Yes and No; or, Glimpses of the Great Conflict (1860) is a clumsy yet representative Victorian “novel of faith and doubt.”Footnote 1 Fleeing from a false accusation of murder, its hero, Ralph Esdaile, disguises himself as “Jules Baylière,” a skeptical journalist, and moves to France. There he abandons his faith in immortality and publishes a journal to preach “a compound of English deism and French socialism.” He lurches from materialism to mesmerism and spiritualism. Drifting to Milan, Esdaile studies Catholic art and debates David Friedrich Strauss's biblical criticism. He is stirred by masses in the cathedral but, converted to Ludwig Feuerbach's humanism, dismisses piety as no more than a projection of man's feelings. Only after meeting the pious Major Hampden does he begin to realize that the Bible alone is a secure resting place for belief. Traveling in Egypt, he rejects Auguste Comte's Positivism, which would oblige him to believe that Christianity belongs to a primitive, superseded stage of man's intellectual development. When he inherits an estate from Hampden in “Oaklandshire,” Esdaile retires there to marry Clara Moberly—a woman he had saved in Rome from following her Tractarian confessor, the Rev. Eusebius Fairlight, into Catholicism. Esdaile collapses with a fatal hemorrhage before this happy event can take place, but at least on his deathbed he knows that Christ died to redeem him. “The spirit that had battled with a thousand ‘Noes’ had pushed at last into the realm of the ‘EVERLASTING YEA.’”Footnote 2

Yes and No is hardly unusual in dramatizing the way in which Protestant belief in mid-nineteenth-century England came under stress from currents of thought agitating Europe as a whole. Esdaile might have stepped out of Clough's Amours de Voyage or Disraeli's Lothair; the seas of Everlasting Noes and Yeas he floats on are Carlylean ones. It is more surprising that the book's main author was the Congregationalist minister Henry Robert Reynolds (1825–96).Footnote 3 As this article will argue, Congregationalists in the mid-nineteenth century displayed an intense preoccupation with menaces to Protestant Christianity that had arisen on the Continent and apparently severely damaged popular faith there. In worrying about these challenges and trying to find answers to them, Congregationalists shared assumptions with and fell back on many of the arguments employed by Anglican apologists for Christianity.Footnote 4 Yet their analysis was distinctive and original in insisting that Continental skepticism was caused by states meddling in the sphere of religious belief and particularly within churches. Like modern historians, they argued that the power of ideas to effect loss of faith depended on their institutional context.Footnote 5 Resolving the crisis of faith abroad and preventing its spread to England therefore required a response that was as much political as intellectual: withdrawal of endowment and control of Catholic and Protestant churches by the state and separation of confessional identities from political rights. This would free believers to follow their conscience, eliminating the hypocrisy and repression that caused people to reject Christianity for philosophical or materialist alternatives to it. Such an interpretation of Europe's problems was consequently a major factor in explaining the growing radicalism with which Congregationalists pursued total religious equality at home, peaking in the 1870s agitation for the disestablishment of the Church of England.Footnote 6

What Reynolds and other Congregationalist ministers of his type thought about the struggles of European Protestantism can therefore tell us much about the strategies adopted to counter the “crisis of faith” that supposedly afflicted the educated classes of mid-nineteenth-century England.Footnote 7 Historians have generally overlooked their pretensions to resolve it, instead understanding the crisis as a phenomenon primarily internal to the established church.Footnote 8 This neglect also reflects a view of mid-nineteenth-century Congregationalists as a body whose social and political power rested on a rudimentary theology of individual conversion, for whom increased intellectual sophistication came late and at the cost of a coherent identity.Footnote 9 Yet throughout this period, leading Congregationalist ministers acted on the conviction that the souls of the most progressive and questioning section of the Victorian bourgeoisie were in their keeping.Footnote 10 As Thomas Binney (1798–1874), an eminent London minister, told the Congregational Union in May 1848, they served “the thinking, active, influential classes” and must “be strong by REASON; for we can owe nothing to authority, prescription, or parade. If we have not mind on our side … we are nothing.”Footnote 11

Reynolds was a case in point. In the decade before Yes and No appeared, he had ministered to East Parade Chapel, Leeds, where “men and women of culture and position, businessmen, anxious mothers with their young children, young men and maidens, the rich and the poor” drank in his intellectual sermons.Footnote 12 Moving to become head of Cheshunt College in 1860, he mixed easily with leading churchmen, and Matthew Arnold even proposed him for election to the Athenaeum.Footnote 13 His high, or at least upper-middle, brow made him a leader of the provincial public culture that has recently interested historians of Victorian Britain—a “spiritual director” or even an “organic intellectual” to the urban middle classes.Footnote 14

Congregational ministers like Reynolds were often bullish about the prospects of their brand of evangelicalism, central to which were independent congregations united through shared experience of regeneration from sin by Christ's death on the cross, as described in an infallible Bible.Footnote 15 The mid-nineteenth-century decades were as profitable for them as for evangelical nonconformity generally, bringing more construction of grander churches, higher salaries, greater investment in ministerial training, and bolder involvement in national politics.Footnote 16 Yet although the evangelical revival had benefited Congregationalists, its very intensity engendered fears of laxity and collapse.Footnote 17 These fears were partly social and logistical: could Protestant churches build enough places of worship to keep pace with the rapid growth of cities and persuade the urban working classes to worship in them?Footnote 18 Could they counteract the swelling tide of frivolous or atheistic cheap literature? Yet, as Yes and No's kaleidoscope of doctrines indicates, Congregationalists were also haunted by intellectual menaces from the Continent, which targeted the educated constituency they considered their own. Binney's thinking classes were exposed to a plethora of alternatives to evangelical Protestantism that promised spiritual fulfillment while dispensing with an infallible Bible and the vital doctrines of human sinfulness and atonement it contained.

Since the early nineteenth century, Congregationalists had been worried by “neology,” by which they meant German higher criticism. In setting aside the inspiration of the Bible, disputing the canonicity of particular passages, and suggesting that its accounts of miracles were just an act of accommodation to the limited understanding of its first readers, neology disturbed people who saw their faith as a summary of authoritative Scripture. To John Pye Smith (1774–1851), the principal of Homerton College and the doyen of Congregationalist divines, neology resembled both English Unitarianism and eighteenth-century deism in trying to deny that an evangelical understanding of the human predicament could be made out from the Bible.Footnote 19 Smith attempted to controvert these tendencies in his massive, frequently reprinted The Scripture Testimony to the Messiah (1818).Footnote 20 Though tolerating, even admiring, German scholars who devoted themselves to close hermeneutical study of the language of Scripture, Smith fiercely condemned efforts by German “neologians” and their English admirers to determine the limits of Scripture's authority as likely to lead to outright loss of Christian faith.Footnote 21

From the 1840s, the threat of neology was reinforced by Continental philosophies that denied the possibility of a personal God's intervention in human history. Scientific naturalism would become the most serious such threat, but it was less dangerous until the 1870s than “pantheism” or “positivism.”Footnote 22 Pantheism loosely described the challenge of German idealism to supernatural revelation. In seeing the world as the expression of laws of reason, as either subjectively or objectively present in the human mind, idealists ruled out the possibility of the external revelation from God to man recorded in the Bible. God was instead immanent in the world and was either identical with impersonal reason or was intuited through man's inner nature. Positivism proposed a different substitute for revealed religion. It suggested that knowledge of phenomena was the only kind possible and that human history was a steady progress toward recognizing that fact. Christian talk about Christ, let alone a personal God, belonged to an outdated, “metaphysical” stage of human development and should be superseded by a “religion of humanity.”Footnote 23

Exponents of these philosophies were disturbing opponents. They were not Voltairean scoffers or the familiar Painite deists of plebeian radicalism.Footnote 24 They might be covert atheists, but they counterfeited a reverential manner.Footnote 25 They did not just preach “doubt” but offered an alternative creed or theodicy for those unhappy with the supposed unworldliness or moral shortcomings of orthodox Christianity.Footnote 26 Elements of Hegelianism, radical biblical criticism, and Positivism were in time painlessly absorbed into Christian apologetic, but in the mid-nineteenth century they appeared to be fundamental challenges to evangelical belief.Footnote 27 On the Continent, they were associated with widespread decay of religious commitment among Protestants. In Germany, educated Protestants appeared to be drifting toward purely nominal membership of the churches.Footnote 28 Both there and in France, militant anticlerical and even atheistic liberalism seemed on the rise from the mid-nineteenth century. Ultramontane Catholicism completed the depression with which most English evangelicals observed the Continent: it upped the ante in the conflict between the modern intellect and faith, apparently crushing the exercise of human reason in religion where the rationalists exalted it.Footnote 29

Understanding the Continental genesis of these philosophies and their alliance with biblical criticism would be crucial if they were to be defeated on their inevitable spread to England. The cross-Channel traffic in skepticism identified by Smith seemed to become denser and more threatening during the 1840s, with American Transcendentalists, French Comtists and German philosophers, and critics exchanging ideas with each other and passing them on to English freethinkers. Moreover, the industrialization of printing and the falling price of books and periodicals dramatically expanded the public for their views.Footnote 30 Needling questions of intellectual and cultural status also pointed to the need for knowledge about Continental skepticism. The crisis of faith was less a static slugging match between reified “faith” and “doubt” than a fluid contest between different sections of the intelligentsia for cultural authority, for the right to define what faith was.Footnote 31 Here the footing of Congregationalists was shaky. Supernatural revelation was being questioned in overlapping worlds in which they were not at home: metropolitan journalism, literature, and science; the ancient universities; socially elitist Unitarian circles.Footnote 32 This liberal, inquiring freemasonry reinterpreted the crisis as a benign “second Reformation,” which would free the truth from the ignorance and theological crudity of evangelicalism, whether timorous Protestants liked it or not.Footnote 33 Congregationalists wanted to demonstrate that they could predict the “irresistible breath of the ‘Zeit-Geist’” more accurately than such soi-disant Europeans as Matthew Arnold.Footnote 34 They were determined to develop expertise under the difficulties imposed by the establishment's prejudiced condescension.Footnote 35

This ambition had two important institutional contexts. The first was in the dissenting colleges. Congregationalists were proud of their learned ministry and took steps during the 1830s and 1840s to preserve it by remodeling old colleges and founding new ones in urban areas where their support had grown rapidly—adding brains to numbers.Footnote 36 These institutions struggled to offer a sufficiently rounded general education, relying on the University of London to examine their students and increasingly on other institutions for secular instruction. Yet until the virtually complete removal of tests at Oxford and Cambridge in 1871, dissenting colleges sustained Congregationalist pretensions to offer their ministers an intellectual culture separate from but equal to the establishment's institutions in whatever concerned the “science of theology and the art of preaching.”Footnote 37 Success in both tasks involved training the “ministry of the age”—the age meaning the social and intellectual revolutions sweeping Europe as a whole.Footnote 38 In addition to providing an education and work for many of the ministers this article describes, they were a physical center for the often-vexed question of how evangelical zeal could be updated intellectually—a constant theme in college addresses of the period.Footnote 39

The second, a natural field of activity for college graduates, was periodical journalism. Congregationalists regarded periodical reviews as a “sufficiently correct index of the intellectual development of a people,” perhaps rightly, for they told busy readers how to judge books they lacked the time or the learning to tackle themselves.Footnote 40 Carlyle's exaltation of the man of letters as a priest struck them as sacrilegious, but ministers should certainly be men of letters and embrace “this new pontificate, the sovereignty of public opinion.” They hoped that their periodicals could demonstrate their “comparative fitness” to influence the “destinies” of the country and that they would be read in the “high places of the earth.”Footnote 41 The Eclectic Review (1805–68) and the British Quarterly Review (1845–85) are particularly important sources for how Congregationalist ministers both interpreted European skepticism for a wide denominational public and advertised their intellectual avoirdupois to outsiders.Footnote 42

This article's analysis of the commentary on European skepticism preached by these pushy intellectuals falls into four parts. The first shows Congregationalists could be just as knowledgeable and as confident in resisting skeptical ideas as were most Anglicans. The second explains why they drew so close a connection between Continental skepticism and Erastianism. The third shows how the link between defending evangelical belief and separating church and state was exploited in the domestic crusade for disestablishment, while the last part assesses why this synthesis failed to win over a wider audience.

All British Protestants, but evangelicals in particular, considered mid-nineteenth-century Europe an important place for projecting and testing their beliefs. Although the evangelical revival's chief effect was to multiply connections between Britain and the United States, it also brought a new concern with the Continent, with missionaries from Britain spreading the gospel in France, Germany, and Switzerland.Footnote 43 Europeans were indeed as much targets of evangelical mission as British street Arabs or the natives of Borrioboola-Gha. The faith thus exported was intense yet fragile, distributed among networks of Protestants who struggled against not only Roman Catholicism but also lukewarm or rationalistic majorities in their own churches. Congregationalist ministers keenly shared in the sense of solidarity with these embattled believers. The Continent became physically closer as travel became more affordable: many a minister went on a pilgrimage to Calvin's Geneva or to what the London minister John Stoughton (1807–97) called “Lutherland.”Footnote 44 Congregationalists joined the Evangelical Alliance (1845) and supported the heroic colporteurs of the British and Foreign Bible Society and the Evangelical Continental Society (1845).Footnote 45 David Worthington Simon (1830–1909), one of Congregationalism's most knowledgeable commentators on German Protestantism, spent, for instance, much of the 1860s acting as the Bible Society's agent in Berlin, interesting himself in the spiritual condition of cabmen as much as in academic theology.Footnote 46 The annual meetings of these agencies were occasions to take stock of evangelical Christianity's fluctuating progress on the Continent.Footnote 47

Enthusiasm for the Evangelical Alliance's jamborees did not of course equate to informed or sympathetic interest in the intellectual problems of Continental Protestantism.Footnote 48 British evangelicalism's critics often fastened on its paranoid insularity and distrust of foreigners who could not parrot the canting Calvinism of “bazaar Christianity.” Typical of this one-sidedness was dread of the questions German critics and theologians raised about the nature of faith.Footnote 49 Many evangelicals, particularly those in the established churches, undoubtedly did see Britain as the modern Israel, a fortress under constant threat from enemies abroad and traitors at home.Footnote 50 Congregationalists were not exempt from such tendencies—as will become apparent—but their leaders claimed that this pinched mentality was the product of belonging to a legalistic national church. As Henry Allon (1818–92), a London minister and an editor of the British Quarterly, liked to note, Congregationalists gladly put their pulpits at the disposal of visiting Europeans, while Anglicans, fearful of breaching the Act of Uniformity, kept theirs closed.Footnote 51 Particularly when it came to German philosophy and biblical criticism, Congregationalists stressed that an ostrich posture was impossible. Their interest in these two subjects certainly reflected more apprehension than enthusiasm. Although more upbeat about urbanization than many religious critics of the “condition of England,” they nonetheless worried that the mass reading public it created would be permeable to foreign skepticism.Footnote 52 As Robert Vaughan (1795–1868), the first principal of Lancashire Independent College and the founder-editor of the British Quarterly, warned, the laudable vigor of city dwellers led them to question received authorities in religion as in politics.Footnote 53 Reynolds warned the Congregational Union in 1851 that “the battle field of opinions” had dramatically widened, taking in the “spiritualism of Schleiermacher, the raving of Rousseau, and the historical criticisms of Strauss.”Footnote 54 Intellectual protectionism was therefore impossible: free trade in ideas must follow free trade in corn. This would mean, Thomas Binney had counseled in 1848, “deal[ing] gently with the younger men” and trusting to their spirit of discovery—“[we] must not be surprised that they betray the influence of German books or German universities.”Footnote 55

Binney was right to hope that young ministers would find German universities that combined a systematic approach to biblical criticism and theology with solid, even reactionary piety. The favorite was Prussian Halle, which by the 1830s was under the sway of F. A. Tholuck. He had overcome a rationalist theology faculty to build an ascendancy founded on his freakish gift for Oriental languages and emotional, neo-Pietist preaching.Footnote 56 Tholuck was a vocal admirer of British evangelicalism, active in the Alliance, and famed for Guido and Julius, a novel that dramatized his emotional rebellion against Enlightenment rationalism.Footnote 57 His broad selection of friends and admirers included Samuel Davidson (1806–98), Lancashire College's professor of biblical criticism, whom he visited in Manchester.Footnote 58 That friendship brought Congregationalists to Halle.Footnote 59 Berlin also had many attractions: the ecclesiastical historian August Neander, the Hebraist E. W. Hengstenberg, and later the theologian Isaak A. Dorner, author of a renowned work on Christology.Footnote 60 Defending his decision to send his son Robert Alfred to Tholuck's Halle in an 1858 memoir, Vaughan claimed that he had hoped that “as a result of his German studies, [my son] would … render … me efficient aid in my endeavours to sustain the interests of revealed truth through the press.” Like his namesake, he had infiltrated the “camp of the Danes” to discover plots against England.Footnote 61

Despite great differences in their methods, it seemed plausible to class these scholars together as representatives of a movement away from the Enlightenment antisupernaturalism that had produced “neology.” They were also noted opponents of the “pantheists” who had broken from the Enlightenment tradition in a different direction. Instead of trying to purge Scripture of its supernatural element, the “pantheistic” New Testament criticism of Strauss, Ferdinand Christian Baur, and his Tübingen School or the Old Testament criticism of Wilhelm Vatke or Bruno Bauer combined a radical attack on the Bible's historical authority with a Hegelian belief in God's immanence in history as a whole.Footnote 62 Within Germany, such scholarship provoked a reaction from “mediators” like Neander and Dorner, who tried to reconcile scientific inquiry with an insistence (derived from Schleiermacher) that the critic must bring a consciousness of redemption through Christ to his work. It also inspired the more reactionary arguments of “neo-Lutherans” like Hengstenberg, who insisted that the biblical critic must be guided by the creeds of the Lutheran Reformation. The existence of both parties was seen as evidence that the scholarly pendulum was swinging back toward the Bible as the only authoritative guide to faith. Congregationalists’ dogged hostility to the higher criticism therefore reflected not just insular contempt for German thought but a considerable, albeit highly partisan, engagement with it.

The battle for “revealed truth” reached English readers through the press. Congregational reviewers consistently adopted a complacent, rather than alarmist, tone toward German scholarship. Worthy “lower critical” studies on scriptural language or hermeneutics were praised; dangerous “higher criticism” was discussed through dismissive summary or excerpts from its opponents. Strauss's Das Leben Jesu is a classic example. Reviewers presented its mythological interpretation of the Gospels as an intellectual curiosity, a bomb that had already been defused in its country of origin.Footnote 63 Orthodox German “lives” of Jesus that appeared in the 1860s were greeted as decisive evidence that Strauss's mythological principle had been superseded just as rapidly as the antimiraculous naturalism it had itself refuted.Footnote 64 The intellectual story of German Protestantism was therefore told as an optimistic journey away from the rationalism of the later eighteenth century that was painful, liable to puzzling detours, but nearly complete.Footnote 65 It was worth reading to discover how it had laid to rest the doubts about Scripture it had originally raised. “It was the haft of Achilles’ spear,” wrote Simon in 1868, “which alone could heal the wounds which the head had made.”Footnote 66 The tendency of leading publishers, such as T. and T. Clark, to screen out rationalist works from their series of translations from Continental theology reinforced this complacency.Footnote 67 So did a number of ecumenical periodicals and scholarly enterprises that united contributions from Nonconformists, Anglicans, and impeccably conservative Germans.Footnote 68

Congregationalists were moreover confident that Britain's native intellectual tradition could expose the wrongheaded philosophy on which “pantheistic” criticism was based. As Dale Johnson has noted, they happily participated in a commonsensical apologetic, which identified Christian faith as a rational response to a convincing array of different evidences.Footnote 69 Locke, Paley, and Butler were the staple diet of the colleges to a late date, just as they were of Oxford and Cambridge. Congregationalists saw in the Lockean tradition a humble vision of the human mind, in which reason's role was to reflect on the evidence of the senses.Footnote 70 This was in signal contrast with the arrogant post-Kantian idealism considered to underpin “pantheist” higher criticism, which pretended that spiritual insight could take place independent of external revelation and which ended in Feuerbach's claim that God was a figment of the human mind.Footnote 71 Following in the tradition of Butler and Paley, Congregationalists argued that existence of design in nature, coupled with scriptural evidences of miracles and the fulfillment of prophecy, created an overwhelming sense of conviction for evangelical doctrines. In their eyes it was perverse dogmatism to follow Strauss or Baur in interpreting miracles as prima facie evidence that Scripture must be unhistorical. Dogmatic hostility to miracles was, suggested Edward Miall, “the rampart upon which the whole artillery of Biblical criticism is mounted.”Footnote 72 In their anxiety to defend Scripture as a source of factual testimony, Congregationalists also put up a long resistance to the intuitionalist theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, though they did appreciate the renewed note of piety he brought to German theology.Footnote 73 In making Christian consciousness, rather than biblical data, the starting point of theology, Schleiermacher was felt to come uncomfortably close to the “spiritualism” espoused by such English and American opponents of biblical Protestantism as Francis William Newman, W. R. Greg, and Theodore Parker.Footnote 74

The most memorable onslaught on their “spiritualism” and its indebtedness to “Continental speculation” was The Eclipse of Faith (1852) by Henry Rogers (1806–77), an influential tutor at Spring Hill College, Birmingham, and Vaughan's successor as principal of Lancashire, as well as a writer for the Edinburgh Review. The Eclipse is a series of dialogues in which Harrington, a melancholy “skeptic” whose certainties have been worn down by the “innumerable controversies” he witnessed as a student in Germany, punctures the dogmatism involved in Straussian criticism and Francis William Newman's scorn for a “book revelation.” Rogers argued that in following the Germans by decoupling the feeling of faith from factual evidence, they would destroy the importance of the Bible in educated culture.Footnote 75 The “glorious prerogative” of Christianity must be its appeal not to the feelings but to understanding, a position that Rogers had already defended against the Tractarians’ hatred of private judgment.Footnote 76 Through a hail of pert sarcasms against the spiritualists, the Eclipse laid out an apologetic for the plain Englishman: the Bible contains a series of appeals to our intellectual, moral, and spiritual nature, which make it overwhelmingly probable that its claims to be a supernatural revelation are true. It is deeply indebted to Butler's arguments against deism, as well as to the inductive methods of Rogers's friend the Noetic Richard Whately.Footnote 77

In trouncing Continental “spiritualism” and Tractarian Romanizing, Rogers was dubbed the leader of a “hard church” intolerant of poetry or mysticism.Footnote 78 A dubious honor perhaps, but it shows that Congregationalist intellectuals were not confined to a dissenting ghetto but shared in and forcefully articulated a defense of English faith as a series of rational inferences from an authoritative Bible.Footnote 79 The trust that philosophical attempts to undermine the possibility of supernatural revelation would founder in their own absurdities also explains the scornful reaction to Comtean Positivism. Reynolds and other writers argued that it perverted what was true in empiricism to suggest that nothing was knowable beyond phenomena. They also claimed, as so many other English critics of Comte did, that his humanist religion was not really liberal but just a godless parody of authoritarian French Catholicism, which promised to free reason from superstition, only to enslave it more thoroughly than ever before.Footnote 80

The relaxed mood with which Congregationalists confronted German Protestant thought could quickly sour. During the 1850s, there was a full-fledged panic about the infestation of Congregational colleges and pulpits by “Germanism.” This was shorthand for a tendency to abandon belief in original sin and the atonement and to treat the Bible as no more inspired than any other literature. These fears were stoked by the denomination's press baron, John Campbell. The huge circulations enjoyed by the journals he published for the Congregational Union—the Christian's Penny Magazine (1846–81) sold over 100,000 copies monthly—enabled him to influence, even bully, a denomination that was highly dependent on the press for a sense of cohesion. Campbell believed that mass publishing, whether of Bibles or of stridently pious journals, was the best defense for faith and despised college men and their rarefied reviews.Footnote 81 As a Scot reared in the austere Calvinism of the Westminster Confession, Campbell used his British Banner (1848–56) newspaper to crusade against those trying to undermine Fortress Britain from within. The “false friend” was “within the camp”; the “poison” of Germanism was mixed into periodical articles and college lectures; “men of eminence” needed monitoring.Footnote 82 Most notorious of all, Campbell attacked T. T. Lynch's hymnbook The Rivulet (1856) for replacing the “doctrine of Paul's epistle to the Romans” with the “doctrine of the German schools” and spreading a “ministration of death.”Footnote 83

The long controversy that followed Campbell's allegations fed into and deeply embittered a wider debate about what counted as “Germanism” and who had the right to point it out in others. “Germanism” was an especially toxic charge when brought against the colleges. Because their mission was to train their pupils to deal with modern skepticism, they were naturally prone to allegations of poisoning rather than inoculating their charges. Tholuck's friend Davidson was the most notorious casualty of these suspicions. This was ironic, because in a series of scholarly works he had tried to show that exploiting German scholars’ painstaking textual study of the New Testament could counteract the “pantheistic spirit” of an age in which “many are disposed to exalt their intuitions too highly, to the detriment of the historical.”Footnote 84 In 1856, however, he published two volumes as his contribution to a revised edition of T. H. Horne's An Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. The governing committee of Lancashire College, prodded into action by Campbell and the Record newspaper, demanded that Davidson retract statements made in the work, notably his arguments that the Bible was partially rather than fully inspired; that many of the doctrines characteristic of Calvinism could not be found in the Bible; and that the Pentateuch was a fragmentary composition, not entirely written by Moses. Having refused to give in, Davidson was forced to resign, bringing to an effective end the teaching of biblical criticism at Lancashire College.Footnote 85 His backers were indignant that he had been accused of Germanism, a “cabbalistic term whose meaning is on all sides unknown, but whose effect is for that very reason electric on good ignorant people.”Footnote 86

These wobbles confirmed critics of orthodox dissent in their belief that its hectoring politics left no room for free inquiry.Footnote 87 They exposed the problem that, whether preaching or teaching, ministers were answerable to trust deeds that bristled with clauses framed in the unyielding Calvinism of an earlier time.Footnote 88 Yet the primacy of the individual church in exercising theological discipline could be a blessing as well as a grievance. Freethinking ministers such as James Baldwin Brown (1820–84) were able to carry their congregations with them in rebelling against Calvinist doctrines. Although such ministers could face informal censorship, such as discouragement of their participation in local or national denominational organizations, concerted action against their alleged “Germanism” was impossible. The Congregational Union's foundational “Declaration of Faith, Church Order and Discipline” (1833) was an ambiguous document whose moderately Calvinist positions did not add up to an enforceable creed. Nor did Congregationalists want one, liking as they did to contrast their unforced agreement with the way Anglicans were policed by the Thirty-Nine Articles.Footnote 89 The outcome of the Rivulet affair was a firm rebuff for Campbell's attempt to set himself up as a watchdog for Germanism. His magazines lost their official connection with the Congregational Union, and ministers agreed that they should not pry into each other's opinions. Months later, Edward Miall's Nonconformist mocked the “hideous phantom” with which Campbell had terrified his readers.Footnote 90 Tellingly, Campbell's chief allies had been Scottish journalists from outside Congregationalist ranks—James Grant of the Morning Advertiser and Alexander Haldane of the Record, whose mission was likewise to hunt out backsliders from British evangelical orthodoxy.Footnote 91

Nor did Davidson's case indicate that biblical criticism was tabooed. The college's decisions to press first for the retraction of his opinions and then for his condemnation were made on narrow margins; he did not want for supporters on the college committee or in the wider Congregational world.Footnote 92 His book had caused ructions because it raised questions about the Bible's inspiration at a time when it was feared that the whole concept of Scripture's supernatural authority was in danger.Footnote 93 Yet there was not much appetite to head off this threat by adopting doctrines of plenary inspiration in which the Bible was seen as a completely inerrant text produced by writers acting under the direct dictation of the Holy Spirit.Footnote 94 Such theories were themselves unwelcome innovations in the Congregational tradition, whose leading scholars had often allowed themselves as much latitude in interpreting scriptural texts as was compatible with belief in their unique authority. Vaughan had given the casting vote that sealed Davidson's departure, but he was deeply embarrassed when his rather flexible views on the Bible's inspiration were probed, revealing that he had wanted to distinguish between its different modes and make allowances for the human element in its composition.Footnote 95

Influential Congregationalists moved with speed to declare against scriptural inerrancy during the 1860s and 1870s, thereby permitting at least a superficial tolerance of the more conservative strains of higher criticism.Footnote 96 Brown's challenge to evangelical orthodoxy, which borrowed from F. D. Maurice's moral critique of the dogmas of original sin and a substitutionary atonement, was simultaneously making headway.Footnote 97 Celebrating thirty years as pastor of the Union Chapel, Islington, in 1874, Henry Allon claimed that this period had seen a successful discarding of “dogmatic human formularies” for a “more restful and implicit acceptance” of the incarnation and redemptive death of Christ.Footnote 98 At the center of a freer conception of evangelicalism was a human yet supernatural Christ, whose atoning self-sacrifice for humanity was understood as a great fact, independent of the complex forensic or commercial metaphors evangelical theologians had once devised to describe it. The great theologian and Nonconformist politician Robert W. Dale (1829–95), who had been trained at Spring Hill by Rogers, argued in 1875 that this shift meant putting the “fact of the Atonement” before “Theory” about it.Footnote 99

The facts about Christ's life and mission accurately recorded in Scripture were now felt to be more important than debate about the precise degree of Scripture's inspiration. The Bible was the “historical development of a saving purpose”: the great facts about Christ and his salvific mission it recorded were indubitable, surviving any quibbles about inspiration, canonicity, miracles, or prophecy.Footnote 100 The new emphasis on Christ reduced nervousness about the Old Testament and meant German critics could be accorded more latitude in studying it.Footnote 101 Even if parts of it were not as old or as accurate in recording matters of fact as previously thought, when taken as a whole it still showed that the Jews had anticipated the coming of a divine Messiah.Footnote 102 As Congregationalists liked to point out to such homegrown higher critics as Bishop J. W. Colenso, this mattered more than debating the number of quails the Israelites had eaten in the desert.Footnote 103 While the British Quarterly Review's attitude remained scornfully dismissive until the elderly Vaughan's retirement in 1865, such acceptance of criticism was marked in journals that saw themselves as standard-bearers for youthful, politicized nonconformity, such as the Nonconformist, the Christian World, or the English Independent.Footnote 104

Increasingly convinced that the person of Christ must be at the center of Christian apologetic, Congregationalists positively welcomed the attempts of higher critics to prove that the Gospel accounts of the superhuman goodness of Christ and his atoning death and resurrection were either mythical or fictional. They argued that their complete failure confirmed the indisputable facts at the basis of evangelical Christology and dismissed such works as Ernest Renan's Vie de Jésus (1863), which attempted to imagine the life of Christ in purely human and naturalistic terms.Footnote 105 Renan's book was certainly alarming, because his “precious little gem of heretical bijouterie,” which presented Christ as an amiable but deluded Galilean holy man, attracted a wider public than many a laborious German treatise.Footnote 106 Its “warm luxuriousness of style” would seduce readers “like a perfume,” warned John Brown Paton (1830–1911), who, like Dale, had been a pupil of Rogers.Footnote 107 Yet Paton and others were confident that Renan's was not a fair scholarly account but a semi-Positivist tract that refused to contemplate any reality beyond “purely natural phenomena.”Footnote 108 If miracles were possible, then the Gospels’ portrait of a superhuman savior was more credible as an explanation of Christianity than Renan's depiction of an “effeminate dreamer … floating buoyantly in the popular current.”Footnote 109

To counter skepticism's attractions, Congregationalists emulated them in powerfully evoking the personality of Christ. “Must we,” Dale asked the Congregational Union in 1869, “lecture to our congregations on Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, and … reveal to them ‘The Secret of Hegel?’ Must we discuss the Positivism of France, and the degenerate Transcendentalism … [of] Germany?” Obviously not: hard-pressed congregations came to chapel to discover what Christ had been like—an appetite of which Renan's popularity was a perverse indication. The duty of ministers was to satisfy it through their preaching.Footnote 110 The experiential, Christological shift involved quietly abandoning some of the apologetic strategies Congregationalists had previously favored, notably the appeal to natural and revealed evidences. Simon, for instance, removed Paley from the Spring Hill curriculum when he arrived there, fresh from Germany, in 1869.Footnote 111 Christ's miraculous character, as craved and experienced by the believer, was better proof for Christianity than any miracles he had worked.Footnote 112 Strauss and Renan had left them, Allon argued in 1874, with “strengthened assurance” about Christ: “rationalistic theories” about Him were “waves” that had “dashed upon this eternal rock.” Congregationalists founded their ministry on that rock by preaching Christ himself, not dogma about him.Footnote 113

The optimism that Congregationalists felt about the weaknesses of skeptical arguments was outweighed by gloom about their virulence on the Continent, especially among educated people. The vision of weakening levels of Protestant commitment and belief became darker with every decade that passed. In 1869, Simon reported that both educated and working-class Berliners were not just apathetic but aggressively scornful toward not just orthodox Christianity but any statement of belief in a personal God.Footnote 114 Why did the Germans or the French succumb to un-Christian philosophies when their failings were so evident? In answering this question, Congregationalists consistently focused on the oppressive meddling of the state in the sphere of religious belief and specifically in the organization of Protestant churches. This analysis reflected the generalized antistatism present in English public life from the 1840s to the 1860s and to which Congregationalists were important contributors.Footnote 115 Because a country's national character or its “permanent atmosphere” largely resulted from the long-term operation of political, economic, or social causes, it followed that too much state intervention could warp it into patterns that were hostile to rational evangelical faith.Footnote 116 In France, the indulgence of popular whims by a series of centralized regimes, ending in the rule of Napoleon III, created the most “morally unhealthy” climate since the Reformation.Footnote 117 The only belief systems that flourished in Napoleon's epicurean capital were sensual Ultramontanism, Communism, and Positivism. By contrast, as the Eclectic Review explained in 1863, the “German forgets his political dismemberment and shadowy objective life in medieval romanticism, theological criticism, and metaphysical disquisition.”Footnote 118 Parceled into petty states with feeble economies and oppressive bureaucracies, the argument ran, talented Germans took refuge in the universities. Divorced from real life, they threw themselves into speculative studies that weakened their hold on the objective truth of Scripture. Higher critical vagaries could be put down to the fact that “the head is too large for the body” in Germany.Footnote 119 Suffering as they did from reactionary government, the Germans had also made theology and biblical criticism organs of political dissidence, giving them a subversive character that took decades to fade.Footnote 120

Suspicion of a strong state was never universal among Congregationalists and rapidly diminished during the 1860s. Opposition to the state's interference in Protestant churches was much more passionate and consistent, with skepticism being understood as a symptom of “erastian leprosy.”Footnote 121 Such a diagnosis was clearest in discussions of German and particularly Prussian Protestantism, which Congregationalists believed had engaged in a Faustian pact with autocratic power. Congregationalists always felt uneasy about the confusion between civil and religious authority within German Lutheran churches. As John Pye Smith noted in 1827, it led to a situation where states had backed up intolerant Lutheran hierarchies interested in enforcing their petty confessional dogmas. Believers had found it impossible to break away from the ministry of rationalist or ineffectual clergy and found their own, genuinely evangelical congregations. Thanks to the toleration won by the Glorious Revolution, English Protestants, who were disgusted with the Church of England's worldliness, had always been able to resort to the conventicle. The Germans had no such option.Footnote 122 Smith exempted Prussia from his criticisms, but that soon changed. In 1817 a Union church had been founded in Prussia by Friedrich Wilhelm III to unite Reformed and Lutheran Protestants in one evangelical body. This was laudable, but creating it essentially by royal fiat had been a huge mistake. So was the attempt to enforce a common liturgy after 1830, “actually at the point of the bayonet.” Thousands of devout Silesian Lutherans had been dragooned, then driven into exile, for refusing to accept it, which made nonsense of the Prussian government's claim to be the protector of Protestantism.Footnote 123 In trampling on spiritual liberties, the Prussian monarchy had created a hollow state church, in which people were herded together by external ordinances, rather than genuinely shared beliefs.

The Union's subsequent development showed to Congregationalists that no good could come from such a state church. Although the Prussian monarchy became increasingly active in supporting the cause of orthodoxy within the universities and the Union, its actions seemed powerless to affect the faith of the people. Congregationalists noted how this shift merely provoked the rise of the “Friends of Light” (Lichtfreunde), a protest movement of old-style rationalist clergy and professors with much support among the laity.Footnote 124 It was also an uncomfortable fact that some of the sturdiest opponents of Hegelian pantheism, such as the Berlin professor Hengstenberg, were closely allied with court reactionaries and advocated intolerance against Baptists and other honest dissenters. Such hardfisted Erastianism would only encourage further unrest, causing radicals to see Christianity as a mask for authoritarianism. Congregationalists viewed the explosion of anticlericalism during the 1848 revolutions as fitting punishment for this policy. The “parasitical minister of state” was always a revolution's first victim.Footnote 125

The paradox that state sponsorship of orthodox Christianity only increased popular alienation from it was most evident to Congregationalists in the couple of decades following the revolutions. Within Prussia, there were attempts to grant the church more independence from the state bureaucracy, yet the effect was to hand more power to clerical reactionaries, led by Hengstenberg and the jurist Friedrich Julius Stahl. Their “neo-Lutheran” vision of the church emphasized rigorous insistence on the antiquated creeds of the Reformation and on shifting the balance of power from the congregations back toward ministers and sacraments.Footnote 126 Paton wrote scornfully in 1857 that such a “dead fossilated Protestantism” had no future. Hengstenberg and Stahl claimed to be championing the Bible, but they defeated their purpose by insisting it must be read in a “churchly sense,” through a filter of obsolescent creeds.Footnote 127 Their emphasis on clerical authority was also uncomfortably reminiscent of crypto-Catholic “Puseyism.”Footnote 128 Vaughan marveled in 1856 at views of clerical authority that savored “more of Catholic Spain than of Rationalistic Germany.”Footnote 129

Congregationalists eagerly hailed German voices that instead backed an evangelical revival based on strengthening congregational powers of election and representation, freedom of association, and philanthropy. They toasted Christian Carl Josias von Bunsen (1791–1860), formerly Prussian ambassador to London, for the conversion to these English principles manifested in his tract The Signs of the Times (Die Zeichen der Zeit, 1855).Footnote 130 Yet German liberals like Bunsen were no better as agents of a genuine Christian revival than their reactionary enemies. For a start, their Protestantism appeared far too rationalistic. At least the Hengstenberg party had realized the need to choose “Hegel or Christ” and picked the latter.Footnote 131 Bunsen spoke loudly about the Protestant right to read the Bible, but his daring Old Testament criticism and his dilettante speculations on the development of God-consciousness in history implied that he had little respect for its authority.Footnote 132 Genuine evangelical churches were founded on Scripture; the meaning of Scripture could not therefore, as Bunsen supposed, fluctuate in accordance with the whims of congregations.Footnote 133 Because the liberals could not wean themselves off the principle of a state church, they ended up calling for the negative right to dispute creeds, rather than for the positive liberty to affirm their faith. This criticism was advanced in particular of the Protestantenverein (1863) movement that began in Baden. In basically equating citizenship with the right to intellectual liberty within the church and in hoping that the liberal state could supersede the church as the bearer of spiritual values, the Protestantenverein was no alternative to Erastianism, but its logical and pernicious end point.Footnote 134

As reactionary “Churchlies” and liberal “Nothingarians” fought for dominance within state churches, genuine evangelical faith supposedly perished. The schoolroom illustrated this well. During the 1850s, the Prussian state reacted sharply against earlier experiments in sponsoring advanced Pestalozzian pedagogy, fearing that it had created a cadre of deistic teachers.Footnote 135 The power of the clergy over primary schools was enhanced, and the teaching of catechisms made a large part of instruction. While Congregationalists might be expected to have welcomed this change, they argued that it merely accentuated alienation from orthodox Christianity by forcing teachers to instruct children in doctrines they did not themselves believe.Footnote 136 A dramatic incident in August 1869, when a rationalist student fired on a clergyman during a service in the Berlin cathedral, apparently exposed the extent of alienation from Christianity that was the result.Footnote 137 For the English Independent, the would-be assassin personified a people driven into skepticism by the state clergy's hypocrisy. The “common answer” that destructive biblical criticism caused infidelity in Prussia was wrong: the “ablest defenders” of Christianity as well as its bitterest enemies came from Germany. The Union church—the “beau ideal of State churchism”—was much more to blame. Its ministers were hirelings, offering only “mechanical” teaching of doctrines they secretly disbelieved. The freethinking German people could hardly be brought to bow down before an authoritative priesthood.Footnote 138 Miall's Nonconformist likewise preached against the encouragement of “moral dishonesty” in the clergy by statesmen who “wink at prevarication in doctrine.”Footnote 139

Protestant Germany needed above all a genuine dissenting culture in which the middle classes could find a positive alternative to the Union's unholy blend of rationalism and sacerdotalism.Footnote 140 France's problems were different. Congregationalists felt that the cause of infidelity here was the failure of the minority Protestant churches to offer an alternative to Ultramontane Catholicism. Rebels against the priests embraced Positivism, socialism, or blank atheism because they were not offered the Gospel instead. The desire to offer that choice led Congregationalists to open a church in the Rue Royale, Paris, in 1863, as a showcase for independent evangelicalism in the “gay metropolis,” close to the gaudy Église Madeleine.Footnote 141 Vaughan, Allon, Dale, and Paton all keenly backed the scheme.Footnote 142 Congregationalists linked the lethargy of France's Protestant churches to the decision to accept a concordat from the first Napoleon.Footnote 143 This had secured income for the churches, but it also handed over their governance to indifferent bureaucrats who also monitored Catholicism and Judaism and whose priority could therefore not be the truth but only civil order.Footnote 144 Given that Protestant ministers could count on a state salary and on congregations constantly replenished through the baptismal registration of Protestant children, why should they display any zeal? Visiting the Montauban Seminary at the beginning of the 1860s, Dale was thus impressed by its sophisticated curriculum but dismayed that its ministerial graduates seemed to view themselves just as state employees.Footnote 145

This critique drew on the dissatisfaction with church-state relations leading French Protestants had themselves expressed. Inspired by an 1845 Swiss secession led by Alexandre Vinet, a passionate advocate for freedom of conscience and separation of church and state, a small but influential party of evangelical ministers had broken away from the Reformed Church in 1849 to form the Union of Evangelical Churches (Union des Églises évangeliques de France, independantes de l’État).Footnote 146 They argued that the state systematically obstructed the careers of evangelicals within the Reformed Church while forwarding those of rationalists. The most celebrated of France's voluntarists in England was Edmond de Pressensé (1824–91), minister of the independent Église Taitbout in Paris—itself founded with English help.Footnote 147 Pressensé was a noted advocate for liberal, yet firmly evangelical and biblical, religion. He had been trained by Vinet, Tholuck, and Neander and preached that Christ's personal authority was the essence of Christianity, recorded in a Bible that was authoritative but not infallible.Footnote 148 His popular Vie de Jésus (1864) countered Renan, conceding Christ's human attributes but insisting he was the Son of God.Footnote 149 Pressensé's church politics were as congenial as his theology: he argued that separation of church and state was crucial to preserving the evangelicalism he represented because it alone would free the believing conscience.Footnote 150 Freedom of conscience was threatened by Ultramontanism. It stirred up anti-Christian hostility by falsely claiming that faith meant irrational obeisance to the pope and thrived on the “feeble and superannuated Gallicanism” of the French state.Footnote 151 Pressensé published histories of the primitive church designed to expose the falseness of papal claims and was a horrified observer of the Vatican Council, on which he reported for the British Quarterly Review.Footnote 152 He argued that the French state must cut its ties not only with Rome but also with the Protestant churches. In a weighty treatise, Pressensé interpreted the Napoleonic concordat as a disaster that had crippled Protestantism just as it had been on the verge of presenting a living alternative to Revolutionary atheism and “Romish theocracy.”Footnote 153

To Pressensé and his English sympathizers, the furious anticlericalism unleashed after the collapse of Napoleon III's regime in 1870 proved the bankruptcy of Erastianism and the need for a voluntarist alternative.Footnote 154 There was excitement in 1872 when Thiers's government permitted the Reformed church to convene its first synod since the Huguenot era. As it was reported in England, the orthodox party used this breath of spiritual liberty to reaffirm their loyalty to the basic evangelical truths of Christ's atoning death and resurrection and to call for separation of church and state. Significantly, it was a rationalist party within the synod—in theological sympathy with English Unitarianism—who continued to shelter behind the church-state connection. The Reformed church might in time go still further, Congregationalists hoped, replacing its Presbyterian order with a looser association of gathered independent churches, acknowledging no sovereign but Christ.Footnote 155

Congregationalists therefore hoped that Continental states would embrace not the cause of orthodoxy but simply that of religious equality and neutrality, providing zealous Christians with the opportunity they needed to make converts to evangelical Protestantism. Where conscience was totally free, it would probably be Christian. With considerable optimism, they claimed that support for separating church and state was spreading with “astounding velocity” in Europe.Footnote 156 In unified Italy, in postrevolutionary Spain, and even in Austria, the state had adopted a newly evenhanded approach to Protestants, which could be interpreted as a precursor to church-state separation.Footnote 157 Free churches appeared even in priest-ridden Belgium to act as the “advanced guards of Protestantism” and as an asylum from the “grossest and wildest infidelity.”Footnote 158 In Germany, Bismarck's Kulturkampf, for all its Erastianism, generated some promising measures that made it easier for people to leave a denomination without suffering loss of civil rights.Footnote 159

These struggles to separate the believing conscience from the state provided context and justification for the campaign to disestablish the Church of England and implement total religious equality. If Edward Miall was the Joshua of the disestablishment cause, commented the British Quarterly Review, then Vinet was its Moses, “who trained that Joshua and nerved his arm to be very courageous.”Footnote 160 Congregationalists, who largely spearheaded the disestablishment campaign, insisted that it was not an optional extra to the resolution of dissenting grievances or the concern of a sectarian pressure group. Rather it was informed by a conviction that only total abstention by the state from funding or promoting the beliefs of particular churches made genuine evangelical belief possible. This argument reflected the distinctive ecclesiology they shared with Baptists, in which there must be no obstruction between the freely gathered congregation and Christ.Footnote 161 The campaign for English disestablishment gained serious momentum in the later 1860s, fueled by excitement at the 1869 disestablishment of the Church of Ireland and anger at Forster's 1870 Education Act.Footnote 162 Miall brought motions on disestablishment before the Commons in 1871–73, provoking much debate in newspapers and journals. The campaign peaked in a nationwide agitation launched by the Liberation Society, followed by independent speaking tours led by Dale and James Guinness Rogers in 1875 and 1877.Footnote 163 Rising enthusiasm for disestablishment gripped scholarly “respectables” as well as the “radical” mainstays of the Liberation Society. By the 1860s, Vaughan's British Quarterly strongly denounced the religious evils of English establishment; Allon made the journal a champion of disestablishment and disendowment. After initial reservations, the Congregational Union also made vocal commitments to the disestablishment cause.Footnote 164

Reflective, broadly evangelical clergymen like A. C. Tait, archbishop of Canterbury from 1868, or Henry Alford, dean of Canterbury, were as worried as Congregationalists by the Continental duel between “atheistical philosophers” and “superstitious devotees.” But they argued that the enthusiasm of Congregationalists for disestablishment was naive and extremist in calling for the application of abstract principles to problems that required negotiation and compromise to solve.Footnote 165 The dean of Westminster, A. P. Stanley (1815–81), was chummy with leading Congregationalists but scoffed at the “strange superstition” that state involvement always sullied the purity of religious faith.Footnote 166 Stanley, like Alford and Tait, believed strongly that the state must play a strong role in managing reform of the national church. To their Nonconformist friends, they held out the prospect of cooperation with, perhaps even comprehension in, the Protestant national church, to be effected through liberalization of subscription to the Articles and liturgy, reform of church patronage, and the exchange of pulpits.Footnote 167 In thoroughly latitudinarian hands, the case for establishment went further. Matthew Arnold argued that the zeitgeist across Europe was pushing irresistibly against the belief that the Bible recorded supernatural events that endorsed a complicated system of doctrine. Only under the guidance of a cultured clergy able to explain the Bible as literature could a Christian culture survive the inevitable realization that miracles did not happen.Footnote 168 Such a clergy must be officers of a national church, whose freedom of utterance was protected by law against ignorant or bigoted congregations. He attacked Nonconformists for fanatical obsession with an insular maxim of disestablishment and for a superstitious, extrabiblical Calvinism that would push people into the outright materialism and atheism observable on the Continent.Footnote 169

Congregationalists met these appeals to tone down their aggression against establishments with pragmatic arguments of their own. While continuing to believe that independent churches were basically the only ones authorized by the New Testament, they did not dwell on the point in arguing with others.Footnote 170 Allon conceded to Stanley that debates about disestablishment must turn on the “comparative advantage and disadvantage” of different kinds of church-state relations. But “the verdict of experience is in [the Nonconformists’] favour,” as the “present spiritual degradation and failure of every State Establishment in Continental Europe” proved.Footnote 171 The implicit contrast drawn by the establishment's defenders between what was right in principle and what was expedient did not hold true, because state churches were not just wrong in principle but always inexpedient in practice.Footnote 172 Instead of acting as a breakwater against the forces that generated skepticism, Allon and others argued that, by virtue of its establishment, the Church of England was a conduit for them.

The charge that many established churchmen were secretly in sympathy with Roman Catholicism was of the oldest vintage. Throughout the 1840s, allegations that the Oxford Movement was a fifth column for popery had stirred up feeling against the establishment and provided support for the fledgling Liberation Society. A spate of conversions to Rome, coupled with the 1850 “Papal Aggression,” lent color to these charges.Footnote 173 The rise of Ritualism, with its marked enthusiasm for vestments, sisterhoods, and confessions, redoubled such suspicions. The relative failure of prosecutions against Ritualists strengthened the argument that the state was incompetent to control priest craft: if anything, it looked like the priests were manipulating the state in an attempt to force their creeds on others.Footnote 174 Congregationalists opposed this on the principle that the Bible alone had authority to regulate the relationship between the individual conscience and God, which was essential to true Christianity.Footnote 175 The fear that the Ritualists would exploit their connection with the state to try to force their beliefs on the people largely explains the furious reaction of many Congregationalists to Forster's Education Act. They argued that its favoritism to denominational schools (both Anglican and Roman Catholic) provided state backing for sacerdotalism just as the Vatican Council showed it to be a renewed menace in Europe.Footnote 176 It was too much, not too little, state sponsorship for dogmatic religion that made Continental schools agents of infidelity, argued opponents of the bill like Dale, who consequently embraced the cause of strictly secular education.Footnote 177

From the 1850s, concern about Romanizers in the church was supplemented by anxiety about a rationalistic “new Oxford movement” that looked to Germany rather than to Rome. Essays and Reviews (1860), in which seven predominantly clerical authors attacked received beliefs about biblical inspiration and provocatively praised German theologians and critics, was widely seen as the movement's Germanophile manifesto.Footnote 178 The broad churchmanship of the Essays did not worry Congregationalists on an intellectual level, given their belief that its chief German influences had already been discredited.Footnote 179 By the close of the 1860s, the more liberal among them could endorse some of the essayists’ conclusions and, as the “Protestants of Protestantism,” applaud their commitment to liberty of inquiry.Footnote 180 What scandalized them was more the ethics of belief involved in publicizing views that ran counter to the feeling of most in the church and apparently to the specific doctrines clergy had sworn to uphold. Worse, the civil power abetted this latitudinarianism. The prosecution against two essayists and then their successful acquittal before the Privy Council established the principle that the state, through the courts, could not meaningfully police Anglican orthodoxy but only force clergymen to obey the “literal and grammatical sense” of the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Prayer Book, which were themselves a compromise fixed by the state.Footnote 181 Congregationalists feared that the church was becoming a body defined purely by law, in which the state's courts enforced purely nominal obedience to creeds that were flouted in both Romanist and rationalist directions. Such “licence of interpretation” was “precisely similar” to that which had eroded any real conviction within the state churches of Germany and France.Footnote 182 It would cause the same revulsion against Christianity in the persons of a hypocritical clergy. The English Independent's 1869 commentary on ministerial insincerity in Germany noted that “if England ever become[s] an infidel country it will be from the same cause.” The “scandalous exhibition” of church factions feuding for dominance disgusted people against Christianity, putting a premium on the “manly earnestness and godly simplicity” of dissent.Footnote 183

What liberal clergy said was therefore less damaging than their chronic inability to accept that it was wrong to say it within the Church of England. Congregationalists had no sympathy for proposals to resolve the problem of hypocrisy by relaxation of subscription. Stanley and other proponents of such measures argued that they would end needless alienation from the church on trifling points of doctrine, empower the clergy to deal more effectively and openly with doubt, and facilitate cooperation with Nonconformists.Footnote 184 Congregationalists appreciated the friendliness toward Nonconformists these beliefs entailed, but they wanted no part of Stanley's church, which they thought would be a mere club, without any meaningful rules of admission. Pretending that the state could decide on membership of the national church regardless of doctrinal differences, warned Brown, would degrade the church into a “government department, a bureau of religion,” leading on to the “deeper depth, which the Church has reached in Prussia.”Footnote 185 Stanley might think his Erastianism was informed by an emollient patriotism, but Congregationalists argued it was “exotic, the outcome of German thought,” and unpopular even in his own church.Footnote 186 Congregationalists similarly felt that Arnold's program of liberalization would throw the evangelical baby out with the dogmatic bathwater.Footnote 187 They hoped that reading his more daring theological essays would make churchmen—who had enjoyed his hits at “Miallism”—realize that his Erastianism tended toward a shallow, deistic moralism.Footnote 188

The Church of England was thus disqualified from a meaningful role in preserving Christian faith against skepticism, simply by virtue of its establishment. A comprehensive established church, Brown wrote in 1871, could only be a “synagogue of the libertines,” a Babel of competing creeds that would destroy each other.Footnote 189 “The Zeitgeist tends in the other direction” from Stanley and Arnold's utopias, argued Congregationalists: toward disestablishment, not comprehension.Footnote 190 Disestablishment would dissolve the disreputable marriage between Ritualists and rationalists and be a necessary prologue for truer conceptions of the Christian church to flourish. By the later 1860s, the church, rather than the individual believer, increasingly became the basic building block of Congregational thought, as ministers distanced themselves from the excessive individualism of early evangelicalism.Footnote 191 The only genuine form of church was that in which believers were gathered together of their own true volition, directly under the sovereignty of Christ: a “supernatural society,” the godly wheat, sifted from the worldly tares.Footnote 192 As Dale argued in 1872, it was essential that all the members of an independent church should be able to testify to regeneration through Christ. A shared experience of redemption through Christ was the principle of cohesion without which it would collapse. Such churches therefore existed by definition to propagate Christological, salvific faith. The contrast was with Continental state churches, the Church of England, English Presbyterianism, or Boston's independent churches. Because these bodies decoupled membership and ministry from personal affirmations of regeneration, there was no security against faith within them being whittled down to deism, Unitarianism, or even “Comte's Godless Humanitarianism.”Footnote 193

This vision had superficial drawbacks. It meant abandoning the dream of a single national church and possibly encouraging sectarianism, for after disestablishment the Church of England would doubtless splinter into competing factions. Congregationalists admitted that many independent churches were still too stringent in the testimonies demanded from prospective members, encouraging formalism and canting language. Chapels had been too pettifogging in the statements of shared faith they had laid down in their trust deeds. But such problems were incidental, argued Congregationalism's apologists, pointing to the efforts being made to interpret trust deeds in a freer way and to be less invasive in the questioning of new members’ spiritual experiences.Footnote 194 Making England a nation of sects also had great benefits, because it would make believers more sincere and more committed. Joining an independent congregation required a positive act of commitment to Christ, generating the “living spiritual power” that was the “one effectual antagonist to unbelief.”Footnote 195 Freedom of conscience in such an ecclesiastical system would not be a dubious boon enjoyed by state clergy at the law's discretion, but a power expressed in and regulated by the vigorous life of independent churches.Footnote 196 Honest but also safe, discussion of the intellectual problems raised for believers was best conducted within a purely voluntary polity. Speaking in 1869 at the laying of a cornerstone for James Baldwin Brown's new Brixton church, Allon thus defended their form of “ecclesiasticism” on the grounds that it was not they but “the Church which is most guarded by articles and creeds and rubrics” that had generated and welcomed heresies.Footnote 197

Appropriately enough, Brown's church was to be a showy essay in early English Gothic. Congregationalists were increasingly keen to identify their religious voluntarism with the exceptional course of English history. While in their intellectual tussles with skeptics Congregationalists had identified with English principles of induction and respect for facts, they also insisted that they “more than any other party, have inspired and moulded” the libertarian tradition in which those principles had flourished.Footnote 198 As Brown argued, English Christianity had avoided the “cataclysms” it had suffered on the Continent because dissenters—the “salt of our national life”—had kept alive the flame of spiritual liberty lit by the Reformation.Footnote 199 The 1862 Bicentenary Commemoration of the two thousand Puritan ministers ejected by Charles II greatly boosted the habit of patriotic identification between their principles and the nation. Congregationalists remembered them as protoenthusiasts for voluntarism, martyrs who had quit the establishment rather than trifle with their consciences. The penal legislation of the Restoration had divorced the Church of England from the religious life of the nation, leaving it as a mere state church—an argument that deeply offended Anglican evangelicals.Footnote 200

The patriotic case that disestablishment was an urgent precondition to offering the people a liberal evangelical alternative to Romanism or skepticism failed to persuade a wider public. It proved impossible to convince Gladstone's government that English disestablishment must follow Irish, while organizational problems and popular apathy or hostility impeded the extraparliamentary campaign launched in the wake of that failure.Footnote 201 The nexus that enthusiasts for disestablishment drew between separation of church and state, the survival prospects of evangelical belief and “Englishness,” also looked unconvincing. To be sure, zealous champions of disestablishment continued to argue that it was vital both to learn from and to escape the Continent's problems. Henry Richard thus told the Congregational Union in May 1877 that in achieving disestablishment, England could successfully surf the “great tidal wave of opinion” rushing against “civil establishments in religion” all over Europe.Footnote 202 Yet the evidence that independent evangelical churches were rolling back infidelity and Ultramontanism unaided was very patchy. Membership of secession churches appeared to be static; rates of conversion where religious neutrality had been granted, slow.Footnote 203

At home, evangelical voluntarism's intellectual and spiritual qualifications for negotiating the crisis of faith remained questionable. Outsiders felt that Congregationalists were more remarkable for zeal than for true liberalism. They felt that the ministers this article has described were not a representative elite, but oddities who were often at the mercy of the bigoted or complacent moneymen who ran their chapels.Footnote 204 Disestablishment, it was argued, would destroy securities for free inquiry, involving the disastrous transfer of power to ignorant or fanatical congregations.Footnote 205 Ironically, Congregationalists often feared the opposite: that in dismantling the edifice of systematic Calvinism they had left themselves without clear conceptions of religious authority. Eustace Conder warned the Union in 1873 against sacrificing doctrines to the “Welt-geist or Zeit-geist,” and lapsing into a sentimental, “molluscous” religion—all “feelers” and no head.Footnote 206 Conder had no desire to be a “theological Jeremiah,” but the furor over the 1877 “Leicester Conference” showed his fears were widely shared. An appeal launched by some younger ministers for a new, undoctrinal kind of communion in the spirit of Christ was interpreted as evidence that a faction was seeking alliance with the Germanophile avant-garde of English Unitarianism and coquetting with the latitudinarianism of the Protestantenverein. It was especially galling that the plot had been hatched just as Congregationalists were organizing one last heave for disestablishment, the Liberation Society's triennial conference having just taken place.Footnote 207 The May 1878 meeting of the Congregational Union reaffirmed its commitment to a list of evangelical doctrines, despite protests from its chairman, Brown.Footnote 208 This action—supported by Simon, Allon, and Dale—as well as a recent squabble between a minister and his congregation that had to be settled in the civil courts, indicated to outsiders that orthodoxy within Congregationalism was no natural product of free association. Rather it relied on the mechanisms of creed making, ultimately enforced by the law of the land, just as it criticized the established church for doing.Footnote 209

The vagaries of the Leicester ministers were commonly blamed on the shortcomings of the colleges. Allon was prominent at the beginning of the 1870s in highlighting their inability to train enough ministers to a sufficiently high standard.Footnote 210 They faced competition too from the older universities for bright Nonconformists. These problems could be addressed by pooling the work of theological examination (Reynolds's plan), by amalgamating existing institutions or changing them into postgraduate seminaries for theology instead of quasi universities. Symptomatic of this shift was Spring Hill's relocation to Oxford as Mansfield College (1886).Footnote 211 These solutions could be defended as progress—in Mansfield's case bringing Nonconformists back to their proper place at the heart of English life and providing the cultural polish Arnold had taunted them for lacking. Yet for that very reason they cast doubt on the need for and viability of an intellectual culture powerfully distinct from the establishment.Footnote 212

Was all-out assault on the established church the best way of defending evangelical Christianity in any case? The main threat to Christian faith in the late nineteenth century both on the Continent and at home seemed to come, not from the Hegelian philosophers or biblical critics who undermined it from within, but from the materialists and scientific naturalists who attacked it from without. Huxley and his protoplasm loomed larger than Strauss and his myths.Footnote 213 Simply by virtue of their status, Congregational ministers faced increasing competition from the scientists who proclaimed that they had a greater vocation to pursue the truth.Footnote 214 In campaigning against the established church, the one institution that guaranteed state recognition for Christianity, Congregationalists risked serving the turn of Christianity's rivals. Looking to the Continent, it was possible to conclude that anticlericalism generally reflected hostility to Christianity rather than enthusiasm for liberty of conscience. In 1871, Allon brushed aside Stanley's insinuation that the Commune's ferocity against organized religion was the “logical development” of disestablishment: he might “as well say that the sack of the Paris banks, or the burning of the Tuileries, is the logical development of free institutions.”Footnote 215 But the point told. However justifiable the principles of disestablishment or disendowment, campaigning for them could serve irreligious ends. The growing involvement in the Liberation Society of known secularists and agnostics—not to mention Anglican Ritualists—caused support for it to fall away.Footnote 216 Even hearty campaigners for disestablishment sometimes regretted the associated drive for secular schooling, reasoning that excluding the Bible from the schoolroom was unwise when society's neglect for Scripture was a serious risk.Footnote 217

An essentially political solution to the crisis of faith was thus vulnerable from two directions. On the one hand, it had to contend with alternative analyses, just as patriotic, which looked to strengthening and reforming the national church. Disraeli's religious policy, for instance, was also predicated on the belief that England was on the verge of a Continental crisis of faith. Like Reynolds, Disraeli turned his hand to producing a novel of faith and doubt, although Lothair (1870) sold far better than Yes and No. Disraeli's preface to Lothair raised the prospect that, under the combined influence of scientific materialism, the “powerful assault on the divinity of the Semitic literature of the Germans,” and Ultramontane reaction, England might become an “atheistical society.” Lothair is, like Esdaile, a vacillating traveler pulled this way and that by the rival systems of the Continent.Footnote 218 Yet, just as Lothair finally finds peace in marriage to an English rose, Disraeli's proposal for avoiding the crisis was stalwart defense of the establishment, coupled with legislative intervention that would force Ritualist clergy to respect the laity's Protestant convictions.Footnote 219

If the established church found able and committed defenders, then it is equally true that many Congregationalists found cooperation with Anglican counterparts more rewarding than confrontation. There was no falling away in Allon or Dale's insistence that free churchmanship was crucial to any successful defense of Christian faith, both at home and on the Continent.Footnote 220 But loyalty to one's own voluntarism often proved increasingly compatible with quiet cooperation with Anglicans encountered in the work of such ecumenical bodies as the Christian Evidence Society or the Companies for the Revision of the Authorized Version.Footnote 221 Reynolds, Stoughton, and Allon, for instance, deeply appreciated their friendships with the likes of Alford and Stanley, forged over London dinners and the exchange of invitations to preach at Cheshunt College and in Westminster Abbey.Footnote 222 For their part, Stanley and other churchmen soothingly emphasized their recognition of the “excellence … the almost indispensable necessity” of Nonconformists as “essentially English” allies, rather than rivals, in teaching the nation Protestant faith.Footnote 223 Grief at Stanley's death in 1881 brought a poetic tribute from Reynolds to “A bird of calm poised high on outstretched wing / Upon the ether thick with angry spray … / Our bird of Jove / With olive leaf in mouth.”Footnote 224 For Congregationalists, keeping England true to the “everlasting yea” had therefore entailed, but finally outlasted, a purely negative attitude to the state church.