ABSTRACT
By all accounts, the Georgian Church that fostered Austen was a low-water mark in the annals of the Church of England, it was rife with structural and moral problems, and under increasing assault by outside forces. Another condition of the Georgian Church was its troubling reliance on patronage and nepotism. Austen's religious inheritance conjoins orthodox christian belief with attitudes forged in the crucible of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious controversies and cultural changes. The coziness of this Anglican world, with its undemanding spirituality and worldly offices, came under direct threat during Austen's lifetime, first through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars that followed; second, through Evangelical reform; and third, through the multitudinous shifts in social and economic organization occasioned by the Industrial Revolution. Absenteeism was also rife in the new urban centers. As Gilbert argues, the squire/parson alliance joined the "two parties with vested interest in preserving as much as possible of the pre-industrial status quo".
