Introduction

Summary

The evangelical tradition has been, and in the twenty-first century continues to be, one of the most vital expressions of Christianity within the Church of England. Since its rise in the eighteenth century, modern evangelical anglicanism has provoked opposition and support, applause and exasperation in almost equal measure. It has exercised a strong appeal for clerics and laypeople, men and women, adults and children. Its adherents have exhibited a wide diversity of methodologies, theologies and spiritualities. They have often disagreed fiercely among themselves while sharing sufficient in common to enable them to recognize each other as belonging within the evangelical fold. Although the Church of England has provided a home for evangelical Christianity, the movement has also overflowed the boundaries of the Church. The relationship between the two has, therefore, been marked by a remarkable degree of complexity. Some late Hanoverian high churchmen, for example, opposed evangelical initiatives because they might provide a means for dissenters to subvert the establishment. Conversely, others supported them because they might provide a way for dissenters to rejoin the Church. On the other side of the fence some evangelical anglicans may have continued in the Church pragmatically because they thought it would provide the widest scope for the ministry to which they had been called - it was simply the best boat from which to fish. Others certainly supported the Church conscientiously as the primary means providentially ordained by God for the conversion and pastoral care of the English people. They supported it too because they felt it to be their natural home. Evangelicals were, after all, the heirs of its reformers and theologians, of Cranmer and Hooker. Their doctrines were its doctrines - to be read in its articles and homilies. Indeed for some, evangelicals were thetrue anglicans, exhibiting the Church's expression of the faith in its purest form. No short collection of documents can hope to do justice to a tradition of such size and diversity. Neither can it claim to be representative. What is offered here is instead a sample illustrative of some aspects of that diversity. It covers a period of almost a century from 1799 to 1881 and comprises four different kinds of texts written by rather different kinds of evangelical.