10 - Cambridge religion: the mid-Victorian years

Summary

THE ORTHODOX TRADITION

PARTIES WITHIN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND, 1830–1870

‘It has been the fate of the Church of England from the beginning to be divided into parties’, remarked J. B. Marsden in 1856, and between 1800 and 1830 two chief groupings were to be discerned, the Evangelicals and the High Church or Orthodox. They were united in loyalty to the Established status of the Anglican church, the Protestant character that it owed to the Reformation, and its hierarchical episcopal structure. They accepted the doctrines of justification by faith and the authority of Scripture, as they did the Thirty-nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer. Within this consensus there were differences of emphasis which led sometimes to acrimony, for example Herbert Marsh's long campaign against Simeon and the Evangelicals. The Orthodox valued the authority of the church and its function to interpret the Bible; they were greatly attached to episcopacy and distinguished between continental Protestants (above all the Lutherans) who had retained it and the Dissenters who had not. Evangelicals, on the other hand, emphasised the importance of an individual's apprehension of scripture, and sometimes welcomed links with the Dissenting churches.

In the period 1830–70 Anglican unity was put under great strain by two developments that were quite distinct, indeed sharply opposed – Tractarianism and the Broad Church movement. The Broad Church was in part an attempt to come to terms with a third development, the growth of disbelief in Christianity, at least as it had usually been represented.