[3] A Troubling of the Water: Developments in the Early Nineteenth Century

In the years around 1830 there was a change of direction in Evangelicalism. Not all sections of the Evangelical community were equally affected, but those that took the new path entered a phase in which many of their previous assumptions were superseded. It was not that their most fundamental convictions altered. Evangelicals continued to preach for conversions, to engage in ceaseless activity, to respect the Bible and to dwell on the theme of the cross. But fresh attitudes became characteristic of the movement-towards the church and the world, towards public issues and even towards the purposes of God. A different mood was abroad. It was partly because a new generation was coming to the fore. The old leaders were going to their reward: Robert Hall, Adam Clarke, William Wilberforce, Hannah More, Rowland Hill and Charles Simeon all died between 1831 and 1836.1 Their successors had risen within an Evangelicalism whose place in the world was assured. They were much less inclined towards a careful pragmatism that would recommend the movement to suspicious onlookers. Rather they expected their views to be given a hearing. They were more confident, more outspoken, more assertive. But the altered tone of much of the Evangelical world was far more than a matter of changing personnel. New influences and fresh circumstances directed currents of opinion into different channels. The shift of mood has often been detected but little analysed. Ford K. Brown notices the change, but his explanation hardly goes beyond the break between the generations.2 Ian Bradley censures ‘a new obscurantism and fanaticism’ without diagnosing it further.3 Alec Vidler, like many others, treats the shift as partly a reaction against the Oxford Movement.4 In fact, however, the process was well under way before the Oxford Movement began; and the new Evangelical mood shared a great deal in common with the Oxford Movement. The fresh trends have recently been valuably summarised,5 but they call for more detailed

One of the reasons for the emergence of new views was doubt about existing methods of spreading the gospel. Organisations like the Bible Society might be at work, but were they proving sufficiently effective? Churchgoing was not improving significantly, if at all. During the decade 1811-21 population growth was extremely rapid. In those ten years, in fact, demographic expansion was at its highest rate in British history. Although Dissent was spreading, attendance at the parish churches was falling relative to population, espccially in the developing urban areas.6 Attention was drawn to the gulf yawning between the Church of England and the labouring masses by Richard Yates, chaplain to the Chelsea Hospital, with two works on the need for church extension published in 1815 and 1817. The public disorder provoked by economic troubles in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars induced politicians to take note. Church building was seen as the antidote to revolution, and so in 1818 parliament voted £1 million for new churches.7 In this context Evangelicals were acutely conscious of the challenge to their strategy of mission. The people had not yet been won for Christ. Thomas Chalmers, serving as a parish minister in Glasgow from 1815, recommended fresh methods of re-Christianising the urban poor in a series of quarterly papers on the Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns (1819-23). His technique concentrated on administering poor relief only through the churches.8 Some of his proposals were to be widely heeded in subsequent decades.