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‘Isaiah's Call to England': Doubts about Prophecy in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2016

Gareth Atkins
Gareth Atkins*
Affiliation:
Magdalene College, Cambridge
*
*Magdalene College, Cambridge, CB3 0AG. E-mail: ga240@cam.ac.uk.
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Abstract

Prophetic thought in nineteenth-century Britain has often been presented as divided between those mostly evangelical constituencies who ‘believed' in its literal fulfilment in the past, present or future and those who ‘doubted' such interpretations. This essay seeks to question that division by tracking the uses of one set of prophetic passages, those concerning the ‘Ships of Tarshish’ mentioned in Isaiah 60: 9 and elsewhere. It examines their appropriation from the late eighteenth century onwards by those seeking prophetic-providential justification for the British maritime empire. Next it shows how such such ideas fuelled missionary expansion in the years after 1815, suggesting that by mid-century that there was a growing spectrum of ways in which such passages were used by religious commentators. The final section shows how biblical critics seeking to bolster the integrity of the Bible as a text reconstructed the geographical and economic settings for these passages, establishing their historical veracity as they did so but in the process undermining their supernaturally predictive status. Thus one way of bolstering ‘faith’ – the study of prophetic fulfilments – was rendered doubtful by another. By the end of our period Tyre and Tarshish retained much of their homiletic punch as metaphors for the sin brought by trade and luxury, but those who saw them as literal proxies for Britain were in the minority.

Keywords

Walter Chamberlain (1820–95)IsaiahprovidenceprophecyAdventism

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 52: DOUBTING CHRISTIANITY: THE CHURCH AND DOUBT , June 2016, pp. 381 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2016 

In January 1860, the Bolton clergyman Walter Chamberlain completed his latest book. In 424 closely wrought pages, Isaiah's Call to England sought to expose how ‘Isa[iah] xviii is an unfulfilled prophecy, foretelling the ingathering of all Israel to Zion; . . . and that, for such purpose of ingathering, Isaiah hails a people friendly to Israel, and to be renowned for their ships and maritime power.’ That power, Chamberlain revealed triumphantly, was ‘ENGLAND’.Footnote 1 If this was not immediately obvious from the passage, which talked in vague terms of woe to a land beyond the rivers of Ethiopia, and of vessels of bulrushes sent to a scattered people, Chamberlain maintained that this was because commentators had wrongly assumed Isaiah 18 to be ancient history. In applying it to events as yet unfulfilled, Chamberlain starts with tame exposition, but begins before long to pull exegetical rabbits out of the hat: the apparent ‘woe’ in verse one of the chapter is in fact Isaiah's favourable ‘ho!’; the lions on the English and Scottish arms match references culled from Ezekiel; and the events Isaiah foretold are imminent, to take place between 1864 and 1914.Footnote 2 Layers of ancient Scripture are stripped back to reveal modern visions: a prophesied highway translates into a railway from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean, while in the most bizarre passage, ‘vessels of bulrushes’ become, through a process of philological scrutiny, ‘steam-packet boats’.Footnote 3 Even Chamberlain realized that this was a bit much – ‘I have halted here a little while just to give the reader time to laugh’ – but he believed it all the same.Footnote 4 He concludes with a seventeen-point prognostication concerning the likely steps towards Israel's restoration, encompassing the machinations of France under Napoleon III, the collapse of the Ottoman empire, a Russian invasion of the Middle East and, lastly, the preservation of England – ‘TARSHISH’ – as fulcrum of the divine plan.Footnote 5

One way of dealing with Isaiah's Call to England is to pigeonhole it as a throwback to the chiliastic jeremiads that had proliferated between 1820 and 1840 and still littered the publishing landscape.Footnote 6 While historicist premillennialists like Chamberlain continued to treat the apocalyptic books of the Bible and current events as mutually reinforcing interpretative keys, others were doubtful about the utility of this method. The ecclesiastical tattler W. J. Conybeare was one of them, his famous Edinburgh Review article of 1855 on ‘Church Parties’ lampooning those obsessed with ‘the Red Dragon’, ‘Gog and Magog’, the ten lost tribes of Israel and the location of Armageddon.Footnote 7 Yet Chamberlain was by no means the outré fanatic Conybeare had in mind. ‘Should any one suspect me of being a dreamer or an enthusiast’, he remarked drily, they ought to try moving to Bolton, where ‘the cooling sedative of six months’ residence in a manufacturing town’ would soon put paid to flights of fancy.Footnote 8 Nor was Chamberlain uneducated. A graduate of Corpus Christi, Cambridge,Footnote 9 his career was punctuated by publications not just on prophecy but on questions that were of more general concern to Anglican clergymen. He wrote in 1863 against Bishop Colenso's critical account of the Pentateuch, for example, and fought Irish disestablishment later in the decade.Footnote 10 If the apocalyptic writing and painting that had so thrilled audiences in earlier decades no longer appealed to such a broad audience, prophetic books and periodicals still found a ready readership, in evangelical circles especially.Footnote 11 The Quarterly Journal of Prophecy, edited by the Free Church of Scotland minister Horatius Bonar, was among several publications that noticed Isaiah's Call favourably.Footnote 12 Only two years later, in 1862, one of the classics of the genre, Edward Bishop Elliott's Horae Apocalypticae, went into its fifth edition.Footnote 13 Recent scholarship suggests that apocalyptic language continued to appeal to politicians, preachers and activists for much of the nineteenth century.Footnote 14

Nevertheless, Chamberlain was speaking to an intellectual subculture that, while still viable, was coming to look old-fashioned. There were a variety of reasons for this. As W. H. Oliver suggested, in what remains the best survey of the subject, ‘few parts of the Bible were as vulnerable to modern critical scholarship as those dwelt upon by prophetical exegetes’: the books of Daniel and Revelation, and (to a lesser extent) Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.Footnote 15 Just as important as higher criticism was a growing sense among liberal thinkers inside and outside the Churches that the historicity of the Bible was less important than the eternal truths it contained. Instead of warping recent history and ancient texts to fit one another, maintained Thomas Arnold of Rugby, commentators would be better employed in applying the timeless moral lessons articulated by biblical prophets to present-day ills.Footnote 16 And there was also the problem of dates. For those who had followed Elliott in predicting on the basis of the ‘Year-Day Theory’ that the millennium would take place in 1866, the non-event necessitated an embarrassing climbdown.Footnote 17 ‘Recent events have fully confirmed the belief that the 1260 years of Papal Supremacy were to close’, insisted the Revd Samuel Minton of Eaton Chapel. ‘But the discovery of a strange, though very general, oversight in the application of Daniel's supplemental period of 75 years, has revealed the truth that the overthrow of Papal rule, is not the overthrow of the Papacy itself.’Footnote 18 While many simply altered their calculations, for hostile observers it served to underline the futility of the exercise tout court.

What follows charts the rise and fall of the providentialist readings of Britain's maritime empire that Chamberlain found so seductive. Tempting though it is to assume that the sidelining of such ideas took place against an increasingly secular backdrop, it should already be clear that changing conceptions of the Bible, prophecy and Providence necessitated a constantly shifting reassessment of what belief and doubt meant, and how they fitted together. To say one ‘believed' in a prophetic passage in around 1800 was different from saying the same thing in 1850 or 1900, and this essay seeks to examine why. Prophetic topoi did not trace a course of linear decline; nor were they the preserve of evangelical literalists, as readers of much of the existing work on the subject might conclude. We cannot assume that there was ever general agreement as to what prophecies meant and that people then ‘doubted' that meaning. Rather, the potency of prophecy was dependent on ‘current affairs’ and a host of other scholarly and cultural influences that rendered them applicable and doubtful by turns, and that altered how such passages were to be read, understood and applied. This essay reflects on how inherited strands of prophetic thought did not fray entirely in the nineteenth century but were repeatedly respun for new purposes. In doing so, it emphasizes how countering one form of doubt could leave the way open for new uncertainties in other areas. Protestant scholars continued, as they always had done, to deploy discoveries about the texts, biblical geography and linguistics in order to underline the Bible's coherence and bolster its authority. As we will see, however, those tools were two-edged, encouraging the sort of historical contextualization that made Scripture appear chronologically remote and culturally strange, and rendering hitherto accepted typological and prophetic readings inadmissible or just plain wrong.Footnote 19

The Bible and British Naval Power

Chamberlain was far from being the first to associate Old Testament passages with British maritime ventures. Ever since the early modern period, Protestants had used scriptural passages pertaining to Israel to frame interpretations of military victories and defeats, sudden deaths, harvests, famines and extreme weather, interpretations which continued to echo in the nineteenth century.Footnote 20 They saw in the defeat of the Spanish Armada parallels with the Israelite escape through the Red Sea (‘God blew and they were scattered'), while from 1690 until its pruning in 1859 the Book of Common Prayer enshrined memories of another Protestant wind in its service for 5 November, which, as well as commemorating the Gunpowder Plot, celebrated William of Orange's landing at Torbay in 1688.Footnote 21 The eighteenth century added further layers of naval-providential rhetoric. ‘The Wrecks of our Navies and Fleets Preach to us, that ’tis in vain we pretend to be Wall'd about by the Ocean, and ride Masters of the Sea’, Daniel Defoe had written after the Great Storm of 1703, warning that God was punishing Britain by the obliteration of her ships and commerce.Footnote 22 Annual ‘storm sermons’, endowed to impress the message on future generations, were still being preached in the 1780s, while Defoe continued to be read long after that.Footnote 23 In the 1790s the ex-slaver turned clergyman John Newton glumly likened Britain to her Old Testament counterpart both in her divinely conferred advantages and in her flagrant disregard for the obligations this entailed, embodied most glaringly, Newton thought, in the triangular trade.Footnote 24 Abolition (1807) and emancipation (1833) would thus provide Victorian sermonizers with a satisfying narrative of national redemption. Typology and prophetic fulfilment were part of an apologetic edifice developed to show both the applicability of the Bible and the continuing intervention of the Almighty in human affairs.Footnote 25

Yet if posing as a ‘new Israel' had worked well for embattled states like sixteenth-century England, such language had less to offer for a global power whose sway depended on naval hegemony. Scriptural references to maritime trade supplied a rich alternative vocabulary for those keen to celebrate commercial success or to condemn its demoralizing effects.Footnote 26

Since the first dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.Footnote 27

These sermonic cadences were those of John Ruskin in the celebrated opening to Stones of Venice (3 vols, 1851–3), but his message would have been recognizable to many a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century congregation. It was not just a poignant image. Commentators had long sought to counter doubts about the inspiration of the Bible by demonstrating the accuracy of the prophecies it contained, and the recorded facts of Tyre's destruction by Nebuchadnezzar and its fall to Alexander the Great in the great siege of 332 BC made this a straightforward but resonant example of how Old Testament predictions had been fulfilled. Travellers’ morbid accounts of the ruins were read both literally, as confirmatory evidence, and figuratively, as warnings to modern nations tempted to pursue profit at the expense of virtue.Footnote 28

Rhetorically useful in a different way was Tarshish, with which Tyre was often associated. The prophet Jonah sought to flee there, explains Father Mapple in Moby Dick, because it was modern-day Cadiz, ‘as far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea’.Footnote 29 Mapple was certainly up-to-date with modern scholarship; but although the French geographer Samuel Bochart had convincingly identified Tarshish with Strabo's Tartessus, in south-western Spain, as long ago as 1646, this did not prevent its typological appropriation.Footnote 30 It appears twenty-one times in the King James Bible, but aside from obscure references in genealogy and geography, what really excited prophetic commentators was the relationship of Tarshish with Israel. It crops up repeatedly as a source of wealth, most significantly in 1 Kings 10: 22, in connection with the legendary golden age of Solomon: ‘once in three years came the navy of Tharshish [sic], bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks’.Footnote 31 Yet there was also a sense in which Tarshish was associated with prophecies unfulfilled. Could it be that it referred to shores beyond those of Spain? George Horne's much reprinted Commentary on the Psalms (1776) offered a multi-layered reading of the appearance of Tarshish in Psalm 72, encompassing the treasures of Solomon; the queen of Sheba; the gifts of the Magi, ‘the first-fruits of the Gentiles’; and ‘lastly, the accession of the nations to the faith’ – ‘even these “isles of the Gentiles”’, he ventured.Footnote 32 Isaiah, which Horne cross-referenced, provided the most tantalizing passages of all. Isaiah 60: 9 evokes a future time when from the ‘isles’, the ‘ships of Tarshish’ will ‘bring thy sons from afar’, restoring the exiles of Israel to the Promised Land, while Isaiah 66: 19 prophesies how ‘the isles afar off’ would declare God's glory among the Gentiles. If Chamberlain was unusual in his focus on Isaiah 18, the quotation of Isaiah 60: 9 on his title page placed him among numerous others who had considered the verse's implications.

The idea that Britain's destiny and the fate of the Jews were peculiarly intertwined was not, then, a new one.Footnote 33 But in the 1790s shadowy aspirations came to look like concrete certainties.Footnote 34 The outbreak of revolution in 1789, the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, the expulsion of Pope Pius VI from the papal states in 1798 and the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon the same year each prompted commentators to revise their eschatological timetables.Footnote 35 French defeats in the Middle East at the hands of Nelson and Sidney Smith, in particular, sparked an orgy of prophetic speculation about Britain's place in the divine plan, not just from wild-eyed enthusiasts but also from cultured high churchmen like the bishop of Rochester, Samuel Horsley, and from the respectable evangelical commentators G. S. Faber, James Bicheno and James Hatley Frere.Footnote 36 ‘Is it an improbable conjecture’, asked Henry Kett, ‘. . . that this maritime, commercial, Protestant kingdom should take the lead in executing the Divine will?’Footnote 37 Ralph Wedgwood was more bullish, his discovery that ‘Brit’ was the Hebrew word for ‘covenant’ acting as springboard for the extravagant theory that Scripture prophecies did not in fact refer to the Jews at all: ‘the British Empire is the peculiar possession of Messiah, and his promised Naval Dominion’.Footnote 38 Frere, likewise, thought that to oppose Britain was to oppose ‘the Israelitish Nation’, the new chosen people of God, an idea given added credence by Napoleon's attempts to align himself with Catholicism and Islam.Footnote 39 Others were more pessimistic. Bicheno coupled Bonaparte's success with his overtures to the Jews, warning that this showed France, not Britain, to be Tarshish and that to oppose her was to risk being crushed under the inexorable wheels of Providence.Footnote 40 The Unitarian Ebenezer Aldred went further, mocking loyalist attempts to read Jacobins into the book of Revelation and inverting Protestant typology to argue that not Rome but Britain was the whore of Babylon. His language deliberately echoed the denunciations of Isaiah and Ezekiel: ‘we make gold our God, commerce our God, our navy our God'.Footnote 41 Yet even this frenzy of predictive writing was not as certain as it seemed. Each new event prompted scholars and savants to elaborate further their roadmaps of the route to Armageddon, drawing caustic commentary from sceptics.

Prophecy and Providential Optimism in Post-war Britain

Doubt cannot have been further from the minds of patriotic sermonizers in the aftermath of Waterloo.Footnote 42 The victory seemed to vindicate claims about Britain's special providential status, fostering a consensus that British philanthropy, wafted around the world on maritime trade routes, now had a special part to play in the global spread of Christianity. Thus the missionary publicist Edward Bickersteth cited the ‘vessels of bulrushes’ in Isaiah 18 in equating maritime power with the despatch of ‘Christian ambassadors to all the inhabitants of the world'; the Methodist scholar Adam Clarke wondered whether the angel of Revelation 14: 6 might in fact be the British and Foreign Bible Society; and two of the most ambitious works, Alexander Keith's Signs of the Times (1832) and Elliott's Horae Apocalypticae (1844), interpreted British naval victories as the second vial poured out in Revelation 16: 3, the turning of the waters into blood denoting extensive casualty lists and the deaths of ‘every living creature’ being tenuously applied to the cessation of trade brought about by British wartime blockades.Footnote 43

Although ingenious manipulation of Scripture texts was not always married to self-awareness, it emphasizes how demonstrations of the predictive precision of the Bible could be used to buttress believers against doubt, and illustrates the intense interest among evangelicals both in the conversion and the restoration of the Jews.Footnote 44 Enthusiasts were predictably thrilled by the installation of Michael Solomon Alexander, a Jew by birth, as first Anglican-Lutheran bishop of Jerusalem in 1841. Here too the participation of Britain's vaunted navy was a key piece in the symbolic jigsaw. ‘Wonderfully surprised', gushed the future earl of Shaftesbury in his diary. ‘Received yesterday a short note from Peel, stating that “orders would be given for an Admiralty steamboat to carry out the Bishop to Syria”!’ ‘“Surely the Isles shall wait for thee and the ships of Tarshish first, to bring thy sons from afar and thy daughters from the ends of the earth”’, he marvelled.Footnote 45 ‘He will go out and disembark under the British flag’, reported Bickersteth joyfully. ‘Hail to the ships of Tarshish! We have here sanctified our national standard.’Footnote 46 The prophetic writer William Cuninghame of Lainshaw went so far as to maintain that the ship assigned, the unfortunately named HMS Devastation, was literally that prophesied in Isaiah 60, ‘devastation’, he claimed, being equivalent to the Hebrew word Tarshish: ‘to reduce’ or ‘to be reduced to poverty’.Footnote 47

Linguistic contortions aside, reactions to the new bishopric serve also to emphasize the perils of hitching one's prophetic cart too closely to current affairs. If wars and rumours of wars in the 1790s and 1800s had encouraged prophetic commentators to construct ever more detailed timelines, the long-running boom in such works gave hostile commentators plenty of ammunition. As mentioned earlier, even the most painstaking apocalyptic number-crunchers might be sent back to the drawing board, as in 1866. There was a growing division between the mostly evangelical constituencies who looked for the literal fulfilment of prophecy, and those who did not, although the line between them was not always clear. British geopolitical interest in the decaying Ottoman empire continued to provide reassuring portents for ‘Christian Zionists’ right up until the First World War, but it also attracted scriptural and quasi-scriptural language from those who did not believe in the predictive potency of Scripture.Footnote 48 This division was further problematized by a growing ambivalence at mid-century about the part Britain was destined to play in global evangelization. For although ‘Commerce and Christianity’ provided mid-Victorian missionaries with a catchy slogan, booming trade was not matched by mass conversions. ‘We know not how long it may please God to uphold the mighty fabric of the British Empire’, mused the bishop of Llandaff, Alfred Ollivant, in an 1850 sermon before the University of Cambridge. Christ's promise to be with his disciples, he pointed out, was ‘inseparably connected' with the fulfilment of the Great Commission, a burden that some, he averred, were reluctant to take up.Footnote 49 Britain's privileged status, Ollivant warned, was provisional.

It may be significant that Ollivant avoided referring to the literal fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy, which was becoming a niche interest. A very different brand of providentialism was in evidence in the annual sermons given before the Master and Brethren of Trinity House, effectively the British lighthouse authority. This was a set-piece occasion, the sermon being in the gift of the Master, who was usually a high-ranking politician, and the polished offerings published as a result evince a gradual shift away from earlier certainties among establishment thinkers.Footnote 50 To trace the series through its heyday in the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s is to find preachers playing safe, extolling the corporation's protection of British seafarers but steering clear of direct prophetic application in favour of moral and metaphorical parallels drawn from the usual maritime-themed texts. The Claphamite evangelical, C. R. Sumner, hit a familiar-sounding note in 1824, warning how ‘the navies that were of old [had] perished' and that the commerce of Tyre and Tarshish had failed to preserve them: ‘if we would secure to our own maritime eminence a more abiding inheritance, we must range ourselves on the side of the Lord'.Footnote 51 Nevertheless, this was a far cry from the full-blown prophetic mode. Perhaps in the optimistic early 1820s the Old Testament was less relevant for those, like Sumner, who held that missions were effectively writing new chapters in the book of Acts. Others, such as the up-and-coming high churchman Richard Mant (1818) and the Cambridge scientist William Whewell (1835) avoided even veiled references to catastrophic judgements, opting instead to outline the ‘great machinery’ of trade, enterprise and civilization benevolently ushering humanity towards more perfect knowledge of God.Footnote 52

Contextualizing Prophetic Passages

If Trinity House preachers offered broad brushstrokes rather than detailed blueprints, it was partly because it was becoming harder to read Britain into the Bible. The emphasis was shifting, from using current events to defend the predictive accuracy of prophetic passages to using past events to reinforce the integrity and historicity of the Bible as a whole. Even among evangelicals there were those such as Samuel Lee, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, who maintained that Old Testament prophecies concerning Israel had already been fulfilled.Footnote 53 One did not have to be learned to appreciate the point: readers of the evangelistic Sailor's Magazine and Naval Journal in 1837 were informed that ‘Ships of Tarshish’ was a generic phrase for large, sea-going merchant ships.Footnote 54 E. B. Pusey was making much the same point in a Bible commentary of 1860 when he equated ‘Tarshish-ships’ with ‘the East-Indiamen which some of us remember’: it was a label, not a place of origin.Footnote 55 It was possible, of course, for inherited providentialist interpretations to coexist with scholarly ideas. After all, if Mediterranean seafarers were capable of getting to Tartessus, they were surely also capable of visiting Britain. ‘We know that the Phoenicians did come to the British Isles for tin, why not Jews also? The islands were well known to Herodotus.’Footnote 56 The idea that the products of Cornish mines might have adorned the Solomonic Temple remained seductive.Footnote 57 So too did the recurring Protestant fantasy that Paul had visited Britain to impart Christianity direct from the fountainhead, which theory avoided embarrassing concessions about the role of papal missionaries in her conversion.Footnote 58 When the Oxford philologist Max Müller asked in an 1867 essay ‘Are there Jews in Cornwall?’, his answer – no – prompted a lengthy and learned reply from the Cornish clergyman-scholar Dr John Bannister.Footnote 59 By the later nineteenth century, however, such ideas were becoming the preserve of writers on the wilder fringes of evangelicalism, and of British Israelites, whose racially tinged ideas drew eclectically on evangelical philosemitism, antiquarian texts and cod linguistics to argue that the British were literally descended from the ten lost tribes.Footnote 60

The eclipse of prophetic literalism bespoke changing priorities among the British clerical scholarly establishment. In the decade after Essays and Reviews (1860), the main concern was to defend the historical truth and textual integrity of the Bible against German ‘higher critics’ such as De Wette and Wellhausen, whose questioning of traditional assumptions about authorship, canonicity, textual integrity and supernatural inspiration were regarded with suspicion. Prophecy was still useful in countering doubt, but not for what it said about the future. Instead it was the scientific recording by archaeologists of predictions long fulfilled – the fall of Jerusalem, say, or the destruction of Babylon – that provided extra-biblical evidence to support beleaguered advocates of the Bible's historical accuracy. William Smith's Dictionary of the Bible (3 vols, 1860–3) was a case in point. Its mostly Anglican contributors sought to use archaeology, travel literature and natural science to throw new light on Middle Eastern life, languages, flora and fauna, and in so doing to show that it was a creation of its times and culture. Facts were what mattered. Thus entries for ‘Metals’, ‘Ship’, ‘Solomon’ and ‘Tarshish’ elucidated the place of Tarshish in Israel's economy and diplomacy, but gave no hint that it was or ever had been linked with Britain, save possibly via Phoenician tin merchants.Footnote 61 Believers could thus guard against doubt by reassuring themselves that the biblical books were backed up by other forms of evidence.

This did not prevent speculation about the location of Tarshish; but the arguments adduced drew not on recent events but on philology and ancient geography. In 1859 the statesman and littérateur George Cornewall Lewis rehearsed in Notes and Queries the argument from classical literature for its being in Spain, but by the time his friend Edward Twisleton came to write the Bible Dictionary entry, another scholar-cum-civil servant, Sir James Edward Tennent, was championing a fresh theory.Footnote 62 Tarshish, he argued, was not one place but two. Most Old Testament references were to a source of silver and lead in the extreme west of the ancient world – Tartessus – while those in Chronicles must refer to another, accessible through Ezion-Geber – Idumea – on the Red Sea, and thus far to the east. The peacocks were the clincher: while the gold of 2 Chronicles 9 could have been procured from Ophir, and ivory and apes from Africa, ‘the peacock is an Indian and not an African bird', its Hebrew name supposedly having Tamil roots.Footnote 63 The ‘great oriental mart’ on which the fleets of Hiram and Solomon descended triennially, Tennent concluded triumphantly, was Point de Galle in Ceylon.Footnote 64 His findings serve to underline a growing scholarly fascination with the Phoenicians as vectors for, and bridges between, Hebraic and Homeric mythologies.Footnote 65 Tarshish continued to attract attention, then, but not as a coded reference to or metaphor for Britain.

Yet seeing Tarshish for what it really was diminished its significance: it became an interesting if obscure fragment in a wider civilizational mosaic of which biblical history itself was increasingly only a part. When Matthew Arnold set forth The Great Prophecy of Israel's Restoration arranged and edited for Young Learners (1872) his intention was to make ‘Hebrew literature in its perfection’, namely Isaiah chapters 40–66 (as Deutero-Isaiah was then defined), accessible to young readers alongside the best of the Roman and Greek authors. Carefully sidestepping the question of whether or not they foretold the future, Arnold, like his father, held that the grandeur of the prophets lay in their unflinching moral courage and imagination.Footnote 66 His Isaiah still foresaw a time when the ‘the isles shall wait for his law’: but only because Arnold thought it sounded better than ‘sea-coasts’, which was the more accurate translation.Footnote 67 Deutero-Isaiah was read by Arnold as one among many beautiful and thus morally elevating ancient expressions of the universal ‘human spirit’. There was no sense in which it foretold the future, or could be used to corroborate events in the present: it was simply a beautiful ancient poem.Footnote 68 Late Victorian schoolchildren looking for references to Tarshish, Tyre and Ophir would find them in Rider Haggard's 1885 adventure novel King Solomon's Mines, but this was designed to give a sense of the exotic rather than to bolster belief.

Conclusion

Like much current work on nineteenth-century religion, this essay has sought to nuance received assumptions about the direction of cultural and intellectual travel. On the one hand it shares the scepticism of recent work towards the now tired paradigm of ‘faith and doubt’ that takes George Eliot, Arthur Hugh Clough and Thomas Hardy as reference points on a gradual but inevitable slide towards secularization.Footnote 69 On the other it has used a particular set of texts to argue that, although prophecy and providential language retained rhetorical and homiletic purchase, by the end of the century even ardent believers did not believe that they could be applied in the ways that they had been a hundred years before. This has important implications for how we see the place of ‘doubt’ in nineteenth-century thought. Serious cases of doubt could indeed prove fatal to belief, but it is clear that in others shifting ideas about received aspects of Christianity did not lead to systemic collapse. As the previous section underlined, new discoveries in geography, natural science and biblical studies did not so much undermine faith as reshape its foundations. As threats to the Bible shifted, so too did the majority of interpreters in how they read significant passages.

This raises important issues for the study of prophecy. For here, too, unhelpful binary distinctions in the secondary literature between the mostly evangelical constituencies who ‘believed' in the literal fulfilment of Scripture predictions and those who ‘doubted' them has obscured the extent to which prophetic ideas and passages could infuse people's thinking in more subtle, more provisional ways. Such passages could soften into emblems or they could harden again into something more concrete: witness how General Allenby's entry into ‘Jerusalem the Blessed' in December 1917, for example, prompted renewed adventist activity among British evangelicals in particular.Footnote 70 If this essay leaves us with a disjuncture, it is between those who saw prophecy and its current or past fulfilment as apologetically useful, and those who did not. By that measure, both Chamberlain and the more up-to-date scholars who participated in Smith's Bible Dictionary were engaging in similarly apologetic endeavours, endeavours that higher criticism would expose as futile by showing prophetic texts to be subject to processes of composition, editing and redaction. Just as telling was the issue raised by Matthew Arnold and others: why would one need or want to confirm the archaeological veracity of a text whose content was moral or spiritual? Whether ‘true’ or not, biblical portrayals of Rome, Jerusalem and Babylon continued to provide poets and sermonizers with some of their most resonant metaphors of glory, power, luxury, commerce and corruption. Kipling was no orthodox believer, but his ‘Recessional', printed in The Times as a would-be lay sermon against complacency commenting on Victoria's Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1897, was soaked in familiar scriptural-prophetic phraseology:

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!Footnote 71

If the imagery was close to that of Chamberlain, the beliefs that animated it were worlds away. Ultimately, then, this essay has identified a growing dichotomy in ideas about how prophecy was to be used. For those who imbibed modern scholarship, prophecy bore witness to the contexts in which it was written: it demonstrated the veracity of the Bible as a set of Near Eastern texts. For those like Kipling it provided ringing words. But as the twentieth century dawned there remained a significant subculture that saw prophetic passages as a prophylactic against doubt in a very different sense, as a code waiting to be unscrambled by faithful exegetes alert to the unfolding of events. Given that parts of the internet are populated with people still convinced that Britain (or America) really is Tarshish, that subculture continues to resonate with some even today.Footnote 72

Footnotes

1 Chamberlain, Walter, Isaiah's Call to England: Being an Exposition of Isaiah the Eighteenth (London, 1860), iv–v.

2 Footnote Ibid. 333, 341–4; 357–9.

3 Footnote Ibid. 423, 203–29.

4 Footnote Ibid. 227.

5 Footnote Ibid. 422–4.

6 Hilton, Boyd, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006), 397–406.

7 [Conybeare, W. J.], ‘Church Parties’, Edinburgh Review 98 (1853), 273–342, at 297.

8 Chamberlain, Isaiah, x.

9 , J. and Venn, J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, 2: From 1752 to 1900, 6 vols (Cambridge, 1940–54), 2: 3.

10 Chamberlain, Walter, A Plain Reply to Bishop Colenso (London, 1863).

11 See, for example, Spence, Martin, Heaven on Earth: Reimagining Time and Eternity in Nineteenth-Century British Evangelicalism (Eugene, OR, 2015).

12 Quarterly Journal of Prophecy 12 (1860), 395–7; see also London Review and Weekly Journal of Politics, Literature, Art, and Society, 4 October 1862, iv.

13 Elliott, like Chamberlain, was a learned man, a one-time fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who ended his days as incumbent of St Mark's, Kemptown, in well-heeled Brighton: see Bateman, J., The Life of the Rev. Henry Venn Elliott (London, 1868).

14 Gribben, Crawford and Stunt, Timothy C. F., ‘Introduction’ to eidem, eds, Prisoners of Hope? Aspects of Evangelical Millennialism in Britain and Ireland, 1800–1880 (Carlisle, 2004), 1–17; see also Brown, Ralph, ‘Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism: The Radical Legacy of Edward Irving’, JEH 58 (2007), 675–704.

15 Oliver, W. H., Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in England from the 1790s to the 1840s (Auckland, 1978), 239–40.

16 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, 2 vols (London, 1844), 1: 65, 177–80.

17 The erstwhile Brethren leader Benjamin Wills Newton was especially scornful of Elliott's argument: see Newton, Benjamin Wills, Aids to Prophetic Enquiry, 3rd edn (London, 1881), 241 n.

18 Minton, Samuel, The Merchants of Tarshish, or, England, America, and Russia in the Last War (London, 1868), iv.

19 See Ledger-Lomas, Michael, ‘Conder and Sons: Dissent and the Oriental Bible in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in idem and Mandelbrote, Scott, eds, Dissent and the Bible in Britain, c.1650–1950 (Oxford, 2013), 205–22.

20 The recent literature on this is vast. Highlights include Walsham, Alexandra, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), 281–325; Ihalainen, Pasi, Protestant Nations Redefined: Changing Perceptions of National Identity in the Rhetoric of the English, Dutch and Swedish Churches, 1685–1772 (Leiden, 2005); Coffey, John, Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr. (Oxford, 2014), 25–78. None of this should imply that providentialism was the preserve of Protestants; see, for instance, Marjorie Reeves's seminal study, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: a Study in Joachimism (Oxford, 1969).

21 Coffey, Exodus and Liberation, 36–7.

22 Defoe, Daniel, The Lay-Man's Sermon upon the Late Storm (London, 1704), 6.

23 E.g. Stennett, Samuel, A Sermon in Commemoration of the Great Storm of Wind (London, 1788).

24 Pratt, J. H., ed., Eclectic Notes: or, Notes of Discussions on Religious Topics at the Meetings of the Eclectic Society, London, during the Years 1798–1814, 2nd edn (London, 1865), 330.

25 Korshin, Paul J., Typologies in England, 1650–1820 (Princeton, NJ, 1982).

26 Walsham, Providence, 299.

27 Ruskin, John, The Stones of Venice: The Foundations (London, 1851), 1.

28 Newton, Thomas, Dissertations on the Prophecies, 3 vols (London, 1766), 1: 314–51, extensively cited travellers’ accounts by Richard Pococke, Thomas Shaw and Henry Maundrell; Horne, Thomas Hartwell's Landcape Illustrations of the Bible, 2 vols (London, 1836; unpaginated), supplemented these with accounts from modern travellers, including William Jowett and James Silk Buckingham.

29 Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (New York, 1851), 46 (ch. 9).

30 For Bochart, see Shalev, Zur, Sacred Words and Worlds: Geography, Religion, and Scholarship, 1550–1700 (Leiden, 2012), 141–204.

31 And in variations elsewhere: see 2 Chron. 9: 21.

32 Horne, George, A Commentary on the Book of Psalms, new edn (London, 1849), 283.

33 See Lewis, Donald M., The Origins of Christian Zionism (Cambridge, 2009), 25–48, for a useful summary of seventeenth-century puritan interest in the subject.

34 Verete, Mayir, ‘The Restoration of the Jews in English Protestant Thought 1790–1840’, Middle Eastern Studies 8 (1972), 3–50; Matar, Nabil, ‘The Controversy over the Restoration of the Jews’, Durham University Journal 87 (1990), 29–44.

35 Semmel, Stuart, Napoleon and the British (New Haven, CT, 2004), 72–106.

36 Leighton, C. D. A., ‘Antichrist's Revolution: Some Anglican Apocalypticists in the Age of the French Wars’, JRH 24 (2002), 125–42.

37 Kett, Henry, History the Interpreter of Prophecy, 2 vols, 4th edn (London, 1801), 2: 291–2 n.

38 Wedgwood, Ralph, The Book of Remembrance (London, 1814), 46.

39 Frere, James Hatley, A Combined View of the Prophecies of Daniel, Esdras and St John, 2nd edn (London, 1815), 114.

40 Bicheno, James, The Restoration of the Jews, the Crisis of all Nations, 2nd edn (London, 1807), 227–35.

41 ‘Eben-Ezer’ [Ebenezer Aldred], The Little Book (London, 1811), 69.

42 ‘Sermons in Aid of the Waterloo Subscription’, Critical Review 5th ser. 2 (1815), 523–8; see also ‘Art. VII’, Monthly Repository 11 (1816), 216–17.

43 Bickersteth, Edward, A Scripture Help (London, 1825), 240–1; Clarke, Adam, The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, 2 vols (New York, 1831), 2: 1048; Keith, Alexander, Signs of the Times, 2 vols, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1832), 2: 120–9; Elliott, Edward Bishop, Horae Apocalypticae, 3 vols, 3rd edn (London, 1847), 3: 329–30.

44 Gidney, W. T., The History of the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews, from 1809 to 1908 (London 1908), 51–200; Lewis, Christian Zionism, 67–106.

45 Hodder, Edwin, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, 2 vols (London, 1886), 1: 378. He was conflating Isa. 43: 6 and 60: 9.

46 Birks, T. R., Memoir of the Rev. Edward Bickersteth, 2 vols, 2nd edn (London, 1852), 2: 182–3.

47 Cuninghame, William, The Political Destiny of the Earth, as revealed in the Bible, 3rd edn (London, 1842), xii.

48 Britain's acquisition of Cyprus (‘Kittim’) particularly excited E. J. Hytche, ‘The Ships of Tarshish’, The Prophetic News and Israel's Watchman, April 1881, 89–91. Americans who disapproved of the British empire dwelt with gloomy relish on the vengeance promised to all nations, predicting divine leniency for their own land alone because of its favourable treatment of Jewish immigrants: Peters, George N. H., The Theocratic Kingdom, 3 vols (New York, 1884), 2: 778–80.

49 Ollivant, Alfred, The Duty of a Christian Nation to her Colonies and Foreign Dependencies (Cambridge, 1850), 27.

50 For accounts of the spectacle, see Illustrated London News, 17 June 1843; 5 June 1847.

51 Sumner, Charles Richard, The Duties of a Maritime Power (London, 1824), 21.

52 Mant, Richard, The Sovereignty of God in the Natural World, and the Agency of Man, Practically Considered (London, 1818), Whewell, William, A Sermon Preached on Trinity Monday . . . 1835 (London, 1835), 17–18.

53 Lee, Samuel, An Inquiry into the Nature, Progress, and End of Prophecy (London, 1849).

54 ‘Ships of Tarshish’, Naval Journal and Sailor's Magazine 10 (1837–8), 346–7.

55 Pusey, E. B., The Minor Prophets (London, 1860), 267.

56 Gidney, London Society, 16.

57 Creasy, Edward S., History of England from the Earliest to the Present Time, 5 vols (London, 1869), 1: 18.

58 See Wheeler, Michael, The Old Enemies (Cambridge, 2006), 51–76.

59 Max Müller, F., ‘Are there Jews in Cornwall?’, in idem, Chips from a German Workshop, 4 vols (London, 1867–75), 4: 299–329; Bannister, John, Jews in Cornwall (Truro, 1867).

60 See Wilson, John, Our Israelitish Origin (London, 1840), for one of the earliest developed statements of this position.

61 Wright, William Aldis, ‘Metals’, in Smith, William, ed., Dictionary of the Bible, 3 vols (London, 1860–3), 2: 341–3; John Saul Howson, ‘Ship’, ibid. 2: 1282–7; Edward Hayes Plumptre, ‘Solomon’, ibid. 2: 1342–54; Edward Twisleton, ‘Tarshish’, ibid. 2: 1438–41.

62 Tennent, James Edward, ‘Tarshish’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 22 vols (Edinburgh, 1853–60), 21: 26–8; see also William Houghton, ‘Peacocks’, in Smith, ed., Dictionary, 2: 763–4.

63 Twisleton, ‘Tarshish’, 1441.

64 Tennent, ‘Tarshish’, 28.

65 See, for instance, Renan, Ernest, Mission de Phénicie (Paris, 1864); Gladstone, William Ewart, Juventus Mundi: The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age, 2nd edn (London, 1870), especially 119–50; Rawlinson, George, History of Phoenicia (London, 1889).

66 Arnold, Matthew, The Great Prophecy of Israel's Restoration, 4th edn (London, 1875), xxix.

67 Footnote Ibid. xxvii.

68 Footnote Ibid. xxxv–xxxvi.

69 For a good recent summary, see Blair, Kirstie, Form and Faith in Victorian Religion and Poetry (Oxford, 2012), 1–20; see also, in this volume, eadem, ‘Reforming the Religious Sonnet: Poetry, Doubt and the Church in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, 427–51.

70 Bebbington, D. W., ‘The Advent Hope in British Evangelicalism since 1800’, Scottish Journal of Religious Studies 9 (1988), 103–14.

71 The Times, 17 July 1897, 13. It was later sung to the tune Melita (‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’), which had strong maritime connections.

72 See, for example, ‘Is America in Bible Prophecy?’, at: <https://www.raptureready.com/featured/ice/AmericaInBibleProphecy.html>, last accessed 8 August 2015.

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