Collins, Anthony (1676–1729)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth P. Winkler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Scriptural Interpretation ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
Immortality Of The Soul ◽  
The Way ◽  
Established Church

Anthony Collins was an English freethinker, best-known to philosophers for his reconciliation of liberty and necessity, and his criticisms of Samuel Clarke’s arguments for the immateriality and immortality of the soul. ‘I was early convinced’, Collins wrote, ‘that it was my duty to enquire into, and judge for my self about matters of Religion’(1727: 4). This is a fair summary of Collins’ lifelong project: to judge the claims of religion as an impartial scientist would judge the claims of a theory, not by ‘the Way of Authority’, but by reason or ‘the Way of private Judgment’(1727: 107). Collins took on almost the whole of religion as affirmed and practised in the eighteenth-century Church of England: its philosophical foundations, its theological doctrines, its methods of scriptural interpretation and its views on the politics of church and state. He found most of it wanting. His conclusions were at least deistic and perhaps atheistic (though he remained a practising member of the established church): the irony of his writing and the reactive character of virtually everything he published make it difficult to know for sure.

Edmund Burke, Dissent and Church and State

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Church State Relations ◽  
State Relations ◽  
The Church ◽  
At Home

This chapter examines Edmund Burke’s attitude towards Protestant dissenters, particularly the more radical or rational ones who were prominent in the late eighteenth century, as a way of understanding his changing attitude towards the Church of England and state. The Dissenters who attracted Burke’s attention were those who were interested in extending the terms of toleration both for ministers and for their laity. Initially Burke supported their aspirations, but from about 1780 things began to change. The catalyst for Burke’s emergence as leader of those who feared that revolution abroad might become a distemper at home was Richard Price’s Discourse on Love of Our Country. The chapter analyses how Burke moved from advocating toleration for Dissenters to become a staunch defender of establishment as to have ‘un-Whigged’ himself. It also considers the debate on the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts as well as Burke’s attitude towards Church–state relations.

Parliament and Church Reform: Off and On the Agenda

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Innes
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church Reform ◽  
Religious Sects ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

This chapter examines the interactions between politics inside and outside of the British Parliament as well as the issue of Church reform. Attempts by Parliament to improve the Church of England's performance of its pastoral functions ceased following the Hanoverian accession, but resumed in the later eighteenth century. During the intervening period, Parliament passed increasing numbers of acts relating to individual parishes or churches along with various acts adjusting or revising rules relating to merely tolerated religious sects, but by contrast left the established church in charge of its own pastoral operations. In the opening years of the eighteenth century, Convocation provided a forum for clerics to promote their own ideas about how to improve pastoral efficacy. The chapter establishes the complex route by which challenges to and changes within the Church of England translated into a concern to act among parliamentary elites.

Georgian Churchmanship Reconsidered: Some Variations in Anglican Public Worship 1714–1830

1985 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. C. Mather
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Good Works ◽  
High Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
Public Worship

Current evaluation of the Church of England under the first four Georges follows in the main the assessment made by Norman Sykes in his monumental Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century, published in 1934. According to that view the Church, which was lastingly cleared of the universal slackness previously imputed to it, exhibited a pervasive Latitudinarianism sympathetically portrayed by Sykes as ‘practical Christianity’, an emphasis on cdnduct and good works to the neglect of ‘organised churchmanship’ and the ‘mystical element’ in religion. R. W. Greaves detected similar features in the concept of ‘moderation’: suspicion of popery and friendship towards dissenters, a cult of plainness in theological explanation and a very general contempt of whatever was medieval. Historians have been willing to acknowledge as exceptions to this ‘mild’ quality of Anglican churchmanship the early Methodists and ‘small Evangelical and High Church minorities’, but only the two former have been taken seriously. Piety of a more traditional kind - rubrical, sacramental, Catholic - has been identified, only to be discounted. The Establishment has been seen in the light of the judgement recently summarised by Dr Anthony Russell: ‘Certainly the temper of the eighteenth century which favoured reason above all else, and was deeply suspicious of mysticism and the emotions, was against any form of sacramentalism.’

The Established Churches, Church Growth, and Secularization in Imperial Britain, c.1830–1930

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stewart J. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Church Growth ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Church Decline ◽  
New Churches ◽  
Established Church

This chapter considers the question of whether church establishments, representing the alliance of church and state, contributed to church decline. It does so through a study of the established Church of England and the established Church of Scotland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter argues that these churches experienced a remarkable resurgence in the decades after 1830—the period representing the height of British world influence—building thousands of new churches, conducting a vibrant home and overseas mission, educating much of the British youth, mobilizing lay support, and raising significant financial donations to supplement their historic tithes and endowments. The motivation behind this growth was largely a sense of Christian responsibility for the higher interests of the British peoples and Empire. Although this revival of the established churches waned after about 1900, there is no evidence that established religion was a cause of church decline in Britain.

‘A Just and Sufficient Maintenance’: Some Defences of the Clerical Establishment in the Eighteenth Century

1987 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 321-332
Author(s):  
Jeremy Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Black Book ◽  
Pastoral Leaders ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church ◽  
Church Historians

Arguments in justification of the Church’s wealth can be illuminating in any age. The wealth of the Church of England in the eighteenth century has had a particularly bad press. Nineteenth-century reformers portrayed the Established Church of the previous century as a money-grabbing institution; clergy being too concerned with lining their own pockets to be effective pastoral leaders. John Wade in his Extraordinary Black Book wanted to expose the rapaciousness of clergy who, ‘with the accents and exterior of angels … perpetuate the work of demons’. He concluded that true Christianity was ‘meek, charitable, unobtrusive and above all cheap’. Clergy were castigated for holding a materialistic outlook which seemed to hinder their religious role and which has been taken by both subsequent Church historians and historians of the left as a sign of the clergy’s involvement with secularizing trends in society. Even the work of Norman Sykes leaves the impression that the clergy’s defence of their wealth went no further than jobbery and place-seeking. Like Namier he played down the ideological nature of such arguments, relegating them to the realm of cant and hypocrisy.

Revival

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. McClymond
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Spiritual Experience ◽  
British Isles ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Conversion Narratives ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
Institutional Boundaries ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

Just as definitions of Dissent can be complicated, ‘revival’ was a multifaceted phenomenon in the eighteenth century. It crossed geographic and institutional boundaries and rounded histories of the phenomenon need to look at the connections between what was happening in Europe, the British Isles, and the American colonies, as well as considering groups both within and outside the Established Church. Some groups, notably Methodists, began within the Church of England, although many eventually left it. Others, like the Moravians, did not fit comfortably into the category of either Establishment or Dissent. Revivals and revivalism relied on shared and intensified spiritual experience but also networks of interconnection of people and ideas. Revivals frequently witnessed extensive outdoor preaching and leaders who were prepared to travel extensively to spread the Word. While there was some soteriological disagreement, many of the awakened sought to spread their experiences through personal interaction and conversion narratives.

The Ecclesiastical Condition of New York at the Opening of the Eighteenth Century

1912 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 79-115
Author(s):  
Edward Tanjore Corwin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Previous History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Antecedent Conditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

The decades clustering about the year 1700 were unusually important in reference to the subsequent ecclesiastical history of New York. The previous history of the Church in that province, except during the political episode of the Leisler troubles, had been comparatively tranquil; but in the decades alluded to, new elements were introduced and complications ensued, which modified all former conditions, and caused not a little friction in ecclesiastical affairs down to the Revolution. Nevertheless, new phases of Christian activity were also thereby developed, which became very influential; and the discussions which ensued clarified the atmosphere in reference to the proper relations of Church and State and prepared the way for their separation. In order to get a proper background for the consideration of the period alluded to, permit a brief reference to some antecedent conditions.

‘A Practice of a Very Hurtful Tendency’

1979 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 315-326
Author(s):  
W. M. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Clear Pattern ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

The church of England in the eighteenth century has been bitterly criticised by succeeding generations for what the high Victorian church of England regarded as two cardinal sins, firstly non-residence of the clergy on their cures and secondly, and consequently, lack of pastoral care. However, generalisations are misleading and especially these generalisations which are largely based on the evidence of opponents of the established church in the early nineteenth century and on standards of pastoral care of one man to one parish, however small the parish, that were only achieved for a period of sixty or seventy years during the later nineteenth century. How misleading these generalisations are becomes apparent when the evidence for non residence and for standards of pastoral care is examined more closely. The object of this paper is to demonstrate that from the evidence of one particular county a clear pattern of clerical residence emerges that is not entirely incompatible with contemporary expectations of pastoral care.

scholarly journals DEVOTIONAL DISCOURSE AND FEMALE AUTHORSHIP: FROM THE STEELE CIRCLE TO MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

SYNERGY ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adina CIUGUREANU
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
The Other ◽  
Devotional Poetry ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Female Authorship ◽  
The Way ◽  
Romantic Aesthetics

The article brings into discussion the case of a few exceptional women who wrote, published, and became popular in the Age of Reason as poets, critics, and activists. They were considered as Nonconformist because they belonged to the Baptist or Unitarian Church and did not follow the mainstream Church of England views. On the other hand, the end of the eighteenth century witnessed the rise of Romantic aesthetics and of a number of nature poets. The questions this article attempts to answer refer both to the influence of the Biblical discourse on a group of women’s literary and non-literary productions and to the way in which the emerging Romantic aesthetics also impacted their work. How did devotional poetry go along Romantic principles and feminist views? Anne Steele’s and Mary Steele’s poetry, Mary Scott’s and Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist agenda will be highlighted in the analysis.

Unity and Concord: An Early Anglican ‘Communion’

2004 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip H.E. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The Church ◽  
Significant Point ◽  
The Way

ABSTRACTThe Anglican Communion did not come into being solely as a geographical extension of the Church of England. An agreement between episcopalian churches in Scotland and America in the eighteenth century represents a significant point in the development of Communion (koinonia) for Anglican ecclesiology. This essay traces the circumstances and the content of the agreement as an example of the way in which Anglicans have come, and are coming, to reconceive the way in which they participate in a global fellowship within the universal church of Jesus Christ.

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