The rapid expansion of Evangelical Protestantism in Britain reached its peak during the Romantic period. By the 1830s more than 60 per cent of Protestants within and outside the established Churches practised some form of Evangelicalism. Yet although historians have made detailed studies of the Oxford Movement and ‘Broad Church’ thought in the context of Romanticism,Footnote 1 the influence of Romanticism upon Anglican Evangelicalism has received far less recognition. Some recent scholarship has now begun to re-examine the complexities of the relationship between Evangelicalism and its cultural environment. The dramatic career of the Scottish preacher and polemicist Edward Irving (1792–1834), in particular, has been interpreted as representing a prime example of the ‘adaption of Evangelicalism into the Romantic idiom’.Footnote 2 David Bebbington focuses upon Irving's role as the first nineteenth-century populariser of the doctrine of Christ's imminent personal return to earth, prior to the establishment of his millennial kingdom, as a major element in determining the changing character of early nineteenth-century Evangelicalism.Footnote 3
There has still been relatively little consideration of the nature of Irving's longer-term theological and spiritual legacy. Indeed, narrative accounts of Victorian religion have tended to suggest that those churchmen who continued to publish prophetic studies well into the later nineteenth century were an insignificant minority and that their work was of little lasting importance. Even denominational historians, seeking to defend the contribution made by prominent Evangelical clerics to Victorian church life, have tended to ignore their prophetic interests.Footnote 4 This article presents an analysis of nineteenth-century Anglican Evangelical theology and spirituality, political and social thought and missionary activity, considering the radical influence of Edward Irving upon mid-Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism.
The article also challenges the conventional historical view that Evangelical Churchmen produced only negative polemical works in response to the innovatory approaches of Oxford Movement and ‘Broad Church’ theologians. It has been argued, for example, that the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828) prompted Coleridge and Keble to consider new questions concerning the nature of the Church and that the shockwaves produced by this process continued to reverberate through the ‘very theological and intellectual centre of the Church of England’ as they fed into the later writings of Newman and Maurice.Footnote 5 The responses of Evangelicals to the political and religious ferment of the 1820s and 1830s have, by contrast, been dismissed on the basis that ‘their theology and to a large extent their literature was already formed’. They were, Stephen Prickett maintains, ‘as a group profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-aesthetic, and, in spite of the “socialism” of men like Kingsley, to that degree less dangerous to the social and political establishment’.Footnote 6
In fact, the tumultuous religious and political atmosphere of the 1820s and 1830s did provoke a comparable crisis of identity within Anglican Evangelicalism.Footnote 7 This sense of crisis stimulated a dramatic increase in Evangelical prophetic study, millenarian preaching and the growth and extraordinary popularity of a new genre of apocalyptic poetry.Footnote 8 Moreover, this crisis, for Evangelicals as much as for the leaders of the Oxford Movement, led to the development of a new interpretation of the role of the national Church.
The influence of Edward Irving on early nineteenth-century Anglican Evangelicalism
The Evangelical Revival has traditionally been interpreted as a counter-cultural phenomenon, a reaction against prevailing modes of thought and the social consequences of industrialisation. It has been represented as a ‘reaction’ against the ‘eighteenth century and its rationalism’, a turning from reason to emotion,Footnote 9 a ‘closed’ intellectual and spiritual ‘sub-culture’.Footnote 10 Evangelicalism and the Enlightenment have generally been regarded as ‘polar opposites’.Footnote 11 Indeed, Evangelicalism, as essentially a religion of the heart, has been interpreted by some writers as an early manifestation of what later came to be described as the Romantic movement. The Anglican theologian F. D. Maurice (1805–72), for instance, identified a philosophical revolution, originating in the mid-eighteenth century, which was reflected in the Methodist conviction that man was essentially a spiritual being, not a mechanism but a being with values and a purpose.Footnote 12
Recent scholarship has, however, investigated some possible affinities between the Evangelical Revival and Enlightenment culture. Important aspects of its spirituality appear to have reflected, in particular, the empirical Lockean outlook of the English Enlightenment. Richard Brantley regards Lockean empiricism as central to the ‘intellectual method’ of Wesley's Methodism. He maintains that Wesley's alignment of theology to the philosophy of the Enlightenment was also reflected in the way in which spiritual experiences were evoked by the leading British poets of the late eighteenth century.Footnote 13 Wesley's application of empiricist philosophy to religious experience was especially important in shaping the distinctive Methodist doctrine of assurance, a conviction that spurred the characteristic activism of the Evangelical movement.Footnote 14 His opposition to ‘systems’ of confessional orthodoxy, his pragmatic methods and optimism concerning the progress of the Gospel have also been identified as typical Enlightenment attitudes.Footnote 15
David Bebbington, in particular, has argued that emphases upon emotion, otherworldliness and moments of intense fervour were not central to the eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival but were actually ‘novelties in the years around 1830’. He maintains that ‘Reason, not emotion, had been the lodestar of the Evangelicals; many of them looked to the millennium of the future, not to the past, for their ideal of a Christian society; and far from wishing to flee from existing conditions, they used normal contemporary methods, whether in business, politics or religion, to accomplish their aims.’Footnote 16 The impact of Romanticism was, according to Bebbington, a major influence upon Evangelical spirituality, but it only came to prominence from the 1820s and 1830s. These decades saw the rise of a narrower and more partisan form of Evangelicalism as the Enlightenment values of Wesley were superseded by new Romantic elements in Evangelical thought, ‘revolutionising the inherited outlook’.Footnote 17
The Romantic religious sensibility depended upon a new emphasis upon the ‘possibility of a more pervasive sacredness, present in this world’.Footnote 18 The popularity of Wordsworth's poetry during the 1820s and 1830s both reflected and helped to stimulate this yearning for a more intense spiritual experience. Wordsworth appealed to a broad religious readership including Evangelicals, as well as radicals like Mill and Hare, and the Tractarians Newman and Keble. Newman later described the Oxford Movement as a reaction against the ‘dry and superficial character of the religious teaching and the literature of the last generation’. It had addressed a need for ‘something deeper and more attractive’, a need that had been stimulated by the poetry of Scott, Coleridge and Wordsworth.Footnote 19
Amongst educated Evangelicals, many of whom had an appreciation of the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge and some knowledge of continental philosophy, prophetic and millenarian ideas became increasingly popular. The Apocalypse, which had been of only marginal interest to the previous generation of Evangelical Anglicans led by Charles Simeon (1783–1836) and the Clapham Sect, was given a greater prominence and importance. Between 1800 and 1840, 100 books discussing the signs of the times were published, ten prophetic periodicals were founded and several prophetic societies and conferences were initiated.Footnote 20 A distinctive new emphasis was being given to the advent hope, which served as an object of personal devotion. The Evangelical cleric, novelist and poet George Croly (1780–1860) declared that
The Christian world would justly lament the loss of a single line of those glorious records of its origin, the historic books of the New Testament, but if by some fatality they could perish, all their doctrines might be recovered from the burning characters of the Apocalypse, truth without a touch of mortality, the direct transmission of the living language of the Spirit of God.Footnote 21
A rising generation of educated Anglican Evangelicals had been drawn towards the adventism of Edward Irving, with Anglican clergymen being in the majority at the annual series of prophetic conferences held at the Albury Park estate of the banker Henry Drummond (1786–1860), a close associate of Irving.Footnote 22 Thomas Rawson Birks (1810–83), who came originally from a Baptist family and joined the Church of England on becoming an undergraduate at Cambridge University, in 1830, claimed, for example, that Irving's revival of the Old Testament concept of a covenanted nation, and its spiritual obligations, had transformed his attitude towards the Anglican Church.Footnote 23 Young men like Birks were sympathetic to Irving's compelling Manichaean outlook and welcomed his condemnation of the accommodating expediency of the Simeonite Evangelical establishment, which Irving had attacked for compromising its Protestant heritage in return for political gains. Irving had claimed that Evangelicalism was losing ground because of ‘the soft and effeminate’ leadership ‘of this generation of saints’, with their ‘political and expedient spirit’, their ‘zeal for parliamentary questions’ and ‘willingness to compromise with the powers of this present world’.Footnote 24
Irving insisted that he and his followers were primarily concerned to pay closer attention ‘to the letter of the word of God’.Footnote 25 Returning to the ‘spirit of prophecy’ meant, Irving claimed, that Evangelicals must reject the accommodating, progressive, approach to promoting the Gospel that had been the strategy of the ‘soft-hearted optimists’, and should ‘set the battle in array against’ infidelity and ‘papal superstition’.Footnote 26
Irving's exposition of scriptural prophecies was based upon his conviction that the thirty years before the French Revolution had witnessed the wrath of the Lord against the kings of the earth.Footnote 27 During this period of upheaval and conflict, the first six vials of divine judgement had been meted out within the limits of the ten papal kingdoms, while Britain, as the only one of the ten nations not under papal sway, was to be identified as the sealed nation described in the Book of Revelation. Britain had been spared and blessed because of the historic resistance of the established Churches of England and Scotland to Roman Catholicism and the future of the nation depended upon the continuing ‘magisterial acknowledgement of the orthodox and true church’.Footnote 28
Irving's growing popularity among Evangelical Anglicans owed much to the way in which his preaching appealed to the striking parallels between biblical prophecy and recent European history and dwelt upon hopes concerning the personal return of Christ and the promised glory of his elect.Footnote 29 Christ's return was believed to be imminent and would be preceded by catastrophic judgements upon the AntiChrist and infidelity.Footnote 30 The advent would introduce a personal thousand-year reign of Christ and the redeemed saints, to be followed by the final day of judgement.Footnote 31
Irving's belief in the literal and imminent personal return of Christ was the most distinctive aspect of his appeal and a significant innovation in Evangelical doctrine.Footnote 32 While the prophetic texts of the Bible had been extensively studied during the eighteenth century, this scholarship was not essentially millenarian. It formed part of the rationalist approach to Scripture that typified the Churches' response to Deism. Old Testament prophecies that seemed to have been fulfilled in the New Testament Gospels were felt to be amongst the strongest evidence that could be used against the Deists and underpinned the confident natural theology of clergymen like William Paley (1743–1805). Little attention was devoted to the unfulfilled prophecies of the Bible or to the second coming of the Messiah.Footnote 33
David Bebbington associates the growing popularity of premillennial adventism from the 1820s with Romantic sensibilities that readily accepted that the supernatural could break into the natural world and could look forward to the sudden appearance of ‘a divine figure’ in the ‘midst of the affairs of nations’. Bebbington also emphasises that premillennial adventism was initially a movement largely restricted to the educated classes, who were the most receptive to new cultural influences, and that this distinguishes it from other popular millenarian movements that have been historically explained as the direct products of social unrest.Footnote 34
E. P. Thompson, for example, interpreted popular millenarianism as a compensation for political disillusionment during periods of increasing oppression. He argued that ‘revivalist pulses’ of popular millenarianism ‘took over just at the point where political or temporal aspirations met with defeat’.Footnote 35 When the radical agitation that followed the French Revolution had begun to fade, the prophetic views of Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott became popular. New waves of revivals also occurred immediately after the failure of the Luddite agitation of 1811–12 and the political campaigns of 1816–17 and 1819.Footnote 36
There is also a significant relationship between the popularity of adventist views among the middle and upper classes and the contemporary social context, to which Bebbington pays insufficient attention. Adventist expectations among these sections of society were most prominent during those periods when working-class radicalism and political activism seemed most threatening to the political status and value system of the established order. Evangelical clergymen produced a flurry of adventist sermons, books and journals during the Catholic Emancipation crisis of 1828–9 and during the reform agitation of 1831–2. Edward Bickersteth (1786–1850) was deeply shaken by recent social turmoil, which had shattered his conviction that the power of the Gospel would convert the world to Christianity – the disturbing implications of Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the Bristol riots (1831) directed his mind increasingly towards the second advent and he began, from 1833, to hold annual gatherings at Watton devoted to the study of prophecy.Footnote 37
Similarly, during the 1840s, Bickersteth, along with many adventist clergymen, interpreted Chartism, together with ‘delusions of infidelity, Popery and lawlessness’ as evidence that the sixth vial of divine judgement was being poured out and that the advent was soon to follow:
We see it in political unions, in the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, viewing the voice of the people as the voice of God. We see it in Chartism in our land, in Republican secret societies in France and on the Continent … Insubordination, restlessness, love of change, contempt of authorities, speaking evil of dignities – these are its characteristics.Footnote 38
Premillennial adventism was not, however, merely a theological product of the contemporary political and social situation. The themes, sentiments and forms of expression found in Romantic literature are also reflected in the vivid rhetoric of Evangelical authors like Bickersteth, their literalistic approach to understanding Apocalyptic visions and their perception that important and long hidden truths were now finally being rediscovered. Similar subject matter and rhetoric reached a wider audience in poems on apocalyptic themes like The judgement of the flood (1834) and The descent into hell (1835) by J. A. Heraud and the blank verse epics of Robert Montgomery (1807–55) and Robert Pollock (1798–1827), often popular among Evangelical readers. Adventist themes were also prominent in the hymns produced by Evangelical writers like Horatius Bonar (1801–89) and Frances Havergal (1836–79).Footnote 39
Adventist hopes reflected the Romantic yearning for more intense spiritual experiences as well as the pervading mood of pessimism and social alienation. Evangelicals were increasingly disillusioned with the perceived failure of their home mission, prevailing secularity, political tensions and Christian divisions. This widespread sense of unease in turn stimulated a greater emphasis upon tradition that led the new generation of Evangelicals to strive to reach back into history for a purer, reformed faith. Irving's sense of a revived faith in scriptural truth had been expressed through his lifelong commitment to what he regarded as the principles of the Scottish Reformers and Covenanters, principles that he believed were the basis of the Scottish national Church and national identity.Footnote 40 Similarly, Evangelical Anglicans had also begun to publish and promote the work of the English Protestant Reformers through the Reformation Society (1827) and the Parker Society (1840).
The influence of Romantic sensibilities upon Evangelicalism was, therefore, a more complex and also a more diffuse phenomenon than Bebbington's account suggests. Indeed, while presenting adventism as a manifestation of Romantic influences, Bebbington associates Romanticism with a variety of often apparently conflicting strands within Evangelicalism: the development of both more reactionary and increasingly ‘liberal’ versions of Evangelical theology, fundamentalism, the Holiness Movement and Pentecostalism.Footnote 41
It is also important to recognise that nineteenth-century adventism, with its Romantic affinities, had been assimilated within an older framework of enduring Enlightenment attitudes and modes of thought. Evangelical clerics like E. B. Elliott (1793–1875) and T. R. Birks developed elaborate exegetical schemes relating biblical prophecy to historical events; their conclusions were reached by reason and research, not through direct illumination by the spirit. Their attempts to discern ordered and predictable patterns of providential action in history reflect the enduring legacy of Enlightenment rationality.Footnote 42 Birks still continued to emphasise the importance of biblical evidences, popularised in the eighteenth century, as well as the natural theology of Paley, which the ‘Albury school’ and the Irvingites had abandoned in favour of a simple trust in divine revelation.Footnote 43 The prophetic interests of leading Anglican Evangelicals were also often combined with a form of moderate Calvinism that has been identified as an enduring Enlightenment influence upon Evangelicalism.Footnote 44
Anglican adventism after Irving
Irving had lost much of his considerable personal authority and credibility in 1831, after he had promoted speaking in tongues in his congregation; he was deposed from the ministry of the Church of Scotland two years later for his belief that Christ's incarnation had involved the divine assumption of fallen human nature.Footnote 45 None the less, premillennial adventism continued to become increasingly influential among Anglican Evangelical clergymen. During the further revival of adventist expectations that occurred around 1840 Edward Bickersteth was a pivotal figure, linking the generations of Anglican adventists, giving a new respectability to prophetic studies after the Irving debacle and converting the future Lord Shaftesbury (1801–85) to premillennialism.Footnote 46
The Prophecy Investigation Society (1842) became the focus for the activities of the second generation of Anglican adventist clergymen. This society promoted premillennialism through twice-yearly meetings and held an annual series of lectures on associated subjects at St Giles's church, Bloomsbury. The Prophecy Investigation Society had, by the 1860s, fifty members, predominantly clergymen from the Church of England.Footnote 47 It was also estimated that more than half the Evangelical clergy of the Church of England had adopted these views.Footnote 48 H. M. Villiers (1813–61) and Robert Bickersteth (1816–44) were active members of the society raised to the episcopal bench in the 1860s, while Edward Henry Bickersteth (1825–1906), whose popular poetry vividly dramatised the events of Revelation, was appointed bishop of Exeter in 1885. T. R. Birks, the most important Evangelical dogmatic theologian of the Victorian era, was a regular contributor to the Bloomsbury lectures, and the leaders of late nineteenth-century Anglican Evangelicalism, Bishop J. C. Ryle of Liverpool (1816–1900) and Bishop H. C. G. Moule of Durham (1841–1920), were also premillennialists.
The correspondence of the young George Eliot, herself an Evangelical at the time, reflects the wider atmosphere of Anglican adventist expectation during this period. Eliot praised Edward Bickersteth's Practical guide to the prophecies Footnote 49 and in 1840 prepared her own historical chart interpreting the text of Revelation.Footnote 50 Christina Rossetti also began to attend the church of the premillennialist William Dodsworth during the 1840s and the second advent became an important theme of her poetry.Footnote 51 Women authors produced a substantial number of prophetic texts, such as Mrs J. C. Martin's The Revelation of St John briefly explained (1851), that popularised the work of male scholars and were often intended to provide instruction for less well-educated readers.Footnote 52 The Christian Lady's Magazine was also edited by a premillennialist, the popular novelist and poet Charlotte Elizabeth (Tonna) (1790–1846).Footnote 53
Politics and society
Adventist beliefs seem to be difficult to reconcile with the mainstream Anglican tradition because they are inevitably tainted by an association with the more fanatical extremes of the religious world. Millennarian expectations are suggestive of an excessive and irresponsible obsession with prophetic speculations, a tendency towards antinomianism, other-worldliness and a destructive fatalistic pessimism. Adventism has been assumed to involve contempt for activism in promoting the Gospel and a belief that a successful ministry rested on bearing faithful witness to the imminent millennium rather than saving an individual soul.
John Kent, for example, has claimed that premillennialism did not lead to serious social criticism, merely ‘self-indulgent pessimism’.Footnote 54 Boyd Hilton's recent study of the influence of Evangelicalism on nineteenth-century social and political thought continues to promote this stereotypical conception of premillennialist ‘Recordite’ Evangelicals.Footnote 55 Most Anglican adventists, however, completely rejected the fatalistic asceticism of Irving's circle.Footnote 56 The situation was actually much more complex than Hilton's account suggests and Hilton's categorisation of Evangelical social attitudes is inadequate.
Hilton argues that postmillennialist ‘Claphamite’ Evangelicals like Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), who had assimilated Malthusian political economy, advocated individual voluntary effort to overcome poverty. Premillennialist ‘Recordites’, preoccupied with the notion of national sins and divine retribution, were essentially paternalist in outlook, stressing the need for government intervention to effect moral and social reform.Footnote 57 Hilton's contention that these differing conceptions of providential theology formed the mainsprings of two distinct and contrasting Evangelical political stances ignores the fact that ‘Claphamites’ often also looked for special divine intervention as a retribution for national sins. Thomas Chalmers, for example, confided to Edward Bickersteth that he utterly despaired of ‘the universal prevalence of Christianity, as the result of a pacific missionary process’. He looked for ‘its conclusive establishment through a widening passage of desolating judgements, with the utter demolition of our present civil and ecclesiastical structures’.Footnote 58 Similarly, the organ of ‘moderate’ Evangelicalism, the Christian Observer, also interpreted the outbreak of a cholera epidemic as a ‘national visitation’ punishing hedonism, commercial fraud, Sabbath desecration and the continuing slave trade.Footnote 59
Hence postmillennialist Evangelicals like Chalmers and premillennialists like Bickersteth and Birks largely shared a common view of providential theology. They all believed in an interventionist God, who could work through national judgements, and that providential intervention did not represent the fickle whims of a tyrannical divine despot – it could be clearly rationalised by reference to the scriptural plan for man's redemption.
Most Anglican Evangelical clerics who, like the ‘Claphamite’ J. B. Sumner (1780–1862) and the ‘Recordite’ A. R. C. Dallas (1791–1869), often came from an aristocratic or privileged background, generally shared a commitment to the defence of a static and divinely ordained social hierarchy and adopted a paternalistic attitude to their flock.Footnote 60 As social inequalities were created by God, in order to try human virtues, these Evangelicals also drew a clear distinction between honourable poverty and idle vagrancy, recognising that the former was the ‘natural lot of many in a well constituted society’. It necessitated a degree of paternalistic charity, on the part of the wealthy, to ensure that poverty did not rise to unacceptable levels.Footnote 61 Intervention also needed to be limited to ensure that idleness was not encouraged. Shaftesbury, for example, attacked the idea of the state providing houses for the working classes at nominal rents because he believed that this would ‘utterly destroy their moral energies’Footnote 62 and represent a ‘kind of legal pauperisation’.Footnote 63
This conservative Evangelical paternalism was combined, in certain cases, with some aspects of fashionable political economy, but Evangelical attitudes to Malthusian political economy are, again, much more complex than Hilton's interpretation allows for. Among Anglican Evangelicals, the ‘Claphamite’ Sumner did take on board Malthusian ideas, within a paternalist framework, but he also continued to stress that it was still the duty of the wealthy to ameliorate social evils.
Hilton discusses how the ‘Claphamite’ Chalmers, influenced by Malthus, argued that any increase in relief for the poor would result over time in an increase in their numbers, absorbing the increase in relief in a corresponding increase in poverty. The Record newspaper itself actually supported Chalmers's tough stand on poor law reform, opposing current laws as interfering with the natural operation of social forces.Footnote 64 The moderate, ‘Claphamite’, Anglican Evangelical periodical the Christian Observer generally supported Chalmers's tough moralism but disagreed with his view on the poor laws.Footnote 65
Chalmers also opposed the corn laws as disrupting the natural, or divine, order. Yet even Henry Drummond, who had been one of Irving's earliest followers and is one of Hilton's main illustrative examples of the ‘Recordite’ view, also actually supported the repeal of the corn laws, in 1846, on the grounds of economic principle and natural justice, even though he was fearful of the political forces and providential catastrophes which repeal might unleash.Footnote 66 Similarly Lord Ashley (the future earl of Shaftesbury) had long supported the protectionist position, but by 1845 he had come to regard repeal as inevitable and felt that it would improve his political aim of furthering the cause of factory reform.Footnote 67
Hilton has also claimed that Evangelical adventists cared for social improvement in spite of their belief in the world's imminent destruction because they did not think of it as improving the world, but as ‘merely’ seeking to try to ‘protect’ their social inferiors ‘from the stormy blasts’.Footnote 68 Here Hilton underestimates the importance attached to the concept of a covenanted nation and national religion, that was closely integrated with the historicist view of Revelation, and which strengthened the commitment of premillennial adventists to the vital social role of the established Church in improving the moral welfare of the population. T. R. Birks, for example, classified his publications on the relationship between Church and State as part of his series of prophetic studies. He declared that the lessons of political history, when seen in the light of Revelation, demonstrated that ‘there are deep moral laws, which preside over the rise and fall of empires, and determine the exaltation of kingdoms to power and greatness, or their rapid decline into feebleness, anarchy and ruin’.Footnote 69
This concept of national religion helps to explain the paradox, highlighted by Edward Norman, that, despite the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828) and Catholic Emancipation (1829), the ideal of a Protestant constitution continued to be a meaningful concept in public life for several decades.Footnote 70 Birks, along with other premillennialists, felt that political judgements should not depend upon immediate practical expediency, but be based upon scriptural ideals, affirming that ‘The nation and kingdom that will not serve’ God ‘shall perish; yes that nation shall be utterly consumed.’Footnote 71
Hence the principle of religious nationality, broadly conceived, remained a vital element in Anglican Evangelical political thought during the nineteenth century. Indeed, the Protestant nature and public role of the established Church now seemed to be even more important given the development and political success of Roman Catholicism and Nonconformity. Anglican Evangelicals found themselves fighting an increasingly bitter rearguard action, relying upon the establishment as the essential bastion against liberalism, national infidelity and social revolution.Footnote 72 The Record, from its foundation in 1828, vociferously supported the establishment principle and groups of Evangelicals founded the Christian Influence Society (1832) and Established Church Society (1834) to defend it.Footnote 73 Birks told Gladstone that he could not ‘in the least approve the maxim, aut Caesar, aut nihil, applied to the relations of the State with either abstract or concrete Christianity’. He declared that ‘Our duty is first to determine the true ideal, & then to approach as nearly as we may, & not to hurry away from it with quickened paces because we despair of its full attainment.’Footnote 74
Indeed, Birks affirmed that the ‘claims of religion’ upon national governments included not only the ‘direct duties of national worship’ but also ‘the whole field of political economy, in the various efforts to be made for the temporal prosperity of the whole nation’.Footnote 75 There was, therefore, a deep-seated and fundamental tension between the Evangelical promotion of religious and spiritual purity and the practical complexities of national political and church life. An Evangelical moral absolutism and perfectionism, intensified by fervent adventist hopes, sat uneasily with an approval of the social status quo and an unwillingness to become directly involved in party politics.
While J. B. Sumner and the Christian Observer talked in general terms of the social obligations of the wealthy, premillennialists tended to adopt a more uncompromising moral position. The Churchman's Monthly Review harshly denounced both the ungodliness of the rich and the idleness of the poor. Similarly, premillennialists were quick to interpret the Irish famine as a judgement upon national sins. Bickersteth, for example, made much of the fact that the blight had set in only a month after the passing of the Maynooth Act (1845), warning that the that the famine was a ‘judgement … from the hand of God’, inflicted as a punishment for the prevalence of worldliness, sabbath breaking, idleness and infidelity.Footnote 76 Yet, as Boyd Hilton acknowledges, ‘moderate’ Evangelicals like Chalmers also saw the famine as a divine punishment and as late as the 1860s Samuel Waldegrave, bishop of Carlisle, made much of particular providences and welcomed national days of prayer to atone for national sins.Footnote 77
Developments in providential theology do not, therefore, appear to have had the crucial determining role in Evangelical thought that Hilton has ascribed to them. Evangelical churchmen like Bickersteth and Birks were fatalistic in the sense that they believed that human society was ultimately doomed to face divine judgement and that it was utterly futile to try to ameliorate the social consequences of sin, which was regarded as the root of poverty. Yet their expectation of impending judgement inspired them to make even greater efforts to awaken a sinful society to the perils it faced. Indeed, their despair at the prospects of a sinful nation actually fuelled their desire to triumph against the odds – biblical prophecy gave them the encouragement that zeal which now might appear foolish would be turned to complete victory by the triumphant return of the Saviour who would vindicate his followers and destroy the enemy.Footnote 78
Equally, there was an ever-present fear of divine judgement upon them if they failed in their enterprise of bringing the government and nation to God. As Evangelical adventists thus viewed the second coming with a combination of hope and fear, they tended to interpret politics in terms of a series of great national moral and spiritual crises to which they responded by launching vigorous campaigns against particular national ‘sins’, a trend typified by the anti-Maynooth agitation during the 1840s. The sense of political crisis at home and abroad spurred adventist expectation, creating a highly charged fusion of religion and patriotism. Anglican adventists believed that they had a prime duty to promote the moral and spiritual welfare of the nation, and felt they had a responsibility to the nation to continue to fight against the ‘evils’ of infidelity, Roman Catholicism and ‘idolatry’ that had been central features of Irving's interpretation of Revelation.Footnote 79
Mission
Nineteenth-century writers who had criticised Irving and his followers, like Francis Newman and, in her later career, George Eliot, felt that the doctrine of the premillennial advent could have no positive spiritual benefit and insinuated that contemporary prophetic studies merely served to give a cloak of respectability to anti-Catholic rhetoric.Footnote 80 While adventism certainly fuelled the intensity of Evangelical anti-Catholic polemic, it is also clear that the advent hope was often personally felt and served as an object of spiritual devotion. David Brown, who had been Irving's assistant from 1828 to 1830, observed that premillennialism constituted ‘a school of Scripture interpretation’ which ‘impinges upon and affects some of the most commanding points of the Christian faith; and, when suffered to work its unimpeded way, it stops not till it has pervaded with its own genius the entire system of one's theology, and the whole tone of his spiritual character’.Footnote 81 The daughter of the Anglican cleric and author Samuel Garratt (1817–1906) recalled that the ‘thought that above all dominated’ her ‘father's life was that of the Second Coming of Christ’.Footnote 82 The doctrine was not only a focus for Garratt's personal prayer and sermons, it had also motivated his work in city missions and political campaigns.Footnote 83 Similarly, a feeling that the second advent was near at hand added a forceful sense of urgency to Shaftesbury's campaigns against national immorality and his involvement with missionary societies.Footnote 84
Irving had gained early notoriety by attacking the bureaucratic approach of leading Evangelical missionary societies and claiming that only the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit could spread the Gospel. This view, that mission without the work of the Spirit was utterly worthless, remained prominent among Evangelical adventists and it provides the key to understanding the approach of men like Edward Bickersteth, secretary of the Church Missionary Society from 1824 to 1831, and a prominent campaigner for missionary causes. Bickersteth was, according to Henry Venn, always careful to distinguish between the external framework and organisation of missions and their spiritual character.Footnote 85
In the same way, Anglican Evangelicals who supported the Evangelical Alliance (1846) sought to distinguish between the organisational difficulties and denominational divisions within the Evangelical Alliance and its spiritual essence. The Evangelical Alliance had been intended to foster co-operation among Evangelicals from different denominations campaigning to oppose Catholicism and to promote Evangelical principles.Footnote 86 The daunting practical obstacles facing the Alliance seemed insignificant by comparison with the conviction of its supporters among Anglican adventists that the Holy Spirit could be seen to be at work in its efforts to promote Christian unity.Footnote 87 Indeed, the severity of the task facing the Alliance was itself interpreted as a sign of its transcendent importance, as causes that were thoroughly in accord with the Gospel were, it was felt, bound to meet with strong opposition.
Hence while Evangelical adventists were convinced that their sinful society was doomed to face judgement, they also strove for success in terms of awakening Christians to their peril. Their awareness of the imminence of judgement was a clear call to sinners for repentance before the day of salvation passed away.Footnote 88 Edward Bickersteth, for instance, compared his own missionary zeal to the recent fire on board a ship, the Ocean Monarch, soon after it had set out from Liverpool. Public opinion, he observed, had been focused not on the tragic loss of many lives in the wreck, but on the bravery of the individual sailors from other vessels who had heroically risked their own lives to rescue survivors from the burning ship. He declared that ‘we have a yet more important work to accomplish – to save immortal souls from a more terrific fire which will one day be kindled for the wicked, and which, when kindled, leaves no way of escape!’ It was the ‘nearness of that more fearful danger and that more full joy’ that ought, he believed, to rouse Christians as ‘each covenanted soul is our hope, and joy, and crown of rejoicing in the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ at His coming’.Footnote 89
Evangelical adventists thus regarded their mission with a mixture of emotions, a curious combination of optimism and pessimism, that reflected the way in which they viewed the prospects of the second advent of Christ with feelings of hope and trepidation. The ‘signs of the times’ appeared to offer them grounds for both fear and hope; setbacks like the Maynooth Act (1845) seemed to be preliminaries to the final battle, or heralds of the millennium, and yet they also encouraged a more aggressive defence of Evangelical Christianity.
Birks maintained that, for premillennialists, the ‘immediate duty of Christian labour and missionary exertion continues the same. The motive in the assurance of present success, is the same also’. The practical difference between them and other Christians was that they believed that the ‘prospect of the first resurrection forbids the Church to rest on her own efforts, or to trust in the outward instruments she employs’. All hopes must be focused upon ‘the person of the saviour’ as ‘the full triumph must visibly belong to the Lord alone’. No apparent want of success should discourage the Church as it can depend upon ‘a mighty reserve of supernatural agency in the counsels of heaven, which shall vanquish every enemy, and complete her triumph’. Even the ‘meanest labours of her children in the service of Christ are now seen to be linked in close and immediate union, with all the unutterable solemnity of that great day of the Lord's coming’.Footnote 90
Women and the Church
Many of the women preachers who came to public prominence in connection with the ‘second evangelical awakening’ that began in Ulster in 1859, spreading through much of Britain in the 1860s, were premillennial adventists. These women, and some of their male clerical supporters, viewed womens' mission as of special eschatological importance.Footnote 91 Phoebe Palmer, an influential figure in the growing Holiness movement, was a prominent premillennialist defender of female preaching in Britain, publishing The promise of the Father; or, A neglected speciality of the last days (1859).Footnote 92 The role of women as preachers was also interpreted by the feminist and campaigner for social reform and public morality, Josephine Butler (1828–1906), as a gift of the spirit and a sign marking the promise of the imminent second coming.Footnote 93
However, the activity of women in mission and parochial activity generally remained under male clerical supervision and there was a clear separation of male and female ministry. William Pennefather (1816–73), organiser of the annual adventist Mildmay conferences, founded the Training Home for Female Missionaries (1860), later the Missionary Training Home For Young Women, from which some women went on to train as deaconesses and others to serve as missionaries.Footnote 94 The Training Home for Female Missionaries became the first London Deaconess Institution. The term ‘deaconess’ had initially been avoided, out of a feeling that women's work should be kept as simple and natural as possible, unofficial and within ‘the lowly sphere assigned to them by God’.Footnote 95 Women were not allowed to address the main Mildmay conferences and the work of deaconesses in domestic visitation, hospital visits and nursing was carried out under close clerical supervision.Footnote 96
Julie Melnyck has argued that Evangelical periodicals edited by women and aimed at a female readership used biblical exegesis and commentary to expand the religious role of women into the public sphere.Footnote 97 Melnyck cites the example of the premillennialist Charlotte Elizabeth (Tonna), editor of the Christian Lady's Magazine, as a leading example of this trend. Yet Charlotte Elizabeth, from the first issue of the Christian Lady's Magazine, was always concerned to emphasise the role of ‘the Christian lady’ pressing on ‘in the train of secure theology’ and never ‘losing sight of the place and office assigned to her by God’.Footnote 98
Charlotte Elizabeth avoided directly challenging male clerical and political authority. While she believed that women were able to take an active social and political role, and that this was a spiritual imperative in times of particular need, she none the less recognised essential constraints on their action. Her own participation in the ‘Ten Hours’ campaign, for shorter industrial working hours, exemplifies her view that female activism should not take the form of direct public agitation, but be confined to personal private influence over males in their circle of friends and family, prayer and petitioning.Footnote 99 Charlotte Elizabeth's most strident polemical tract, The perils of the nation: an appeal to the legislature, the clergy and the higher and middle classes (1843), appeared anonymously and her editorial role in the Protestant Magazine (1841–4), organ of the anti-Roman Catholic Protestant Association, was also performed anonymously.
The tone and emphasis of Charlotte Elizabeth's anonymous publications and the coverage of more public and controversial topics in the Christian Lady's Magazine, identified by Melnyck, can be directly related to the continued influence of adventism on Evanglicalism from the 1840s. The more polemical nature of her work and its more strident tone was shared by many popular women writers who were influential spiritual guides in this period. Charlotte Elizabeth described the changing nature of her work with reference to the climate of adventist expectation in the 1840s:
It was never in the Editor's contemplation to make this work a controversial one … But events of a stirring character have come to pass, a crisis of great moment has drawn nearer and nearer… and even women that were at ease have been called to rise up, and to keep watch and ward with their brethren. It is for this cause that The Christian Lady's Magazine has perhaps appeared to lose somewhat of its feminine character.Footnote 100
Hence Melnyck overstates the case for the exposition of biblical theology enabling women to adopt more controversial and public political roles. The growing influence of adventism was a more significant and subtle influence on womens' social and political activism. This was because the premilllennialist world view framed individual experiences of good and evil in society into a much more specific pattern of divine intervention in the world, within a framework leading to imminent and final judgement,Footnote 101 and this spiritual outlook increasingly shaped the development of womens’ mission and social campaigns from the 1840s.
Adventism and theological change
Irving, Croly and a succession of other prominent prophetic preachers had predicted that the onset of the millennium would occur during the 1860s. E. B. Elliott, a leading Anglican prophetic scholar, in his 1862 edition of Horae apocalypticae, had argued that it would occur in the year 1866.Footnote 102 Public interest in such works of prophetic exposition and a wider enthusiasm for art and literature influenced by apocalyptic imagery had reached a remarkable peak of popularity, reflected in the popular demand for Edward Henry Bickersteth's apocalyptic epic poem Yesterday, to-day and for-ever (1866).Footnote 103 Bickersteth had kept the ‘design’ of his poem ‘laid up’ in his ‘heart’ for ‘twenty years’ until ‘the deep conviction that those solemn events’ foretold in Revelation were ‘already beginning to cast their prophetic lights and shadows on the world’.Footnote 104
Similarly, in 1867, T. R. Birks published his most important and controversial work of eschatology, The victory of divine goodness, feeling compelled to make public views he had developed thirty years earlier. During the 1830s Birks had suffered a profound crisis of conscience over the doctrine of the future eternal punishment of the wicked. The subject had ‘sorely, deeply and continuously exercised’ his thoughts until, through close study of biblical prophecy during the 1840s, a ‘light’ arose ‘out of the darkness and sorrow of years of early meditation’.Footnote 105 The ‘study of prophecy, and wider meditation on Scripture’ had ‘widened and deepened’ his ‘creed’.Footnote 106
While historians of doctrine have acknowledged the influence of aspects of Irving's thought upon liberal Anglicans like F. D. Maurice,Footnote 107 they have paid scant attention to Irving's influence upon the theology of Evangelical churchmen like Bickersteth and Birks. T. R. Birks's theological development was, in particular, shaped by the legacy of Irving and has many significant parallels with that of Maurice.Footnote 108
Birks's interpretation of the atonement reflects Irving's conception of Christ's divine headship of all humanity, which was also a vital element in Maurice's thought, and his emphasis upon the incarnation as a manifestation of divine love to all men rather than a crude sacrificial offering to appease divine wrath.Footnote 109 Birks sought to refute the assumption that the purpose of the atonement was to satisfy divine wrath and thereby to awaken divine compassion for sinners. Such views misrepresented both God as a wronged tyrant, and the nature of the atonement, which was a manifestation of divine justice and mercy alike. Birks insisted that the love of the Father preceded and introduced the redeeming grace of the Son. Through an act of love,
He took on Himself the whole burden of a guilty race, so far as its transfer was possible, consistently with the inflexible and eternal laws of righteousness, and made ‘a full, perfect, and sufficient satisfaction for the sins of the whole world’, so far as it retained the character of a separable evil, that might still be renounced and forsaken, and was not transformed, by enduring impenitence, into an inseparable part of the sinner's moral being.Footnote 110
Birks, like Maurice, was concerned to emphasise the personal, as well as the collective, aspect of Christ's atonement. Christ's sacrifice, Birks believed, provided a full satisfaction for the collective guilt of the whole human race, but it also had a specific reference to the faith of individual believers, as the present guilt of individuals who rejected grace and disbelieved God's promise could not be cancelled until they repented and believed.Footnote 111
Birks sought to emphasise that the atonement had a two-fold character. It was both a public declaration of God's righteousness, in a manifestation of saving grace, and it had a specific reference to individuals as the ‘largeness and grandeur of the sacrifice, as offered for all, cannot destroy its individual reference, but only makes its application plain, easy and direct to each individual conscience’. Hence the element of vicarious substitution in Christ's sacrifice was not in the nature of a legal transaction, but one that was brought about by individuals ‘believing in a work already done for them before they believe, and by their depending on Him, and Him alone, who atoned for them by His death’.Footnote 112
This distinction between the collective guilt of the whole human race and the personal guilt of individuals was central to Birks's interpretation of the atonement. It enabled him to address the main ambiguity in the conventional ‘moderate’ Calvinism of Evangelical Anglicans, which had been based on an understanding of the atonement offering a potential general redemption but actually being savingly effective only for God's elect. Moderate Calvinists had generally been wary of attempting to explain the precise nature of the relationship between the act of the atonement, as sufficient to save all, and the effectual election to salvation of only a chosen few.Footnote 113
Eric Culbertson errs in stating that Birks ‘took the Arminian position on universal atonement’,Footnote 114 that the atonement was intended as an offer of salvation to all men. Birks affirmed ‘I have never become an Arminian for a moment’.Footnote 115 He insisted that the atonement was not made for persons irrespective of character, but was confined exclusively to penitents. He continued to describe himself as a moderate Calvinist, maintaining that the atonement was redemptively applied to those made regenerate through gracious sovereign election by the Spirit. None the less, his interpretation of the atonement can also be seen to have placed a novel emphasis upon the responsibility and accountability of man.
The atonement was not only a ransom but also a ‘moral magnet’ and could only operate in conjunction with a personal faith in the incarnation of Christ.Footnote 116 Hence Birks, like Maurice, sought to move away from a narrow view of substitutionary atonement and towards a more incarnationalist stance based upon a conception of Christ's headship of the whole human race. He declared that ‘I affirm that substitution belongs, exclusively, to His sacrifice and death; but that federal headship refers to His whole work, including that sacrifice, from His Incarnation to His return in glory.’Footnote 117
Birks believed that the scriptural testimony to the universal atonement of Christ ensured that the resurrection of the wicked, as well as of the just, resulted from this atoning sacrifice.Footnote 118 This belief in a literal miraculous resurrection of the earthly bodies of the dead was another notion promoted by Irving, which Birks assimilated with his view of the atonement and a historicist understanding of Revelation to produce novel interpretations of the doctrines of divine judgement and eternal punishment of the unregenerate.
Birks drew attention to the prophetic descriptions of the salvation of nations, as well as individuals. Biblical descriptions of the final judgement, eternal blessing and punishment were to be interpreted collectively and with reference to individuals, as the personal misery of lost souls was plainly described in Scripture. Yet the purpose of divine judgement was not, in itself, merely to punish sin, but to abolish all such wrongdoing forever.Footnote 119
Scripture gave a solemn assurance that the penal sentence of the wicked would never be reversed, but the depth of divine love that ‘passeth knowledge’ gave an equal assurance that their doom would not be one of unmitigated misery and that, without ‘reversing their doom’, God's love may send them ‘a thrill of wondrous consolation through the abyss of what would else be unmingled woe and despair’.Footnote 120 Their punishment was of such a nature that it did not exclude the lost from some form of passive, but real, contemplation of the divine goodness, demonstrating that God was both perfect justice and mercy.Footnote 121 Birks maintained that the future condition of the lost would
combine, with the utmost personal shame and humiliation and anguish, the passive contemplation of a ransomed universe and of all the innumerable varieties of blessedness enjoyed by unfallen spirits and the ransomed people of God; such a contemplation as would be fitted, in its own nature, to raise the soul into a trance of holy adoration in the presence of infinite and unsearchable Goodness.Footnote 122
Although unbelievers were not ultimately saved from divine judgement, the second death and the unquenchable fire described in Revelation, they were saved, as Christ had died for all men, from temporal death and corruption, from the curse of hopeless vanity, from an abyss of hopeless misery and of everlasting despair. As the judgement of the wicked was a work of God's mercy, as well as his judicial righteousness, divine mercy denied them the ‘full power’ of adding ‘sin to sin’, keeping from them the power of hurting each other, and must be able to ‘force them back’ to ‘the presence of that infinite goodness’.Footnote 123
Here Birks, again like Maurice, was concerned to emphasise the recovery of a broad biblical perspective, putting New Testament ideas on doctrines like hell into a broader scriptural context, centred firmly on the person of Christ. He felt that he had formulated a ‘true Via Media’ between ‘Universalism and an immoral Fatalism’.Footnote 124 Salvation, he believed, resulted not simply from the fact of the atonement, ‘but from its special application by personal faith’, and divine punishment, ‘however severe and solemn’, did not ‘exclude its objects from some possible and real manifestation of the Divine goodness’.Footnote 125
The relation between the saved and the lost was an issue which, W. R. Ward has observed, ‘much of evangelicalism expended considerable energy in ignoring’.Footnote 126 Birks argued that Scripture, from paradise to the second advent, revealed that the entire human race ‘has been placed under an economy of redeeming love’. Those who, by continued rebellion and persevering sin, have forfeited the full redemption offered by life in Christ, still partake in the bodily resurrection and are freed from committing further sin, though their will is not freely and spontaneously but ‘through punishment and humiliation alone, brought into subjection to the supreme and perfect goodness’.Footnote 127 All who were to be judged shared a common divine ‘sonship by creation’. They also shared in the common headship of the race as while Christ was ‘pre-eminently the Brother of the righteous’, he was also ‘the Brother of the prodigals’ who ‘have foresaken their Father's house’ and thus ‘the Judge, who is the Son of Man, will not forget or overlook the annulled relation of brotherhood’.Footnote 128 Those who ‘receive either few or many stripes from the Son of Man when He sits on the throne of judgement, are still by the voice of the supreme Lawgiver included in the vast fraternity of the human race, and within the range of the law, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”’.Footnote 129
Birks's doctrine of passive contemplation reflected this conception of the common brotherhood of the lost and the blessed. The passive contemplation by the unregenerate of the goodness of God, Birks maintained, was no more difficult to accept than a belief in the coexistence of both perfect mercy and perfect justice in God.Footnote 130 This, in combination with the righteousness of divine punishment, made abhorrent any notion of souls being given into the power of Satan to be perpetually tormented or to torment each other. That ‘death and hell should be cast into the lake of fire, is a work of redemption, a triumph of divine love’.Footnote 131
More conventionally orthodox Evangelicals, like E. A. Litton (1813–97), had continued to emphasise the separation of the blessed and the lost, rather than their union, maintaining that the ‘great gulf fixed’ was the purpose of divine judgement and the basis of God's providential plan for the future state of mankind.Footnote 132 R. B. Girdlestone (1836–1923) also held fast to a traditional view of hell as a state of ‘ruin and utter degradation, not remedial chastisement, but endless woe’. He reconciled this with the notion of a God of love by arguing that love was an attribute of God manifested in the redemption of the world through his Son but that this attribute could not be seen in isolation from God's other scriptural attributes, like justice and retribution. The only ground for pardon from divine justice was Christ's atonement and if man refuses that then he has no hope of mercy or pity.Footnote 133
Birks's abandonment of the idea of a literal hell, with devils tormenting men who continue to blaspheme God forever, in favour of sinful rebellion being eternally silenced, did leave room for a growing number of Evangelicals, later in the nineteenth century, to teach the amelioration of the sufferings of the lost, or their extinction, as a fitter alternative to eternal punishment. This trend was particularly prominent among adventist Evangelical Churchmen.
E. H. Bickersteth's popular devotional poem Yesterday, to-day and for-ever, for example, reflects the influence of Birks's views. Bickersteth's epic charts the progress of a departed soul from death to resurrection and judgement. The poem dispenses with perpetual demonic torments in hell, in favour of sinful rebellion being eternally silenced, and depicts the lost as acknowledging the righteousness of their punishment. Sinful rebellion is portrayed as silenced in book iii, lines 592–3 and the wicked are depicted accepting the righteousness of their punishment in book xi, lines 662–79. Satan is also given a final soliloquy in which he acknowledges the goodness restraining him from further ‘suicidal wickedness’ and the infinite mercy providing glimpses of the ‘beauty of holiness’.Footnote 134
Birks and E. H. Bickersteth tended to emphasise the scripture testimony to the effect that while God had declared the punishment of the lost to be everlasting, divine punishment was an act of mercy rather than vengeful justice and, both by its nature and degree, was regulated by the strictest justice and most persevering divine love. Samuel Garratt, a close associate of Birks, went further. Garratt maintained that the fate of the wicked involved the loss of the inheritance of the saints and the eternal shame of that loss but, because willing submission to a just punishment can bring its own ‘relative blessing’, their punishment was also intended to become the means of their moral reformation. It was, perhaps, necessary to bring them within the ministrations of the risen saints, who would continue their ministry after the resurrection to deliver the universe from sin, and to give them some hope of final salvation.Footnote 135 Other Anglican adventists, including Samuel Minton (1820–94), were attracted towards conditionalism – the belief that only those who had faith in Christ were saved from death, while those who did not were simply annihilated.Footnote 136
It is important to emphasise that few leading Evangelicals moved as far towards universalism as did Samuel Garratt, although this was a common misconception in some parts of the religious press at the time, as is evident in some of the virulent attacks made upon T. R. Birks.Footnote 137 None the less, the radical views of Garratt and Minton demonstrate the dramatic influence that premillennial adventism had upon nineteenth-century Anglican Evangelical theology. Adventist beliefs were an important and positive force for theological change and nineteenth-century Evangelical theology should no longer be dismissed as merely a desperate and entirely negative reaction to the work of ‘liberal’ authors. Evangelicals had begun to articulate novel views on the future state from the 1840s, well before the supposed mid-century ‘crisis of faith’, and their primary stimulus was not, as Rowell and Culbertson have claimed, the challenge of Broad Church theology but rather their historicist view of Revelation which had often led them to reinterpret long held beliefs.Footnote 138
Premillennial adventism was a major formative influence upon T. R. Birks's theological development. His attempt to accommodate his interpretations of prophetic Scripture to the moderate Calvinism of Anglican Evangelicalism led him to develop views on the atonement and eternal judgement that were highly original. Indeed, Birks's views on the fate of the unsaved were, according to one leading commentator, ‘as novel and startling in their contrast to popular theology’Footnote 139 as any to be found in the doctrinal history of the Church.
While Anglican adventism had developed important features that distinguish it from the extravagant pentecostalism of the 1820s, Irving's radical legacy was none the less an enduring and pervasive influence upon nineteenth-century Anglican Evangelicalism. An adventist understanding of contemporary social and political unrest had driven many Anglican Evangelicals to abandon their traditionally ambiguous attitudes towards the establishment and popular dissentFootnote 140 and on to mounting a defence of a particularly narrowly defined and paternalistic role for the Church of England.
The typical, and paradoxical, Romantic appeal combined a stress on individualism,Footnote 141 which convinced Evangelical authors that their own personal interpretations of prophetic Scriptures were of unique importance, with a strong sense of tradition and political conservatism – a feeling that the forces of religion and politics had an overriding duty to keep the excesses of individual reason in check. In Evangelical polemic this was articulated in terms of a crusade against the ‘great Liberal movement’,Footnote 142 which encompassed secular philosophy, Broad Church theology and popular radicalism.
Events were perceived within a more supernaturalist outlook, which now interpreted biblical prophecy as a judgement on the present rather than as a prediction of a distant future. Evangelicals had moved away from the traditional distinction between worldly and spiritual matters that had characterised the approach of Simeon's generation and kept them aloof from political life. Now the adventist beliefs of Evangelical Churchmen drove them to campaign more vigorously on issues concerning the status of the Anglican establishment, against ‘Papal Aggression’ and to promote pan-Evangelical unity.Footnote 143 Adventist beliefs also spurred the boom in domestic and overseas missionary activity in the later nineteenth century.Footnote 144
Adventism was a significant influence in shaping the character of women's activities in the fields of missionary work, social and political campaigns. For some women, adventist beliefs gave a special urgency and importance to their role as activists, deaconesses and preachers and, to a more limited extent, as writers of works of theology.
Scholars have suggested that adventism apparently had a dual-edged, paradoxical, effect upon Evangelical theology, fostering a more dogmatic, Calvinistic, anti-rationalist and intolerant approach, but also a marked softening of orthodoxy, with some Evangelicals promoting milder views of the character of God, viewing Christ more as a moral example than a sacrificial martyr and placing less emphasis on hell and the fear of damnation as a method of conversion. Hilton has drawn a chronological distinction between these trends, arguing that the more strident form of Evangelicalism was rapidly fading from prominence by the later nineteenth century, being superseded by milder, more incarnationalist views.Footnote 145 Other authors have placed a greater emphasis upon evidence of a hardening of convictions among many Evangelicals during this same period, which has been described as the development of ‘proto-fundamentalism’.Footnote 146
These conflicting interpretations reflect the difficulties that have arisen when twentieth-century conceptual categories have been applied to the religious culture of the nineteenth century. Attempts to trace a clear lineage of either Evangelical ‘liberalism’ or ‘fundamentalism’ crudely oversimplify the complexity of nineteenth-century Evangelicalism and also demonstrate a failure to recognise the subtlety of the social and cultural influences acting to produce theological change. As this article has sought to demonstrate, an important motivating force for theological change in the second quarter of the nineteenth century came from adventist beliefs, rather than the ‘fear of liberalism in its theological and social expression’.Footnote 147 While adventist convictions certainly added to the stridency of Evangelical polemic attacking Roman Catholicism, Darwinism and Broad Church theology, it is less clear that there is a direct continuity between nineteenth-century attitudes and twentieth-century fundamentalism.
George Marsden has identified the distinguishing characteristic of twentieth-century fundamentalism as an opposition to materialistic culture, emphasising the supernatural, and based upon three distinctive doctrines – the verbal inspiration of Scripture, creationism and futurist premillennialism.Footnote 148 Futurism, with its more intense stress on apocalyptic speculation, remained a marginal factor during the nineteenth century and it still did not predominate in British Evangelicalism even as late as the 1920s.Footnote 149 Moreover, the historicist beliefs characteristic of nineteenth-century Evangelicalism often worked against an excessive biblical literalism as a degree of flexibility of scriptural interpretation was necessary in order to reconcile the interpretation of prophecy with current events.Footnote 150
Boyd Hilton's argument that Evangelical adventism moved from Irvingite pessimism towards a moderate and incarnationalist optimism during the later nineteenth century also needs to be challenged. Indeed, the passage which Hilton cites as typical of a new incarnationalist optimism in the later nineteenth century is actually taken from a series of lectures which present a revised version of an ethical standpoint which Birks had first expounded in a treatise published in 1834.Footnote 151 This article has demonstrated that Anglican Evangelicals had, during the earlier part of the nineteenth century, combined an Irvingite fatalism regarding the inevitability of divine judgements with a strong element of optimism, towards both the prospects for Evangelical efforts in this lifetime and hopes for a glorious redemption in the future.
Most Evangelicals were still very much concerned to emphasise the harshness of divine judgement. In a contribution to a symposium discussing F. W. Farrar's Eternal hope (1878), T. R. Birks maintained that the ‘most essential’ feature of eternal punishment was ‘the conception of an irreparable, irreversible loss of a privilege now attainable; and when the door has been shut, never after to be attained’.Footnote 152 Birks continued to advocate a narrow and partisan political conservatism, regarding Gladstone's Midlothian Campaign (1879–80) as a matter of ‘life and death for our Church and our Empire’ which were facing the ‘broad pathway of national apostasy’ and he anticipated the enthronement of the ‘ballot box and the addition table or the despotism of mere numbers’.Footnote 153 Such vitriolic High Tory politics reflect the enduring legacy of Irving, which continued to be felt well into the later nineteenth century.Footnote 154 It also underpinned the vigorous campaigns against ritualism by the Church Association (1865). Yet, as this article has argued, Irvingite ideas were also a vital spur to pan-Evangelical co-operation and led churchmen like Birks, E. H. Bickersteth and Samuel Garratt to reject the orthodox doctrine of hell.
