ABSTRACT
There were two principal styles of clergyman working in the Church of England in Jane Austen's lifetime. The first, which we may call the ‘Establishment’ kind, saw their profession in the same light as any other profession. A young man from the university took orders without evidence of spiritual vocation, and received his parish—his ‘living’—from a landowner in whose gift it was, and who was likely to be at least equally indifferent. The other kind were designated ‘Evangelicals’, because they were evangelists who tried to reach the hearts of their parishioners. Whereas the Establishment clergy took the salvation of their parishioners’ souls for granted, so long as they were church attenders and paid their tithes, the Evangelicals believed that it was their calling to bring home to their congregations a consciousness of their sinfulness and of their need for regeneration. Only when the preacher reached and stirred up the emotions of his listeners was he really doing his work, and the converted peasant meant more to the Evangelical than the unconverted landlord, however generous his patronage. For the Establishment clergy, on the other hand, this emotion-stirring meant ‘enthusiasm’—a word which, at least in the earlier eighteenth century, had connotations resembling ‘emotionalism’ or even ‘fanaticism’ today. For the Establishment, Evangelicalism was vaguely subversive of society and dangerous to reason; it was at least ridiculous. The distinction between the two kinds of clergy goes back to the beginnings of the Church of England at the Reformation, but in the eighteenth century the Evangelicals derived their inspiration most from John Wesley (1703–91). Wesley had been forced out of the Church into his own Methodist movement, but his influence remained strong within it.
