh Bourne
(London, 1855), Vol. 1, p. 173. See also p. 26.
414 For example, Jabez Bunting as cited by J.H.S.Kent, The doctrine of the ministry’,
The Age of Disunity (London, 1966), p. 85.
415 The Works of the Rev.John Wesley, A.M., 3rd edn, Vol. 7 (London, 1829), p.
207.
416 Baker, Wesley and the Church of England, ch. 15.
417 Walsh, ‘Methodism at the end of the eighteenth century’, p. 288.
418 WV, Vol. 1, p. 150.
419 Brown, Baptists, p. 105.
420 W.R.Ward, ‘Baptists and the transformation of the church’.
421 Sher, Church and University, pp. 50–6.
422 Davies, Cornish Evangelicals, p. 71.
423 D.M.Thompson, Denominationalism and Dissent, 1795–1835: A Question of
Identity, Friends of Dr Williams’s Library 39th Lecture (London, 1985), esp. p.
13.
424 Dallimore, Whitefield, Vol. 2, p. 92.
425 Martin, Evangelicals United, pts II and III.
426 D.M.Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture (London, 1984), ch. 8. T.W.Herbert,
John Wesley as Editor and Author (Princeton, NJ, 1940), pp. 88–97.
427 C.Binfield, So Down to Prayers: Studies in English nonconfornrity, 1780–1920
(London, 1977), ch. 3.
428 J.Erskine, ‘Memoir’, in Extracts from an Exhortation to the Inhabitants ofthe
South Parish of Glasgow by the late Rev.Dr John Gillies (Glasgow, 1819), p. 6.
429 ibid., p. 7. Herbert, Wesley, p. 47.
430 Hall, ‘Review of Foster’s Essays’, The Miscellaneous Works and Remains ofthe
Rev.Robert Hall (London, 1846), p. 446.
431 Wesley to Samuel Furly, 15 July 1764, Letters, ed. Telford, Vol. 4, p. 256.
432 ibid., p. 290.
433 Sher, Church and University, pp. 57 f.
434 J.Dale, ‘The theological and literary qualities of the poetry of Charles Wesley in
relation to the standards of his age’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1961,
ch. 7.
435 Arminian Magazine, March 1785, p. 151.
436 Jones, Congregationalism, p. 166.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 297

437 Marshall and Todd, Congregational Hymns, pp. 53f., 71. Hoyles, Waning, p.
228.
438 Binfield, So Down to Prayers, p. 45. In A Gathered Church: The Literature of
the English Dissenting Interest, 1700–1930 (London, 1978), Donald Davie points
out the classicism of Watts’s Calvinism (pp, 25–8, 35), but mistakenly denies it
to Charles Wesley or the early Evangelicals of the Church of England (chs 3 and
4); cf. Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture.
439 Marshall and Todd, Congregational Hymns, pp. 156 ff.
440 Dale, ‘Poetry of Charles Wesley’, ch. 5.
441 ibid., pp. 104, 108, 127, 146.
442 ‘Invitation to sinners’, in G.Osborn (ed.), The Poetical Works of John and
Charles Wesley (London, 1868), Vol, 4, p. 371. This paragraph is based on Dale,
‘Poetry of Charles Wesley’, ch. 6.
443 ‘Collection of hymns’, ed. Hildebrandt et al., p. 74.
444 Wesley to Richard Boardman (?), 12 January 1776, Letters, ed. Telford, Vol. 6,
p. 201.
445 Arminian Magazine, 1781, p. iv.
446 For example, WV, vol. 4, p. 228. T.Jackson, Recollections of My Own Life and
Times (London, 1873), p. 216.
447 E, Martin, ‘Sale of Wesley’s publications’, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical
Society, vol. 1 (1897), p. 90.
448 Jackson, Recollections, pp. 25 f.
449 Herbert, Wesley, p. 1.
450 Lackington, Memoirs, p. 73.
451 H.F.Mathews, Methodism and the Education of the People, 1791–1851 (London,
1949), pp. 31 f., 184.
452 ibid., p. 182.
453 Lackington, Confessions, p. 184.
454 Nuttall, Trevecca College.
455 P.B.Cliff, The Rise and Development of the Sunday School Movement in
England, 1780–1980 (Nutfield, Surrey, 1986), p. 25,
456 Martin, Evangelicals United, ch. 8.
457 Mathews, Methodism and Education, p. 172.
458 V.Kiernan, ‘Evangelicalism and the French Revolution’, Past & Present, no. 1
(1952).
459 Brown, Fathers of the Victorians, esp. foreword.
460 J.Pollock, Wilberforce (London, 1977), ch. 7. R.J.Hind, ‘William Wilberforce and
the perceptions of the British people’, Historical Research, vol. 60, no. 143
(1987). For Evangelical attacks on popular culture, see p. 132.
461 Jones, More, pp. 134 ff, 104–7.
462 L. and J.C.F.Stone, An Open Elite? England, 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1984), p. 327.
463 Wellwood, Erskine, p. 72. A. Russell, The Clerical Profession (London, 1980), p.
114.
464 R.F.Wearmouth, Methodism and the Common People of the Eighteenth
Century (London, 1945), pp. 202–11.
465 F.K.Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England
(Oxford, 1980), pp. 8 f.
466 Heitzenrater, Wesley, Vol. 1, p. 135.
298 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

467 Welch (ed.), Calvinistic Methodist Chapels, pp. xiv f.

468 George Whitefield’s Journals (n.p., 1960), p. 395.
469 See pp. 121 ff.
470 W.Myles, A Chronological History of the People called Methodists, 3rd edn
(London, 1803), p. 183.
471 D.G.Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago, 1977), ch. 4.
472 Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade, chs 4–3.
473 S.Drescher, Econocide: Economic Development and the Abolition of the British
Slave Trade (Pittsburgh, 1977).
474 Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade, ch. 9.
475 S.Drescher, ‘Public opinion and the destruction of British colonial slavery’, in
James Walvin (ed.), Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846 (London, 1982), pp.
37–40.
476 M.Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies
(Ithaca, NY, 1982).
477 Pollock, Wilberforce. Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade, chs 10, 11, 14. C.D.Rice,
‘The missionary context of the British anti-slavery movement’, in Walvin (ed.),
Slavery and British Society. R.Anstey, ‘Religion and British slave emancipation’,
in D.Eltis and J.Walvin (eds), The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade
(Madison, Wis., 1981).
478 S.Drescher, ‘Two variants of anti-slavery: religious organization and social
mobilization in Britain and France, 1780–1870’, in C.Bolt and S.Drescher (eds),
Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey
(Folkestone, 1980), p. 48.
479 S.Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative
Perspective (London, 1986), ch. 6, esp. p. 131. G.Stephen, Anti-Slavery
Recollections in a Series of Letters addressed to Mrs Beecher Stowe [1854]
(London, 1971), p. 248.
480 J.Owen, Memoir of the Rev.T.Jones, late of Creaton (London, 1851), p. 160.
481 Witherspoon, The Charge of Sedition and Faction against Good Men, espedally
Faithful Ministers, considered and accounted for (Glasgow, 1758), p. 31.
482 R.Hall, ‘An apology for the freedom of the press’ [1793], in O.Gregory (ed.), The
Works of Robert Hall, A.M. (London, 1839), Vol. 4, pp. 45–144. The Trial of
Wm, Winterbotham…for Seditious Words (London, 1794).
483 Lovegrove, ‘Itinerant evangelism’, p. 224.
484 Gregory (ed.), Works of Hall, Vol. 4, p. 146.
485 A.Fuller, Thoughts on civil polity’ [1808], Complete Works, Vol. 5 (London,
1832), p. 532.
486 Hempton, Methodism and Politics, pp. 47 f.
487 Kent, ‘Wesleyan mcmbership’, pp. 111 f.
488 Newton to Mrs P—, August. 1775, in The Works of the Rev.John Newton
(Edinburgh, 1837), p. 250.
489 Lawson, ‘“Our discipline”’, p. 195.
490 Hempton, Methodism and Politics, ch. 2. Walsh, ‘Methodism at the end of the
eighteenth century’, pp. 304 ff.
491 Wilberforce, Practical View, p. 403.
492 I.Bradley, ‘The politics of godliness: Evangelicals in parliament, 1784–1832',
DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1974.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 299

493 Walsh, ‘Methodism at the end of the eighteenth century’, p. 303.

494 Evans, A Letter to the Rev. Mr John Wesley occasioned by his Calm Address
(Bristol, 1775), p. 11, quoted by E.A.Payne, ‘Nonconformists and the American
Revolution’, Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society, vol. 1, no.
8 (1976), p. 220.
495 John Rippon cited in ibid., p. 210.
496 Sher, Church and University, pp. 267 ff.
497 Handy, United States and Canada, p. 140.
498 For example, Hall, ‘On toleration’, in Gregory (ed.), Works of Hall, Vol. 6, pp.
370–96.
499 Scott, Force of Truth, p. 44 n,
500 Clarke, ‘The origin and end of civil government’, The Miscellaneous Works of
Adam Clarke, LL.D., F.A.S., Vol. 7 (London, 1836), p. 249.
501 Hempton, Methodism and Politics, pp. 30–43. Semmel, Methodist Revolution,
pp. 88 ff.
502 Sher, Church and University, pp. 281–6.
503 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times in Three
Volumes, 6th edn (London, 1737), Vol. 3, p. 400, cited by J.Hook, The Baroque
Age in England (London, 1976), p. 48. See also J.Steegman, The Rule of Taste
from George I to George IV (London, 1968).
504 M’Kerrow, Secession Church, pp. 845–9.
505 Edwards, ‘Narrative’, p. 57.

CHAPTER 3:
A TROUBLING OF THE WATER

1 D.M.Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture (London, 1984), pp. 35 f.

2 F.K.Brown, Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge,
1961), pp. 518 ff.
3 I.Bradley, The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians
(London, 1976), pp. 194 f.
4 A.R.Vidler, The Church in an Age of Revolution (Harmondsworth, Middlesex,
1961), p. 49.
5 M.Hennell, Sons of the Prophets: Evangelical Leaders of the Victorian Church
(London, 1979), pp. 9–15. Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture, pp. 24–37. See also
E.R.Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American
Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago, 1970), ch. 1; H.Willmer, ‘Evangelicalism,
1785 to 1835’, Hulsean Prize Essay, University of Cambridge, 1962; I.S.Rennie,
‘Evangelicalism and English public life, 1823–1850’, PhD thesis, University of
Toronto, 1962.
6 R.Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the
British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 21–5.
7 E, R.Norman, Church and Society in England, 1770–1970 (Oxford, 1976), pp.
52–5.
8 S.J.Brown, Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland
(Oxford, 1982), ch. 3. R.A.Cage and E.O.A.Checkland, Thomas Chalmers and
300 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

urban poverty: the St John’s Parish experiment in Glasgow, 1819–1837’,

Philosophical Journal, vol. 13, no. 1 (1976).
9 J.H. Stewart, Thoughts on the Importance of Special Prayer for the General
Outpouring of the Holy Spirit (London, 1821), p. 9; cf. D.D.Stewart, Memoir of
the Life of the Rev.James Haldane Stewart, M.A., 2nd edn (London, 1857), pp.
91–102.
10 R.Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and
America, 1790–1865 (Westport, Conn., 1978), p. 63.
11 E, Irving, For Missionaries after the Apostolical School: A Series of Orations
(London, 1825), p. 18.
12 W.T.Gidney, The History of the London Society for Promoting Christianity
among the Jews from 1809 to 1908 (London, 1908), p. 70.
13 A.L.Drummond, ‘Robert Haldane at Geneva, 1816–17’, Records of Scottish
Church History Society, vol. 9, no. 2 (1946). T.Stunt, ‘Geneva and British
Evangelicals in the early nineteenth century’, JEH, vol. 32, no. 1 (1981), esp. p.
40.
14 A.Haldane, The Lives of Robert Haldane of Airthrey, and his Brother, James
Alexander Haldane, 5th edn (Edinburgh, 1855), pp. 429 f., 454.
15 Dialogues on Prophecy, vol. 1 (London, 1827), p. 212.
16 J.Williams, ‘Memoirs of the Rev.Robert Hawker, D.D.’, in The Works of the
Rev. Robert Hawker, D.D., Vol. 1 (London, 1831).
17 The Sinner Saved: or Memoirs of the Life of William Huntington (London,
[1813]),
18 W.Carus, Memoirs of the Life of the Rev. Charles Simeon, M.A., 2nd edn
(London, 1857), p. 417.
19 J.J.Evans, Memoir and Remains of the Rev.James Harington Evans, M.A.. 2nd
edn (London, 1855), pp. 31–37, 30.
20 Carus, Simeon, pp. 566 f.
21 Evans, Evans, p. 27.
22 H.H.Rowdon, The Origins of the Brethren, 1825–1850(London, 1967), pp. 61 ff.,
67 f. See also T.C.F.Stunt, ‘John Henry Newman and the Evangelicals’, JEH, vol.
21, no. 1 (1970).
23 E.Irving, The Last Days: A Discourse on the Evil Character of these our Times,
proving them to be the “Perilous Times” of the “Last Days”, 2nd edn (London,
1850), pp. 451–6.
24 H.L.Alexander, Life of Joseph Addison Alexander, Vol. 1 (1870), p. 290, quotcd
by P.E.Shaw, The Catholic Apostolic Church sometimes called Irvingite
(Morningside Heights, NY, 1946), p. 50.
25 A.L.Drummond, Edward Irving and his Circle (London, n.d.) is still the most
useful general analysis of Irving.
26 Irving, For the Oracles of God: Four Orations. For Judgment to Come: An
Argument in Nine Parts (London, 1823), p. 104.
27 Carlyle, Reminiscences [1887], ed. C.E.Norton (London, 1972), p. 195.
28 M.O.W.Oliphant, The Life of Edward Irving, 4th edn (London, n.d,), p. 96.
29 Carlyle, Reminiscences, p. 240. Irving, Judgment to Come, p. 307.
30 Irving, Babylon and Infidelity Foredoomed of God, Vol. 1 (Glasgow, 1826), pp.
308 f.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 301

31 S.T.Coleridge to Daniel Stuart, [8?] July 1825, in E.L.Griggs (ed.), Collected

Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 5 (Oxford, 1971), p. 474.
32 Irving, Babylon and Infidelity, p. 309; Judgment to Come, p. 138.
33 Coleridge to Edward Coleridge, 23 July 1823, in Griggs (ed.), Letters of
Coleridge, Vol. 5, p. 286.
34 Irving, Missionaries, pp. vii f.
35 W.Hanna, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas Chalmers, D.D., LL.D.,
Vol. 3 (Edinburgh, 1851), p. 160.
36 For example, Irving, Missionaries, p. xiv. R.J.White (ed.), The Political Thought
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1938).
37 Irving, Missionaries, pp. vii, 84, 85.
38 M.H.Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic
Literature (London, 1971), p. 32.
39 C.R.Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement (Durham, NC, 1942).
M.H.Bright, ‘English literary Romanticism and the Oxford Movement’, Journal
of the History of Ideas, vol. 40, no. 3 (1979).
40 G.S.R.Kitson Clark, The Romantic element: 1830 to 1850’, in J.H.Plumb (ed.),
Studies in Social History: A Tribute to G.M.Trevelyan (London, 1955), pp. 230,
214–17.
41 See pp. 62 f.
42 Morning Watch, March 1830, p. 34. See also S.C.Orchard, ‘English Evangelical
eschatology, 1790–1850’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1969;
W.H.Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in
England from the 1790s to the 1840s (Auckland, NZ, 1978); D. Hempton,
‘Evangelicals and eschatology’, JEH, vol. 31, no. 2 (1980); D.W.Bebbington, The
advent hope in British Evangelicalism since 1800’, Scottish Journal of Religious
Studies (forthcoming).
43 Rather confusingly, Harrison calls the premillennialists ‘millenarian’ and the
postmillennialists ‘millennialist’. J.F.C.Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular
Millenarianism, 1780–1850 (London, 1979), pp. 5, 208.
44 Cuninghame, A Dissertation on the Seals and Trumpets of the Apocalypse
(London, 1813). T.R.Birks, A Memoir of the Rev.Edward Bickersteth, Vol. 2
(London, 1856 edn), p. 45.
45 Frere, A Combined View of the Prophecies of Daniel, Esdras, and St.John, 2nd
edn (London, 1815), pp. iv f, 210–16, esp. p. 212.
46 Irving, Babylon and Infidelity, Vol. 1, pp. v-viii; Vol. 2, pp. 23 n., 243.
47 J.J.Ben-Ezra, The Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty, trans. Irving
(London, 1827), p. xlix.
48 R.H.Martin, Evangelicals United: Ecumenical Stirrings in Pre-Victorian Britain,
1795–1830 (Metuchen, NJ, 1983), chs 8 and 9. M. Vrete, The restoration of the
Jews in English Protestant thought, 1790–1840’, Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 8,
no. 1 (1972).
49 Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, p. 12.
50 Dialogues, vol. 1, p. 208.
51 Carlyle, Reminiscences, p. 287.
52 E.Miller, The History and Doctrines of Irvingism, or the So-Called Catholic and
Apostolic Church, Vol. 1 (London, 1878), pp. 35–46.
53 Dialogues, vol. 3, p. 2.
302 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

54 R.Wallis (ed.), Millenialism and Charisma (Belfast, 1982), p. 1.

55 Ben-Ezra, Coming of Messiah, pp. vi, xlix.
56 J.H.Pratt (ed.), The Thought of the Evangelical Leaders: Notes of the Discussions
of The Eclectic Society, London, during the Years 1798–1814 [1856] (Edinburgh,
1978), p. 256. Simeon to Miss E.Elliott, 19 February 1830, in Carus, Simeon, pp.
658 f.
57 H.McNeile, A Sermon preached at the Parish Church of St Paul, Covent Garden,
on Thursday Evening, May 5, 1826, before the London Society for Promoting
Christianity amongst the Jews (London, n.d.), pp. 8, 23, 25; G.T. Noel, A Brief
Enquiry into the Prospects of the Church of Christ, in Connexion with the
Second Advent of Our Lord Jesus Christ (London, 1828), pp. 28, 37.
58 J.H.Stewart, A Practical View of the Redeemer’s Advent, in a Series of
Discourses, 2nd edn (London, 1826), p. ix.
59 Harris, The Great Commission (London, 1842), p. 122.
60 D.Brown, Christ’s Second Coming: Will it be Premillennial? (Edinburgh, 1846),
pp. 13 ff.
61 ibid., 3rd edn (Edinburgh, 1853), pp. 10, 8.
62 E.Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G. (London,
1888 edn), pp. 385, 524, 735.
63 Brown, Christ’s Second Coming, 3rd edn, p. 10.
64 Blaikie, Brown, pp. 333, 44.
65 Brown, Christ’s Second Coming, 3rd edn, p. 455.
66 T.R.Birks, First Elements of Sacred Prophecy (London, 1843), p. 3.
67 Elliott, Horae Apocalypticae: Or, a Commentary on the Apocalypse… [1844],
2nd edn, Vol. 1 (London, 1846), prcceding p. 117.
68 S.Garratt, Signs of the Times, 2nd edn (London, 1869), pp. ix ff.
69 Cumming, Apocalyptic Sketches (London, 1848), p. 3; cf. R.Buick Knox, ‘Dr
John Cumming and Crown Court Church, London’, Records of Scottish Church
History Society, vol. 22, no. 1 (1984).
70 Stewart, Stewart, p. 307. R.Braithwaite, The Life and Letters of Rev.William
Pennefather, B.A. (London, 1878), p. 253.
71 The first was The Second Coming, the Judgement, and the Kingdom of Christ
(London, 1843). An annual volume was publishcd up to 1858.
72 Waldegrave, New Testament Millennarianism [sic] (London, 1855).
73 British and Foreign Evangelical Review, vol. 4, no. 14 (1855), p. 698.
74 Maitland, An Enquiry into the Grounds on which the Prophetic Period of Daniel
and St. John has been supposed to consist of 1260 years (London, 1826).
75 Dialogues, vol. 1, p. 366. Birks, Sacred Prophecy, p. 2.
76 Miller, Irvingism, Vol. 2, pp. 266 f.
77 Rowdon, Origins of the Brethren, ch. 1 and ch. 9, sect. 2. Sandeen, Roots of
Fundamentalism, ch. 3. See also W.G.Turner, John Nelson Darby (London,
1926).
78 J.Sargent, Memoir of the Rev. Henry Martyn, B.D., 8th edn (London, 1825), p.
426.
79 A.W.Brown, Recollections of the Conversation Parties of the Rev, Charles
Simeon (London, 1863), p. 100.
80 Wilson, Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity, Vol. 1 (London, 1828), p.
455.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 303

81 Horne, An Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy

Scriptures, Vol. 1 (London, 1818), pp. 435 f.
82 Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture, p. 40. T.R.Preston, ‘Biblical criticism,
literature and the eighteenth-century reader’, in I.Rivers (ed.), Books and their
Readers m Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester, 1982), pp. 105 f.
83 R.Hawker, The Evidences of a Plenary Inspiration (Plymouth, [c.1794]), pp. 21
f., 31, 50 ff.
84 Pratt (ed.), Evangelical Leaders, pp. 152 f., 2.
85 Haldane, Haldanes, ch. 18, esp. p. 412.
86 Haldane, The Evidence and Authority of Divine Revelation (Edinburgh, 1816),
pp. 134 f.
87 Martin, Evangelicals United, pp. 123–31. Rennie, ‘Evangelicalism and public
life’, pp. 42–9.
88 Haldane, Haldanes, p. 505.
89 Haldane, Haldanes, pp. 511–15. J.Medway, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of
John Pye Smith, D.D., LL.D., F.R.S., F.G.S. (London, 1853), ch. 17.
90 H[enry] D[rummond], A Defence of the Students of Prophecy (London, 1828), p.
23.
91 Way, The Latter Rain, 2nd edn (London, 1821), p. v.
92 CO, 1843, p. 806.
93 ‘Modern millenarianism’, Eclectic Review, March 1829, p. 214.
94 Bonar, Prophetical Landmarks (London, 1847), p. 274.
95 Rowdon, Origins of the Brethren, p. 52.
96 Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, pp. 107 ff.
97 Haldane, Haldanes, p. 515.
98 Gaussen, Theopneustia: The Plenary Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures
(London, 1841), pp. 27 f.
99 For example, J.Conder, An Analytical and Comparative View of All Religions
(London, 1838), p. 514.
100 Gaussen, Theopneustia, ch. 3, p. 37.
101 W.J.Abraham, The Divine Inspiration of Holy Scripture (Oxford, 1981), p. 33.
102 Gaussen, Theopneustia, p. 25.
103 Haldane, Divine Revelation, p. 138.
104 Gaussen, Theopneustia, pp. ii, 27.
105 CO, September 1854, p. 625, Medway, Pye Smith, p. 285.
106 Abraham, Divine Inspiration, pp. 16 f.
107 Medway, Pye Smith, pp. 307 f. Harris in New College, London: The
Introductory Lectures Delivered at the Opening of the College (London, 1851),
p. 33. T.R.Birks, Modern Rationalism and the Inspiration of the Scriptures
(London, 1853), pp. 101–12.
108 Haldane, Haldanes, p. 516.
109 A.C.Cheyne, The Transforming of the Kirk: Victorian Scotland’s Religious
Revolution (Edinburgh, 1983), pp. 7 f. Professor Cheyne, however, characterises
these opinions as symptomatic of ‘Scotland’s religious conservatism’, not
recognising their novelty.
110 R, 24 October 1850.
111 CO, April 1861, p. 256.
112 Dialogues, vol. 1, p. 368.
304 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

113 Drummond, Irving, pp. 138 f., 153, 167 f. See also G.Strachan, The Pentecostal
Theology of Edward Irving (London, 1973).
114 Miller, Irvingism, Vol. 1, pp. 64, 346; cf. Shaw, Catholic Apostolic Church.
115 See pp. 58 f.
116 Noel, Prospects of the Church, pp. 155 f.
117 Dialogues, vol. 1, pp. 346, 40.
118 Harris, Great Commission, pp. 11, 124.
119 See 142, 143 f.
120 W.Hanna (ed.), Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen from 1800 till 1840
(Edinburgh, 1877), pp. 66.
121 Erskine, The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel, 4th edn (Edinburgh, 1831), p.
88, quoted in Hanna (ed.), Erskine, p. 376. See also D.Finlayson, ‘Aspects of the
life and influence of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, 1788–1870’, Records of
Scottish Church History Society, vol. 20, no. 1 (1978).
122 [Drummond], Defence, p. 39. Hanna (ed.), Erskine, p. 127.
123 D.Campbell, Memorials of John McLeod Campbell, D.D., Vol. 1 (London, 1877),
pp. 51–4; cf. G.M.Tuttle, So Rich a Soil: John McLeod Campbell on Christian
Atonement (Edinburgh, 1986).
124 Irving, Last Days, p. 451.
125 J.P.Newell, ‘A nestor of Nonconformist heretics: A.J.Scott (1805–1866)’, Journal
of the United Reformed Church History Society, vol. 3, no. 1 (1983). Hanna
(ed.), Erskine, pp. 127 ff. F.Maurice, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, 2nd
edn, Vol. 2 (London, 1884), pp. 406 ff.
126 Irving, Sermons, Lectures, and Occasional Discourses (London, 1828), p. v.
127 Irving, The Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine of Our Lord’s Human Nature
(London, 1830), p. vii.
128 D.Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought
(London, 1973), ch. 5.
129 F.Irving, Missionaries, pp. 28, 18.
130 F.R.Coad, A History of the Brethren Movement (Exeter, 1968), ch. 1.
131 Autobiography of George Müller, ed. G.F.Bergin (London, 1905), pp. 223, 16.
See also p. 39.
132 H. and G.Taylor, Hudson Taylor, 2 vols (London, 1911 and 1918). See also B.
Stanley, ‘Home support for overseas missions in early Victorian England, c.
1838–1873’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1979, chs 7 and 8.
133 J.Hudson Taylor, A Retrospect, 2nd edn (London, 1898), p. 41.
134 Dialogues, vol. 3, p. vii; vol. 2, p. 4.
135 Irving, Last Days, p. 447.
136 Thelwall, Sermons, chiefly on Subjects connected with the Present State and
Circumstances of the Church and the World (London, 1833).
137 A Memoir of the Rev.Henry Budd (London, 1855), p. 449.
138 Irving, Last Days, p. xxxviii.
139 Budd, p. 449.
140 Dialogues, vol. 3, p. 472. H.Budd, Infant-Baptism the Means of National
Reformation according to the Doctrines and Discipline of the Established
Church (London, 1827), p. 235.
141 Irving, Babylon and Infidelity, Vol. 2, p. 264.
142 Dialogues, vol. 1, p. 349.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 305

143 Drummond, Defence, p. 58.

144 R, L.Lively, ‘The Catholic Apostolic Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-Day Saints: a comparative study of two minority millenarian groups in
nineteenth-century England’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1978, p. 108.
145 Drummond, Defence, pp. 57 f.
146 Griggs (ed.), Letters of Coleridge, Vol. 6, p. 976 n.
147 Irving, Last Days, pp. 121, 124–30.
148 T.Hill (ed.), Letters and Memoir of the late Walter Augustus Shirley (London,
1849), p. 177.
149 Coad, Brethren Movement, pp. 29 f.
150 Irving, Last Days, pp. 122 f.
151 Irving, Homilies on the Sacraments: Vol, 1: On Baptism (London, 1828), p. 434.
152 Oliphant, Irving, p. 216.
153 Irving, Last Days, p. 121.
154 Budd, Infant-Baptism, p. vii.
155 Hill (ed.), Shirley, p. 130. Dialogues, vol. 3, p. 472. F.D, Maurice, The
156 Kingdom of Christ, Vol. 1 (London, 1838), pp. 104 ff. Newsome, Two Classes of
Men, p. 30.
157 Dialogues, vol. 2, pp. 4 f.
158 Irving, Missionaries, p. 83.
159 Dialogues, vol. 2, p. 242.
160 Irving, Last Days, p. 132.
161 Dialogues, vol. 3, p. 472.
162 Drummond, Defence, pp. 61–4.
163 Dialogues, vol. 1, pp. 373 f.
164 S.W.Gilley, ‘Newman and prophecy, Evangelical and Catholic’, Journal of the
United Reformed Church History Society, vol. 3, no. 5 (1985). Stunt, ‘Newman
and the Evangelicals’, p. 71. See also D.Newsome, ‘Justification and
sanctification: Newman and the Evangelicals’, Journal of Theological Studies,
vol. 15, pt 1 (1964); and ‘The Evangelical Sources of Newman’s Power’, in
J.Coulson and A.M.Allchin (eds), The Rediscovery of Newman (London, 1967).
165 H.Tristram (ed.), John Henry Newman: Autobiographical Writings (New York,
1957), pp. 202–6, 208.
166 E, A.Knox, The Tractarian Movement, 1833–1845 (London, 1933), pp. 124 ff.
167 D.Newsome, The Parting of Friends: A Study of the Wilberforces and Henry
Manning (London, 1966).
168 P.Toon, Evangelical Theology, 1833–1856: A Response to Tractarianism
(London, 1979), ch. 1.
169 Budd, p. 602.
170 See pp. 147 ff.
171 Bickersteth, Christian Hearer, 2nd edn (London, 1826), pp. 128–42.
172 J.E.Gordon, Original Reflections and Conversational Remarks chiefly on
Theological Subjects (London, 1854), p. 315.
173 G.F.A.Best, ‘Evangelicals and the Established Church in the early nineteenth
century’, Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 10, pt 1 (1959).
174 Lord Henley, A Plan of Church Reform (London, 1832),
175 Dialogues, vol. 2, p. 252.
176 O.Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Vol. 1, 2nd edn (London, 1970), pp. 36 f.
306 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

177 [R.B.Seeley], Essays on the Church (London, 1834).

178 Rennie, ‘Evangelicalism and public life’, pp. 300–3.
179 Chalmers, Lectures on the Establishment and Extension of National Churches
(London, 1838).
180 D.W.Bebbington in Baptist Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 8 (1978), pp, 376 ff.
R.W.Davis, ‘The Strategy of “Dissent” in the repeal campaign, 1820–1828’,
Journal of Modern History, vol. 36, no. 4 (1966),
181 Chadwick, Victorian Church, Vol. 1, pp. 60 ff.
182 H.S.Skeats and C.S.Miall, History of the Free Churches of England, 1688–1891
(London, 1891), pp. 479 f.
183 D.M.Lewis, Lighten their Darkness: The Evangelical Mission to WorkingClass
London, 1828–1860 (Westport, Conn., 1986), ch. 3. J.Wolffe, The Evangelical
Alliance in the 1840s: an attempt to institutionalise Christian Unity’, in
Voluntary Religion, Studies in Church History, vol. 23, ed. W.J. Sheils and
D.Wood (Oxford, 1986).
184 CO, 1843, pp. iii f. See also pp. 136 f.
185 J.H. Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, being a History of his Religious Opinions
[1864] (London, 1946 edn), p. 197.
186 Irving, Babylon and Infidelity, p. 400.
187 Random Recollections of Exeter Hall m 1834–1837 (London, 1838), p. 135.
188 J.C.Colquhoun, William Wilberforce: His Friends and His Times (London,
1867), p. 7.
189 Dialogues, vol. 2, p. 251.
190 B.Hilton, ‘The role of providence in Evangelical social thought’, in D. Beales and
G. Best (eds), History, Society and the Churches (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 225–8.
191 Dialogues, vol. 2, p. 258.
192 Rennie, ‘Evangelicals and public life’, p. 158. Random Recollections, p. 144.
193 Dialogues, vol. 1, pp. 5 f.
194 ibid., vol. 1, p. 211; vol. 3, p. 423.
195 I.McCalman, ‘Unrespectable radicalism: infidels and pornography in early
nineteenth-century Britain’, Past & Present, 104 (1984), pp. 84 ff.
196 Dialogues, vol. 1, p. 39.
197 Drummond, Defence, p. 110.
198 R.W.Davis, Dissent in Politics, 1780–1830: The Political Life of William Smith,
M.P. (London, 1971), esp. ch. 11.
199 Irving, Sermons, Lectures…, p. ix.
200 Martin, Evangelicals United, pp. 131–40.
201 K.R.M.Short, ‘London’s General Body of Protestant Ministers: its disruption in
1836’, JEH, vol. 24, no. 4 (1973).
202 E.Norman, The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford,
1984), ch. 1.
203 D.Bowen, The Protestant Crusade in Ireland, 1800–70 (Dublin, 1978), esp. pp.
89, 99.
204 D.Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–1850 (London,
1984), ch. 5.
205 G.I.T.Machin, The Catholic Question in English Politics, 1820 to 1830 (Oxford,
1964).
206 Davis, ‘Strategy of “Dissent”’.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 307

207 G.F.A.Best, ‘The Protestant constitution and its supporters’, Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society, 5th series, vol. 8 (1958), p. 108. Marsh, Marsh, pp. 126
ff.
208 Irving, Babylon and Infidelity, pp. x f.; Last Days, pp. 489–508.
209 Protestant Churchman, October 1871, p. 493. I am grateful for this reference to
Dr J.R. Wolffe.
210 L.H.Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Immigrants in Victorian London (Manchester,
1979), p. 15.
211 S.Gilley, ‘English attitudes to the Irish in England, 1780–1900’, in C.Holmes
(ed.), Immigrants and Minorities in British Society (London, 1978).
212 G.F.A.Best, ‘Popular Protestantism in Victorian Britain’, in R.Robson (ed.), Ideas
and Institutions of Victorian Britain (London, 1967). E.R.Norman, Anti-
Catholicism in Victorian England (London, 1967). W.L.Arnstein, Protestant
versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr Newdegate and the Nuns
(Columbia, Mo., 1982). J.R.Wolffe, ‘Anti-Catholicism in midnineteenth-century
Britain’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1985.
213 Elliott, Horae Apocalypticae, Vol. 4, p. 279.
214 Witness, 9 January 1850.
215 G.I.T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1832 to 1868
(Oxford, 1977), pp. 94–9.
216 McNeile, Nationalism in Religion: A Speech delivered at the Annual Meeting of
the Protestant Association, held in the Exeter Hall, on Wednesday, May 8, 1839
(n.p., n.d.), pp. 2, 4.
217 Norman, Anti-Catholicism, ch. 2. Machin, Politics and the Churches, ch. 5, pt 5.
218 W.Ralls, ‘The Papal Aggression of 1850: a study in Victorian anti-Catholicism’,
Church History, vol. 43, no. 2 (1974). Norman, Anti-Catholicism, ch. 3.
219 Ben-Ezra, Coming of Messiah, pp. viii f.
220 Rowdon, Origins of the Brethren, p, 17.
221 CO, January 1844, p. 128.
222 Brooks, Advent and Kingdom, p. 340.
223 Waldegrave, New Testament Millenarianism, p. 424.
224 Harris, Great Commission, ch. 3.
225 CO, January 1844, p. 128.
226 G.F.Berwick, ‘Life of Francis Close’, vol. 8 (1938), p. 25, quotcd by Hennell, Sons
of the Prophets, p. 107.
227 P.Fairbairn, The Interpretation of Prophecy [1864] (London, 1964 edn), p. vii.
228 Lively, ‘Catholic Apostolic Church’, p. 258. Although the samplc includes some
twentieth-century members, they are relatively few.
229 Rowdon, Origins of the Brethren, pp. 302 ff.

CHAPTER 4:
THE GROWTH OF THE WORD

1 T.Hardy, Jude the Obscure [1896] (London, 1978), p. 93.

2 I, Bradley, The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians
(London, 1976), p. 38,
308 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

3 O.Anderson, ‘The reactions of Church and Dissent towards the Crimean War’,
JEH, vol. 16, no. 4 (1965), p. 215.
4 J.Wigley, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday (Manchester, 1980), pt 3.
5 G.M.Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age [1936], 2nd edn (London,
1953), p. 5.
6 J.S.Mill, ‘Essay on Liberty’ [1859], On Liberty and Considerations on
Representative Government, ed. R.B. McCallum (Oxford, 1946), p. 61.
7 ibid., chs 3 and 4, esp. pp. 62, 78.
8 W.E.Gladstone, ‘The Evangelical movement: its parentage, progress and issue’,
British Quarterly Review, July 1879, p. 6.
9 Paper by J.Coates at the Elland Society, 14 April 1803, cited by J.D. Walsh, ‘The
Yorkshire Evangelicals in the eighteenth century: with especial reference to
Methodism’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1956, p. 327.
10 J.Jerram (ed.), The Memoirs and a Selection from the Letters of the Late Rev.
Charles Jerram, M.A. (London, 1855), p. 295.
11 W.J.Conybeare, ‘Church parties’, Edinburgh Review, no. 200 (1853), p. 338. The
figure is doubted by O. Chadwick (The Victorian Church, Vol. 1, 2nd edn
(London, 1970), p. 446), but on inadequate grounds.
12 A.Haig, The Victorian Clergy (London, 1984), p. 2.
13 R.Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion and Reform, 1830–1841
(Oxford, 1987), p. 119.
14 T, Hill (ed.), Letters and Memoir of the late Walter Augustus Shirley, D.D.
(London, 1849). R, 16 March 1848.
15 B.E.Hardman, The Evangelical party in the Church of England, 1855–1865’, PhD
thesis, University of Cambridge, 1964, ch. 2.
16 W.S.F.Pickering, ‘The 1851 religious census: a useless experiment?’, British
Journal of Sociology, vol. 18, no. 4 (1967), pp. 393 f.
17 K.S.Inglis, ‘Patterns of religious worship in 1851’, JEH, vol. 11, no. 1 (1960), pp.
80 ff.
18 Prospects for the Eighties (London, 1980), p. 23.
19 R.Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the
British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), p. 22. R.B.Walker, ‘Religious changes in
Cheshire, 1750–1850’, JEH, vol. 17, no. 1 (1966), pp. 80 ff.
20 A.D.Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and
Social Change, 1740–1914 (London, 1976), p. 32.
21 Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 147 f.
22 C.G.Brown, The Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730 (London,
1987), p. 61.
23 W.D.Balda, ‘“Spheres of influence”: Simeon’s Trust and its implications for
Evangelical patronage’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1981, p. 187.
24 B.I.Coleman, The Church of England in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: A Social
Geography (London, 1980), pp. 8–25. See also A. Everitt, The Pattern of Rural
Dissent: The Nineteenth Century (Leicester, 1973); and pp. 26 f.
25 H.McLeod, ‘Class, community and region; the religious geography of
nineteenth-century England’ in A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain,
vol. 6, ed. M. Hill (London, 1973).
26 Coleman, Church of England, pp. 40 f.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 309

27 B.Stanley, ‘Home support for overseas missions in early Victorian England, c.

1838–1873’ PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1979, p. 201.
28 For example, R.M.Goodridge, ‘Nineteenth-century urbanization and religion:
Bristol and Marseilles, 1830–1880', in A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in
Britain, vol. 2, ed. D.Martin (London, 1969), pp. 126 f.
29 H.McLeod, Religion and the Working Class in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(London, 1984), p. 13.
30 H.McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (London, 1974), pp.
299 f.
31 C.Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London: Third Series: Religious
Influences, Vol. 7 (London, 1902), p. 396.
32 J.Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (New
York, 1982), p. 32.
33 Booth, Life and Labour, Vol. 7, p. 112.
34 G.Crossick, ‘The emergence of the lower middleclass in Britainia discussion’, in
G.Crossick (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain, 1870–1914 (London, 1977),
p. 19.
35 McLeod, Class and Religion, p. 33.
36 C.D.Field, ‘The social structure of English Methodism: eighteenth-twentieth
centuries’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 28, no. 2 (1977), p. 209.
37 E.R.Wickham, Church and People in an Industrial City (London, 1957), p. 107.
38 Gilbert, Religion and Society, p. 63.
39 P.Hillis, ‘Presbyterianism and social class in mid-nineteenth-century Glasgow: a
study of nine churches’, JEH, vol. 32, no. 1 (1981), pp. 55, 63.
40 Stanley, ‘Home support’, p. 198.
41 J.Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875 (Oxford,
1976), p. 239.
42 Gilbert, Religion and Society, p. 63.
43 Field, ‘English Methodism’, p. 216.
44 S.Yeo, Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis (London, 1976), pp. 118
ff. Hillis, ‘Presbyterianism and social class’, pp. 57, 62.
45 C.Kemble, Suggestive Hints on Parochial Machinery (London, 1859), p. 29. On
pew rents, cf. C, G.Brown, ‘The costs of pew-renting: church management,
church-going and social class in nineteenth-century Glasgow’, JEH, vol. 38, no. 3
(1987).
46 R.F.Horton, in G.Haw (ed.), Christianity and the Working Classes (London,
1906), p. 87.
47 A.A.MacLaren, Religion and Social Class: The Disruption Years in Aberdeen
(London, 1974), pp. 128–31.
48 B. and F.Bowers, ‘Bloomsbury Chapel and mercantile morality: the case of Sir
Morton Peto’, Baptist Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 5 (1984), pp. 210–20.
49 The decline of church discipline can be traced in C.Binfield, Pastors and People:
The Biography of a Baptist Church: Queen’s Road, Coventry (Coventry, 1984),
pp. 35, 74, 93, 105, 156.
50 For example, Labour Leader, 19 May 1894, p. 2.
51 M.C.Bickersteth, A Sketch of the Life and Episcopate of the Right Reverend
Robert Bickersteth, D.D., Bishop of Ripon, 1857–1884 (London, 1887), p. 70.
52 Haw (ed.), Christianity and the Working Classes, p. 16.
310 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

53 Horton in ibid., p. 87.

54 A.E.Dingle, ‘Drink and working-class living standards in Britain, 1870–1914’,
Economic History Review, 2nd series, vol. 25, no. 4 (1972), pp. 608–12.
55 W.R.Lambert, Drink and Sobriety in Victorian Wales, c. 1820-c. 1895 (Cardiff,
1983), p. 32.
56 P.Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England (London, 1978), p. 137. T,
Mason, Association Football and English Society, 1863–1915 (Brighton, 1980), p.
26.
57 E.Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement,
1791–1866 (Manchester, 1974), p. 237.
58 Cox, English Churches, pp. 102 f. On rural folk religion: Obelkevich, Religion
and Rural Society, ch. 6; D. Clark, Between Pulpit and Pew: Folk Religion in a
North Yorkshire Fishing Village (Cambridge, 1982).
59 H.Pelling, ‘Popular attitudes to religion’, Popular Politics and Society in Late
Victorian Britain (London, 1968), p. 19.
60 R.Carwardine, ‘The Welsh Evangelical community and “Finney’s Revival”’. JEH,
vol. 29, no. 4 (1978), p. 467.
61 Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, p. 106.
62 R.B.Walker, ‘The growth of Wesleyan Methodism in Victorian England and
Wales’, JEH, vol. 24, no. 3 (1973), p. 270.
63 E.P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth,
1968 edn), pp. 427–30, 919–23.
64 E.J.Hobsbawm and G.Rudé, Captain Swing (Harmondsworth, 1973 edn), pp.
248–51.
65 P.Stigant, ‘Wesleyan Methodism and working-class radicalism in the North,
1792–1821’, Northern History, vol. 6 (1971). J.Rule, ‘Methodism and Chartism
among the Cornish miners’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour
History, vol. 22 (1971).
66 Currie et al.. Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 107–13.
67 S.E.Koss, ‘1906: revival and revivalism’, in A.J.A.Mason (ed.), Edwardian
Radicalism, 1900–1914 (London, 1974).
68 Gilbert, Religion and Society, p. 195; cf. Currie etal., Churches and Churchgoers,
p. 111.
69 J.Kendall, Rambles ofan Evangelist, pp. 42 f., quoted by Carwardine, ‘Welsh
Evangelical community’, p. 470.
70 Walker, ‘Growth of Wesleyan Methodism’, pp. 268, 271.
71 See J.S.Werner, The Primitive Methodist Connexion: Its Background and Early
History (Madison, Wis., 1984), pp. 44 171–4.
72 W.Leach to J.Bunting, 22 October 1832, in W.R.Ward (ed.), Early Victorian
Methodism: The Correspondence of Jabez Bunting, 1830–1858 (Oxford, 1976),
pp. 20 f.
73 Werner, Primitive Methodist Connexion, chs 2 and 3.
74 J.Kent, Holding the Fort: Studies in Victorian Revivalism (London, 1978), pp. 49
f.
75 Carwardine, ‘Welsh Evangelical community’.
76 R.Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and
America, 1790–1865 (Westport, Conn., 1978), pp. 97–133.
77 A.Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns [1902] (Harmondsworth, 1963), ch. 5.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 311

78 Elgin Courier, quoted by Revival, 31 March 1860, p. 103.

79 J.E.Orr, The Second Evangelical Awakening in Britain (London, 1949).
80 Revival, 21 January 1860, p. 22.
81 ibid., 25 February 1860, p. 61.
82 ibid., 18 February 1860, p. 53; 28 January 1860, p. 30.
83 ibid., 25 February 1860, p. 61; 31 March 1860, p. 102.
84 Revival, 28 April 1860, p. 133. Carwardine, Transatlantic Revival, p. 133,
85 Hardman, ‘Evangelical party’, pp. 319 ff.
86 Revival for the first half of 1860.
87 O.Anderson, ‘Women prcachcrs in mid-Victorian Britain: some reflexions on
feminism, popular religion and social change’, Historical Journal, vol. 12, no. 3
(1969).
88 F.R.Coad, A History of the Brethren Movement (Exeter, 1968), pp. 167–74.
89 See pp. 162 ff.
90 H.James, The Country Clergyman and his Work (London, 1890), pp. 154 f.
91 Kemble, Parochial Machinery, p. 23.
92 C.Bridges, The Christian Ministry, 3rd edn (London, 1830), p. 471.
93 F.K.Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England
(Oxford, 1980), p. 99; cf. H.D.Rack, ‘Domestic visitation: a chapter in early
nineteenth-century evangelism’, JEH, vol, 24, no. 4 (1973).
94 The scheme was in large measure evangelistic, even though it is often discussed
as an exercise in poor relief. R.A.Cage and E.O.A.Checkland, Thomas Chalmers
and urban poverty: the St John’s parish experiment in Glasgow, 1819–1837’,
Philosophical Journal, vol. 13, no. 1 (1976).
95 Lord Henley, A Plan of Church Reform, 2nd edn (London, 1832), p. 14 n.
96 James, Country Clergyman, p. 148.
97 F.K.Prochaska, ‘Body and Soul: Bible nurses and the poor in Victorian London’,
Historical Research, Vol. 60, no. 143 (1987).
98 L.E.Shelford, A Memorial of the Rev. William Cadman, M.A, (London, 1899), p.
44.
99 G, H.Sumner, Life of Charks Richard Sumner, D.D. (London, 1876), p. 248.
100 Hardman, ‘Evangelical party’, pp. 268 f.
101 E.Hodder, Life of Samuel Morley (London, 1888 edn), pp. 94–100.
R.Carwardine, ‘The evangelist system: Charles Roe, Thomas Pulford and the
Baptist Home Missionary Society’, Baptist Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 5 (1980).
102 S.J.Price, A Popular History of the Baptist Building Fund (London, 1927).
103 W.Hanna, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas Chalmers, D.D., LL.D.,
Vol. 4 (Edinburgh, 1852), ch. 19.
104 A. Peel, These Hundred Years: A History of the Congregational Union of
England and Wales, 1831–1931 (London, 1931), pp. 302–16. E.A.Payne, The
Baptist Union: A Short History (London, 1958), pp. 104 f.
105 James, Country Clergyman, p. 156.
106 Occasional Paper (Church Pastoral-Aid Society), no. 53 (1858), p. 6.
107 W.Cuff, Fifty Years’ Ministry, 1865–1915 (London, 1915), pp. 40 f., 45 f.
108 Occasional Paper (CPAS), no. 53 (1858), p. 8.
109 D.M, Lewis, Lighten their Darkness: The Evangelical Mission to Working-Class
London, 1828–1860 (Westport, Conn., 1986), ch. 5.
312 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

110 J.M.Weylland, These Fifty Years: Being the Jubilee Volume of the London City
Mission (London, 1884), esp. p. 334. C.Binfield, George Williams and the
Y.M.C.A. (London, 1973), pp. 151–5, chs 6, 13, 14.
111 J.Wood, The Story of the Evangelization Society (London, n.d.). H.D.Brown, By
Voice and Book: The Story of the Christian Colportage Association (London,
n.d.). L.A.G.Strong, Flying Angel: The Story of the Missions to Seamen
(London, 1956).
112 Hodder, Morley, p. 218.
113 C, 8 January 1880, p. 13.
114 Address of 1858 in Speeches of the Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G. [1868] (Shannon,
1971), p. 308, quoted by G.B.A.M. Finlayson, The Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury,
1801–1885 (London, 1981), p. 410.
115 For example, G.Kitson Clark, Churchmen and the Condition of England,
1832–1885 (London, 1973), pp. 71–4.
116 See pp. 213–17.
117 K.Heasman, Evangelicals in Action: An Appraisal of their Social Work in the
Victorian Era (London, 1962), p. 14.
118 J.Rose, Elizabeth Fry (London, 1980).
119 G.Wagner, Barnardo (London, 1979).
120 E.R.Norman, Church and Society in England, 1770–1970 (Oxford, 1976), esp.
pp. 62–7. C.M.Elliott, The Political Economy of English Dissent, 1780–1840’, in
R.M.Hartwell (ed.), The Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1970).
121 Cage and Checkland, ‘Chalmers and urban poverty’, pp. 37 ff.
122 J.B.Sumner, Christian Charity (London, 1841), pp. vii f., xii.
123 B.W.Noel, The State of the Metropolis Considered (London, 1835), p. 21.
124 J.Clifford, Jesus Christ and Modern Social Life (London, [1872]), p. 35.
125 Bridges, Christian Ministry, p. 472.
126 Bickersteth, Bickersteth, pp. 68 f.
127 J.Stoughton, Congregationalism in the Court Suburb (London, 1883), pp. 60 f.
128 Kemble, Parochial Machinery, pp. 24–7.
129 Yeo, Religion and Voluntary Organisations, p. 58.
130 Bradley, Call to Seriousness, p. 122.
131 Nottingham Athenaeum, vol. 1 (1860), pp. 16–20, 43 ff., 64 ff.
132 J.Venn, ‘Charity Schools’, CO, September. 1804, p. 542, quoted by M. Hennell,
John Venn and the Clapham Sect (London, 1958), p. 137.
133 T.W.Laqueur, The cultural origins of popular literacy in England, 1500–1850’,
Oxford Review of Education, vol. 2, no. 3 (1976), p. 255. R.Houston, ‘The
literacy myth?: illiteracy in Scotland, 1630–1760’, Past & Present, no. 96 (1982),
pp. 98 f.
134 T.C.Smout, ‘Born again at Cambuslang: new evidence on popular religion and
literacy in eighteenth-century Scotland’, Past & Present, no. 97 (1982), p. 122.
135 R.S.Schofield, ‘Dimensions ofilliteracy, 1750–1850’, Explorations in Economic
History, vol. 10, no. 4 (1973).
136 W.W.Champneys, Parish Work: A Brief Manual for the Younger Clergy
(London, 1866), pp. 19 f.
137 T.W.Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class
Culture, 1780–1850 (New Haven, Conn., 1976). P.B.Cliff, The Rise and
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 313

Development of the Sunday School Movement in England, 1780–1980 (Nutfield,

Redhill, Surrey, 1986).
138 Kemble, Parochial Machinery, p. 21 n.
139 Laqueur, Religion and Respectability, p. 89.
140 Cox, English Churches, p. 80 n.
141 H.C.Colman, Jeremiah James Colman (London, 1905), p. 126.
142 Bickersteth, Bickersteth, p. 231.
143 Finlayson, Shaftesbury, pp. 251 f.
144 H.J.Burgess, Enterprise in Education: The Story of the Work of the Established
Church in the Education of the People prior to 1870 (London, 1958), pp. 224, 142
ff., 160.
145 M.Sturt, The Education of the People: A History of Primary Education in
England and Wales in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1967), pp. 21–7.
Stoughton, Congregationalism, p. 63.
146 Burgess, Enterprise in Education, p. 224. The Wesleyan figure is for 1847:
D.Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–1850 (London,
1984), p. 171.
147 J.M.Goldstrom, The Social Content of Education, 1808–1870: A Study of the
Working-Class School Reader in England and Ireland (Shannon, Ireland, 1972),
p. 19. Cox, English Churches, pp. 96 f. See also W.M.Humes and H.M.Paterson
(eds), Scottish Culture and Scottish Education, 1800–1980 (Edinburgh, 1983).
148 James, Country Clergyman, p. 118.
149 For example, O.Chadwick, Victorian Miniature (London, 1960).
150 Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society, p. 35.
151 D.W.Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870–
1914 (London, 1982), p. 31. Witness, 30 May 1854.
152 F.M. L.Thompson, ‘Landowners and the rural community’, in G.E. Mingay
(ed.), The Victorian Countryside, Vol. 2 (London, 1981), p. 469.
153 P.Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later
Victorian England (Hassocks, Sussex, 1980).
154 A.Howe, The Cotton Masters, 1830–1860 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 61 f.
155 T.R.Blumer: G.E.Milburn, Piety, Profit and Paternalism: Methodists in Business
in the North-East of England, c. 1760–1920 (Bunbury, Cheshire, 1983), p. 22.
156 R.Balgarnie, Sir Titus Salt, Baronet (London, 1877), pp. 142 f. Viscount
Leverhulme, Viscount Leverhulme (London, 1927), pp. 95 f.
157 T.H.W.Idris: Baptist Times, 12 January 1906, p. 22.
158 J.B.Johnson: R.Moore, Pit-Men, Preachers and Politics: The Effects of
Methodism in a Durham Mining Community (London, 1974), p. 83.
159 G.Stephen, Anti-Slavery Recollections in a Series of Letters addressed to Mrs
Beecher Stowe [1854] (London, 1971), p. 161.
160 C.Binfield, ‘“Self-harnessed to the Car of Progress.” Baines of Leeds and East
Parade: a church and a dynasty’, So Down to Prayers: Studies in English
Nonconformity, 1780–1920 (London, 1977), p. 79.
161 G.and W.Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody [1892], (Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, 1965 edn), p. 24.
162 B.Harrison and P.Hollis, ‘Chartism, Liberalism and the life of Robert Lowery’,
English Historical Review, vol. 82, no. 3 (1967).
314 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

163 G.Crossick, An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society: Kentish London, 1840–1880

(London, 1978), p. 142.
164 Moore, Pit-Men, pp. 142 ff.
165 Booth, Life and Labour, Vol. 7, p. 399.
166 Binney, Is it Possible to make the Best of Both Worlds?, 9th edn (London, 1855),
pp. 94 f.
167 Coleman, Church of England, p. 7; cf. O.Anderson, ‘The incidence of civil
marriage in Victorian England and Wales’, Past & Present, no. 69 (1975). In
Scotland, however, marriage was a civil contract, and so ecclesiastical
involvement was purely voluntary.
168 Cox, English Churches, pp. 97–100.
169 Gilbert, Religion and Society, pp. 89 f. Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society,
chs 4 and 5.
170 Moore, Pit-Men, pp. 124–32. Werner, Primitive Methodist Connexion,
pp. 157–61.
171 C.Binfield, So Down to Prayers, pp. 26 f.
172 J.Lea, The growth of the Baptist denomination in mid-Victorian Lancashire and
Cheshire’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, vol.
124 (1972), p. 143.
173 James, Country Clergyman, pp. 163 ff.
174 A.L.Drummond and J.Bulloch, The Church in Late Victorian Scotland, 1874–
1900 (Edinburgh, 1978), pp. 168 ff.
175 J.Burgess, The Lake Counties and Christianity: The Religious History of
Cumbria, 1780–1920 (Carlisle, 1984), p. 96.
176 Chadwick, Victorian Church, Vol. 2, p. 223.
177 Cox, English Churches, pp. 26 f., 282 f., 290 ff.
178 B.Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain
(London, 1978). B.Heeney, ‘The beginnings of church feminism: women and the
councils of the Church of England, 1897–1919’, JEH, vol. 33, no. 1 (1982), esp. p.
108 (Dean Wace).
179 Anderson, ‘Women preachers’, p. 468 n. Heeney, ‘Church feminism’, p. 90 n.
180 A.T.Pierson, Forward Movements of the Last Half Century (New York, 1900),
ch, 13.
181 Z.Fairfield, Some Aspects of the Woman’s Movement (London, 1915), appendix.
See pp. 174 f.
182 Anderson, ‘Women preachers’. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy.
183 R.A.Knox, A Spiritual Aeneid (London, 1918), pp. 5 f.
184 H.Thornton, Family Prayers (London, 1834).
185 S.Butler, The Way of All Flesh (London, 1903). E.Gosse, Father and Son
(London, 1907).
186 L.Hoare, Hints for the Improvement of Early Education and Nursery Discipline
(London, 1819); Friendly Advice on the Management and Education of Children
(London, 1824). J.H.Townsend (ed.), Edward Hoare, M.A., 2nd edn London,
1896), p. 7. See also Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture, ch. 4.
187 Shaftesbury’s diary, 5 September 1840, quoted by Finlayson, Shaftesbury, p.
131.
188 R, 18 January 1855, p. 2, citing the Leader, as quoted by Hardman, ‘Evangelical
party’, p. 133.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 315

189 On Dickens: V.Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the

Victorian Novel (Oxford, 1975), ch. 8. On Eliot: E.Jay, The Religion of the Heart:
Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford, 1979), ch.
4.
190 G.Best, ‘Evangelicalism and the Victorians’, in A.Symondson (ed.), The
Victorian Crisis of Faith (London, 1970), p. 48 f.
191 The World of Cant (London, 1880), p. 143; cf. A.Mursell, Memories of My Life
(London, 1913), pp. 185 ff.
192 W.Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious Systems of
Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country
Contrasted with Real Christianity, 4th edn (London, 1797), p. 453.
193 M.Hennell, ‘Evangelicalism and worldliness, 1770–1870’, in G.J.Cuming and
D.Baker (eds), Popular Belief and Practice, Studies in Church History, vol. 8
(Cambridge, 1972), p. 230.
194 J.H.Pratt (ed.), The Thought of the Evangelical Leaders: Notes of the Discussions
of The Eclectic Society, London, during the Years 1798–1814 (Edinburgh, 1978),
pp. 157–62; cf. Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture, pp, 75–8.
195 A.W., The Theatre; and can it be improved?’, CO, May 1851, p. 300.
196 J.Kay, A Defence of the Legitimate Drama (Edinburgh, 1883), p. 18.
197 G.S.Barrett, ‘The secularisation of the church’, in Congregational Yearbook,
1895, p. 47.
198 Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture, ch. 6, esp. p. 137.
199 M.Raleigh (ed.), Alexander Raleigh: Records of his Life (Edinburgh, 1881), p.22.
200 P.Horn, Education in Rural England, 1800–1914 (Dublin, 1978), p. 193.
201 C.Binfield, ‘“Old fashioned Dissenting narrowness”: Crabb Robinson and the
Patissons’, So Down to Prayers, ch. 3. T, S.James, ‘Home life’, in R.W.Dale, Life
and Letters of John Angell James (London, 1862 edn), p. 382, quoted by
Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against, p. 48.
202 Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture, ch. 8, sect. C; cf. Jay, Religion of the Heart,
pp. 195–202.
203 Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against, p. 59. J.Briggs and I.Sellers (eds),
Victorian Nonconformity (London, 1973), pp. 117 f.
204 Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against, p. 62.
205 CO, September 1845, p. 522.
206 Hardman, ‘Evangelical party’, p. 377.
207 T, 27 December 1860, p. 8, cited by Hardman, ‘Evangelical party’, p. 79.
208 Bradley, Call to Seriousness, p. 28. G.Unwin and J.Telford, Mark Guy Pearse:
Preacher, Author, Artist (London, 1930), p. 29.
209 J.B.B.Clarke (ed.), An Account of the Infancy, Religious and Literary Life of
Adam Clarke, LL.D., F.A.S., Vol. 2 (London, 1833), p. 38.
210 H.A.Thomas (ed.), Memorials of the Rev. David Thomas, B.A. (London, 1876),
p. 4.
211 A, Delves, ‘Popular recreation and social conflict in Derby, 1800–1850’, in E. and
S.Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict (Brighton, 1981). Hennell, Sons
of the Prophets, p. 106. P.Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational
Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London, 1978), pp. 18 f.
212 G.Eliot, Middlemarch [1871–72] (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1965), p. 191.
316 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

213 S.K.Phillips, ‘Primitive Methodist confrontation with popular sports: case study
of early nineteenth century Staffordshire’, in R.Cashman and M.McKernan
(eds), Sport: Money, Morality and the Media (Sydney, NSW, n.d.).
214 B.Harrison, ‘Animals and the state in nineteenth-century England’, Peaceable
Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1982), pp. 115 f.,
118. A.Lloyd, The Great Prize Fight (New York, 1977), esp. ch. 16.
215 See p. 113 f.
216 Colman, Colman, p. 354.
217 See pp. 71 f.
218 Stephen, Anti-Slavery Recollections, p. 248.
219 For example, F.J.Klingberg, The Anti-Slavery Movement in England (New
Haven, Conn., 1926).
220 G.A.Catherall, William Knibb: Freedom Fighter (n.p., 1972), p. 66; cf.
K.R.M.Short, ‘Jamaican Christian missions and the Great Slave Rebellion of
1831–2’, JEH, vol. 27, no. 1 (1976).
221 J.C.Gill, The Ten Hours Parson: Christian Social Action in the 1830s (London,
1959).
222 For example, D.Bowen, The Protestant Crusade in Ireland, 1800–70 (Dublin,
1978), p. 221 (A.R.C. Dallas).
223 G.I.T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1832–1868 (Oxford,
1977), pp. 169–77.
224 K.Ingham, The English Evangelicals and the Pilgrim Tax in India, 1800–1862’,
JEH, vol. 3, no. 2 (1952).
225 S.E.Maltby, Manchester and the Movement for National Elementary
Education, 1800–1870 (Manchester, 1918), p. 67.
226 Binfield, Pastors and People, ch. 7. Bebbington, Nonconformist Conscience, ch.
7.
227 P.McHugh, Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform (London, 1980), ch. 7.
228 G.Battiscombe, Shaftesbury: A Biography of the Seventh Earl (London, 1974), p.
147.
229 A.Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London [1883] (Leicester, 1970), pp. 16 f.
230 Occasional Paper (CPAS), no. 133 (1884), p. 5.
231 A.E.Dingle, The Campaign for Prohibition in Victorian England: The United
Kingdom Alliance, 1872–1895 (London, 1980). L.L.Shiman, The Crusade
against Drink in Victorian England (London, 1986).
232 Sargent, Martyn, p. 67.
233 Wigley, Victorian Sunday, pp. 53–7, 64–7. Finlayson, Shaftesbury, pp. 313–16.
234 J.G.Bowran, The Life of Arthur Thomas Guttery, D.D. (London, n.d.), p. 63.
235 T.W.Moody, The Irish university question of the nincteenth century’, History,
vol. 43, no. 2 (1958).
236 P.Wright, Knibb ‘the Notorious’: Slaves’ Missionary, 1803–1845 (London,
1973), p. 126.
237 Bebbington, Nonconformist Conscience, pp. 52 f.
238 B.Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England,
1815–1872 (London, 1971), pp. 269, 273.
239 D.B.Davis, ‘The emergence of immediatism in British and American antislavery
thought’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 49, no. 2 (1962).
240 A.Miall, Life of Edward Miall (London, 1884), pp. 29 ff.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 317

241 M.J.D.Roberts, ‘Pressure-group politics and the Church of England: the Church
Defence Institution, 1859–1896’, JEH, vol. 35, no. 4 (1984).
242 W.H.Mackintosh, Disestablishment and Liberation: The Movement for the
Separation of the Anglican Church from State Control (London, 1972). D.M.
Thompson, ‘The Liberation Society, 1844–1868’, in P.Hollis (ed.), Pressure from
Without in Early Victorian England (London, 1974).
243 Hardman, ‘Evangelical party’, ch. 7. P.M.H.Bell, Disestablishment in Ireland and
Wales (London, 1969), pp. 96–109.
244 D.W.Bebbington, ‘Nonconformity and electoral sociology, 1867–1918’,
Historical Journal, vol. 27, no. 3 (1984). K.O.Morgan, Wales m British Politics,
1868–1922 (London, 1963).
245 J, G.Kellas, ‘The Liberal Party and the Scottish church disestablishment crisis’,
English Historical Review, vol. 79, no. 1 (1974).
246 I.G.C.Hutchison, A Political History of Scotland, 1832–1924: Parties, Elections
and Issues (Edinburgh, 1986), pp. 84, 116 f.
247 D.E.H.Mole, ‘The Church of England and society in Birmingham c.1830–1866’,
PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1961, p. 266. Bickersteth, Bickersteth, pp,
32, 189.
248 Bebbington, ‘Nonconformity and electoral sociology’.
249 J.H.Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua [1864] (London, 1946), p. 193.
250 J.Foster, ‘On some of the causes…’, Essays in a Series of Letters to a Friend
(London, 1805); cf. Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture, pp. 203 f.
251 H.Crooke, The Spirit No Respecter of Persons in His Gifts and Graces (London,
1755), p. 15, quoted by Walsh, ‘Yorkshire Evangelicals’, p. 147 n.
252 Finlayson, Shaftesbury, p. 336.
253 J.G.Breay, ‘The pastor’s obligations to the church of God’, The Faithful Pastor
Delineated (London, 1844), quotcd by Mole, ‘Church and society in Birmingham’,
p. 75.
254 E.Stock, The History of the Church Missionary Society, Vol. 2 (London, 1899),
pp. 63, 550.
255 W.B.Brash, The Story of Our Colleges, 1835–1935 (London, 1935), p. 72.
256 A.de Q.Robin, Charles Perry, Bishop of Melbourne (Nedlands, Western
Australia, 1967), p. 15. Hardman, ‘Evangelical party’, pp. 396, 409.
257 See above, p. 123.
258 W.Robertson Nicoll, My Father: An Aberdeenshire Minister, 1812–1891
(London, 1908), pp. 62, 72.
259 N.G.Brett-James, The History of Mill Hill School, 1807–1923 (Reigate, [1925]),
p. 219.
260 A.S.Wilkins, Our National Universities (London, 1871), p. 342 n.
261 They are unsympathetically portrayed by Butler, Way of All Flesh, pp. 231–4.
262 J.D.Walsh, The Magdalene Evangelicals’, Church Quarterly Review, no. 159
(1958). J.A.Venn, A Statistical Chart to Illustrate the Entries at the Various
Colleges in the University of Cambridge, 1544–1907: Descriptive Text
(Cambridge, 1908), p. 10.
263 D.Rosman, ‘Evangelicals and culture in England, 1790–1833’, PhD thesis,
University of Keele, 1979, p. 365.
264 Hardman, ‘Evangelical party’, pp. 402, 409.
318 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

265 A.C.Downer, A Century of Evangelical Religion in Oxford (London, 1938), pp.

70 f., 66 f.
266 J.B.McCaul, A Memorial Sketch of the Rev. Alexander McCaul, D.D. (London,
1863), p. 15. Stoughton, Congregationalism, p, 65.
267 J.S.Black and G.Chrystal, The Life of William Robertson Smith, (London, 1912).
See pp. 184 f.
268 Mole, ‘Church and society in Birmingham’, p. 89.
269 Pfleiderer, The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant and its
Progress in Great Britain since 1825 (London, 1890), ch. 2 (Samuel Davidson
and Robertson Smith qualify as biblical critics). B.M.G.Reardon, Religious
Thought in the Victorian Age (London, 1980), ch. 12, pp. 456 f.
270 R.A.Soloway, Prelates and People: Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England,
1783–1852 (London, 1969), pp. 107–16.
271 S.Waldegrave, New Testament Millennarianism (London, 1855).
272 C.H.Davis to editor, R, 4 January 1861, p. 4,
273 Horne, An Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy
Scriptures, 4 Vols (London, 1818); ct. p. 87. McCaul, The Old Paths (London,
1837). L.Sergeant, ‘Christopher Benson’, DNB.
274 T.Cooper, ‘Joseph Baylee’, DNB.G.Goodwin, ‘John Buxton Marsden’. DNB.
275 G.B.Smith, Thomas Rawson Birks’, DNB.
276 Obituary: The Very Rev.William Goode, D.D., Dean of Ripon (London, 1883),
reprinted from Clerical Journal, p. 4; cf. P.Toon, Evangelical Theology, 1833–
1856: A Response to Tractarianism (London, 1979), pp. 117 ff.
277 F.Boase, Modern English Biography, Vol. 6 (Truro, 1921), col. 64.
278 Garbett, The Bible and its Critics (London, 1861); The Dogmatic Faith (London,
1867); cf. R.W.Macan, Religious Changes in Oxford during the Last Fifty Years
(London, 1918), p. 12.
279 D.S.Margoliouth, ‘Robert Payne Smith’, DNB.
280 W.G.D.Fletcher, ‘Nathaniel Dimock’, DNB, 1901–1911.
281 P.Fairbairn, The Interpretation of Prophecy (London, 1964), pp. xvii-xxii.
W.G.Blaikie, ‘Patrick Fairbairn’, DNB.
282 A.P.F.Sell, Defending and Declaring the Faith: Some Scottish Examples,
1860–1920 (Exeter, 1987), chs 7 and 9.
283 R.S.Franks, The theology of A.M.Fairbairn’, Transactions of the Congregational
Historical Society, vol. 13, no. 3 (1939).
284 A.W.W.Dale, The Life of R.W.Dale of Birmingham (London, 1898), pp. 324 f.,
710–17.
285 The ablest analysis of Forsyth remains W.L.Bradley, P.T. Forsyth: The Man and
his Work (London, 1952).
286 Finlayson, Shaftesbury, p. 349.
287 A.Haig, The Victorian Clergy (London, 1984), p. 49.
288 L.Stephen, Life of Henry Fawcett (London, 1885), p. 94.
289 G.S.Spinks, Religion in Britain since 1900 (London, 1952), p. 10 n; cf. Chadwick,
Victorian Church, Vol. 2, ch. 8.
290 J, W.Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge, 1966), esp. ch. 6.
291 Lecky, A History of the Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe (London,
1865). Chadwick, Victorian Church, Vol. 2, pp. 114 f., 11–23.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 319

292 N.Barlow (ed.), The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882 (London,

1958), p. 87.
293 Birks, Supernatural Revelation (London, 1879), p. 136. See also J.R.Moore, The
Post-Darwinian Controversies (Cambridge, 1979).
294 J.Kent, From Darwin to Blatchford: The Role of Darwinism in Christian
Apologetic, 1875–1910 (London, 1966), pp. 20–8.
295 P.Mathias, The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain,
1700–1914 (London, 1969), p. 378.
296 Cox, English Churches, ch, 6.
297 Yeo, Religion and Voluntary Organisations, esp. pp. 105 ff. Joyce, Work,
Society and Politics, pp. 339 f.
298 S.Meacham, A Life Apart: The English Working Class, 1890–1914 (London,
1977).
299 K.Hardie, ‘Socialism’ in Labour Leader, February 1894, p. 5.
300 J.H.Harley in Labour Leader, 8 February 1907, p. 595.
301 McLeod, Class and Religion, p. 25.
302 R, 2 January 1863, p. 2.
303 Birks, Supernatural Revelation, p. vi.
304 R, 2 January 1867; cf. R.Ferguson and A.M.Brown, Life and Labours of John
Campbell, D.D. (London, 1867).
305 A.P.F.Sell, ‘Henry Rogers and The Eclipse of Faith’, Journal of the United
Reformed Church History Society, vol, 2, no. 5 (1980).
306 Justus to editor, CO, September 1847, p. 519.
307 Theological liberalism’, British Quarterly Review, April 1861, p. 488.
308 J.Angus, Theology an Inductive and a Progressive Science (London, n.d.), pp. 20
f.
309 N.Goodman, The Established Church a Hindrance to Progressive Thought
(Manchester, 1873).
310 Raleigh (ed), Raleigh, p. 282.
311 Finlayson, Shaftesbury, p. 575.
312 D.A.Johnson, ‘The end of the “evidences”: a study in Nonconformist theological
transition’, Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society, vol. 2, no.
3 (1979).
313 Thomas, Thomas, p. 49.
314 C.S.Horne, A Popular History of the Free Churches (London, 1903), p. 421.
315 H.C.G. Moule, The Evangelical School III’ in R, 18 January 1901, p. 79. J.Scott
Lidgett, My Guided Life (London, 1936), p. 73. I.E. Page (ed.), John Brash:
Memorials and Correspondence (London, 1912), p. 48. Bradley, Forsyth, pp.
94–7.
316 M.D.Johnson, ‘Thomas Gasquoine and the origins of the Leicester conference’,
Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society, vol. 2, no. 10 (1982).
317 Binfield, ‘“No quest, no conquest.” Baldwin Brown and Silvester Horne’, So
Down to Prayers, pp. 189–99.
318 Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh, p. 283.
319 T.Waugh, Twenty-Three Years a Missioner (London, n.d.), p. 33. Birks, The
Victory of Divine Goodness, 2nd edn (London, 1870), pp. 42–8. E.R. Garratt, Life
and Personal Recollections of Samuel Garratt (London, 1908), p. 79. See G.
Rowell, Hell and the Victorians (Oxford, 1974), pp. 123–9.
320 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

320 R.T.Jones, Congregationalism in England, 1662–1962 (London, 1962), p. 265.

321 R.W.Dale, The Old Evangelicalism and the New (London, 1889), pp. 38 ff.
322 Booth, Life and Labour, Vol. 7, p. 119.
323 Sword and the Trowel, July 1876, p. 306.
324 Baptist, 4 November 1881, quoted by P.S.Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon: A
Preacher’s Progress (New York, 1982), p. 416.
325 Payne, Baptist Union, ch. 7, supplemented by E.A.Payne, ‘The Down Grade
controversy: a postscript’, Baptist Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 4 (1979) and by
Kruppa, Spurgeon, ch. 8.
326 Spurgeon, An All-Round Ministry (London, 1900), p. 17, quoted by Kruppa,
Spurgeon, p. 374.
327 Kruppa, Spurgeon, p. 424.
328 Payne, ‘Down Grade controversy’, p. 149.
329 A. Bentley, The transformation of the Evangelical party in the Church of
England in the later nineteenth century’, PhD thesis, University of Durham,
1971, p. 202.
330 N.Yates, The Oxford Movement and Anglican Ritualism (London, 1983), pp. 25
ff.
331 R.Braithwaite, The Life and Letters of Rev.William Pennefather, B.A. (London,
1878), p. 454.
332 Finlayson, Shaftesbury, p. 519.
333 O.Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2nd edn, Vol. 1 (London, 1970), pp. 495–
501.
334 J.Bentley, Ritualism and Politics in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1978).
335 One of the knuckle-dusters is displayed at Clevedon Court, Somerset.
336 P.Toon and M.Smout, John Charles Ryle: Evangelical Bishop (Cambridge,
1976), p. 67.
337 Garratt, What Shall We Do? Or, True Evangelical Policy (London, 1881), pp, 15,
24.
338 S.Butler, The Way of All Flesh [1903] (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1966), pp.
402–5. The changes, however, are antedated by Butler (Jay, Religion of the
Heart, p. 268).
339 R, 19 January 1883, p. 59 (Talbot Greaves).
340 J.Bateman, The Life of the Right Rev.Daniel Wilson, D.D., Vol. 1 (London,
1860), p. 182.
341 Bickersteth, Bickersteth, pp. 28 f.
342 Shelford, Cadman, p. 61.
343 D.Voll, Catholic Evangelicalism (London, 1963), esp. pt 2, ch. 2. Kent, Holding
the Fort, ch. 7.
344 Garbett, Is Union Desirable? (London, 1871).
345 Garbett, Religious Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Southport, [1877]), p. 4.
346 J.Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians (London, 1971), p. 30. J.F. White,
The Cambridge Movement: The Ecclesiologists and the Gothic Revival
(Cambridge, 1962), p. 188.
347 J.Bateman, The Church Association: Its Policy and Prospects considered in a
Letter to the Chairman, 2nd edn (London, 1880), p. 86.
348 Waldegrave to the Rev.Henry Ware, 7 July 1868, Waldegrave MS Letter Book
4, quoted by Burgess, Lake Counties and Christianity, p. 57.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 321

349 Shelford, Cadman, p. 62.

350 D.M.Murray, ‘From Disruption to Union’, in D.B.Forrester and D.M. Murray
(eds), Studies in the History of Worship in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1984).
351 W.H.Harwood, Henry Allon, D.D. (London, 1894), p. 35. M.J.Street, F.B. Meyer:
His Life and Work (London, 1902), pp. 83, 92. CW, 12 July 1906, p. 3 (Bernard
Snell).
352 Binfield, ‘Dissenting Gothic’, So Down to Prayers.
353 Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, Vol. 2 (London, 1887), p. 77.
354 Ward, Religion and Society, pp. 144–7.
355 J.Inglis, ‘The Scottish churches and the organ in the nineteenth century’, PhD
thesis, University of Glasgow, 1987.
356 Chadwick, Victorian Church, Vol. 1, pp. 218 ff.
357 Waldegrave to the Rev.G.H.Ainger, Waldegrave MS Letter Book 2, quoted by
Burgess, Lake Counties and Christianity, p. 56.
358 Garratt, Garratt, p. 252.
359 R, 10 June 1887, p. 561.
360 R, 18 September 1876.
361 N.G.Annan, Leslie Stephen (London 1951), ch. 3.
362 Strachey to Woolf, October 1904, quoted by M.Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A
Critical Biography, Vol. 1 (London, 1967), p. 198.
363 Holroyd, Strachey, Vol. 1, p. 267.

CHAPTER 5:
HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD

1 I.E.Page, A Long Pilgrimage with Some Guides and Fellow Travellers (London,
1914), p. 162. On the holiness tradition, see R.Brown, ‘Evangelical ideas of
perfection: a comparative study of the spirituality of men and movements in
nineteenth-century England’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1965.
2 D.B.Hankin, in Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural
Holiness, held at Oxford, ‘August 29 to September 7, 1874 (London, n.d.), p. 84.
3 M.E.Dieter, The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, NJ,
1980), p. 178. See p. 94 f.
4 C, 15 July 1875, p. 17; 12 August 1886, p. 6, LF, September 1880, p. 163. See pp.
81–6.
5 Mr Grane from Shanklin. Meeting…at Oxford, p. 210.
6 P.Brown, ‘The holy man in late antiquity’, Society and the Holy in Late
Antiquity (London, 1982), p. 121.
7 Meeting…at Oxford, p. iv.
8 Wesley, ‘A plain account of Christian perfection’, in John and Charles Wesley,
ed. F.Whaling, The Classics of Western Spirituality (London, 1981), p. 334.
9 ibid., p. 329.
10 ibid., pp. 335, 326. The standard monograph in this field is H.Lindström, Wesley
and Sanctification (Stockholm, 1946),
11 Alexander, Christian Holiness Illustrated and Enforced in Three Discourses
(Ewood Hall, ncar Halifax, 1800), p. 14.
12 Arthur, The Tongue of Fire, 10th edn (London, 1857), p. 48.
322 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

13 KH, January 1873, pp. 5 f. (W.Waters); September 1874, p. 295 (C. W.L.
Christian); December 1872, p. 413 (W.G.Pascoe).
14 KH, January 1872, p. 34; September 1874, p, 295.
15 KH, January 1872, p. 5; June 1872, p. 203; April 1874, p. 112.
16 Page, Long Pilgrimage, p. 140.
17 J.A.Beet, Holiness as Understood by the Writers of the Bible (London, 1880), p.
53. Pope, A Compendium of Christian Theology, Vol. 3 (2nd edn, London,
1880), pp. 44–61. Pope, however, held (unlike Wesley) that genuine holiness
must be unconscious: cf. W. Strawson, ‘Methodist theology, 1850–1950', in
R.Davies et al. (eds), A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain Vol. 3
(London, 1983), pp. 225 f.
18 Page, Long Pilgrimage, p. 145.
19 I.E.Page (ed.), John Brash: Memorials and Correspondence (London, 1912), p. 36.
F.H.Cumbers (ed.), Richmond College, 1843–1943 (London, 1944), pp. 101 f.
20 H.T.Smart, The Life of Thomas Cook (London, 1913), p. 34. KH, October 1873,
p. 347.
21 KH, October 1872, p. 338. T.H.Bainbridge, Reminiscences, ed. G.France (London,
1913), p. 87.
22 KH, October 1872, p. 338; December 1872, p. 414. Page, Long Pilgrimage, pp.
160, 196. Page, Brash, pp. 2 f., 26. R.M.Pope, The Life of Henry J. Pope (London,
1913), p. 88.
23 Bainbridge, Reminiscences, pp. 55 f. KH, October 1873, p. 346. Page (ed.), Brash,
pp. 144, 147.
24 KH, June 1872, p. 186.
25 Page, Brash, p. 214.
26 KH, March 1873, p. 99.
27 KH, April 1874, p, 144.
28 Crewdson, A Beacon to the Society of Friends (London, 1835), p. 77.
29 E.Isichei, Victorian Quakers (London, 1970), pp. 7, 9.
30 D.E.Swift, Joseph John Gurney: Banker, Reformer and Quaker (Middletown,
Conn., 1962), p. 175.
31 Isichei, Victorian Quakers, p. 12.
32 George Fox to Lady Claypole, Journal of George Fox (London, 1908), Vol. 1, p.
432, quoted by G.F.Nuttall, ‘George Fox and his Journal’, The Puritan Spirit
(London, 1967), p. 185.
33 Robert Barclay, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity, 14th edn
(Glasgow, 1886), p. 171.
34 Book of Christian Discipline of the Religious Society of Friends in Great Britain
(London, 1883), pp. 98 (baptism with the Holy Ghost), 101 (rest). Journal of the
Life, Travels and Gospel Labours of William Williams (Dublin, 1839), p. 13 (full
surrender), quoted by H, H.Brinton, ‘Stages in spiritual development as
exemplified in Quaker journals’, in H.H.Brinton (ed.), Children of Light: In
Honor of Rufus M.Jones (New York, 1938), p. 395.
35 H.Pearsall Smith, The Unselfishness of God and How I Discovered It (London,
1903), ch. 29.
36 Book of Christian Discipline, p. 99.
37 Isichei, Victorian Quakers, p, 17. H.Pearsall Smith, Unselfishness, pp. 232 f.
M.N.Garrard, Mrs. Penn-Lewis: A Memoir (London, 1930), pp. 34, 177.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 323

38 H.Pearsall Smith, Unselfishness, pp. 119, 225. R.A.Parker, A Family of Friends:

The Story of the Transatlantic Smiths (London, 1959), pp. 36 f.
39 Meeting…at Oxford, pp. 59, 202, 228, 38.
40 Record of the Convention for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness held at
Brighton, May 29th to June 7th, 1875 (Brighton, n.d.), p. 335.
41 Memoir of T.D.Harford-Battersby (London, 1890), pp. 110 f. J.E.Cumming, ‘The
founder and some of the leaders’, in C.F.Harford (ed.), The Keswick Convention:
Its Message, its Method and its Men (London, 1907), pp. 60–3.
42 F.R.Coad, A History of the Brethren Movement (Exeter, 1968), pp. 262 f.
43 C.H.Mackintosh, The Assembly of God, pp. 35 f., quoted by W.Reid, Plymouth
Brethrenism Unveiled and Refuted (Edinburgh, 1875), pp. 105 f.
44 C.H.Mackintosh, Sanctification: what is it?, 2nd edn, pp. 10, 19, quoted by Reid,
Plymouth Brethrenism, pp. 272 f., 290.
45 George Goodman in W, October 1919, p. 160.
46 C, 17 September 1874, p. 11.
47 J.E.Orr, The Second Evangelical Awakening in Britain (London, 1949), p, 220.
H.Pickering (ed.), Chief Men among the Brethren, 2nd edn (London, 1931), pp.
102 ff. Orr calls him ‘Hambledon’.
48 R, 18 February 1874.
49 R.Pearsall Smith to editor, R, 24 April 1874.
50 H.Pearsall Smith, Unselfishness, pp. 190, 234 f.
51 Coad, Brethren Movement, pp. 168 f.
52 C.H.Mackintosh, The Three Appearings, p. 31, quoted by Reid, Plymouth
Brethrenism, p. 290.
53 Revival, 4 November 1869, p. 3.
54 R.Braithwaite, The Life and Letters of Rev.William Pennefather, B.A. (London,
1878), pp. 290, 336, 305, 297.
55 ibid., pp. 325, 12, 316, 360 f.
56 Harford-Battersby, pp. 152 f. J.S.Reynolds, Canon Christopher of St.Aldate’s’
Oxford (Abingdon, 1967), p. 180. See p. 6.
57 Braithwaite, Pennefather, pp. 303, 379, 261.
58 Revival, 5 November 1868, p. 620.
59 Braithwaite, Pennefather, p. 271.
60 C, 5 February 1874, pp. 3 f.; 1 July 1875, p. 1.
61 Some Records of the Life of Stevenson Arthur Blackwood, K.C.B., compiled by a
friend and edited by his widow (London, 1896), p. 347.
62 A. Smellie, Evan Henry Hopkins: A Memoir (London, 1920), pp. 53 f. Revival, 4
November 1869, p. 6. Mrs Boardman, Life and Labours of the Rev, W, E.
Boardman (London, 1886), pp. 156 ff. Stevenson Blackwood, p. 133. C, 17
September 1874, p. 10. Reynolds, Christopher, pp. 131 f. Harford-Battersby, p.
156. Braithwaite, Pennefather, pp. 431, 291. R, 24 May 1875.
63 Revival, 4 November 1869, p. 3.
64 H.Bonar, Life of the Rev.John Milne of Perth, 5th edn (London, 1868), pp.
337–40.
65 C, 15 October 1874, p. 8.
66 Boardman, Boardman, p. 161. C, 30 April 1874, p. 13; 21 October 1875, p. 14; 23
April 1874, p. 18; 7 May 1874, p. 8; 4 November 1875, p. 17.
324 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

67 O.Anderson, ‘Women preachers in mid-Victorian Britain: some reflexions on

feminism, popular religion and social change’, Historical Journal, vol. 12, no. 3
(1969), esp. pp. 470–4. See also pp. 116 f.
68 J.Radcliffe, Recollections of Reginald Radcliffe (London, n.d.), p. 107.
69 H.W.S., The Way to be Holy (London, 1867), consists of articles reprinted from
The Revival.
70 Dieter, Holiness Revival, p. 109, n. 51. ‘D.Morgan Esq.’, an English publisher,
must in fact be R.C.Morgan.
71 Revival, 11 November 1869, p. 1; 4 November 1869, p. 15; 30 December 1869, p.
13; 20 January 1870, p. 13.
72 G, E.Morgan, A Veteran in Revival: R.C.Morgan: His Life and Times (London,
1909), pp. 126 f. D.W.Whittle and W.Guest (eds), P.P. Bliss, Joint Author of
“Sacred Songs and Solos”: His Life and his Work (London, 1877), p. 55.
73 Braithwaite, Braithwaite, pp. 280 f.
74 Radcliffe, Radcliffe, p. 118.
75 ibid.
76 Morgan, Morgan, p. 85.
77 Meeting…at Oxford, p. 58.
78 Revival, 14 January 1860, p. 22. Radcliffe, Radcliffe, p. 118 (Baptist Noel).
79 Revival, 28 January 1860, pp. 26, 27.
80 J.F.Findlay, Dwight L.Moody: American Evangelist, 1837–1899 (Chicago, 1969),
pp. 127 ff., 130 f., 149–55, 165 f.
81 J.Kent, Holding the Fort: Studies in Victorian Revivalism (London, 1978), p.
136.
82 W.H.Daniels, D.L.Moody and his Work (London, 1875), p. 249. Kent,Holding
the Fort, pp. 143 f., 146. J.C.Ryle to editor, R, 28 May 1875. Dean Close to
editor, R, 21 June 1875.
83 Daniels, Moody, pp. 425, 431, 432. On Moody’s preaching, cf. Kent, Holding the
Fort, pp. 169–204.
84 Kent, Holding the Fort, ch. 6. See also p. 174.
85 KH, June 1874, p. 213.
86 C, 22 January 1874, p. 5.
87 Findlay, Moody, p. 132.
88 Kent, Holding the Fort, p. 186.
89 C, 7 May 1874, p. 6. R, 24 May 1875. C, 19 May 1875, p. 9.
90 Findlay, Moody, pp. 342 n.6, 407 n.37, 408, 412 n.46. C, 4 August 1892, p. 23.
91 W.B.Sloan, These Sixty Years: The Story of the Keswick Convention (London,
n.d.), p. 19.
92 Ryle to editor, R, 28 May 1875. Close to editor, R, 21 June 1875.
93 Page, Brash, p. 146.
94 Dieter, Holiness Revival, ch. 2. T.L.Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform (New
York, 1965 edn).
95 Dieter, Holiness Revival, pp. 22 f. Page, Long Pilgrimage, p. 193, KH, September
1874, p. 295.
96 Convention…at Brighton, p. 217. Boardman, Boardman, pp. 253 f. J.B. Figgis,
Keswiek from Within (London, 1914), p. 17.
97 Revival, 4 November 1869, pp. 1 f. Boardman, Boardman, pp. 155–76. Meeting
at Oxford, p. 73. Convention…at Brighton, pp. 383 f.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 325

98 Dieter, Holiness Revival, pp. 27–32. Kent, Holding the Fort, ch. 8, pt 2.
99 Kent, Holding the Fort, pp. 342–7. Meeting…at Oxford, p. 52 (‘the altar
Christ’).
100 Kent, Holding the Fort, ch. 8, pt 3.
101 Dieter, Holiness Revival, pp. 96–106. V.Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal
Movement in the United States (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1971).
102 KH, March 1872, pp. 74 f.; November 1872, pp. 364–72.
103 W.G.Pascoe quoted by Dieter, Holiness Revival, p. 167.
104 H.Pearsall Smith, Unselfishness, pp. 239–88.
105 For example, Anderson, ‘Women preachers’, p. 477.
106 Smiles, Self-Help, new edn (London, 1860), pp. 253, 293.
107 Revival, 9 January 1868, p. 17.
108 Meeting…at Oxford, p. 45.
109 R, 22 January 1875.
110 Smiles, Self-Help, p. 52.
111 T.R.Tholfsen, Working Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England (London,
1976), pp. 26–34, 61–5, 72 ff.
112 See p. 169.
113 J.W.Burrow, Evolution and Society (London, 1966), chs 5 and 6. A.W. Coats,
‘The historist reaction in English political economy, 1870–90’, Economica, new
series, vol. 21, no. 4 (1954). A.Porter, ‘Cambridge, Keswick and late nineteenth-
century attitudes to Africa’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History,
vol. 5, no. 1 (1976), p. 16.
114 M.J.Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980
(Cambridge, 1981), ch. 3.
115 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J.D.Wilson (Cambridge, 1971), p. 49.
116 Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, pp. 113, 142.
117 R, 24 May 1875. C.Jerdan, ‘Recent holiness teaching’, United Presbyterian
Magazine, vol. 9 (1892), p. 50. G.Jackson, ‘Some Evangelical shortcomings’, A
Parson’s Log (London, 1927), p. 143.
118 Fox to Dr Elder Cumming, in S.M.Nugent, Charles Armstrong Fox: Memorials
(London, n.d.), p. 210.
119 C.Binfield, ‘“ Old-fashioned Dissenting narrowness”: Crabb Robinson and the
Pattissons’, So Down to Prayers: Studies in English Nonconformity, 1780–1920
(London, 1977), p. 46.
120 J.Westbury-Jones, Figgis of Brighton: A Memoir of a Modern Saint (London,
1917), p. 213.
121 C, 25 July 1895, p. 14.
122 Wiener, Decline of the Industrial Spirit, pp. 46–65.
123 Meeting…at Oxford, p, 134.
124 E.H.Hopkins, The Law of Liberty in the Spiritual Life (London, 1884), p. 15.
125 Meeting…at Oxford, pp. 78 f.
126 Pearsall Smith to editor, R, 24 April 1874.
127 Revival, 10 December 1868, p. 683.
128 R, 18 January 1889, p. 56.
129 F.Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook [1923], trans.
J.E.Anderson (London, 1973). D.W.Bebbington, Patterns in History (Leicester,
1979), ch. 5.
326 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

130 Meeting…at Oxford, p. 42.

131 More, Practical Piety (London, 1830), pp. 2 f.
132 Bonar to G.T.Fox, quoted by Fox to editor, R, 18 June 1875.
133 Jerdan, ‘Holiness teaching’, p. 49.
134 D.D.Sceats, ‘Perfectionism and the Keswick Convention, 1875–1900’, MA thesis,
University of Bristol, 1970, esp. p. 72.
135 Smart, Cook, p. 175.
136 Wesley, ‘Christian perfection’, p. 314.
137 For example, Meeting…at Oxford, p. 228.
138 R, 18 January 1882; cf. R, 22 January 1875, 21 January 1876.
139 Ryle to editor, R, 28 May 1875. Ryle, A Letter on Mr Pearsall Smith’s Brighton
Convention by the Rev.John C.Ryle (Stradbroke, Suffolk, 1875). Ryle, Holiness
(London, 1877, and still in print); cf. Kent, Holding the Fort, pp. 351–4.
140 For example, Jerdan, ‘Holiness teaching’, p. 52.
141 J.C. Pollock, The Keswick Story (London, 1964), pp. 35 f.
142 J.B. Harford and F.C. Macdonald, Handley Carr Glyn Moule, Bishop of Durham
(London, 1922), pp. 118 f. R. Matthews, English Messiahs: Studies of Six English
Religious Pretenders, 1656–1927 (London, 1936), ch. 5.
143 W.H. Aldis and W.M. Smith (introd.), The Message of Keswick and its Meaning
(London, 1957), pp. 67, 70, 100.
144 R, 21 January 1878.
145 Meeting…at Oxford, p. 59.
146 Ryle, Letter on…Brighton Convention, p. 1.
147 A.T.Pierson, Forward Movements of the Last Half Century (New York, 1900), p.
21.
148 E.V.Jackson, The Life that is Life Indeed: Reminiscences of the Broadlands
Conference (London, 1910), p. 19.
149 Smellie, Hopkins, p. 63,
150 C, 1 April 1886, p. 19.
151 H.Pearsall Smith, Unselfishness, pp. 205–25. Boardman, Boardman, p. 29. Page,
Brash, pp. 10, 48. H.D.Rawnsley, Literary Associations of the English Lakes,
Vol. 1 (Glasgow, 1894), pp. 135 f.
152 Battersby to editor, R, 14 June 1875.
153 R, 24 May 1875.
154 Bonar to G.T.Fox, quoted by Fox to editor, R, 18 June 1875.
155 R, 24 May 1875.
156 See p. 219.
157 See p. 28.
158 Page, Brash, pp. 35, 110.
159 Harford-Battersby to editor, R, 14 June 1875.
160 ‘The Brighton Convention and its opponents’, London Quarterly Review,
October 1875, p. 98.
161 Page, Brash, pp. 37 f.
162 Wesley, ‘Christian perfection’, pp. 335 f.
163 F.de L.Booth-Tucker, The Life of Catherine Booth the Mother of the Salvation
Army, 3rd edn (London, 1924), Vol. 1, p. 208.
164 Meeting…at Oxford, p. 54.
165 Wesley, ‘Christian perfection’, p. 323.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 327

166 C, 22 January 1874, p. 14. H.W.Webb-Peploe, The Life of Privilege, Possession,

Peace and Power (London, 1896), pp. 28 f.
167 Wesley, ‘Christian perfection’, pp. 374, 320.
168 Pearsall Smith to editor, R, 24 April 1874.
169 C, 15 July 1880, p. 12; 29 July 1880, p. 12; 12 August 1880, p. 10. Smellie,
Hopkins, p. 81.
170 C, 14 November 1895, p. 9; 21 November 1895, p. 21.
171 N.Frye, The drunken boat: the revolutionary element in Romanticism’, in N.Frye
(ed.), Romanticism Reconsidered (New York, 1963), pp. 8 ff.
172 Aldis and Smith (introd.), Message of Keswick, p. 43.
173 R.Sandall, The History of the Salvation Army, Vol. 2 (London, 1950), chs 18–21.
174 E.A.Wood, Memorials ofjatnes Wood, LL.D., J.P., of Grove House, Southport
(London, 1902), p. 257.
175 Convention…at Brighton, pp. 10, 18 f. F.S.Webster, ‘Keswick hymns’, in
Harford (ed.), Keswick Convention.
176 Morgan, Veteran in Revival, p. 174 n.
177 V.Gammon, ‘“Babylonian performances”: the rise and suppression of popular
church music, 1660–1870’, in E.Yeo and S.Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class
Conflict (Brighton, 1981), esp. p. 78.
178 R.W.Dale in G.Jackson, Collier of Manchester: A Friend’s Tribute (London,
1923), p. 152 n.
179 Morgan, Veteran in Revival, pp. 172 f; cf. Kent, Holding the Fort, ch. 6.
180 J.M.Crane (ed.), The Autobiography of Maria Vernon Graham Havergal
(London, 1888), p. 190.
181 Smellie, Hopkins, p. 178.
182 S.M.Nugent, ‘Women at Keswick’, in Harford (ed.), Keswick Convention, p.
195.
183 Anderson, ‘Women preachers’. Braithwaite, Pennefather, p. 362.
184 Garrard, Mrs Penn-Lewis, pp. 194 f.
185 Z.Fairfield, Some Aspects of the Woman’s Movement (London, 1915), p. 229.
186 Nugent, ‘Women at Keswick’, pp. 199 f.
187 KH, November 1874, p. 380.
188 H.Lockyer, Keswick: The Place and the Power (Stirling, [1936]), pp. 33 f.
189 M.V.G.Havergal, Memorials of Frances Ridley Havergal (London, 1880), pp.
138, 350. Garrard, Penn-Lewis, p. 29.
190 E.T.A. to editor, C, 18 July 1895, p. 16.
191 A.T.Pierson, ‘The message: its practical application’, in Harford(ed.), Keswick
Convention, p, 93.
192 For example, H.F.Bowker in C, 4 November 1875, p. 9.1. E.Page in KH, June
1872, p, 196.
193 Pierson, Forward Movements, p. 34. T.Waugh, Twenty-Three Years a Missioner
(London, n.d.), p. 142.
194 Charles Hollis to editor, C, 19 March 1885, p. 22.
195 C, 12 August 1880, p. 10.
196 KH, June 1872, p. 197.
197 D.W.Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870–
1914 (London, 1982), pp. 47 f.
198 Convention…at Brighton, p. 289.
328 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

199 For example, C, 9 September 1875, p. 9.

200 Pierson, ‘The message’, p. 93.
201 Boardman, Boardman, ch. 16.
202 Pierson, The message’, p. 94. C, 11 August 1892, p. 19.
203 P.S.Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon: A Preacher’s Progress (New York,
1982), pp. 219 f. LF, 11 August 1926, p. 899.
204 Kent, Holding the Fort, p. 317, reaches the same conclusion.
205 Braithwaite, Pennefather, p. 303.
206 Meeting…at Oxford, p. 181.
207 P.Bailey, “‘A mingled mass of perfectly legitimate pleasures”: the Victorian
middle class and the problem of leisure’, Victorian Studies, vol. 21, no. 1 (1977).
208 J.D.Marshall and J.K.Walton, The Lake Counties from 1830 to the Mid-
Twentieth Century (Manchester, 1981), pp. 188 ff.
209 J.S.Holden, ‘Young men at Keswick’, in Harford(ed.), Keswick Convention, p.
209. J.B.Figgis, Keswick from Within (London, 1914), p. 163.
210 Pollock, Keswick Story, p. 111.
211 R, 18 January 1892, p. 71. C, 4 August 1892, p. 23.
212 R, 18 January 1901, pp. 88 f.; 17 January 1902, pp. 67 f.
213 C, 2 August 1900, p. 11. Smellie, Hopkins, p. 124.
214 Convention…at Brighton, p. 456.
215 C, 24 September 1874, p. 12.
216 Page (ed.), Brash, pp. 106, 109, 185.
217 Page (ed.), Brash, p. 214. Page, Long Pilgrimage, p. 249.
218 To the Uttertmost: Commemorating the Diamond Jubilee of the Southport
Methodist Holiness Convention, 1885–1945 (London, 1945), esp. pp. 63, 75.
219 Page (ed.), Brash, p. 146.
220 KH, November 1874, p. 391.
221 Page, Long Pilgrimage, p. 46.
222 Govan, Spirit of Revival, pp. 22, 24, 31, 33, 40. J.Rendel Harris (ed.), The Life of
Francis William Crossley (London, 1900), ch. 5.
223 Ford, Steps of John Wesley, pp. 90 ff. Garrard, Penn-Lewis, p. 235.
224 R.M.Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American
Pentecostalism (New York, 1979), p. 37.
225 Ford, Steps of John Wesley, p. 29.
226 An illuminating analysis of the first three is the substance of Ford, Steps of John
Wesley, The fourth is discussed in T.R.Warburton, ‘Organisation and change in
a British Holiness Movement’, in B.R.Wilson (ed.), Patterns of Sectarianism
(London, 1967),
227 See pp. 196.
228 Ford, Steps of John Wesley, p. 130 n.
229 T.H.Darlow, in W.Y.Fullerton, F.B. Meyer: A Biography (London, n.d.), p. 36.
230 R, 2 August 1907, p. 679.
231 On CICCU: J.C.Pollock, A Cambridge Movement (London, 1953). On the
creation of BTI: C, 16 June 1892, p. 8.
232 This is evident in C.H.Hopkins John R. Mott, 1865–1955: A Biography (Grand
Rapids, Mich., 1979).
233 Morgan, Veteran in Revival, p. 190.
234 Wilson (ed.), Patterns of Sectarianism, pp. 23 f., 27.
235 Smellie, Hopkins, p. 83.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 329

CHAPTER 6:
WALKING APART

1 Letter of December 1923 in E.N.Gowing, John Edwin Watts-Ditchfield: First

Bishop of Chelmsford (London, 1926), p. 229.
2 H.A.H. Lea to editor, R, 12 January 1934, p. 18.
3 G.M.Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of
Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York, 1980), pp. 118–23,
159.
4 LW, June 1924, p. 122 (J.N.Ogilvie).
5 JWBU, August 1927.
6 BW, 29 May 1913, p. 226 (P. Watchurst).
7 J.A.Chapman, The Bible and its Inspiration (n.p., n.d. [c.1930]), pp. 14, 5.
8 R, 7 July 1933, p. 397.
9 K.H. Boynes, Our Catholic Heritage (n.p., n.d. [c.1927]), p. 8.
10 P.Austin, Letters to a Fundamentalist (London, 1930), pp. 26 f.
11 W.A.Challacombe to editor, R, 10 March 1911, p. 236. See pp. 90 f.
12 H.Cockayne to editor, R, 30 March 1922, p. 213.
13 I.Ellis, Seven against Christ: A Study of ‘Essays and Reviews’ (Leiden, 1980), p.
115.
14 J.Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century (London,
1984).
15 Free Church of Scotland Special Report of the College Committee on Professor
Smith’s Article Bible (Edinburgh, 1877), pp. 20, 16, 8 f,
16 J.S.Black and G.W.Chrystal, The Life of William Robertson Smith (London,
1912).
17 Special Report, p. 22.
18 W.B.Glover, Evangelical Nonconformists and Higher Criticism in the
Nineteenth Century (London, 1954), pp. 128 f., 186–93.
19 R.A.Riesen, Criticism and Faith in Late Victorian Scotland: A.B.Davidson,
William Robertson Smith and George Adam Smith (Lanham, Md, 1985).
20 LW, May 1912, p. 134.
21 S.Neill, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861–1961 (Oxford, 1964),
pp. 33–97.
22 A.M.Ramsey, From Gore to Temple (London, 1960), pp. 5–8.
23 Driver, An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (Edinburgh,
1891).
24 Forsyth, ‘Revelation and the Person of Christ’, in Faith and Criticism (2nd edn,
London, 1893), p. 109.
25 R.T.Jones, Congregationalism in England, 1662–1962 (London, 1962), p. 258.
26 Glover, Nonconformists and Higher Criticism, pp. 205–11. J.T.Wilkinson,
Arthur Samuel Peake: A Biography (London, 1971), pp. 24 f.
27 I.E.Page (ed.), John Brash: Memorials and Correspondence (London, 1912), p. 74.
28 See pp. 145 f.
29 C, 1 June 1893, p. 11. The author is identified at 8 June 1893, p. 19.
330 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

30 Newness of Life, January 1898, p. 1.

31 R.F.Horton, An Autobiography (London, 1917), pp. 84–98.
32 For example, H.Wace in R, 16 January 1903, p. 63.
33 R, 18 January 1878.
34 R, 25 June 1909, p. 673.
35 C, 12 May 1892, p. 7; 14 July 1892, p. 8.
36 Baptist Handbook, 1918, p. 133. LF, 7 March 1923, p. 269. G.E.Morgan, A
Veteran in Revival: R.C.Morgan: His Life and Times (London, 1909), pp. 157 f.
37 C, 13 February 1896, p. 26.
38 R, 25 June 1909, p. 673. C, 4 January 1906, p. 12. JWBU, March 1915, p. 61.
39 JWBU, March 1915, pp. 60–3.
40 A.G.Wilkinson, Christ or the Higher Critics (London, 1917).
41 JWBU, April 1915, p. 79.
42 D.Johnson, Contending for the Faith: A History of the Evangelical Movement m
the Universities and Colleges (Leicester, 1979), p. 70.
43 J.C.Pollock, Cambridge Movement (London, 1953), p. 178.
44 JWBU, May 1921, pp. 115 f. LF, 18 June 1924, p. 714.
45 C, 1 June 1893, p. 11.
46 W, September 1921, pp. 99 f.
47 Expository Thoughts on St John’s Gospel, Vol. 1, p. vii, quoted by M.L.Loane,
John Charles Ryle, 1816–1900 (London, 1983), p. 60.
48 For example, H.D.Brown, The Bible: The Word of God (London, n.d.), p. 44.
49 BC, December 1922, p. 95 (W.R.Rowlatt-Jones).
50 AW, April 1921, pp. 187 f; cf. F.W.Pitt, Windows on the World: A Record of the
Life of Alfred H.Burton, B.A., M.D. (London, n.d.), pp. 16 f. 27, 35.
51 D.F.Wright, ‘Soundings in the doctrine of scripture in British Evangelicalism in
the first half of the twentieth century’, Tyndale Bulletin, vol. 31 (1980), pp. 100
ff.
52 R, 13 January 1911, p. 50.
53 Wace, ‘Science and the Bible’, in H. Wace et al,, Creative Christianity (London,
1921), p. 17.
54 JWBU, March 1922, p. 56.
55 R, l0 January 1924, p. 19.
56 Wace, The Bible and Modern Investigation (London, 1903). R, 14 October 1920,
p. 790.
57 LF, 12 December 1923, p. 1535.
58 R, 5 October 1922, p. 650. For the contrast with a deductive approach to
inspiration, see pp. 89 f.
59 Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture.
60 R, 27 April 1922, p. 279 (W. Young).
61 C, 11 March 1886, p. 24. See also pp. 88 f.
62 AW, October 1922, p. 113.
63 E. Morton and D. Dewar, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness: A Memoir of
Harold Christopherson Morton (London, 1937), pp. 34 f.
64 For example, Lover of Keswick to editor, LF, 25 August 1926, p. 960.
65 Page (ed.), Brash, p. 176.
66 F. Ballard, Christian Reality in Modern Light (London, 1916), p. 383.
67 LW, November 1918, p. 164; May 1919, p. 69.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 331

68 R, 3 July 1931, p. 441.

69 C, 22 June 1893, p. 20; 10 July 1884, p. 16.
70 See p. 152.
71 A.T. Pierson, Forward Movements of the Last Half Century (New York, 1900),
p. 159 n.
72 A. Porter, ‘Evangelical enthusiasm, missionary motivation and West Africa in
the late nineteenth century: the career of G.W. Brooke’, Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History, vol. 6, no. 1 (1977), pp. 38 ff.
73 R, 18 January 1901, p. 99 (Prebendary Webb-Peploe).
74 Page (ed.), Brash, p. 186. For dispensationalism, see p. 86.
75 C, 21 July 1892, p. 8.
76 C, 26 June 1913, p. 14.
77 For historicism, see pp. 85.
78 Garratt to C.R. M’Clenaghan, 8 March 1906, in E.R. Garratt, Life and Personal
Recollections of Samuel Garratt (London 1908), p. 165.
79 R, 29 November 1917, p. 805.
80 MBAPPU, June 1919, pp. 1 f.; AW, December 1923, pp. 134 f.; May-June 1947,
pp. 232 f.
81 LF, 8 September 1926, p. 1021. R, 11 November 1926, p. 786.
82 C, 28 April 1921, p. 11.
83 E. Luff to editor, C, 14 July 1921, p. 27; cf. J.W. Newton, The Story ofthe Pilgrim
Preachers (London, n.d.).
84 J. Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (New
York, 1982), p. 257.
85 C, 11 March 1886, p. 18 (Grattan Guinness).
86 MBAPPU, August 1919, p. 19 (A. H. Burton).
87 Page (ed.), Brash, p. 68.
88 C, 13 February 1919, p. 22 (G. E. Morgan).
89 LF, 26 May 1926, p. 547 (G. H. Lancaster).
90 See p. 171 and pp. 218 ff.
91 A. Close to editor, LF, 13 May 1925, p. 535.
92 G. Jackson, ‘Some Evangelical shortcomings’, A Parson’s Log (London, 1927), p.
143.
93 MR, 1 August 1912, p. 22.
94 Page (ed.), Brash, p. 74.
95 JWBU, July 1915, p. 148; March 1917, pp. 53–60.
96 R, 13 July 1922, p. 482.
97 JWBU, August 1919, p. 177; February 1920, p. 25.
98 H. Murray, Dinsdale Young: The Preacher (London, 1938), pp. 108 f.
99 J.I. Brice, The Crowd for Christ (London, 1934), esp. pp. 150 f.
100 Mrs Boardman, Life and Labours ofthe Rev. W.E. Boardman (London, 1886),
ch. 16. Pierson, Forward Movements, ch. 30.
101 LF, 22 June 1921, p. 689.
102 LF, 29 July 1921, p. 849.
103 LF, 7December 1921, p. 1409. Victory to editor, LF, 31 August 1921, p. 1006.
104 Oswald Chambers: His Life and Work (London, 1959 edn), p. 48. For the
Pentecostal League, see pp. 173 f., 178.
332 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

105 E.W. Gosden, Thank You, Lord! The Eightieth Anniversary of the Japan
Evangelistic Band, 1903–1983 (London, 1982), p. 82.
106 E. Evans, The Welsh Revival of 1904 (London, 1969), p. 146.
107 War on the Saints (Leicester, 2nd edn, 1916), pp. 284–95.
108 M.N. Garrard, Mrs Penn-Lewis: A Memoir (London, 1930), ch. 10.
109 LF, December 1881, p. 236.
110 Evans, Welsh Revival, pp. 192 ff.
111 R.M. Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American
Pentecostalism (New York, 1979), ch. 4.
112 D. Gee, Wind and Flame (n.p., 1967), chs 3–5. See also P. Lavin, Alexander
Boddy, Pastor and Prophet (London, 1986).
113 A.F. Missen, The Sound of a Going (Nottingham, 1973), pp. 7 f.
114 Anderson, Vision, pp. 159 f. Evans, Welsh Revival, p. 194.
115 B.R. Wilson, Sects and Society (London, 1961), ch. 2; cf. E.C. W. Boulton,
George Jeffreys: A Ministry of the Miraculous (London, 1928) and D.W.
Cartwright, The Great Evangelists: The Lives of George and Stephen Jeffreys
(Basingstoke, 1986).
116 Gee, Wind and Flame, pp. 126–30.
117 Wilson, Sects and Society, p. 22 n.
118 Labourers with God: Being a Brief Account ofthe Activities ofthe Elim
Movement (London, [c.1943]), p. 30.
119 LF, 14 June 1922, p. 732.
120 Anderson, Vision, p. 6.
121 See pp. 143 f.
122 G.F. Nuttall, ‘A. D. Martin’, The Puritan Spirit (London, 1967), p. 328.
123 G.S. Wakefield, Robert Newton Flew, 1886–1962 (London, 1971), p. 44.
124 I. Sellers, Salute to Pembroke (n.p., 1960), ch. 4. CW, 14 June 1906, p. 4.
125 Campbell, The New Theology (London, 1907), p. 74; cf. K. Robbins, The
spiritual pilgrimage of the Rev. R.J. Campbell’, JEH, vol. 30, no. 2 (1979).
126 Campbell, Christianity and the Social Order (London, 1907), pp. vii, 182.
127 C, 27 September 1906, p. 10.
128 JWBU, July 1915, p. 157.
129 R.J.Campbell, A Spiritual Pilgrimage (London, 1916), chs 10, 11.
130 Cox, English Churches, pp. 245 f. T.Rhondda Williams, How I found my Faith
(London, 1938).
131 R, njanuary 1905, p. 38.
132 L.Elliott Binns to editor, R, 21 April 1921, p. 253.
133 Ridley Hall, Cambridge: Annual Letter and Report of Triennial Reunion, 1912
(n.p., n.d.), pp. 22–33.
134 MR, 29 February 1912, p. 5 (Dinsdale Young). C, 14 August 1913, p. 8.
135 A.Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War (London, 1978),
pp. 176 ff.
136 JWBU, April 1917, pp. 80 f. (W.T.Kitching).
137 R, 11 December 1914, p. 1125.
138 JWBU, November 1915, p. 246.
139 W, March 1920, p. 233. If a Man die (London, 1917).
140 JWBU, March 1915, p. 56.
141 For example, S.E.Burrows to editor, C, 29 January 1920, p. 18.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 333

142 For example, LCMM, February 1919, p. 13 (Sir C.E.Tritton).

143 R, I8 January 1904, p. 97.
144 R, 18 September 1924, p. 591.
145 D.H.C.Bartlett to editor, R, 17 August 1922, p. 549.
146 K.Weatherhead, Leslie Weatherhead: A Personal Portrait (London, 1975), p. 61.
147 G.W.Bromiley, Daniel Henry Charles Bartlett, M.A., D.D.: A Memoir
(Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, 1959), p. 30. A. Mitchell to editor, R, 28 January
1922, p. 632.
148 G.Jackson, The Preacher and the Modern Mind (London, 1912), p. 166.
149 R, 26 May 1933, p. 311.
150 Jones, Congregationalism, p. 447.
151 Weatherhead, Jesus and Ourselves (London, 1930), p. 261.
152 C, 25 October 1906, p. 11; 29 November 1906, p. 9.
153 JWBU, May 1935, p. 94; September 1935, p. 200.
154 R, 24 December 1925, p. 918 (T.J.Pulvertaft).
155 R, 3 March 1933, p. 117 (E.A.Knox).
156 G.Rogers, A Rebel at Heart: The Autobiography of a Nonconforming
Clergyman (London, 1950), p. 170.
157 G.H.Harris, Vernon Faithfull Storr: A Memoir (London, 1943), pp. 50 ff.
158 Liberal Evangelicalism: An Interpretation (London, [1923]), pp. vi f.
159 Harris, Storr, pp. 54 f.
160 R, 21 April 1933, p. 215.
161 Harris, Storr, pp. 50, 53.
162 Rogers, Rebel p. 172.
163 LF, 20 January 1926, p. 61.
164 K.H.Boynes, The Fellowship of the Kingdom (London, [1922]).
165 J.A.Chapman, Our Methodist Heritage (London, [1919?]), p. 4.
166 H.G.Tunnicliff, The Group (London, [1920?]), p. 5.
167 J.M.Turner, ‘Methodism in England, 1900–1932’, in R.Davies et al. A History of
the Methodist Church in Great Britain, Vol. 3 (London, 1983), pp. 319 f.
168 Chapman, Methodist Heritage, p. 2. Boynes, Our Catholic Heritage, p. 4.
169 Harris, Storr, p. 56.
170 W.Strawson, ‘Methodist theology, 1850–1950’, in Davies et al (eds), Methodist
Church, vol. 3, p. 206.
171 R, 19 January 1883, p. 56.
172 For example, R, 15 January 1904, pp. 100 ff. (W.H.Griffith Thomas).
173 R, 27 November 1924, p. 763.
174 R, 17 December 1909, p. 1278.
175 R, 21 January 1926, p. 55.
176 F.Courtenay Burroughs to editor, R, 9 September 1904, p. 898.
177 C.H.Tomkins to editor, R, 19 August 1904, p. 839.
178 Mary E.Burstow to editor, R, 26 August 1904, p. 858.
179 R, 3 March 1921, p. 149.
180 R, 8 October 1937, p. 627.
181 R, 10 March 1933, p. 127.
182 A.Mitchell to editor, R, 30 September 1904, p. 967.
183 R, 12 July 1917, p. 489.
184 R, 5 July 1935, p. 418.
334 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

185 T.A.Ballard and T.C.Chapman to editor, R, 27 September 1917, p. 649. R, 27

September 1935, p. 578. R, 27 June 1941, p. 235. R, 4 July 1941, p. 242.
186 R, I8 January 1907, p. 61.
187 R, 15 January 1904, pp. 99 f.
188 Garratt to editor, R, 11 November 1904, p. 1142; 9 December 1904, p. 1246; cf.
Garratt, Garratt, ch. 9.
189 R, 3 February 1905, p. 99.
190 G.Denyer to editor, R, 1 December 1927, p. 854.
191 R, 23 June 1927, p. 466.
192 R, 21 July 1927, p. 542.
193 R, 1 December 1927, p. 852.
194 Boynes, Our Catholic Heritage, p. 11.
195 G.S.Wakefield, Methodist Devotion: The Spiritual Life in the Methodist
Tradition (London, 1966), pp. 103 f.
196 D.Murray, ‘Disruption to Union’, in D.B.Forrester and D.M.Murray Studies in
the History of Worship in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1984), pp. 90–3.
197 L.S.Hunter, John Hunter, D.D.: A Life (London, 1922), ch. 10.
198 LF, 27 May 1925, p. 600.
199 BW, 19 February 1920, p. 456.
200 Orchard, From Faith to Faith (London, 1933).
201 C.Binfield, ‘Freedom through discipline: the concept of little church’, in Monks,
Hermits and the Ascetic Tradition, Studies in Church History, vol. 23, ed. W.J.
Sheils (Oxford, 1985), pp. 441 f.
202 LF, 28 July 1926, p. 838. G.T.Brake, Policy and Politics in British Methodism,
1932–1982 (London, 1984), pp. 314–28.
203 B.Heeney, ‘The beginnings of church feminism: women and the councils of the
Church of England, 1897–1919’, JEH, vol. 33, no. 1 (1982), pp. 105, 108.
204 C.M.Coltman, ‘Post-Reformation: the Free Churches’, in A.Maud Royden, The
Church and Woman (London, 1925), p. 116.
205 Baker, Women in the Ministry (London, 1911), pp. 13, 48 f., 55, 43.
206 R, 10 February 1933, p. 80; 13 April 1933, p. 208.
207 R, 18 September 1936, p. 569.
208 Strawson, ‘Methodist theology’, pp. 185 f. R, 13 January 1905, p. 38.
209 C, 17 September 1885, p. 8. LF, December 1887, p. 260.
210 H.H.Evans to editor, C, 23 September 1887, p. 16; 2 May 1895, p. 22.
211 R, 23 October 1924, p. 689. For Dixon, cf. C, 9 February 1893, p. 17.
212 C.L.Drawbridge to editor, R, 30 July 1915, p. 540.
213 C, 11 February 1926, p. 4.
214 Church Family Newspaper, 10 September 1920, pp. 8, 10.
215 J.Barnes, Ahead of his Age: Bishop Barnes of Birntingham (London, 1979), pp.
125–32. B. Booth, These Fifty Years (London, 1929), ch. 21.
216 R, 2 September 1920, p. 692; 9 September 1920, p. 708, C, 9 September 1920, p.
3.
217 C, 23 September 1920, pp. 1 f.
218 Barnes, The future of the Evangelical movement’, in Liberal Evangelicalism.
Barnes, Barnes, p. 175.
219 LF, 8 October 1924, p. 1192.
220 F, November 1927, p. 200.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 335

221 JWBU, November 1923, p. 248. Morton and Dewar, A Voice crying, pt IV.
222 R, 29 September 1933, p. 549 (H.E.Boultbee).
223 B.Atkinson, Is the Bible True? (London, 1933), p. 49.
224 R, 24 June 1926, p. 427.
225 R, 9 October 1924, p. 658 (H.C.Morton). LCMM, October 1927, p. 156.
226 F, January 1935, p. 9; May 1941, p. 97; March/April 1943, pp. 24–9. C, 21
February 1935, p. 8.
227 R, 18 July 1930, p. 474 (H.Earnshaw Smith).
228 J.Forbes Moncreiff to editor, LF, 14 July 1926, p. 748. Sister L.Holt to editor, LF,
25 August 1926, p. 954. Winifred M.Gould to editor, LF, 1 September 1926, p.
983.
229 BW, 18 August 1921, p, 357.
230 JWBU, January 1918, p. 20. J.Lingard to editor, LF, 9 April 1924, p. 408. LCMM,
July 1924, p. 102.
231 W, August 1919, p. 128 (D.Hewines).
232 See pp. 113, 127 f.
233 C, 5 February 1920, pp. 3 f.
234 LW, March 1922, p. 52.
235 Cox, English Churches, p. 219.
236 BW, 11 March 1920, p. 535.
237 LF, 16 May 1923, p. 556.
238 Morton to editor, MR, 21 March 1912, p. 6.
239 R.E.Jones to editor, MR, 8 August 1935, p. 18.
240 Wilson, Sects and Society, pp. 82, 84 (Elim).
241 AW, May 1922, p. 51 (A. H. Burton).
242 R.H.A.Morton to editor, MR, 10 November 1932, p. 20.
243 LF, 6 October 1926, pp. 1131 f.
244 BC, January 1925, p. 16.
245 R.E.A.Lloyd to editor, R, 12 June 1936, p. 375, and succeeding correspondence. R,
18 November 1938, p. 739.
246 LW, June 1919, p. 88.
247 H to editor, LF, 16 July 1924, p. 815.
248 BW, 13 July 1922, p. 309.
249 R, 25 January 1935, p. 57; 11 January 1935, p. 26.
250 R, 1 April 1932, p. 9; 6 March 1931, p. 143.
251 R, 20 February 1931, p. 117. J.Wigley, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday
(Manchester, 1980), p. 193.
252 C, 3 November 1932, p. 5. R, 17 November 1933, p. 651.
253 BW, 27 November 1919, p. 206.
254 For example, Dean Wace in R, 17 March 1921, pp. 182 f.
255 CW, 6 June 1889, p. 65.
256 A.Scott Matheson, The Church and Social Problems (London, 1893), p. v.
257 BW, 6 March 1919, p. 401.
258 MT, 1 January 1885, p. 1.
259 Mudie-Smith (ed.), The Religious Life of London (London, 1904), p. 13.
260 Grant, Free Churchmanship, pp. 173 ff.
261 For example, D.P.Hughes, The Life of Hugh Price Hughes (London, 1905), p.
134.
336 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

262 K.S.Inglis, ‘English Nonconformity and social rcform, 1880–1900’, Past &
Present, no. 13 (1958). J.H.S.Kent, ‘Hugh Price Hughes and the Nonconformist
conscience’, in G.V.Bennett and J.D.Walsh (eds), Essays in Modern English
Church History in Memory of Norman Sykes (London, 1966).
D.W.Bebbington, The city, the countryside and the social gospel in late Victorian
Nonconformity’, in The Church in Town and Countryside, Studies in Church
History, vol. 16, ed. D.Baker (Oxford, 1979).
263 Hughes, Social Christianity: Sermons delivered in St James’s Hall, London, 3rd
edn (London, 1890), p. 15.
264 CW, 4 October 1888, pp. 758 f; cf. K.Marx and F.Engels, The Communist
Manifesto (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1967), p. 116. See also D.Thompson,
‘john Clifford’s social gospel’, Baptist Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 5 (1986).
265 R, 6 December 1907, p. 1066.
266 R, 1 January 1904, p. 8.
267 R, 21 January 1910, p. 72.
268 R, 17 January 1913, pp. 67 f.
269 R, 17 January 1918, pp. 37 f. Watts-Ditchfield, The Church and the Labour
Movement’, Churchman, January 1908.
270 Gowing, Watts-Ditchfield, pp. 10 f.
271 R, 17 January 1908, pp. 63, 67.
272 A country incumbent to editor, R, 31 January 1908, p. 106. F.D.Stammers to
editor, R, 7 February 1908, p. 125.
273 R, 3 March 1921, p. 149.
274 A.E.Garvie, Memories and Meanings of my Life (London, 1938), pp. 241 ff.
275 Brake, Policy and Politics, chs 10 and 11.
276 LW, April 1934, pp. 161–4.
277 Jackson, ‘The church and the social gospel’, Reasonable Religion (London 1922),
p. 139.
278 G.Studdert-Kennedy, Dog-Collar Democracy: The lndustrial Christian
Fellowship (London, 1982), esp. p. 40.
279 F.Coutts, The History of the Salvation Army, Vol. 6, The Better Fight, (London,
1973).
280 JWBU, May 1924, pp. 106 f. LF, 16 April 1924, p. 415.
281 JWBU, July 1917, p. 161.
282 D.W.Bebbington, ‘Baptists and politics since 1914’, in K.W.Clements (ed.),
Baptists in the Twentieth Century (London, 1983), p. 86.
283 W, September 1920, pp. 323 ff.
284 Bebbington, ‘Baptists and politics’, p. 87.
285 ibid., p. 85. C, 3 March 1932, p. 5.
286 D.Moberg, The Great Reversal: Evangelism versus Social Concern
(Philadelphia, 1972).
287 A Nonconformist Minister, Nonconformity and Politics (London, 1909), p. 130,
quoted by D.W.Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics,
1870–1914 (London, 1982), p. 158.
288 D.W.Bebbington, ‘Nonconformity and electoral sociology, 1867–1918’,
Historical Journal, vol. 27, no. 3 (1984).
289 R, 3 December 1909, p. 1224; 18 August 1911, p. 750.
290 MR, 4 January 1912, p. 3.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 337

291 LW, July 1912, p. 197.

292 A.G.James, The Spirit of the Crusade (London, 1927), p. 16.
293 H.P.Hughes, ‘The problem of London pauperism’, The Philanthropy of God
(London, 1892), p. 195.
294 Labour Leader, 9 February 1895, p. 2; cf. P. d’A.Jones, The Christian Socialist
Revival, 1877–1914: Religion, Class and Social Conscience in Late-Victorian
England (Princeton, NJ, 1968).
295 Rattenbury, Six Sermons on Social Subjects (London, [1908]).
296 M.Edwards, S.E.Keeble: Pioneer and Prophet (London, 1949), pp. 67 f.
297 CW, 8 April 1909, p. 13; 28 April 1910, p. 4.
298 R, 6 December 1907, p. 1066; 3 January 1908, p. 11.
299 BW, 7 April 1921, p. 9 (S.W.Hughes).
300 G.P.Thomas to editor, BW, 28 April 1921, p. 66.
301 Hughes, The Christian hope’, Ethical Christianity (London, 1892), p. 76; cf.
J.G.Mantle Hugh Price Hughes (London, 1901), pp. 49 f.
302 Clifford, God’s Greater Britain (London, 1899), p. 164.
303 Page (ed.), Brash, p. 66.
304 R, 26 March 1925, p. 214.
305 R, 3 September 1925, p. 609 (London City Mission advertisement).
306 LF, 16 April 1924, p. 445.
307 CW, 14 May 1891, p. 395.
308 Thompson, ‘John Clifford’s social gospel’, p. 214.
309 R, 8 November 1917, p. 750.
310 R, 18 September 1924, p. 591.
311 AW, November 1923, p. 123.
312 MT, 19 June 1913, p. 3.
313 D.W.Bebbington, ‘The persecution of George Jackson: a British Fundamentalist
controversy’, in Persecution and Toleration, Studies in Church History, vol. 21,
ed. W.J.Sheils (Oxford, 1984).
314 H.Cockayne to editor, R, 30 March 1922, p. 213.
315 R, 18 January 1907, p. 70.
316 Bromiley, Bartlett, p. 22. W.S.Hooton and J.S.Wright, The First TwentyFive
Years of the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society (1922–47) (London, 1947),
pp. 5 f.
317 D.H.C.Bartlett to editor, R, 6 April 1922, p. 224. Fox to editor, C, 28 July 1921, p.
22. Fox to Bartlett, April 1921, in Bromiley, Bartlett, pp. 26 f.
318 Bromiley, Bartlett, pp. 24–7.
319 R, 15 December 1921, p. 829.
320 G.Hewitt, The Problems of Success: A History of the Church Missionary
Society, 1910–1942, Vol. 1 (London, 1972), pp. 467–71. Bromiley, Bartlett, pp.
27–36.
321 R, 11 November 1926, p. 786.
322 R, 31 July 1919, p. 646.
323 W, March 1920, p. 234. J.B.Figgis, Keswick from Within (London, 1914), p. 160.
324 Church Family Newspaper, 30 July 1920, p. 10. JWBU, October 1920, p. 223.
J.Mountain, The Keswick Convention and the Dangers which threaten it (n.p,,
1920), p. 8.
325 C, 6 July 1933, p. 12.
338 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

326 Mountain, Keswick Convention, p. 14.

327 Mountain, What Keswick needs (n.p., 1921). Mountain, The Bible Vindicated
(n.p., 1921). Mountain, Rev. F.C. Spurr and Keswick (n.p., 1921). Mountain,
Rev. F.C. Spurr and his Bible (n.p., 1922). Charles Brown to editor, BW, 14 July
1921, p. 276.
328 Battersby Harford to editor, R, 6 January 1921, p. 4. Douglas-Jones to editor, R,
13 January 1921, p. 32.
329 C, 17 February 1921, pp. 1 f. JWBU, July 1921, p. 159.
330 R, 28 April 1921, p. 282.
331 J.C.Pollock, The Keswick Story (London, 1964), pp. 154 ff.
332 R, 21 July 1933, p. 425.
333 BC, July-September 1919, p. 1; October-December 1919, p. 4.
334 Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, p. 172.
335 BC, October 1923, p. 152.
336 R, 14 June 1923, p. 387; cf. H.G.Wood, T.R.Glover: A Biography (Cambridge,
1953), p. 155.
337 BC, July 1925, pp. 100 f.; November 1925, p. 147.
338 BC, January 1923, p. 8; February 1925, p. 30.
339 D.G.Fountain, E.J.Poole-Connor (1872–1962): Contender for the Faith
(Worthing, 1966), pp. 122–8.
340 D.M.Thompson, Let Sects and Parties Fall: A Short History of the Association of
Churches of Christ in Great Britain and Ireland (Birmingham, 1980), pp. 131 ff.
K.O.Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation: Wales, 1880–1980 (Oxford, 1981), pp. 199 f.
341 Wood, Glover, pp. 159–63.
342 LF, 20 May 1925, p. 573.
343 F, April 1929, p. 84.
344 R, 30 December 1925, p. 1607.
345 R, 20 September 1917, p. 637; 12 April 1929, p. 237.
346 H.Wace etal., Creative Christianity (London, 1921); cf. R, 7 June 1923, p. 367;
14 June 1923, p. 391.
347 E.A.Payne, The Baptist Union: A Short History (London, 1958), p. 211.
348 J.T.Carson, Frazer of Tain (Glasgow, 1966), p. 49.
349 R, 30 October 1924, p. 708.
350 S.Bruce, No Pope of Rome (Edinburgh, 1985).
351 Cadoux, Catholicism and Christianity (London, 1928), p. 55; cf. E.Kaye,
‘C.J.Cadoux and Mansfield College, Oxford’, Journal of the United Reformed
Church History Society, vol. 3, no. 8 (1986).
352 G.K.A.Bell, Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, 3rd edn (London,
1952), p. 1326.
353 R, 24 March 1932, p. 184 (Exeter); 6 May 1932, p. 285 (Salisbury); 24 February
1933, p. 103 (London).
354 R, 31 July 1924, pp. 504 f.
355 R, 19 February 1925, p. 117.
356 F, October 1931, p. 226.
357 LCMM, February 1927, pp. 29–32.
358 N.G.Dunning, Samuel Chadwick (London, 1933), p. 193.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 339

359 LF, 17 September 1924, p. 1116 (Holden); 20 October l926, p. 1189 (Meyer); 30
July 1924, p. 895 (Scroggie). J.Morgan, This was his Faith: The Expository
Letters of G.Campbell Morgan (n.p., [1954]), p. 245.
360 LF, 30 July 1924, pp. 895 f.
361 C, 1 November 1934, p. 43. LF, 16 June 1926, p. 647 (A.H.Carter).
362 LF, 16 January 1924, p. 61.
363 F.F.Bruce, In Retrospect: Remembrance of Things Past (London, 1980), p. 300.
364 Carter, Modernism: The Peril of Great Britain and America (Hounslow, [1923]);
cf. LF, 5 December 1923, p. 1447.
365 LF, 20 January 1924, p. 122.
366 Cook to editor, LF, 3 February 1926, p. 120.
367 LF, 12 December 1923, p. 1535; 16 June 1926, p. 647.
368 JWBU, December 1920, p. 270; October 1923, p. 220. LF, 4 November 1925, p.
1270. R, 3 November 1927, p. 777; 24 December 1931, p. 833; 29 July 1932, p.
879,
369 MBAPPU, September 1919, p. 32.
370 MBAPPU, March 1920, p. 80; April 1920, p. 88; May 1920, p. 96.
371 AW, 1923, Financial Statement as at 18 December 1922.
372 D.H.C.Bartlett to editor, R, 17 August 1922, p. 549; 3 August 1934, p. 464; 16
October 1924, p. 666.
373 R, 12 June 1924, p. 395. Runs of the League’s publications, the Bible Witness
and the Bible League Quarterly, have not been discovered.
374 F, February 1931, p. 36; February 1928, p. 43.
375 F, December 1929, p. 268.
376 C, 27 October 1921, p. 21.
377 BC, July-September 1928, p, 34. R, 20 May 1926, p. 321.
378 JWBU, May 1920, p. 98. The first figure is presented as though it were also for
1918–19, but that must be a misprint.
379 Insertion in copy of JWBU, December 1920, at John Rylands University Library
of Manchester; cf. D.Crane, The Life-Story of Sir Robert W.Perks Baronet, M.P.
(London, 1909).
380 LCMM, August 1925, p. 113.
381 BC, April 1925, p. 65. JWBU, February 1926, p. 34.
382 JWBU, April 1926, p. 82.
383 E.Pritchard, For Such a Time (Eastbourne, 1973). G.Swan, Lacked Ye Anything?
(London, 1913). J.L.Maxwell, Half a Century of Grace: A Jubilee History of the
Sudan United Mission (London, n.d.). R.and E.Dewhurst, God Gave the Increase
(London, 1979).
384 LF, 5 August 1925, p. 913; cf. N.Grubb, Rees Howells, Intercessor (London,
1952).
385 BC, November-December 1921, p. 15.
386 BC, October 1926, p. 103. Murray, Young, pp. 105–8. Wilson, Sects and Society,
pp. 46 f., 51 f. See also J.Wilson, ‘British Israelism: the ideological restraints on
sect organisation’, in B.R.Wilson (ed.), Patterns of Sectarianism (London, 1967).
387 R, 5 May 1933, p. 257. Armitage to editor, R, 2 June 1933, p. 321.
388 Woods to editor, F, September 1933, pp. 211 f.
389 S.Schor and A.P.Gold Levin to editor, LF, 30 June 1926, p. 691; 7 July 1926, p.
715. C, 7 December 1933, p. 64.
340 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

390 A.L.Glegg, Four Score…and More (London, 1962), p. 60.

391 W.K.Chaplin and M.J.Street, Fifty Years of Christian Endeavour (London,
1931).
392 C, 27 October 1921, p. 14; cf. F.P. and M.S.Wood, Youth Advancing (London,
1961).
393 J.C.Pollock, The Good Seed: The Story of the Children’s Special Service Mission
and the Scripture Union (London, 1959).
394 J.Eddison (ed.), ‘Bash’: A Study in Spiritual Power (Basingstoke, 1983), esp. p.
18.
395 R.Manwaring, From Controversy to Co-Existence: Evangelicals in the Church
of England, 1914–1980 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 57, 59 f. ‘Covenanters’ Golden
Jubilee: a special supplement’, Harvester, February 1980. J, Kerr, A Midnight
Vision: The Story of Colin Kerr and the Campaigners (Worthing, 1981).
J.Springhall et al, Sure and Stedfast: A History of the Boys’ Brigade, 1883 to
1983 (London, 1983), pp. 70 f.
396 S. to editor, LF, 21 March 1923, p. 322.
397 K, 12 October 1934, p. 604 (W.H.Aldis).
398 For example, JWBU, October 1933, p. 224. R, 11 December 1924, p. 824
(Dinsdale Young and Russell Howden).
399 K, 27 January 1933, p. 57.
400 A.D.Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian Britain (London, 1980), pt 3.
401 For example, AW, July 1922, p. 75. JWBU, January 1926, p. 11.

CHAPTER 7:
THE SPIRIT POURED OUT

1 CEN, 15 November 1963, p. 1; C.H.May to editor, 22 November 1963, p. 6.

2 Quoted by P.Hocken, Streams of Renewal: The Origins and Early Development
of the Charismatic Movement in Great Britain (Exeter, 1986), p. 96.
3 K.McDougall quoted by E.England, The Spirit of Renewal (Eastbourne, 1982), p.
17.
4 Hocken, Streams of Renewal, p. 184.
5 ibid., chs 10, 11, 14. M.Harper, None Can Guess (London, 1971).
6 Hocken, Streams of Renewal, chs 12, 21.
7 Harper, None Can Guess, p. 64. England, Spirit of Renewal, pp. 153 f,
8 W.Davies, Rocking the Boat: The Challenge of the House Church (Basingstoke,
1986), pp. 25 f.
9 Hocken, Streams of Renewal, sect. 1.
10 Wallis, The Radical Christian (Eastbourne, 1981), p. 10.
11 A.Walker, Restoring the Kingdom (London, 1985). Walker has popularised the
use of the term ‘Restorationism’ for all the connexions together, but it should be
noted that others would wish to confine the term to Bryn Jones’s movement.
12 R.Trudinger, Built to Last (Eastbourne, 1982), ch. 2. P.Greenslade, The King’s
Church, Aldershot’, in R.Forster (ed.), Ten New Churches (Bromley, 1986).
13 J.V.Thurman, New Wineskins: A Study of the House Church Movement
(Frankfurt am Main, 1982), chs 2, 4. Walker, Restoring the Kingdom, pp. 25–9.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 341

14 R.Forster, ‘Icthus Christian Fellowship, Forest Hill, London’, in Forster (ed.), Ten
New Churches.
15 J.Gunstone, Pentecostal Anglicans (London, 1982), p. 46,
16 Hocken, Streams of Renewal, ch. 1, pp. 63–5, 68 f., 72, 128 ff.
17 J.Ford, In the Steps of John Wesley: The Church of the Nazarene in Britain
(Kansas City, Mo., 1968), pp. 168–72. Hocken, Streams of Renewal, p. 64.
18 Hocken, Streams of Renewal, p. 76.
19 W.J.Hollenweger, The Pentecostals (London, 1971), p. 6. Hocken, Streams of
Renewal, pp. 147 ff.
20 Walker, Restoring the Kingdom, p. 242. See p. 197.
21 Hocken, Streams of Renewal, pp. 144 f.
22 J.Ward, ‘Pentecostal theology and the charismatic movement’, in D.Martin and
P.Mullen (eds), Strange Gifts? A Guide to Charismatic Renewal (Oxford, 1984).
23 For example, M.Harper, Walk in the Spirit (London, 1968), pp. 20 f.
24 Harper, None Can Guess, p. 9.
25 Hocken, Streams of Renewal, pp. 146 f.
26 D.J.Bennett, Nine O’Clock in the Morning (Plainfield, NJ, 1970).
27 Hocken, Streams of Renewal, ch. 17.
28 The Charismatic Movement in the Church of England (London, 1981), p. 12.
29 Walker, Restoring the Kingdom, pp. 77–85.
30 AFR, Spring 1985, pp. 3, 6, 7; Winter 1985, pp. 2 f.; Summer/Autumn 1986, pp.
3 f.
31 T.Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (London, 1970), esp. ch. 4. B.
Martin, A Sociology of Contemporary Cultural Change (Oxford, 1981).
32 Charismatic Movement in the Church of England, pp. 41 f.
33 Martin, Contemporary Cultural Change, p. 225.
34 M.Harper, As at the Beginning (London, 1965), p. 84.
35 M.Bradbury and J.McFarlane (eds), Modernism, 1890–1930 (Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, 1976).
36 V.Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ [1924], Collected Essays, Vol. 1
(London, 1966), p. 321.
37 M.Bradbury and J.McFarlane, ‘Movements, magazines and manifestos’, in
Bradbury and McFarlane (eds), Modernism, p. 202.
38 ‘The Layman with a Notebook’, What is the Oxford Group? (London, 1933).
Apart from works cited below, cf. A.W.Eister, Drawing-Room Conversion
(Durham, NC, 1950) and D.W.Bebbington, ‘The Oxford Group Movement
between the wars’, in Voluntary Religion, Studies in Church History, vol. 23, ed.
W.J.Sheils and D.Wood (Oxford, 1986).
39 H.Begbie, Life Changers (London, 1923), p. 34.
40 T.Driberg, The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament (London, 1964), p. 16.
41 A.J.Russell, For Sinners Only (London, 1932), p. 160.
42 Begbie, Life Changers, 4th edn (London, 1929), p. 21.
43 R, 30 September 1932, p. 581; 18 November 1932, p. 689; 30 December 1932, p.
790.
44 G.Lean, Frank Buchman: A Life (London, 1985), pp. 132, 156.
45 M.Linton Smith and F.Underhill, The Group Movement (London, 1934), p. 36.
46 R, 27 January 1933, p. 55.
47 ‘Layman’, Oxford Group, p. 50.
342 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

48 R, 7 October 1932, p. 601.

49 L.W.Grensted, ‘Conclusion’, in R.H.S.Crossman (ed.), Oxford and the Groups
(Oxford, 1934), p. 198.
50 R, 14 October 1932, p. 617.
51 M.Harrison, Saints Run Mad (London, 1934), pp. 93, 81.
52 L.W.H.Bertie, ‘Some aspects of the Oxford Group as seen by a medical
practitioner’, in F.A.M.Spencer (ed.), The Meaning of the Groups (London,
1934), p. 39.
53 R, 4 December 1931, p. 769.
54 Smith and Underhill, Group Movement, p. 42.
55 Bertie, ‘Aspects’, p. 43.
56 Russell, Sinners, p. 279.
57 S, A.King, The Challenge of the Oxford Groups (London, 1933), p. 61. B.
Nichols, All I Could Never Be (London, 1949), pp. 249 f.
58 Smith and Underhill, Group Movement, pp. 23 f.
59 G.Allen, ‘The Groups in Oxford’, in Crossman (ed.), Oxford, p. 33.
60 R.Thomson, The Pelican History of Psychology (Harmondsworth, Middlesex,
1968), pp. 421 f.
61 Groups, May 1934, pp. 641–4.
62 F.C.Raynor, The Finger of God (London, 1934), p. 96.
63 Groups, June 1934, p. 2.
64 ibid., August 1934, p. 109.
65 Grensted, ‘Conclusion’. BW, 27 July 1933, p. 340.
66 C.M.Chavasse in R, 18 November 1932, p. 689.
67 R, 27 October 1933, p. 610.
68 ‘Layman’, Oxford Group, p. 70.
69 M.D.Biddiss, The Age of the Masses: Ideas and Society in Europe since 1870
(Hassocks, Sussex, 1977), pp. 83–91.
70 ‘Layman’, Oxford Group, p. 69.
71 H.H.Henson, The Oxford Groups (London, 1933), p. 70.
72 Quoted by Smith and Underhill, Group Movement, p. 34.
73 Russell, Sinners, p. 291.1. Thomas, The Buchman Group (London, [1933]), p. 3.
74 W.F.Brown to editor, MR, 3 November 1932, p. 20.
75 W.H.Clark, The Oxford Group: Its History and Significance (New York, 1951),
p. 110.
76 Moore, Brensham Village [1946] (London, 1966 edn), pp. 162, 171.
77 H.R.Hammond to editor, MR, 28 January 1932, p. 17. R, 17 June 1932, p. 388.
78 Grensted, ‘Conclusion’, p. 199. Henson, Oxford Groups, p. 48.
79 Oldham to editor, T, 6 October 1933, p. 13.
80 Groups, April 1934, pp. 545 f.
81 ‘Layman’, Oxford Group, p. 81.
82 R, 14 October 1932, p. 617. ‘Observer’ to editor, R, 16 December 1932, p. 766.
83 Harrison, Saints Run Mad, p. 99.
84 R, 14 October 1932, p. 617.
85 T, 27 July 1936, p. 9. Driberg, Mystery, p. 143.
86 T, 9 March 1939, p. 4.
87 T, 10 March 1939, p. 4.
88 MR, 17 October 1933, p. 4.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 343

89 Harrison, Saints Run Mad, pp. 107 f.

90 Allen, He that Cometh, p. 212.
91 Henson, Oxford Groups, p. 48.
92 J.W.C.Wand, ‘The Groups and the churches’, in Crossman (ed.), Oxford, p. 168.
93 E.Brunner, The Church and the Oxford Group (London, 1937), p. 93.
94 Sir Francis Fremantle, MP, to editor, T, 9 December 1933, p. 8.
95 Bishop of Durham to editor, T, 19 September 1933, p. 8.
96 Russell, Sinners, p. 44.
97 Raynor, Finger of God, pp. 108–11, 170 f.
98 Henson, Oxford Groups, p. 48. L.P.Jacks, ‘Group unity and the sense of sin’, in
Crossman (ed.), Oxford, pp. 117 f.
99 BW, 13 July 1933, p. 295. Driberg, Mystery, ch. 4.
100 F.N.D.Buchman, Remaking the World (London, 1958 edn), pp. 14 f. T, 15 July
1935, p. 12.
101 T, 27 July 1936, p. 9.
102 T, 8 August 1938, p. 8; 27 July 1936, p. 9.
103 Buchman, Remaking, pp. 45–8.
104 R, 3 August 1934, p. 465.
105 R, 29 April 1932, p. 261.
106 R, 20 November 1931, p. 729.
107 M.Harper, A New Way of Living (London, 1973), pp. 7 f.
108 Talcott Parsons quoted by Martin, Cultural Change, p. 15.
109 Harper, Walk, p. 43.
110 D.Bridge and D.Phypers, More than Tongues Can Tell (London, 1982), pp. 61,
74 f.
111 England, Spirit of Renewal, p. 111.
112 Walker, Restoring the Kingdom, p. 52.
113 Renewal, February/March 1979, p. 11.
114 P.Beall, The Folk Arts m God’s Family (London, 1984), p. 33.
115 Hocken, Streams of Renewal, chs 4, 9, pp. 158 f.
116 CEN, 28 June 1974, p. 7.
117 Charismatic Movement in the Church of England, p. 16. Walker, Restoring the
Kingdom, pp. 123 f., 191.
118 R.Peart and W.R.Davies, What about the Charismatic Movement? (London,
1980), p. 39.
119 I.Savile, ‘Canford Magna Parish Church’, in E.Gibbs (ed.), Ten Growing
Churches (n.p., 1984), p. 181. S.Bruce, Firm in the Faith (Aldershot, 1984), p.
143. AFR, Autumn 1981, p. [7].
120 Harper, Beginning, p. 10. M.Israel, ‘The Spirit of truth’, in Martin and Mullen
(eds), Strange Gifts?, pp. 131, 133.
121 England, Spirit of Renewal, p, 159.
122 Harper, Beginning, p. 105.
123 Thurman, New Wineskins, p. 43.
124 A.Mather, ‘Talking points: the charismatic movement’, Themelios, vol. 9, no. 3
(1984), p. 21.
125 Hocken, Streams of Renewal, p. 172.
126 V.Budgen, The Charismatics and the Word of God (Welwyn, 1985), p. 60.
127 J.Graham, The Giant Awakes (London, 1982), p. 112.
344 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

128 Harper, None Can Guess, p. 150.

129 Harper, Beginning, p. 110.
130 Charismatic Movement in the Church of England, p. 20.
131 Harper, Beginning, p. 94.
132 Renewal, February/March 1979, p. 5.
133 Harper, None Can Guess, p. 8.
134 ‘Gospel and Spirit: a joint statement’, Churchman, vol. 91, no. 2 (1977), p. 103.
135 Budgen, Charismatics and the Word of God, pp. 206 f.
136 Harper, None Can Guess, p. 8.
137 ‘Gospel and Spirit’, p. 106. Walker, Restoring the Kingdom, pp. 154 f.
138 Harper, None Can Guess, p. 142.
139 A.Kane, Let There be Life (Basingstoke, 1983), p. 88. Savile, ‘Canford Magna’, p.
180. Thurman, New Wineskins, pp. 43, 95.
140 AFR, Winter 1985, p. 26.
141 Gunstone, Pentecostal Anglicans, ch. 9. R.Trudinger, Cells for Life (Basingstoke,
1979).
142 F.Lees, Love Is Our Home (London, 1978).
143 Kane, Let There be Life, p. 67. Peart and Davies, Charismatic Movement, pp. 38
f.
144 Watson, I Believe in the Church (London, 1982 edn), pp. 85 ff.
145 J.Hardwidge, The Isca Christian Fellowship’, in Forster (ed.), Ten New
Churches, p. 125.
146 Martin, Cultural Change, p. 17.
147 Harper, None Can Guess, p. 13,
148 Wallis, Radical Christian, p. 165.
149 Thurman, New Wineskins, p. 61.
150 Walker, Restoring the Kingdom, pp. 88 f., 105.
151 P.Beall, The Folk Arts in God’s Family (London, 1984). A.Long, Praise Him in
the Dance (London, 1976).
152 For example, Hardwidge, ‘Isca Christian Fellowship’, p. 128.
153 G.Kendrick (ed.), Ten Worshipping Churches (n.p., 1986), pp. 11 f., 76.
154 Charismatic Movement in the Church of England, p. 25.
155 Renewal, April/May 1979, p. 28.
156 Charismatic Movement in the Church of England, p. 37.
157 Beall, Folk Arts, p. 55.
158 Harper, None Can Guess, p. 143.
159 Wallis, Radical Christian, pp. 88, 23.
160 A.Munden, ‘Encountering the House Church Movement’, Anvil, vol. 1, no. 3
(1984), p. 202.
161 Kane, Let There be Life, p, 160.
162 Renewal, April/May 1979, p. 12.
163 Wallis, Radical Christian, p. 171.
164 Walker, Restoring the Kingdom, p. 74.
165 Harper, None Can Guess, pp. 75, 26 f., 36.
166 Greenslade, ‘King’s Church’, p. 147.
167 Wallis, Radical Christian, p. 184.
168 Harper, None Can Guess, p. 82.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 345

169 Charismatic Movement in the Church of England, p. 37. Peart and Davies,
Charismatic Movement, p. 13. Kane, Let There be Life, p. 127.
170 Thurman, New Wineskins, p. 71.
171 ‘Gospel and Spirit’, p. 110.
172 Ern Baxter, quoted by Walker, Restoring the Kingdom, p. 145.
173 Walker, Restoring the Kingdom, ch. 13.
174 Charismatic Movement in the Church of England, p. 14.
175 Walker, Restoring the Kingdom, p. 188. D.Halls, ‘Community Church in
Tottenham, Waltham Forest and Ilford’, in Gibbs (ed.), Ten Growing Churches,
p. 114.
176 Charismatic Movement in the Church of England, p. 26.
177 P.Mullen, ‘Confusion worse confounded’, in Martin and Mullen (eds), Strange
Gifts?, p. 105.
178 Walker, Restoring the Kingdom, p. 188.
179 B.R.Wilson, Sects and Society (London, 1961), pp. 106 f.
180 D.McBain, quoted by England, Spirit of Renewal, p. 128.
181 Hocken, Streams of Renewal, p. 112.
182 AFR, Summer/Autumn 1986, p. 4.
183 Harper, Beginning, p. 88,
184 Gunstone, Pentecostal Anglicans, p. 31.
185 AFR, Autumn 1982, p. [7]. England, Spirit of Renewal, p. 148.
186 Charismatic Movement in the Church of England, p. 9. AFR, Spring 1986, p. 3;
Spring 1985, p. 8.
187 Peart and Davies, Charismatic Movement, p. 1.
188 Gunstone, Pentecostal Anglicans, p. 25, P. Beasley-Murray and A, Wilkinson,
Turning the Tide (London, 1981), p, 37.
189 Walker, Restoring the Kingdom, p. 102.
190 Savile, ‘Canford Magna’, p. 185.
191 CEN, l0 January 1964, p. 1.
192 CEN, 14 June 1968, p. 1.
193 CEN, 22 April 1977, p. 7.
194 ‘Gospel and Spirit’, pp. 102, 105.
195 C.Calver, He Brings us Together (London, 1987), pp. 66 f.
196 Walker, Restoring the Kingdom, p. 121.
197 England, Spirit of Renewal, p. 98.
198 Wallis, Radical Christian, p. 53.
199 Peart and Davies, Charismatic Movement, p. 36.
200 B.Hopkinson, ‘Changes in the emphases of Evangelical belief, 1970–1980:
evidence from new hymnody’, Churchman, vol. 95, no. 2 (1981), pp. 130, 134.
201 R.Shaw, quoted by Hocken, Streams of Renewal, p. 156.
202 Harper, Beginning, p. 119.
203 ibid., p. 125.
204 Hopkinson, ‘Evangelical belief, pp. 131, 134.
205 Carey, The Gates of Glory (London, 1986), p. 205.
206 Peart and Davies, Charismatic Movement, pp. 9 f.
346 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

CHAPTER 8:
INTO A BROAD PLACE

1 Canon D.M.Paton in P.Crowe (ed.), Keele ‘67: The National Evangelical

Anglican Congress Statement (London, 1967), p. 16.
2 J.C.King, in CEN, 14 April 1967, p. 6.
3 Sect. 83 in Crowe (ed.), Keele ‘67, p. 37. Letters to editor, CEN, 19 May 1967, p.
6.
4 Sects 20 and 37 in Crowe (ed.), Keele ‘67, pp. 23, 26.
5 C.Buchanan in CEN, 11 March 1977, p. 6.
6 CEN, 11 January 1957, p. 3.
7 M.Saward, Evangelicals on the Move, The Anglican Church Today (London,
1987), pp. 32 f.
8 G.E.Duffield, ‘Evangelical involvement: the doctrine of the church’, in J.C.King,
Evangelicals Today (Guildford, 1973).
9 Stott, ‘World-wide Evangelical Anglicanism’, in ibid., p. 181.
10 R.Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers (Oxford, 1977), p. 30.
11 Prospects for the Eighties (London, 1980), p. 5. P.Brierley and B.Evans, Prospects
for Wales (London, 1983), p. 5. P.Brierley and F.Macdonald, Prospects for
Scotland (Bromley, 1985), p. 5.
12 Social Trends, 1982 edn (London, 1981), p. 193.
13 P.A.Welsby, A History of the Church of England, 1945–1980 (Oxford, 1984), pp.
19 f.
14 P.B.Cliff, The Rise and Development of the Sunday School Movement in
England, 1780–1980 (Nutfield, Redhill, Surrey, 1986), pp. 318 f.
15 A. Marwick, British Society since 1945 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1982), ch.
9.
16 See pp. 201 f.
17 F.W.Dillistone, Into all the World: A Biography of Max Warren (London, 1980),
pp. 60, 154.
18 ibid., pp. 50 f. S.Gummer, The Chavasse Twins (London, 1963).
19 R.T.Jones, Congregationalism in England, 1662–1962 (London, 1962), pp. 450 f.,
453–7.
20 W.M.S.West, To Be a Pilgrim: A Memoir of Ernest A. Payne (Guildford, 1983).
21 See p. 204.
22 D.M.Thompson, ‘The older Free Churches’, in R.Davies (ed.), The Testing of the
Churches, 1932–1982 (London, 1982), p. 93. G.W.Kirby to editor, CG,
September 1948, p. 11. S.Bruce, Firm in the Faith (Aldershot, 1984), p. 45.
23 Stott, in Fundamentalism: A Religious Problem: Letters to the Editor of The Times
and a Leading Article (London, 1955), pp. 15 f.
24 P.Sangster, Doctor Sangster (London, 1962). For general trends, see A.
Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–1985 (London, 1986).
25 Bishop J.W.Hunkin, in LE, May 1947, p. 9.
26 LE, September 1947, p. 33; September 1948, p. 153.
27 CEN, 31 July 1953, p. 6.
28 LE, November 1950, pp. 335, 351. CEN, 17 April 1964, p. 1.
29 Modern Free Churchman,
30 LE, May 1947, pp. 11, 13.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 347

31 C.O.Rhodes in LE, February 1950, p. 289. CEN, 28 May 1954, p. 7.

32 CEN, 29 January 1960, p. 3.
33 L.Hickin, ‘The revival of Evangelical scholarship’, Churchman, vol. 92, no. 2
(1978). M.Warren, Crowded Canvas (London, 1974), pp. 223 f. Evangelical
Fellowship for Theological Literature: Annual Register, no. 7 (1950).
34 Evangelicals Affirm (London, 1948), p. xi. LE, May 1948, p. 114. Warren,
Crowded Canvas, pp. 167, 224.
35 LE, December 1951, p. 403.
36 R.Nixon in Churchman, vol. 92, no. 2 (1978), pp. 99 f.
37 Bruce, Firm in the Faith, pp. 75 ff.
38 J.Highet, The Scottish Churches (London, 1960), ch. 3. D.P.Thomson, Personal
Encounters (Crieff, Perthshire, 1967), p. 70.
39 K.Robbins, ‘Britain, 1940 and “Christian Civilization”’, in D.Beales and G.Best
(eds), History, Society and the Churches: Essays in Honour of Owen Chadwick
(Cambridge, 1985).
40 A.W.Smith in AW, July-August 1945, p. 51.
41 CEN, 19 January 1951, p. 3.
42 Welsby, Church of England, pp. 45–8. Gummer, Chavasse Twins, ch. 12.
43 CEN, 11 january 1952, p. 3.
44 CEN, 16 January 1953, p. 3.
45 A.A.Woolsey, Channel of Revival: A Biography of Duncan Campbell
(Edinburgh, 1974), chs 13–16.
46 G.T.Brake, Policy and Politics in British Methodism, 1932–1982 (London, 1984),
pp. 390 f. Thompson, ‘Older Free Churches’, p. 93.
47 J.E.Tuck (ed.), This is My Story (London, 1955), ch. 1.
48 Jones, Congregationalism, p. 450.
49 R.R.Williams in LE, May 1947, p. 12.
50 CEN, 21 June 1957, p. 7.
51 CEN, 27 November 1953, p. 3; 1 January 1954, p. 6;J.W.Roxburgh to editor, 8
January 1954, p. 10; R.A.Finlayson to editor, 22 January 1954, p. 10.
52 CEN, 3 May 1963, p. 10.
53 Baptist Union Directory, 1973–4, pp. 40 f.
54 Dr C.W.Hale Amos to editor, R, 20 August 1937, p. 536.
55 AW, September-October 1949, p. 459.
56 I.L.S.Balfour, ‘The twentieth century (since 1914)’, in D.W.Bebbington (ed.),
The Baptists in Scotland: A History (Glasgow, 1988), pp. 75 f. Baptists and
Unity (London, 1967), pp. 36 f.
57 See p. 267f.
58 CEN, 16 November 1974, p. 2.
59 R.Davies, ‘Since 1932’, in R.Davies et al. (eds), A History of the Methodist
Church in Great Britain, Vol. 3 (London, 1983), pp. 374–9.
60 J.I.Packer (ed.), All in Each Place: Towards Reunion in England (Appleford,
Abingdon, Berks., 1965), esp. pp. 9 f., 15 f. CEN, 7 February 1969, pp. 8 f.
61 Sect. 96 in Crowe (ed.), Keele ‘67, p. 39. CEN, 22 April 1977, p. 8.
62 J.King in CEN, 11 February 1977, p. 6.
63 CEN, 7 March 1986, p. 1.
64 C.O.Buchanan et al., Growing into Union (London, 1970).
348 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

65 English Churchman, 9 January. 1953, pp. 14, 15 f., 17, 18; 6 February. 1953, p.
62.
66 CEN, 13 January 1961, p. 3.
67 C.Buchanan, ‘Liturgy’, in King (ed.), Evangelicals Today.
68 Sect. 76 in Crowe (ed.), Keele ‘67, p. 35. H.J.Burgess to editor, CEN, 21
69 April 1967, p. 6. P.Crowe to editor, CEN, 5 May 1967, p. 7. N.Anderson, An
Adopted Son: The Story of my Life (Leicester, 1985), pp. 239 ff.
70 CEN, 22 July 1949, p. 3.
71 Anderson, Adopted Son, p. 142.
72 Packer, ‘“Keswick” and the Reformed doctrine of sanctification’, Evangelical
Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 3 (1955), p. 158.
73 D.Winter in CEN, 29 July 1960, p. 2. CEN, 14 July 1972, p. 6.
75 Bruce, Firm in the Faith, p. 50.
76 J.Eddison (ed.), ‘Bash’: A Study in Spiritual Power (Basingstoke, 1983).
77 J.C.Pollock, The Good Seed: The Story of the Children’s Special Service Mission
and the Scripture Union (London, 1959), pp. 187–92.
78 R.Manwaring, From Controversy to Co-Existence: Evangelicals in the Church
of England, 1914–1980 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 108 f.
79 A.L.Glegg, Four Score and More (London, 1962), pp. 60–3.
80 Operation Mobilisation: The History (n.p., n.d.).
81 CEN, 8 October 1965, pp. 1, 16; 28 October 1966, pp. 3, 14.
82 CEN, 12 March 1954, p. 5; cf. F.Colquhoun, Harringay Story (London, 1955);
J.Pollock, Billy Graham: The Authorised Biography (London, 1966); P.Back,
Mission England—What Really Happened? (Bromley, 1986).
83 CEN, 26 February 1954, p. 5.
84 CEN, 28 May 1954, p. 6; 8 July 1966, p. 1,
85 CEN, 4 June 1954, p. 2. W.Sargant, Battle for the Mind (London, 1957), esp. ch.
6. But cf. Bruce, Firm in the Faith, pp. 104–12.
86 W.G.McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy
Graham (New York, 1959), p. 517. But cf. Highet, Scottish Churches, ch. 3.
87 CEN, 27 May 1955, p. 2.
88 CEN, 30 December 1966, p. 1.
89 G.Carr to editor, CEN, 27 May 1955, p. 14.
90 D.Johnson, Contending for the Faith: A History of the Evangelical Movement in
the Universities and Colleges (Leicester, 1979), p. 359. For CICCU, see p. 188.
91 F.D.Coggan (ed.), Christ and the Colleges: A History of the Inter-Varsity
Fellowship of Evangelical Unions (London, 1934), pp. 212, 214. F.F.Bruce, In
Retrospect: Remembrance of Things Past (London, 1980), p. 68.
92 See also correspondence following review of Is Evolution a Myth? in C, 11
November 1949, p. 12, esp. Bible student to editor, 3 February 1950, p. 10.
93 CG, June 1948, p. 32.
94 Bruce, In Retrospect, p. 128.
95 F.F.Bruce, The Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical Research’, Evangelical Quarterly,
vol. 19, no. 1 (1947), p. 52.
96 Bruce, In Retrospect, pp. 127, 110 f.
97 CG, March 1948, p. 16.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 349

98 H.H.Rowdon, London Bible College: The First Twenty-Five Years (Worthing,

1968). R.Coad, Laing: The Biography of Sir John W. Laing, C.B.E. (1879–1978)
(London, 1979), pp. 189–92.
99 CG, March 1948, p. 8. ‘A London graduate’ is almost certainly Johnson.
100 D.Williams, IVP: The First Fifty Years (Leicester, 1986), p. 7,
101 Crowe (ed.), Keele ‘67, pp. 48–60.
102 C.B.R.F. (The Journal of the Christian Brethren Research Fellowship).
103 Bruce, In Retrospect, pp. 184–8, 182.
104 J.I.Packer, ‘Expository preaching’, in CEN, 15 January 1960, p. 3.
105 ‘Introduction’, in D.M.Lloyd-Jones, The Puritans: Their Origins and Successors
(Edinburgh, 1987).
106 E.Davies, ‘God’s gift to a nation’, in C.Catherwood (ed.), Martyn Lloyd-Jones:
Chosen by God (Crowborough, East Sussex, 1986), p. 185. See also I.H. Murray,
David Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years, 1899–1939 (Edinburgh, 1982)
and J. Peters, Martyn Lloyd-Jones: Preacher (Exeter, 1986).
107 D.M.Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers (London, 1971), p. 120.
108 CEN, 4 January 1963, p. 3.
109 R.Horn, ‘His place in Evangelicalism’, in Catherwood (ed.), Lloyd-Jones, p. 16.
110 Evangelical Library Bulletin.
111 ‘Introduction’, in Lloyd-Jones, Puritans, p. ix.
112 Maurice Wood in CEN, 15 January 1960, p. 3.
113 J.E.Davies, Striving Together: A Statement ofthe Principles that Have Governed
the Aims and Policies of the Evangelical Movement of Wales (Bryntirion,
Bridgend, 1984), pp. 5, 45.
114 S.B.Ferguson, ‘William Still: a biographical introduction’, in N.M. de S.
Cameron and S.B.Ferguson (eds), Pulpit & People: Essays in Honour of William
Still on his Seventy-Fifth Birthday (Edinburgh, 1986). Bruce, Firm in the Faith,
p. 45.
115 Prospects for the Eighties, p. 41.
116 W.J.Hollenweger, The Pentecostals (London, 1972), p. 191.
117 Tychicus to editor, LF, October 1963, quotcd by D.Gee, Wind and Flame
(Croydon, 1967), p. 299.
118 M.J.C.Calley, God’s People: West Indian Pentecostal Sects in England (London,
1965), pp. 118, 128, 39.
119 G.E.Vandeman to editor, CEN, 12 February 1954, p. 10.
120 J.Ford, In the Steps of John Wesley: The Church of the Nazarene in Britain
(Kansas City, Mo., 1968), p. 274.
121 B.R.Wilson, The Exclusive Brethren: a case study in the evolution of a sectarian
ideology’, in B.R. Wilson (ed.), Patterns of Sectarianism (London, 1967).
122 Bruce, In Retrospect, p. 289. G.Brown and B.Mills, ‘The Brethren’: A Factual
Survey (Exeter, 1980), p. 46.
123 J.King in CEN, 11 February 1977, p. 6.
124 CEN, 14 April 1967, p. 6; 27 January 1978, p. 4. Third Way, 29 December 1977,
pp. 7 ff.
125 F.Coutts, The History of the Salvation Army, Vol. 7, The Weapons of Goodwill
(London, 1986), pp. 168 ff.
126 D.B.Winter, New Singer, New Song (London, 1967).
127 Bruce, Firm in the Faith, pp. 129–35, spec. p. 133; p. 50.
350 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

128 CEN, 20 February 1976, p. 3.

129 CEN, 6 February 1976, p. 4.
130 CEN, 28 October 1966, p. 14.
131 Coutts, Salvation Army, Vol. 7, esp. pp. 18, 180, 326 f.
132 LCMM, July 1929, p. 109.
133 T.C.Hammond, Perfect Freedom (London, 1938); cf. D.J.Tidball, Contemporary
Evangelical Social Thinking—A Review (Nottingham, 1977), pp. 5 f.
134 CG, June 1948, p. 4.
135 Channon, ‘Why I believe Christ is coming’, AW, May-June 1949, p. 422.
136 M.Whitehouse, Who Does She Think She Is? (London, 1971). M.Caulfield,
Mary Whitehouse (London, 1975).
137 CEN, 15 January 1965, p. 16. J.Capon,…and There Was Light: The Story of the
Nationwide Festival of Light (London, 1972), p. 10.
138 Pornography: The Longford Report (London, 1972).
139 R.Wallis and R.Bland, Five Years On: Report of a Survey of Participants in the
Nationwide Festival of Light Rally in Trafalgar Square, London, on 25
September 1976 (n.p., n.d.), p. 45.
140 T, 16 April 1986, p. 1.
141 CEN, 13 January 1960, p. 3.
142 CEN, 22 April 1977, p, 10.
143 Tidball, Social Thinking, pp. 9 f.
144 CEN, 26 July 1974, p. 3; 2 August 1974, pp. 1 f. See also C.R.Padilla (ed.), The
New Face of Evangelicalism (London, 1976).
145 Evangelicalism and Social Responsibility: An Evangelical Commitment (Exeter,
1982), p. 23.
146 Third Way, December 1982/January 1983, p. 5.
147 Third Way, January 1987, p. 19. CEN, 22 April 1977, p. 8.
148 Packer, ‘A kind of Puritan’, p. 44.
149 Horn, ‘His place in Evangelicalism’, p. 21.
150 L.Samuel, ‘A man under the Word’, in Catherwood (ed.), Lloyd-Jones, pp. 199 ff.
151 Lloyd-Jones, Puritans, pp. 73–100.
152 Horn, ‘His place in Evangelicalism’, pp. 22 ff. Stott, ‘An appreciation’, in
Catherwood (ed.), Lloyd-Jones, p. 207.
153 CEN, 28 October 1966, p. 5.
154 Davies, Striving Together, pp. 5–8.
155 British Evangelical Council Newsletter, Summer 1981.
156 See pp. 230 f.
157 Sect. 14 in Crowe (ed.), Keele ‘67, p. 22.
158 I.Capon, Evangelicals Tomorrow (Glasgow, 1977), ch. 4. J.King in CEN, 11
February 1977, p. 6.
159 H.L.McBeth, The Baptist Heritage (Nashville, Tenn., 1987), p. 525.
160 R.J.Sheehan (ed.), The Baptism of the Spirit and Charismatic Gifts (St Albans,
[1979]), esp. pp. 2 f. Evangelical Times, March 1978, p. 7; May 1985, p. 9;
December 1985, p. 3; May 1986, pp. 12 ff.; June 1986, p. 3.
161 CEN, 24 July 1970, p. 3.
162 J.Drane, ‘Bible use in Scottish churches’, in Brierley and Macdonald, Prospects
for Scotland, pp. 26–9.
163 CEN, 11 January 1974, p. 8.
 NOTES: PREACHING THE GOSPEL 351

164 CEN, 23 November 1966, p. 1; 27 January 1978, p. 4.

165 Capon, Evangelicals Tomorrow, ch. 3; cf. T.Thiselton, ‘Understanding God’s
word today’, in J.Stott (ed.), Obeying Christ in a Changing World: 1: The Lord
Christ (London, 1977).
166 CEN, 26 January 1979, p. 3.
167 J.Dunn, The authority of scripture according to scripture’, Churchman, vol. 96,
no. 2, and vol. 96, no. 3 (1982).
168 CEN, l0 January 1986, p. 1.
169 Capon, Evangelicals Tomorrow, pp. 32, 34.
170 CEN, 25 January 1974, p. 5.
171 Capon, Evangelicals Tomorrow, p. 49.
172 J.I.Packer, The Evangelical Anglican Identity Problem (Oxford, 1978) p. 30.
173 K.N.Medhurst and G.Moyser, Church and Politics in a Secular Age (Oxford,
1988), ch. 11, scct. 6.
174 CEN, 11 March 1977, p. 6.
175 J.R.W.Stott, What Is an Evangelical? (London, 1977).
176 CEN, 27 January 1978, p. 1; 26 January 1979, p. 3; 2 February 1979, p. 2.
177 Stott, ‘World-wide Evangelical Anglicanism’, p. 180. CEN, 9 January 1980, p. 3.
178 Saward, Evangelicals on the Move, p. 45.
179 CEN, 8 October 1965, p. 16; cf. A.D.Gilbert, The Making of Post-Christian
Britain: A History of the Secularization of Modern Society (London, 1980), ch.
6.
180 CEN, 28 October 1966, p. 3.
181 Third Way, January 1987, p. 19.
182 Wallis and Bland, Five Years On, p. 30.
183 Brake, Policy and Politics, p. 369.
184 Saward, Evangelicals on the Move, p. 34.
185 Baptist Times, 31 December 1987, p. 7.

CHAPTER 9:
TIME AND CHANCE

1 Hansard, 3rd series, vol. 110 (1850), col. 713.

2 S.Bruce, Firm in the Faith (Aldershot, 1984), p. 79.
3 Dale, The Old Evangelicalism and the New (London, 1889).
4 W.M.Groser quoted by P.B.Cliff, The Rise and Development of the Sunday
School Movement in England, 1780–1980 (Nutfield, Redhill, Surrey, 1986), p.
197.
5 J.Stott, in J.Stott and R.T.Coote (eds), Down to Earth: Studies in Christianity
and Culture (London, 1981), p. vii.
6 B.M.G.Reardon, Religious Thought in the Victorian Age (London, 1981), chs 5
and 6.
7 For example, T.Cauter and J.S.Downham, The Communication of ldeas: A Study
of Contemporary Influences on Urban Life (London, 1954). The process has
been described as ‘stratified diffusion’: J.Cox, The English Churches in a Secular
Society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (New York, 1982), p. 8.
352 EVANGELICALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN

8 W.Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of

Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country
Contrasted with Real Christianity, 4th edn (London, 1797), pp. 9 f.
9 D.E.Allen, British Tastes: An Enquiry into the Likes and Dislikes of the
Regional Consumer (London, 1968). A.P.Cohen (ed.), Belonging: Identity and
Social Organisation in British Rural Cultures, Anthropological Studies of
Britain, 1 (Manchester, 1982).
10 The pattern is comparable to that described in the classic study of the spread of
telephones in Sweden by T.Hägerstrand, Innovation Diffusion as a Spatial
Process (Chicago, 1967 edn), esp. pp. 7 f.
11 For an earlier case-study, cf. G.Donaldson, ‘Scotland’s conservative north in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, Scottish Church History (Edinburgh,
1985), pp. 201 f.
12 Barr, Fundamentalism (London, 1977), pp. 2–6, 61 f.
13 M.Saward, Evangelicals on the Move, The Anglican Church Today (London,
1987), p. 83. N.M.de S.Cameron to editor, LW, January 1987, p. 38.
14 J.I.Packer, ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God (London, 1958). I.H.
Marshall, Biblical Inspiration (London, 1982), ch. 3.
15 M.Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, Vol. 1
(Cambridge, 1980), pp. 375 f.
 Index

activism 2, 3, 9–11, 40–2, 73, 104–50, Anglican Evangelical Group Movement

244, 268 199–2, 201, 203, 205, 206, 211, 217,
Adam, Thomas 30, 51 220, 226, 248, 249, 250
Adeney, W.F. 184 Anglican Renewal Movement 243
Advent Testimony and Preparation Anglo-Catholics 96, 127, 133, 147, 184,
Movement 188, 191, 208, 214, 221–4, 197, 202, 203, 226, 253, 254.
249 See also High Churchmen
adventism (or second coming) 78, 80–2, Angus, Joseph 143
82–5, 85, 151, 156, 158, 180, 188–1, anti-Catholicism 100–2, 192, 212,
191, 193, 195, 261. 219–22, 253, 269
See also postmillennialism and anti-slavery 11, 51, 70–2, 132, 134–6
premillennialism Anti-Socialist Union of Churches 213
Aked, Charles 196 apocrypha controversy 86–8
Albury Conferences 82, 85, 87, 90, 91, 93, Apostolic Church 195, 228, 259
95, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103 Arminianism 15–16, 17, 26, 27, 59, 62,
All Nations College 223 72, 76, 91–3, 160–2, 171, 178
Allan, Tom 250, 251 Armitage, J.J. R. 223
Alleine, Joseph 34 Arnold, Matthew 4, 126, 166
Allen, Thomas 70 Arnott, Anne 14
Allport, Josiah 138 Arthur, William 152
America, Americans 7, 29, 34, 39, 40, 54, Assemblies of God 195, 228, 259
55, 57, 58, 59, 61, 65, 72, 75, 114, 115, assurance 6–6, 26, 41–49, 53, 55, 73
154, 156, 160, 161, 162, 163–5, 166, Atkinson, Basil 206
169, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 187, atonement See cross, doctrine of
188, 194, 195, 196, 205, 212, 218, 219, attendance, church 106–9, 124, 125,
221, 222, 225, 226, 228, 229, 232, 233, 126–9, 142, 247, 256
234, 242, 255–9, 260, 262, 263 Aubrey, M.E. 219
Georgia 38, 39, 41, 48, 69, 205 Austin, Percy 181
Massachusetts 39, 46
New England 52 Bainbridge, Cuthbert 153, 161
Philadelphia 156, 157 Baines, Edward 125
The South 70, 205 Baker, Hatty 204
Anderson, Christopher 41 Band of Hope 127, 133
Anglican Evangelical Assembly 266, 267 Bannerman, James 89
baptism 8–9, 94–6, 96, 126

353
354 INDEX

believer’s 17, 55, 65 Benson, Christopher 139

of the Holy Spirit 194, 226, 227, 228, Bentham, Jeremy 64, 79
229, 243 Berridge, John 30
Baptist Bible Union 218, 222, 226 Bible 1, 2, 3, 11–13, 34, 39, 40, 57, 103,
Baptist Home Missionary Society 118 133, 137, 140, 141, 245, 247, 265–9,
Baptist Missionary Society 11, 40, 63, 268, 272
132 criticism 182–6, 185, 192, 193, 215,
Baptist Revival Fellowship 227, 248, 264 217, 220, 257
Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland merrancy 12–13, 88–89, 90, 181, 182,
118, 144, 218, 248, 252, 264 186–91, 225, 256, 272
Baptists 33, 39, 40, 55, 109, 118, 125, 127, infallibility, 12, 86, 185, 197, 215–20,
130, 144, 184, 185, 188, 196, 204, 226, 256
244, 248, 252, 264, 265, 267, 272 inspiration 12–13, 85–8, 88–90, 180,
Associations 20, 23, 55, 71 181, 182, 183, 185, 193, 197, 204, 272
General 17, 32, 65 literalism 13, 87–9, 180, 181, 188–1,
New Connexion of General 26, 32, 62, 200, 204
65 verbal inspiration 13, 85, 88–89, 180,
Particular 17, 65 181, 186–91, 225
Strict 55–7, 63, 272 versions 40, 140, 265
Barclay, Oliver 263 Bible Christians 25, 128
Barclay, Robert 155 Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society
Bardsley, Cyril 217 216, 219
Bardsley, Bishop Cuthbert 237 Bible College of Wales 223
Baring, Bishop Charles 106, 139 Bible League 185–8, 188, 205, 206, 216,
Baring, George 77 217, 218, 221, 222
Barnardo T.J. 119 Bible Society, British and Foreign 65, 75,
Barnes, Bishop E.W. 205–8, 230 86–8, 99, 155
Barnet Conference 158, 159, 160 Bible Training Institute, Glasgow 178,
Barr, James 272 187, 220
Barratt, T.B. 195 Bickersteth, Edward 12, 96
Barrett, G.S. 13 Bickersteth, John 146
Barth, Karl 251 Bickersteth, Bishop Robert 4, 10, 106,
Bartlett, D.H.C. 216 111, 136
‘Bash’ camps 255 Biddulph, T.T. 56, 57, 60
Batty, Edward 185 Binney, Thomas 98, 126
Batty, R.B. 137 Birks, T.R. 89, 139, 141, 142, 144
Baxter, Ern 229 Black, Alexander 89
Baxter, Richard 33, 34, 37, 39, 43 Blackwood, Stevenson 159
Baylee, Joseph 139 Blomfield, W.E. 145
Beasley-Murray, Paul 265 Bloomsbury Group 231, 235, 270
Bean, James 35 Boardman, W.E. 163, 170
Beet, Agar 153 Boddy, A.A. 195
Belben, Howard 257 Böhler, Peter 39, 44, 48
Believers’ Bible Union 218, 222 Bolton, John 222
Bell, Andrew 123 Bonar, Horatius 87–9, 159, 168, 170
Bennett, W.H. 184 Book of Common Prayer See Prayer Book
Bennetts, George Armstrong 193 Booth, Abraham 21, 40, 45, 50, 52
Benington, John 260 Booth, Bramwell 206
 INDEX 355

Booth, Catherine 163, 171 Cadman, William 118, 146, 147

Booth, General William 163, 177 Cadoux, C.J. 219
Bourne, Hugh 64 Calvary Holiness Church 178
Bowker, H.F. 175 Calvinism, Calvinists (or Reformed
Boys’ Brigade 224 tradition) ix, 15–16, 17, 26–8, 28, 29,
Boys’ Life Brigade 224 33, 34, 35, 42, 44, 46, 53, 54, 59, 64,
Brainerd, David 40 66, 76–8, 81, 91–3, 105, 160–2, 162,
Brash, John 153, 170, 171, 177 163, 168–72, 178, 197, 253, 254, 256,
Bray, Gerald 265 258, 259, 265, 270, 254.
Brethren 14, 85, 93, 94, 95, 102, 103, 117, moderate 62–5
131, 156–9, 186, 187, 188, 191, 207, Calvinistic Methodists 28–29, 31, 69
212, 224, 226, 227, 257, 260, 267, 271, Welsh 29, 131, 194, 218, 226
272 Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian
Exclusive 157, 260 Union 169, 178, 186, 256, 257
Bright, John 13 Cambridge Seven 11, 195
Bristol Baptist College 33, 72 Campaigners 224
British and Foreign Bible Society See Campbell, John 142, 143
Bible Society Campbell, John McLeod 55, 91, 92, 138
British and Foreign School Society 123, Campbell, Mary 90
155 Campbell, R.J. 196–9, 199, 215, 217, 218
British Evangelical Council 264–8, 267 CARE Campaigns and Trust 262
British Israel movement 223 Carey, Bishop George 243, 245
Broad Churchmen, Broad Carey, William 40, 41, 61
Churchmanship 13, 80, 92, 143, 170, Carlyle, A.J. 211
182 Carlyle, Thomas 78, 166, 167
Broadlands conference 170, 193 Carr, James 153
Brooks, J.W. 102 Carson, Alexander 87, 89
Brooks. Thomas 43 Carter, A.H. 185, 221
Brown, Charles 217 Catherwood, Frederick 247
Brown, David 83 Catholic Apostolic Church 78, 85, 90, 94,
Brown, Douglas 191 95, 97, 103, 271, 272
Brown, James Baldwin 14, 144 Caughey, James 7, 115
Browne, Bishop Peter 48, 49 Cave, Alfred 183, 184, 188
Browning, Robert 143 Cave, William 35
Bruce, F.F. 257, 258 Cecil, Richard 57, 61, 86
Bubier, G.B. 13 Cennick, John 29
Buchanan, Colin 254, 266 Central Churchmanship 201
Buchman, Frank 232–7, 235, 236–40, 242, Chadwick, Samuel 4, 193–6, 206, 220,
245 225
Budd, Henry 93–5, 95, 96 Chalmers, Thomas 6, 9, 10, 58, 61, 64, 75,
Bull, G.S. 132 79, 89, 91, 97, 118, 120, 139
Bulteel, Henry 77, 96 Chambers, Oswald 194
Bunting, Jabez 28 Channon, W.G. 261
Bunyan, John 34 charismatic renewal movement 226–33,
Burroughs, E.A. 200 237–8, 254, 259, 265, 267, 271, 272
Burton, A.H. 187 Chavasse, Bishop Christopher 14, 219,
Butler, Samuel 128, 146 248, 251
356 INDEX

Cheltenham Conference of Evangelical Church Pastoral Aid Society 64, 118, 202,
Churchmen 219 248, 258, 261
Children’s Special Service Mission 224 Church Service Society 147
China Inland Mission 11, 93, 151, 223, Church Society 253
255 Churches of Christ 218
Christenson, Larry 229 cinema 207, 209, 225, 260
Christian Alliance of Women and Girls Clapham Sect 70, 72, 128
186 Clarke, Adam 10, 72, 74, 131
Christian Brethren Research Fellowship Clarke, Samuel 29, 50
258 Clarkson, Thomas 70
Christian Colportage Association 119 Clayton, Charles 130
Christian Endeavour 128, 224 Cliff College 193, 257, 271
Christian Evidence Society 205 Clifford, John 120, 185, 210, 213, 214
Christian Influence Society 97 Clifton Conference 160
Christian Instruction Society 118 Close, Dean Francis 102, 131, 163
Christian Medical Fellowship 257 Coates, Gerald 227, 241
Christian Social Union 210, 211 Coggan, Archbishop Donald 250
Christian Socialist League 213 Cole, Thomas 33
Christopher, Alfred 159 Coleridge, S.T. 79, 80, 94, 97, 270
Church Association 146, 220, 253 Colman, J.J. 123
Church Communion Society 94 communion, holy 3, 65, 94, 145, 146, 201,
Church Defence Institution 135 202, 203, 253, 254:
Church Education Society 123 eastward posidon 145, 201, 202, 203
Church Missionary Society 41, 96, 105, Conder, Josiah 57, 61
108, 110, 129, 137, 179, 185, 190, 215– Conference on Politics, Economics and
8, 219, 248 Citizenship (COPEC) 212, 214
Church of England (or Anglicans) ix, 6, 8, Congregational Home Missionary
16, 20, 22, 24, 25, 29–2, 32, 35, 44, 50, Society 118
64, 69, 75, 77, 94, 96–8, 102, 103, 105, Congregational Revival Fellowship 248
107, 108, 110, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, Congregational Union of Scotland 16
135, 136, 148, 158, 162, 169, 181, 182, Congregationalists 17, 107, 109, 115, 121,
185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 197, 199–2, 123, 125, 127, 130, 140, 143, 144, 177,
201–5, 204, 206, 208, 210, 213, 214, 178, 184, 188, 196–9, 199, 204, 211,
219, 220, 226, 226, 228, 244, 246, 247, 219, 226, 243, 248, 249, 251.
248, 250, 251, 253–7, 259, 263, 265, See also Independents
266–70, 270, 272, 273 Conington, John 138
episcopate 106, 137, 138–40, 145, 203 Conservative Party 101, 114, 136, 212
Evangelical Council 267. Contagious Diseases Acts 133, 134
See also Anglo- Catholics, Broad Continental Society 76
Churchmen, High Churchmen conversion 1, 2–9, 34, 50, 64, 73, 115,
Church of God in Christ 259 118, 118, 129, 150, 214, 244, 268
Church of God of Prophecy 259 Cook, C.T. 221
Church of Scotland 17–18, 20, 22, 25, 32– Cook, Thomas 168
4, 41, 50, 64, 66, 91, 107, 136, 183, 189, Council of Christian Churches on Social
207, 211, 226, 248, 250, 259, 267, 272 Questions 209
Church of South India 253 Countess ot Huntingdon’s Connexion 12,
Church of the Nazarene 178, 260 28–29, 30
Covenanters 224
 INDEX 357

Cowper, William 45 Down Grade controversy 144–6, 184, 272

Cowper-Temple, William 170 Driver, S.R. 184, 185
Crewdson, Isaac 154 Drummond, Henry, of Catholic Apostolic
Cromer Convention 189, 200, 202, 249 Church 76, 77, 82, 91, 95. 95, 99, 101,
Crosby, Fanny 174 103
cross, doctrine of or atonement 1, 2, 3, Drummond, Henry, Free Church
13–16, 34, 38, 144, 152, 198–1, 200, protcssor 141
206, 207, 218, 245, 268 Duncan, George 261
Crusade for World Revival 239 Dunn, James 266
Crusaders 224, 255 du Plessis, David 228
Cullis, Dr 194 Dyer, John 132
Cumming, John 84
Cunninghame, William 81 Ebury, Lord 8
Cupitt, Don 252 Eclectic Society 60, 61, 63, 86, 129
revived 247
Dale R.W. 9, 13, 140, 173, 269 ecumenical movement 228, 246, 252–7,
Dallinger, W.H. 205 263, 264, 265
Darby, J.N. 85, 88, 190 Edinburgh University Christian Union
Darbyshire, J.R. 197–198 251–5
Darricott, Risden 31 education 67–9, 99, 102, 122–5, 133, 141,
Dartmouth, Earl of 22 269
Darwin, Charles 141, 142, 205 Acts, 1870 124; 1902 114, 133; 1944 247
Darwinism (or evolution) 91, 141, 180, Edwards, Jonathan 4, 6, 9, 19, 23, 32, 40,
181, 205–9, 225 205–9, 225 45, 46–8, 48, 49, 53, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62,
social 141, 165, 210 63, 64, 73, 167, 272
Davidson, A.B. 183 Egypt General Mission 223
Davies, John 86 Elim Pentecostal Church (Foursquare
Dealtry, William 97 Gospel Alliance) 195–8, 223, 228, 243,
de Candole, Canon H.L. V.C. 199, 217 259
Denman, D.R. 257 Eliot, George 22, 25, 129, 131
Denman, F.L. 190 Eliot, John 39
Denney, James 13, 140 Eliot, Dean P.F. 201
Dickens, Charles 129, 166 Elliott, Charlotte 174
Dimock, Nathaniel 139 Elliott, E.B. 84, 101
disestablishment 97, 135–7 Emmanuel Holiness Church 178
Disney, Alexander 152 empiricism 51, 52, 53, 56–8, 89, 172, 188
dispensationalism 85, 190 Enlightenment 18, 47, 49–68, 70, 79, 80,
Dissenters 17, 20, 25, 31–3, 50, 53, 55, 64, 83, 89, 99, 103, 140, 142, 143, 152, 165,
65, 66, 71, 72, 75, 94, 96, 97–9, 101, 167, 171, 173, 183, 188, 230, 270, 272
102, 103, 108, 125, 137, 138, 143, 154, Erskine, Ebenezer 17
166, 201. Erskine, John 32, 53, 61, 62, 72
See also Nonconformists Erskine, Thomas 91, 92, 138
district visiting 118–118, 121, 142 Escobar, Samuel 263
Dixon, A.C. 205 Established Church Society 97
Dodd, C.H. 251 Evangelical Alliance 6, 98, 161, 209, 219,
Doddridge, Philip 20, 31, 33, 34, 53, 54, 255
61 63, 86, 87, 88, 89
358 INDEX

Evangelical Alliance Relief (TEAR) Fund, Fleming, Sir Ambrose 206

f he 262 Fletcher, John 10, 152
Evangelical Candidates’ Ordination Flew, Robert Newton 196
Council 219 Forester, George 226, 228
Evangelical Coalition for Urban Mission Forsyth, P.T. 13, 140, 184, 197, 199
262 Fort Lauderdale Five 229
Evangelical Fellowship for Theological Foskett, Bernard 33
Literature 250 Foster, Henry 86
Evangelical Library 259 Foster, John 136
Evangelical Movement of Wales 259, 264 Fountain Trust 227, 228, 240, 242
Evangelical Union 6, 7, 16, 115 Fox, C.A. 166
Evangelical Union of South America 223 Fox, George 155
Evangelicals passim Fox, G.T. 168
centrist 248, 249–3 Fox, Prebendary H.E. 185, 215–8, 222
conservative 179–226, 247, 248–2, Francke, August 38, 93
250–5, 253, 254–70, 272 Fraternal Union for Bible Testimony
liberal 179–226, 247, 248, 249–3 221
evangelism 3, 39–2, 64–6, 75, 114–15, Frazer, Alexander 219
117–20, 160, 161, 214. Free Church Federation 218
See also activism, district visiting Free Church of Scotland 107, 118, 124,
Evangelization Society 119 136, 137, 182–5, 265
Evans, Caleb 33, 72 Free Presbyterians 56, 272
Evans, Hugh 33 Fremantle, W.R. 15
Evans, James Harington 77 Frere, J.H. 81, 82
Evans, P.W. 219 Frontier Youth Trust 262
evolution. See Darwinism Fry, Elizabeth 119, 128
Evolution Protest Movement 206 Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship
Expressionism 231, 238 International 228
Fuller, Andrew 33, 62, 63–5, 71
Faber, F.W. 170 Fundamentalists 88–90, 179, 180, 181,
Fairbairn, A.M. 140 184, 188, 192, 193, 194, 196, 215–20,
Fairbairn, Patrick 139 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225, 235,
Faith Mission 177 249, 272–6
Farish, William, 138
Fawcett, John 32 Gadsby, William 55
Fellowship of Evangelical Churchmen Garbett, Edward 3, 139, 147
216, 222, 226, 248 Garratt, Samuel 144, 146, 148, 203
Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Garvie, A.E. 211
Churches 218, 264 Gaussen, Louis 88–89, 186
Fellowship of the Kingdom 200, 203–6, General Body of Protestant Dissenting
211, 226, 248, 249 Ministers 99
Festival of Light 262, 267 Genevan churchmanship 248
Figgis, J.B. 166 Germany, German thought 78–79, 80,
Filey Christian Holiday Crusade 255 102, 136, 142, 143, 168, 170, 182,
Findlay, J.A. 200 183, 188, 198, 217, 231
Finney, Charles 7, 115, 163 Gib, Adam 73
Fishbourne, Admiral E.G. 159, 160 Gibbons, Thomas 31, 52
 INDEX 359

Gill, John 63 Hardie, Keir 142

Gillies, John 32, 66 Hardy, Thomas 104, 113, 167
Gladstone, S.H. 216 Hare, Bishop Richard 243
Gladstone, W.E. 6, 13, 97, 105, 106, Harford, John Battersby 217
175 Harford-Battersby, T.D. 156, 159, 170,
Gladwin, John 263 171
Glover, T.R. 218 Harper, Michael 226–30, 229, 230, 238,
Gooch, Fuller 188, 191 239–3, 241, 242, 245, 265
Goode, William, 1762–1816 63 Harris, Howel 19, 29, 31, 38, 44, 73
Goode, Dean William, 1801–68 139 Harris, John 83, 89, 91, 102
Goodwin, John 53 Harris, Reader 172, 177, 194
Gordon, J.E. 96, 100, 101 Hartley, Thomas 30
Gore, Charles 14, 211 Harvestime 227, 242
Gorham Judgement 8, 147 Haslam, William 6, 158, 159
Gosse, Edmund 128 Havergal, Frances 174
Gough, Prebendary A.W. 214 Haweis, Thomas 30
Gough, Hugh 257 Hawker, Robert 77, 86
Graduates’ Fellowship 257 Hay, Robert Wright 185
Graham, Billy 255–9, 257, 264 healmg, divine 90, 233, 238–2
Graham, Bishop John 106 Heath, Richard 15
Greaves, J. Clapham 153 Hellier, Benjamin 153
Green, Bryan 248 Henley, Lord 97
Green, Michael 255 Henry, Matthew 2
Greenbelt 260 Henry, Philip 34
Greenhough, J.G. 145 Henson, Bishop Hensley 234, 235, 236
Gregory, Benjamin 153 hermeneutics 140, 266
Grensted, L.W. 234, 235 Hervey, James 35, 44
Grimes, C. May 174 High Churchmen, High
Grimshaw, William 30, 43, 44 Churchmanship 1, 34, 35–8, 41, 52,
Groves, A.N. 93 64, 80, 93–7 118, 121, 123, 129,
Guest, Edwin 138 145–9, 158, 201–5.
Guinness, H. Grattan 159, 190, 223 See also Anglo-Catholics
Gurney, J.J. 154 Hill, Rowland 27, 74
Guthrie, William 42–4 Hinton, J.H. 7
Guttery, Arthur 134 Hoare, Louisa 128
Hoare, Canon Edward 176
Haffner, Dr 87 Hocking, Silas K. 130
Haldane, Alexander 83 Holden, Stuart 217, 220
Haldane, Robert 41, 76, 86–8, 88–89, holmess movement 150–80, 180, 184,
99, 186 190, 193–6, 225, 272
Halévy, Elie 52 Hopkins, Evan 167, 170, 179, 216
Hall, Bishop John 35 Horne, T.H. 86, 139
Hall, Robert 15, 66, 71, 72, 74, 138 Horneck, Anthony 35, 36
Hambleton, John 157 Horton, R.F. 8, 185
Hammond, Archdeacon T.C. 187, 250, house churches 227
258, 261 Howard, R.T. 217
Hankin, D.B. 165 Howden, J. Russell 220, 225
360 INDEX

Hughes, Hugh Price 134–6, 210, 213, Jews’ Society 76, 81–3, 138
214, 271 Johnson, Douglas 256, 257
Hunter, John 204 Jones, Bryn 227, 242, 243
Huntingdon, Countess of 12, 22, 28– Jones, Griffith 38
29, 30, 32, 41 Jones, J.D. 198, 219
Huntington, William 77 Jones, J. Ithel 257
Hutcheson, Francis 47, 49, 50, 59 Jones, Thomas 71
Hutchings, Eric 256 Joystrings 25
Hutchinsonianism 56 justification by faith 2, 6, 20–21, 29,
Huxley, T.H. 141, 206 35, 39, 62, 150, 157
hymns61, 66–8, 143, 154, 173, 174,
236, 244, 245, 253 Keble, John 83, 95
Keeble, S.E. 213
Icthus Fellowship 228 Keele Evangelical Anglican Congress,
Independent Labour Party 142, 197 1967, 14, 246–50, 253, 254, 258, 260,
Independents 11, 17, 20, 29, 31, 39, 40, 265, 266, 267
41, 63, 66. Kellett, F.W. 137
See also Congregationalists Kempis, Thomas a 36
Industrial Christian Fellowship 211 Kensit, John 146
Ingham, Benjamin 36 Keswick Convention 150–80, 180, 190,
Inglis, Sir Robert 100, 268 193, 194, 200, 207, 208, 212, 216–20,
Inskip, John S. 164 254–8, 261, 265, 270
International Christian Mission 184 Kilham, Alexander 28
International Hebrew Christian King, Bishop Edward 146
Alliance 223 Kingsley, Charles 143, 145
International Holiness Mission 177–9 Knibb, William 134
International Missionary Council 235 Knox, Bishop E.A. 199, 234
Inter-School Christian Fellowship 255 Knox, Ronald 128
Inter-Varsity Fellowship 15, 224, 250,
252, 256–61, 259, 260, 261, 263 Labour Party 142, 192, 211
Ireland 97, 100, 101, 134, 269 Lackington, James 21, 58
Ulster 115 Laing, John 257
Irving, Edward 75–7, 77–79, 80, 81, 82, Lancaster, Joseph 123
83, 85, 90, 91–3, 93, 94–6, 96, 99, Lang, L. Wyatt 234
100, 102, 103, 142, 182 Langston, E.L. 191, 198, 214, 216
Irvingites See Catholic Apostolic Lansbury, George 211
Church Lausanne Congress, 1974, 263, 269
Law, William 14, 29, 30, 37
Jackson, George 179, 193, 211, 215 Lee, Robert 147
James, John Angell 130 Lees, Sir Thomas and Lady 240, 242
Japan Evangelistic Band 194 Lenwood, Frank 199
Jay, William 7 Leverhulme, Lord 125
Jeffreys, George 195, 223 Liberal Christian League 197
Jeffreys, Stephen 195 Liberal Party 135, 136, 142, 212
Jenkins, Bishop David 252 Liberalism, theological 98, 99, 103
Jenkins, E.E. 177 Liberation Society 135
Jews 87, 126, 139, 223 Lidgett, J. Scott 14
 INDEX 361

Linner, Michael 44 McIntyre, Principal D.M. 187, 220–3,

literature 66–9, 129, 130 257
Litton, E.A. 139 McMurtrie, John 183
Lloyd-Jones, Martyn 258–2, 264 McNeile, Hugh 101
Locke, John 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 56, 58, Mellows, Frank 211
66, 72, 73, 142, 270 Mennonites 263
London Bible College 257 Methodist New Connexion 28, 163
London City Mission 98, 118, 222, 261 Methodist Revival Fellowship 227, 248
London Diocesan Home Mission 118 Methodist Sacramental Fellowship 203
London Institute for Contemporary Methodist Unitarians 52
Christianity 263 Methodists 2, 6, 7, 9, 20, 21, 23, 24–6,
London Missionary Society 41, 61, 65, 26–9, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40,
75–7, 78, 93 41, 44, 45, 49, 50, 51, 59, 62, 64, 65,
London University 99 67, 72, 100, 105, 107, 108, 111, 114,
Longford, Lord 262 115, 117, 118, 124, 125, 127, 130,
Lord’s Day Observance Society 208–11 144, 148, 161, 163, 164, 177, 179,
Lucas, Dick 255, 266 181, 184, 189, 196, 200, 208, 211,
Luther, Martin 37, 39, 188 213, 215, 219, 226, 226, 227, 236,
241, 244, 245, 248, 251, 267, 272
Machray, Robert 137 holiness teaching 26, 59, 152–5,
Maclaurin, John 13, 24, 32, 33, 59 163, 164, 168, 170–4, 177, 178,
Magee, Archbishop William 100 193–6, 200, 206, 214, 220.
Maguire, Frank 229 See also Bible Christians,
Mahan, Asa 163 Methodist New Connexion,
Mainstream 265 Primitive Methodists, Wesleyan
Maitland, S.R. 85 Methodists
Maltby, W. Russell 14, 200 Meyer, F.B. 147, 177, 184, 186, 195,
Manley, G.T. 187, 205, 216, 258 196, 220, 222
Manning, H.E. 8, 96 Micklem, Nathaniel 248
Mant, Richard 8 Mildmay Conference 158–61, 161, 163,
Marcham Manor Press 258 174, 190
Marsden, J.B. 139 Mill, J.S. 79, 105, 149, 166
Marsh, William 2, 100 millennialism 61, 91.
Martin, A.D. 196 See also postmillennialism,
Martin, W.J. 257 premillennialism
Martyn, Henry 85, 134, 137 Miller, Hugh 101
Mason, John 57 Miller, J.C. 136
Mather, Cotton 40 Miller, Isaac 138
Matheson, Scott 209 Miller, Joseph, ix, 2, 4, 21, 44, 51, 56,
Matlock Convention 194 64
Maurice, F.D. 14, 92, 95, 143, 144, 145, ministry 10, 95, 105–7, 130, 138, 140,
170, 210, 211, 269 145
Maxfield, Thomas 51 Missen, Alfred 228
Maynooth question 101 missionanes 11, 70, 132, 137, 178, 190
McAulay, Alexander 153 missions
McCaul, Alexander 138, 139 faith 93, 151, 178
McCree, G.W. 4 overseas 11, 39–2, 102, 118, 128,
158, 174, 223, 260, 269
362 INDEX

Missions to Seamen 119 Newton, Isaac 47, 49, 52, 56, 57, 60, 90,
Mitchell, Albert 199 142
Moderates, in Church of Scotland 32, Newton, John 26, 29, 60, 62, 72
53, 65, 66 Nichols, Beverley 233
Modern Churchmen’s Union 200, 249 Noble, John 227
Modernism Noel, Baptist 120, 161
cultural 230–5, 233, 234, 236, 237, Noel, G.T. 91
241, 245, 270, 272 Nonconformist Anti-Socialist Union
theological 179–2, 181, 200, 217, 213
218, 219, 220, 221, 230, 240, 273 Nonconformist Conscience 135, 211
Monier-Williams, Sir Monier 138 Nonconformists (or Free Churches)
Montgomery, James 166 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 114, 118,
Moody, D.L. 117, 161–4, 170, 173, 175, 118, 127, 129, 133, 135, 136, 137,
176 142, 143, 146, 147, 159, 175, 176,
Moore, John 234 183, 184, 196, 203–6, 210, 212–15,
Moorhouse, Henry 12, 160 253, 270.
Moral Re-Armament 237 See also Dissenters
Moravians 29, 36, 38–39, 40, 41, 44, Norris, John 37, 48
48, 51, 76 North, Brownlow 12, 117
More, Hannah 11, 24, 25, 68–69, 74, North, Wally 227
168 Northumberland, Seventh Duke of 103
Morgan, G. Campbell 209, 220 Nottingham Evangelical Anglican
Morgan, R.C. 115, 160, 161, 172, 185 Congress, 1977, 262, 264, 265, 266
Morgan, Thomas 31
Morley, Samuel 119 Oldham,J. H. 235
Morton, H.C. 189, 193, 206, 208, 222 Operation Mobilisation 255
Moule, Bishop Handley 166, 198 Orchard, W.E. 204
Mountain, James 217, 218, 222, 223 Orr, Edwin 115
Mudie-Smith, Richard 210 Orr, James 140
Muggeridge, Malcolm 262 Orthodoxy, Eastern 37, 239, 252
Müller, George 93, 151, 157 Overcomer League 177, 194
Murray, lain 261 Overseas Missionary Fellowship 255
Owen, John 53, 264
Nash, Eric 224 Oxford Conference of Evangelical
National Assembly of Evangelicals 261, Churchmen 219
264, 267 Oxford Group 232–42, 240, 242, 245
National Church League 220, 253 Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian
National Schools 123, 124 Union 178
National Secular Society 113 Oxford Movement 74, 95, 102, 105,
National Sunday School Union 269 135, 139, 147, 148, 158, 220
National Viewers’ and Listeners’
Association 261 Packer, J.I. 3, 252, 254, 258, 266
New Testament Church of God 259 Page, I.E. 153, 175, 177
New Theology controversy 196, 199, Palau, Luis 256
215, 217 Paley, William 58, 141
Newman, J.H. 95, 96, 98, 136, 139 Palmer, Phoebe 163–5, 166, 171
Palmerston, Lady 129
 INDEX 363

Palmerston, Lord 106 postmillenmalism 61–3, 80–2, 83, 189,

Pankhurst, Christabel 191 214, 261
Parker, Joseph 185 Powerscourt, Lady 85
Pascoe, W.G. 153 Prayer Book 203, 254, 266
Pathfinder Movement 255 revision 203, 220, 253, 254
Pattison family 66 Prayer Book and Homily Society 93
Payne, Ernest 248 prayer meetings 9, 114, 208, 260
Payne, Thomas 45 premillcnnialism 80–6, 87, 102, 103,
Peake, A.S. 184 129, 151, 178, 182, 189–4, 214–17,
Pearce, Bishop E.H. 201 220, 225, 252, 261, 271, 272
Pelham, Bishop J.T. 106 futurist 84–6, 190, 191–4
Penn-Lewis, Jessie 15, 174, 177, 194 histoncist 84, 88, 101, 190, 191, 192
Pennefather, William 158, 159, 160, Presbyterians
161, 162, 166, 176 English 17, 99, 243
Pentecostal Church of Scotland 178 Scottish 111, 177, 204, 208, 219,
Pentecostal League 172, 177–9, 194 226
Pentecostalists 178, 194–8, 226, 228, Priestley, Joseph 50
229, 243, 259, 267, 272 Primitive Methodists 25, 109–11, 114,
Perceval, Spencer 97 114–16, 117, 128, 131, 159
perfection 26, 152–4, 167, 170, 172 Proclamation Society 68
Perkins, William 42, 43 Procter, C.J. 197
Perks, R.W. 222 Prophecy Investigation Society 84, 190
permissive society 248, 260, 261 Protestant Association 101
Perry, Bishop Charles 137, 165, 169 Protestant Methodists 148
Perth Conference 160 Protestant Operative Society 101
Peto, Sir Morton 111 Protestant Reformation Society 100
pew rents 111 Protestant Truth Society 146, 219
philanthropy 69–1, 75, 104, 119–3, Puritan Conference 259, 264
128, 269. Puritans 17, 18, 34, 39, 42, 43, 45, 46,
See also social concern 54, 57, 59, 71, 73, 196
Philipps, Sir john 38 Pusey, E.B. 95, 96, 145
Philipps, Philip 173
Philips, Henry 31 Quakers 17, 70, 109, 126, 128, 154–7,
Philpotts, Bishop Henry 8, 148 158, 196
Pickering, Henry 186
Pierson, A.T. 170, 175 Radcliffe, Reginald 7, 161
Pietism, continental 38 Ragged Schools’ Union 123
Pigott, Jean Sophia 174 Raleigh, Alexander 7, 14, 143
Pilgrim Preachers 191 Ramsey, Archbishop Michael 14, 252
Pitt, William 70, 71 Ranyard, Mrs 118
Polhill, Cecil 195 Rattenbury, J.E. 15, 213
politics 71–4, 114–5, 131–7, 212–5, recreation 113, 129, 130–2, 151, 174–6,
262, 269 176, 207–11, 225
Poole-Connor, E.J. 218 Redpath, Alan 251
Pope, W.B. 15, 153 Rees, Tom 251
Popular party in Church of Scotland Reformed theology See Calvinism
65, 72
Post Green Community 240
364 INDEX

Regions Beyond Missionary Union Rowland, Daniel 19

223 Russell, G.W. E. 1
Reid, Gavin 260 Russian Missionary Society 223
Reid, Thomas 58, 142 Ryder, Bishop Henry 106
Relief Church 32, 41 Ryle, Herbert 217
religious census, 1851 10, 106–9, 109, Ryle, Bishop J.C. 1, 2, 146, 148, 163,
110 169, 170, 176, 186–9, 188
Religious Tract Society 68
Research Scientists’ Christian Salisbury, Lord 124, 273
Fellowship 257 Salt, Sir Titus 125
Restorationists 227–31, 229, 238, 240, Salvation Army 128, 150, 163–5, 172,
242, 243, 244, 245, 265, 267 173, 176, 177, 178, 206, 212, 232,
revivalism 7, 52, 54, 114–17, 160–4, 252, 260, 261, 272
173, 185 Sangster, W.E. 249
revivals 75, 271 1859–60 115–17 Sankey, I.D. 117, 161–3, 163, 173
Azusa Street, Los Angeles, 1905 Saunders, Dick 256
195 scholarship 136–41, 256–61
Cambuslang, 1742 19, 32, 33, 58, Scholefield, James 11, 97, 138
61, 122 science 49, 56, 58, 60, 90, 141, 205–9
East Anglia, 1921 191 Scofield Bible 190
Hebrides, 1950–2 251 Scott, A.J. 90, 92
Kilsyth, 1839 115 Scott, Thomas 14, 29, 56, 60, 61, 63,
Rwanda, 1930s 254 72, 82
Welsh, 1904–5 194 Scougal, Henry 37
Richard, Cliff 260 Scripture Readers’ Association 118
Richmond, Legh 114 Scripture Union 224, 255, 260
Ridgelands College 223 Scroggie, Graham, 220, 225
Riding Lights 241 Scupoli, Lorenzo 37
ritualism 94, 105, 145–7, 148, 201, 202, Seagrave, Richard 35
203 Secession Church 18, 20, 32–4, 54–6,
Rix, Wilton 204 61, 73, 110, 272
Roberts, Evan 194 second coming See adventism
Robinson, Bishop J.A. T. 252 Seeley, R.B. 97
Robinson, Robert 32 Selbie, W.B. 188–1
Rogers, Guy 202, 205, 211, 225 Seventh-Day Adventists 260
Rogers, Henry 142 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of 73
Romaine, William 30, 44, 56, 62 Shaftesbury, Seventh Earl of 1, 11, 83,
Roman Catholics 16, 39, 72, 100–2, 106, 119, 123, 129, 132, 133, 136,
102, 109, 133, 134, 170, 179, 192, 140, 143, 145, 149
226, 228, 240, 241, 244, 246, 249, Shaftesbury Project 263
252 Shaw, G. Bernard 15, 209
Romanticism 18, 67, 79–1, 83–5, 86, Sheppard, Bishop David 262, 266
90, 91, 92, 94, 102, 103, 143, 145, Shirley, Bishop W.A. 94, 95, 106
147, 151, 166–9, 169, 170, 171, 172, Short, A. Rendle 257
173, 174, 176, 178, 181, 183, 193, Sider, R.J. 262
196, 203, 210, 224, 230, 255, 269, Simeon, Charles 7, 12, 30, 31, 35, 57,
270, 272 64, 74, 77, 82, 85, 86, 138
Rosebery, Lord 135
 INDEX 365

Simeon Trust 10, 31, 107 Stephen, Leslie 149

Simon, D.W. 143 Stephens, James 70
Simson, John 50 Stewart, J. Haldane 75, 82
Sisters of the Jesus Way 241 Stickney, Sarah 130
Skrine, Clarmont 160 Still, William 259
Smail, Thomas 240 Stockmeyer, Pastor 175
Smiles, Samuel 120, 164–6 Stoddard, Solomon 46
Smith, George Adam 183 Stokes, G.G. 138
Smith, Hannah Pearsall 150, 154, 155, Storkey, Alan 263
156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, Storr, Canon Vernon 199, 200, 201,
169, 170 249
Smith, J. Pye 87, 88, 89, 138 Stott, John 3, 13, 244, 247, 249, 251,
Smith, Dean R. Payne 139 254, 255, 258, 263, 264, 266
Smith, Robert Pearsall 150, 154, 156, Stowell, Hugh 133
157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, Strachey, G. Lytton 149
164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169–1, 171, Strangers’ Friend Societies 70, 118
172, 175, 176, 177 Stride, Eddy 261
Smith, Bishop Taylor 223 Student Christian Movement 186, 218,
Smith, William 99 250, 256
Smith, William Robertson 138, 182–5, Press 181, 258
272 Student Volunteer Movement for
Smith, Archbishop William Saumarez Foreign Missions 128, 190
137 Sudan United Mission 223
Smithies, T.B. 159 Sumner, Bishop C.R. 10, 106, 118
smoking 175, 235, 260 Sumner, Archbishop J.B. 8, 106, 120,
Snell, Bernard 197 138
social concern 68–71, 102, 132, 246, Sunday observance 104, 105, 126, 128,
260–7. 131, 134, 208–11, 212, 235, 241, 262
See also philanthropy and social Sunday Schools 68, 122–4, 128, 247
gospel surplices 148, 201
social gospel 180, 209–17, 261, 271 Sutcliff, John 61
socialism 142, 210, 213
Society of Friends See Quakers Tait, A.C. 118
Socinianism 3, 50, 52, 73, 99 Tatlow, Tissington 186
Sojourners’ Community 263 Tawney, R.H. 211
Soper, Donald 199 Taylor, Dan 26, 32
Southport Convention 177, 193 Taylor, J. Hudson 93, 151, 223
Spencer, Herbert 141, 205 Taylor, Jeremy 36, 37, 47
Spener, Philip 38 Taylor, Michael 252
sport 113, 130–2, 151, 180, 208 Tearcraft 262
Spring Harvest 244 Tell Scotland 250
Spurgeon, C.H. 8, 13, 144–6, 147, 151, temperance 105, 113, 126, 127, 131,
175, 177, 184, 185, 205 133–5, 135, 175, 212
Spurgeon’s College 219, 265 Temple, William 211, 212
Spurr, F.C. 217 Test and Corporation Acts 97
Staniforth, Sampson 4 theatre 66, 127, 129–1, 131, 180, 207,
Steadman, William 89 208, 235, 241, 260
Stephen, George 132
366 INDEX

Thelwall, A.S. 93 Waldegrave, Bishop Samuel 84, 102,

Thiselton, Tony 266 139, 147, 148
Thomas, David 15, 129 Walker, Bishop James 8
Thomas, W.H. Griffith 187 Walker, Samuel 23, 30, 31, 40, 44, 51,
Thompson, Bishop J. Denton 201, 210 53, 56, 59, 65
Thomson, D.P. 250 Waller, C.M. 185
Thomson, George 29 Wallis, Arthur 227, 241, 242, 244
Thornton, Henry 128 Wallis, Jim 263
Thornton, Spencer 10 Warburton, John 55
Tidsall, W. St Clair 206 Warfield, B.B. 187, 272
Tindall, W.H. 177 Warren, Max 3, 6, 248, 250
Toland, John 50 Watson, David 240, 241, 253, 265
tongues, speaking in 78, 90, 194–7, Watts, Isaac ix, 53, 66
226, 228, 230, 238 Watts-Ditchfield, Bishop J.E. 179, 211,
Toplady, Augustus 27 217
Tories 71, 72 Way, Lewis, 81–3, 87
Torrance, T.F. 252 Weatherhead, Leslie 199, 234
Traidcraft 262 Weaver, Richard 117, 173
Transcendentalism 166 Webb-Peploe, Prebendary H.W. 167,
Trevecca College 28, 38, 68 172, 179, 213
Trudinger, Ron 242 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
Tuckwell, John 185 253
Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical Wenham, J.W. 250, 260
Research 257 Wesley Bible Union 180, 206, 208, 215,
Tyndale House, Cambridge 257 216, 222, 223, 226
Wesley, Charles 11, 26, 37, 38, 44, 49,
Union of Modern Free Churchmen 249 52, 66–8
Unitarians 17, 26, 52, 73, 99, 109, 166, Wesley, John 2, 6, 10, 11, 13, 19, 21,
268 22, 23, 24, 25, 26–8, 28, 29, 30, 34,
United Kingdom Alliance 105, 135 36–8, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 47–49, 50–2,
United Presbyterians 107, 129, 136 52, 53, 56–8, 59, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69,
United Reformed Church 243 71, 72, 73, 115, 152, 167, 169, 171,
Universities and Colleges Christian 172, 272
Fellowship 256–60 Wesley, Samuel 66
Wesley, Susanna 34, 37
Varsities and Public School Camps 224 Wesleyan Methodist Missionary
Vaughan, Robert 138 Society 41, 137, 152
Venn, Henry, 1725–97 6, 9, 12, 15, 20– Weslcyan Methodists 70–2, 114, 123,
2, 30, 31, 44, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62 124,
Venn, Henry, 1796–1873 1, 129, 130 Western Schism 77
Venn, John 61, 122, 129 Westminster Confession 17, 43, 54,
Victoria Institute 258 272
Villiers, Bishop H.M. 84, 106 Westminster Fellowship 264
Vine, W.E. 187 Weymouth, R.F. 137
Whigs 71, 72, 97
Wace, Dean Henry 187–90, 198, 202– Whinney, Bishop Michael 243
5, 204 White, Edward 144
 INDEX 367

Whitefield, George 19, 22, 28, 29, 31, Young Men’s Christian Association
32, 33, 38, 45, 53, 54, 65, 69, 73 119, 186
Whitehouse, Mary 261 Young Women’s Christian Association
Wigram, Bishop J.C. 106, 130 128–186
Wilberforce, William 11, 16, 24, 57, 59,
60, 68, 70, 74, 96, 99, 129, 270 Zinzendorf, Nicholas von 38, 40, 44
Wilkerson, David 228
Wilkes, A. Paget 194
Wilkinson, G.H. 147
Williams, D.P. 195
Williams, Edward 64
Williams, Fleming 209
Williams, Geoffrey 259
Williams, Bishop R.R. 249–3
Williams, T. Rhondda 197
Williams, T. Nefyn 218
Willison, John 43
Wilson, Bishop Daniel 86, 146
Wilson, Robert 156
Wimber, John 229
Winterbotham, William 71
Witherspoon, John 53, 57, 58, 66, 71,
72
Wollaston, Francis 138
Women 24–6, 127–9
ministry of 25, 64, 117, 118, 128, 160,
174, 204–7, 266
Wood, Arthur 224
Wood, Frederick 224
Wood, Maurice 247, 251
Woods, Bishop E.S. 209
Woods, G.H. 223
Woolf, Virginia 149, 231
Wordsworth, William 66, 79, 80, 143,
166, 176, 181, 196
working classes 24, 109–14, 117, 123,
125–7, 127, 129, 142, 151, 176, 243,
256, 269
World Council of Churches 241, 252,
263
Wright, J. Stafford 251
Wycliffe Preachers 219

Yates, Richard 75
Yoder, J.H. 263
Young, Dinsdale 185, 193, 223
Young Life Campaign 223