The Church of England

Between 1850 and 1900 there were people in the Church of England, including some of its leaders, who cared as little about the spiritual condition of the masses as the masses were supposed to care about religion. To them the first task was defending the establishment, meeting the intellectual challenge of secular thought, or taking a side in the struggle over ritual. Nevertheless, the Church's relationship with the working classes was one of a few issues which Churchmen in general believed to be crucial. When clergymen addressed or talked about working-class people in this period, they normally sounded unlike those of their fathers who had scolded the poor for neglecting public worship, blamed them for their poverty, and ordered them to obey their spiritual masters. ⁵⁶ Clergymen were now more inclined to offer hand-shakes and smiles. Charles Kingsley and F. D. Maurice were men of influence who spoke in the new tone of voice; but it could be heard also in a sermon preached in 1858 by John Keble, the least socially-conscious of the Tractarians, on the subject: ‘The rich and the poor one in Christ.’ It was audible at a conference attended by Churchmen and Nonconformists on ‘Working Men and Religious Institutions’ in 1867, when the Dean of Westminster, A. P. Stanley, invited working men to suggest how services in the Abbey might be made ‘more available and more useful for them.’ ⁵⁷ The friendly and diplomatic approach was expressed in the custom, begun in 1866, of holding at the annual Church Congress – an institution whose purpose was ‘to assist in forming and also in partially expressing the public opinion of the Church on the current Church questions of the day’ ⁵⁸ – a special meeting for working men. The meetings were begun by the Archbishop of York, William Thomson, who admitted to having a skilful way with a working-class audience. In 1878, addressing the working-men's meeting at the Church Congress in Sheffield, Thomson said expansively that at first the clergy had not hit quite the right note in these meetings.

We began by saying, You are a working man and I am a working man, and now we have come to you as one working man to another. But I am afraid the working man saw through that. He saw a distinction between the position of a bishop and the position of a man who works day by day for his daily wages. . . . We are not working men addressing working men. . . . We have a stronger bond yet than that of being working men together. We are immortal souls together. . . .

Thomson went on, amidst Hear-Hears, to say that the future of England lay with the working man. ⁵⁹ The archbishop agreed that this remark might sound like flattery. He was, however, in earnest. ‘I see very clearly,’ Thomson said once, ‘that the Church of England must either come into closer contact with the working classes of the country, or else her national position will suffer, and her leading position perhaps be ultimately lost.’ ⁶⁰ This was one powerful reason for the changing tone of Churchmen towards the working classes, and it is significant that it can be seen at work in minds as different as those of this Archbishop of York and F. D. Maurice. It was a translation into ecclesiastical terms of the anxiety and the hope which led Disraeli to take his leap in the dark.