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Religious Societies: Methodist and Evangelical 1738–1800

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

John Walsh
John Walsh*
Affiliation:
Jesus College, Oxford
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Extract

One does not have to believe in free trade to recognize that in religion as well as economic life the erosion of a monopoly can provoke an uprush of private enterprise. It must be more than coincidental that two modern ‘church in danger’ crises which accompanied an erosion of Anglican hegemony - the Revolution of 1688 and the constitutional crises of 1828–32 – were followed by bursts of voluntary activity. Clusters of private societies were formed to fill up part of the space vacated by the state, as it withdrew itself further from active support of the establishment. After the Toleration Act perceptive churchmen felt even more acutely the realities of religious pluralism and competition. Anglicanism was now approaching what looked uncomfortably like a market situation; needing to be promoted; actively sold. Despite the political and social advantages still enjoyed by the Church, the confessional state in its plenitude of power had gone, and Anglican pre-eminence had to be preserved by other means. One means was through voluntary societies. The Society for the Reformation of Manners hoped by private prosecutions to exert some of the social controls once more properly exercised by the Church courts. The S.P.G. sought to encourage Anglican piety in the plantations and the S.P.C.K. to extend it at home by promoting charity schools and disseminating godly tracts. It was a task of voluntarism to reassert, as far as possible, what authority remained to a church which, because it could not effectively coerce, had to persuade.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 23: Voluntary Religion , 1986 , pp. 279 - 302
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1986

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References

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28 [Gibson] Observations p. 8; Whitefield, Works 4 p. 31.

29 There were still 12 religious societies in the London area in 1759, listed in W. Dodd, Unity Recommended in a Sermon, preached before the Religious Societies in and about London (London 1759) Appendix p. 24. The society at St. Giles, Cripplegate lasted till 1762; J.W. Legg, English Church Life p. 313.

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94 Walker, Fifty-two Sermons 2 p. 194. For the pastoral office in Methodism see W.R. Ward, ‘The Legacy of John Wesley: the Pastoral office in Britain and America’ in A. Whiteman, J.S. Bromley and P.G.M. Dickson eds Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants (Oxford 1973))pp. 323-50;J.S. Kent, The Age of Disunity (London 1966) pp. 44-85.

95 The Works of the Rev. R. Cecil 3 ed 2 vols (London 1827) 1 pp. 107-8, 2 p. 483.

96 Christian Observer 7 (1808) p. 317.

97 The fullest account of the Evangelical societies is that of F.K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians (Cambridge 1961).

98 Christian Observer 7 (1808) pp. 739-40.

99 Useful recent studies of Evangelical family piety are E. Jay, The Religion of the Heart. Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth Century Novel (Oxford 1979) pp. 131-48 and C. Tolley, ‘The Legacy of Evangelicalism in the Lives and Writings of certain Descendants of the Clapham Sect’ (unpub Oxford D.Phil. thesis 1980).

100 Bridges, C., An Essay on Family Prayer (London 1847)p. 27.Google Scholar