On July 4, 1844, Edward Feild, then in his early forties, arrived in St. John's as the newly consecrated Anglican bishop of Newfoundland. His was a vast diocese, stretching from the Labrador coast to Bermuda. Although Feild's time as a student at Queen's College, Oxford in the 1820s predated the first publications of Tracts for the Times, his theology and ecclesiology were deeply influenced by the Oxford Movement and would continue to be shaped by the Gothic revival, popular romanticism, and Anglo-Catholic sensibilities. Thus Feild arrived in Newfoundland with a desire to remake his diocese in conformity with his vision of ‘proper’ Anglican order. However, as Hollett so painstakingly demonstrates in this meticulously researched book, much of Feild's diocese was firmly attached to a vibrant, popular evangelicalism that was prepared to mount serious and sustained opposition to the realization of Feild's vision. It is this clash of principles that forms this book's central theme.
Hollett has chosen to organize his material geographically rather than thematically. This allows him to provide a mass of detailed analysis while keeping in view the local and deeply personal nature of popular religion. Among other considerations, Hollett is alive to the theological importance of church architecture in shaping worship—not just the external design of buildings, but the more important question of how the internal space was arranged. Herein lay one of the focal points of conflict between Feild, his Tractarian priests, and the ordinary members of the Evangelical Anglican community in Newfoundland. Throughout this book Hollett argues that Feild and his clerical supporters failed to capture the hearts and minds of ordinary Newfoundlanders; “that while Feild had success with some clergy, certainly not all, he had to face continued popular opposition, so that Protestant Anglicanism remained the spirituality of choice for a significant portion of the Church of England in Newfoundland and Labrador” (19).
Feild's modern biographers, while acknowledging his uncompromising High Churchmanship/Tractarianism, have tended to see Feild in a fairly positive light. Both Senior and Jones saw him as a hardworking, conscientious, bishop, with considerable administrative ability. Hollett's portrait is far less sympathetic. Feild's theology and ecclesiology, to say nothing of his character and personality, are subjected to a searching criticism. His commitment to apostolic succession, baptismal regeneration, a high sacramentalism, and a sectarianism that exhibited a disdain for Evangelical Anglicans and Methodists, to say nothing of his love of pomp and ceremony, and his exaltation of the clergy at the expense of popular preachers and teachers, are set against a heart-felt popular spirituality that emphasized the preaching of the Word, and a simple faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. Almost everywhere, Feild's actions, and those of his clerical lieutenants, are seen as alien, intrusive, and unwelcome.
The tone often adopted towards Feild and his supporters will undoubtedly irritate some readers, as will the overuse of nautical metaphors. Moreover, as much as the ‘bottom up’ approach adopted by Hollett is to be commended, it seems evident that one of the strengths of Evangelical Anglicanism in Newfoundland (as elsewhere in British North America) was its connection to seats of power and influence in England. From the detailed analysis provided in this book it is apparent that Feild's controversy with Newfoundland Evangelicals was part of a transatlantic dispute played out in the committee rooms of the Newfoundland School Society (and later the Colonial Church and School Society) and on the pages of the (London, England) Record. Such societies and newspapers could command the support of prominent and influential aristocrats, politicians, and clergy, reminding us that opposition to Tractarianism in the colonies, whether in Quebec, Montreal, or Newfoundland, was as much a matter of the socially and politically well connected as it was of those of more humble origins. The transatlantic nature of this conflict might have been given greater attention.
While it might appear unreasonable to suggest that the author should have made a long book longer by addressing other subjects, it is a measure of the value of his work that it does suggest other lines of inquiry. More than a thousand miles south of the Avalon Peninsula lay the coral archipelago of the Bermuda islands at the southernmost point of Feild's diocese. It was to its warmer climate and waters that Feild repaired year after year rather than endure the harsh reality of Newfoundland winters. But mid-nineteenth-century Bermuda was hardly an idyllic vacation destination. The British military and naval presence was everywhere in evidence as Bermuda took on increased strategic importance following the loss of the American colonies. Prison hulks were moored in its harbors and epidemic diseases like yellow fever struck the islands with regularity. Situated closer to North Carolina than to either the British Caribbean or British North America, Bermuda's Protestant identity was shaped by both Britain and America (as its Roman Catholic identity was largely Portuguese). Indeed, much of the history of English-speaking Christianity in the Atlantic world might be seen in microcosm in Bermuda. While Hollett's principal concern is understandably with Newfoundland and Labrador, Bermuda frequently appears in the backdrop of his narrative and it appears evident that Feild attempted to stamp his mark there as well. Thus it would have been instructive to have had the two parts of Feild's diocese placed alongside each other and subjected to a more systematic, comparative analysis.
Leaving these questions aside, Beating Against the Wind remains a solid book on Newfoundland Anglicanism, one that extends and deepens our knowledge. Taken together with Hollett's earlier study of Methodism, we now have two of the most comprehensive studies of Newfoundland Protestantism available to modern historians.
