Religion

Leonard W. Cowie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351620277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This title, first published in 1973, uses contemporary documents to explore religion in the nineteenth-century. The text examines the evidence of various Christian denominations, including Evangelicalism, Roman Catholicism and the Christian Socialists, and explores various historical issues. This title will be of interest to students of both history and religion.

Introduction

The nineteenth century was a strongly religious age in England. As on the Continent, there was a revival of religion in the years after 1815 which gave the century its fundamental aspect. Nevertheless, the opening years of the period hardly suggested that the English people as a whole were likely to become religious. Christianity was established in the form of the Church of England, but about a quarter of the people were Nonconformists, estranged from the Church of England and often bitterly hostile to it, while the Church itself was crippled by serious weaknesses and abuses. The Church of England was bound to be of key importance in any religious revival. Its recovery was essential, and yet the situation was confused and uncertain and seemed to have been made yet more so by the effects in England of the French Revolution.

The outbreak of the French Revolution, though at first hailed with joy by some in England, soon aroused dread and dismay among the upper, governing classes. The most influential denunciation of the revolutionaries was Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790. To him the Revolution was a threat, not only to political stability and public order, but also to the place of the Christian religion in society. He appealed to the tradition, rooted in Medieval Christendom, which regarded Church and State as an inseparable, united entity, settled and sanctioned in the law of England:

The English people do not consider their church establishment as convenient, but as essential to their state; not as a thing heterogeneous and separable; something added for accommodation; that they may either keep or lay aside, according to their temporary ideas of convenience. They consider it as the foundation of their whole constitution, with which, and with every part of which, it holds an indissoluble union. Church and state are ideas inseparable in their minds, and scarcely is the one ever mentioned without mentioning the other.

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1852 ed.), 80.

This conception was still held by many churchmen, and it was to be given fresh expression by the first Tractarians; but it was entirely unacceptable to the Nonconformist bodies, who not only opposed the Church of England on matters of faith and organization, but also resented the privileges which they considered it enjoyed unfairly through its established position. They now largely had freedom in the exercise of their religion, but were subject to a number of objectionable restrictions on their activities as citizens. Though the seventeenth-century Test and Corporation Acts,* designed to exclude them from governmental and administrative office, had ceased to affect them in practice, they were excluded from Oxford and Cambridge, had to pay Church Rates* and could not use their own marriage and burial services. Joseph Priestley, the theologian and scientist, expressed the Nonconformist outlook in a reply to Burke:

The church of Christ is built upon a rock, and we are assured that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Now, had this church of yours, whose fears and cries have always been the signal of alarm to all its neighbours, been made of proper materials, and constructed in a proper manner, had it been built upon this rock of truth, it would never have had anything to fear... Should the state itself be overturned, the people would, of themselves, and from predilection, reinstate their favourite church in all its former rights and privileges. But you are sensible it has not this hold on the minds of the people, and you justly suspect, that, if any misfortune should happen to it, they would never rebuild it, but, if left to their own free choice, would adopt some other plan, more useful and commodious.

Joseph Priestley, Letters to Burke (1791), 113–14.

It seemed, therefore, that there was very serious opposition to the revival of the idea of the Church of England as a national Church. Nor was this only because of the expressed opposition of the Nonconformists. History had deprived the Church of England of popular support in both country and town. In the countryside it had long been associated with the squires and the wealthy farmers, and the clergy identified themselves with this class and accepted the deep-rooted contemporary social order. Joseph Arch, later to be the pioneer of trade unionism among the agricultural labourers, recalled how this was so during the 1830s in the Warwickshire village of Barford where he spent his childhood. His father was an agricultural labourer, and the practice which Joseph Arch described was fairly common in rural churches at this time. In some villages the communion of those who went up to the altar first was called the ‘First Table’ and of those who followed the ‘Second Table’. Anyone bold enough to go up before those of the rest of his class would have to face general disapproval:

I never took the Communion in my parish church in my life. When I was seven years old I saw something which prevented me once for all. One Sunday my father was going to stop to take the Communion, and I, being a boy, had of course to go out before it began. I may here mention that the church opened then in a direct line with the chancel and the main aisle, so that anyone looking through the keyhole could easily see what was going on inside. The door is now to the side of the church and out of direct line with the chancel. I was a little bit of a fellow and curious. I said to myself, ‘What does father stop behind for? What is it they do? I’ll see.’ So I went out of the church, closed the door, placed my eye at the keyhole and peeped through, and what I saw will be engraved on my mind until the last day of my life. That sight caused a wound which has never been healed. My proud little spirit smarted and burned when I saw what happened at the Communion service.

First up walked the squire to the communion rails; the farmers went up next; then up went the tradesmen, the shopkeepers, the wheelwright and the blacksmith; and then, the very last of all, went the poor agricultural labourers in their smock frocks. They walked up by themselves; nobody else knelt with them; it was as if they were unclean—and at that sight the iron entered straight into my poor little heart and remained fast embedded there. I said to myself, ‘If that’s what goes on—never for me!’ I ran home and told my mother what I had seen, and I wanted to know why my father was not as good in the eyes of God as the squire, and why the poor should be forced to come up last of all to the table of the Lord. My mother gloried in my spirit.

Joseph Arch, The Story of his Life Told by Himself (ed. Frances, Countess of Warwick, 2nd ed., 1898), 19–20.

In the towns and especially in the new industrial areas, Methodism was firmly rooted. John Wesley had thought of his movement as seeking ‘to reform the nation, more particularly the Church, and to spread Scriptural holiness over the land’. It developed into a popular Christianity such as had never been known in England, at any rate since the Middle Ages. He had not intended that his followers should leave the Church of England, but his ways were not those of the established religion, and formal separation came soon after his death in 1791. By 1815 there were some 200,000 Methodists in England, most of whom were to be found among the lower classes and (although village preaching was now gaining adherents in the countryside) mostly in the urban areas. Here they had established themselves where the Church had failed to evangelize successfully and had provided religious care for thousands who had not known it before. In most large towns their chapels outnumbered the parish churches, and their worshippers were more numerous. Their religious outlook and practices often became accepted by the people in these places as the recognized expression of religion and exercised an influence even on the Anglican clergy.

In 1837, W. F. Hook went to be Vicar of Leeds, then a busy town of 88,000 people, mostly engaged in the woollen industry. After he had been there for four months, he depicted in a letter the religious situation as he found it there and the general reaction to his determination to establish the services of the parish church according to the principles which Tractarianism was now spreading among the clergy:

As to religion, the traditional or established religion in Leeds is Methodism; and consequently, as is natural, since we breathe a Methodistic atmosphere, everything has a Methodistic tendency. A pious Churchman here means a person who likes an establishment and consequently supports the Church; but then the Church is not sufficient to supply his wants; so that he probably institutes two or three prayer-meetings in some large house or warehouse, where he can indulge in extemporaneous prayer and Methodistic rant. Nor do the people venture to entertain a notion that the Church is right; their mode of defence is to show that it is not so very wrong that it is sinful to belong to it; they do therefore belong to it, looking forward to the day when it will be reformed, i.e. brought down to the state of some Methodistic sect Even many of the clergy, without knowing it, shape their doctrines and style of preaching according to the Methodistic system; and those who are not humdrum, labour not to instruct, but to excite. Then I have, to meet all this, a dirty, ugly hole of a church, in which it is impossible to perform divine service properly; the chancel, for example, being formed into an almost distinct church, and the body of the church being arranged to look as near as possible like a conventicle; which same ugly old church is located in the very St Giles’s of Leeds. I am now preparing a plan for pulling the church half down and rebuilding it; but this will cost between three and four thousand pounds, and I fear to start the subscription now while trade is so bad. I am starting up the clergy by insisting upon the strictest rubrical observance in all the occasional services—baptisms, marriages and funerals. Nobody here seems to have a noting that baptism is anything more than a form of registration; I think it is my duty therefore to have it always administered with peculiar solemnity. They do stare sometimes when I tell them that before administering the Sacrament, I require them to attend the prayers of the Church and pray with me: they think by the Sacrament I must needs mean the Lord’s Supper.

W. R. W. Stephens, The Life and Letters of Walter Farquhar Hook (2 vols, 1879), I, 408–9.

Anglican reform as represented by Hook was, however, only slowly manifesting itself in 1815. On the whole, the Church seemed to be showing little capacity to adapt itself to meet the problems and challenges of the new century. It was conservative in outlook and hostile or indifferent to ideas of change or initiative. The rational, sceptical intellectual atmosphere of the eighteenth century had had a deadening influence upon it. It had become a Church in which ‘enthusiasm’ was equated with fanaticism or bigotry and greater importance was attached to ethical and moral precepts than to matters of belief or worship.

In fact, the French Revolution, which in England strengthened the ties between Church and State, at first delayed the coming of reform. Churchmen feared that the ideas of the Revolution were dangerously hostile to the Christian religion and its institutions. Tom Paine, who wrote The Rights of Man in 1791 in answer to Burke’s Reflections, was an avowed republican and was widely regarded as an infamous infidel. Bishops and divines insisted in their sermons upon the inevitable connection of democratic principles and foreign subversion with irreligión and blasphemy. To cling to the existing order in Church and State seemed to them to be the only way of preserving the religion they were bound to defend.

The outlook of the Church of England at this time has been well expressed by J. A. Froude, the historian, whose father, as Archdeacon of Totnes in the years after the Napoleonic War, was typical among the clergy in upholding the Church ‘as part of the constitution’ and respecting the bishops as national authorities:

The French Revolution had frightened all classes out of advanced ways of thinking, and society in town and country was Tory in politics and determined to allow no innovations upon the inherited faith. It was orthodox without being theological. Doctrinal problems were little thought of. Religion, as taught in the Church of England, meant moral obedience to the will of God. The speculative part of it was accepted because it was assumed to be true. The creeds were reverentially repeated; but the essential thing was practice. People went to church on Sunday to learn to be good, to hear the commandments repeated to them for the thousandth time and to see them written in gilt letters over the communiontable. About the power of the keys, the real presence or the metaphysics of doctrine, no one was anxious, for no one thought about them. It was not worth while to waste time on questions which had no bearing on conduct and could be satisfactorily disposed of only by sensible indifference.

J. A. Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects (4 vols, 1886), IV, 239f.

Such a spirit of conservatism and fear of innovation ignored the vital need for reform in the Church. The English Reformation of the sixteenth century had changed its doctrine and worship, but left its weaknesses of organization unrelieved. Many medieval abuses were still prevalent One third of the clergy were pluralists;* even more of them were non-resident.* Sometimes parishes were completely without a resident clergyman, the duties of the absent incumbent being performed by the neighbouring clergy or by a curate who came into the parish to take the services. Other such parishes were served by a resident curate, but he might receive only a pittance by way of payment from the incumbent whose job he was doing. There were mitigating circumstances on the side of absenteeism and pluralism. The endowment of the parishes was very uneven. Sometimes it was so small that an incumbent had to hold more than one parish in order to have an income on which he could live. Again, there were no clerical pensions or provision for illness, so that an aged or sick incumbent could only pay someone else to do his duty. Yet, the fact remained that most of the pluralists were not poor—their combined parishes were good ones and brought them very ample incomes; and most of the non-resident clergy were not incapacitated—they merely preferred to live in more pleasant parts of the country or even on the Continent.

The memories of S. Baring Gould, who was born in 1834 and spent his boyhood in Devonshire, describe vividly what these abuses could mean, especially in the more remote parts of the country, where change was slow:

The parish of Lydford, the largest in England, comprising 50,751 acres— mostly indeed Dartmoor, but yet with Princetown in numbering a considerable population, and Lydford itself, distant from Princetown nearly fifteen miles by road, was held for a great many years by the Revd Dr Fletcher. This Fletcher was also Rector of Southill in Cornwall, one of the richest livings in the county, worth £594 per annum—twenty-five miles from Lydford, he held this with the church and rectory situated three miles from the town of Callington, also in the parish. For many years I knew the successive curates of Lydford, but never heard of Dr Fletcher visiting the place to take duty in it. The chancel roof was in holes, and on one Christmas Day the holy table was spread with a covering of snow. In my own parish, the Rector, Mr Elford, was non-resident. He lived nine miles off, at Tavistock. When the Bishop demurred to this, ‘How can I live,’ said he, ‘in a place where there is no barber to trim my wig?’ And this was accepted as sufficient excuse. From 1795 to 1811 Elford held as well the curacy of Coryton, under the Revd R. V. Willesford, who was a pluralist Rector. This man was also Vicar of Brentnor, Vicar of Awelscombe, near Honiton, Curate of Tavistock and Headmaster of Tavistock Grammar School from 1795 to 1821.

S. Baring Gould, Church Revival (1914), 127–18.

The main reason for these abuses in the Church was that it still possessed no central administrative body. Queen Anne’s Bounty distributed to the poorest parishes certain crown revenues, which had originally been diverted from the Church at the Reformation and were restored by Queen Anne, but there was no other way of making any redistribution of the Church’s income. Since the early eighteenth century, the Convocations of Canterbury and York, the ancient assemblies of the clergy, had been forbidden to transact business. Even the creation of a new parish required a separate Act of Parliament. The outward signs of such a situation were to be seen not only in the parishes, but in the cathedrals and great town churches as well. Anthony Trollope wrote in The Warden of the impression made upon the Revd Septimus Harding when, during his brief visit to London, he attended Matins at Westminster Abbey:

The minor canon * hurried in, somewhat late, in a surplice not in the neatest order, and was followed by a dozen choristers, who were also not as trim as they might have been: they all jostled into their places with a quick hurried step, and the service was soon commenced. Soon commenced and soon over, for there was no music, and time was not unnecessarily lost in the c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Evangelicals
• 3 The Reformers
• 4 The Tractarians
• 5 The Ritualists
• 6 The Sisterhoods and the Slums
• 7 The Roman Catholics
• 8 The Nonconformists
• 9 The Broad Churchmen
• 10 The Christian Socialists
• 11 The Missionaries
• 12 Conclusion
• Glossary
• Books for further reading
• Index