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Authors: Arthur Bryant
Tags: History, Non-Fiction
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reform at all," was a curiously English saying for an Irishman. It expressed the intensely personal interpretation of the national conception of freedom.
It derived from the Christian faith acknowledged by the peoples of all the other lands of Europe s ave those of the Turk. Heretics in Catholic eyes, backsliders in those of Geneva, the rustic English by the very freedom of their beliefs kept perhaps nearer to the Christian pattern of life than any other people. Dogma counted less for them than fair dealing, ritual than honesty. By their laws neither priest nor king had any power to constrain the individual conscience, for such constraint seemed to them unjust. Save for Holland, England was the only European country in which men might worship God in any way they pleased. The multiplicity of their beliefs was bewildering. A French visitor thought that the only point in which they agreed was in every Englishman believing in some particular peculiar to himself alone.
It was true that there was a State Church to which the majority of Englishmen still belonged and whose membership conferred civic privilege. But this was regarded not so much as a religious matter as one of political convenience, and was partly aimed at stopping clerical power from falling into the hands of those less tolerantly inclined. 1 The Church of England was supported by Parliament not because it had a monopoly of truth but because it was thought the most suitable medium for promulgating Christian teaching. " Gentlemen," said Lord Chancellor Thurlow to the deputation of Nonconformists which waited on him in 1788 to ask for a repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, " I'm against you, by God. I am for the Established Church, damme! Not that I have any more regard for the Established Church than for any other Church, but because it is established. And if you can get your damned religion established, I'll be for that too! " 2
After a century's monopoly of the loaves and fishes it cannot be said that the Church or England was in a very flourishing state. There was a good deal of pluralism, in some cases amounting to downright scandal, much neglect both of church and parishioner and a general atmosphere of comfortable complacency. Almost a quarter of the nine thousand parishes were without resident incumbents, and in many churches there was an uninspiring atmosphere of damp and decay: weeds grew in the graveyard and small
1 The denial of political rights to the small Catholic minority in England, which in Ireland amounted to a grave social injustice, was persisted in from a widespread belief that Catholics used political power to establish religious despotism. The most popular British festivals were those that celebrated past escapes from " Popish tyranny."
2 Crabb Robinson, Diary , I, 378.
boys played fives in the shady corner under the belfry. And the new classes which commerce was creating in place of the old world of status were little regarded by comfortable clergymen obsessed by thoughts of tithes and good living.
Yet here also the fidelity of the English to the principles of freedom came to their aid. Those whom the Church neglected, the rejected of the Church cared for. The missionary journeys of the early Methodists among the pagan outcasts of industrial Britain evoked a Christian revival in the quarter where it was least expected and most needed. Wesleyans and Evangelicals, Nonconformists of the older denominations and Quakers stepped in and did God's work where well-endowed complacency failed. Among the roughest of the rough—the lonely weavers of Yorkshire and Lancashire and the foul-mouthed miners of Durham and Cornwall—thousands of men were to be found practising a faith as pure as that taught by Christ to the fishermen of Galilee and using with quaint but moving effect the phraseology of the Bible. This noble work of reconversion— the supreme triumph of eighteenth-century English individualism— served not only spiritual but
It derived from the Christian faith acknowledged by the peoples of all the other lands of Europe s ave those of the Turk. Heretics in Catholic eyes, backsliders in those of Geneva, the rustic English by the very freedom of their beliefs kept perhaps nearer to the Christian pattern of life than any other people. Dogma counted less for them than fair dealing, ritual than honesty. By their laws neither priest nor king had any power to constrain the individual conscience, for such constraint seemed to them unjust. Save for Holland, England was the only European country in which men might worship God in any way they pleased. The multiplicity of their beliefs was bewildering. A French visitor thought that the only point in which they agreed was in every Englishman believing in some particular peculiar to himself alone.
It was true that there was a State Church to which the majority of Englishmen still belonged and whose membership conferred civic privilege. But this was regarded not so much as a religious matter as one of political convenience, and was partly aimed at stopping clerical power from falling into the hands of those less tolerantly inclined. 1 The Church of England was supported by Parliament not because it had a monopoly of truth but because it was thought the most suitable medium for promulgating Christian teaching. " Gentlemen," said Lord Chancellor Thurlow to the deputation of Nonconformists which waited on him in 1788 to ask for a repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, " I'm against you, by God. I am for the Established Church, damme! Not that I have any more regard for the Established Church than for any other Church, but because it is established. And if you can get your damned religion established, I'll be for that too! " 2
After a century's monopoly of the loaves and fishes it cannot be said that the Church or England was in a very flourishing state. There was a good deal of pluralism, in some cases amounting to downright scandal, much neglect both of church and parishioner and a general atmosphere of comfortable complacency. Almost a quarter of the nine thousand parishes were without resident incumbents, and in many churches there was an uninspiring atmosphere of damp and decay: weeds grew in the graveyard and small
1 The denial of political rights to the small Catholic minority in England, which in Ireland amounted to a grave social injustice, was persisted in from a widespread belief that Catholics used political power to establish religious despotism. The most popular British festivals were those that celebrated past escapes from " Popish tyranny."
2 Crabb Robinson, Diary , I, 378.
boys played fives in the shady corner under the belfry. And the new classes which commerce was creating in place of the old world of status were little regarded by comfortable clergymen obsessed by thoughts of tithes and good living.
Yet here also the fidelity of the English to the principles of freedom came to their aid. Those whom the Church neglected, the rejected of the Church cared for. The missionary journeys of the early Methodists among the pagan outcasts of industrial Britain evoked a Christian revival in the quarter where it was least expected and most needed. Wesleyans and Evangelicals, Nonconformists of the older denominations and Quakers stepped in and did God's work where well-endowed complacency failed. Among the roughest of the rough—the lonely weavers of Yorkshire and Lancashire and the foul-mouthed miners of Durham and Cornwall—thousands of men were to be found practising a faith as pure as that taught by Christ to the fishermen of Galilee and using with quaint but moving effect the phraseology of the Bible. This noble work of reconversion— the supreme triumph of eighteenth-century English individualism— served not only spiritual but
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