ABSTRACT
The deep structural problems affecting churches and chapels continued between the 1880s and the end of the First World War. It was their outcome in the Free Churches that changed. By 1919, it should have been obvious to all but the most partisan that the urban Free Churches were in radical decline. As a consequence, historians, Jeffrey Cox argued, 'are addicted to the language of inevitable and irreversible decline, decay, and failure, and to the historical change with references to an underlying "process" of secularization'. Rather than chapelgoing decline being a product of the decline of Free Church philanthropy, the latter may well have been an effect of overstretched congregations. Free Church seating continued to rise until 1891, but attendances reached a peak in 1881. In the newer/smaller denominations attendances held steady at 2.2 per cent between 1881 and 1891 and declined thereafter.
