- CLM
Christian Lady's Magazine
- CMR
Churchman's Monthly Review
- QJP
Quarterly Journal of Prophecy. Page numbers refer to bound editions.
In October 2007 Ralph Brown contributed an article to this Journal that discussed the ‘radical legacy of Edward Irving’ in mid nineteenth-century Britain. Brown contended that not enough attention has been paid to the way in which the prophetic themes announced by the radical Church of Scotland minister, Edward Irving (1792–1834), reverberated through mainstream Anglican Evangelicalism in the decades following Irving's premature death. Brown insisted that premillennialism continued to act as a leaven within the theological discourse of leading Evangelicals such as the former Church Missionary Society missionary Edward Bickersteth (1786–1850); the rector of St George's, Bloomsbury, and future bishop of Durham, Henry Montagu Villiers (1813–61); the vicar of Kelshall, Hertfordshire, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Thomas Rawson Birks (1810–83); and the author and journalist Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna (1790–1846).Footnote 2 Brown argued that these Evangelicals ‘rejected the fatalistic asceticism of Irving's circle’, and he therefore disputed any interpretation of premillennialism that casts it as inherently fanatical or sectarian.Footnote 3 These premillennialists, he maintained, were mainstream Anglican Evangelicals pursuing a typical course of promoting godliness and devotion within Church and Society.
In mounting this argument, Brown critiqued the depiction of nineteenth-century Evangelicalism and premillennialism proffered in Boyd Hilton's Age of atonement.Footnote 4 In this work Hilton had been concerned with tracing the effects of Evangelical theology among the intellectual leadership of British society in the nineteenth century. In particular, he sought to demonstrate that Evangelical ideas provided a key underpinning for laissez-faire political economy. Hilton argued that the majority of ‘moderate’ Evangelicals believed in a system of general providence in which God intervened through ‘a “natural” and predictable system of rewards and punishments appropriate to good and bad behaviour’.Footnote 5 In such a system, Hilton argued, the naturally occurring laws of economic life that ostensibly caused pain and setbacks were believed by many Evangelicals to have been designed by God to educate and reform the individual.Footnote 6 Trying to prevent suffering was pointless and counter to divine purposes. This economic doctrine of salvation through pain was widely held by economic and social theorists of the early nineteenth century, argued Hilton, who concluded that the pervasiveness of the doctrine was due to the purchase that the Evangelical concept of vicarious atonement wrought by the punishment of Christ on the cross had on British intellectual and religious life.
In making this argument, Hilton claimed to be correcting a depiction of Evangelicals as philanthropists and supporters of interventionist social policy.Footnote 7 He argued that this reputation has been gained for Evangelicalism by a vocal minority of ‘extremists’, whom Hilton described as ‘pentecostal, pre-millenarian, adventist, and revivalist’.Footnote 8 Unlike the majority ‘moderates’, these Evangelicals believed that ‘the judicial and penal visitations of providence occurred not in a constant or “direct” way of “natural consequence” but immediately and by special fiat’.Footnote 9 Premillennialists therefore believed, according to Hilton, that social intervention, by individuals or governments, was necessary in order to protect people against blasts of stormy unpredictability.Footnote 10 Hilton thus cast such premillennialists as sectarian, extreme and untypical of mainstream moderate Evangelicalism.
In his article, Brown disputed the dichotomy drawn between the two groups of Evangelicals by arguing that Hilton had misunderstood premillennialism. He claimed that that which united Evangelicals in this era was greater than that which divided them. First, Brown pointed out that premillennialism was a far more widespread doctrinal position than Hilton implied; its presence among a diverse group of Evangelicals means that no easy generalisations can be made about its relationship to social or economic views.Footnote 11 Secondly, Brown pointed out that all Evangelicals shared a common view of providence that acknowledged both special and general providential activity.Footnote 12 Thirdly, Brown argued that a shared social background gave all Evangelicals of the era a sense of paternalistic responsibility to the lower classes, thus social interventionism was not merely the result of a particular doctrine of providence or eschatology.Footnote 13 Fourthly, Brown argued that premillennialist social interventionism was not just a reaction against ‘stormy blasts’, but rooted in a view of prophecy which held a high view of the way in which God acted through the established Church in history. This led to a conception of the national Church as a source for corporate renewal, an outlook shared with other non-millennialist Evangelicals.Footnote 14 Fifthly, Brown pointed out that premillennialists could be galvanised to action by the thought of the second advent, finding encouragement in the notion of ultimate victory for Christian principles and spurred into zealous activity by thinking about the nearness of the return of Christ. Thus it was not only a particular view of providence which led premillennialists to exercise a distinct sense of social responsibility.Footnote 15
In a spirited response to Brown's article, Hilton said that Brown's summary of his argument was a ‘travesty’.Footnote 16 Hilton defended his depiction of moderate Evangelicals as firm supporters of the idea of general providence, rejecting any evidence that Brown adduced to challenge this view by arguing that, while moderates sometimes believed in special providence, extremist premillennialists never believed in general providence.Footnote 17 Premillennialists had no ‘sense of an underlying natural law’.Footnote 18 This fact, argued Hilton, validated his dichotomy and allows the ‘categorisation of Evangelicals into postmillennialist moderates and premillenarian extremists’ to continue to function ‘as a predictor of social attitudes’.Footnote 19 Hilton was not prepared to listen to Brown's attempt at nuancing the understanding of premillennialism because, he explained, his goal was to account for Victorian social and economic thought, not to extend knowledge of nineteenth-century Evangelicalism. So, for example, when dealing with Brown's claim that ‘Hilton underestimates the importance attached to the concept of a covenanted nation and national religion’ to Evangelical thought,Footnote 20 Hilton acknowledged that it is true that arguments concerning the role of the covenanted nation ‘hardly figure in the Age of atonement, but why should they have done since, unlike Brown, I was not writing the history of Evangelicalism’.Footnote 21
Hilton's admission that he did not consider additional information about Evangelical theology to be germane to his argument is odd. If one is to give an accurate account of the social effects of a movement, one must surely be fully conversant with its intellectual contours. Ironically, by paying more attention to the shape and nuance of Evangelical theology, as Brown suggested, it is actually possible to strengthen some of Hilton's conclusions while at the same time affirming and extending Brown's central convictions about the nature of premillennialism.
One of the most compelling aspects of Hilton's thesis is his distinction between an ‘age of atonement’ and an ‘age of incarnation’.Footnote 22 In his article, Brown offered an olive branch to Hilton in this regard by claiming that Hilton had suggested that premillennialism was part of a shift towards a liberalising of theology which stressed Christ's immanence rather than his transcendence, and focused more on his solidarity and empathy with humanity than his judgement of sin.Footnote 23 Hilton replied that he did not say this (which is true), and reiterated that the age of incarnation had nothing to do with Evangelicalism and everything to do with the demise of Evangelical hegemony and the growing influence of Broad-Church thought.Footnote 24 Hilton repeated the claim that he made in the Age of atonement, that Irvingism had ‘much in common’ with later nineteenth-century incarnationalism, but he denied that this had any effect on shifting Evangelical theology itself towards incarnationalism.Footnote 25
In fact, Brown was correct to wish that Hilton had made such an argument because premillennialism did indeed act as a revisionist force within nineteenth-century Evangelicalism.Footnote 26 By acknowledging this, Hilton would of course risk losing the distinction between his Evangelical-led age of atonement and Broad-Church-led age of incarnation, but he would find greater support for his overall contention that an ‘age of incarnation’ was dawning in the middle decades of the nineteenth century among exactly the group of people (i.e. premillennialists) whom he had already established were dissenters from the ‘atonement’-led theology and social policy.
Meanwhile, Brown was correct to defend premillennialism from accusations of fanatical sectarianism and to seek reasons for premillennialist social intervention other than a commitment to special providence. However, in making this defence Brown is in danger of playing down the kind of premillennialist distinctiveness recognised by Hilton. In the end, Brown supports Hilton's conception of a distinctive ‘age of atonement’, with the proviso that he wants the majority of premillennialists included within it.Footnote 27 Ironically, this conclusion dilutes his own argument that premillennialism precipitated theological change in the nineteenth century.
In fact, the theological revisionism of the movement, and its unique social vision, can be stated far more explicitly and explained more convincingly by pointing to an element of premillennialist eschatology neglected by Brown: the premillennialist commitment to the renewal of the human body and the renovation of the earth. This was a future hope which gave a very ‘this-worldly’ flavour to premillennialist theology for it refused to follow the classic Evangelical habit of creating a dualism between ‘body’ and ‘soul’ or between ‘earth’ and ‘heaven’. This was a new form of thought, very different from ‘atonement’-style theology. Brown is also correct to point to the premillennialist understanding of the national Church as an instrument of the divine purpose which made the pre-millenialist social vision less based on Hilton's explanation of ‘special providence’ and rooted more in the notion of the covenanted Nation and Church as a source of corporate renewal and responsibility.Footnote 28 What can be added to this, however, is that the premillennialist prophetic sense caused its adherents not only to respect and value the Church in history, but also to interpret the whole course of historical time as in and of itself purposeful and even sacrosanct. This stress on the importance of the historical process undergirded the premillennialist commitment to upholding the temporal-spatial realm as a significant, enduring and divinely-ordered entity.
The next two sections of this article treat these two neglected aspects of debate about premillennialism by looking at their conception of historical time and by examining their attitudes towards the material world. The premillennialist desire to claim that God was profoundly involved with the temporal-spatial sphere aligned these premillennialists with developments in Victorian theology in which the temporal sphere (or ‘time’) came to be viewed as an important and enduring element within the purposes of God, rather than simply as a place of preparation for heaven or a distant ‘eternity’. This high view of the fabric of time and space, which Hilton would see as one of the hallmarks of the non-Evangelical ‘age of incarnation’, shows that premillennialists were not the fringe extremists, obsessed by calamity and judgement, whom Hilton depicts. It also shows, however, that neither was a premillennialist the typical ‘Evangelical’, more interested in souls than bodies, as Brown would have us view them. Premillennialists were, pace Brown, distinctive in terms of classic Evangelical theology, and, pace Hilton, thoroughly mainstream and even progressive in terms of their anticipation and precipitation of nineteenth-century theological trends. After examining these two aspects of premillennialist thought, the article concludes with some reflections on how this new understanding of the premillennialist vision of the renewal of time and space might help historians better to grasp the social vision of mid nineteenth-century Evangelicalism.
Premillennialism and historical time
The issue of premillennialist attitudes towards historical time involves critiquing Hilton's contention that premillennialist Evangelicals firmly supported special providence and never believed in general providence. The problem with Hilton's argument is not that he has overlooked evidence of premillennialists who did believe in general providence; rather, it is that he has created a false dichotomy between ‘general’ and ‘special’ providence that fails to represent premillennialist attitudes towards God's involvement in history.
The premillennialists under discussion in this article, as in the articles by Brown, were ‘historicists’. This is a technical description meaning that these women and men interpreted the words of prophecy in the Bible as pertaining to events in the history of the Church, arguing that a ‘day’ spoken of in prophetic Scripture should be interpreted as meaning a ‘year’ of historical time.Footnote 29 Prophetic fulfilment was thus a long, drawn-out process, not a short burst of apocalyptic activity. This differed from an alternative mode of prophetic interpretation coming into vogue in the 1820s, called futurism, which argued that all prophetic events were as yet unfulfilled.Footnote 30
The preference for this mode of interpreting prophetic Scripture meant that historicist premillennialists were naturally fascinated by history. ‘Prophecy cannot … be complete without history’, wrote Edward Bickersteth, ‘for its fulfilment must be sought in history; history is not only the light of the times, but the light of prophecy.’Footnote 31 Premillennialists did not believe in a God who suspended the natural order of time and space to intervene in world affairs, rather they talked of God's plans being ‘blended in with the whole range of history; and all the events recorded in profane historians’.Footnote 32 This ‘blending’ meant that God used the regular rise and fall of empires and individuals to fulfil his purposes. ‘Civilization is the handmaid to divine truth, and the redemption of nature to the service of man advances by parallel steps with the redemption of man himself to the service of his Maker’, wrote the Churchman's Monthly Review, a journal committed to the historicist premillennialist cause, in its first edition in January 1841. ‘The history of society is the stately porch – the history of the church of God the magnificent temple to which it leads.’Footnote 33 It was thus the perception of the observer, as much as the nature of the event itself, which changed profane history into sacred drama. ‘The more closely we search, the more deep and wondrous will be the truths which it reveals … All the events of time will borrow new elements of dignity and greatness from the majesty of those eternal counsels, which are seen to be fulfilled in them from age to age’, concluded Thomas Rawson Birks.Footnote 34
There were not, then, two parallel histories, sacred and profane, with an arbitrary God dipping into the latter at will. Rather, for these premillennialists, secular and sacred histories were seen as parts of the same unitary realm. ‘God's eternal thoughts are written on the face of time’, concluded a writer in the Quarterly Journal of Prophecy, a journal edited by the Free Church of Scotland leader Horatius Bonar (1808–89) which, while entertaining a variety of premillennialist viewpoints, contained a significant number of stridently historicist premillennialist articles.Footnote 35 This sense of historical unity had consequences for the premillennialist conception of the temporal-spatial sphere because it led to a high appreciation of the products of human culture. The rector of Claydon, Buckinghamshire, William Fremantle (1807–95), could thus claim that the history of civilisation, marked by art, learning and knowledge, was concomitant with the progressive establishment of the kingdom of God on earth: ‘What a sanctified and calming light this throws upon all the works of God, all the dispensations of Providence, all the events of nations. Every moment of time, every act of man, every production of art, every discovery of science … contributes its quota of praise.’Footnote 36 The Quarterly Journal of Prophecy echoed this view in 1850, proposing that even the minutest element of the world was invested with a genetic code that strained towards a future fulfilment:
[In] every Being, and Planet, and Atom, of which the World consists, there was incorporated, when their spheres were first assigned, a tendency, which … would lead on to the development of God's idea in Creation … the Collective Mind of Nature is impregnated with hope … it is ready, like as was Lazarus, to burst its bandages and cerements, and walk again amid the sunshine of its early splendour.Footnote 37
This concept of an all-pervasive ‘mind of nature’ which sanctified rather than negated the course of history draws attention to the fact that these premillennialists shared with other nineteenth-century romantic thinkers the belief that an underlying ‘will’ revealed itself through the historical process. In fact, one of the most famous authors of a guide to prophecy, the Anglican clergyman Edward B. Elliott (1793–1875), lavished praise on the German romantic philosopher of history Frederick von Schlegel (1772–1829) for articulating a philosophy of history which attended to the role of providence in shaping the course of history and for proposing that as ‘the highest object of philosophy is the restoration of God's image in man, so the great object of the philosophy of history must be to trace historically the progress of this restoration’.Footnote 38 Elliott agreed that Christians must similarly search out the ‘moral philosophy of the history of Christendom’.Footnote 39
In uttering such sentiments these premillennialists were ‘historicist’ in the more familiar use of the term. Premillennialists participated in the nineteenth-century's rage for history.Footnote 40 They even shared the historicist sense that the work of the historian involved recognising the essential difference between other times and contemporary culture.Footnote 41 ‘There are few offices more important or more difficult than that of the historian’, wrote the reviewer of Robert Wilberforce's The five empires, an outline of ancient history in 1841,
especially when he records the events of other times than his own … he who goes back to remote ages, and travels afar to foreign climes, for the material of his work, requires many and great qualifications to enable him to make it such as shall reflect true honour upon himself, and confer real benefit on others.Footnote 42
Premillennialists held the office of historian in high esteem even when that historian was ostensibly hostile to Christianity. Edward Gibbon, in particular, was the premillennialists' favourite infidel. A writer in the Churchman's Monthly Review in 1846 concluded that ‘The student who is now prepared to enter upon the examination of the vith chapter [of Revelation] should take Mr Elliott's commentary in one hand and Gibbon's history in the other: Indeed, it would be difficult to say which of the twain – the infidel or the believer – has contributed most largely to the elucidation of the Apocalypse.’Footnote 43
These premillennialists were products of an historically-minded age in one further sense. Premillennialists shared the early Victorian awe at the vastness and grandness of time. Premilllennialists were, in their own ambit, proponents of ‘deep time’, often resorting to geological metaphors to capture the breadth and mystery of the historical process. ‘The present is an era of fossil geology’, wrote one reviewer in the Churchman's Monthly Review in 1844. The writer continued: ‘In all directions the buried remains of past ages are dug up and brought to light with persevering zeal.’Footnote 44 Meanwhile another reviewer praised the work of German scholars such as Leopold von Ranke and Barthold Niebuhr who, he believed, ‘have toiled in the mine of ages; they have pierced through the superincumbent mass; they have descended to and examined the primary strata; they have brought the treasures of antiquity to light; and have exhumed facts that lay buried under the ruins of a primeval world’.Footnote 45
The historian John Burrow has drawn attention to what he believed to be the transition in the nineteenth century ‘from a characteristic (though far from universal) disposition to the representation of history in terms of eventfulness, even of a catastrophic, apocalyptic kind, to the subtler representation of it as a kind of sedimentary process, whose longer-term significance lay far beyond the knowledge of the actors engaged in it’.Footnote 46 Burrow linked the interest in apocalypse in the early nineteenth century with a temporal understanding that ‘deals in shocks and endings, or types of the end, of the moments when the order of time and nature is suspended’.Footnote 47 Hilton would probably agree and point to the premillennialists as a primary example. However, this form of premillennialism, despite its ostensible concern with ‘apocalyptic’ history, in fact fits better with the new ‘sedimentary’ approach to historical change. This was because the belief that the whole course of historical development was an unfolding of God's plans implied that God needed the media of time to convey the blessings of eternity. ‘It is obvious that all the blessing of Christ's redemption will not, we may truly say, cannot be communicated at once, but must await a gradual development’, contended the Quarterly Journal of Prophecy.Footnote 48 ‘The Divine plan is usually that of gradual development’, affirmed the Churchman's Monthly Review. Footnote 49 Such a sense of development allowed premillennialists to claim that, in a society where the cry of ‘progress’ was uttered, they had some claim to be the true progressives. In a statement which echoed the optimistic language of Whig historians, the Quarterly Journal of Prophecy concluded that, living towards the end of history, ‘our ground is now surer; our way less intricate; our steps are firmer. We must now be considerably nearer truth, if we have not wholly reached it. We see, at least, more clearly the direction in which it lies’.Footnote 50
Such an emphasis on the gradual progressivism of history challenges the notion that premillennialists saw God's activity as a sort of nervous interventionism. ‘Our God is not a God of expedients like man: surprised as it were by this event, and suddenly called upon to provide for that emergency’, affirmed the vicar of Willian, Hertfordshire, William Pym (1792–1852), but rather ‘from the unfathomable recesses of his own eternity, he has looked forth over all the future concerns of time, fore-ordaining everything according to his pre-determinate counsel; and, consistently with that sure rule, shall each be unfolded in its season’.Footnote 51 Premillennialists were, in fact, committed to a natural law of historical development. ‘It is possible to conceive how the Almighty works’, argued the Quarterly Journal of Prophecy in 1855, ‘not by sudden miraculous effect, but by natural law, long order and progress, seeing the end from the beginning, and advancing, it is probable, men and angels, and the world they inhabit, to higher charges, each grander and more perfect than the preceding’.Footnote 52
Premillennialists possessed a linear, progressive sense of time that invested the historical process with meaning and purpose. God was indeed no absent lawgiver of the sort that Hilton associated with the ‘age of atonement’, but neither was he the capricious deity presiding over a chaotic world. He was rather the all-pervasive force underlying a pattern of progressive temporal development. The world was not a static realm of probation or excoriating moral trial for the individual, but a complex organic mechanism that was in the process of eternally-driven transformation. There is, therefore, much about the premillennialist conception of time which fits better within Hilton's ‘age of incarnation’, which he describes as an age fascinated with the passage of time, progress and mutability.Footnote 53 Premillennialism was a manifestation of the growing nineteenth-century fascination with temporal development. Indeed, the essential emphasis of their thought is well captured by George Poulet Scrope who, reflecting on his geological researches (in a statement alluded to by Hilton as symbolic of the outlook of the ‘age of incarnation’), concluded that ‘the leading idea … is Time! – Time ! – Time!’Footnote 54
Premillennialism and the material world
The earth
The premillennialist view of history outlined could be called ‘universal’. These premillennialists were convinced that the flow of world history was leading not to the removal of a small number of Christians from the earth, but to the renovation of the temporal-spatial sphere. As Birks put it, during the millennium ‘the separate elements, prepared for thousands of years, are all to be combined in one vast and glorious exhibition of the moral dominion of God’.Footnote 55
Many premillennialists called this doctrine of the final settlement of history ‘the restitution of all things’. This term was taken from a passage in Acts iii.20, when Peter preaches the following words: ‘And he shall send Jesus Christ, which before was preached unto you: Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began.’Footnote 56 In successive journal articles, lectures and tracts, premillennialists in this period contended that the ‘restitution’ spoken of in this passage was, in fact, a short-hand description for the events which would occur when Christ returned to earth and which were each results of the redemptive work of Christ. William Pym commented that ‘The restitution of all things, therefore, in this earth, we understand to mean, that almighty act whereby every thing, which has been cursed for the sin of man, shall be restored to at least its primitive state of perfection and blessing, though, we conceive, to a higher degree.’Footnote 57 Although the central text for a belief in ‘restitution’ was derived from a passage in the book of Acts, premillennialists believed that the restitution of all things was a doctrine articulated throughout Scripture. Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna stated that ‘We shall find that this restitution of all things, is dwelt on by all the New Testament writers, as well as the Old; indeed, it is the one bright spot on which, in the eternity before us, the eye is taught to rest.’Footnote 58
At the heart of this vision was the millennium itself. This would be the period of one thousand years during which righteousness flourished on the earth, as recorded in Revelation xx. However, although premillennialists began by talking about the nature of the millennium, they easily diverged into simply making a statement about heaven or eternity per se. For example, Thomas Nolan (1809–82), minister of St John's Chapel, Bedford Row, affirmed the belief that the gamut of millennial promises could in fact be read as pertaining to the whole span of eternal life: ‘This blessed period begins with the coming in glory of Christ at the commencement of the millennium … It is not, however, necessary to suppose that it is to terminate at the close of that period.’Footnote 59
The doctrine of the restitution of all things in fact represented a revision of Evangelical eschatology away from a hope of the future life that tended to be immaterial and ‘soulish’, and towards one that was material and fleshly. This idea was captured in a fictional dialogue between ‘John’ and his ‘Minister’, published in the Irish Evangelical journal The Christian Herald, edited by Irish premillennialist Edward N. Hoare (1800–77). After explaining the idea of Christ's return to earth, ‘John’ enquired:
John – But, Sir, about this earth being the place where Jesus and his people are to be in glory; – I thought we were to go to heaven to Him, and not for Him to come down to us.
Minister – Wherever Jesus is, that is heaven; and when this earth is changed, and made new, and as glorious as it was when first God created it … then this earth will be all that we are used to fancy heaven would be.Footnote 60
There was more than a hint of iconoclasm in this and other similar statements that attempted to disabuse people of the notion of an immaterial heaven.
This strong view of the materiality of the future life fed back into a high estimation of the current earthly life. Gerard Noel (1782–1851), at this time curate of St Mary Magdalene, Richmond, Surrey, suggested that the doctrine of the restitution of all things ‘consecrates all the variety and loveliness of the material objects around us, by their connexion with a Paradise yet to be restored to our full, and perhaps eternal enjoyment’.Footnote 61 This delight in the natural world reflected the famous theme of literary romanticism in its love of nature, captured by William Wordsworth:
Premillennialists were Wordsworthian in their descriptions of the millennium. Henry Montagu Villiers, for example, caricatured the view which he opposed in insisting that happiness would be found not in ‘a place of ethereal blessedness, – not a place of clouds, to be driven hither or thither by the wind’.Footnote 63 Meanwhile the editor of the Jewish Expositor, Thomas Boys (1792–1880), echoed Wordsworth's sentiments in verse:
Such views expressed the characteristic romantic insight that religion was not something over and above the physical or natural world, but an entity that must be sought within it.Footnote 65
It was the hope of material restitution that explains why Thomas Rawson Birks, a central figure in Brown's study, embraced a doctrine of universal moral restitution, and is the key to unlocking why revisions of the doctrine of eternal punishment were ‘particularly prominent among adventist Evangelical Churchman’.Footnote 66 Without accounting for this materialistic element of premillennialist thought, Brown's argument that premillennial adventism changed people's views on the doctrine of eternal punishment is somewhat unsatisfying for it does not actually account for why premillennialism should cause such soteriological revisionism. It was, in fact, the sense that the comprehensiveness of the final settlement must include some sort of repair of morally rebellious creatures in parallel with repair of the material world that caused hints of universalism to bubble under the surface of premillennialist writing. Gerard Noel, for example, imagined that in the eschaton God would ‘send a commission, not to annihilate but to repair … he might educate, enlighten, protect, and reward – he might bring into exercise the latent sympathies of the misguided and the ignorant’.Footnote 67 Meanwhile Alexander Dallas (1791–1869), one of the leading figures in the ‘second reformation’ movement in Ireland, called the millennium ‘the educational period of the sons of Adam’, at the end of which God would restore all those who had graduated through the ‘educational system of restitution’ to their original, pre-lapsarian condition when, ‘being cleansed from their corruptions [they] shall fulfil the original intention of God in the creation of their first father; and that the purpose of the Almighty shall stand, in spite of the cunningest devices of Satan’.Footnote 68 These were not outright statements of universalism, but they were certainly powerful images of a more inclusive final settlement than that which has been associated with Evangelicalism in general, or premillennialism in particular, during this era.
The body and the incarnation
The means by which people would enjoy this restored earth was by the resurrection of their earthly bodies. Premillennialists complained that ‘the greater part of the Christian church … have turned to the phantomizing system of the Buddhists, who believe that the future happiness of mankind will consist in moving about in the air’.Footnote 69 They argued that any description of salvation that imagined the soul in heaven had entered into the promise of God was inadequate. ‘I can find in the Bible’, concluded Norfolk Evangelical Benjamin Philpot (1790–1889), ‘no other happiness provided for redeemed man than one which involves the corporeal condition in which he came from the hand of the Creator. We can have no sympathies with any other condition.’Footnote 70 This high view of the human body was undergirded by a strong appreciation of the incarnated Christ. Alexander Dallas claimed that the ‘incarnation must be considered as the centre of the fulfilment of the great scheme of Redemption’.Footnote 71 This was not the ‘ethical’ Jesus that Hilton spoke of as a product of a ‘sentimentalisation’ of British culture.Footnote 72 Rather, it was a doctrine of incarnation firmly eschatological in origin.
One of the unifying themes of premillennialism, shared by historicists and futurists, was that Christ would return bodily, or ‘literally’.Footnote 73 This view was held in contradistinction to the eighteenth-century view that the return of Christ spoken of in the Bible represented either individual conversion or the moral rule of Christ through worldwide conversions in the last days. Premillennialists turned to the doctrine of the incarnation to neutralise claims that the premillennial doctrine of the second advent was, as John Cox (1802–78) summarised it, ‘low, gross, carnal, judaizing, and I know not what beside’.Footnote 74 Incarnation proved parousia. ‘They seem to imagine that it is too much condescension in the Saviour to dwell with men!’, wrote an anonymous Scottish premillennialist. ‘Can any thing be too condescending for Him, who has already come in the likeness of sinful flesh, and subjected himself to temptations from the devil and insults from men?’Footnote 75 Indeed, premillennialists suggested that to doubt the second advent might call into question the reality of the first advent, for ‘what valid reason can be offered for putting a spiritual interpretation on the one class of predictions, in the above series, which was not extended to the other?’, enquired Glasgow author and publisher James A. Begg (d. 1869).Footnote 76
The focus on incarnation may have arisen from a heightened expectation of the coming of a victorious, physically present messiah, yet it also generated a strong focus on the humanness of Christ, a shifting of Christology away from the vicarious sacrifice of Christ on the cross, which Hilton associated with a harsh, retributive ‘age of atonement’, and towards a focus on Jesus' sympathy with the human condition. ‘The Eternal Word became flesh’, wrote Gerard Noel, ‘but in that flesh the divinity seemed, often, to repose quiescent, and left the manhood to the full influence of the Holy Ghost; left the man Christ Jesus, beneath that influence, to struggle, even as we do, with all the sorrows, pangs, and privations of life.’Footnote 77 Premillennialists were eager to emphasise that the humanity of Christ should be of great comfort to Christians all too aware of their own frailty. Edward Hoare wrote that ‘To the tempted Christian, the oneness of the flesh of Christ with the flesh of David, and therefore, with his flesh, is of the greatest importance; and to every Christian, hope of victory and of glory can only be held out by pointing him to “God manifest in flesh”.’Footnote 78
The incarnation was thus perceived as the way in which humanity had been reconnected to the divine. William Cadman (1815–91), who for some time served as Montagu Villiers's assistant at St George's, Bloomsbury, and was later the highly successful rector of St George's, Southwark, thus invited his auditors in 1852 to ‘rise with me still higher in the scale … and cast ourselves in holy contemplation before the throne of the Eternal. And what is there? First and foremost we behold God Incarnate: God in our flesh’.Footnote 79 This focus on the incarnation thus reaffirmed the idea that God had a strong concern with the material world. As Gerard Noel put it, ‘Jesus Christ is linked to our world by ties less fragile than those which human theology has framed.’Footnote 80
Premillennialism and society
What, then, of the premillennialist social vision? There were some specific factors that gave premillennialism a distinctive social edge. Brown is correct to point to the concept of the covenanted nation, for example. Indeed, this particular emphasis arose in part through the premillennialist habit of turning to Old Testament prophecies which spoke of a promised earthly kingdom. These scriptural promises gave colour to the premillennialist notion of restitution, and emphasised a sense of God's concern with corporate, temporal structures. It was thus natural to liken Christian, and even British, identity to that of Israel. It may also be added that the comprehensive nature of the hope for a universal restitution meant that premillennialists were willing to pay attention to the life of communities, not just individuals. This clearly filtered through to some statements about social reform. Evangelical publisher and author Robert Benton Seeley (1798–1886), for example, could criticise an Evangelicalism where the Bible was ‘regarded as merely a guide to heaven, and as having very little bearing upon the things of this sublunary earth’.Footnote 81 Here was the characteristic premillennialist stance: salvation should work itself out on earth, within temporal structures.
It is not, however, possible to argue that premillennialism in and of itself produced a comprehensive social vision; Brown is right to resist attempts at predicting Evangelical social attitudes based solely on eschatology. Rather, it must be remembered that Evangelical social vision as a whole was shifting in these decades. The attention paid by premillennialists to temporal-spatial structures actually represented at an eschatological pitch the growing attention being shown across mid-century Evangelicalism towards the amelioration of the material structures which caused poverty. Evangelicals generally were moving to a conception of social reform that focused far more on the physical sphere than had previously been the case.Footnote 82 Brown misses this aspect of Evangelical development because he wants premillennialists to be reckoned as essentially similar to other Evangelicals. He thus has to agree with Hilton that moral and spiritual reform were the driving force of Evangelical social reform because only when the spiritual character of the poor was changed would there come the ‘frugal self-reliance that was the key to improving their material well being’. In short, he concluded, ‘Victorian Evangelicals “wanted to save souls, not bodies”’.Footnote 83
Such a conclusion is only partially correct for mid-century Evangelicalism, however. While it is true that there was little abatement in the desire to improve the morality and spirituality of the nation, nor any widespread move to argue that the state ought to take control of social welfare, there emerged in this period a strong realisation that the causes of immorality and irreligion were rooted not only in the darkness of the individual's own soul but also in the depravity of the physical conditions in which she or he lived. The Christian Guardian put this view forward in 1842. Discussing the problem of the poor, it informed its readers that
it is not that they exhibit a nature more radically evil than our own, but that they are placed in circumstances which more strongly and evidently develop their corruptions, and bring out more abundantly and into stronger light before others … alas! ourselves infected, we go among the diseased and dying; – inmates of the same great hospital, but living in better wards.Footnote 84
Evangelicals increasingly contended that vice and profanity were hugely exacerbated, if not entirely created, by the material conditions in which many people lived. Referring to the traditional understanding of poverty as a consequence of individual sin, Anthony Ashley Cooper (from 1851 the 7th earl of Shaftesbury) (1801–85), the most famous premillennialist social reformer, declaimed: ‘Well, now, talk about its being their fault, indeed! Pray, is it their fault that they cannot improve the sewage of this great metropolis?’Footnote 85
Flowing from this conviction, Evangelicals also began to reformulate their ideas about the purpose of poverty. If the sordidness of the environment promoted sin, hardened hearts and incubated vice, then surely poverty was no positive encouragement to spiritual reformation, as some Evangelical thinkers had contended. The premillennialist John Cox stated that ‘it would be blasphemy to lay all the wretchedness around us at the door of sovereignty, or to say with reference to all the squalid wants and misery in our country, “so providence ordains it.” Human legislation and political mistakes and crimes must take their share’.Footnote 86 Evangelicals thus came to argue that not all poverty was caused, desired or even used by God, and that submission to the existing temporal structures was not the only godly response to industrial society.Footnote 87 This was part of a broader realisation that physical experience was bound to moral character, that the soul and the body were an integrated whole. ‘In our pursuits, the moral and physical elements are closely, intricately, and inseparably, combined’, claimed Shaftesbury.Footnote 88
The link between personal sin and suffering buckled under the weight of evaluating complex communal maladies such as the sanitation system of a major city. Evangelicals began to seek corporate responses to communal problems. Seeley thus argued that charity or piecemeal sentiment was inadequate: ‘More than mere sympathy or even alleviation is necessary. Something must be done to produce a permanent amelioration.’Footnote 89 Thus it was that Evangelicals increasingly ‘put their faith in sewers and water’Footnote 90 and, indeed, in a range of other public health, education, workplace and housing reforms. Norris Pope has identified this change of sentiment as the rise of ‘evangelical environmentalism’, but it might equally be called a commitment to the reformation of time and space as Evangelicals became involved in attempts both to reform patterns of time through the Ten Hours, Early Closing and Saturday Half Day Holiday movements, and to reform spatial structures through housing and public health campaigns.Footnote 91
The Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes is particularly instructive in this regard. Inaugurated in 1844, the society gained support from several premillennialists including H. M. Villiers, his successor at St George's, Bloomsbury, Emilius Bayley, the rector of St-Dunstan's-in-the-West Edward Auriol (1805–80), Edward Bickersteth, William Pym, Robert Benton Seeley and the Liverpool premillennialist Hugh McNeile (1796–1879), as well as other non-millennialist Evangelicals.Footnote 92 The society pioneered the building of model houses for families in London and provincial towns.Footnote 93 The first purpose-built ‘model dwelling house’ was constructed in Bagnigge Wells, St Pancras in 1845,Footnote 94 with a further model house built in George Street in Bloomsbury the following year.Footnote 95 This latter building, noted the society, combined
every thing deemed essential or valuable in such an establishment – complete ventilation and drainage; an ample supply of water; separation and retirement in the sleeping apartments; with all those conveniences which, whilst conducing to the health and physical comfort of the inmates, tend to increase their self-respect, and elevate them in the scale of moral and intellectual beings.Footnote 96
Such language was clearly indicative of the ‘environmental’ concerns of the organisation and reflected the growing conviction that the structural causes of poverty must be addressed if there was to be moral and spiritual improvement. As the annual report of 1859 concluded, ‘to attempt any material amendment of the character and habits of the poor, apart from some preliminary amelioration of their homes, is every whit as hopeless as the effort to purify the Thames without first intercepting in the sewers the normal source of its contamination’.Footnote 97
Evangelicals in mid nineteenth-century Britain may not have attempted explicitly to integrate their eschatology with new attitudes towards social action, nor was every Evangelical who participated in the growing appreciation of the environmental causes of poverty a premillennialist. However, this does not mean that there was no connection between premillennialist views and a shifting social agenda. The same cultural, social and intellectual forces that were shaping the one were also altering the other. Future research on Evangelical contributions to mid nineteenth-century social reform should avoid the common tendency to suggest that Evangelicals in general, and premillennialists in particular, turned to ameliorative social reform in spite of their theology, and should rather probe how theology and praxis were inextricably bound together.Footnote 98 This article has suggested one line of enquiry for how this might have been so by pointing to the rising appreciation of the temporal sphere as a locus of authentic Christian concern.
Hilton made two contrasts in Age of atonement, first between moderates and extremists, and second between an ‘age of atonement’ and an ‘age of incarnation’. If the need for historiographical lumps is to be accepted, as Hilton suggests, perhaps Ockham's razor might shave this down to just one distinction; between those in the nineteenth century holding to a pessimistic, and those holding to an optimistic, view of the temporal-spatial sphere.Footnote 99 Early nineteenth-century ‘moderate’ Evangelicalism, with its sense of the world as a probationary testing ground, may well have fallen into the former category; mid-nineteenth century premillennialist Evangelicalism, paradoxically enough, appears to be best placed in the latter. By asserting this, Brown's insights about premillennialism are affirmed. Premillennialism was not all doom and gloom, nor the preserve of fanatics. Rather, it was a moderate and even liberalising creed held by numerous key Evangelical leaders. It paid attention to the need for renewal of corporate structures and encouraged activism, not only out of a sense of urgency before the return of Christ, but because of a conviction of physical continuity between this world and the next. Christ would return to complete and fulfil a plan for the world and its human inhabitants which had been developing throughout history.
This high view of time and space was announced in language of prophecy and apocalypse which has distracted historians, including Hilton, from some of the essential similarity between premillennialist thought and broader developments in nineteenth-century religious thought. In particular, premillennialism was rooted in the same set of theological and intellectual changes, combined with new responses to both social and spiritual poverty, which were transforming British Christian thought and action in a number of ways that Hilton identifies as characteristic of a dawning ‘age of incarnation’. This means that Hilton was also correct to distinguish premillennialists from an older Evangelical tradition, even though he failed to push this argument to its logical conclusion: namely, that premillennialism was part of the growing tendency in mid nineteenth-century theology and activism to focus upon the renovation, repair and recreation of the temporal-spatial sphere.
