Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ledger-Lomas
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Gothic Architecture ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Strong Trend ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
Self Image ◽  
The Social ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Church

The nineteenth century was a very good century for Congregationalism in England and Wales. This chapter documents the significant numerical growth it achieved during this period, and its energetic efforts in the area of missions, both foreign and domestic. Congregationalists provided the lifeblood of the large, well-funded London Missionary Society, and the most celebrated missionary of the age, David Livingstone, was a Scottish Congregationalist. Throughout this chapter the question of whether generalizations about Congregationalism in England were also true of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland is kept in view. This chapter explores the denomination’s raison d’être in its distinctive view of church polity as local and the way that it was increasingly in tension with the strong trend towards greater union among the churches. Founded in 1831, the Congregational Union of England and Wales waxed stronger and stronger as the century progressed, and Congregational activities became progressively more centralized. Although women were excluded from almost all official positions in the churches and the Congregational Unions and generally were erased from denominational histories, they were nevertheless often members with full voting rights at a time when this was not true in civic elections. Women were also the force behind the social life of the congregations, including the popular institutions of the church bazaar and tea meeting. They were the main energizing power behind works of service and innumerable charitable and outreach efforts and organizations, as well as playing a significant part in fundraising. The self-image of Victorian Congregationalism as representing the middle classes is explored, including the move towards Gothic architecture and the ideal of the learned ministry. A mark of their social aspirations, the Congregational Mansfield College, founded in 1886, was the first Protestant Dissenting Oxbridge college. Congregationalists also gave leadership to the movement towards a more liberal theological vision, to an emphasis on ‘Life’ over dogma. English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish Congregationalists all participated in a move away from the Calvinist verities of their forebears. Increasingly, many Congregational theologians and ministers were unwilling to defend traditional doctrines in regards to substitutionary atonement; biblical inspiration, historicity, authorship, dating, and composition; and eternal punishment. A particularly important theme is Congregationalism’s prominent place of leadership in Dissenting politics. The Liberation Society, which led the campaign for the disestablishment of the Church of England, was founded by the Congregational minister Edward Miall in 1844, and Dissenting Members of Parliament were disproportionately Congregationalists. Many Christians emphatically and passionately knew themselves to be Dissenters who were relatively indifferent about which Nonconformist denomination they made their spiritual home. In such an environment, Congregationalism reaped considerable, tangible benefits for being widely recognized as the quintessential Dissenting denomination.

The Social Composition of the County Magistracy in England and Wales, 1831–1887

1971 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl H. E. Zangerl
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Statistical Evidence ◽  
Time Span ◽  
County Government ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Church

“The revolution is made,” the Duke of Wellington declared in 1833, “that is to say power is transferred from one class in society, the gentlemen of England professing the faith of the Church of England, to another class of society, the shopkeepers being dissenters from the Church, many of them being Socinians, others atheists.” Wellington's political postmortem was, to say the least, premature. The gentlemen of England and Wales continued to prosper, especially in the counties. In fact, most local government historians have argued that the landed classes virtually monopolized the administration of county affairs before 1888 when county government was institutionally restructured by the County Councils Act. The instrument of their control was the county magistracy acting in Quarter and Petty Sessions. K. B. Smellie, expressing a widely-held viewpoint, describes the county magistracy in the nineteenth century as the “rear guard of an agrarian oligarchy,” the “most aristocratic feature of English government.” Yet no one has furnished statistical evidence for this contention on a countrywide basis or for an extended time span. Is the notion of an aristocratic stranglehold over the counties really more impressionistic than substantive? By examining the “Returns of Justices of the Peace” between 1831 and 1887 in the British Parliamentary Papers, a nearly untapped statistical storehouse, it is possible to determine the degree of continuity in the social composition of the county magistracy.Before doing so, it might be helpful to sketch the changing character of the Quarter Sessions.

The City, the Countryside and the Social Gospel in Late Victorian Nonconformity

1979 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 415-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. W. Bebbington
Keyword(s):  
Church Attendance ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Adult Population ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The People ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church

The late nineteenth-century city posed problems for English nonconformists. The country was rapidly being urbanised. By 1881 over one third of the people lived in cities with a population of more than one hundred thousand. The most urbanised areas gave rise to the greatest worry of all the churches: large numbers there were failing to attend services. The religious census of 1851 had already shown that the largest towns were the places where there were the fewest worshippers, although nonconformists gained some crumbs of comfort from the knowledge that nonconformist attendances were greater than those of the church of England. Unofficial surveys in the 1880S revealed no improvement. Instead, although few were immediately conscious of it, in that decade the membership of all the main evangelical nonconformist denominations began to fall relative to population. And it was always the same social group that was most conspicuously unreached: the lower working classes, the bottom of the social pyramid. In poor neighbourhoods church attendance was lowest. In Bethnal Green at the turn of the twentieth century, for instance, only 6.8% of the adult population attended chapel, and only 13.3% went to any place of worship. Consequently nonconformists, like Anglicans, were troubled by the weakness of their appeal.

The Evangelical Discovery of History

2013 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 330-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Bebbington
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Churches Of Christ ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Evangelical Protestantism ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Church

‘From some modern perspectives’, wrote James Belich, a leading historian of New Zealand, in 1996, ‘the evangelicals are hard to like. They dressed like crows; seemed joyless, humourless and sometimes hypocritical; [and] they embalmed the evidence poor historians need to read in tedious preaching’. Similar views have often been expressed in the historiography of Evangelical Protestantism, the subject of this essay. It will cover such disapproving appraisals of the Evangelical past, but because a high proportion of the writing about the movement was by insiders it will have more to say about studies by Evangelicals of their own history. Evangelicals are taken to be those who have placed particular stress on the value of the Bible, the doctrine of the cross, an experience of conversion and a responsibility for activism. They were to be found in the Church of England and its sister provinces of the Anglican communion, forming an Evangelical party that rivalled the high church and broad church tendencies, and also in the denominations that stemmed from Nonconformity in England and Wales, as well as in the Protestant churches of Scotland. Evangelicals were strong, often overwhelmingly so, within Methodism and Congregationalism and among the Baptists and the Presbyterians. Some bodies that arose later on, including the (so-called Plymouth) Brethren, the Churches of Christ and the Pentecostals (the last two primarily American in origin), joined the Evangelical coalition.

media products overseas. Third, the dissolution of apparent differences achieved in Neighbours’s UK success is likewise partly dependent upon conjunctural coincidences of the 1980s, as well as on cross-cultural familiarities bred of histories linked by colonization. Not only can it be claimed that “every next person in Britain has a relative in Australia” (Fowler 1991). It is also arguable that Neighbours’s UK popularity arises because it can reduce almost all cultural specificities to projections of relief from a grey, cramped, class-divided, Thatcherized society (one might remember here that such cultural specificities as Neighbours might have had are already severely etiolated by the program’s anodyne, easily generalizable, and depoliticized ethos). Indeed, there is a remarkable congruence between Neighbours’s introverted, mutually supportive community and Thatcherite anti-welfare doctrines of self-help. Neighbours’s Australia represents a distant home, I suggest, for residents of the “scepter’d isle” long since bereft of Empire apart from Hong Kong and the Falkland Islands, and simultaneously having acute difficulties connecting with Europe. Ruth Brown notes in British responses to Neighbours a twilight gasp of colonial condescension toward a remnant of Commonwealth: “Neighbours seeks to persuade us that middle-class neighbourliness is alive and well and living in Australia, Britannia’s infant arising . . . to glad her parent’s heart by displaying her glories shining more brightly in another sphere” (Brown 1989). Given Britain’s uncertain self-image in the world it once bestrode, an “invasion” of cultural products from a former convict colony can bring out a certain snobbery. In the case of Nancy Banks-Smith’s remarks on Home and Away, cultural snobbery perhaps overlays class snobbery: “One is aware of Home and Away as one is aware of chewing-gum on the sole of one’s shoe” (Banks-Smith 1990). Such views recall the comment of the Australian poet, Les Murray: “Much of the hostility to Australia, and it amounts to that, shown by English people above a certain class line can be traced to the fact that we are, to a large extent, the poor who got away” (Murray 1978: 69). That both major British political parties could take up Neighbours as political football testifies not just to the category of youth as ongoing focus of moral panics in a country deeply prone to such motions, but also to the continuing ubiquity of Neighbours. If Crocodile Dundee supplied Australian tourists with cab-driver conversation around much of the world for at least a year, Neighbours has sustained its impact much longer in Britain. Acknowledged by government, royal family, and Church of England, it has achieved journalistic benchmark status for things Australian. USA: lost in Dallasty Neighbours is probably the most successful international soap opera that’s ever been. (Cristal 1992)

2002 ◽  
pp. 117-117
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
Moral Panics ◽  
Cultural Products ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The World ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Supportive Community

The Theology of the Westminster Confession of Faith in its Context

2019 ◽  
pp. 265-278
Author(s):  
Whitney G. Gamble
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
The Church

In 1643, England’s Long Parliament called theologians from every county of England and Wales to Westminster Abbey to revise the Thirty-Nine Articles, the foundational documents of the Church of England. As the divines commenced their revisions, they encountered a theological movement which they believed represented the greatest threat to the cause of Reformation. Somewhat surprisingly, it was not Roman Catholicism or even Arminianism; it was antinomianism, a new and powerfully growing sect. Concern to combat antinomian tenets drove the assembly into complex theological debates for the first six weeks of its meetings. Parliament’s signing of the Solemn League and Covenant, however, brought an end to the assembly’s revisions. The Covenant instigated the writing of a statement of faith that would function as the confession for a theologically united Church of England, Scotland, and Wales. To supervise the execution of this plan, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland sent commissioners to the assembly to serve as consultative members. Although written in London primarily by English theologians, the Westminster Confession of Faith would be repudiated by Restoration officials. Its true impact came through its acceptance and implementation by the Church of Scotland.

II.—An unsolved problem in Gothic architecture: the permanent outer roof

Archaeologia ◽  
1917 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 21-34
Author(s):  
D. H. S. Cranage
Keyword(s):  
Unsolved Problem ◽  
External Effect ◽  
Gothic Architecture ◽  
End To End ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Church

The destruction at Rheims has called attention to a weakness which is found in almost all Gothic churches—the inflammable nature of the outer roof. The inner vault of the cathedral church is intact, but the outer roof was consumed in the great fire of 1914. It was of lead resting on a fine piece of carpentry at an unusually steep angle. The sweep of the roof from end to end was one of the great attractions of the external effect of the church. The present appearance (pl. I) is almost that of a great bath with high walls, for the distance between the two roofs was much greater than in the case of many contemporary churches. The outline of the extrados of the vault is somewhat obscured by the debris which has fallen on to it.

The Glorious Coup

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ozan O. Varol
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
Military Elite ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Church ◽  
Constitutional Monarchy

This chapter discusses a 1688 conspiracy cultivated by military officers that culminated in a coup d’état against England’s King James II, popularly known as the Glorious Revolution. The soldiers who deserted James II joined the invading Dutch forces of William of Orange to topple the king. The coup was largely the product of a Protestant crisis of conscience among those of England’s military elite who remained faithful to the Church of England in the face of an absolutist Catholic King James II. The coup brought enduring changes to the social, religious, and political fabric of England, as its empire transitioned from absolute to constitutional monarchy.

The Oxford Movement

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Jay
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Natural Mode ◽  
Potential Threat ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Gothic Architecture ◽  
The Church

In 1833 a reforming government seemed to threaten the disestablishment of the Church of England. This provoked a small number of clergy associated with Oxford University to address Tracts for the Times (1833–1841) to fellow Anglican clerics. Reminding them that they derived their spiritual authority not from the state, but by virtue of ordination into a church which traced its direct descent from the body instituted by Christ and his apostles, the tracts ranged from scholarly argument to templates for the renewal of spiritual life. The tract writers included John Henry Newman, John Keble, Richard Hurrell Froude, Isaac Williams, and Edward Bouverie Pusey. Determined to reinterpret the Church of England to itself as the true Catholic church in England, they sought to counteract the perceived Protestant bias of the Book of Common Prayer by appealing to the early Fathers of the undivided church of antiquity, and by emphasizing the via media (middle way) favored by many 17th-century theologians. The series that gave the movement its alternative name, Tractarianism, came to an abrupt end when in Tract XC (1841), Newman, the influential vicar of the University church, argued that the Prayer Book’s Thirty-Nine Articles, to which all ordained clergy and all Oxford students were then obliged to subscribe, could be interpreted as compatible with Roman Catholic theology. For many, Newman’s founding of a semi-monastic community to which he retreated in 1843, and his reception into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845, where he was followed by a number of other Tractarians, marked the end of the movement. This impression was lent continued currency both by Newman’s own account, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), and by subsequent 19th-century historians. However, the movement’s influence continued to be felt throughout the wider Anglican communion in renewed attention to sacramental worship, in church building, and in the founding of Anglican communities. The movement’s appeal to pre-Reformation theology led to its being associated with the revival of Gothic architecture, while Tractarian sacramental fervor later translated into obsessive observance of Prayer Book rubrics by the so-called Ritualists. Admiration for the Lake Poets fed into a Tractarian aesthetic which saw poetic language as religion’s natural mode of expression, half revealing, half concealing heavenly truths, and poetic rhythm and structure as devices for controlling thoughts and emotions. As its title indicates, Keble’s The Christian Year (1827) was designed to accompany the liturgy: immensely popular, it carried the movement’s principles well beyond Anglo-Catholic circles. It was supplemented by further collections of Tractarian poetry. Institutionally male in origin, the movement nevertheless legitimated women’s work through sisterhoods, in education and as writers. Charlotte Yonge and Christina Rossetti are the two most notable exemplars of this impulse. The movement provoked polemical fiction both from its ardent disciples and from disenchanted followers. In the popular press, Anglo-Catholicism quickly translated into Roman Catholicism, thus presenting a potential threat to English values. The revival of confession, sisterhoods, and the notion of celibacy seemed to undermine the Victorian domestic order, while priestly attention to liturgical vestments was attacked as unmanly. If Anglo-Catholicism’s long-term legacy was spiritual, its short-term effect was to politicize Victorian religion.

The Shrine of St. Winefride and Social Control in Early Modern England and Wales

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19
Author(s):  
Matthias Bryson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Alternative Concept ◽  
The Church

In 1534, Henry VIII declared himself the supreme head of the Church of England. In the years that followed, his advisors carried out an agenda to reform the Church. In 1536, the Crown condemned pilgrimages and the veneration of saints’ shrines and relics. By the end of the seventeenth century, nearly every shrine in England and Wales had been destroyed or fell into disuse except for St. Winefride’s shrine in Holywell, Wales. The shrine has continued to be a pilgrimage destination to the present day without disruption. Contemporary scholars have credited the shrine’s survival to its connections with the Tudor and Stuart regimes, to the successful negotiation for its shared use as both a sacred and secular space, and to the missionary efforts of the Jesuits. Historians have yet to conduct a detailed study of St. Winefride’s role in maintaining social order in recusant communities. This article argues that the Jesuits and pilgrims at St. Winefride’s shrine cooperated to create an alternative concept of social order to the legal and customary orders of Protestant society.

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