[4] The Growth of the Word: Evangelicals and Society in the Nineteenth Century

Within the Church of England, as Gladstone pointed out in 1879, the Evangelical movement never became dominant, yet ‘it did by infusion profoundly alter the general tone and tendency of the preaching of the clergy; not, however, at the close of the last or the beginning of the present century, but after the Tractarian movement had begun, and, indeed, mainly when it had reached that forward stage…of Ritualism’.8 If the initiative had passed to the Oxford Movement and its offspring, the greatest influence of the Evangelicals as an Anglican party came in the period just after the middle of the century. The number of Evangelical clergy had been estimated in 1803 at five hundred.9 In 1823 there had been 1,600 clerical subscribers to the Church Missionary Society.10 By 1853 the Evangelical clergy were judged to embrace 6,500, that is, well over a third of the whole number.11 The pace of change had increased in the 1830s and 1840s as a higher proportion of ordinands was drawn from the Evangelical camp. More young men were offering themselves for ministry, so that the balance of allegiance within the profession altered the more rapidly. By 1854 a majority of clergy had been ordained in the previous twenty years.12 The younger men, even if outside the party boundary of

Evangelical bishop, Henry Ryder, was appointed to Gloucester in 1815 (and to Lichfield in 1824). The second and third, the brothers C.R. and J.B. Sumner, were elevated to Llandaff in 1826 (Winchester in 1827) and to Chester in 1828 respectively. Several clergy of Evangelical sympathies, if not firm party men, were consecrated during the 1830s.13 In 1846 and 1848 W.A.Shirley and John Graham became Bishops of Sodor and Man and of Chester.14 Between 1856 and 1860 six more Evangelicals were added to the bench: H.M.Villiers went to Carlisle (and later Durham), Charles Baring to Gloucester, Robert Bickersteth to Ripon, J.T.Pelham to Norwich, J.C.Wigram to Rochester and Samuel Waldegrave to Carlisle. This flurry of appointments owed more, it was said, to Shaftesbury’s influence with Palmerston than to the candidates’ merits. But that was unfair: Palmerston, like Shaftesbury, was looking for conscientious pastoral bishops and, not surprisingly, found suitable men among the enlarged ranks of the Evangelicals.15 By this time, furthermore, there was an Evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury inj. B. Sumner (1848-62), who, if no striking personality, was as hard-working as his colleagues. The Evangelical school, dominant in the churches of Scotland and the chapels of England and Wales, had come into its own even in the Church of England.