elitist prerogatives they had constructed for themselves as clerics under former circumstances had made of inherited prerogatives. In addition, as many students of evangelicalism have noted, egalitarian, sectarian and anti-establishment instincts of one generation quite easily become elitist, conformist, and quasi-establishmentarian instincts in the next generation. The history of Methodism is the prime example of that process. The careers of the American Nathan Bangs and of the English Wesleyan Jabez Bunting followed the path that the Canadian Egerton Ryerson also pursued, which was a path from democratic beginnings to establishment-like maturity. The

doi:10.4324/9780203166505-78

Chapter

elitist prerogatives they had constructed for themselves as clerics under former circumstances had made of inherited prerogatives. In addition, as many students of evangelicalism have noted, egalitarian, sectarian and anti-establishment instincts of one generation quite easily become elitist, conformist, and quasi-establishmentarian instincts in the next generation. The history of Methodism is the prime example of that process. The careers of the American Nathan Bangs and of the English Wesleyan Jabez Bunting followed the path that the Canadian Egerton Ryerson also pursued, which was a path from democratic beginnings to establishment-like maturity. The

Chapter

elitist prerogatives they had constructed for themselves as clerics under former circumstances had made of inherited prerogatives. In addition, as many students of evangelicalism have noted, egalitarian, sectarian and anti-establishment instincts of one generation quite easily become elitist, conformist, and quasi-establishmentarian instincts in the next generation. The history of Methodism is the prime example of that process. The careers of the American Nathan Bangs and of the English Wesleyan Jabez Bunting followed the path that the Canadian Egerton Ryerson also pursued, which was a path from democratic beginnings to establishment-like maturity. The

ABSTRACT

The experience of evangelical women does not mean that the spread of evangelicalism reasserted a new kind of clerical control. It does show, however, that the movement from national churches to gathered churches – a movement that evangelicals did so much to inspire and that took place with such a genuine expansion of lay opportunity – was a complex movement. As in earlier and later periods of evangelical history, so also in the first generation of modern evangelicalism, the priesthood of all believers was a powerful ideal. That it remained as well an elusive ideal cannot obscure the powerful impetus that evangelical religion and lay Christianity offered to each other in the years between the revivals of the 1730s and the revivals of the 1850s.