I. INTRODUCTION#

By the 1850s the British economy was thriving. Britain was the leading industrial power and trading nation, controlling 25 percent of the world’s commerce. British soldiers, governmental officers, and merchants were hoisting the Union Jack flag in new territories. Britain’s Royal Navy was second to none on the high seas. British missionaries were taking the gospel to “heathen peoples” and promoting the values of “Christian” civilized Europe.

The English and Irish population grew from 20.9 million in 1821 to 27.4 million in 1851, despite the tragic loss of life during the Irish Potato Famine (about 1 million) and massive Irish emigrations (2.5 million). The Welsh population numbered about 700,000 in 1821. The Scottish population expanded from 1.6 million in 1801 to 3.2 million in 1861.

The English monarchy and Parliament constituted key institutions at the hub of political life of the “four nations” in the British Isles (England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland). The governance of the four nations from London, however, sometimes proved to be a difficult and onerous task. The peoples did not all share identical “national” (or “regional”) histories, nor have access to equal economic opportunities, nor enjoy a common religious, ethnic, and linguistic heritage. Even within the “nations,” local ethnic groups and dialects existed. Appeals to disestablish the Church of England could inflame religious and political discourse.

The largest Christian bodies:

• In England, the Anglicans (established Church of England), Dissenters, and Roman Catholics

• In Scotland, the Church of Scotland, other Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics

• In Wales, Anglicans and Non-Conformist Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists

• In Ireland, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Presbyterians.

English was increasingly used as the common linguistic coin of the realm, but Irish, Gaelic, and Welsh survived.

This social and religious diversity characterized in part the “nineteenth century” — a term remarkably made popular by the poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson. Later generations of historians have sometimes preferred to use the expression a “long nineteenth century,” dating the period from 1789 to 1914 or even from 1750 to 1950. Writing from a world history perspective, Edmund Burke III proposed that the “long” version was characterized by diverse “crises” such as

1. a long-term global crisis that ran through the late eighteenth century and permitted the rise of Britain as an empire builder

2. a crisis of the years 1848–63, marked by the revolutions of 1848

3. the Irish Potato Famine (1845–52)

4. the Taiping Rebellion in China (1850–64), in which 20 million people died

5. the Crimean War (1853–56), with Russia fighting against Turkey, England, France, and Sardinia

6. the American Civil War (1861–65) — the bloodiest war in U.S. history, measured by the percentage of deaths to total population.

In the late nineteenth century, competition for empire building heated up among the European powers. Commentators sometimes labeled these acquisitive efforts as imperialism or colonization. The word imperialism (1870) could mean the extension of a state’s control by the acquisition (often forced) and political and economic subjugation of lands outside a nation’s borders. Colonization could mean the settling and establishment of governance of those same acquired areas.

II. BRITAIN’S DOMINANCE AS AN EMPIRE BUILDER#

The defeat of Emperor Napoleon in 1815 signaled the end of the first French Empire. Despite the worrisome loss of the thirteen American colonies during the American Revolution (1775–83), Britain had replaced France as the dominant overseas empire builder and colonizer by the last third of the eighteenth century.

Three kings and one queen ruled over the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Hanover during its greatest empire years: George III (1760–1820), George IV (1820–30), William IV (1830–37), and Queen Victoria (1837–1901). The kings were not especially auspicious monarchs.

George III, the grandson of George II, is often remembered for two things: presiding over the loss of the American British colonies, and eventually going “mad” due to porphyria, a hereditary disease. He was at times mentally confused and at one point adjudged insane, and by 1810 he was incapable of ruling. This led to his son’s presiding as “regent” until George III died in 1820.

During the regency, George IV, the Prince of Wales and a convinced Protestant, was reluctant to allow Roman Catholics greater liberties. He was pleased that the English people customarily read Bibles in their cottages. Despite his religiousness and being initially a favorite in high society, however, George IV, nicknamed “Prinny,” became a royal embarrassment.

In 1785 George IV had secretly married a Catholic widow, a union that would in principle disqualify him from ever becoming king due to the Royal Marriage Act of 1772. The marriage was later judged invalid. In 1795 he acceded to pressure and married Caroline of Brunswick, whom he later tried to divorce.

George IV’s successor, King William IV, served in the navy. He lived with an actress, Dorothea Bland (stage name, Mrs. Jordan), who bore ten of his children out of wedlock. Then he married Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen. In 1830 he became king. He helped force the Reform Act of 1832 through Parliament. The act doubled the number of voters to one million (often landowners).

Queen Alexandrina Victoria (1819–1901), nicknamed “Drinny,” was small in physical stature, but large in heart. More than her three male predecessors, she witnessed the extraordinary expansion of the British Empire. Only eighteen years old when she became queen in 1837, she resolved to serve England well.

In 1840 Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1819–61), a man of great culture. The couple had nine children. When Albert, her consort, died in 1861, Victoria was overcome by grief. For ten years she went into mourning and became known as “the Widow of Windsor.”

Toward the last third of her reign, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli helped arrange for her to acquire the title Empress of India (1877–1901). In the years 1887 and 1897 (her fiftieth Golden Jubilee and sixtieth Diamond Jubilee), the British celebrated Victoria’s remarkably long reign. They feted both their queen and their great empire. A few commentators compared the British Empire favorably to the vastness and power of the Roman Empire. Some claimed the sun never set on the British Empire, so widely scattered were its territories.

In the preceding eighteenth century, England’s future as an aggressive empire builder had appeared much less likely. By 1763 England had wrested “New France” in North America (in eastern Canada) and portions of India from the French during the Seven Years War (1756–63; in North America, the French Indian War, 1754–63). She also governed the West Indies, the thirteen British colonies in North America, other portions of Canada, and South Africa and supported additional outposts throughout the world.

Nonetheless, critics questioned whether England, despite her formidable navy, could rule her colonies effectively from a distance of thousands of miles. The ensuing loss of the thirteen British colonies during the American Revolutionary War (1775–83) confirmed this premonition.

Worries about colonial rule did not hinder William Carey who in 1792 boldly set sail for Calcutta, India, as a Protestant missionary. Nor did they keep the Scottish Protestant missionary Robert Morrison from heading to China via New York in 1807.

Some observers thought the early nineteenth-century missionary movement with its intention of bringing the gospel of Christ to the “heathen” might simultaneously project the political power of England. Others heartily disagreed. In the Edinburgh Review (1808), Sydney Smith argued that missionaries like Carey were “insane” and “ungovernable” and might thwart English empire building in India. He indicated that the “wise and rational part of Christians” understood they had “enough to do at home.”

Historian Duncan Bell points out that the advent of steamship technology (perfected by Robert Fulton in the Clermont in 1807) and the telegraph system (perfected by Samuel Morse in 1844) began to “dissolve distance” and make missionary undertakings and renewed empire building more manageable.

Especially after 1870, a second wave of European colonization gathered momentum. Europeans—with the English, French, and Italians leading the way —continued to acquire colonies throughout the world, especially in Africa and Asia. In the 1880s Germany belatedly entered the “scramble” for empire in Africa. For their part, the Russian government continued to expand its rule in the steppe regions and elsewhere, but it did sell Alaska to the United States in 1867. By contrast, the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire suffered substantial territorial losses.

In 1900 contemporaries estimated that England’s extensive empire encompassed a quarter of the world’s landmass and nearly 400 million people. Yet the statisticians apparently did not include women in this figure. England’s “colonies,” “protectorates,” and “dominions” and other territories stretched around the world. They included among others, the West Indies, Gibraltar, Australia, New Zealand, Burma, British India, Egypt, Canada, and vast portions of eastern, western, and southern Africa.

A. Western “Christian” Civilization#

Along with other countries, the British entertained a conviction that western Europe’s Christian nations were in fact the most powerful in military might, economics, and political institutions and that a Christian civilization is intellectually, morally, and religiously superior to non-Christian cultures.

Many British appeared to believe sincerely that the essential goal of empire building was an altruistic one. As Christians they had the obligation to spread the gospel and Christian civilization, to evidence the love of Christ in compassionate deeds, and to “reform” the morals of the “heathen.” Hundreds of missionaries mainly from artisan economic classes departed for “heathen” lands. Some were willing to sacrifice their lives, not thinking this cost too exorbitant for a disciple of Christ.

At a meeting with students at Cambridge University, Scotsman David Livingstone (1813–63), in describing his own danger-laden missionary efforts in Africa, declared, “I never made a sacrifice. Of this we ought never to talk, when we remember the great sacrifice which He made Who left His Father’s throne on high to give Himself for us.”

In the early nineteenth century a debate ensued in both Scotland and England regarding the priority issue: Does “civilizing” come before “evangelizing,” or should the reverse be the case?

As their armies and navies, businesspeople, and missionaries crisscrossed the world reinforcing colonial expansion, some British and Europeans on the Continent believed it was “the white man’s burden” to bring Christian civilization to non-Christian peoples throughout the world.

Both Europeans and Americans sometimes viewed with condescension and disdain the race, customs, and civilizations of the peoples they encountered or forced to submit to their colonial control.

Some began to turn away from describing Europe in the older tripartite manner of north, middle, and south. Rather they spoke of “western Europe” as a whole. By the 1820s, several cartographers began to distinguish the “civilized peoples” of “western Europe” from the peoples of “eastern Europe” (the Slavs and the Russians), stereotyping them as barbarous and despotic.

B. The Perilous Lives of the Poor#

With notable increases in industrial productivity and scientific innovations and the perception of enhanced quality of university academic life after the 1850s, empire-building countries such as England, France, and Germany became the envy of many throughout the world. Yet large numbers of Europeans did not benefit from these advances. Surviving the challenges of daily life constituted their chief preoccupation.

This was particularly the experience of the politically voiceless masses — the urban and country poor and destitute, who remained generally neglected and sometimes despised by members of the middle and upper classes. Often owners of workshops, factories, and mines paid paltry sums, thereby forcing workers to live in “row houses,” bleak tenements, attics, and cellars. Suffering from grinding poverty, these people were sometimes called “white wage slaves.”

In the nineteenth century the poor of the English countryside in large numbers poured into the cities in search of work. It has been estimated that in 1800, 20 percent of the population resided in cities; by 1900, 75–80 percent. In 1800 London had a population of nearly 1 million; in 1900, it was 6.5 to 6.7 million.

Friedrich Engels, author of The Conditions of the Working Class in England (1844), characterized the working districts of Manchester, England’s most notable industrial city, as subject to “filth, ruination and uninhabitableness.” A large percentage of Manchester’s workers died by the age of twenty. In 1840 the English average age of death was 39.5 years for men and 42.7 years for women. Mortality rates were high in other parts of Europe.

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 had forced indigent paupers (the infirm, older people, and children) to live and work for menial wages in regimented “poorhouses,” where most died and exited unmourned in plain wooden coffins. In “A Walk in a Workhouse”, Charles Dickens (1812–70) described in graphic detail the pitiful struggle for survival he had witnessed within the somber walls of a poorhouse.

Some commentators did lament the huge discrepancies that existed between the living standards of the poor and the middle and upper classes. Evangelizing, educating, and caring for the physical needs of these people, especially the very poor, were daunting tasks for the churches.

• In 1835 David Nasmith (1799–1839) founded the London City Mission, intended to extend “the knowledge of the Gospel among the poor.”

• Anglicans and Dissenters supported the mission.

• “Bible Women” distributed Bibles among the very poor for a shilling a piece.

By contrast, on occasion members of the upper classes frequented slums for another reason: to seek out the services of prostitutes.

The causes for the social agitation and suffering of Europeans were multiple:

• Dramatic inequalities of income between social classes

• The turmoil associated with riots, revolts, and revolutions

• The struggles to win universal suffrage

• The difficulties of organizing labor unions

• Labor strikes

• The exploitation of workers including women and children

• The displacement of families from the countryside to harsh tenement life in overcrowded cities

• Sparse or deficient diets

• The outbreak of virulent diseases, such as cholera, typhus, and influenza

Rounds of violence occurred in Manchester at the so-called Peterloo Massacre in 1819, the Captain Swing riots in 1830–31, and more riots in 1842.

In Britain, gender bias was flagrant as women workers generally received a quarter of what men earned for similar work. Women sometimes turned to prostitution to earn money for the care of their children. Alternatively, women and children, sometimes half naked, worked long hours for pittances in dank and dangerous coal mines.

In 1842 Anthony Cooper, Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (1801–1885), a dedicated Christian, helped pass the Mines Act in Parliament that largely stopped this form of exploitation. Earlier, in 1833, the government had issued the British Factory Act, which stipulated that children aged thirteen to eighteen should not work more than twelve hours a day and children nine to thirteen no more than nine hours a day.

In 1848 the Queen’s College for Women was established in London.

C. The Emergence of the “Modern State”#

Whatever their circumstances, many citizens in the wake of the French Revolution found their lives affected by a new political and desacralized entity, sometimes called the “modern state.” Its sanction was often a democratic constitution and not a religious warrant such as divine right.

This “state” began to keep civil records of births (instead of baptisms), marriages, and deaths, often taking over that function from the clergy. This was promoted in England and Wales with the Registration Act and the Marriage Act of 1836. Ministers could register non-Anglican Christian marriages with the government. State bureaucracies strengthened social infrastructures by providing postmen, police, and eventually schoolteachers. The state could levy taxes.

In some states, national unity was anchored, not in religious or dynastic loyalties to a prince, but in the use of a common language or in ethnic identity. In other states, nationhood was constructed from a “democratic” base of those who possessed the prerequisite qualifications to vote (male gender, wealth including property). During the Napoleonic era, however, some revolutionaries were spurred on by the vision of reestablishing a Catholic monarchy in Spain.

Other revolutionaries of the nineteenth century —such as the Italian Guiseppe Garibaldi, a fierce anticlerical foe of the Papal States—sought to “liberate” their peoples from foreign powers and unify them on the basis of a democratic constitution.

D. Religious Currents in British Life 1789–1837#

England was not unaffected by political developments and intellectual and religious movements taking place on the Continent between the years 1789 and 1837, that is, an era beginning with the French Revolution and culminating with the last year of the British “Hanoverian Age.”

The campaign to “restore” and bring stability to the life of the Christian churches during and after the French Revolution, the enormous energies devoted to Christian missions, and the spiritual revivals that affected France, Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia seemed to suggest that Christianity would remain the principal religion on the Continent into the foreseeable future. The Christian faith appeared firmly rooted in the British Isles as well.

Neither the anti-Christian writings of the philosophes nor the “dechristianization” campaign of the French Revolution had completely subverted the Christian religion’s pivotal role in defining European culture. In the 1790s, most Europeans still thought in categories informed in part by the Christian faith.

In the 1790s the British public generally revered the Bible as authoritative and “infallible,” that is, truthful and reliable given its divine origin.

• Some theologians did debate whether Scripture was “dictated” and “verbally inspired.”

• Many British believed that salvation comes through Christ and that morality and religion cannot be separated.

• The Genesis account of God’s creation of the world, animal and plant life, and Adam and Eve informed them of the earth’s origin and their own.

• They generally believed God rules the universe providentially and was its creator.

Numerous Christians, whether Anglican, Dissenter, or Unitarian, read their Bibles with a goal of understanding current events. It was commonly thought that particular biblical passages, if properly understood, predicted the emergence of a Millennium, a period of a thousand years that would take place in the “end days.”

Historian Tim Fulford observes, for example, that in the 1790s, as the French Revolution raged on the Continent, many Englishmen “expected the millennium to come in their own lifetime, preceded by apocalyptic destruction.”

Revivals also marked the last decade of the eighteenth century.

• From 1792 to 1796 the Methodist preacher William Bramwell (1759–1818) and Anne Cutler (1759–94), a woman known for her prayer life, were much involved in the significant Yorkshire Revival.

• In 1797 James Alexander Haldane (1768–1851), a lay Presbyterian preacher, effectively ministered in sparsely settled back regions of Scotland.

• A revival took place in Ontario, Canada, during the years 1797–98.

In the 1790s, revivals (led by Reformed pastors) also broke out in the Connecticut Valley in the United States. They became early manifestations of the so-called “Second Great Awakening” (late 1780s – early 1840s). This awakening encompassed multiple disparate elements:

• The widespread distribution of Christian literature

• Reformed preaching in Connecticut by theological descendants of Jonathan Edwards

• The faithful gospel witness of Methodist circuit riders

• The occurrence of emotionally high-octane camp meetings in Kentucky and Tennessee (the “West”)

• Stunning conversions and changed lives

• Waves of college revivals (as at Yale and Princeton)

• Urban church revivals

• The physical phenomena called the “exercises” (running, singing, “the jerks”) that overtook believers and unbelievers.

Some contemporary observers attributed the awakening to the spread of a “heavenly fire.” Others dismissed it as the purveyor of overheated religious enthusiasm. Still others viewed the awakening as a mixed spiritual blessing. In the United States the number of Methodists and Baptists multiplied dramatically during the first half of the nineteenth century.

E. Religion and Romanticism#

During the French Revolution (1789–1799), a number of Europeans began efforts at “restoration.” Restoration could mean different things to them:

• A quest to reopen churches closed by “dechristianizers”

• An effort to return the pope to a position of greater authority and respect in Europe

• An initiative to reestablish a divine right monarchy, and a court battle to recover lost properties

• For some, it could also signify a heartfelt quest for meaningful values in an agitated world turned upside down by revolutions

Various writers and artists embraced a movement called “Romanticism.” As the French Revolution careened toward the Terror, these intellectuals, including poets William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), often experienced sickening feelings of betrayal and revulsion. “Romantic” critics of the revolution sometimes held the philosophes of the Age of Reason accountable for the revolution’s “infidelity” and its murderous, bloody excesses.

A group of German philosophers, including Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), became convinced that rationalistic philosophes ignored the “true” object of philosophy, the study of the “inner mental life.” The philosophes had allegedly downplayed the reality that humans experience deep feeling, and passions.

A desire to explore the inner spiritual life and emotions of human beings became an essential aspiration of Romantic writers, painters, musicians, and theologians.

Many Romantics self-identified as one kind of Christian or another. While criticizing the supposed rationalistic excesses of the Age of Reason, Romantics often appropriated selectively the conclusions of thinkers of that same age. Thus the religious reflections of the Romantics about the Christian faith on occasion jarred more conservative believers who upheld traditional doctrines of the Bible’s authority or other orthodox doctrines. On other occasions, the religious reflections of Romantics soothed Christians, giving them comfort and reassurance.

Besides the Christian faith, Romantic intellectuals and artists drew their inspiration from many other sources:

• The “cult of sensibility” of the eighteenth century, the Stürm und Drang movement of the 1770s in Germany

• The fairy tales of the Grimm brothers

• The folklore of particular “primitive” peoples that supposedly revealed genuine truths about life

• Medieval stories and tales of chivalry, love, and heroism at King Arthur’s Court

Romantics often looked to the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) for guidance. Romantics explored deep feelings not only of pathos but of paranoia. They associated their personal experiences not only with other living creatures but with nature in general.

A number of Protestant theologians, including Friedrich Schleiermacher, emphasized themes that had affinities with those of the Romantic movement.

F. Societal Unrest#

Despite societal unrest and the presence of radical political groups, England did not experience the equivalent of a French Revolution. Talk of revolt was fairly common, however.

• Bread prices soared between 1790 and 1801 and stoked anxieties. Threats surfaced in handbills: “Peace and a Large Bread or a King without a Head.”

• In 1792 a worried George III laid down a “Proclamation against Seditious Writings.”

• Some members of the government were fearful that English radical partisans of the French Revolution and advocates of certain forms of millennialism might incite the lower classes to revolt.

In 1792 Richard Brothers prophesied that England’s war with France would precede the collapse of monarchy in Europe. In 1795 Brothers’s millennial assertions struck even closer to home: King George III was going to surrender his crown to Brothers; London was Babylon and would be destroyed; only those who followed Brothers to Jerusalem, where the millennium would ensue, could be saved. The English government arrested Brothers and ultimately placed him in an asylum. But one such arrest could not dampen a desire of the English people to understand Scripture’s teaching about the “last things.”

Worries about conspiracies by the likes of Brothers were compounded by fears that those Dissenters (especially Methodists) and Roman Catholics who remained without full civil rights might be lured into rebellious activity against the English government.

In 1797 radical United Irishmen who sought to establish an Irish independent republic were pursuing conspiratorial contact with Irish immigrants in England and Scotland. The English put down an Irish rebellion (1797–98). Ireland dutifully joined England as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800.

Many English adjudged that their constitution, in backing the established Anglican Church, served as a bulwark against the spread of revolutionary fervor. In 1828 Reverend Stephen Cassan condemned the Dissenters’ appeals for disestablishment and their criticism of “constituted authorities” as “schismatic,” “sin,” “rebellion,” and “spiritual republicanism.” Other pastors suspected that “Unitarians, deists and Infidels” were behind the drive to get rid of the Corporation and Test Acts.

In 1838 William Gladstone (1809–98), a future prime minister, published The State in Its Relations to the Church, in which he articulated a fairly common opinion of Anglicans regarding their church’s foundational position in English society. Gladstone, an evangelical, in time became a Broad Church Anglican.

“The Established Church was the conscience of the English state, and that State was bound to give an active, informed, consistent, and exclusive financial and general support to the Anglican religion which was of the purest and most Apostolic descent.”

III. ANGLICAN RENEWAL AND DEBATE#

In the late eighteenth century some 13,500 priests ministered as vicars or rectors in local Anglican parishes.

• Clusters of local parishes were organized into “deaneries.”

• A bishop presided over a diocese made up of parishes.

• Suffragan bishops served as assistants to certain bishops.

• Above the bishops in rank were the archbishop of York and the archbishop of Canterbury.

• The archbishop of Canterbury ruled as the primate of all England.

• Above him in authority were the king or queen, the supreme governor of the Church of England, the established church of the land.

The Anglican clergy and laity of the nineteenth century included various groups, ranging from members of the Oxford Movement to Evangelicals to “Broad Churchmen”, associated with an openness to biblical criticism. Many Anglicans agreed that to give Dissenters or Non-Conformists, Roman Catholics, and Jews full civil and religious rights could ultimately displace the Anglican Church from its central role in society and could be politically destabilizing. They also realized that not to afford members of these groups their civic liberties might tempt them to participate in subversive activity in order to gain these rights through force of arms.

A concern about a potential revolt of Catholics in Ireland created the backdrop for the passage of the Roman Catholic Relief Act in 1829. This act allowed Roman Catholics to sit as members of Parliament. At the same time, it frightened Anglican Ultramontanes — “Ultras” — and even writers like Coleridge, who believed the dominant role of the established church had now been undermined. Fears were further deepened by news of the revolution in France in 1830.

Some Anglican clergy candidly acknowledged that their church did not enjoy popular favor due to the glaring disparity between the wealthy and the poor and the common practice of upper clergy to absent themselves from their parishes. In the 1820s a number of members of Parliament believed the Anglican Church needed serious reform.

High Church Anglicans called for a renewed commitment of the English people to the Anglican Church. John Keble’s attention-grabbing sermon, “National Apostasy”, in 1833 chastised Parliament’s decision to eliminate ten of the twenty-two Anglican parishes in Ireland. He thought the state had overstepped its prerogatives in interfering in the life of the church. Things soon went from bad to worse from Keble’s point of view.

A. The Oxford (Tractarian) Movement#

Members of the Oxford Movement, or “Tractarians”, urged the English people to recommit themselves to the “apostolic” Anglican Church. The group’s leaders included John Keble, John Henry Newman (1801–90), and Oxford scholars Richard Froude (1803–36) and Edward B. Pusey (1800–1882).

• They published a series of ninety tracts in which they reiterated their contention that the Anglican Church was historically linked (“Our Apostolical Descent”) to the one holy, apostolic church founded by Jesus Christ.

• Anglican bishops were the “Successors of the Apostles.”

• Froude introduced “High Church” liturgies and worship practices into the Anglican Church.

By the 1840s, a number of High Church Anglicans warmly endorsed an Anglo-Catholic ritualism and emphasis on Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. Pusey’s sermon “The Holy Eucharist, a Comfort to the Penitent” (1843) promoted support for “high” sacramental theology. At the same time, Pusey esteemed the evangelicals’ emphasis on vital Christian piety. The Tractarians often agreed with evangelicals in their criticism of Protestant liberals.

Some evangelical critics thought the Oxford Movement fostered a belief in baptismal regeneration, a teaching they said did not comport with the doctrine of justification by faith alone affirmed in the Thirty-nine Articles. They claimed that the “High Church” Anglo-Catholicism of the Oxford Movement constituted a stepping-stone to Roman Catholicism. In Tract 90 (1841), Newman tried to answer this criticism by claiming that Roman Catholic doctrine was compatible with the Thirty-nine Articles.

Four years later, Newman converted to the Roman Catholic faith. A number of other High Church Anglicans, including Henry Manning and two sons of William Wilberforce, did so as well. With Newman’s conversion, the Tractarian Movement weakened substantially.

B. The Evangelical Anglicans#

Members of the “Evangelical Party” within the Anglican Church were often known for their “experimental piety,” their belief in the final authority of Scripture, their moral seriousness (a desire to be like Christ), and their view of conversion (“the great change”) linked to the doctrine of justification by faith alone. In many regards they resembled their evangelical predecessors of the eighteenth century, John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield.

John Venn (1759–1813) and his son, Henry Venn (1796–1873), gave significant leadership to the Evangelical Anglicans. John Venn served as the pastor in Clapham, a village near London. His evangelical parishioners included some members of the “Clapham Sect” (or “Clapham Circle”), who were generally quite affluent.

In the 1790s they began to meet at the well-appointed home of Henry Thorton, a banker. The group of twelve included, among others, William Wilberforce, the renowned social reformer; Zachary Macaulay, a convinced foe of slavery; Charles Grant, a director of the East India Company; James Stephen; and Hannah More. Not all were Anglicans.

This group energetically organized and helped finance religious societies and missions and educational initiatives. They engaged in social reform such as the antislavery campaign in Parliament. At age forty-five Henry Venn began to serve as the secretary of the Church Missionary Society. Henry Thorton’s book on prayer was widely distributed among Christians.

Critics of the evangelicals sometimes accused them of religious “enthusiasm” and claimed they lacked loyalty to the Anglican Church.

C. Evangelical Identity#

Faced by the challenge of the Tractarian Movement and the rise of Anglo-Catholicism, a number of evangelicals such as John James (English) and Robert Baird (American) sought to forge a “great Protestant union” of evangelical Christians worldwide.

• In 1845 they initiated steps leading to the formation of the Evangelical Alliance.

• On August 19, 1846, more than 900 delegates from fifty countries met in London for the alliance’s first major gathering.

Many hoped to dispel “sectarianism.” The delegates agreed that the purpose of their alliance was “to enable Christians to realize in themselves and to exhibit to others that a living and everlasting union binds all true believers together in the fellowship of the Church”.

The “allies” accepted a broad Protestant creed of nine “cardinal principles,” including the divine inspiration, authority, and sufficiency of the Bible and justification by faith alone. They did not want to create, however, an international ecclesiastical body with juridical, funded power to enforce compliance on “subsidiary” doctrines. Rather, members were “free to hold [their] own views in regard to subsidiary principles.”

Disputes between American and English delegates over the legitimacy of slavery hobbled the ecumenical enterprise as an international entity. The Americans resented the pointed scolding they received from the British regarding slavery. Over time, various countries did establish their own “evangelical alliances.”

Evangelicals gained further strength in the Anglican Church. In 1848 John Sumner became the first evangelical archbishop of Canterbury. Two years later, a ruling permitted Reverend George Gorham to serve as an Anglican cleric even though he did not affirm a belief in baptismal regeneration; many High Church Anglicans were perturbed by this decision. In 1853 W. J. Conybeare claimed that nearly 32 percent of the Anglican clergy had evangelical convictions.

In 1877 Bishop J. C. Ryle (1816–1900), a popular Anglican writer and an evangelical, provided a more detailed doctrinal definition of the evangelical faith, explaining five doctrines:

1. “The absolute supremacy of Holy Scripture”

2. “the doctrine of human sinfulness and corruption”

3. “the work and office of Jesus Christ”

4. “the inward work of the Holy Spirit in the heart of man”

5. “the outward and visible work of the Holy Ghost in the life of man.”

Ryle claimed these beliefs conformed to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican Church and the teachings of the Protestant Reformers.

D. Anglican Social Reformers#

Societal reform stood out as a particular concern of evangelical Anglicans such as William Wilberforce (1759–1833), who had become a member of Parliament at age twenty. During two “Grand Tours” in Europe (1784–85), Wilberforce’s traveling companion, Isaac Milner, introduced him to the evangelical faith. They discussed books such as Philip Doddridge’s The Rise and Progress of Religion (1745). Wilberforce came to saving faith in Christ.

In 1787, at the urging of his political associate and Christian friend, William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806), Wilberforce began a lengthy struggle as a member of Parliament to end the international slave trade. He was encouraged to persevere in this struggle by John Wesley and a number of Quakers.

On May 12, 1789, in the House of Commons, Wilberforce launched an opening, verbal broadside against the slave trade, what he condemned as the “foulest blot that ever stained our national character.” Eventually, on February 23, 1807, Parliament ruled the slave trade illegal. In 1833, just before Wilberforce’s death, Parliament passed the Abolition of Slavery Act forbidding the slave trade in the British Empire. In the United States and elsewhere, however, it persisted.

Wilberforce sought vigorously to reform the morals of the upper classes. In 1787 he formed the Proclamation Society against Vice and Immorality and ten years later published A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in This Country Contrasted with Real Christianity. In this book he called on “nominal” Christians in the upper classes of England to match their everyday morals with their outward religious profession.

Between 1782 and 1832 at least one hundred evangelicals served as members of the House of Commons and another one hundred in the House of Lords. Like Wilberforce, many believed they could help change the nation’s morality by applying their religious principles to the world of politics. Wilberforce’s own virtuous example inspired them. Evangelicals also organized groups designed to address England’s social and economic ills.

Wilberforce supported financially the efforts of Hannah More (sometimes called the “Queen of Methodists”) and her sister Martha to minister to the physical, spiritual, and educational needs of England’s poor in the rural countryside. Hannah, an evangelical poet and social reformer, came from a home of considerable wealth.

• She criticized the lax morals of her contemporaries in Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society (1788).

• She also fought against the slave trade.

• She established a home for poor children.

• Her Cheap Repository Tracts, with a circulation in the millions, encouraged members of the lower classes to embrace the evangelical faith and its morals.

• She supported local Sunday schools.

Much like Edmund Burke, she attempted to counter any appeals of radicals to entice the English people to engage in seditious political activity.

E. Cambridge University: The Ministry of Charles Simeon#

Whereas Oxford University was linked to the Tractarian Movement, Cambridge University became associated with evangelical students much influenced by the life and ministry of the Anglican Charles Simeon (1759–1836).

Soon after his Anglican ordination, Simeon became a priest at Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge, where he ministered for fifty-four years. On one occasion Simeon declared, “He is no Christian who does not see the hand of Christ constantly.”

Simeon also served as a Fellow at King’s College, where his teaching, his godly example of a man of prayer, and his desire for evangelical unity affected many students — who adopted the name “Sims” or “Simeonites.” They founded a branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society at Cambridge and the Jesus Lane Sunday School for young boys.

In 1848 evangelical students formed a group that in 1854 became the Cambridge University Prayer Union. Years after Simeon’s death in 1836, many still cherished and appreciated his Christian example.

F. Dissenters (Non-Conformists)#

In the 1790s, Dissenters continued to object strenuously to the privileged status that the Anglican Church enjoyed as England’s established state church. In that decade, Methodists, who by 1795 had more distinctly separated from the Anglican Church, added their strong voice to the complaints of other Non-Conformist Presbyterians, Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists, and Unitarians. Some evangelical Dissenters based their calls for disestablishment on their congregational ecclesiology.

The most vocal Dissenters were probably the Unitarians Richard Price and Joseph Priestley. They opposed Edmund Burke’s apology for the Anglican Church’s position as the established church.

Because Dissenters were not permitted entrance to attend Cambridge or Oxford, many attended dissenting academies, some of which had allegedly become nurseries for “subversive doctrines and arguments” (Burke’s judgment) due to Joseph Priestley’s influence on their curriculum.

Methodists emerged as one of the fastest-growing dissenting groups. Between the 1780s and the 1820s their numbers climbed rapidly from 80,000 to nearly 220,000. Thomas Coke founded Methodist missions in the British West Indies after 1786 and in Sierra Leone in 1811. Methodists split into various denominations (the Methodist New Connection, 1797; the Primitive Methodists, 1811) due to internal debates. Sometimes upper-class Anglicans accused Methodists of seditious activity, of purveying religious “enthusiasm,” and of heeding unauthorized (non-Anglican) preachers. On occasion, the Anglican Wilberforce attempted to defend the Methodists from their accusers.

Despite serious opposition, many Methodist men and women continued to attend cottage prayer meetings and encourage gospel preaching, demonstrate love for the poor, and perform good deeds in a sacrificial fashion. John Wesley had provided a model in this regard. He gave to the poor large sums of money that he had earned from his publications. Moreover, he had not been shy in providing strong counsel about the use of wealth.

Methodists collected funds for the poor in their chapels. They founded orphanages and Sunday schools, visited the prisons, and began medical programs. Not surprisingly, many laboring poor turned to the Methodists for spiritual solace, community fellowship, material aid, and a heightened sense of respect for women.

By the 1820s Dissenters constituted close to 20 percent of the British population. Some of their leaders urged the suppression of the Test and Corporation Acts that restricted Dissenters’ access to certain employments and narrowed their educational choices. In 1828 these laws were finally repealed.

The Reform Act of 1832 also indirectly permitted a number of Dissenters of means to enjoy greater political participation. Dissenters often supported efforts to extend greater rights to Jews.

G. Roman Catholics: An Expansion of Influence#

Not only were Protestant Dissenters anxious to see the end of the privileged status of the Anglican Church, Roman Catholics sought this as well. They lived under onerous restrictions until the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829. Then their overall situation improved.

In 1845 John Henry Newman, a master wordsmith and theologian, converted from High Church Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. In the same year, Newman published a seminally important work, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. He argued that the church’s doctrine could evolve from the purity of the deposit of faith without taking on corruptions. Newman believed this approach to tradition and Christian truth could explain why aspects of Catholic theology might have a different doctrinal presentation from the teachings of the early church and yet constitute innovative theological clarifications, not heretical “corruptions”.

In 1879 Newman became a cardinal. While open to a circumspect use of new critical methods in scholarship, Newman criticized “Liberalism” — “the doctrine that there is no truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another.” At the same time, he was hesitant to affirm the inerrancy of Scripture. Rather, he argued “that the issue of inspiration is for doctrine and morals.”

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed an expansion of the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in British society. In 1850 the so-called “Papal Aggression” of Pope Pius IX occurred.

• He divided England into Catholic dioceses, and members of the Catholic hierarchy returned.

• Nicholas Wiseman (1802–65), a cardinal, became the Catholic archbishop of Westminster (London).

• The number of convents increased, with 77 of the 114 convents in England founded in the last quarter of the century.

• The nuns devoted themselves sacrificially to spiritual contemplation, education, the care of orphans, and “fallen women,” among other concerns.

In the wake of the catastrophic Potato Famine, many Irish emigrated to England, thereby adding to the overall population of Roman Catholics. Virulent anti-Catholicism ensued, however, as some worried Protestants attempted to turn back the growing strength of the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1851 the Bulwark or Reformation Journal of the Scottish Reformation Society published a hard-hitting article with the telling title “The Blight of Popery.” Most English believed their nation’s religious identity remained indelibly Protestant.

IV. PROTESTANT CHRISTIAN MISSIONS#

Debate ensued among Particular Baptists (Reformed Baptists) regarding the role of human agency in missions and the practicality and the biblical warrant for foreign missions. In his The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation (1785), Andrew Fuller (1754–1815), a Baptist minister, reiterated Jonathan Edwards’s distinction between the “natural and moral inability” of the sinner. Elsewhere, Fuller argued that pastors had the duty to preach the gospel to “all who will hear it.”

A. The Pioneering Role of William Carey#

William Carey (1761–1834), the “father of modern missions,” also played an important part in persuading his Baptist colleagues that they had an obligation to engage in foreign missions because the Great Commission applied to them and not solely to the apostles.

Having converted from Anglicanism, Carey became a Particular or Calvinistic Baptist Non-Conformist in 1779. A shoemaker by trade, Carey served as a Baptist layminister in 1786 and later as a pastor of the Baptist church at Moulton in Northamptonshire, England. One person who had significant influence on Carey was Andrew Fuller of Kettering, who argued that Calvinism does not preclude evangelistic responsibility.

Cobbling by day, running a Christian day school, and serving as a pastor, Carey added to an already busy bivocational life the study of languages. He soon discovered he was a natural linguist and taught himself Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, and Dutch.

Inspired by the Polynesian adventures of Captain James Cook as well as the missionary exploits of the Moravians and Puritans, Carey became convinced that the Great Commission required implementation. He articulated his philosophy in 1791 to the Northampton Baptist Association in a pamphlet titled “An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens”. Avoiding its being a dry work of theological discourse, in it Carey made his case by using the best available geographic and ethnographic data to map and count the number of people who had never heard the gospel.

On May 31, 1792, he delivered a sermon at the Northamptonshire Baptist Association in which he issued a “missionary” call and articulated a famous injunction: “Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.” Carey’s appeal led four months later to the creation of the Particular Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen, later renamed the Baptist Missionary Society.

It was the first missionary society of its kind and the model for hundreds of future societies. Influenced by Carey’s arguments, its leaders rejected the notion that the Calvinist doctrine of election relieved Reformed Christians of their obligation to pursue foreign missionary activity.

Not only did Carey urge his Christian brethren to “expect great things” and “attempt great things,” but the next year he and his wife, Dorothy, and his children and John Thomas, a medical doctor, set out for India.

Although historians often propose that these happenings signaled the birth of the “modern era of Protestant missions,” it should be recalled that Carey recognized and appreciated the contributions of earlier missionaries throughout church history, including John Wesley and the Moravians. Moreover, in the History of the Propagation of Christianity and the Overthrow of Paganism (1723), Reverend Robert Miller had earlier called for missionary efforts to reach the “heathen” for Christ.

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, the earliest English Protestant missionary society, had also supported the fourteen-year effort of John Eliot (1604–90), an “Apostle to the Indians”, to translate the Bible into Algonquian (which was completed in 1663). Toward the end of his life, some Algonquians, who were Native Americans of New England, thanked Eliot for his forty years of faithful ministry in “making known to us the Glad Tidings of Salvation of Jesus Christ.”

Toward the year 1800, from a Protestant perspective the task of world evangelism remained daunting. More than 90 percent of the world’s Protestants lived in England, Europe, and North America. In 1900 Eugene Stock, Editorial Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, London, observed retrospectively that in 1800:

• Asia was nearly “wholly heathen or Mohammedan”

• Islam was dominant in the “lands of the Bible”

• China was “closed”

• Japan was “hermetically sealed”

• William Carey had just entered Bengel, India

• Africa was a “coastline” with an interior “utterly unknown"

Australia did have a small Protestant settlement around Sydney. After exploring portions of the coastline, in 1770 Captain James Cook claimed for King George III the eastern region of Australia, what he called New South Wales. On January 18, 1788, the first fleet of eleven ships with 1,350 settlers aboard — many of whom were convicts accused of minor crimes — arrived at Botany Bay. Richard Johnson, an evangelical chaplain, and his wife, Mary, accompanied them. Johnson had been recommended for the post by the evangelicals Wilberforce and Newton. On January 26, 1788, the fleet sailed into Sydney Cove. Johnson celebrated the first Anglican service a few days later. In 1814 Samuel Marsden (1765–1838), an evangelical chaplain who had ministered in New South Wales, began a gospel mission to New Zealand.

In 1800, Protestants generally viewed Roman Catholics, Jews, the followers of other world religions, and the “heathen” as needing the evangelical “gospel of Jesus Christ.” Between 1780 and 1830, postmillennial eschatology would serve as a major stimulus for Christian missions. Premillennial eschatology did so as well, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Because many potential converts lived in “unknown” territories, Western missionaries were obliged to trek into totally unfamiliar areas. They sometimes reported witnessing “primitive” and “savage” practices by inhabitants that reinforced a sense of racial superiority and the widespread view that Western civilization was in general superior to other cultures. By contrast, a missionary like William Carey developed a genuine respect for aspects of the culture of the Indian people he was trying to reach with the gospel.

British mission organizations included:

• The well-known Society of Promoting Christian Knowledge (1698) and its partner, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1701)

• The Methodist Missionary Society (1786)

• The Baptist Missionary Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen (1793)

• The London Missionary Society (1795)

• The Church Missionary Society (1799; initially known as the Society for Missions to Africa and the East)

• The Religious Tract Society (1799)

• The British and Foreign Bible Society (1804)

• The Wesleyan Missionary Society (1813)

• The English Presbyterian Society (1847)

Although the Church Missionary Society, which was Anglican, had a member of the royalty as a stipulated “patron” and the archbishop of Canterbury as vice patron, it should not be assumed that all mission societies were pawns of the English government or commercial interests. Until the 1840s, missionary initiatives were sometimes charged with complicating the task of British diplomats, businessmen, and military leaders. Moreover, a number of missionaries (especially Dissenters) condemned the exploitation of natives by commercial companies and governmental agents.

Several mission strategists became worried that Western missionaries were creating native churches whose members were becoming too dependent upon the missionaries themselves for their spiritual and material well-being, As a remedy they urged that mission churches should become “self-propagating.”

In 1886 John L. Nevius (1829–93), an American Presbyterian missionary to China and Korea, drew up a “New System” (the “Nevius Method”) to replace an “Old System” of missions. Native churches should follow “the principles of independence and self-reliance from the beginning” and not rely on a “paid native agency.” That is, members of native churches should financially support their leaders chosen from their own ranks and have a sense of responsibility for the life of the church.

“Native Christians,” or “native workers,” played critical roles as missionaries, preachers, teachers, deacons, and catechists in the evangelization of their countries. Indeed, most Africans were won to Christ by the witness of other Africans. Philip Quaque, an ordained Anglican (from 1765 to 1816); Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first Anglican bishop in West Africa (1864); and Apolo Kivebulaya (c. 1864–1933) in the Congo stood out as “native” leaders.

Several thousand African Americans from Nova Scotia, the majority of whom were freed slaves, migrated to Sierra Leone as “recaptives” and “resettlers,” starting in 1787, and they were especially effective in evangelistic witness.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the number of African missionaries began to swell. In 1841 the Church Missionary Society (CMA, Anglean) had only nine African and Asian missionaries. By 1873 its ranks had expanded to include 148 African and Asian missionaries.

The number of CMA women missionaries also grew. Between 1820 and 1885, 99 women (not including wives) and 1,018 men served as missionaries, but between the years 1885 and 1900 there were 485 women and 581 men. After 1860, the number of single women in various other missionary societies also increased substantially.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, missionary endeavors gained more momentum.

• In July 1886, at Dwight L. Moody’s “College Students’ Summer School” located in Mount Hermon, Massachusetts, one hundred students signed a statement indicating their intention to serve as missionaries.

• On December 6, 1888, one of the students, John R. Mott, helped organize the Student Volunteer Movement.

• A British Student Volunteer Movement was also established.

• The Missionary Review (July 1888) reported, “The wonderful wave of missionary zeal which has swept through our American colleges during the last eighteen months has moved about 1800 young men and 600 young women to offer their lives in service to Christ as foreign missionaries.”

Contemporaries attributed the greater interest in missions in the United States and England to various factors:

• The launch of a prayer movement (1872)

• Dwight L. Moody’s British evangelistic campaigns of 1872–73 and 1882–84

• The example of the “Cambridge Seven”

• The “Higher Life” sanctification teaching of the English Keswick Movement (1873), “Let go and let God,” with victory over all known sin

• The inspirational story that the missionary David Livingstone had died praying on his knees.

Improved means of travel and communication also made missionary work more logistically feasible.

B. David Livingstone: Missionary Explorer#

The Scot David Livingstone (1813–75) of the London Missionary Society was trained in theology and medicine. A hard-driving man, he gained great fame as a discoverer.

After 1841, Livingstone took the gospel into the Lake District of Central Africa and labored among the Tswana people from 1843 to 1853. He thought that Christianity could play a helpful role in “civilizing” the peoples he encountered. He also encouraged the establishment of commerce as a substitute for the slave trade in which some Africans participated.

By 1856 Livingstone had emerged as a national hero. He was famous for his evangelical missionary efforts, geographical discoveries, and attack on the slave trade. In 1857 he sought the government’s backing, as he hoped to “make an open path for commerce and Christianity.” Livingstone’s concern for commerce did not escape criticism, nor did the fact that his wife, Mary, and his children had suffered from his long absences.

In 1870 the rumor circulated that Livingstone had been killed somewhere in Africa. Then Henry M. Stanley (1841–1901), a journalist and explorer, “found” him and famously asked, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Despite arguments to the contrary, Livingstone’s primary desire was to penetrate “darkest Africa” with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

C. Mary Slessor: “Mother of All Peoples”#

Toward the end of his life, Livingstone made a strong appeal that someone should step forward to continue the work he had begun in Africa. A young Scottish woman, Mary Slessor (1848–1915), responded. Overcoming deep-seated fears, she volunteered to serve as a single woman with a Presbyterian mission in the Calabar in West Africa (now Nigeria), a region known for animist beliefs and poisonous snakes.

In a land of headhunters, witch doctors, and sudden death, she taught that Jesus is the “Great Physician and Savior, the Son of the Father God who made all things.” In the name of Christ she defied the threats of hostile chiefs and warriors engaged in evil acts. She ministered to abandoned children, especially sets of twins.

In Calabar she became deeply loved and known as the “White Ma,” the mother of the people. She recalled, like the apostle Paul, that nothing, including death itself, can separate us “from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Single women such as Mary Slessor sometimes enjoyed more leadership opportunities on the mission field than they did back in their home churches.

D. Hudson Taylor: “Faith Missions”#

As a young man, James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) turned away from the Christian faith of his father, who was a druggist and a lay Methodist preacher. But in 1849 Taylor picked up a tract in which he read the words, “It is finished.” He was converted after he realized that Christ’s death on the cross was totally sufficient to pay for his sins.

In 1854 Taylor arrived in China as a missionary and eventually founded the China Inland Mission (CIM; 1865). He also inspired the Cambridge Seven, a group of university athletic students who decided in 1885 to accompany him to China and were applauded for this by Queen Victoria. One of the Cambridge Seven was the cricketer Charles Thomas Studd (1860–1931).

Taylor promoted “faith missions.” He declared, “Depend upon it. God’s work, done in God’s way, will never lack God’s supplies.” He also advocated the “secret” of Christian living: “I have striven in vain to abide in Him. I’ll strive no more. For has not He promised to abide with me—never to leave me, never to fail me?”

In 1900 Taylor spoke on “The Source of Power” at the Ecumenical Missionary Conference in New York City. Despite great advances, he cautioned the delegates about the “great weakness” of the missionary movement: “We have given too much attention to methods, and to machinery and to resources, and too little to the Source of Power; the filling with the Holy Ghost.” He reminded the delegates that “the gospel itself is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.”

When Taylor died in 1905, many of CIM’s 849 missionaries had moved out from missionary stations along China’s coast and penetrated the interior of China, and this despite enormous hardships.

Lottie Moon (1840–1912), an American Southern Baptist, also sacrificially ministered to the Chinese people from 1873 until her death (except for furloughs). She too emphasized faith missions, calling on her fellow Baptists in 1888 to give a Christmas faith offering for foreign missions. Over the years, Southern Baptists have given between one and two billion dollars to the Lottie Moon Christmas offering.

E. “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation” (1900)#

Like Hudson Taylor, John R. Mott (1865–1955), the General Secretary of the World’s Student Christian Federation, addressed the Ecumenical Missionary Conference in New York City in 1900. He gave reasons: “… it is possible to evangelize the world in this generation,” highlighting “the recent missionary achievement of the Church” and the “remarkable resources” of the present day.

Among these resources he cited:

• The 135 million members of the Protestant churches worldwide, the enormous “money power of the Church”

• The 500 missionary societies

• The Scriptures translated in whole or in part into 421 languages

• The 1,500 Christian associations for students

• The 20 million Sunday school “scholars”

• The 2,000 students from the World’s Student Christian Federation already on the mission fields

• The “Native Church” with its 1.3 million communicants and more than 4 million adherents

Mott rejoiced that for the first time in the history of the church “practically the whole world is open.”

• He pointed out that “improved means of communication constitutes one of the chief facilities of which the Church of this generation can avail itself.”

• They included extensive “railway lines in non-Christian lands,” the reduced amount of time for missionaries to reach foreign fields, “submarine cables,” the “universal Postal Union,” and the improved productivity of printing presses.

According to Mott, God had made “the whole world known and accessible to our generation” so that the kingdom of Jesus Christ could be extended and built up throughout the earth.

Nonetheless, the task of world evangelism remained daunting, especially in non-Western lands. In 1900 approximately 80 percent of Christians in the world were white.

V. RELIGION IN THE VICTORIAN AGE (1837–1901)#

The Protestant faith exercised a pervasive influence in England, especially among the middle class, during the reign of Queen Victoria. Some historians refer to a prevalent form of Protestantism as “Victorian religion.”

Between the years 1837 and 1847 the publishing output of English Bibles and Testaments was enormous:

• From the Queen’s Printer, 2,284,540 Bibles and 1,971,877 Testaments

• From Oxford, 2,612,750 Bibles and 2,062,250 Testaments

• From Cambridge, 895,500 Bibles and 1,111,600 Testaments.

The British and Foreign Bible Society (founded in 1804) also sold millions of Bibles and Testaments.

In 1851 a Religious Census provided data on church attendance in England and Wales: 400,000 Dissenters; 100,000 Established Church. On a particular Sunday, something like 7.26 million people out of 18 million attended churches and chapels.

The American educator and politician Horace Mann reported two sets of statistics in 1854 based on the census: the percentage of church attendees belonging to a religious group; the same percentage with an addition of one-third of the totals to account for those people with legitimate reasons for nonattendance (such as the elderly and the sick). The first set of statistics reads: Anglicans, 17.6 percent; Methodists, 14.9 percent; Independents, 6.6 percent; Baptists, 5.1 percent; Roman Catholics, 2.0 percent.

British evangelical Protestants were heartened by the Revival of 1859 in England, Ireland, and Wales. Reports about Jeremiah Lanphier’s Fulton Street prayer meetings (1857–58) and other noonday prayer meetings in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other cities, towns, and villages throughout the United States, and accounts of the thousands of conversions reached Britain, Ireland, and Wales. News from the “Business Men’s Awakening” prompted some pastors to call on their people to pray for a similar outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

On March 14, 1859, a crowd of three thousand gathered outside the First Presbyterian Church of Ahoghil. Listening to the preaching of a layperson, hundreds came under deep conviction for their sins. During the Ulster Revival of 1859, possibly as many as 100,000 people confessed Christ as Savior. Dr. William Gibson described this spiritual awakening in his book The Year of Grace: A History of the Ulster Revival of 1859.

Likewise, in Wales, a land well-known for its revivals, another 100,000 were converted. In England, much “open-air and theater preaching” took place.

Evangelical Christians were also heartened by George Williams’s creation of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in 1844. Young men gathered together to study Scripture, pray, and enjoy interacting with each other. In 1851 the first YMCA in the United States was founded in Boston. In 1855 the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) was formed.

A. Church Divisions and Spiritual Renewal in Scotland#

In 1843 the established Church of Scotland (the Auld Kirk) which upheld the Westminster Confession of Faith, suffered a “disruption,” or major split. Some 450 ministers withdrew to Tanfield Hall and created the “Free Church of Scotland.”

• They claimed that they were the true defenders of Calvinism, the Westminster Confession of Faith, and the Bible’s infallibility.

• They denied that they were “Voluntarists,” or creators of a secession.

• They viewed their church as the “pure” established church.

• They successfully created a competitive church similar in organizational structure to the Church of Scotland (with its approximately 750 pastors).

After the “Disruption of 1843,” yet another denomination was formed, the United Free Presbyterian Church (1847). Members of this church believed in the separation of church and state. Their church joined together with the United Succession Church and the Relief Church. Toward 1875, the Church of Scotland had about 460,000 members, the Free Church of Scotland 256,000, and the United Free Presbyterian Church 187,000.

In 1872 and 1873 Dwight L. Moody (1837–99) and Ira Sankey (1840–1908), a gospel composer and singer, pursued evangelistic campaigns in England and Scotland. Many pastors of the Free Church of Scotland supported the evangelists. Other clerics argued that the evangelists’ message did not accord with the Westminister Confession. Large numbers of people attended the meetings.

In a different manner, the prolific Scottish author and pastor George MacDonald (1824–1905) called on his Scottish readers and others to remember that we “must love him [God] or be desolate.” His imaginative works of fantasy and faith exerted a profound influence on later writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and G. K. Chesterton.

The much publicized trial (1877–81) of Professor William Robertson Smith (1846–94) shocked conservative members of the Free Church of Scotland. Smith, an Old Testament scholar, had defended and taught higher critical views of the Bible at the University of Aberdeen. Removed from his teaching chair, Smith nonetheless received strong support from three hundred friends who interpreted the verdict of the trial as allowing “all Free-Church ministers and office-bearers free to pursue the critical questions raised by Professor W. R. Smith.”

As the nineteenth century drew to an end, troubled relations continued between certain members of the Free Church of Scotland and the United Church of Scotland regarding the latter church’s alleged acceptance of higher criticism, departure from Reformed doctrines, and openness to Arminianism.

B. Wales: “Land of Revivals”#

Beginning in the mid-1730s, Wesleyan and Calvinist Methodist preachers such as Howell Harris established reading groups and churches as they spread their gospel message in Wales.

In 1811 Thomas Charles (1755–1814) helped orchestrate the departure of Welsh Calvinists from the Church of England. For his part, Christmas Evans (1766–1838), the “Bunyan of Wales,” preached with fervor and founded Baptist churches. Multiple spiritual revivals helped propel the Non-Conformist advance, despite opposition and civil disturbances. Non-Conformist chapels were built at a rapid clip. These chapels joined Anglican churches as fixtures of one town after another in the Welsh countryside.

In the 1840s, many Non-Conformists feared what they thought was an increased influence of the Roman Catholic Church over the Church of England. This perception fueled the desire of Welsh Non-Conformists to see the disestablishment of the Anglican Church. Thomas Gee published a newspaper that specifically called for disestablishment.

The Welsh sensitivities of some Non-Conformists were wounded when the government published Blue Books (1847), which criticized the quality of Welsh education. For them, religious non-conformity and Welsh patriotism had become inextricably bound together.

The Religious Census of 1851 revealed that the number of Non-Conformists in Wales had surpassed the membership of the Church of England.

Non-Conformists were especially galled by the fact that the Church of England in Wales received a tithe — one-tenth of their income — even though they were not members of the established church. Eventually, so-called “Tithe Wars” broke out between the years 1886 and 1890. These conflicts pitted government troops against farm workers attempting to thwart the efforts of tithe collectors.

In 1904–5 another great revival swept through Wales. Evan Roberts (1878–1951), a young coal miner, had prayed for eleven years that he might be used in a great revival. In 1904 Roberts attended a meeting in which Seth Joshua, a leading Calvinist Methodist evangelist, spoke. Joshua’s closing words, “Lord … bend us” (in Welsh meaning “shape us”), greatly impacted Roberts.

Roberts urged his listeners to observe what became known as the “Four Points” if they desired an “outpouring of the Holy Spirit” in their own lives:

1. Confess any sin from the past

2. Give up anything that is “doubtful”

3. Obey what the Spirit prompts you to do

4. Confess publicly your faith in Christ as your Savior

Other preachers felt a similar passion to preach and call the Welsh people to repentance.

Hundreds upon hundreds of meetings consisting of prayer, singing, preaching, soul searching, and confession enveloped Wales. Some 100,000 people, ranging from college students to coal miners, confessed Christ. Many judges no longer had cases to judge in court, so steeply did crime rates decline.

The Welsh Revival constituted but one of a cluster of revivals at the dawn of the new century. News of revival in one country often encouraged laity and missionaries alike to pray for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on their own lands.

• In 1905 revivals were reported in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe.

• Between 1906 and 1909, revivals broke out in Kassia Hills and Assam, India; in Los Angeles, California, in the Azusa Street prayer meetings under the leadership of the African-American William Seymour; in Wonsan, Pyongyang, Makpo, and Seoul, Korea; in Zimbabwe, Africa; in Manchuria, China; and in Valparaiso, Chile.

R. A. Hardie, a medical doctor and Methodist missionary, played a key role in the beginning stage of the epochal Korean revivals. In 1903 he was convicted by Jesus’ teaching that his disciples should ask for the Holy Spirit (Luke 11:1–13). Hardie confessed to other missionaries he had been prideful and depended too much on his own efforts in ministry and not enough on the work of the Holy Spirit. Deeply moved by Hardie’s confession, a number of missionaries and Koreans began to confess their own sins and sought the power of the Holy Spirit to sanctify their own lives. Revival fires began to spread through Korea.

Jonathan Goforth (1859–1936), a Canadian Presbyterian missionary serving in China, was thrilled to learn about the “Pentecost” great revival of 1907 in Korea. He traveled to Korea so that he could witness firsthand the spiritual awakening there. He indicated that thousands of Koreans were caught up in deep remorse, repentance, reconciliation with those they had offended, incessant prayer, listening to the words of Scripture, craving to experience more of Christ, and sensing the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit in their meetings.

When Goforth returned to Manchuria, he related to expectant Chinese audiences what he had witnessed in Korea. The “Manchurian Revival” broke out—one if the first major revivals in China.

C. Ireland: Religious Tensions over “Home Rule” and “Union” with England#

Sharp antagonisms festered between Protestants (Episcopalians and Presbyterians) and Catholics in Ireland. In 1791 the association “United Irishmen” was formed. It brought together Ulster Presbyterians, Free Thinkers, and Catholics alike. Their common goal: to drive out the English.

In 1798 British soldiers roundly defeated the United Irishmen’s attempt to establish an Irish Republic with French support. Atrocities were perpetrated by the warring parties. Up to 30,000 people perished in the conflict. Thereafter the Act of Union (1800) forged a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It engendered resentment among some Irish because they no longer had their own Parliament, but instead sent 100 Irish members to the House of Commons and 25 peers to the House of Lords. In fact, Protestants generally favored the union with England, whereas the 4 million Irish Roman Catholics spurned it.

Protestants sought to foster evangelistic outreach by forming the Hibernian Bible Society (1806) and the Religious Tract and Book Society (1810). In Ulster, Henry Cooke (1788–1868) gave leadership to conservative Presbyterians. Between the years 1815 and 1845 many Irish (probably 1,500,000) left to settle in other lands. By the 1840s, England’s Irish population had soared to more than 400,000. Many were impoverished workers.

In 1823 the Catholic Association was founded with the goal of winning Catholic emancipation. Irish members of Parliament often lent their support to the Liberal party. This party worked for both Catholic emancipation (1829) and the winning of rights for Non-Conformist Protestants.

By contrast, radical republicans envisioned the creation of a secular Irish state. They were prepared to resort to force of arms if such were deemed necessary. They opposed those Protestants in Northern Ireland who, with certain notable exceptions (Charles Parnell, 1846–91, an influential Home Rule advocate), insisted on a continued “union” with England. These latter Protestants included militants prepared to fight for their religion.

In 1834 the vast majority of the Irish remained Roman Catholic. Only 10.7 percent of the populace were members of the Church of Ireland (Anglican), and only 8.1 percent were Presbyterians.

The Irish people depended on potatoes as the basic staple of their diet.

• Between the years 1816 and 1842 various potato famines rendered life miserable for the Irish.

• In 1845, a “blight of unusual character” (a new fungus) devastated the potato crop.

Famine and food riots ensued. Approximately 775,000 died (some estimates ranging up to one million), and two million Irish emigrated to England, Canada, and the United States.

Approximately 800,000–900,000 Catholic Irish emigrated to the United States, whereas Irish Protestants in smaller numbers often chose to settle in Canada.

The Irish frequently blamed British colonial policies as creating the conditions conducive to the famine’s onslaught. They also criticized British relief efforts. Many Irish had no choice but to live in woeful workhouses. At least 200,000 perished.

In the last third of the nineteenth century the “Irish Question” — that is, the status of Ireland’s contentious relations with England — often grabbed the rapt attention of British politicians.

• In 1869 the Anglican Church was disestablished in Ireland.

• Irish members of Parliament promoted the case for Home Rule, whereas republican revolutionaries such as the Fenians loomed menacingly in the shadows.

• In 1879 the Irish Land League entered the fight to protect the land rights of Irish tenants.

• A republican armed revolt erupted and was rudely suppressed.

William Gladstone, the Liberal Party Prime Minister of England, argued in favor of Home Rule.

• In 1886 the First Irish Home Rule Bill was proposed and defeated in the House of Commons.

• The Second Irish Home Rule Bill was offered in 1893 and suffered the same fate in the House of Lords.

Thereafter, the economic status and familial and religious commitments of the Irish often determined whether they favored Home Rule or a continued Union with England.

D. Charles Spurgeon: The “Prince of Preachers”#

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–92), a young Baptist minister whose preaching attracted large crowds in London, was becoming well known across the Atlantic. A number of superb preachers graced pulpits during the Victorian era, yet Spurgeon garnered the title “the Prince of Preachers.”

As a child Spurgeon had been taught Puritan writings by his parents and grandfather. On a snowy day in 1850, Spurgeon attended a Primitive Methodist chapel. The preacher addressed Spurgeon directly: “Young man, look to Jesus Christ. Look!” Spurgeon experienced a joyful conversion.

Even Spurgeon’s earliest preaching drew large crowds. At age twenty-six he began a lengthy preaching ministry at the reconstructed Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, a building that could hold an audience of 5,000. In 1857 he spoke at the Crystal Palace to a crowd of 24,000; at least 100,000 copies of this message circulated.

Spurgeon founded a Pastors’ College, where young people could train for the ministry. He also published his sermons on a regular basis, edited the magazine The Sword and the Trowel (1865), and still had time to write more than seventy books. He did all these things while battling gout, dealing with family issues, and engaging in various theological discussions and sharp debates.

In the theological tradition of the scholar Dr. John Gill, Spurgeon was a Particular Baptist. As a Calvinist he affirmed a belief in election and predestination but not infant baptism. Spurgeon did come under sharp criticism from James Wells and other Particular Baptist colleagues for offering “Gospel invitations.” The critics labeled his invitations for salvation “Arminian and unsound.” For his part, Spurgeon viewed these Particular Baptists as “hyper-Calvinists.” However, he sought to maintain good relations with these Particular Baptists.

In an edition of The Sword and the Trowel in 1887, Spurgeon criticized those who he thought were undermining biblical authority.

In the ensuing “Down-Grade Controversy” (1887–92), Spurgeon defended biblical inerrancy and eternal punishment against “post-mortem” salvation. In this he received little support from the members of the Baptist Union (founded in 1813 by Particular Baptists), some of whom were leaning toward the “New Theology.”

Spurgeon viewed this theology as a variant form of Protestant Liberalism. Spurgeon withdrew from the Baptist Union, as did his church, the Metropolitan Tabernacle.

Spurgeon continued to preach faithfully to packed audiences. He was one of the most popular evangelical writers of all times. His books went through multiple editions and were translated into many languages.

E. Christian Social Reformers in the Victorian Era#

A number of Christians attempted to address the appalling social and economic needs of the poor in Victorian England.

The Quaker Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845) ministered to women and children in England’s overcrowded prisons and attempted to reform aspects of the prison system that she said “should never exist in a Christian and civilized country.”

Shocked by horrific living conditions for women inmates at Newgate Prison, Fry in 1817 established an association “to provide for the clothing, instruction, and employment of women; to introduce them to a knowledge of Holy Scripture; and to form in them as much as possible those habits of sobriety, order and industry, which may render them docile and peacable in prison and respectable when they leave it.” She also created a training school for nurses, some of whom later worked for Florence Nightingale, the reformer of hospital nursing. Fry also urged other Christians to give of themselves in caring for the needy.

Thomas Barnardo (1845–1905), a philanthropist, also cared for the needy children of the streets by setting up shelters for them. His slogan: “No Destitute Child Ever Refused Admission.”

George Mueller (1805–98) founded the Scriptural Knowledge Institution, established homes for thousands of orphaned children, and supported evangelistic missions. He prayed in faith that money would come in for his orphan homes, even if he did not specifically request funds from donors. The needed money always arrived on time (on occasion in the nick of time). Mueller hoped this demonstration of “God’s faithfulness” would encourage other Christians to pray.

F. The Salvation Army#

In 1855 William Booth (1829–1912), a Methodist, married Catherine Mumford (1829–90), whose father was an itinerant pastor. Both Booths appreciated Holiness teachings about sanctification and perfection and became preachers and evangelists.

Catherine Booth wrote a pamphlet, titled Female Ministry: Or Women’s Right to Preach the Gospel, in which she defended the right of women to preach. In the Salvation Army, women could not only preach but also hold high offices in the organization.

In 1865 the Booths created the Christian Mission in the impoverished London East End. They focused on ministering to the “unwanted.” In 1878 the Christian Mission was renamed the Salvation Army. William Booth served as its commanding general, and his directives were not to be disobeyed. The “Salvationists” included clergy members (“Officers”) and laypeople (“Soldiers”) who made a commitment to evangelistic outreach and the care of the weak and the poor.

• They worked with “fallen women,” drunkards, “sluggards,” and others who were in desperate physical and spiritual need.

• They provided “Soup, Soap, and Salvation.”

The Salvationists used musical instruments, entertaining presentations, plain speech preaching, and distribution of tracts and Bibles as they tried to catch the attention of people in the streets.

In 1883 it was decided that Salvation Army members did not need to observe water baptism or the Lord’s Supper. The Salvationists believed that church people sometimes counted on attendance on these ordinances as a means to salvation. By the 1880s, a number of Christians worried that large numbers of the working classes had no Christian affiliation at all. Sharing their concern, William Booth published In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), an indicting book in which he compared the spiritual lostness of a tenth of the English citizenry with that of Africans who had never heard the gospel.\

When Catherine Booth died in 1890, she was eulogized as “the most famous and influential Christian woman of the generation.”

William received opposition from various sources, including the Anglican Church, alcohol-selling industries, and news media —t he latter in part because he chose some of his children as key leaders in the movement. After Catherine’s death, disputes arose between Booth and his children, and he also became blind. But he was honored as a Freeman of the City of London and was granted an honorary degree from the University of Oxford.

G. The Sunday School Movement and Public Education#

Robert Raikes (1735–1811), editor of the English newspaper Gloucester Journal, was a principal founder of the Sunday school movement. Raikes noticed that children of the poor frequently haunted city streets on Sundays and got caught up in mischievous activities. During the weekdays many of these same children worked long hours in textile factories or in the mines.

Whereas children from wealthy homes had schools they could attend or were taught by private tutors, no public education system was in place to serve the children of the poor. Moreover, charity schools were not especially numerous.

Between 1780 and 1783 Raikes opened up a series of Sunday schools. The children sang hymns, said prayers, and recited the catechism. Teachers — the majority of whom were women — tried to help the students learn about hygiene and discipline. Some taught reading and writing, others only reading. Eventually teachers, not all of whom were especially well educated, gave “lessons” to their children. In time, the attendees were called “scholars.”

During the nineteenth century many churches and chapels began Sunday schools. Some factory owners did so as well. In 1803 the Sunday School Union, largely led by Non-Conformists, was founded. Impoverished parents sent their children to Sunday schools as a way to provide them with at least “scraps” of education. The percentage of children from the working classes who attended Sunday schools grew dramatically, from 13.8 percent in 1801 to 49.6 percent in 1831 to 75.4 percent in 1851.

The Sunday school movement was an effective complement to what were known as “Ragged Schools” — that is, the formation of free public education for the down-and-out, a movement initiated in the late eighteenth century by Thomas Cranfield.

Both of these school movements also attracted critics. Some claimed that factory owners began Sunday schools to promote a docile attitude among their child workers, that the quality of the education received at the Sunday schools was poor, and that the teachers attempted to inculcate either Anglican or Dissenters’ doctrines into the children.

In 1870 the Elementary Education Act established public schools that offered free and compulsory education to children whatever their background. The act stipulated that “no catechism or formulary distinctive of any particular denomination would predominate the religious instruction.”

In fact, Non-Conformist members of Parliament, who had helped pass this act, complained that Anglicans and Catholics continued to exercise a disproportionate influence on English public education.

H. Victorian Morals and Domesticity#

“Victorian religion,” including its evangelical manifestations, undoubtedly influenced the social mores and religious practices of many British, especially the middle class. The Victorians placed an emphasis on the development of a person’s moral character.

For many Victorians, the home was the cherished center of family life. The ideal Victorian mother assumed the respected role of running household affairs and caring for and nurturing the children, being — as John Angell James put it in a sermon in 1852 — “the queen of the domestic circle.”

By contrast, the husband worked outside the home in the rough-and-tumble, competitive world of industrial England. He sought to provide financial security for his family. Rather than spending an entire evening drinking at a pub after work, he would ideally return to his “castle” — a single family dwelling. There he ruled as the head of the household. He was responsible for leading his children and wife (and servants) in their Christian duties and family prayers. He was to caution members of his household about the perils of sin and encourage them to pursue godliness.

On Sundays the family attended church together and strictly observed the Lord’s Day. Doing unnecessary “work” or pursuing “amusements” such as knitting, sketching, and cards, or reading frivolous literature, or playing sports was not permitted in many homes.

Critics accused the Victorians of prudishness, advocating old-fashioned religious beliefs, practicing hypocrisy in sexual morality (“slumming” in red-light, poor districts of certain cities), manifesting repressive attitudes toward women, and insensitivity to the economic and social plights of the lower classes.

I. Victorian Religion and a “Crisis of Faith”#

“Victorian religion,” whether embraced by Anglicans, Anglo-Catholics, or Dissenters, appeared secure as an enduring cultural force shaping British society. Paradoxically, however, a number of contemporaries acknowledged experiencing a “crisis of faith.”

In a society where Victorian religion could serve as a conventional belief, some English may have wrestled with doubts but hesitated to admit this for fear of public reproach. Moreover, a discrepancy could exist between those who were in fact “freethinkers,” atheists, infidels, agnostics, humanists, and secularists versus those who were labeled as such. Finally, a number of people such as art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) were apparently atheists for a time but then returned to the Christian faith. Dramatic reconversions were not unheard of.

In 1851 William Hale White and two others were expelled from New College, London, because they would not profess an “orthodox” view of biblical inspiration. White later wrote “Mark Rutherford” novels that chronicled the difficulties of upholding the Christian faith in Non-Conformist Christian circles.

Elsewhere, in the Bampton Lectures at Oxford University (1860–61), vicar and professor J. W. Burgon complained vigorously that even the inspiration of Holy Scripture was under attack: “It is quite monstrous, in the first university of the most favored of Christian lands, that a man should be compelled thus to lift up his voice in defense of the very inspiration of God’s Word.”

In 1860, secularists G. J. Holyoake, Joseph Barker, J. B. Bebbington, and others spoke at a significant secularist gathering. In 1869 Henry Sidgwick specifically alluded to a religious “crisis”.

In 1888 Mrs. Humphry Ward published the novel Robert Elsmere that recounted a pastor’s losing battle to retain his evangelical convictions. The novel scored a significant publishing success.

Some aristocratic notables and descendants of the evangelical “Clapham Sect” participated in the Bloomsbury Group, notorious as it was for embracing “amoral” anarchy.

J. The Christian Faith and “Modern” Scholarship#

The flood of new information and findings of “modern” scholarship — as represented especially by Darwinism and “higher biblical criticism” — contributed to the significant unease about orthodox Christian doctrine. Responses to this modern scholarship took various forms.

“Broad Church Anglicans” sought to accommodate Christian beliefs to the scholarship. They constituted a loosely organized movement consisting of clerics often associated with the 1860 book Essays and Reviews. As theological “liberals,” they prided themselves on possessing a “breadth and freedom of view.” They portrayed themselves not as “High” or “Low” but as “Broad” Churchmen — an expression that came into parlance in the late 1840s.

In 1889 the High Church Anglican Charles Gore published an edited volume Lux Mundi, A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation. Since 1875, at Oxford a number of the theological descendants of the Anglo-Catholic Tractarians had met to discuss privately how they could create a theology that was both “unchanging” (faithful to Scripture and the historic Anglican creeds) and “elastic” (responsive to the new scholarship). Under Gore’s editorship, they published essays in Lux Mundi. It revealed publicly their general acceptance of “modern scholarship.”

Gore penned a controversial article on biblical inspiration that countenanced higher criticism, especially in relation to the Old Testament. The popular book became one of the most influential theological volumes of the late nineteenth century. It went through at least ten editions in one year and provoked considerable alarm. Conservative commentators worried that its authors did not fully uphold the divinity of Christ.

The response of agnostics such as Thomas Huxley (1825–95), Darwin’s great defender, represented another kind of reaction to “modern scholarship.” He wanted to reform British education and make science its foundation. In 1869 Huxley, discomforted by being labeled an “infidel,” coined the word “agnosticism” to describe his position. The term caught on in the general public. Agnosticism gained a foothold among students in British universities and among members of the fashionable upper classes. Huxley also attempted to demonstrate that a “natural history” of the Bible would help solve the “synoptic problem” related to the Gospels.

A strain of more thoroughly “secular” thought also existed in England. It was reinforced by the new scholarship. By the early 1860s, at least four atheistic and infidel journals existed. John Stuart Mill (1806–73), the famous non-Christian author of The System of Logic (1843), On Liberty (1859), and other books, offered to the English people a version of utilitarianism, what some thought was a respectable non-Christian alternative to the Christian faith. He argued that happiness is the end-all of human existence.

In 1869 Mill with Harriet Taylor published The Subjection of Women. They argued for women’s rights to vote, to enjoy equal educational and employment opportunities, and to preserve property ownership rights for married women.

Mill paid special homage to the earlier “utilitarianism” of jurist Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), who had announced his provocative desire to extirpate the very idea of religion. Bentham proposed a utilitarian, non-biblically based naturalistic ethic: human beings act in accordance with the motivations of pain and pleasure, even in the area of religion. The greatest good constitutes that which brings the greatest pleasure to the greatest number.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, opponents of the Christian faith often criticized what they claimed were Christianity’s ethical deficiencies. They excoriated among other doctrines the substitutionary atonement of Christ and the eternal damnation of those who do not follow Christ.

Critical of Mill’s empiricism, Thomas Hill Green (1836–82) reinvigorated a movement of philosophical British idealism. As a monist interacting with the thought of both Kant and Hegel, he argued that a “spiritual principle” in nature created the unified world we experience. This principle reproduces itself in our world.

Philosophers ranging from Green to Francis Bradley (1846–1924) made various expressions of British idealism a significant force in the intellectual life of England.

In the 1890s proponents of realism challenged idealism’s validity. Realists proposed that the world is made up of unchanging facts not necessarily dependent on a knower or God. A person has an immediate intuition of these facts and does not need to resort to a concept of an “Absolute Principle” to account for them.

Even beyond World War I, realists and idealists engaged in dogged criticisms of each other’s views.

K. Attacks against the Doctrine of Biblical Infallibility#

On one occasion Mill claimed that all thoughtful Englishmen of his day were by implication “either a Benthamite or a Coleridgean.” Coleridge was likewise greatly appreciated by the Broad Churchmen.

In his posthumous Letters of an Enquiring Spirit (1841), Coleridge launched a direct attack on what he called the “popular belief” in the infallibility of Scripture. Coleridge argued that the doctrine of biblical infallibility stemmed from a misconceived dictation theory of biblical inspiration.

Coleridge had traveled to Germany and was steeped in German writers from Semler to Reimarus to Lessing and Schleiermacher. He introduced his English readers to elements of the higher criticism of the German Neologians. A Romantic, Coleridge also dismissed the apologetic value of “evidences” for God’s existence. The true evidence of Christianity would include “the actual Trial of the Faith in Christ…”

In 1846 the novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819–80), who had been raised as an evangelical, further abetted the entrance of German liberal theology into England by publishing an English translation of Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus). She had accepted forms of higher criticism, largely due to her reading of Strauss’s work and Charles Hennell’s Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838). Yet much of the British public did not become agitated by this literature. They were not privy to it.

Around 1859, however, a cluster of books appeared that did cause genuine consternation among conservative British Christians. Darwin’s Origins of Species and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty were published that year. Many Christians perceived these books as directly challenging the validity of a biblically based worldview. Their fears were not totally alarmist.

The publication of Essays and Reviews further alarmed many British Christians. The authors professed their desire to reconcile the Christian faith with the findings of contemporary scholarship. Jowett added the controversial premise that Scripture should be evaluated just as any other book would be. Conservative Christians castigated the authors as “The Seven Against Christ.” Several of the authors were put on trial in ecclesiastical courts.

The heated controversy about Essays and Reviews lasted four years and unleashed a flood of tracts, sermons, magazine pieces, and books.

In 1862 the publication of J. W. Colenso’s The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined stirred up the caldron of religious controversy even further. Colenso, a missionary bishop in Natal, South Africa, argued that:

• Findings of geologists made it impossible for him to believe in a “universal Deluge” as described in Genesis.

• He denied that Moses had personally written the Pentateuch “as a whole.”

• He also dismissed the Bible’s infallibility.

In Scotland, the controversy over Professor William Robertson Smith’s advocacy of higher criticism roiled the theological waters especially in the 1870s and 1880s. In 1870 Smith became the recipient of the chair of Hebrew and Old Testament Criticism at the University of Aberdeen. He disarmingly argued that “higher criticism does not mean negative criticism.”

In 1875 Smith, who had been trained at New College, Edinburgh, published a controversial article, “Bible”, for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Smith proposed that Moses did not write the Pentateuch. He denied that prophets had predictive capabilities

Newspaper coverage of Smith’s four-year trial (1877–81) by the General Assembly of the Free Church gave him a vehicle for popularizing his views on higher criticism within a large reading public.

For many Christians, the brilliant advances in biblical studies by the distinguished Cambridge University triumvirate B. F. Wescott (1825–1901), F. J. A. Hort (1828–92), and J. B. Lightfoot (1828–89) and others did much to answer the more severe attacks of critics on the Bible’s authority.

• In 1881 Wescott and Hort published The New Testament in the Original Greek, a work seventeen years in the making.

• They also published the Revised Version of the King James Bible. Dean Burgon criticized sharply the presence of a Unitarian on the revision committee for the Revised Version.

• Lightfoot also masterfully edited The Apostolic Fathers and authored commentaries on such biblical books as the Pauline epistles.

Despite disturbing questions raised by “higher critics,” scientists, and students of comparative religion, apparently the majority of Victorian Christians continued to evince respect for the Bible’s authority, even if some limited the extent of its infallibility to matters of “faith and practice” and not history and science.

Standing aloof from these controversies as “separatists,” the members of the dissenting Plymouth Brethren churches

• the “Exclusive,” those who disallowed nonmembers to participate in Communion

• the “Open” Communion branch, those who permitted such

became especially well known for their commitment to the Bible’s infallibility, including matters of history and science. Essentially a lay-led movement, the Brethren did not believe that the office of a pastor possessed biblical warrant. In their “assemblies” they “broke bread” together regularly and stressed Bible study and holy living.

The leader among the Exclusive Brethren was John Nelson Darby, who had a distinctly separatist bent and was an early advocate of “Dispensational theology”.

VI. CONCLUSION#

Only four years after the sixtieth-year celebration of Queen Victoria’s long reign (1897), the Victorian era finally came to an end. On January 22, 1901, Victoria died. A newspaper article, dated January 23, described her death as the “greatest event in the memory of this generation, the most stupendous change in existing conditions that could possibly be imagined.” It extolled Victoria as “the most respected of all women living or dead.”

Between February 2 and 4 her body lay in state at the Albert Memorial Chapel. Then it was eventually escorted to the Frogmore Mausoleum and placed next to her beloved husband, Prince Albert. Behind the funeral cortège, Queen Victoria’s son, the new King of England Edward VII, and her grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, solemnly walked side by side. Not many years later, their respective nations, England and Germany, would engage in the deadly battles of World War I (1914–18).

During the nineteenth century, the British had gained what looked like a position of unquestioned political and economic leadership in the world. Their empire stretched from sea to shining sea around the globe. Many Christians relished the “muscular Christianity” of contemporary missionaries such as C. T. Studd and rejoiced that hundreds of British were taking the gospel of Jesus Christ into far-off “heathen” lands. In 1896 a high point in missionary recruitment was reached.

A number of evangelical reformers, theological liberals, Christian and non-Christian socialists, secular humanists (who emphasized “brotherhood”), and Marxists remained appalled that large numbers of the poor of both rural and urban England continued to live in deplorable conditions.

Moreover, deep-seated resentments against British rule festered among some native peoples in various corners of the British Empire. A firestorm of controversy erupted when a newspaper writer proposed that Africans living in areas where the Muslim faith dominated enjoyed better living conditions than those in areas colonized by British “Christians.”

At the close of the nineteenth century, many British still viewed themselves as self-reliant, optimistic individuals. Their military was apparently strong, their better businessmen were savvy capitalists, and their scholars were progressive and innovative. As with the Germans, they were witnessing stunning technological innovations (such as the automobile and movies), and some were wooed to join a “leisure revolution.”

They were citizens of a “Christian country” (as they were prone to call England) that was both religiously tolerant and highly civilized. The observance of “Quiet Sundays” was still practiced, even if less rigorously so. In the 1880s both church and Sunday school attendance reached high-level marks.

About 50 percent of youngsters between five and thirteen attended Sunday school. Parents still thought their children should be christened or baptized. Between the years 1902 and 1914, 66–70 percent of babies received an Anglican baptism, 5 percent a Roman Catholic baptism.

After the 1880s, Anglicans and Non-Conformists—especially from the upper middle class —attended church less regularly and engaged in less social service work among the poor. Agnosticism had emerged as a socially palatable belief among students and members of the upper classes. And after 1890, some British had an increased awareness that the culture at large was experiencing diverse kinds of religious crises.

Utopian political and socialist radicals and union organizers joined international parties and complained bitterly about indisputable inequities of the distribution of wealth in the society and the government’s alleged callous attitude toward the poor and colonials. Various “secular forces” and the distractions of “modern” society were blamed for loosening the cultural grip of the Christian faith on the British people.

Perhaps for this reason, the surprising religious power of the Welsh Revival (1904–5) caught many contemporaries off-guard. In addition, a number of articles appeared in American newspapers in 1905 suggesting that both Europe and the United States might soon be caught up in “continental” spiritual awakenings.

More generally, however, the British constituted a self-contented people, if the unrestrained way they celebrated Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (1887) and Diamond Jubilee (1897) counts as evidence. With intoxicating sentiments of this kind drifting through the air and spinning heads, it is little wonder that numerous British continued to cultivate a long-standing sense of superiority toward peoples of other lands, even nearby Europeans living across the English Channel.