Church Renewal Brings Cultural Transformation: The English Revolution of the Early Nineteenth Century

In spite of considerable progress in the last few years, there is a good deal of discouragement among those seeking renewal in the church and the society. It is as if people are despairing of ever achieving real reform. Is it really possible that a society and a church that have lost their way to the extent ours have done have ever come back to some semblance of health and faithfulness? Yes, often, although the usual approach to history serves to conceal that fact. To illustrate this let us consider one particular period of history, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England. But first some background.

The Decline of English Society

In the aftermath of Oliver Cromwell’s death, the son of the executed King Charles I was invited back from his exile in France to reassume the throne his father had last occupied. The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 was the occasion for a widespread purge in the Church of England. After ripping the bodies of Cromwell and his lieutenants from their graves for a public hanging, the regime of Charles II executed or imprisoned some of the puritan leaders and expelled Anglican clergymen with puritan leanings from their posts. A generation later the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was greeted with revulsion by many high churchmen who believed they were witnessing the ousting of the king to whom they had sworn allegiance as part of their religious duties. Being unable to accept the legitimacy of the rule of William and Mary, they lost their clerical jobs in 1690. With the most dedicated clergymen of the Church gone, first the militant Protestants and then the high churchmen, the future was not promising. As one modern observer puts it:

The ‘moderate,’ ‘reasonable’ men, the time-servers, self-seekers and pluralists—these all were left: but the wings of faith were gone. Had the ‘National’ Church studied how best to extinguish all spiritual fire within the realm and to crush all crusading initiative, she could have devised no better plan than these two tragic expulsions.1

English life thus entered the eighteenth century, a historian concludes, “like the surface of the moon…pockmarked with extinct religious volcanic craters.”2

That judgment may seem overstated, but contemporaries were saying similar things. Here is Bishop Butler in the Advertisement to the first edition of his Analogy of Religion, published in 1736:

It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it is, not at length, discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it, as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among all people of discernment; and nothing remained, but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals, for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world.3

Across the Channel, Montesquieu wrote in 1730 that, “There is no religion in England. If anyone mentions religion people begin to laugh.”4

Amid the general rejection of Christianity folk religion flourished in many places, the kind of superstitions that one finds almost any place among the uneducated and unevangelized.5 The upper classes had their own version of paganism, with morals to match. Sexual libertinism was endemic in the ranks of the nobility and at times the court as well. Crime was rampant, and the only response of the authorities was to impose draconian penalties; scores of offenses were punishable by hanging. Public drunkenness was endemic and lamented in almost every serious discussion of the state of the realm.

If Christianity had become a joke to many people, that was partly because the Church had become a joke, the clergy leading the way. The poet George Crabbe, himself a clergyman, wrote of the parson of the Vale of Belvoir, intending this poetic tale to represent the degradation of the Anglican clergy:

A Jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday’s task,
As much as GOD or Man can fairly ask;
The rest he gives to loves and Labours light,
To Fields the morning and to Feasts the night;
None better Skill’d the noisy Pack to guide,
To urge their chase, to cheer them or to chide;
A Sportsman keen, he shoots through half the day,
And skill’d at Whist, devotes the night to play;
Then, while such honours bloom around his head,
Shall he sit sadly by the Sick Man’s bed,
To Raise the hope he feels not, or with zeal
To combat fears that ev’n the pious feel?6

If the Church was in bad shape, what of Dissent? Perhaps the Baptists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists had the determination and resources to accomplish their sacred calling. That seems not to have been the case. William Jay, a dissenting minister born in 1769, thought that the dissenters were to blame for the growth of Methodism. Their ministers were well educated in contrast to the rank and file of Methodist lay preachers, but “with a very few exceptions, pointless, cold, and drawled off from notes,” he wrote in his autobiography. Instead of seeing the successes of the “boisterous, rude, coarse, incoherent” Methodist preachers as a judgment on their own proud ineffectiveness, thus leading them to repentance and reform, they maintained their disastrous course.7

Yet the 1730s, black as they seemed to Christians living then, may have been the bottom of the trough. Two years after Bishop Butler wrote about the eclipse of Christianity, John Wesley was converted through faith in Christ and the next year the Methodist movement began. Methodist assemblies began spreading, particularly in mining and fishing villages on the fringes of the kingdom, places like Cornwall and Wales.

Successive Waves of Renewal in the Religious Life of England

The lethargy began very slowly to lift from England when the Wesley brothers started the Methodist movement. Loyal priests of the Church of England until their deaths decades later, John and Charles Wesley found themselves unwelcome in the Anglican churches but more than welcome by ordinary people to whom they preached in the fields. As they traveled throughout England and Wales preaching the gospel of repentance and faith in Christ, they planted meetings in the villages and appointed local leaders who exercised oversight through prayer, Bible study and fellowship meetings. We have much evidence of the complete transformation not only of persons, but families and whole communities. The Wesleys believed they had a particular calling to minister to the poor, and their colleague, the Calvinist Methodist George Whitfield (also an Anglican priest), made inroads among the high-born, through his disciple Lady Huntingdon, the daughter and wife of earls.

Along with the Methodist itinerants isolated Anglican parishes began to ring with the preaching of the gospel in a way that had become exceedingly rare. Jones of Llandowror in Wales, Walker of Truro in Cornwall, Venn at Huddersfield, and Newton of Olney (later of St. Mary Woolnoth in London) were the most famous of a gradually increasing number of Evangelicals bringing new life to these communities, the new life of the gospel.8 Evangelical publications soon spread throughout the land, a potent political center was established in the London suburb of Clapham, and pockets of very strong Evangelical presence dotted the countryside. In Cambridge Isaac Milner and Charles Simeon produced two generations of Evangelical clergymen, and Simeon’s famous Trust found them pulpits aplenty. On the west coast near Bristol Hannah and Martha More, spurred on and financed by their friend, William Wilberforce, created order and prosperity out of a wild and lawless place where economic life had stagnated and culture was almost completely absent. The basis for their work was the patient teaching and preaching of the gospel.9 Earlier in life, Hannah More had been one of the most promising poets of the age; close friend of luminaries like Samuel Johnson and the actor David Garrick, she had turned aside from London literary life in order to lead the Evangelical revival in her own neighborhood. Her literary output, especially her Cheap Repository Tracts, modeled on the secular chapbooks, made an enormous impact throughout England.

In addition to the cultural scene, the Evangelicals in parliament made spectacular progress in reforming some of the most disgraceful practices in the kingdom. William Wilberforce, newly converted in the late 1770s, began a half-century of effort in ridding the nation of slavery. It took prodigious labors, but in 1811 he and his colleagues finally induced a hitherto reluctant parliament to outlaw the slave trade. And in 1833, the same week that Wilberforce died, slavery was banned throughout the British Empire. Meanwhile Lord Ashley (better known by his later title, the Earl of Shaftesbury) was calling attention to the terrible conditions in the factories and mines under which children labored to the ruin of their morale and their health. The parliamentary investigations and ameliorative legislation that followed was due almost wholly to these efforts.

The Evangelical movement in the Church of England was already in its prime, and perhaps past it, when Thomas Arnold became headmaster at Rugby school in 1827. The public schools by then had richly earned their reputation as lawless and godless places, run more by unruly pupils than by the masters, who were mostly clergymen. We have numerous testimonials from surviving pupils who report the terror they endured in these places. (Dickens caught something of the flavor of these schools in Nicolas Nickelby, and he responded to criticism by asserting that there were many schools much worse than the one he invented in that novel.) Arnold was determined to change all that, to create a school that would produce Christian gentlemen, and the example of Rugby is generally considered to have transformed the English public schools. He had been part of the liberal faction (the Noetics) at Oriel College, Oxford, and the later Broad Church movement drew much of its inspiration from him. But Arnold was very different from many who would come to identify with his example. Some of his sermons had a strikingly evangelical tone to them although Arnold was in some ways very critical of the Evangelical party in the Church. His view of conversion, for example, could have been uttered by Simeon or Newton: “…it is not improvement that is required, but a change of heart and life; a change of principles, of hopes, of fears, of masters; a change from death unto life; from Satan to God.”10 Arnold was widely recognized as being completely devoted to the person of Christ. Many of his more conservative enemies, such as John Henry Newman, adverted to the religious fervor and high moral tone of his pupils when they arrived at Oxford and Cambridge.11

Newman was himself the de facto leader of another very important element of the religious renewal within the Church of England, called variously the Tractarian or Oxford movement. For about seven years, beginning in 1833, this group issued numerous writings called Tracts, although they were mostly academic pieces very different from the evangelical tracts that flooded the land. These writings made the case for a recovery of what Newman and his friends thought was the proper role of the Church in the religious life of the nation. This was the High Church position that had languished in Anglican thinking, and that the Tractarians sought to bring back to the center. Like others among the Tractarians, Newman had been an Evangelical, but had gradually come under the sway of High Church colleagues at Oxford. Until 1840, the controversy roiled not only Oxford, but all of the Church of England. In that year, Newman issued the infamous Tract 90, which played into the hands of his enemies by seeming to validate their contention that Tractarianism was a cat’s paw for Roman Catholicism. This brought his influence in the Church of England to an end. Five years later he entered the Roman Catholic Church. Tractarianism as a movement was dead as a consequence of the uproar over Tract 90, but the Tracts nevertheless circulated throughout the land, and clergymen influenced by Newman, Froude, Pusey, Keble and others were ensconced in parishes throughout England. Moreover, the next generation saw a movement indebted to the Tractarian example: the ritualist priests active in mission work and social transformation in many of the large cities.

Evangelicalism was only one of the competing elements of this religious renewal within the Church of England, but its spirit nevertheless permeated the whole. It had never claimed to be anything more than a recovery of what had been lost by neglect or unbelief. The other renewal movements within the Church were fully as contemptuous of the odd combination of moralism and antinomianism which was characteristic of eighteenth-century English religion—the reduction of Christianity to moral declamations accompanied by immoral living—and in reaching back for neglected elements of Christianity had almost necessarily seized on some of the same ones as the Evangelicals had. Arnold and his followers disliked the Evangelical emphasis on the plenary inspiration of the Bible as well as the “priestcraft” of the Tractarians; the Tractarians disliked the failure (as they saw it) of both the Evangelicals and the Arnoldians to appreciate fully the role and authority of the Church; the Evangelicals thought neither of the other two understood the centrality in the Christian gospel of both the authority of the Bible and of personal conversion. Nevertheless, all three, despite the mutual recriminations, looked much more like each other than they did to the characteristic religion of the previous century. Moreover, the dissenting groups—especially the Congregationalists, the Baptists, and the Methodists (which had separated from the Church of England by early in the nineteenth century)—had become fully as imbued with the spirit of evangelicalism as had the Evangelicals in the Church.

The Cultural Transformation of English Society

There is space here to do no more than provide a brief overview of the effect of the Christian renewal on English society. One of the most noticeable changes brought about by the renewal was the concern for education. The Wesley brothers insisted on advanced reading of a moral, theological and philosophical nature for their itinerant preachers. This body of literature was composed of works written by Methodist leaders, but also included reprints of many other authors, often in abstracted form. The Christian Library (1749-1755) consisted of fifty volumes of edited material from a variety of sources. This was a kind of Reader’s Digest two centuries before its time, and it was one reason that even a humble Methodist home was likely to possess a small collection of books.12 A lively periodical literature also developed, and the Wesley hymns alone provided a fairly comprehensive theological education. Wesley’s followers were not in general well-educated or sophisticated, but the leadership gave them university-level books to read; the works of Jonathan Edwards, for example (even with the Calvinism excised), provided an intellectual regimen that would have required close attention from almost anyone.

As important as the Sunday School movement was in the spread of both literacy and religion, there was considerable opposition to it on religious grounds in both England and America. Opponents feared the Sabbath was being desecrated by the secular task of teaching reading, especially when it was done in houses of worship. Some thought the primacy of the family in teaching religion would be compromised by having it done by others.13 Notwithstanding those fears, the Sunday Schools were still teaching religion in 1867, when a national survey was taken of Sunday Schools operated by the Church of England. The surveys—and also biographies—tell of the important role these schools played. In one collection of Lancashire biographies, eleven out of fifty-eight of the subjects born before 1830 were educated exclusively in Sunday Schools, with an additional twenty-three receiving some of their schooling there. Of another 107 people, nine were educated at least predominantly in the Sunday Schools and thirteen others partially. An 1842 survey of boys in mining towns showed that twenty-seven had no schooling except what they received in the Sunday Schools.14

As religious schooling emerged from a purely volunteer society to a more regular one, it was increasingly influenced by two rival societies which had similar goals and methods. Joseph Lancaster, largely supported by dissenters, and Andrew Bell, from the High Church wing of the Establishment, both advocated the monitorial system, in which older pupils helped teach younger ones. As in the case of the Sunday Schools, these schools taught faith and morals along with the basic literacy work for which they are better known.

For several decades the main influence on the direction of teacher training was exerted by the Evangelical physician and bureaucrat James Kay-Shuttleworth. He established the Battersea Training School in 1842, which was the prototype for some forty similar institutions. Kay-Shuttleworth intended to set the pattern for the whole English educational system. He regarded the teaching of children as a drudgery that could not be done well except by raising up a corps of dedicated people who would accomplish the task with a sense of calling, rather than merely as a job, and he believed that sense could be transmitted to the teachers only by combining intellectual and religious training.15 As he later wrote, “The main object of a normal school is the formation of the character of the schoolmaster, as an intelligent Christian man entering on the instruction of the poor, with religious devotion to his work.”16 His method for inculcating the right spirit into the prospective teachers was by the example and instruction of the principal, by holding religious services in the school, attendance at church services, and “acts of charity and self-denial,” as a prelude to a life-long habit of such behavior.17

What the English Read

The fact that many more English people could read in the early nineteenth century than before had to have made an enormous difference in how they thought and acted. These new readers tended to be among the upper levels of working people—not the mass of unskilled laborers, but rather shopkeepers and the higher grade of domestic servants, to many of whom the reading material of their betters filtered down.18 Such people did not rely solely on hand-me-downs, however; many became good customers of the book-sellers. A survey taken of a lower-class London neighborhood in 1848 revealed that the average family possessed eleven books, and that did not include the serial literature that was the original venue of such estimable works as Dickens’s novels.19

To understand better the difference all this made, we have to consider just what it was that all these new readers were reading. In the first place, the Bible was sold and read more than any other book, which was just the end sought by many of the schools when they opened their doors. The Bible also proved to be the catalyst for the creation and maintenance of the most successful of the pan-evangelical organizations. Such groups as the London Missionary Society and the Tract society suffered internal conflict due to the differing views of dissenters and churchmen, but the determination of the British and Foreign Bible Society, founded in 1804, to do only one thing—publish and distribute Bibles without comment, which became the Society’s “fundamental principle”—saved it from all that. By 1814, the Society had more than 100,000 subscribers, and numbered auxiliaries in almost every English county. A decade later, by one estimate, there were more than 850 auxiliaries and 500 Ladies groups.20 England became drenched with biblical knowledge. Newman recalled being “brought up from a child to take great delight in reading the Bible… .”21

Autobiographical writings from the period suggest that after the Bible the two books having the most formative effect on Englishmen were Pilgrim’s Progress and Paradise Lost, themselves both based on the Bible. Bunyan’s allegory was taken by many as a historical account of real people, and Milton seems to be the author who created a taste for poetry among the youth.22 Newman’s brother-in-law, also a Tractarian leader, noted that people frequently said these two writers did more to influence English religion than even the Bible.23

Surprisingly, one of the most influential pieces of literature during the whole of the nineteenth century was a grammar textbook. Lindley Murray was asked to write a book that would assist instruction in a York school for women. As a result English Grammar was published in 1795, and republished many times over the decades. Murray was a devout Evangelical, and the book was larded with appropriate examples and illustrative precepts that provided the meat for the grammatical bones of the language. It met with the praise not only of evangelicals, but of almost everyone interested in the task of instructing people on the intricacies of the English language. But the grammar was jacketed with a heavy dose of the religious teaching that was already covering England from so many other sources. As with Murray’s grammar, so it was with almost all children’s literature, a fact, as one modern scholar puts it, “immediately obvious on every page of every book.”24

With books too expensive for many people, lending libraries met the demand. C. E. Mudie (from 1842) and W. H. Smith (1858) became the largest buyers of books in England and in effect became the arbiters of what the reading public would have available. Both were evangelicals. Mudie was a dissenter, who occasionally preached and wrote hymns, and Smith considered becoming a clergyman. They judged books not only from a business perspective but also from the standpoint of their religious faith, avoiding what they considered indecency or blasphemy. They affected the book purchasers’ reading habits as well as the borrowers’, because of their influence over the decisions of publishers. Considering whether to publish a new novel, the publishing offices would resound with the crucial question: “What will Mudie say?”25

Some of the evangelical publications were far from being narrow, strictly religious organs. From the start the Christian Observer dealt with matters beyond the theological and ecclesiastical. In the issue of February 1802, for example, the section entitled “Literary and Philosophical Intelligence” included items on natural philosophy, medicine and surgery, history, poetry, veterinary medicine, landscape gardening, exploration, geography, anatomy, zoology, chemistry, astronomy, archeology, agriculture and paleontology. There were news items from Britain, France, Prussia, America, Turkey, Russia, and Italy. Each issue had a long section entitled “A View of Public Affairs.” The Observer claimed a theological basis for its interest in cultural matters, inasmuch as it recognized “no hostility between serious Religion and Elegant Literature.” “Philosophy and genius rejoice to take up their cross and follow Christ.”26 It reviewed Lord Byron’s Childe Harold more favorably than many would expect, favorably enough in fact to elicit Byron’s letter of appreciation.27 Even the obstreperously dogmatic Evangelical newspaper, the Record, was surprisingly catholic in its scope, publishing articles from a range of fields almost as diffuse as the Observer’s.

The literature of the age was saturated with religious terminology, images, ideas. Sometimes this seemed to be an almost unconscious reflection of the increasingly religious milieu. Jane Austen, Walter Scott, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Charles Dickens and many lesser-known novelists showed this in their work.28 But other novelists were consciously using their tales to bear tidings of some message, usually a religious message. When Trollope called himself a “preacher of sermons,” he was identifying himself with what had become a dominant feature in nineteenth century fiction.29 Hannah More’s Calebs in Search of a Wife was, in effect, a treatise on Evangelical social ethics. Charlotte Yonge acknowledged that her novels were intended to function “as a sort of instrument for popularising Church Views,” by which she meant Tractarian views.30 Thomas Hughes’s fabulously popular novel, Tom Brown’s School Days, was intended to preach the gospel according to Thomas Arnold, as he more or less acknowledged in the sixth edition. “Why my whole object in writing at all, was to get the chance of preaching… .I can’t see that a man has any business to write at all, unless he has something which he thoroughly believes and wants to preach about.31

Later on in the century the religious revival would have its effect on children’s literature. The didactic material for children began to be invested with religious meaning and with mystery, principally through the work of the Scot George MacDonald, who began his adult life as a dissenting minister.32

So pervasive was the influence of evangelical language on the period that it was adopted, often unconsciously, by those who disbelieved it or even were hostile to it. Much autobiographical writing exhibited those traits because of the evangelical emphasis on personal testimony as a means of evangelism.

The Moral Revolution in England

The early nineteenth century was the swing period between the rampant moral antinomianism typical of the eighteenth century and the well-known penchant for morality associated with the Victorian period that began with the new Queen’s ascension to the throne in 1837. The contrast was highlighted by the radical atheist tailor Francis Place, friend and disciple of Jeremy Bentham, who recalled his childhood in the London of the 1770s and ’80s. Speaking of ordinary lower class people of that period, he feared that those living a generation later would not believe how far English society had come:

The circumstances which it will be seen I have mentioned relative to the ignorance, the immorality, the grossness, the obscenity, the drunkenness, the dirtiness, and depravity of the middling and even of a large portion of the better sort of tradesmen, the artizans, and the journeymen tradesmen of London in the days of my youth, may excite a suspicion that the picture I have drawn is a caricature… .33

Place may not have understood well the causes of the seismic shift in the moral sensibilities of the English public, but he had lived through the changes and he could describe what he had seen.

Families living on the edge economically had a special stake in the moral condition of husbands whose status as providers was dependent upon a reasonable degree of regularity. Drunkenness and gambling could turn a marginal existence into absolute penury, and women were known to weep for joy at the conversion of their husbands in the local chapel, for it afforded some hope that the family provider would be able to provide. The oft-told and possibly apocryphal story of the recent convert in a Durham mining village illustrates what happened untold times: the miner being questioned by his chums asked them if they remembered what his home was like a few months ago compared with now. If Jesus could turn beer into clothing for his children and furniture for his house, why should he not be able to turn water into wine? These villages were sometimes divided into two separate cultures, the pub culture and the chapel culture. The occasional secularist teetotaler would belong nowhere.34

For those living in the fifty years before Victoria came to the throne, to be able to exit from a life of drunkenness and debauchery was a kind of liberation. The miner did not consider himself oppressed by the ethos of the chapel, but rather delivered from the destruction toward which he was heading, along with his family. The miner’s wife (or the fisherman’s or the weaver’s) now had bread and meat on the table after payday, and his children had shoes on their feet. A leading Congregationalist minister in Manchester declared in 1843 that commerce:

is constantly teaching men that thought and labour, during the years immediately before them, present the only path to repose and enjoyment during the years in the distance. Men are thus taught, that in relation to the affairs of the world, no less than to the affairs of religion, the man who would be successful “must take up his cross and deny himself.”35

Yet that did not quite get it right. It was not “commerce” that did the teaching so much as the minister and his colleagues.

By the time the French commentator Hippolyte Taine visited England after mid-century, he discovered that not only were novels free of explicit sexual material, but that it was almost impossible to induce Englishmen to speak of an illicit sexual life: “for many of them this is a closed book the mere mention of which is shocking.”36 He also noted that drunkenness among the upper classes was rare, a very different condition than had obtained a half-century earlier.37 Taine was speaking of the upper classes, but throughout the society the same was true wherever the evangelical ethos had advanced. There seemed to be few Englishmen who believed that the health of the society could be preserved in the absence of personal moral rectitude by the bulk of the population.

The late-Victorian biographer John Morley disliked the evangelicals intensely, complaining about “this dull and cramped” religion. But he credited them with “impressing a kind of moral organization on the mass of barbarism which surged chaotically into the factory towns.”38 Even this was not exactly so, since it emphasized, as sceptics of the late nineteenth century were wont to do, the alleged compulsion of the Christian reformers. The French historian Élie Halévy was much closer to the truth in speaking of their moral influence. They opposed cruelty to animals on religious grounds, and it fell into desuetude before becoming illegal. In such ways, said Halévy, evangelical religion became the “moral cement of English society.”39 This was a thesis far more defensible than the speculation for which he became famous (and notorious)— the cause and effect relationship between Methodism and the lack of revolution in England.

The middle classes played a prominent role in the religious revival. The organizational skills to build the great voluntary societies, the increasing fortunes that men were willing to put to use for the purpose, the widespread literacy which enabled them to learn the principles of their faith and to teach them to others, all combined to make the middle class the great engine of the revival. Many of the main features of the Victorian social scene were products of middle class religious practices. It was evangelical family life, with its family devotions, its father at home and its well-behaved children, its attendance at Sunday worship, its sense of responsibility for its own members and its neighbors, its participation in the societies intended to do good, that became middle class Victorian family life.

The upper classes were not immune from the religious revival. Whitefield had worked with the Countess of Huntingdon for the conversion of her noble friends, and the effort had not been entirely fruitless. Hannah More had preached that the reformation of English morals was dependent upon the high-born to show the example to the rest of society: the message was in her title, Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society (1788). “Reformation must begin with the GREAT, or it will never be effectual. Their example is the fountain whence the vulgar draw their habits, actions, and characters.”40 Wilberforce’s title showed he had a similar idea: A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity (1797). And so also his friend Thomas Gisborne’s title, An Enquiry into the Duties of Men in the Higher and Middle Classes of Society (1794), which instructed even the King on his duties as a Christian monarch.

It will now be obvious to readers what I have until this point skirted: this newly re-Christianized culture was the culture of Victorianism. It sounds odd to say favorable things about the Victorian period because the propagandists have done their work so well. Lytton Strachey41 portrayed the Victorians as laughable hypocrites, and the various scholarly works of Sydney and Beatrice Webb and J. L. and Barbara Hammond and later Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson created the impression of the smugly prosperous grinding the faces of the poor into the dirt—almost the opposite of the reality.

One of the disappointments in looking back at the evangelical, Arnoldian and Tractarian portions of the Christian renewal is the gulf of incomprehension and hostility that separated each of them from the others. The evangelicals saw the gospel in narrow terms, believing that the recovery of the teaching about sin and redemption in Christ would lead to whatever else was necessary. The Tractarians believed that nothing could avail if the vessel in which the gospel was found—the Church—were neglected. Arnold and his followers had their focus on the world that ought to be transformed by the recovery of the gospel. Gospel, Church, and World. The extent of the change wrought in society by the religious revival was revolutionary in its scope and its depth, and in the staying power of the transformation, but we have not seen in this what might have happened were the three visions combined more perfectly into one, mutually compensating for each others’ deficiencies.

The renewal, as with those before and after, was not permanent; perhaps human nature makes that impossible. But for decades, the tincture of vital religion spread through the society, giving to it the coloration of a revived Christianity. This new society, the product of a silent revolution from within the nation’s own Christian tradition, was far from perfect, but it freed the slaves, taught the ignorant, brought spiritual life where there was darkness, turned the drunk and indigent into useful citizens and effective parents, and ameliorated the harsh conditions brought about by industrialization, internal migration, and rapid population growth. It was a revolution that succeeded in making almost all things better. There are not many like that.

There is no reason to believe the spiritual renewal of the early nineteenth century was the last one that God has planned for the world. And there is no reason to believe that the PC(USA), with its rich treasure of reformed heritage, cannot be a vehicle for bringing another one about. The combination of moralistic preaching with a cavalier winking at openly immoral behavior, sadly common in our denomination, was the essence of the eighteenth century English religion that formed the backdrop for the revival of the English Church and nation two centuries ago. Our own renewal movement should take heart from that fact.

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 4, No. 3 (May/Jun 1998).