[3] Evangelical expansion: cooperation and conflict

The late eighteenth-century revival had a profound effect on religious life, not only in Britain and Ireland, but throughout the rest of the world. It has been suggested that ‘no outburst of missionary zeal, unless it be the Jesuit mission of the late 16th century, has ever paralleled the missionary developments resulting from the Evangelical Awakening between 1790 and 1820’.1 The ‘passion for evangelism’ which it promoted was also channelled into a crusade for moral and social reform involving Christians of all denominations and nurtured by a variety of voluntary religious agencies.2 In bible, preaching and missionary societies, evangelical clergy and laity were given a new sense of cohesion and direction, as well as the organizational facilities required for their campaign against irreligion and immorality. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century manifold societies were set up to encourage recruitment, manage funds and stimulate public interest in foreign and domestic missions.