Anglican Attitudes to Roman Catholicism in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

This chapter focuses on Charles John Ellicott's contribution to biblical scholarship in the nineteenth century, immense though that was. The decades of the 1850s and 1860s were unsettled ones in the world of biblical scholarship and Ellicott was profoundly disturbed by and hostile towards trends which he felt undermined the authority of Scripture. Groups towards which Ellicott was particularly hostile were the English Church Union and the Society of the Holy Cross, both of which he suspected of Romanising. The first Lambeth Conference had been held under the presidency of Archbishop Longley in 1867, with Ellicott as secretary, an office he was also to discharge at the second and third Conferences, in 1878 and 1888. Ellicott's personal passionate concern that infidelity' should be confronted and challenged cannot be doubted, but he was not willing to countenance the impotence of the Anglican Communion's leadership being made public.